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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

A Novel Correction Method for QT Interval in the Presence of Left Bundle Branch Block Morphology

Authors:
Alasti↗Esmailian↗Machado↗Adhikari↗Cheng↗S. H↗Ha↗Alison↗Krahn↗A. D↗Han↗H.-C↗…

Background Accurate assessment of the QT interval is challenging in the presence of QRS prolongation, such as during ventricular pacing or bundle branch block. Current correction methods are heterogeneous and lack consensus. To evaluate the relationship between QRS duration and QT interval during ventricular pacing and to develop a practical correction method for QT assessment. Methods In this prospective single-centre study, 94 patients undergoing electrophysiology study for supraventricular tachycardia were included. Standardised pacing was performed at the same cycle length from the right ventricular (RV) apex, high output and low output pacing from His catheter, and coronary sinus (reference). QRS and QT intervals were measured from 12-lead ECGs. Changes in QT (QT) and QRS duration (QRS) were analysed using linear regression and mixed-effects modelling. QT correction formulas of the form QT corrected = QT N x QRS were evaluated using Bland-Altman analysis across multiple coefficients. Results A significant positive correlation between QRS and QT was observed across all pacing sites (r = 0.52-0.74, p < 0.001). In mixed-effects modelling, QRS was a strong independent predictor of QT (0.59, p < 0.001), with no significant interaction between pacing site and QRS, supporting a consistent relationship across pacing locations. Bland-Altman analysis demonstrated that correction coefficients of 0.65-0.70 minimised systematic bias compared with lower coefficients, with similar precision across models (SD 16 ms) and no evidence of proportional bias. A coefficient of 0.65 provided the most balanced performance between bias and variability. Conclusion QT prolongation during ventricular pacing is primarily driven by QRS widening and follows a consistent linear relationship across pacing sites. A simple correction using QT corrected = QT 0.65 x (QRS 100 ms) provides a practical and accurate method for QT assessment, with potential clinical applicability in patients with conduction abnormalities or ventricular pacing.

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

How Much Capacity Does EEG Denoising Need? Ultra-Compact Networks reveal Benchmark Saturation and Metric-Utility Gap

Authors:
Jasmeet Singh Bindra↗Siddharth Panwar↗

arXiv:2606.08594v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep learning EEG denoising architectures have scaled from tens of thousands to tens of millions of parameters, yet no prior study has isolated model capacity as the experimental variable or tested whether reconstruction metrics predict downstream neural-signal utility. We address both gaps by fixing architecture, loss, data split, and training recipe while sweeping only channel width from 1.05K to 40.26K parameters in a minimal depthwise-separable convolutional U-Net. Models were evaluated on the EEGDenoiseNet benchmark, cross-dataset BCI transfer tests, controlled baseline retraining, and downstream motor-imagery classification with five decoder families across all nine BCI Competition IV-2a subjects. Reconstruction performance saturated by 3-6.5K parameters, with post-elbow gains of at most 0.015 correlation coefficient per log10-parameter unit. An 8.46M-parameter baseline retrained under the same pipeline matched the 40.26K compact variant on EOG–a 200x parameter gap yielding no advantage–while a Patch-Transformer control reproduced the same diminishing-return shape. Downstream evaluation exposed a classifier-dependent metric-utility gap: reconstruction-optimized denoising significantly degraded CSP+LDA classification across all nine subjects and three artifact types (best denoised accuracy 0.547 vs. 0.612 noisy baseline; Bonferroni p=0.0488), persisting on naturally recorded trials (Delta=-0.047; BH-FDR q=0.0049). End-to-end neural decoders showed variable or neutral effects. Standard EEG denoising benchmarks are saturated far below current model capacity, and reconstruction metrics do not predict BCI utility. Ultra-compact models at 33-46 KB and 1.27-2.61M FLOPs/segment are practical for edge deployment. These findings argue for capacity-controlled evaluation, harder task-aware benchmarks, and mandatory downstream validation.

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

Guiding Federated Graph Recommendation with LLM-encoded knowledge

Authors:
Thi Minh Chau Nguyen↗Hien Trang Nguyen↗Duc Anh Nguyen↗Van Ho-Long↗Thanh Trung Huynh↗Zhao Ren↗

arXiv:2606.15277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based recommender systems are highly effective at extracting collaborative signals from user–item interactions, and federated learning (FL) allows these models to be trained while preserving user privacy. However, aggregating graph representations across distributed, non-IID clients remains a challenge; structural embeddings learned locally often misalign, and naive averaging fails to capture meaningful cross-client relationships. Most existing federated graph methods rely exclusively on structural aggregation, neglecting the rich, global semantic context available in large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose a novel framework that uses LLM-encoded knowledge to guide federated graph recommendation. Specifically, clients learn structural representations from local graphs while simultaneously summarizing their typical interaction patterns into compact semantic vectors via a frozen LLM. The central server then uses these LLM-encoded semantic signals to discover related preference patterns across clients, guiding the selective aggregation of their structural representations. This enables semantically informed cross-client collaboration without exposing raw data. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that guiding structural alignment with LLM-encoded knowledge consistently improves recommendation accuracy over existing federated graph baselines.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Microwave-free vector magnetometry and crystal orientation determination with Nitrogen-Vacancy centers using Bayesian inference

Authors:
Hilario Espin\'os↗Omkar Dhungel↗Arne Wickenbrock↗Dmitry Budker↗Ricardo Puebla↗Erik Torrontegui↗

arXiv:2512.13835v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond provide a solid-state platform for quantum sensing. While optically detected magnetic resonance techniques offer high sensitivity, their reliance on microwaves introduces heating and stray electromagnetic fields that can perturb nearby samples. Optical approaches based on cross-relaxation between differently oriented NV centers remove this constraint but have so far required stringent alignment of the external field with crystallographic axes, restricting their practicality. Here we introduce a general framework for microwave-free vector magnetometry at near-zero field that leverages Bayesian inference to extract both the magnetic field vector and the NV orientation directly from photoluminescence maps. An analytical model of cross-relaxation resonances enables efficient inference under arbitrary field and orientation configurations, while naturally incorporating the discrete degeneracies of the NV symmetry. We experimentally demonstrate robust orientation determination and vector-field reconstruction, establishing a general route toward compact and alignment-free NV magnetometers for practical sensing applications.

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05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

The EU needs to back its ambition to end animal testing with cash

Authors: Unknown Author

The European Union has declared that it wants to stop using animals in chemical safety testing. Its goal will need a timeline and a serious funding commitment. The European Union has declared that it wants to stop using animals in chemical safety testing. Its goal will need a timeline and a serious funding commitment.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

MedAgent: A Retrieval-Augmented Clinical Decision Support Agent with Verifiable Evidence Grounding for Evidence-Based Medicine

Authors:
Wang↗Guo↗Ye↗

Evidence-based medicine demands clinical answers that are not only fluent and medically plausible, but also anchored in traceable evidence, tailored to patient-specific clinical questions, sensitive to the hierarchy of evidence, and respectful of clinical safety boundaries. While general-purpose large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong medical language generation ability, they tend to lean on parametric memory, underuse retrieved evidence, hallucinate citations, conflate evidence levels, and draw conclusions that are not fully supported by the underlying literature. Such limitations pose particular risks in clinical decision support, where answer reliability, evidence traceability, and reasoning consistency are paramount. To address these issues, we present MedAgent, an evidence-based medical agent trained through an end-to-end pipeline that integrates supervised fine-tuning (SFT) cold start, reward modeling, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). The agent is designed to execute a structured workflow encompassing clinical question understanding, PICO extraction, evidence retrieval, evidence stratification, citation-grounded answer generation, and quality evaluation. Specifically, a Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct backbone is first cold-started on 200 human-verified agent trajectories, equipping it with tool invocation, PICO parsing, structured response generation, and citation faithfulness. Next, a Qwen2.5-7B reward model is trained on 2{,}099 pairwise preference samples to provide semantic-level quality signals for evidence-based responses. Finally, GRPO reinforcement learning is conducted in a retrieval-augmented agent environment, where every rollout involves real evidence retrieval and is scored jointly by rule-based rewards and reward-model signals. To avoid over-reliance on training rewards, we further construct an independent evidence-based medical evaluation benchmark, MedTrustBench, which contains 200 clinical questions spanning 10 specialties and four difficulty levels. Each question is annotated with standardized PICO elements and rubric-based scoring criteria. The benchmark includes 1{,}187 rubrics across seven dimensions: question relevance, evidence hierarchy, evidence quality and timeliness, evidence-answer consistency, completeness and depth, logical rigor, and medical terminology. Under an identical RAG pipeline, retrieval tool, retrieval configuration, and evaluation protocol, MedAgentv17 attains 78.6 points, outperforming GPT-4.1 (75.3) and approaching GPT-5.4 (80.3). These results show that a 14B domain-aligned model can surpass strong general-purpose baselines on specialized evidence-based medical reasoning, while delivering practical advantages in cost, privacy, controllability, and hospital-oriented private deployment. The model and associated datasets are publicly released at https://www.modelscope.cn/profile/InfoxmedModel

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

To Compare, or Not to Compare: On Methodological Practices in Evaluating Social Bias

Authors:
Federico Marcuzzi↗Xuefei Ning↗Roy Schwartz↗Iryna Gurevych↗

As Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in critical applications, robustly evaluating their social biases is paramount. However, the current literature suffers from widespread methodological fragmentation, which yields contradictory conclusions. This stems largely from ignoring the structural framing of benchmark-level evaluations. To resolve this, we introduce a unified and controllable framework that standardizes heterogeneous benchmarks to systematically contrast isolated demographic assessments with forced-choice comparative settings. Crucially, this allows us to disentangle the confounding effects of Chain-of-Thought reasoning, neutral fallback options, and other structural artifacts in social bias evaluations. Our evaluation across multiple model families reveals a massive, systematic paradigm gap: while isolated assessments limit prejudice activation, comparative settings act as aggressive catalysts for latent discrimination, a shift primarily driven by underspecified contexts. Alarmingly, CoT reasoning exacerbates social biases under comparative settings, and this systemic bias persists as a deterministic prejudice even when models are provided neutral fallback options or claim to answer randomly. Finally, we demonstrate that this comparative prejudice is a generalized phenomenon that scales positively with model size. Ultimately, we offer a crucial methodological guideline: while researchers must leverage comparative settings to robustly audit hidden biases, practitioners cannot safely rely on comparative deployments in ambiguous real-world tasks.

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08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

High-Order Talagrand and Eldan–Gross Inequalities via Besov-Type Variance Functionals

Authors:
Guangyue Han↗Peijie Li↗

arXiv:2606.14876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: By introducing high-order Besov-type variance functionals that generalize the canonical variance, we develop a unified framework for proving high-order Talagrand-type inequalities that relate high-order energies to Fourier weights. Applying this machinery, we establish high-order Poincaré-type, $L^p$–$L^q$, isoperimetric-type, Falik–Samorodnitsky and Eldan–Gross inequalities, all with explicit constants, in both the Boolean and Gaussian settings. Fundamentally, our semigroup-based framework relies primarily on hypercontractivity and high-order Bismut-type derivative estimates, and is broadly applicable.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

COSMOS: Model-Agnostic Personalized Federated Learning with Clustered Server Models and Pseudo-Label-Only Communication

Authors:
Ben Rachmut↗Luise Ge↗William Yeoh↗Ning Zhang↗Yevgeniy Vorobeychik↗

arXiv:2605.11165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) in heterogeneous environments remains challenging because client models often differ in both architecture and data distribution. While recent approaches attempt to address this challenge through client clustering and knowledge distillation, simultaneously handling architectural and statistical heterogeneity remains difficult. We introduce COSMOS, a model-agnostic framework that enables server-side personalization using only pseudo-label communication. Clients train local models and predict on the public data; the server clusters clients by prediction similarity, trains a cluster-specific model for each group using its own compute, and distills the resulting models back to clients. We provide the first theoretical analysis showing that distillation from the learned cluster models can yield exponential personalization risk contraction, going beyond the convergence-to-stationarity guarantees typically provided in model-agnostic FL. Experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that COSMOS consistently outperforms all model-agnostic FL baselines while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art personalized FL methods. More broadly, our results highlight personalized server-side learning with pseudo-labels as a promising paradigm for scalable and model-agnostic federated learning in highly heterogeneous environments.

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10.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

TCRBinder: Unified pre-trained language model with paired-chain synergy for predicting T-cell receptor binding specificity

Authors:
Weihe Dong↗

by Weihe Dong, Qiang Yang, Long Xu, Xiaokun Li, Kuanquan Wang, Suyu Dong, Gongning Luo, Xianyu Zhang, Tiansong Yang, Xin Gao, Guohua Wang Deciphering how human T cells recognise peptide-HLA (pHLA) complexes underpins next-generation vaccines and personalised immunotherapies, yet extreme sequence diversity and paired-chains interdependence still hamper reliable in silico prediction of T-cell receptor (TCR) specificity. To overcome these hurdles, we built TCRBinder, a paired-chain-aware deep model with a multi-branch encoder that routes each molecular component through dedicated transformer-based modules to capture contextual signals in both HLA pseudo-sequences and antigenic peptides while simultaneously processing the TCR α and β chains. This design captures the synergistic interaction between paired chains to emulate peptide-HLA-TCR (PHT) interactions and expose residue-level contact motifs. Across PHT and peptide-TCR (pTCR) benchmarks, the model delivered state-of-the-art performance (AUC-ROC = 0.911, AUPR = 0.791 for the PHT task) and remained superior on multiple independent datasets. We tracked the dynamics of clonal expansion and, in a large SARS-CoV-2 repertoire containing completely unseen peptides, improved the AUC-ROC by up to 16.3% over the leading alternatives. Moreover, TCRBinder provided mechanistic insights by pinpointing contact hotspots and quantifying residue contributions to binding probability. These capabilities position TCRBinder as a versatile tool for rational antigen discovery, immunotherapy stratification, and neoantigen vaccine design.

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

Discriminative Span as a Predictor of Synthetic Data Utility via Classifier Reconstruction

Authors:
Radhika Amar Desai↗Modigari Narendra↗

In many real-world computer vision applications, including medical imaging and industrial inspection, binary classification tasks are characterized by a severe scarcity of positive samples. A widely adopted solution is to generate synthetic positive data using image-to-image transformations applied to negative samples. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how can we reliably assess whether such synthetic data will improve downstream model performance? In this work, we propose a geometry-driven metric that predicts the utility of synthetic data without requiring model training. Our approach operates in the embedding space of a pre-trained foundation model and represents the dataset through difference vectors between samples. We evaluate whether the weight vector of a linear classifier can be expressed within the subspace spanned by these variations by measuring the relative projection error. Intuitively, if the variations induced by synthetic data capture task-relevant directions, their span can approximate the classifier, resulting in low projection error. Conversely, poor synthetic data fails to span these directions, leading to higher error. Across multiple datasets and architectures, we show that this metric exhibits strong correlation with downstream classification performance of CNNs trained on mixtures of real negative and synthetic positive data. These findings suggest that the proposed metric serves as a practical and informative tool for evaluating synthetic data quality in data-scarce settings.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Natural Identifiers for Privacy and Data Audits in Large Language Models

Authors:
Lorenzo Rossi↗Bart{\l}omiej Marek↗Franziska Boenisch↗Adam Dziedzic↗

arXiv:2606.24408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Assessing the privacy of large language models (LLMs) presents significant challenges. In particular, most existing methods for auditing differential privacy require the insertion of specially crafted canary data during training, making them impractical for auditing already-trained models without costly retraining. Additionally, dataset inference, which audits whether a suspect dataset was used to train a model, is infeasible without access to a private non-member held-out dataset. Yet, such held-out datasets are often unavailable or difficult to construct for real-world cases since they have to be from the same distribution (IID) as the suspect data. These limitations severely hinder the ability to conduct scalable, post-hoc audits. To enable such audits, this work introduces natural identifiers (NIDs) as a novel solution to the above-mentioned challenges. NIDs are structured random strings, such as cryptographic hashes and shortened URLs, naturally occurring in common LLM training datasets. Their format enables the generation of unlimited additional random strings from the same distribution, which can act as alternative canaries for audits and as same-distribution held-out data for dataset inference. Our evaluation highlights that indeed, using NIDs, we can facilitate post-hoc differential privacy auditing without any retraining and enable dataset inference for any suspect dataset containing NIDs without the need for a private non-member held-out dataset.

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

Illumination-Robust Camera-Based Heart-Rate Estimation for Physiological Sensing in Robots

Authors:
Zhi Wei Xu↗Torbj\"orn E. M. Nordling↗

Physiological awareness is important for service, social, and assistive robots that interact with humans in everyday environments. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact heart-rate (HR) estimation from an RGB camera, making it a promising sensing modality for robot-mounted vision systems. However, illumination variation remains a major barrier to robust deployment. This paper presents an end-to-end spatial-temporal transformer framework for remote HR estimation on a new dataset with varied illumination. Our estimator integrates PRNet-based 3D face alignment, clip-level illumination augmentation, the Residual Temporal Standardization Module, and controlled hybrid temporal-frequency supervision. The training objective combines a Soft-Shifted Pearson waveform loss with a spectral Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where a tuned weight ($\mathbf{\beta}$) controls the contribution of frequency-domain heart-rate guidance. Experiments on a static all-level mix protocol covering three illumination levels show that $\mathbf{\beta}=5$ provides the strongest result among the tested beta settings, achieving a best-run HR mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.79 bpm and an HR correlation of 0.982. Compared with the PhysFormer baseline evaluated on our dataset, our estimator reduces HR MAE by 93.6 %, while increasing HR correlation from 0.088 to 0.982, making it usable when illumination varies.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Beyond Native Success: Auditing Deployment-Interface Exposure of CLIP Backdoors

Authors:
Kunlan Xiang↗Haomiao Yang↗Wenbo Jiang↗

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training models are widely reused across downstream interfaces, including feature extraction, retrieval, reranking, and selection. Existing CLIP backdoor, however, usually validate attacks on a small attack-native task, leaving unclear whether the same poisoned checkpoint remains exposed, weakens, or becomes not applicable when reused through other interfaces. We introduce DIFE, a Deployment-Interface Footprint Evaluation framework that audits backdoored CLIP checkpoints across deployment interfaces. DIFE makes various evaluations comparable by specifying each interface's component readout, trigger channel, target event, reference condition, and metric. DIFE also introduces effective-footprint diagnosis to identify the reusable CLIP component or component combination that carries exposure and explains where risk transfers. Auditing reproduced CLIP backdoors with DIFE reveals a structured landscape: native success is not a checkpoint-level risk certificate, exposure follows component footprints, text-side poisoning does not yield textual-encoder control, and some coupled attacks remain mechanism-bound. This audit reveals a import gapin existing CLIP backdoors: a textual encoder that itself becomes a reusable carrier of adversarial behavior. We therefore introduce BadTextTower to fill this gap. BadTextTower produces strong text-conditioned retrieval, reranking, and selection exposure while leaving visual-only reuse nearly clean.

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

Does it matter which Gaussians you pick in 4D Gaussian streaming?

Authors:
Ashim Dahal↗Rabab Abdelfattah↗Nick Rahimi↗

Anchor-driven 4D Gaussian streaming methods such as Instant Gaussian Stream (IGS) update a dynamic scene each frame from a compact set of Gaussian anchors, chosen by default with Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) at a fixed budget of $8{,}192$. Because these anchors act as control points that drive the whole scene through linear blend skinning, the rule used to choose them ought to affect reconstruction quality. We test this by holding the IGS pipeline fixed and changing only the sampler, comparing FPS, random, uniform, an opacity-scale heuristic, and a learned policy across budgets and refinement settings on N3DV and MeetingRoom. At deployment budgets the sampler has no measurable effect: a cheap random or uniform sampler at $4{,}096$ anchors matches FPS@8192 within measurement error, the default budget is over-provisioned, and the result holds on a second backbone (3DGStream). The learned policy is mixed rather than consistently better: it can improve the N3DV validation set at tight budgets, but does not give a stable cross-dataset rule, and selection is never the bottleneck because refinement dominates runtime. We will release our full sweep and evaluation protocol as a sampler benchmark.

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16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

MetaboNet-Bench: A Multi-modal Benchmark for Glucose Forecasting in Type 1 Diabetes

Authors:
Nathaniel Jeffries↗Miriam Wolff↗Sam Royston↗Elizabeth Healey↗Caleb Mayer↗David Klonoff↗Michael Snyder↗Tao Wang↗

arXiv:2606.18640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Glucose forecasting algorithms are an important aspect of glycemic control management in type 1 diabetes. So far, the research community has developed numerous algorithms and models for forecasting. However, it is well-recognized that the lack of standardized model performance evaluation benchmarks makes fair comparison difficult and hinders further innovation, and thus benchmark standardization is in urgent need. Furthermore, many published glucose forecasting algorithms are limited to CGM data alone, ignoring other multimodal signals such as insulin dosing and carbohydrate intake. Here, we introduce MetaboNet-Bench, a benchmark for multimodal glucose forecasting for patients with type 1 diabetes that provides an extensible open-source evaluation framework for comparison of glucose forecasting algorithms that leverage glucose, insulin, and carbohydrate data. We then demonstrate its utility by benchmarking several recently published glucose forecasting models and a custom multimodal time-series model, representing different model architectures. The results show that the benefit of adding data modalities is conditioned on the complexity of the model and that incorporating more clinical metrics helps identify meaningful gaps to fill for future research.

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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

County Year Informatics Model for Annual and Cumulative Unique Lung Cancer Screening Eligibility in Maryland, 2026 to 2045

Authors:
Adebamowo↗S. N↗

Purpose: Population-level lung cancer screening programs require denominators that reflect age, smoking history, geography, and changing eligibility over time. We estimated annual prevalent and 20-year cumulative unique low-dose computed tomography screening eligibility for Maryland residents under alternative screening criteria. Methods: We built a deterministic cohort-cell stock-flow simulation using Maryland county-equivalent jurisdiction projections by age, sex, and race/ethnicity, with ACS socioeconomic/nativity covariates and smoking-history priors for ever-smoked status, pack-years, and quit-years. Scenarios included USPSTF 2013 legacy, USPSTF 2021, ACS 2023/2024, a risk-model-expanded sensitivity, and ever-smoked-only capacity stress tests. Cumulative unique eligibility counted people once at first eligibility rather than summing annual prevalent person-years. Results: Under USPSTF 2021, an estimated 238,346 Maryland residents were eligible in 2026 and 245,326 in 2045. The 20-year cumulative unique denominator was 768,668, whereas naively summing annual prevalent counts produced 4,850,735 person-years, a 6.31-fold overcount. ACS 2023/2024 expanded annual eligibility to 314,616 in 2026 and cumulative unique eligibility to 902,796 by adding remote former smokers. Ever-smoked-only adult eligibility was 1,957,699 in 2026 and 3,383,683 cumulative unique over 20 years. Conclusion: A Maryland statewide screening initiative should plan from cumulative unique eligibility and county-equivalent jurisdiction-specific burden rather than annual prevalence alone. Explicit pack-year and quit-year modeling materially changes statewide and county allocation compared with current-smoking proxy models.

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

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

Authors:
Yi Yu↗Xinchuan Qiu↗

arXiv:2606.08881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored. We present a standardized real-world benchmark for evaluating representative VLA and imitation learning policies on the low-cost SO-101 robotic platform. The benchmark comprises four representative manipulation tasks together with unified evaluation protocols, enabling systematic comparison under embodiment uncertainty. Using real-world teleoperated demonstrations, we fine-tune and evaluate $\pi_{0.5}$, SmolVLA, Wall-X, and ACT directly on the physical platform. Beyond conventional task success rates, the benchmark incorporates a structured failure taxonomy, semantic- and execution-level failure decomposition, and recovery-aware evaluation metrics to characterize policy robustness. Experimental results show that stronger pretrained VLA policies generally outperform the imitation learning baseline, although performance remains highly task-dependent under low-cost robotic deployment conditions. Execution instability emerges as the dominant failure source, while recovery capability varies substantially across architectures. These results highlight the importance of failure and recovery analysis beyond binary task success and establish SO-101 as a practical benchmark for evaluating embodied AI systems under realistic low-cost robotic deployment conditions.

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

To forget is to preserve: Machine Unlearning for 3D medical image segmentation

Authors:
Nitesh Kumar Singh↗Akhilesh Singh↗Arjun Arora↗

With new data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [1] that allow individuals to ask that any of their personal information be erased from trained machine learning models, there has been a push to investigate the unlearning of data from models as a way to comply with these laws. In this regard, based on four mechanics, we consider several approximate unlearning strategies applied to the MRBrainS18 dataset [2]. We use a 3D ResNet-50 [3] as a backbone architecture for segmentation that has been pre-trained with the Med3D framework [4]. Considering the pre-trained model as a baseline, we evaluate respective retention accuracy on 2 types of subjects, i.e., retain and forget. We assess these approaches through their Dice similarity coefficient and mean absolute error (MAE) values using two separate training horizons 20 and 50 epochs. The results show that the Noisy Label strategy had the best overall trade-off with a decrease of 93% in the forget set while maintaining 84% accuracy for the retained set after 50 epochs. All other strategies showed extreme levels of forgetting at higher epoch numbers while also demonstrating catastrophic degradation of their retain set performance. The results of this study provide a strict baseline of performance metrics for unlearning on a subject-specific level and provide practitioners with clear criteria for selecting the proper strategies.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Fabric Image Demoiréing Benchmark from Synthesis to Restoration

Authors:
Pengchao Wei↗Xiaojie Guo↗

Fabric moiré is a sampling-induced aliasing artifact caused by the interaction between fine textile patterns and camera sensor grids, producing structured interference that severely degrades image quality. Unlike screen-induced moiré, which stems from strictly periodic display lattices, fabric moiré is intrinsically more challenging due to the broadband and semi-periodic nature of textile weaves. The heavy spectral overlap between intrinsic texture and aliasing components renders fabric demoiréing substantially more ill-posed. Consequently, existing models trained on screen moiré datasets generalize poorly to these complex textile patterns. Despite its practical importance, fabric image demoiréing remains underexplored and lacks standardized benchmarks. We present the first comprehensive benchmark for fabric image demoiréing. To address the difficulty of acquiring pixel-aligned real-world pairs, we develop a physically motivated synthesis framework and construct a large-scale dataset comprising 16,050 paired multi-resolution fabric images with controllable aliasing severity. Furthermore, we customize a baseline model, which establishes promising performance on the proposed benchmark dataset with strong generalization ability. Our benchmark provides a standardized platform for advancing research in fabric image demoiréing.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MetaPlate: Counterfactual-Guided RAG-LLM Tool for Personalized Food Recommendation and Hyperglycemia Prevention

Authors:
Asiful Arefeen↗Carol Johnston↗Hassan Ghasemzadeh↗

arXiv:2606.10120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Postprandial hyperglycemia is a key risk factor for metabolic disorders; however, existing dietary guidance is often static, impractical, and insufficiently personalized, providing recommendations that are difficult to follow or not impactful. While recent advances leverage continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and machine learning to predict glycemic responses, these approaches are largely predictive and lack actionable guidance. Moreover, recommendation systems are often misaligned with user goals and require extensive input. We present MetaPlate, a counterfactual explanation (CF) guided, context-aware decision-support framework that generates personalized meal recommendations to mitigate postprandial glucose excursions in healthy adults. MetaPlate integrates multimodal data, including CGM readings, wearable-derived physiological signals, and user-provided meal inputs from $25$ individuals to model pre-meal context. A machine learning model predicts glucose response, while a CF optimization module adjusts meal composition modifying macronutrient amounts to maintain glucose levels within a target range ($\leq 140$ mg/dL). An LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) layer enhances interpretability by producing human-readable recommendations using constrained search of the USDA food database. We evaluate MetaPlate via a structured expert-in-the-loop assessment with registered dietitians (RDs), comparing performance before and after prompt refinement. Results show improvements in meal realism, portion suitability, and recommendation likelihood, with expert feedback indicating a shift from clinically implausible outputs to actionable, contextually appropriate recommendations. Our findings emphasize the importance of domain knowledge and structured constraints in LLM-driven systems and highlight the potential of MetaPlate as a real-time personalized dietary decision-support tool.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

How Much Do Reviews Really Contribute? A Study on Text-Enriched Matrix Factorization for Recommendations

Authors:
Eduardo Ferreira da Silva↗Mayki dos Santos Oliveira↗Joel Machado Pires Denis Dantas Boaventura↗Frederico Ara\'ujo Dur\~ao↗

arXiv:2606.16973v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Incorporating textual reviews into a Recommender System has become a prominent strategy for enriching collaborative signals with semantic information. However, the actual contribution of review-derived representations remains an open question, particularly when strong collaborative baselines are employed. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of textual information on Matrix Factorization by introducing and comparing three enrichment strategies over a common collaborative backbone. First, we propose a learnable gating mechanism that adaptively balances collaborative and textual signals during training. This mechanism is applied to two distinct review representations: (i) aggregated topic profiles extracted from user and item histories, and (ii) full text embedding representations derived from reviews. Additionally, we explore a cross-attention mechanism that identifies and emphasizes the most informative dimensions of the textual representation before fusion with collaborative factors. We evaluate six variants: pure, enriched with topic profiles and text via gating; enriched with topics and text via gating; and enhanced with cross-attention over textual features. Experiments across multiple review-based datasets reveal that although adaptive fusion mechanisms improve representation flexibility, the marginal contribution of textual signals remains limited compared to the collaborative backbone. These findings suggest that, under typical rating-prediction settings, collaborative information continues to dominate performance, raising important considerations for the effective integration of semantic review signals into recommendation models.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Agentic Autodiscovery of Diastolic Dysfunction Phenotypes from Surface Electrocardiogram

Authors:
Jamthikar↗A. D↗Shanmugham↗Singh↗Radhakrishnan↗Dong↗Maganti↗Yanamala↗Sengupta↗

Background: Left ventricular diastolic dysfunction (LVDD) is a major determinant of heart failure (HF), yet its assessment relies on multiparametric echocardiography, limiting scalability. We previously demonstrated that generative artificial intelligence (AI) can synthesize tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) waveforms from the 12-lead ECG. The growing complexity of candidate architecture creates a need for automated model-discovery frameworks. Objectives: To evaluate agentic AI-based auto-discovery for ECG-based LVDD assessment using either raw ECG or synthetic TDI waveforms. Methods: Two attention-based agentic AI architectures were developed using an automated large language model-driven refinement framework that optimized transfer-learning and multimodal architectures through autonomous proposal, validation, and selection of candidate model configurations. Development was performed in 1,011 paired ECG-echocardiography studies and externally validated in 983 patients using two reference frameworks: (i) data-driven phenogroups and (ii) the 2025 ASE Diastolic Function Guidelines. External validation was performed in CODE-15% (n=219,567) for HF-related mortality and EchoNext (n=35,718) for structural heart disease associations. Results: Despite the modest cohort size, the ECG-based agentic search achieved area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCs) of 0.87 (95% CI: 0.85-0.89) and 0.83 (95% CI: 0.80-0.86) for phenogroup and guideline-based LVDD severity classification. Corresponding AUCs for the synthetic TDI-based model were 0.82 (95% CI: 0.80-0.85) and 0.80 (95% CI: 0.77-0.84), respectively. In large-scale external validation, both models stratified incident HF mortality with subdistribution hazard ratios ranging 5.5 to 9.5 (Gray's p

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SVHighlights: Towards Extremely Long Sport Video Highlight Detection

Authors:
Donggyu Lee↗Youngbin Ki↗Jeonghun Kang↗Taehwan Kim↗

While highlight detection for long-form videos is of great practical importance, most existing methods remain limited to short-form content, largely due to the absence of a suitable benchmark. To bridge this gap, we introduce SVHighlights, to the best of our knowledge, the first benchmark for highlight detection in extremely long sports videos, each exceeding one hour in duration, across multiple sports categories. SVHighlights is constructed from pairs of full-length sports videos and their corresponding official highlight videos using a dataset generation pipeline, enabling scalable label generation without conventional per-clip saliency annotation. The benchmark comprises 320 videos with an average duration of 2.00 hours and a total of 640.18 hours, substantially exceeding previous datasets. Existing methods also face fundamental challenges on long videos: models trained on short clips fail to generalize to hour-long content, and their clip-level scoring lacks the broader context needed to identify highlights. To address this and provide a strong baseline, we present TF-SELECTOR, a training-free segment-based approach that divides each video into context-aware segments by merging adjacent shots sharing the same semantic content, and predicts segment-level saliency scores using a large language model with multimodal inputs including visual captions, transcripts, and audio volume. Experiments demonstrate that TF-SELECTOR achieves superior performance across most metrics compared to Video Temporal Grounding (VTG)-tuned baselines, with improvements of +2.50 in HIT@1, +4.04 in HIT@K, and +2.95 in IoU. These results establish SVHighlights as a challenging testbed for long-form highlight detection and demonstrate that a simple segment-based strategy can effectively scale to hour-long videos.

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