中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

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

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Inside the Latent Flow: Causal Deciphering of Attention Dynamics in Audio Separation Foundation Models

Authors:
Yuxuan Chen↗Haoyuan Yu↗Peize He↗

arXiv:2606.10046v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow-matching transformers achieve strong audio separation, yet their attention dynamics are opaque. We adapt established causal-intervention principles into a deterministic, inference-time probing protocol for SAM Audio. Orthogonal probing uncovers a dual-pathway text-conditioning mechanism: additive injections control semantic identity, while cross-attention refines acoustic structure. We observe an asynchronous layerwise convergence: stable layers build temporal scaffolds early, whereas fast layers continue resolving artifacts during sampling. The model also attenuates temporal segmentation cues to maintain continuous-flow stability. Using these insights, we propose Layer-Selective Attention Caching (LSAC), a training-free acceleration method that caches attention in stable layers. Across acoustic complexities, LSAC cuts self-attention computation by about ~25% with negligible quality loss and yields up to 6.7x higher quality retention than naive step reduction.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Score Approximation for Diffusion Models on Arbitrary Low-Dimensional Structures

Authors:
Xinhe Mu↗Zaijiu Shang↗Zhaoqi Zhou↗Chuan Zhou↗Qi Meng↗Guiying Yan↗Zhiming Ma↗

arXiv:2606.19894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The remarkable success of score-based diffusion models has spurred significant efforts to establish their theoretical foundations. However, existing complexity bounds for score approximation rely heavily on restrictive assumptions like Lipschitz continuous densities or smooth manifold supports, which are routinely violated by the singularities, sharp boundaries, and disjoint clusters inherent to real-world perceptual data. This work establishes a universal score approximation theorem that works for any distribution supported on any compact set of upper Minkowski dimension $d$. Using a novel discrete-mixture formulation, we prove that the score function can be approximated with a ReLU network whose complexity grows exponentially only with $d$, thus breaking the exponential curse of ambient dimensionality. Combined with existing theories on accurately solving the backward diffusion SDE for arbitrary compact distributions, our work shows that diffusion models readily adapt to irregular, non-smooth data structures, explaining their competence in real-world generative tasks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Cancer care disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada: A sequential mixed-methods study

Authors:
Timilshina↗Jacobson↗Birze↗Wodchis↗W. P↗Kuluski↗Strumpf↗Ammi↗

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted healthcare delivery worldwide, with cancer care among the most affected services. Prior studies documented delays in referrals, reduced specialist access, and increased provider burden. However, the extent to which these experiences were reflected at the system level remains unclear. Objective To document cancer care experiences and examine whether these experiences were reflected in population-level health system indicators across Ontario, Canada. Methods We used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 32 participants, including patients with cancer (n=8), caregivers (n=5), healthcare providers (n=14), and decision-makers (n=5) across two hospital settings in Ontario, Canada. Emergent themes informed the development of quantitative indicators. We then conducted a retrospective population-based analysis of linked administrative health databases for cancer patients in Ontario (n=87,786) to assess the prevalence of identified themes. Results Four themes emerged: (I) delays in diagnosis and screening; (II) disrupted access to primary care; (III) barriers to specialist and mental health services; and (IV) fragmented care for patients with multimorbidity. Quantitative findings corroborated major themes. Screening rates declined for cervical (64.8% to 57.5%) and breast cancer (64.5% to 57.2%). While in-person primary care shifted almost entirely to virtual modalities (8.5% to 95.4%), overall visit volumes remained stable. Specialist care showed uneven patterns, with increased oncology visits but declines in cardiology and mental health services. Patients with multiple comorbidities experienced the largest reductions in non-oncology specialist care. Conclusion The pandemic disrupted key components of cancer care, particularly screening, access to certain specialist services, and care for patients with complex needs. Integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence highlights areas of system vulnerability and underscores the need for coordinated, resilient cancer care capable of maintaining essential services during future crises.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

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

Authors:
Rongji Xun↗Junjie Yuan↗Zhongjie Wang↗

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.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Metacognitive Myopia in Large Language Models

Authors:
Florian Scholten↗Tobias R. Rebholz↗Mandy H\"utter↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potentially harmful biases that reinforce culturally embedded stereotypes, influence moral judgments, or amplify positive evaluations of majority groups. We propose metacognitive myopia as a cognitive-ecological framework accounting for a conglomerate of established and emerging LLM biases. Our theoretical framework posits that biased samples in the information environment cause five symptoms of metacognitive myopia in LLMs: integration of invalid embeddings, susceptibility to redundant information, neglect of base rates in conditional computation, decision rules based on frequency, and inappropriate higher-order statistical inference for nested data structures. Moreover, it posits that the two main components of metacognition, monitoring and control, could account for these five symptoms. Accordingly, we further outline how monitoring and control could be approximated technically, for instance, through hidden parallel reasoning histories that allow interactive LLMs to evaluate risks of myopic inference before generating overt responses. Our theoretical framework provides a novel perspective on flawed human-machine interactions and agentic AI and raises significant ethical concerns regarding the implementation of LLMs in organizational structures and high-stakes decisions.

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

Metrics for Evaluating Biological AI Model Predictive Accuracy at the Data-Substrate Level

Authors:
Ewing↗M. A↗

Reports in the biological literature disagree on whether a given model can predict a biological outcome from a given data sample — one study finding a model capable, another, on the same kind of data, finding it is not. This is particularly a challenge in relation to LLMs–where the models are large and opaque, with weights and training data inaccessible.textbf{ }Such disagreements cannot be settled by directly inspecting the model. To address this challenge, we considertextbf{ }an alternative approach: assessing whether the data sample is adequate to support the prediction asserted. For a given dataset, its substrate — the underlying structure of the data — determines what any model can recover, independent of architecture or capacity. At the same time, predicting the present state of a biological process and predicting the direction of its future change are different tasks; the second is supportable among AI models only where the data encode direction as determinable from the state — a property we call encoding — and is unsupportable where the same observed state precedes change in opposite directions — a property we call non-identifiability, in the informational rather than the statistical sense. We introduce two generic metrics, Predictive Blindness Risk (PBR) and Prediction Indeterminacy Measure (PIM), that evaluate a data substrate for predictive accuracy directly — without access to model weights, architecture, or training data — and locate the regions of a data substrate where a predictive claim can be supported and where it cannot. Using human biological subjects, we employ the Yale Brain Metastases Longitudinal Data (1,430 human subjects; 11,892 MRI studies; four sequences) and show that direction of change was non-identifiable across regions encompassing the majority of transitions; a nonlinear AI model gained essentially nothing over majority-direction prediction there while recovering direction near-perfectly where the state encoded it; and model accuracy tracked data-substrate resolvability continuously (Spearman {rho} = -0.95 to -1.00). The metrics adjudicate, before any model is trusted and from the data alone, where claims of predictive accuracy — of state, or of the law of change — can be supported.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HorusEye: Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis

Authors:
Armel Yara↗

We introduce HorusEye, Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis. Our investigation followed five stages. The first one is benchmarking RefCOCO-Degraded, a dataset of 15,244 images (3,811 base images x 4 conditions: Clean, Fog, Smoke and Thermal) with systematic visual degradation. Through four research questions, we evaluate multiple VLMs (Gemini, Qwen2-VL, BLIP-2, LLaVA, Kosmos-2) across visual grounding the second stage, language feedback recovery the third one, health VQA tasks the fourth, and hallucination analysis the final stage. Our key finding is that language feedback effectiveness is model-dependent: Gemini achieves +47.3% improvement in thermal conditions through iterative language feedback, while Qwen2-VL shows -5.1% degradation under the same protocol. We also identify the 'Thermal Paradox' where cropping strategies that improve RGB performance catastrophically fail in thermal imagery. Furthermore, BLIP-2 uniquely hallucinates more under degradation, making it unsuitable for emergency deployment

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Contactless 3D Human Body Measurement Using Depth Cameras for Smart Health Monitoring

Authors:
Martha Asare↗Xuan Wang↗Juan Lopez Alvarenga↗Lois Akosua Serwaa↗Jinghao Yang↗

Contactless body measurement technologies are becoming increasingly significant for smart health monitoring, digital health applications, and remote patient assessment. Traditional anthropometric measurements typically necessitate physical contact and trained personnel, which may constrain scalability in remote healthcare settings. In this study, we introduce a depth camera-based framework for estimating human body measurements utilizing 3D point cloud data. An Orbbec Astra 2 depth camera was employed to capture RGB images, depth maps, and 3D point clouds of participants. The captured point cloud was processed using Python-based tools, including Open3D, NumPy, and OpenCV, to segment the human body from the background. Key anthropometric measurements, such as height and arm span, were computed. The measurements were obtained through a combination of spatial filtering and landmark selection on the 3D point cloud, followed by the projection of the computed measurements onto the corresponding RGB image using camera intrinsic parameters. In addition to linear measurements, the approximate body volume and visible surface area were estimated using voxel-based occupancy analysis and mesh-based surface reconstruction methods. The experimental results from a single depth capture demonstrated that accurate body measurements and geometric estimates could be obtained from depth camera data without physical contact. This study provides a foundation for future real-time systems that integrate depth sensing with intelligent health monitoring and generative AI models for smart healthcare applications.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Geometry of critical discrete structures: long-range percolation on the hierarchical lattice and the discrete torus

Authors:
Arghyadeep Chatterjee↗Sourish Maniyar↗Sanchayan Sen↗

arXiv:2509.09589v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Consider (a) balls $\Lambda_n$ of growing volumes in the $d$-dimensional hierarchical lattice, and (b) the $d$-dimensional discrete torus $\mathbb{T}_n^d$ on $n^d$ vertices. Place edges independently between each pair of vertices $x\neq y\in\Lambda_n$ or $\mathbb{T}_n^d$ with probability $1-\exp(-\beta J(x, y) )$ where $J(x, y) \asymp \| x-y \|^{-\alpha}$ for some $0

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Point-Wise Geometry-Aware Transformer for Partial-to-Full Point Cloud Registration in Computer-Assisted Surgery

Authors:
Siyu Zhou↗Zhongliang Jiang↗

Partial-to-full registration remains challenging due to varying overlap ratios, fluctuating point densities, and the presence of noise. While transformers have shown strong potential for point cloud processing, prior methods typically confine them to global context aggregation, overlooking fine-grained local geometry crucial for accurate correspondence. We propose GAPR-Net, a learning-based point cloud registration framework with a coarse-to-fine architecture that combines convolution and transformer modules, in which local and global information is fused between the partial and full point clouds using a cross-attention mechanism. To achieve this, a transformation-invariant point-wise geometric feature representation is proposed, which can robustly capture relative geometric features for individual points with respect to their neighboring points. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments are conducted on four geometrically distinct bones, including the tibia, femur, pelvis, and thoracic cartilage. The overall registration recall reaches 94.2\%, the method results in a low RMSE of 1.992 mm and $R^2$ values of 0.908 and 0.974 for rotation and translation, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the partial-to-full point cloud registration problem. The proposed method enables highly accurate 3D point cloud registration using partial observation, providing a critical foundation for precise surgical navigation and robotic interventions in computer-assisted surgery. The code will be accessed after the double-blind review process.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Identification of environmental factors and growth stages in the prediction of fibre yield and fibre quality traits in rain-grown cotton

Authors:
Feng↗Rafter↗Wilson↗Li↗Conaty↗

Context Understanding how and when environmental conditions influence overall crop performance is crucial for optimising the development of genotypes to a specific breeding target environment. We focused on economically important traits of Australian rain-grown cotton including fibre yield and quality traits, which have not been investigated comprehensively. The aim of the study was to identify relevant environmental factors, and the timing and extent of their impact on rain-grown cotton production. Methods We used a data driven approach to analyse the relationship between ten climate related environmental factors across various plant growth stages and eight fibre yield and quality traits, using a large-scale field dataset of 9,283 records collected over 23 years at 4 locations, with 53 unique year-location combinations. We applied eight complementary statistical models including stepwise, penalised and Bayesian linear regression, regression-tree based ensemble methods and deep learning frameworks to (1) select the most essential environmental covariates affecting rain-grown cotton production, and (2) evaluate the predictive performance of these models. Results The environmental impacts on rain-grown cotton production were trait and growth-stage specific. Number of rainy days and solar radiation were identified as the most influential environmental factors for fibre yield traits, vapour pressure deficit at maximum daily temperature was the most influential factor for majority of fibre quality traits. However, each analysed trait was influenced by multiple environmental factors across multiple growth stages (rather than a single factor or a single growth stage). These influential covariates explained a wide range of variation in the traits, accounting for 5.8% to 68.2%. Using the best-fit random forest model, our findings revealed non-linear relationships between key environmental covariates and the traits. Conclusions Environmental factors at different rain-grown cotton growth stages are key determinants for the performance of end-of-season fibre yield and fibre quality parameters. These findings highlight the need to account for environment conditions when developing cotton varieties optimised for rain-grown production systems. Potential strategies are proposed whereby these key environmental factors can be used to increase the rate of genetic gain in rain-grown cotton production systems. Implications The results of this study will be crucial for future genetic evaluations and analyses of genotype-by-environment interaction effects in rain-grown cotton, which must account for the influence of the environment on plant performance. Furthermore, these methods can be applied to other species to identify critical growth stages and environmental factors which most influence crop performance.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Impact of Network Constraints on Fault-Tolerant Distributed Quantum Computing

Authors:
Eneet Kaur↗Shahrooz Pouryousef↗Nitish Kumar Chandra↗Hassan Shapourian↗Jiapeng Zhao↗Ramana Kompella↗Reza Nejabati↗

arXiv:2606.17495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As we move towards scalable and modular quantum computing, quantum data centres become imperative. Existing analyses typically treat network constraints in isolation or through simplified models, leaving the interplay between error correction operations and communication resources underexplored. In this work, we present an end-to-end simulation framework that jointly models surface-code operations, internal QPU connectivity, and realistic network constraints including finite entanglement generation rates, limited communication qubits, and bandwidth contention, producing execution latency, from which logical error rate estimates are obtained. The framework is modular by design, allowing individual components such as routing heuristics, scheduling policies, and network topologies to be independently replaced. Numerical evaluation reveals distinct operating regimes in which the optimal resource allocation and code distance selection shift depending on the network characteristics. These results point to tradeoffs in the design of distributed quantum computing architectures that are not visible when computation and communication are modeled separately.

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

Analyzing Error Propagation in Korean Spoken QA with ASR-LLM Cascades

Authors:
Donghyuk Jung↗Youngwon Choi↗

We analyze how automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors propagate through ASR-LLM cascades in Korean spoken question answering (SQA), focusing on downstream semantic failures that conventional ASR metrics cannot fully capture. Our analysis shows that the relative downstream degradation caused by ASR errors is consistent across LLMs with different absolute performance, suggesting that cascade degradation largely tracks ASR-stage information loss. We further identify single-character Korean ASR errors as a Korean-specific loss channel, where even a minimal transcription difference can change the intended question and degrade downstream QA performance. Finally, an auxiliary comparison shows that a large audio language model outperforms an ASR-LLM cascade with an approximately matched language backbone in noisy Korean SQA, indicating the potential of direct audio input to mitigate transcript-induced information loss.

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

OmniTraffic: A Controllable Generation Pipeline and Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Reasoning

Authors:
Maonan Wang↗Zhengyan Huang↗Kemou Jiang↗Yuhang Fu↗Jiayue Zhu↗Yuxin Cai↗Xingchen Zou↗Qiaosheng Zhang↗Yi Yu↗Ding Wang↗Xi Chen↗Ben M. Chen↗…

Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics. However, existing traffic-oriented multimodal benchmarks largely emphasize passive visual recognition or isolated video understanding, offering limited support for evaluating structure-aware traffic reasoning under controlled conditions. We introduce OmniTraffic, a controllable generation pipeline and benchmark for spatio-temporal traffic reasoning. Built around 12 real-world intersections reconstructed into editable 3D traffic environments and complemented by surveillance footage from two countries, OmniTraffic supports both controlled and natural-condition evaluation. It defines a three-level task hierarchy spanning scene perception, multi-view and temporal reasoning, and decision support. Using structured traffic metadata, OmniTraffic generates synchronized multi-view VQA samples covering vehicle states, lane functions, view–BEV correspondence, temporal dynamics, and signal-phase analysis, resulting in 8M VQA samples and a 3K human-verified test set. Evaluation of eleven frontier MLLMs reveals a large human–model gap, with the most pronounced failures in topology-grounded and spatio-temporal reasoning tasks. Fine-tuning a lightweight MLLM on simulated OmniTraffic data further improves performance on real-world traffic scenes, demonstrating the value of simulation-generated supervision for traffic-specific multimodal reasoning. Beyond a fixed dataset, OmniTraffic provides an extensible pipeline with configurable intersections, camera views, traffic demands, signal phases, visual conditions, and rare events.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Robust Instruction Compliance in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Wo Wei Lin↗Ethan Rathbun↗Enrico Marchesini↗Xiang Zhi Tan↗

arXiv:2605.12655v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in real-world use cases may need to adapt to external natural language instructions that interrupt ongoing behavior and conflict with long-horizon objectives. However, conditioning rewards on instructions introduces a fundamental failure mode as Bellman updates couple value estimates across instruction contexts, leading to inconsistent values when instructions interrupt macro-actions. We propose Macro-Action Value Correction for Instruction Compliance (MAVIC), which corrects Bellman backups at instruction boundaries by correcting the incoming instruction objective and restoring the continuation value under the current objective. Unlike reward shaping, MAVIC modifies the bootstrapping target itself, enabling consistent value estimation under stochastic instruction switching within a unified policy. We provide theoretical analysis and an actor-critic implementation, and show that MAVIC achieves high instruction compliance while preserving base task performance in increasingly complex cooperative multi-agent environments.

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

Proprioceptive-visual correspondence enables self-other distinction in humanoid robots

Authors:
Yurun Chen↗Tianyuan Gao↗Yizhong Ge↗Shikun Ban↗Yizhou Wang↗Hongkai Xiong↗Wenjun Zeng↗Wentao Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.13222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distinguishing self from others is a prerequisite for social intelligence, yet humanoid robots that increasingly share workspaces with humans still lack this ability. Here we show that a humanoid robot can learn self-other distinction from proprioceptive-visual correspondence, without any identity labels or kinematic models. Once established, this distinction bootstraps a predictive self-model that maps joint configurations to three-dimensional body occupancy, capturing how the robot's body changes with action. In multi-agent scenes involving humans or morphologically identical robots, the system reliably identifies itself, learns a 3D self-model, and supports downstream tasks including target reaching, collision-aware motion planning, and human-to-robot motion retargeting. Together, these results outline a route toward bodily self-representation in robots that act and coordinate alongside others in shared physical environments. Project page: https://euron-zc.github.io/humanoid-self-model/.

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

ConTex: Reformulating Counterfactual Generation For Time Series Forecasting

Authors:
Jan Voets↗Hasan Tercan↗Tobias Meisen↗Sebastian Baum↗

arXiv:2606.18049v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision-making with deep learning-based time series forecasting requires not only accurate predictions but also actionable insights. However, current architectures do not inherently provide such information. Specifically, guidance is needed on how current conditions must be modified to shift from a predicted outcome to a desired future scenario. Counterfactual explanations provide a natural framework for this task, as they represent minimal input changes that alter the model's prediction, indicating when and how intervention is required. Existing approaches rely on instance-wise optimization, leading to inconsistency across instances, high computational costs, and limited applicability in real-time settings. To address these limitations, we reformulate counterfactual generation for time series forecasting as the problem of learning a globally consistent intervention strategy, allowing counterfactuals to be generated through a single shared function. We propose Counterfactual Time Series Explanations (ConTex), a model-agnostic, decomposed architecture comprising a temporal context encoder and a conditional encoder, followed by two heads that capture interventions in terms of temporal relevance and modification strength. This structure overcomes the instability and inconsistency of instance-based approaches by producing targeted, interpretable interventions across time and feature dimensions in a single forward pass, making it suitable for real-time applications. Across multiple forecasting architectures and benchmark datasets, ConTex achieves state-of-the-art validity while generating sparse counterfactuals that minimize the number of necessary interventions. Additionally, our approach reduces computational cost by at least 12-36x compared to instance-wise generation and supports real-time inference at approximately 0.007 seconds.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Finite-Width Neural Tangent Kernels from Feynman Diagrams

Authors:
Max Guillen↗Philipp Misof↗Jan E. Gerken↗

arXiv:2508.11522v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural tangent kernels (NTKs) are a powerful tool for analyzing deep, non-linear neural networks. In the infinite-width limit, NTKs can easily be computed for most common architectures, yielding full analytic control over the training dynamics. However, at infinite width, important properties of training such as NTK evolution or feature learning are absent. Nevertheless, finite width effects can be included by computing corrections to the Gaussian statistics at infinite width. We introduce Feynman diagrams for computing finite-width corrections to NTK statistics. These dramatically simplify the necessary algebraic manipulations and enable the computation of layer-wise recursion relations for arbitrary statistics involving preactivations, NTKs and certain higher-derivative tensors (dNTK and ddNTK) required to predict the training dynamics at leading order. We demonstrate the feasibility of our framework by extending stability results for deep networks from preactivations to NTKs and proving the absence of finite-width corrections for scale-invariant nonlinearities such as ReLU on the diagonal of the Gram matrix of the NTK. We numerically implement the complete set of equations necessary to compute the first-order corrections for arbitrary inputs and demonstrate that the results follow the statistics of sampled neural networks for widths $n\gtrsim 20$.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Is It You or Your Environment? A Bayesian Inference Framework for Genomically-Anchored Personalized Physiological Interpretation

Authors:
Aruna Dey↗Suraj Biswas↗

arXiv:2606.13556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized health AI systems face a fundamental cold-start problem: machine learning models for physiological interpretation require weeks of individual behavioral data before they can distinguish constitutional variation from environmentally driven deviation. We propose a solution grounded in causal inference and Bayesian prior design. An individual's genomic profile serves as an exogenous genetic anchor – a domain-informed, personalized prior that is fixed at conception, immune to reverse causation, and available before a single behavioral observation is collected. The anchor initializes a Bayesian belief state over an individual's physiological set point G-hat = mu + sum(beta_i * g_i), where beta_i are GWAS-derived effect sizes and g_i are risk-allele counts. Each incoming physiological measurement P produces a non-constitutional deviation delta = P - G-hat that separates the signal attributable to environment and state from the constitutionally fixed baseline. As behavioral data accrue, the prior decays according to G-hat_t = w(t)*G-hat_genomic + [1-w(t)]*P-bar_t, transitioning from genome-dominated to empirical-baseline-dominated inference. The same observed HRV of 55 ms generates a suppression hypothesis for a person whose prior predicts 80 ms, and an enhancement hypothesis for a person whose prior predicts 30 ms – a reversal impossible without a personalized anchor. We develop this architecture across six physiological domains, grading genomic priors by evidence strength, distinguishing robustly replicated anchors (FTO, FADS1/2, FKBP5) from contested candidate genes (SLC6A4, MAOA, DRD2). We address the inference boundary between association, Mendelian randomization, and individual token causation, and define four constraints for deployment: evidence-graded priors, dynamic decay, ancestry-matched effect sizes, and attribution rather than deterministic output.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Latent Space Analysis for Interpretable Uncertainty in Melanoma Classification

Authors:
Ciro Listone↗Aniello Murano↗

Melanoma is a highly aggressive skin cancer, making early and accurate diagnosis critical. While deep learning excels in skin lesion classification, standard ``black-box" models struggle to explain diagnostic uncertainty, limiting clinical trust. This work introduces a hybrid framework combining a class-aware adversarial Variational Autoencoder and an XGBoost classifier, transcending simple binary classification by leveraging a generative latent space for interpretable decision support. Guided by adversarial training, the model learns the visual characteristics of skin lesions and projects them into a continuous latent space, ensuring that similar images are grouped closely together. Trained on this latent space, the XGBoost classifier achieves a robust AUC of 0.868, competing closely with state-of-the-art models. For borderline cases, the framework enables clinicians to leverage the latent topology through Content-Based Image Retrieval. This provides a dual benefit: it allows the clinician to visually compare an ambiguous lesion against biopsy-confirmed precedents and acts as an early warning sign since a borderline classification can indicate that a lesion shares features of both nevi and melanomas, potentially requiring close monitoring. Our approach translates algorithmic hesitation into transparent, evidence-based visual support, bridging the gap between predictive performance and clinical trust.

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

Durability and Seasonal Variation in the Effectiveness of Nirsevimab over Three Seasons in Connecticut

Authors:
Xu↗Aparicio-Llorente↗Warren↗Kennedy-Shaffer↗Pitzer↗V. E↗Weinberger↗D. M↗Oliveira↗C. R↗PROVE-ID Group Authors↗

Background Nirsevimab has been widely administered in the United States since 2023 to protect infants and young children from severe disease caused by respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Although early post-licensure studies have shown high effectiveness against medically attended RSV infection, uncertainty remains about the durability of protection, effectiveness beyond the first RSV season, and the extent to which changing RSV seasonality influences real-world effectiveness. Objective To estimate the effectiveness of nirsevimab against medically attended RSV infection across three consecutive RSV seasons and to examine how effectiveness varies by season and time since immunization. Methods We conducted a test-negative case-control study utilizing electronic health records of infants and young children tested for RSV by polymerase chain reaction in outpatient and inpatient settings within the Yale New Haven Health System between October 1, 2023, and March 1, 2026. Effectiveness of nirsevimab was estimated using multivariable logistic regression, adjusting for age, weekly RSV activity, pre-existing risk factors, and other potential confounders. Variation in effectiveness was examined by season, encounter setting, and time since immunization up to 24 months. Results Overall, 17,755 infants and young children were tested for RSV infection, of whom 2,388 (13.4%) were cases and 15,367 (86.6%) were controls. The overall effectiveness of nirsevimab was 67.3% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 59.8, 73.3%) against all medically-attended RSV infections, 60.2% (95% CI: 49.6, 68.5%) against RSV-associated outpatient visits, and 88.9% (95% CI: 82.3, 93.0%) against RSV-associated hospitalization. Effectiveness against medically attended RSV infection declined across seasons, from 76.7% (95% CI: 60.5, 86.3%) in 2023/24 to 54.4% (95% CI: 33.0, 68.9%) in 2025/26. Lower season-specific effectiveness in later seasons corresponded with progressively delayed RSV activity over. Protection against RSV-associated hospitalization declined with increasing time since immunization, from 92.5% (95% credible interval [CrI]: 85.9, 96.4%) at 1 month, to 77.2% (95% CrI: 60.4, 87.6%) at 6 months, and 39.9% (95% CrI: 2.4, 63.3%) at 12 months post-immunization, after which effectiveness plateaued. Conclusions Nirsevimab remained effective against RSV-associated hospitalization through 6 to 12 months after immunization. Delayed RSV activity was associated with lower effectiveness, highlighting the importance of aligning administration with local RSV circulation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Skill-Augmented AI Agents for Medical Research Analysis: An Exploratory Multi-Model Human Evaluation in an NSCLC Transcriptomic Biomarker Task

Authors:
Qianyu Yao↗Fei Sun↗Bocheng Huang↗Wei Chen↗Jiarui Jiang↗Shu Quan↗Yifei Chen↗Wenjie Xu↗Bo li↗Liping Su↗Ruoqiong Wu↗Huhai Hong↗…

arXiv:2606.11830v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background. Large language models and AI agents are increasingly used to support biomedical research, but native model outputs may omit key analytical steps, misuse methods, or overstate conclusions. We evaluated whether autonomous access to a medical research skill package was associated with higher-quality AI-generated transcriptomic research-analysis outputs compared with native AI without skills. Methods. We conducted an exploratory multi-model human evaluation using a non-small cell lung cancer immunotherapy biomarker task. Six model backbones were tested. The evaluation included 21 anonymized outputs: 9 native-AI outputs and 12 skill-augmented outputs generated through an AI agent implementation represented by OpenClaw. Four non-expert biomedical reviewers and two blinded experts evaluated each output, with two ratings from each reviewer type. The primary outcome was expert-rated overall quality. Results. Skill-augmented outputs showed directionally higher expert overall quality than native-AI outputs (mean 5.50 vs 5.11; difference=0.39; bootstrap 95\% CI, -0.04 to 0.90; Welch p=0.156). Non-expert reviewer quality showed the same direction (mean 4.72 vs 4.47; difference=0.26; bootstrap 95\% CI, -0.25 to 0.80; Welch p=0.373). Expert agreement was limited (single-rating ICC=-0.15), and model-specific effects were descriptive and heterogeneous. Conclusions. Autonomous skill access showed a directional quality signal in this exploratory sample, but the signal was smaller than expert-rating noise and should not be interpreted as confirmatory evidence. The findings primarily motivate larger evaluations of skill-augmented AI agents with stronger reliability controls, platform replication, and biological-validity assessment.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Select to Think: Unlocking SLM Potential with Local Sufficiency

Authors:
Wenxuan Ye↗Yangyang Zhang↗Xueli An↗Georg Carle↗Yunpu Ma↗

Small language models (SLMs) offer efficient deployment, yet they often lag behind their larger counterparts (LLMs) in reasoning. Existing remedies either invoke an LLM at points of reasoning divergence, incurring substantial latency and cost, or rely on standard distillation, which is limited by the SLM's capacity to accurately mimic the LLM's complex generative distribution. We address this dilemma by identifying local sufficiency: at divergence points, the LLM's preferred token often resides within the SLM's top-K next-token predictions, even when failing to emerge as the SLM top-1 choice. We therefore propose Select to Think (S2T), which reframes the LLM's role from open-ended generation to selection among the SLM's proposals, simplifying the supervision signal to discrete candidate rankings. Leveraging this, we introduce S2T-Local, which distills the selection logic into the SLM, empowering it to perform autonomous re-ranking without inference-time LLM dependency. Empirically, a 1.5B SLM's top-8 candidates contain the 32B LLM's choice with a 95% hit rate, and S2T-Local improves the 1.5B SLM's Math Avg. over greedy decoding by 24.1% relative gain, matching the efficacy of 8-path self-consistency with single-trajectory efficiency.

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

A Survey on Data-Driven Models for Soil Moisture Regression and Classification

Authors:
Ilektra Tsimpidi↗George Georgoulas↗Vidya Sumathy↗George Nikolakopoulos↗

arXiv:2606.18316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soil Moisture (SM) modelling constitutes a complex spatiotemporal learning problem characterised by nonlinear environmental interactions, heterogeneous data sources, and limited ground observations. Physics-based approaches, such as water balance models, rely on explicit hydrological equations and high-quality inputs, but their computational cost and scalability limitations restrict large-scale deployment. Data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) methods have emerged as flexible alternatives, enabling the extraction of empirical relationships between soil moisture and environmental variables with reduced modelling assumptions. This work presents a structured survey of AI-based models for soil moisture estimation and classification. Existing approaches are organized into five categories: (a) statistical time-series models, (b) geostatistical methods (c) classical machine learning (ML) models, (d) Deep Learning (DL) models and (e) Probabilistic/Bayesian methods. These models leverage historical soil moisture records, meteorological variables, vegetation indices, topography, soil characteristics, and geolocation data to perform regression or classification tasks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Latent Space Reinforcement Learning for Inverse Material Estimation in Food Fracture Simulation

Authors:
Adrian Ramlal↗Yuhao Chen↗John S. Zelek↗

Realistic visual simulation of food manipulation requires accurate material parameters, yet these are difficult to measure directly and vary across the heterogeneous regions of a single food item. We address the inverse problem of estimating material parameters from a target description of fracture behavior in a non-differentiable continuum damage mechanics simulator. Using orange peeling as a test case, we train a neural surrogate on 2,000 forward simulations and compare Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES, a gradient-free evolutionary optimizer) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm) across the original 9-dimensional parameter space and two learned 4-dimensional latent representations. Since different oranges have different material properties, a practical inverse system must handle arbitrary targets without retraining. We train a goal-conditioned PPO policy that learns a general inverse mapping: given any target description of peeling behavior, the policy produces a material parameter estimate in a single forward pass (8 surrogate evaluations, approximately 10ms). Operating in a normalizing flow latent space with a shared surrogate evaluator, the goal-conditioned policy achieves 0.642 actual recovery when validated through the simulator, outperforming the original parameter space by 23%. A warm-start extension that initializes CMA-ES refinement from the policy's output further improves recovery to 0.828 with 540 evaluations. These findings provide a practical framework for inverse food physics and lay groundwork for vision-driven material identification from video observations of food manipulation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →