Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:f9d6691f8aac92f15c53341c5a819564

The direct economic impact of surgical non-response in orthopaedic hip, knee, and spine surgery for osteoarthritis: a cost-utility analysis

Authors:

Rampersaud↗Y. R↗Perruccio↗A. V↗Collett↗Sundararajan↗Du↗J. T↗Montoya↗Power↗J. D↗Canizares↗…

Background Annually, nearly 2 million hip, knee, and spinal inpatient surgeries are performed in Canada and the US for osteoarthritis (OA), costing over $37 billion in hospital expenditures. However, 15-30% of patients experience limited or no improvement, resulting in poor value for money. This study evaluated the one-year cost-utility of joint and spine procedures for OA by comparing non-responders to responders, considering various responder definitions. Methods Individual micro-costing data were collected for 1,175 elective hip, knee, and spine patients enrolled in the Longitudinal Evaluation in the Arthritis Program - Osteoarthritis (LEAP-OA) between 2014 and 2018. Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) were derived using the SF-6D utility index. One-year incremental cost-utility ratios (ICURs) were calculated from the hospital perspective. Results Responder rates varied by definition, ranging from 78%-94% for hip replacements, 64%-90% for knee replacements, 60%-64% for spine fusions, and 50%-68% for spine decompressions. Corresponding ICURs were: $45,956-$51,773/QALY for responders versus $108,593-$485,762/QALY for non-responders for hip replacements; $54,831-$71,151/QALY for responders versus $200,486-$1,203,596/QALY for non-responders for knee replacements; $65,980-$74,422/QALY for responders versus $262,039-$729,686/QALY for non-responders for spine fusions; and $29,947-$42,168/QALY for responders versus $63,195-$662,586/QALY for non-responders for spine decompressions. Conclusions While surgical response rates were highly dependent on the responder definition, ICURs for non-responders were significantly higher than those for responders across all definitions. Beyond the negative impact on patients, there is a compelling economic argument for investment in improved pre-operative identification of patients at risk of surgical non-response. Such efforts could enable more personalized, value-based care pathways and reduce the provision of low-value surgical interventions.

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02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12816

Graph Reinforcement Learning for Calibration-Aware Quantum Circuit Routing

Authors:

Yash Vardhan Tomar↗Dheeraj Peddireddy↗Vaneet Aggarwal↗

arXiv:2606.12816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum circuit routing is a key step in compiling programs for noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors. Routes that appear efficient by standard overhead metrics can still lose fidelity when they pass through poorly calibrated couplers. We study a calibration-aware graph reinforcement-learning router that uses same-day IBM Heron r2 calibration data to choose hardware-edge SWAPs. We train the policy with proximal policy optimization and evaluate it with exact simulated fidelity across nine Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) Bench circuits and three calibration snapshots. Across these evaluations, pooled mean exact fidelity is $0.727$, compared with $0.440$ for SABRE-best20 and $0.481$ for target-aware SABRE. Fidelity gains come with higher routed two-qubit counts and are concentrated in the 5q and 8q circuit families; under the fixed tree action graph, all 10q families favor SABRE-best20. Overall, our results show that calibration-aware learned routing can improve fidelity beyond gate-count-driven compilation.

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03.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16959

Diagonal-Budgeted Trotterization for Efficient Quantum Hamiltonian Simulation

Authors:

Srikar Chundury↗Blake Burgstahler↗Jiajia Li↗In-Saeng Suh↗Frank Mueller↗

arXiv:2606.16959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient classical simulation of quantum Hamiltonian dynamics is often bottlenecked by exponential state growth and the overhead of generic sparse linear algebra. We introduce diagonal-budgeted Trotterization, a structure-aware strategy that decomposes Hamiltonians into factors preserving diagonal sparsity while tightly controlling fidelity loss. Our implementation, HamSim, utilizes a compact diagonal-sparse data layout and specialized C++/CUDA kernels to bypass the overheads of generic formats like CSR. By leveraging SIMD vectorization, multithreading, and GPU acceleration, HamSim achieves high performance across heterogeneous architectures. Benchmarks on the HamLib suite show that HamSim significantly outperforms Qiskit-Aer. On CPUs, HamSim attains speedups of $182$–$1,269\times$ on optimization instances (TSP, MaxCut) and $4.8$–$841\times$ on physical models (TFIM, Heisenberg). On GPUs, it achieves up to $178\times$ speedup for $12$–$16$ qubit problems. Unlike traditional Trotterization, HamSim maintains near-perfect fidelity without requiring exponential steps. This demonstrates that diagonal-aware numerical kernels provide a scalable foundation for high-fidelity classical Hamiltonian simulation.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20333

SoftSkill: Behavioral Compression for Contextual Adaptation

Authors:

Xijia Tao↗Yihua Teng↗Xinyu Fu↗Ziru Liu↗Kecheng Chen↗Yuzhi Zhao↗Suiyun Zhang↗Rui Liu↗Lingpeng Kong↗

arXiv:2606.20333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly deployed as natural-language Markdown files that encode answer policies, evidence-use habits, and task procedures. These files are readable and portable, but they are consumed indirectly: for each task instance, a frozen language model must translate a long textual artifact into generation-time behavior. This paper asks whether a natural-language skill can instead initialize a compact continuous context object, refined by a trainable soft delta while the base model remains frozen. We propose SoftSkill, a frozen-backbone method that tunes such soft skills with next-token prediction and deploys them as latent behavioral priors at inference time. In our main single-round setting, a length-32 SoftSkill prefix on Qwen3.5-4B improves over no-skill prompting by 8.3 points on SearchQA, 42.1 points on LiveMath, and 1.3 points on DocVQA. Relative to SkillOpt, SoftSkill improves accuracy by 5.2 points on SearchQA and 12.5 points on LiveMath, while replacing hundreds to thousands of Markdown skill tokens with a few virtual tokens. We further study agentic execution as a harder boundary case, where sparse trajectory imitation provides useful signal but does not yet robustly compress long-horizon procedural behavior. More broadly, the results suggest that some task skills are better treated not as additional Markdown to be reinterpreted at inference time, but as compact latent controls over how a frozen model enters the task.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17962

A Neuro-Symbolic Approach to Strategy Synthesis for Strategic Logics

Authors:

Marco Aruta↗Vadim Malvone↗Aniello Murano↗Domenico Parente↗Luca Rizzuti↗

arXiv:2606.17962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning about what agents can achieve through strategic interaction is a core challenge in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Logics for strategic ability, such as ATL, provide rigorous methods, but their adoption is often hindered by the computational cost of strategy synthesis. We introduce a neuro-symbolic framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) into the model-checking pipeline for MAS. The LLM acts as a strategy-generation oracle, proposing candidate strategies that are then formally validated by a standard MAS model checker. This generate-and-certify architecture uses LLM guidance to navigate large combinatorial strategy spaces while preserving formal soundness: generated strategies are accepted only when certified by the verifier. We instantiate the framework for bounded strategic reasoning in NatATL and introduce the first NatATL strategy-synthesis dataset, consisting of 4211 instances. Experiments with an open-weight Qwen3-32B model show that our certified pipeline achieves 92\% accuracy on strategy-synthesis outcomes.

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06.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2605.13648

Sticky CIR process with potential: invariant measure and exact sampling

Authors:

Tony Shardlow↗

arXiv:2605.13648v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the sticky Cox–Ingersoll–Ross (CIR) process in one dimension, a diffusion on $[0,\infty)$ with a sticky boundary condition at the origin, arising as the marginal process in a sparse Bayesian inference framework based on Hadamard–Langevin dynamics. For the parameter range $\delta\in(1,2)$, in which the origin is accessible but not absorbing, we prove well-posedness of the process and uniqueness of its invariant measure, which is a mixture of a point mass at zero and a weighted gamma-type density on the interior. We derive an explicit Green's function for the resolvent in terms of confluent hypergeometric functions, and use this to construct an exact sampler for the invariant measure in the zero-potential case. For a non-trivial potential $G$, we establish existence and uniqueness of the tilted invariant measure via a Girsanov change of measure, and develop two sampling algorithms: a Metropolis–Hastings corrected sampler that targets the invariant measure exactly, and a cheaper, biased unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) for a boundary-clamped variant of which we prove a first-order expansion of the stationary bias with an explicit constant: the leading error is a rank-one transfer of mass $K_\star h|\log h| $ onto the atom, so the total-variation bias is of exact order $h|\log h | $ – independent of $\delta$ – whenever the potential has nonzero boundary drift. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted behaviour: the Metropolis–Hastings sampler achieves the target invariant measure at all step sizes, while the ULA bias follows the proven first-order law, including its constant.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14898

{\alpha}-Fair Insurance Pricing: A Fairness Continuum

Authors:

Tianhe Zhang↗Xiguang Liu↗Peng Shi↗

arXiv:2606.14898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness in insurance pricing remains a long-standing and deeply debated puzzle. On one hand, insurers, driven by profitability considerations, set premiums that differentiate across individual risks to achieve actuarial fairness. On the other hand, insurance serves a critical societal function by pooling risks across a population, motivating cross-subsidization among groups to promote solidarity fairness. The tension between these two competing notions of fairness makes insurance pricing inherently complex, particularly in modern settings where granular data allow for increasingly fine risk differentiation and regulators face growing pressure to protect vulnerable groups. To address this challenge, we propose an $\alpha$-Fair Individual Solvent Premium ($\alpha$-FISP) framework for insurance pricing that explicitly captures the trade-off between actuarial and solidarity fairness while guaranteeing solvency, a fundamental requirement in insurance operations. We formulate the pricing problem as a constrained optimization task, where actuarially fair premiums are adjusted subject to budget constraints on cross-subsidization within each risk class. This formulation naturally yields a family of solutions parameterized by $\alpha$, tracing a continuum between purely actuarial and purely solidarity-based pricing and enabling decision-makers to select an operating point along this fairness spectrum. We derive theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework. Numerical experiments show that $\alpha$-FISP is computationally tractable and aligns well with the U.S. regulatory regimes featuring heterogeneous state-level fairness requirements.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2605.05407

PRISM: Perception Reasoning Interleaved for Sequential Decision Making

Authors:

Mohamed Salim Aissi↗Clemence Grislain↗Clement Romac↗Laure Soulier↗Mohamed Chetouani↗Olivier Sigaud↗Nicolas Thome↗

arXiv:2605.05407v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling LLM-based embodied agents from text-only environments to complex multimodal settings remains a major challenge. Recent work identifies a perception-reasoning-decision gap in standalone Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which often overlook task-critical information. In this paper, we introduce PRISM, a framework that tightly couples perception (VLM) and decision (LLM) through a dynamic question-answer (DQA) pipeline. Instead of passively accepting the VLM's description, the LLM critiques it, probes the VLM with goal-oriented questions, and synthesizes a compact image description. This closed-loop interaction yields a sharp, task-driven understanding of the scene. We evaluate PRISM on the ALFWorld and Room-to-Room (R2R) benchmarks. We show that: (1) PRISM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art image-based models, (2) our Interactive goal-oriented perception pipeline yields systematic and substantial gains, and (3) PRISM is fully automatic, eliminating the need for handcrafted questions or answers.

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09.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:bf0516eb9d1f802e9844639a7bb56aa8

Validation of an Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Mobile Application for Dietary Oxalate Assessment in Kidney Stone Prevention

Authors:

Scotland↗K. B↗Ojo↗O. A↗Anokwuru↗Javaherforoush↗Jimenez↗Teoh↗Suryavanshi↗Chan↗

Background: Calcium oxalate nephrolithiasis is the most common type of kidney stone disease. Dietary oxalate intake is an important modifiable factor. Assessing dietary oxalate exposure in clinical practice poses challenges due to limitations of traditional dietary recall tools and variability in food composition data. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in mobile health may offer scalable solutions for better dietary monitoring and kidney stone prevention. We examined the ability of StoneFree AI to estimate dietary oxalate from verbal and image-based food inputs. Objective: To evaluate the accuracy and limitations of StoneFree AI, for estimating dietary oxalate intake from verbal food descriptions and meal images, and to evaluate errors from entries that may inform future clinical use in kidney stone prevention. Methods: StoneFree AI is a cross-platform mobile application that uses a multimodal large language model (Google Gemini) to interpret verbal food descriptions and visual food images. The identified foods were mapped to oxalate values using the Harvard Oxalate Database. System performance was evaluated using 804 verbal food entries and 276 portion-size food images obtained from the ASA24 dietary assessment database. Verbal inputs were compared with reference oxalate values using absolute error and predefined agreement thresholds ({+/-}1, {+/-}5, {+/-}10 mg). Image-based inputs were evaluated against mutually exclusive primary error categories, including food identification, portion estimation, ingredient recognition, oxalate reference selection, and non-analyzable cases. Results: For verbal food entries, the AI system showed strong agreement with reference oxalate values. Overall, 82.1% of estimates were within {+/-}1 mg, 91.5% within {+/-}5 mg, and 94.5% within {+/-}10 mg of reference values. The mean absolute error was 3.32 mg, the median absolute error was 0.10 mg, and the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) was 0.860. Image-based inputs showed a higher overall error rate of 63.0%, primarily due to food identification errors (33.0%), inaccurate portion estimation (11.0%), and ingredient recognition errors (9.8%). Most errors occurred with visually complex meals, such as mixed dishes and grain-based foods. Conclusions: AI-assisted estimation of dietary oxalate intake demonstrated high accuracy when structured verbal inputs were used but was less reliable for image-based meal analysis. These findings suggest AI-enabled mobile tools may support dietary monitoring for kidney stone prevention, particularly when user input is structured. Further refinement of computer vision models and prospective clinical validation are required before widespread clinical implementation.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.24006

Fulde-Ferrell superfluids in an asymmetric three-component Fermi Gas

Authors:

Yuhan Lu↗Lihong Zhou↗Yongping Zhang↗

arXiv:2602.24006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An asymmetric three-component Fermi gas, featuring Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling between the first and second components and contact interaction only between the first and third components, introduces both spin-orbit coupling and population imbalance-two mechanisms known to stabilize the Fulde-Ferrell superfluids.We systematically study Fulde-Ferrell superfluids in an asymmetric three-component Fermi gas { in two dimensions and at zero temperature} by finding the global minima of the thermodynamic potential. We reveal a new class of composite Fulde-Ferrell superfluids that emerges when strong spin-orbit coupling generates a double-well structure in momentum space within the lower spin-orbit-coupled band. The key features of these composite superfluids are identified.

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11.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15062

Discontinuous strong-to-weak symmetry breaking transition from thermal pure states

Authors:

Taiki Haga↗Masaya Kunimi↗Masaya Nakagawa↗

arXiv:2606.15062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking in many-body quantum systems undergoing decoherence from thermal pure states. For generic initial pure states with volume-law entanglement entropy, we show that the system undergoes a discontinuous dynamical phase transition at a critical time. This transition is accompanied by a singularity in the entropy of the system, which saturates to its maximum value at the same critical time. Through numerical simulations of the dephasing Ising and hard-core boson models, we establish the universality of this transition across different symmetries. Our results reveal that the dynamical emergence of a decohered mixed state from a highly entangled state is not a gradual asymptotic relaxation, but rather a sharp phase transition driven by a sudden collapse of global coherence.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20488

How Fragile Are Training-Free AI-Generated Image Detectors? A Controlled Audit of Score Direction, Preprocessing, and Compression

Authors:

Jingwen Zhou↗Mingzhe Wang↗

Training-free detectors of AI-generated images promise generator-agnostic deployment without classifier training, yet their reported numbers are rarely compared under a single controlled protocol. We audit two representative training-free scores – an autoencoder-reconstruction score (AEROBLADE-style) and a noise-perturbation feature-similarity score (RIGID-style) – plus a naive feature-kNN control, on a common 1,500-image GenImage-derived benchmark spanning seven generators and JPEG compression at quality 70 and 50. The audit yields three cautionary findings. (i) Implementation details masquerade as method differences: replacing the LPIPS backbone (AlexNet -> VGG-16) changes overall AUROC by +0.085, and switching between resize-to-512 and native-resolution preprocessing flips per-generator conclusions by up to 0.38 AUROC. (ii) Score direction is not a property of the method but of its hyperparameters: the RIGID-style score is inverted (AUROC < 0.5) on SD1.5 and Wukong at noise level sigma=0.05, recovers to >0.5 for every generator at sigma=0.01, and collapses to 0.15 at sigma=0.3. (iii) Dataset format bias inflates robustness claims: without unified re-encoding, AUROC under JPEG-50 exceeds the clean condition for the AlexNet-backbone reconstruction score; after bias correction the residual anomaly localizes to a single generator (BigGAN). The audited scores have complementary per-generator failure sets, but naive z-score fusion does not beat the best single score, indicating that exploiting complementarity requires direction-aware combination.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15144

PACUTE: Phonology-, Affix-, and Character-level Understanding of Tokens for Filipino

Authors:

Jann Railey Montalan↗David Demitri Africa↗Jimson Paulo Layacan↗Richell Isaiah Flores↗Ivan Yuri De Leon↗Lance Calvin Gamboa↗

Large language models (LLMs) process text as sequences of subword tokens, which can obscure the character-level and morphological structure that underlies word formation. This limitation is most acute for languages with non-concatenative morphology, where standard tokenizers systematically misalign token boundaries with morpheme boundaries. We introduce PACUTE, a diagnostic benchmark of 4,600 tasks designed to evaluate morphological understanding in Filipino, a language characterized by productive infixation, reduplication, and diacritic-driven lexical distinctions that are typically absent from written text. PACUTE includes a hierarchical diagnostic framework of six compositional levels that localizes where morphological understanding breaks down. Evaluating open-weight LLMs and frontier commercial models, we find that open-weight models perform near chance on morpheme decomposition regardless of scale. Frontier models perform much better, often recovering individual affixes under contains-match scoring, but remain far below their character-level ceilings on compositional tasks of morpheme transformations and syllabification. These results identify productive morphological composition, rather than character access alone, as the persistent bottleneck for Filipino word-structure understanding.

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14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11651

DeepRHP: A Hybrid Variational Autoencoder for Designing Random Heteropolymers as Protein Mimics

Authors:

Shuni Li↗Zhiyuan Ruan↗Andy Shen↗Ivan Jayapurna↗Ting Xu↗Haiyan Huang↗

arXiv:2606.11651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic random heteropolymers (RHPs), consisting of a predefined set of monomers, offer an approach toward the design of protein-like materials. These RHPs, if designed appropriately, can mimic protein behavior and function. As such, there is a need for computational tools to efficiently guide RHP design. We bridge this gap by developing DeepRHP, a modified variational autoencoder (VAE) model under a semi-supervised framework. By equipping a classical VAE with an additional feature-based VAE, DeepRHP forces the latent space to capture structures of critical chemical features as well as individual RHP sequence patterns. In this sense, our method is versatile by allowing any relevant features to be incorporated in a hybrid manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DeepRHP by suggesting potential monomer compositions that stabilize membrane proteins (e.g. Aquaporin Z) in non-native environments and cross-validating our prediction with published results. The concordance between our model and true RHP function suggests strong potential in utilizing hybrid autoencoder architectures to guide RHP design for proteins and other biological compounds.

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15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16815

A Perception vs. Distortion Perspective on Score-Based Generative Channel Estimation

Authors:

Marco Skocaj↗Lukas Eller↗Mate Boban↗

arXiv:2606.16815v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Driven by their remarkable success in computer vision and inverse problem solving, score-based models are increasingly applied to wireless communications, where they show promise across a range of physical-layer tasks. However, despite this growing interest, the current literature often lacks a rigorous analysis of when score-matching offers a tangible advantage over traditional discriminative learning. This paper aims to address this gap through the use-case of channel estimation, a fundamental inverse problem in wireless systems. We present a theoretically grounded interpretation of score-based channel estimation through the lens of the perception-distortion tradeoff, identifying the conditions where score matching excels as well as its key limitations. In particular, by modeling downstream wireless tasks (e.g., capacity maximization) as functionals of the channel estimation process, we quantify the excess risk incurred by standard distortion-minimization approaches. Extensive numerical results show that under high predictive uncertainty, the large excess risk gap can be offset by score-based estimation, enabling near Bayesian-optimal precoding via the learned posterior, whereas in the low predictive uncertainty regime, discriminative distortion-minimization approaches are preferable due to lower complexity and more efficient use of model capacity.

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16.

Science (Express) 2026-06-11 DOI: 10.1126/science.aeh0665

Laser phase plate improves structure determination of small proteins by cryo-EM | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Phase plates can in principle overcome the poor image contrast in electron cryo–microscopy (cryo-EM) and the resulting limits on the structural reconstruction of small proteins. However, previous designs have been unstable and compromised the high-resolution signal. They have thus been unable to surpass results achieved by standard cryo-EM. Here, we show that the laser phase plate (LPP), installed in a custom, modern Titan Krios microscope, enhances the resolution in single-particle reconstruction of small proteins by improving specimen-motion correction, recovery of information from the early frames, as well as particle visualization, 3D classification, and alignment. These advances use standard defocus ranges and reconstruction procedures, but open the door to LPP-tailored protocols offering further improvements by leveraging the LPP demonstrated here.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19733

QueryGaussian: Scalable and Training-Free Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Retrieval

Authors:

Xiuyuan Zhu↗Ke Lu↗Zijie Yang↗Chao Yue↗Jian Xue↗Dongming Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.19733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently retrieving specific 3D instances from large-scale scenes via natural language prompts remains a formidable challenge in multimedia analysis. Existing approaches predominantly follow a "scene-level embedding" paradigm, which requires distilling high-dimensional semantic features into every 3D primitive. This strategy suffers from a fundamental architectural bottleneck: memory and computational costs scale linearly with scene complexity, inevitably triggering out-of-memory (OOM) failures in city-scale environments. To address this barrier, we propose QueryGaussian, a training-free framework for expeditious and scalable open-vocabulary 3D instance retrieval. Unlike holistic semantic distillation, QueryGaussian employs an instance-level query mechanism that decouples semantic understanding from geometric representation. Specifically, we leverage pre-trained 2D vision models to interpret user prompts and lift segmentation masks into 3D via a concurrent maximum-weight association strategy, ensuring semantic-visual consistency. To mitigate projection ambiguity, we introduce a temporal fusion module with multi-stage adaptive density clustering. Experimental results demonstrate that QueryGaussian not only matches the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods but also delivers a decisive efficiency leap, reducing GPU memory usage by over 70% and accelerating inference by 180x. Crucially, QueryGaussian enables expeditious instance retrieval on city-scale scenes containing tens of millions of Gaussians using consumer-grade hardware.

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18.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21 DOI: HASH:1503ecc04840a6c2280666cc51cc7b31

OracleScreen-LILRB4: Machine Learning-Guided Discovery of Myeloid Immune Checkpoint Binders Validated in Patient-Derived Cells

Authors:

Abdel-Rahman↗Gabr↗

The identification of small molecule modulators of immune checkpoint proteins remains a significant challenge in drug discovery due to the flat, featureless nature of protein-protein interaction interfaces and the characteristically low hit rates observed in conventional high-throughput screening campaigns. Here we report OracleScreen-LILRB4, an ensemble machine learning framework trained on quantitative biophysical screening data from two structurally diverse compound libraries (19,800 compounds total) screened against the myeloid immune checkpoint leukocyte immunoglobulin-like receptor B4 (LILRB4/ILT3). By formulating binding prediction as a regression task targeting continuous {Delta}Fnorm values rather than binary hit classifications, OracleScreen-LILRB4 achieved a mean Spearman R of 0.61 and ROC-AUC of 0.86 under scaffold-aware cross-validation. Prospective virtual screening of a 45,760-member compound library and experimental validation of the top 200 predictions yielded a 28.5% hit rate, representing a 15.0-fold enrichment over baseline, with 16 compounds demonstrating nanomolar-affinity LILRB4 (ILT3) engagement. Lead compounds ORS-22 and ORS-14 restored anti-tumor immune activity across patient-derived colorectal cancer and acute myeloid leukemia co-culture systems, reversing SCG2-mediated immunosuppression and recovering cytotoxic T-cell function. These findings establish OracleScreen-LILRB4 as an effective computational framework for accelerating small molecule discovery against non-enzymatic immune checkpoint targets.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17786

Toward Accessible Psychotherapy Training Using AI-Driven Interactive Patient Avatars

Authors:

Pascal Riachi↗Sofie Kamber↗Stella Brogna↗Andrew Gloster↗Rafael Wampfler↗

Training psychotherapists in evidence-based interventions such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) requires repeated practice with meaningful feedback, yet opportunities for safe, standardized training are limited by ethical, logistical, and resource constraints. We introduce a system designed to support ACT-oriented psychotherapy training through spoken dialogue with an embodied virtual patient. The system uses large language models to simulate patient behavior conditioned on profiles derived from real therapy sessions and configurable clinical scenarios, while a separate automated evaluator provides turn-by-turn feedback on therapist responses based on established ACT fidelity criteria. Rather than aiming to replace supervision, the system is intended to support deliberate practice by enabling experimentation, reflection, and immediate feedback in low-risk settings. Expert evaluation with practicing psychologists confirmed high realism in patient behavior and demonstrated that immediate turn-by-turn ACT feedback increased therapists' awareness of intervention choices and enabled effective experimentation with alternative responses. Quantitative evaluation across 49 therapy transcripts identified GPT-4o-mini as the optimal feedback model, achieving the lowest mean absolute error (MAE = 6.12) in replicating human supervisor ACT fidelity ratings with statistically significant agreement. This work demonstrates the potential of fidelity-aware simulated patients as a scalable complement to psychotherapy training.

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20.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-10 DOI: HASH:ab674c8e3911f8ef037f20b90aaac355

A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

Authors:

Xiaotong Peng↗

Whale falls are biodiversity oases at seabeds1–6, yet their record from the oceans has remained sparse and fragmentary6,7. Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to&nbsp;7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded. We show that carcasses host specialized communities dominated by brittle stars, bone-boring worms and chemosynthesis-based bivalves and that the fossil record in this area comprises both extant and extinct deep-diving beaked whales. Isotopic dating shows that whale falls in this region have occurred since at least 5.3 million years ago. These findings reshape the understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time. Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insight into deep-ocean biodiversity and whale evolutionary history.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19222

Mechanism-Guided Selective Unlearning for RLVR-Induced Reasoning

Authors:

Chenyu Zhou↗Qiliang Jiang↗Shuning Wu↗Xu Zhou↗

arXiv:2606.19222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose MAST (Mechanism-Aligned Selective Targeting), a mechanism-guided method for unlearning RLVR-induced reasoning with substantially lower collateral damage than standard full-parameter updates. In matched SFT/RLVR checkpoints on Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B and Qwen3-1.7B-Base, the SFT-to-RLVR increment differs sharply from the SFT update in token-level delta-log-probability, and full-parameter gradient ascent forgets only by damaging retain MATH and GSM8K. MAST ranks attention-projection tensors by off-principal energy, update magnitude, and forget-gradient coupling magnitude, then updates only the top-ranked subset. On the primary model, MAST induces statistically significant target forgetting (MATH forget 45/150 to 37/150; McNemar p=0.0078) while preserving GSM8K (+0.8 pp) and MATH retain (-0.5 pp). The advantage reproduces across seeds, NPO/SimNPO objectives, and Qwen3, where MAST preserves GSM8K while full-parameter unlearning collapses it.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2509.22808

ArFake: A Robust Framework for Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Spoofing Detection Benchmark

Authors:

Mohamed Elsetohy↗Alhassan Ehab↗Ali Mekky↗Besher Hassan↗Shady Shehata↗

With the rise of generative text-to-speech models, distinguishing between real and synthetic speech has become challenging, especially for Arabic that have received limited research attention. Most spoof detection efforts have focused on English, leaving a significant gap for Arabic and its many dialects. In this work, we introduce the first multi-dialect Arabic spoofed speech dataset. To evaluate the difficulty of the synthesized audio from each model and determine which produces the most challenging samples, we aimed to guide the construction of our final dataset either by merging audios from multiple models or by selecting the best-performing model, we conducted an evaluation pipeline that included training classifiers using two approaches: modern embedding-based methods combined with classifier heads; classical machine learning algorithms applied to MFCC features; and the RawNet2 architecture. The pipeline further incorporated the calculation of Mean Opinion Score based on human ratings, as well as processing both original and synthesized datasets through an Automatic Speech Recognition model to measure the Word Error Rate. Our results demonstrate that FishSpeech outperforms other TTS models in Arabic voice cloning on the Casablanca corpus, producing more realistic and challenging synthetic speech samples. However, relying on a single TTS for dataset creation may limit generalizability.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17220

When Rules Learn: A Self-Evolving Agent for Legal Case Retrieval

Authors:

Mingxu Tao↗Jiawei Hu↗Xian Zhou↗Wenpeng Hu↗Jiajun Cheng↗Yunbo Cao↗Zhunchen Luo↗Guotong Geng↗

arXiv:2606.17220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal case retrieval remains challenging due to the complexity of legal language and the need for precise lexical alignment between queries and relevant cases. Although dense retrieval models have achieved notable progress, empirical studies show that BM25 continues to serve as a strong baseline in this domain. It motivates us to propose a self-evolving framework for rule-driven query rewriting that enhances BM25 without any parameter training. The framework equips an LLM-based agent with an automatic evaluation environment, enabling it to iteratively create rewriting rules, plan validation experiments over rule combinations, and eliminate ineffective rules based on historical feedbacks. We evaluate our method on the Chinese legal case retrieval benchmark LeCaRD-v2. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms non-evolutionary baselines, including human-designed rules and greedy rule selection, particularly when powered by a highcapacity core LLM. We also conduct detailed analyses to investigate the mechanisms underlying self-evolution. Our findings reveal that LLM's capabilities to leverage previous experimental results and its intrinsic knowledge of rule elimination play critical roles in refining the rule set via self-evolution.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2604.09737

STaR-DRO: Stateful Tsallis Reweighting for Group-Robust Structured Prediction

Authors:

Samah Fodeh↗Ganesh Puthiaraju↗Elyas Irankhah↗Afshan Khan↗Sreeraj Ramachandran↗Linhai Ma↗Srivani Talakokkul↗Sarah Schellhorn↗

arXiv:2604.09737v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structured prediction with large language models requires outputs that are label-accurate, ontology-constrained, structurally valid, and evidence-grounded under label imbalance and heterogeneous group difficulty. We present a unified framework for ontology-constrained generation. First, we introduce a modular prompt-engineering architecture combining XML-style structure, expert disambiguation rules, chain-of-thought reasoning, metadata-aware decision logic, schema contracts, and a self-validation gate. It targets recurrent in-context failures, including format drift, label ambiguity, evidence hallucination, and metadata-conditioned confusion. Second, we propose STaR-DRO, combining Tsallis mirror ascent, sparse entmax-style primal mapback, EMA-smoothed group-loss tracking, rescaled ascent signals, and bounded excess-only multipliers. Unlike conventional DRO, which relies on dense Shannon-entropy exponentiated-gradient updates, can introduce high-variance stochastic reweighting, assigns positive adversarial mass to groups that are not persistently hard, and incurs costs through simplex competition, STaR-DRO upweights only persistently hard groups without suppressing easier ones. We evaluate the framework on EPPC Miner, a clinically grounded high-stakes structured-prediction task requiring hierarchical label prediction and evidence-span extraction from patient-provider secure messages. Across 1B-70B Llama models, prompt engineering improves zero-shot extraction, yielding an average label F1 gain of +14.46 and a Span F1 gain of +17.40. Building on supervised fine-tuning, STaR-DRO further improves accuracy and robustness, increasing average label F1 by +1.08 and +2.20 while reducing mean groupwise validation cross-entropy by 21.3% and 14.8% relative to SFT and standard DRO, respectively. These results advance reliable automated communication mining for patient-centered clinical care analysis.

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25.

Nature Medicine 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:d41e362c735a27b9725317334cebb886

Clinical Profile and Genomic Characterization of the 2026 Bundibugyo Virus Index Case in Uganda

Authors:

Andrew Nsawotebba↗

Bundibugyo virus disease (BVD) remains a high-consequence threat in Eastern and Central Africa, where cross-border mobility, nonspecific early symptoms, and delayed recognition can obscure transmission. In this case report, we describe Uganda’s 2026 BVD index case: a male patient who traveled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Uganda and was admitted to a private hospital in Kampala on 11 May 2026 after more than two weeks of vomiting and diarrhea, with epigastric pain, weakness, and hiccups. He deteriorated rapidly, developing acute kidney injury, pulmonary edema, hepatic dysfunction, hypoxemia, delirium, atrial flutter, possible disseminated intravascular coagulation, and multiorgan failure, and died on 14 May. A posthumous EDTA whole-blood specimen tested at the Central Emergency Response and Surveillance Laboratory was positive for orthoebolavirus RNA and confirmed as Bundibugyo virus (BDBV) by RT-qPCR. Sequencing achieved 99% genome coverage at ≥100× depth. The 2026 BDBV genome formed a distinct lineage approximately equidistant from the 2007–2008 Butalya and 2012 Isiro variants, differing by 216–227 nucleotides (~1.2% sequence divergence). Here, we demonstrate the value of fatality surveillance, private-sector surveillance, diagnostic optimization through national specimen referral, and rapid molecular-genomic diagnostics for early detection, transmission chain interruption, and public health response coordination.

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