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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Comparative Effectiveness and Safety of Prophylactic Vasopressors for Preventing Post-induction Hypotension in the Elderly: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-analysis

Background: Post-induction hypotension is a predictable haemodynamic hazard in older adults undergoing general anaesthesia. Prevention remains divided among volume optimisation, anaesthetic dose reduction, rescue treatment after hypotension occurs and proactive vasoactive support. Methods: We searched PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, CENTRAL, CNKI, Wanfang and VIP from inception to 30 March 2026. Eligible studies were randomised trials of prophylactic vasoactive drugs given before, during or immediately after induction in older adults. The primary outcome was post-induction hypotension. Secondary outcomes were post-induction mean arterial pressure (MAP), systolic arterial pressure (SBP), heart rate (HR) and reported haemodynamic adverse events. Random-effects network meta-analysis was used, and confidence in network estimates was assessed using CINeMA principles. Results: Thirty-one trials including 2,821 participants were included in the revised network. Compared with placebo/control, all active agents favoured lower post-induction hypotension. The most favourable point estimates were observed for phenylephrine (odds ratio [OR] 0.17, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.01 to 2.16) and metaraminol (OR 0.19, 95% CI 0.02 to 1.53), although both were imprecise. More precise reductions were observed for methoxamine (OR 0.23, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.43), norepinephrine (OR 0.25, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.47) and ephedrine (OR 0.34, 95% CI 0.19 to 0.63). Phenylephrine ranked highest for MAP support, norepinephrine ranked highest for SBP support, and ephedrine ranked highest for HR preservation. Global inconsistency was detected for SBP but not for hypotension incidence, MAP or HR, supporting cautious profile-based interpretation. Conclusions: Prophylactic vasopressor choice during induction should be guided by haemodynamic phenotype rather than ranking alone. In the revised network, active prophylaxis consistently favoured lower hypotension, but sparse nodes produced uncertainty. Norepinephrine retained a comparatively balanced profile when vasodilatory post-induction hypotension is anticipated, phenylephrine and related alpha-agonists provided stronger pressure support when HR and cardiac-output reserve are preserved, and ephedrine was most relevant when chronotropic support is desired. Keywords: general anaesthesia; induction; hypotension; norepinephrine; phenylephrine; ephedrine; network meta-analysis; older adults.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Signals of Provenance: Practices & Challenges of Navigating Indicators in AI-Generated Media for Sighted and Blind Individuals

arXiv:2505.16057v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-Generated (AIG) content has become increasingly widespread by recent advances in generative models and the easy-to-use tools that have significantly lowered the technical barriers for producing highly realistic audio, images, and videos through simple natural language prompts. In response, platforms are adopting provable provenance with platforms recommending AIG to be self-disclosed and signaled to users. However, these indicators may be often missed, especially when they rely solely on visual cues and make them ineffective to users with different sensory abilities. To address the gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews (N=28) with 15 sighted and 13 BLV participants to examine their interaction with AIG content through self-disclosed AI indicators. Our findings reveal diverse mental models and practices, highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of content-based (e.g., title, description) and menu-aided (e.g., AI labels) indicators. While sighted participants leveraged visual and audio cues, BLV participants primarily relied on audio and existing assistive tools, limiting their ability to identify AIG. Across both groups, they frequently overlooked menu-aided indicators deployed by platforms and rather interacted with content-based indicators such as title and comments. We uncovered usability challenges stemming from inconsistent indicator placement, unclear metadata, and cognitive overload. These issues were especially critical for BLV individuals due to the insufficient accessibility of interface elements. We provide practical recommendations and design implications for future AIG indicators across several dimensions.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Reinforcement Learning for Accelerated Aerodynamic Shape Optimisation

arXiv:2507.17786v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) based adaptive optimization algorithm for aerodynamic shape optimization focused on dimensionality reduction. The form in which RL is applied here is that of a surrogate-based, actor-critic policy evaluation MCMC approach allowing for temporal 'freezing' of some of the parameters to be optimized. The goals are to minimize computational effort, and to use the observed optimization results for interpretation of the discovered extrema in terms of their role in achieving the desired flow-field. By a sequence of local optimized parameter changes around intermediate CFD simulations acting as ground truth, it is possible to speed up the global optimization if (a) the local neighbourhoods of the parameters in which the changed parameters must reside are sufficiently large to compete with the grid-sized steps and its large number of simulations, and (b) the estimates of the rewards and costs on these neighbourhoods necessary for a good step-wise parameter adaption are sufficiently accurate. We give an example of a simple fluid-dynamical problem on which the method allows interpretation in the sense of a feature importance scoring.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

daVinci-kernel: Co-Evolving Skill Selection, Summarization, and Utilization via RL for GPU Kernel Optimization

GPU kernel optimization represents a paradigm where functional correctness is assumed and execution efficiency is the objective. We present daVinci-kernel, a reinforcement learning framework that couples skill discovery with skill exploitation through a dynamically evolving skill library. daVinci-kernel jointly trains three agents sharing one LLM backbone: a Skill Selection Agent that retrieves relevant techniques via BM25 and LLM reranking, a Policy Agent that generates multi-turn CUDA/Triton kernels conditioned on selected skills, and a Skill Summary Agent that distills successful rollouts into reusable skills. Candidate skills are added only after execution-based verification confirms reproducible speedups. All three agents share a single LLM backbone, are initialized via a structured SFT cold start on diversity-filtered data, and are then jointly optimized end-to-end with multi-turn REINFORCE and per-agent advantage estimation. On KernelBench, daVinci-kernel-14B achieves 37.2%, 70.6%, and 32.2% on Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 under the Fast$_1$ threshold, outperforming the strongest prior RL-trained model, Dr.Kernel-14B.

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

TabKD: Tabular Knowledge Distillation through Interaction Diversity of Learned Feature Bins

arXiv:2603.15481v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation enables model compression without original training data, critical for privacy-sensitive tabular domains. However, existing methods does not perform well on tabular data because they do not explicitly address feature interactions, the fundamental way tabular models encode predictive knowledge. We identify interaction diversity, systematic coverage of feature combinations, as an essential requirement for effective tabular distillation. To operationalize this insight, we propose TabKD, which learns adaptive feature bins aligned with teacher decision boundaries, then generates synthetic queries that maximize pairwise interaction coverage. Across 4 benchmark datasets and 4 teacher architectures, TabKD achieves highest student-teacher agreement in 14 out of 16 configurations, outperforming 5 state-of-the-art baselines. We further show that interaction coverage strongly correlates with distillation quality, validating our core hypothesis. Our work establishes interaction-focused exploration as a principled framework for tabular model extraction.

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

Frequency-Multiplexed Millimeter-Wave Fault-Tolerant Superconducting Qubits Enabled by an On-Chip Nonreciprocal Control Bus

arXiv:2512.17588v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling superconducting quantum processors is fundamentally limited by the escalating complexity of cryogenic wiring and the detrimental effects of microwave crosstalk and Purcell decay. This paper proposes a novel architecture based on frequency-multiplexed millimeter-wave superconducting qubits, integrating an on-chip cryogenic nonreciprocal space-time-periodic Josephson frequency multiplier as a universal control bus. The bus replaces multiple high-frequency XY drive lines with a single low-frequency input tone, which is parametrically converted into a comb of high-order harmonics, each resonantly addressing a distinct qubit. The nonreciprocal nature of the bus provides intrinsic isolation that suppresses Purcell decay and reduces coherent crosstalk by more than $98\%$ compared to a conventional reciprocal shared drive line. Full error-budget analysis demonstrates that the architecture can maintain gate errors below the fault-tolerance threshold for arrays exceeding 25 qubits, converting a crosstalk-dominated error budget into one primarily limited by intrinsic material coherence. Theoretical modeling based on a non-Markovian master equation further indicates that the engineered environment enables information backflow, offering a pathway to enhanced coherence. This integrated, frequency-multiplexed, and nonreciprocal control bus offers a compelling route toward dramatic I/O simplification, improved noise resilience, and scalable high-coherence superconducting quantum processors.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Limit theorems for random Dirichlet series with summation over primes, with an application to Rademacher random multiplicative functions

arXiv:2508.15032v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is shown that two conjectures put forward in the recent article Iksanov and Kostohryz (2025) are true. Namely, we prove a functional central limit theorem (FCLT) and a law of the iterated logarithm (LIL) for a random Dirichlet series $\sum_p \frac{\eta_p}{p^{1/2+s}}$ as $s\to 0+$, where $\eta_1$, $\eta_2,\ldots$ are independent identically distributed random variables with zero mean and finite variance, and $\sum_p$ denotes the summation over the prime numbers. As a consequence, an FCLT and an LIL are obtained for $\log \sum_{n\geq 1} \frac{f(n)}{n^{1/2+s}}$ as $s\to 0+$, where $f$ is a Rademacher random multiplicative function.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

LLMs as ASP Programmers: Self-Correction Enables Task-Agnostic Nonmonotonic Reasoning

arXiv:2604.27960v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive reasoning milestones but continue to struggle with high computational costs, logical inconsistencies, and sharp performance degradation on high-complexity problems. While neuro-symbolic methods attempt to mitigate these issues by coupling LLMs with symbolic reasoners, existing approaches typically rely on monotonic logics (e.g., SMT) that cannot represent defeasible reasoning – essential components of human cognition. We present "LLM+ASP," a framework that translates natural language into Answer Set Programming (ASP), a nonmonotonic formalism based on stable model semantics. Unlike prior "LLM+ASP" approaches that require manually authored knowledge modules, domain-specific prompts, or evaluation restricted to single problem classes, our framework operates without any per-task engineering and applies uniformly across diverse reasoning tasks. Our system utilizes an automated self-correction loop where structured feedback from the ASP solver enables iterative refinement. Evaluating across six diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that: (1) stable model semantics allow LLMs to naturally express default rules and exceptions, outperforming SMT-based alternatives by significant margins on nonmonotonic tasks; (2) iterative self-correction is the primary driver of performance, effectively replacing the need for handcrafted domain knowledge; (3) compact in-context reference guides substantially outperform verbose documentation, revealing a "context rot" phenomenon where excessive context hinders constraint adherence.

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

An Exploratory Study of Blood Glucose Estimation from Photoplethysmography Signals using Machine Learning

arXiv:2606.15927v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diabetes and extreme blood sugar levels are some of the major health problems faced by humans today across the world. While Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) has emerged as an effective technology for management of diabetes as well as for monitoring blood sugar levels, this technology has traditionally been invasive (that is, requiring the piercing of the skin) and carries the risk of irritation, induration, etc. This highlights the need for accurate and non-invasive CGM methods that can be deployed at scale. With the emergence of various sensing technologies and their integration in wearables like the smart-watch, we now have the capability to continuously monitor body signals like the Photoplethysmogram (PPG) in a non-invasive manner. Having the ability to continuously monitor blood glucose through CGMs and continuously monitor PPG signals through a smart-watch offers an opportunity to get dense data on these two, opening the possibility of building machine learning and deep learning based models to estimate blood glucose level from PPG signals. In this work, we first present a paired dataset comprising continuous PPG signals from a smartwatch along with glucose values recorded using a CGM device. We also present the results of some preliminary experimental explorations performed on our dataset. These preliminary results suggest that some predictive signals may exist, though more exploration is needed with more data from a larger number of individuals. The dataset can be accessed at https://zenodo.org/records/20577959

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mechanical Conscience: A Mathematical Framework for Dependability of Machine Intelligenc

arXiv:2605.03847v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributed collaborative intelligence (DCI), encompassing edge-to-edge architectures, federated learning, transfer learning, and swarm systems, creates environments in which emergent risk is structurally unavoidable: locally correct decisions by individual agents compose into globally unacceptable behavioral trajectories under uncertainty. Existing approaches such as constrained optimization, safe reinforcement learning, and runtime assurance evaluate acceptability at the level of individual actions rather than across behavioral trajectories, and none addresses the multi-participant, uncertainty-laden nature of DCI deployments. This paper introduces mechanical conscience (MC), a novel concept and simplified mathematical framework that operationalizes trajectory-level normative regulation for both single-agent and distributed intelligent systems. Mechanical conscience is defined as a supervisory filter that minimally corrects a baseline policy's actions to reduce cumulative deviation from a normatively admissible region, while accounting for epistemic uncertainty. We introduce associated constructs, conscience score, mechanical guilt, and resonant dependability, that provide an interpretable vocabulary and computable governance signals for this emerging field. Core theoretical properties are established: admissibility equivalence, existence of optimal regulation, and monotonic deviation reduction. Illustrative results demonstrate that MC-regulated agents maintain trajectory-level normative acceptability where conventional controllers drift outside admissible bounds, and that the framework naturally extends to suppress interaction-induced emergent risk in multi-agent DCI settings.

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

Decoupling Inference from State Updates in Low-Latency Feature Engines via Probabilistic Thinning

arXiv:2606.16981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming data systems increasingly underpin Machine Learning workflows that maintain large numbers of continuously updated aggregations. In production settings, each incoming event typically triggers read-modify-write operations to persistent storage, making high-frequency state updates a dominant source of latency, contention, and operational cost. In this work, we decouple inference from state persistence in streaming Machine Learning pipelines via probabilistic thinning: every event is scored, but durable state updates are selectively triggered by informative events. Unlike approaches that shed input or state, we show that persistence-path control is achievable without a high-frequency in-memory control plane or cross-worker coordination, relying exclusively on approximate statistics retrieved from disk-backed key-value stores. We model the resulting stochastic processes, derive bounds on filtering rates, and prove that common time-based aggregations remain unbiased under variance-aware formulations, preventing systemic error accumulation. We evaluate the approach in a controlled setting that isolates per-event costs, demonstrating substantial reductions in storage Input/Output and serialization overhead. Across experiments, up to 90% of events are excluded from the persistence path while preserving and in some cases improving downstream utility.

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

Automated Scoring of Arabic Text Using Large Language Models: A Literature Review

In modern educational systems, Automatic Text Scoring (ATS) plays a central role by enabling scalable and consistent evaluation of learner responses without human intervention. Recently, the increased accessibility of LLMs and Arabic-specific datasets has sparked renewed interest in this area. In this work, we investigate LLM-Based approaches for the automated evaluation of Arabic texts, focusing on both short answer grading (ASAG) and essay scoring (AES). We further introduce a structured taxonomy comprising five dimensions: application domain, feedback generation capability, LLM architecture deployed, alignment with competency referential frameworks, and prompt engineering strategy. By applying this taxonomy, we conduct a comparative analysis of existing studies, examining their methodological approaches, datasets, evaluation metrics, and reported performance. The findings highlight the need for sustained and pedagogically grounded research efforts in Arabic ATS, given its significance for improving educational quality across Arabic-speaking communities.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

CADBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for AI-Assisted CAD Program Generation

arXiv:2605.10873v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recovering editable CAD programs from images or 3D observations is central to AI-assisted design, but progress is difficult to measure because existing evaluations are fragmented across datasets, modalities, and metrics. We introduce CADBench, a unified benchmark for multimodal CAD program generation. CADBench contains 18,000 evaluation samples spanning six benchmark families derived from DeepCAD, Fusion 360, ABC, MCB, and Objaverse; five input modalities including clean meshes, noisy meshes, single-view renders, photorealistic renders, and multi-view renders; and six metrics covering geometric fidelity, executability, and program compactness. STEP-based families are stratified by B-rep face count and all families are diversity-sampled to support controlled analysis across complexity and object variation. We benchmark eleven CAD-specialized and general-purpose vision-language systems, generating more than 1.4 million CAD programs. Under idealized inputs, specialized mesh-to-CAD models substantially outperform code-generating VLMs, which remain far from reliable CAD program reconstruction. CADBench further reveals three recurring failure modes: reconstruction quality degrades with geometric complexity, CAD-specialized models can be brittle under modality shift, and model rankings change across metrics. Together, these results position CADBench as a diagnostic testbed for measuring progress in editable 3D reconstruction and multimodal CAD understanding. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/anniedoris/CADBench.

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

Disparate Impact in Synthetic Data Generation

arXiv:2606.13105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the fairness notion of disparate impact for synthetic data generation (SDG), that assesses whether the utility of generated records is the same across sensitive groups. Our approach departs from existing work on fair SDG, that address the problem of correcting for undue biases in the observed distribution, hence redefining SDG as learning a distribution that is not that of the real data. By contrast, non-disparate impact is notably achieved when the synthetic and real distributions are the same. We expose reasons why SDG may fail to reach that solution and discuss why approximation and estimation errors occur and can be disparate across groups. We notably look into the expressive power of SDG methods relative to distribution complexity, sampling errors due to group proportions, and estimation errors induced by differential privacy mechanisms. We illustrate cases of disparate impact on both artificial and real-world data, focusing on SDG methods that rely on probabilistic graphical models. We also introduce a strategy of learning group-wise SDG models and illustrate how it can improve both the overall utility and its parity in many settings.

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

Lect\=uraAgents: A Multi-Agent Framework for Adaptive Personalized AI-Assisted Learning and Embodied Teaching

Effective personalized AI-assisted learning demands systems that can not only generate accurate learner-specific educational materials, but also dynamically adapt their instruction to diverse learners. However, existing educational agents have primarily focused on lecture content automation and simulations, which often fall short of modelling multimodal and embodied instructional methods tailored for the individual learner. To this end, we propose Lect\=uraAgents - a multi-agent framework that enables personalized learning through end-to-end adaptive embodied teaching. At its core, Lect\=uraAgents mirrors a professor-student relationship, in which a ProfessorAgent leads a collaborative team of specialized subordinate agents through research, planning, review, and embodied delivery of lecture contents that adapt to a learner's needs. The framework offers three main contributions: (1) a hierarchical multi-agent architecture for end-to-end personalized learning; (2) an adaptive embodied teaching mechanism, wherein the ProfessorAgent executes visible and pedagogically motivated teaching actions (e.g., handwrite, highlight, underline, etc.) over contents in a teaching environment; and (3) a Teaching Action-Speech Alignment (TASA) algorithm that employs salience-based heuristics and temporal semantic segmentation to generate coherent teaching action sequences aligned with learner profiles. We evaluate Lect\=uraAgents on diverse courses at high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels using sample-specific rubric-based analysis; with generated lecture materials and teaching actions assessed and validated by expert educators. Experimental results show consistent gains in lecture content quality, embodied teaching quality, assessment, and personalization over existing approaches, positioning Lect\=uraAgents as a pedagogically well-grounded framework for personalized learning at scale.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Scaling limits of the single-curve interface and outermost loops in the planar random field Ising model

arXiv:2606.13147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the interface separating $+1$ and $-1$ spins in the near-critical planar random field Ising model (RFIM) with Dobrushin boundary conditions has a scaling limit, whose law is conformally covariant and almost surely absolutely continuous with respect to SLE$_3$. The limiting curve can be seen as a massive version of SLE$_3$ in the sense of Makarov and Smirnov, but in a random environment. We then show that the outermost spin loops of the near-critical planar RFIM with $+1$ boundary conditions have subsequential limits and that any of these limits is almost surely singular with respect to CLE$_3$. This dichotomy between absolute continuity of the single interface and singularity of the outermost loops reflects the fact that a single interface does not explore enough of the magnetization field of the near-critical RFIM to detect the singularity of this field with respect to the critical Ising magnetization field, whereas the outermost spin loops do.

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

The Voice Behind the Words: Quantifying Intersectional Bias in SpeechLLMs

Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs) process spoken input directly, retaining cues such as accent and perceived gender that were previously removed in cascaded pipelines. This introduces speaker identity dependent variation in responses. We present a large-scale intersectional evaluation of accent and gender bias in three SpeechLLMs using 2,880 controlled interactions across six English accents and two gender presentations, keeping linguistic content constant through voice cloning. Using pointwise LLM-judge ratings, pairwise comparisons, and Best-Worst Scaling with human validation, we detect recurring directional disparities. Eastern European-accented speech receives lower helpfulness scores, particularly for female-presenting voices. Responses remain polite but differ in helpfulness. While LLM judges capture the directional trend of these biases, human evaluators exhibit significantly higher sensitivity, showing stronger accent-level contrasts.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

ScriptManager: a platform for scalable and reproducible high-resolution analysis of genomics datasets

Background: The growing diversity of genomic and epigenomic assays has driven a parallel expansion in data formats, analysis workflows, and figure-generation tools. However, tools for analyzing data and assembling publication-quality figures are often specialized to a specific assay, dramatically limiting their interoperability and reproducibility. Results: We present the v1.0 release of ScriptManager, a Java-based framework for modular and reproducible analysis and visualization workflows of genomics and epigenomics data. Unlike existing tools specialized for individual assay types, ScriptManager provides a unified and extensible framework for cross-assay visualization and workflow reproducibility. The v1.0 release adds novel analytical modules, GUI session logging, automated unit and integration testing, tutorials, and expanded documentation. It also integrates with the broader reproducibility ecosystem through Singularity containers, Anaconda packaging, and Galaxy XML wrappers. We demonstrate ScriptManager's TagPileup scaling from local single-core execution to a 10,305-job analysis distributed across the Open Science Grid (OSG), with the full workload completing in

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

E-VAds: An E-commerce Short Videos Understanding Benchmark for MLLMs

E-commerce short videos represent a high-revenue segment of the online video industry characterized by a goal-driven format and dense multi-modal signals. Current models often struggle with these videos because existing benchmarks focus primarily on general-purpose tasks and neglect the reasoning of commercial intent. In this work, we first propose a multi-modal information density assessment framework to quantify the complexity of this domain. Our evaluation reveals that e-commerce content exhibits substantially higher density across visual, audio, and textual modalities compared to mainstream datasets, establishing a more challenging frontier for video understanding. To address this gap, we introduce E-commerce Video Ads Benchmark, which is the first benchmark specifically designed for e-commerce short video understanding. We curated 3,961 high-quality videos from Taobao covering a wide range of product categories and used a multi-agent system to generate 19,785 open-ended Q&A pairs, which consist of five distinct tasks. Finally, we develop E-VAds-R1, an RL-based reasoning model featuring a multi-grained reward design called MG-GRPO. This strategy provides smooth guidance for early exploration while creating a non-linear incentive for expert-level precision. Experimental results demonstrate that E-VAds-R1 achieves a 109.2% performance gain in commercial intent reasoning with only a few hundred training samples. Data is available at https://github.com/TaobaoTmall-AlgorithmProducts/E-VAds_Benchmark.

20.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-02

Prognostic value of cervical length for spontaneous preterm birth in asymptomatic women with singleton pregnancy: An individual participant data meta-analysis

Authors:

by Kelly Hughes, David Nguyen, Mason Aberoumand, Heather Ford, Erin Clarke, Nuria Banos Lopez, Margaret Dziadosz, Richard Fischer, Renato T. Souza, Jose Guilherme Cecatti, Kelly Orzechowski, Courtney Olson-Chen, Alberto Borges Peixoto, Vorapong Phupong, Joshua Rosenbloom, Moeun Son, Athena Souka, Liu Du, Michael Sean Esplin, Roberta Granese, Simi Gupta, Brenda Kazemier, Lindsay Kindinger, Pihla Kuusela, Jeanine Van der Ven, Omer Weitzner, Evelyn Minis, Alba Farras Llobet, Heather Frey, Rashmi Bagga, Siddhidatri Mishra, Elizabeth Patberg, Philip Bennett, Megan Hall, Andrew Shennan, Shaun Brennecke, Shakila Thangaratinam, Anna Lene Seidler, Ben Willem Mol, Rui Wang Background Spontaneous preterm birth (SPTB) is the leading cause of perinatal and early childhood mortality worldwide. Studies have generally suggested that mid-trimester transvaginal sonographic cervical length

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

DOG-DPO:Dynamic Optimization in Geometry for Safety Alignment

arXiv:2606.07678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment for large language models relies on preference data, but current pipelines often train on large, redundant datasets. Existing data selection methods typically score each preference pair independently, collapsing directional preference information into scalar quality or diversity scores. This sample-centric view is especially limiting in multi-dataset settings, where shared safety directions coexist with dataset-specific residual risks. We propose DOG-DPO, a training-free data selection framework that treats preference pairs as structured geometric signals. DOG-DPO first represents each preference pair as a direction in model representation space. It then decomposes multi-dataset preference geometry into a global anchor subspace and dataset-specific residual subspaces. Finally, it selects subsets by maximizing diversity-based coverage, encouraging broad, non-redundant coverage of alignment directions before DPO training. Across six safety benchmarks and two model backbones, DOG-DPO achieves a strong utility-robustness trade-off using only 11% of the preference pairs. It recovers most of the safety gains of full-data training while remaining entirely teacher-free, training-free, and substantially faster than representative selection baselines.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scanners

Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based systems. Through an empirical study of existing skill scanners, we find that current defenses primarily rely on textual descriptions, manifests, and source code as the main signals for security analysis, which can leave visually conveyed malicious intent insufficiently examined. This creates a practical blind spot: harmful operational instructions hidden in images may bypass scanning while still being recoverable by multimodal agents during deployment. To systematically investigate this threat, we propose SkillCamo, a document-mediated multimodal instruction attack that conceals malicious instructions within images bundled with a skill while rewriting the surrounding documentation to naturally reference those images as part of the normal workflow. Thus, the attack does not rely on the image alone, but on the joint interpretation of textual guidance and visual payload at execution time. To defend against such attacks, we further propose ExecScan, an execution-grounded multimodal scanning module that performs intent extraction, behavior reconstruction, abuse assessment, and deliberative execution simulation over skill artifacts. ExecScan jointly analyzes documentation, code, referenced resources, and visual content to recover hidden instructions, reconstruct executable behavior chains, and identify downstream risks such as exfiltration, destruction, persistence, deception, and privilege escalation. Extensive experiments show that image-hidden malicious instructions challenge existing skill scanners, while ExecScan can improve the skill scanning performance.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Food4All: An Agentic Framework and Benchmark for Food Resource Navigation with Adaptive User Understanding

Food assistance referral requires conversational agents to translate underspecified, often noisy help-seeking dialogues into locally valid resource recommendations. We present Food4All, an agentic food-resource referral framework and benchmark grounded in 686 structured Indiana food resources. Food4All couples a food-specific search tool with 300 multi-turn evaluation tasks spanning single food needs, composite cases with access or document constraints, and five non-ideal user interaction traits: unreasonable demands, rambling responses, impatience, incomplete answers, and inconsistent information. We evaluate six Large Language Models (LLMs) on requirement grounding, resource retrieval, final referral correctness, and interaction efficiency. Although the strongest model achieves 96.33% referral accuracy, our diagnostics reveal persistent failures in grounding schedule, eligibility, intake, and document constraints, as well as failures to preserve valid retrieved resources in the final recommendation. Trait-level analysis further shows that different non-ideal behaviors stress different parts of the referral pipeline. Food4All provides a controlled testbed for studying tool-calling agents in constraint-sensitive food assistance referral under realistic user interaction challenges.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Effective Resistances and Commute Times in Sparse Random Geometric Graphs

arXiv:2606.14895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The commute time between two nodes in a network - the expected number of steps for a random walk to travel from one node to the other and then return - is a metric of broad importance arising in community detection, network routing, dimensionality reduction, and diffusion modeling. For random geometric graphs (RGGs), in which nodes are placed at random in a spatial domain and connected pairwise wherever their Euclidean distance is below a threshold radius, the relationship between commute times and the embedding geometry remains poorly understood outside very dense settings (where the role of the geometry disappears and commute times degenerate to a sum of inverse degrees). We develop and numerically validate a model for approximating commute times in sparse RGGs on a torus by combining theoretically motivated geometric contributions with an inverse degree sum. The geometric terms include a universal logarithmic contribution from the Laplacian, a quadratic correction encoding the compact topology of the torus, and a quartic angular term reflecting the square anisotropy of the domain. We fit this model to samples of node pairs across a range of graph sizes and mean degrees, demonstrating good predictive performance and that the geometric terms contribute significantly to model fit. We then study the continuous perturbation of the model from a regular square lattice to a fully random geometric graph, further validating the functional model form through this transition and showing how commute times in sparse RGGs retain meaningful geometric information about the embedding space.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining and struggle to achieve the same level of performance compared to models dedicated to each task. Additionally, many of these models suffer from slow image generation speeds, limiting their practical deployment in real-time or resource-constrained settings. In this work, we propose Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer (LaTtE-Flow), a novel and efficient architecture that unifies image understanding and generation within a single multimodal model. LaTtE-Flow builds upon powerful pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to inherit strong multimodal understanding capabilities, and extends them with a novel Layerwise Timestep Experts flow-based architecture for efficient image generation. LaTtE-Flow distributes the flow-matching process across specialized groups of Transformer layers, each responsible for a distinct subset of timesteps. This design significantly improves sampling efficiency by activating only a small subset of layers at each sampling timestep. To further enhance performance, we propose a Timestep-Conditioned Residual Attention mechanism for efficient information reuse across layers. Experiments demonstrate that LaTtE-Flow achieves strong performance on multimodal understanding tasks, while achieving competitive image generation quality with around 6x faster inference speed compared to recent unified multimodal models.