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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Articulat3D: Reconstructing Articulated Digital Twins From Monocular Videos with Geometric and Motion Constraints

Building high-fidelity digital twins of articulated objects from visual data remains a central challenge. Existing approaches depend on multi-view captures of the object in discrete, static states, which severely constrains their real-world scalability. In this paper, we introduce Articulat3D, a novel framework that constructs such digital twins from casually captured monocular videos by jointly enforcing explicit 3D geometric and motion constraints. We first propose Motion Prior-Driven Initialization, which leverages 3D point tracks to exploit the low-dimensional structure of articulated motion. By modeling scene dynamics with a compact set of motion bases, we facilitate soft decomposition of the scene into multiple rigidly moving groups. Building on this initialization, we introduce Geometric and Motion Constraints Refinement, which enforces physically plausible articulation through learnable kinematic primitives parameterized by a joint axis, a pivot point, and per-frame motion scalars, yielding reconstructions that are both geometrically accurate and temporally coherent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Articulat3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on synthetic benchmarks and real-world casually captured monocular videos, significantly advancing the feasibility of digital twin creation under uncontrolled real-world conditions. Our project page is available at https://maxwell-zhao.github.io/Articulat3D/.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

The Coin Flip Judge? Reliability and Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

Authors:

LLM-as-a-Judge is now widely used to rank model outputs, train reward models, and populate public leaderboards, but its run-to-run reliability remains under-characterized. We study repeated identical evaluations on 29 tasks spanning 10 categories using two OpenAI judge models (GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini), with 50 pairwise trials and 50 pointwise trials per question, supplemented by temperature and prompt-sensitivity ablations. Across judges, pairwise preferences flip on average 13.6% of the time, with 28% of questions exceeding a 20% flip rate and one question reaching 56%. GPT-4o-mini also exhibits a significant first-position bias (72% A-majority, p = 0.024). At the same time, mean pointwise score gaps are small (0.19–0.36 on a 10-point scale) and not statistically significant in aggregate, producing a pairwise–pointwise gap: judges frequently choose a winner even when their own scalar scores provide little evidence of a meaningful quality difference. Beyond within-judge instability, cross-judge agreement is only 76% ($\kappa = 0.51$), semantically equivalent prompt templates change majority outcomes in 25% of tested cases, and deterministic decoding reduces but does not eliminate inconsistency. A reliability curve analysis shows that, in our dataset, 11 repeated trials are needed for a majority vote to recover the 50-trial reference verdict with 95% probability on average, rising to 15 for high-variance questions. These findings suggest that single-trial LLM judging is often too noisy for high-stakes evaluation, and that multi-trial aggregation, position randomization, and explicit uncertainty reporting should be standard practice. Because both judges are from a single provider, cross-provider replication remains an important next step.

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

Alternate loss functions and regression models that achieve robustness to outliers by modulating the learning rate

arXiv:2606.22068v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Most real-world datasets used for training supervised learning models are contaminated with noisy data and outliers leading to large prediction errors. This paper proposes a new approach for achieving robustness where the learning rate is modulated by a factor that is sensitive to outliers. In this approach a reduction of the learning rate is shown to be achieved by using alternate loss functions that are infinitely differentiable, strictly convex or quasiconvex and more closely approximate the absolute error than Huber and log-cosh losses. A comparison of the performance of regression models trained with different loss functions on a wide variety of benchmarks and datasets is presented to demonstrate the superior performance of the Square Root Loss (SRL) and Smooth Mean Absolute Error (SMAE) losses proposed in this paper. Two new robust linear regression models are presented. Highly vectorized robust parameter update formulae that take advantage of modern GPUs for both stochastic and batch gradient descent are presented.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Spectrally Regularized Latent Flow Matching for Turbulence Generation

arXiv:2606.11691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent diffusion and flow matching have emerged as leading approaches for synthetic turbulence generation, yet they systematically under-represent dissipation-range amplitudes. We introduce a latent flow matching framework with a spectrally regularized compression stage that directly targets this failure mode. On a 256^2 DNS dataset at Re_f \approx 2250, replacing an MSE-trained VAE with a zone-weighted log-spectral objective raises deep-dissipation retained spectral power from 25% to 94% in reconstruction and from 20% to 79% in unconditional generation. The improved latent representation also yields a substantially better sampling cost-fidelity tradeoff: the MSE-trained latent space imposes a fundamental quality ceiling near DD bias -0.70 that no integrator or step-count can overcome, while the spectrally regularized latent space reaches DD bias -0.117 at just 20 function evaluations. Mechanistically, encoder-decoder swap experiments show that the improvement is driven primarily by encoder-induced latent reorganization rather than decoder capacity, while a support-amplitude decomposition reveals that MSE-trained models behave as conservative suppression models, minimizing pointwise error by attenuating intermittent high-wavenumber structure. Both pipelines recover the second-order structure function and the correct sign of S_3, indicating the correct cascade direction without explicit supervision. A small residual gap in the magnitude of S_3 suggests that phase-coherent triadic organization remains a complementary axis to amplitude fidelity for future generative turbulence models.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Unifying spacetime approaches to quantum mechanics

arXiv:2606.12539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent efforts to formulate quantum mechanics in a way that treats space and time on a more equal footing have led to a large variety of spacetime-oriented approaches. In this work we present a detailed study of spacetime states, the objects that play the role of quantum states in the recently introduced framework of spacetime quantum mechanics, and show that the main proposals in the literature are different manifestations of the same underlying object. Path integrals, quantum states over time, pseudo-density matrices, the Page and Wootters mechanism, superdensity operators, and timelike-entanglement proposals all arise from spacetime states through particular evaluations, reduced information, linear maps, or quantum channels. This unification provides explicit mathematical representations of these formalisms, reveals relations among them, and clarifies the spacetime information each one captures. We also study the broader relevance of the spacetime-state point of view for Leggett-Garg inequalities, OTOCs, temporal tensor networks, fermionic systems, relativistic QFTs, quantum reference frames, and classical physics, together with additional insights and perspectives revealed by the common unifying framework.

06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

On the Reliability of Cue Conflict and Beyond

Understanding how neural networks rely on visual cues offers a human-interpretable view of their internal decision processes. The cue-conflict benchmark has been influential in probing shape-texture preference and in motivating the insight that stronger, human-like shape bias is often associated with improved in-domain performance. However, we find that the current stylization-based instantiation can yield unstable and ambiguous bias estimates. Specifically, stylization may not reliably instantiate perceptually valid and separable cues nor control their relative informativeness, ratio-based bias can obscure absolute cue sensitivity, and restricting evaluation to preselected classes can distort model predictions by ignoring the full decision space. Together, these factors can confound preference with cue validity, cue balance, and recognizability artifacts. We introduce REFINED-BIAS, an integrated dataset and evaluation framework for reliable and interpretable shape-texture bias diagnosis. REFINED-BIAS constructs balanced, human- and model- recognizable cue pairs using explicit definitions of shape and texture, and measures cue-specific sensitivity over the full label space via a ranking-based metric, enabling fairer cross-model comparisons. Across diverse training regimes and architectures, REFINED-BIAS enables fairer cross-model comparison, more faithful diagnosis of shape and texture biases, and clearer empirical conclusions, resolving inconsistencies that prior cue-conflict evaluations could not reliably disambiguate.

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

Full $\Gamma-$expansion for the level-two large deviation rate functionals of non-reversible one-dimensional diffusions with periodic boundary conditions

arXiv:2606.17859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consider the diffusion process \begin{equation*} dX_{\epsilon}(t) = \mss b(X_{\epsilon}(t)) \, dt + \sqrt{2\, \epsilon\, \mss a(X_\epsilon(t))} \, dW_{t}, \end{equation*} on the one-dimensional torus $\bb T = [0,1)$. Here $\epsilon$ is the temperature, $W_{t}$ a Brownian motion on $\bb T$ and $\mss a$, $\mss b$ functions of class $C^{2}(\bb T)$ satisfying further conditions. Denote by $\mss P(\bb T)$ the set of probability measures on $\bb T$ equipped with the weak topology, and by $\ms I_{\epsilon}\colon \mss P(\bb T)\to [0,+\infty)$ the level two large deviation rate functional of the diffusion $X_{\epsilon}(\cdot)$. We derive a full $\Gamma-$expansion of $\ms I_{\epsilon}$, as $\epsilon \to 0$, expressing it as \begin{equation*} \ms I_{\epsilon} = \frac{1}{\epsilon} \;\ms J^{(-1)} \; +\; \ms J^{(0)} \;+\; \sum_{p=1}^{\widehat{\mf q}}\frac{1}{\theta^{(p)}_{\epsilon}}\;\ms J^{(p)}\,, \end{equation*} where $\ms J^{(-1)}$, $\ms J^{(0)}$, $\ms J^{(p)} \colon \mss P(\bb T)\to [0,+\infty]$ represent rate functionals, independent of $\epsilon$, and $\theta^{(p)}_{\epsilon}$ are the time-scales at which the Markov process $X_{\epsilon}(\cdot)$ exhibits a metastable behaviour.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Risk-Aware LLM Agents for Geospatial Data Retrieval: Design and Preliminary Adversarial Evaluation

We present an LLM-driven framework for retrieving remote sensing data from cloud-based geospatial catalogues using natural language queries. The system converts user intent into structured API calls, enabling efficient access to satellite imagery and environmental datasets. The architecture integrates three agents: Guardrail for safety and policy enforcement, General-QA for intent interpretation, and Recommender-Analyst for schema-aware API call generation. This coordinated design ensures reliable, semantically aligned interaction with external data services. The modular framework is portable across platforms through API schema substitution and supports applications in environmental monitoring, disaster response, and climate analysis. It establishes a scalable interface between user intent and geospatial infrastructure, enabling streamlined and automated Earth observation workflows. Preliminary experiments under adversarial multi-turn settings show that prompt-level safety instructions improve robustness, although rare high-impact failures persist in API manipulation scenarios and highlight the need for adaptive, system-level defenses that balance safety, usability, and cost efficiency, which motivates the use of our intercept-level Guardrail agent.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Flood and Harvest: The Provable Necessity of Trivia for Generating Valuable Mathematics via the Lens of Language Generation in the Limit

AI systems coupled to proof assistants now generate formal mathematics at scale, and the gap between what a checker can verify and what a mathematician would value has become the binding constraint. We model the generation of valuable mathematics as nested language generation in the limit: a verifiable formal language $F$, accessed through a membership oracle (the proof checker), contains an unknown valuable language $H \in \mathcal{H}$ revealed only through an adversarial enumeration of a core $C \subseteq H$ of exact density $\alpha$ (the literature). Every output is valuable ($\in H$), trivial ($\in F \setminus H$), or a hallucination ($\notin F$). We settle four questions. First, the verifier is not taste: the collections admitting generation with breadth are exactly those of the oracle-free model, characterized fiber-wise by Angluin's condition. Second, the verifier does buy sound coverage, covering all unseen valuable statements while asserting only valid ones: possible with it, impossible without it; it relocates unavoidable errors from false to trivial. Third, and centrally, a sharp dichotomy on the tight family: generators emitting finitely many trivia achieve optimal coverage $\alpha/2$, while any infinite trivia allowance, even at vanishing rate, jumps the optimum to $1-\alpha/2$ (both tight, for cores presented as the candidate intersection), and one generator attains both ends. The transition is in trivia count, not rate; the gap $1-\alpha$ is the unrecorded mass. Fourth, both regimes instantiate in a compression model of mathematics. A perfect verifier cannot substitute for taste: the unbounded stream of correct-but-worthless statements is not an engineering accident but a provable necessity, since covering unrecorded valuable mathematics requires an infinite, but asymptotically negligible, stream of certified trivia.

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

Model-Native Computing Architecture: Envisioning Future System Architecture Through the Lens of Computer Architecture

arXiv:2606.00288v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are undergoing a transition from model technology to system technology. Engineering challenges like cache reuse, context capacity, agent scheduling, and permission control resemble classical computer systems problems. This raises a question: if we treat the LLM as a CPU, KV cache as processor cache, context window as main memory, and agent framework as an operating system, can decades of computer architecture wisdom guide next generation model native systems? This paper pursues this analogy as a visionary survey. We map computer architecture concepts onto the emerging model native stack, survey literature across LLM as OS, memory management, agent frameworks, tool protocols, multi agent coordination, cognitive architectures, and safety governance, finding that each addresses a different layer without a unifying model. We propose the Intelligent Computing Architecture (ICA): six functional layers with interface contracts and design axioms. We resolve the tension over whether the LLM resembles a CPU or OS via a dual plane architecture a probabilistic execution plane (what can be computed) and a deterministic control plane (what should be computed), with every layer passing through as a graded crossover. We propose three Amdahl style design heuristics Semantic Locality, Context Budget, and Agent Speedup as organizing back of envelope models, illustrate their parameter ranges with published data, and identify predictive validation as the principal open task. We articulate analogy boundaries, note differences between silicon and model era architectures, and propose a research roadmap. This is a conceptual and survey contribution with no new experimental results.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Measurable Majorities Are Not Finitely Axiomatizable

arXiv:2606.25954v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This theoretical note studies the finite axiomatizability of strict majority reasoning in finite social decision frames. Moss and Pedersen (2026) introduce a coherence criterion that characterizes exactly when qualitative majority judgments are representable by a finitely additive measure. The question addressed here is whether that coherence criterion can be replaced, in the finite setting, by any bounded finite fragment. We prove that it cannot. For every $k\ge 1$, we construct a maximal standard frame whose shortest coherence violation has length exactly $2k+2$. Hence there is no uniform finite bound on the incoherence index of social decision frames, resolving Conjecture 5.7 stated by Moss and Pedersen (2026). The construction is geometric, in the sense that it proceeds via orthogonality and dimension in rational vector spaces, and self-contained: it isolates a symmetric family of half-sized voting blocs and extends it to a maximal frame in which every shorter balanced obstruction is excluded. Along the explicit infinite sequence of universe sizes obtained in the construction, this also establishes the middle-layer family predicted by Conjecture B.25 by Moss and Pedersen (2026). Together with the soundness and completeness theorem for the Moss-Pedersen minimal logic for strict majorities, this establishes that measurable social decision frames are not finitely axiomatizable in that language.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Better Adherence, Richer Context: A Field Evaluation of LLM-Powered Conversational Voice Diaries for Sleep

arXiv:2606.18596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sleep diaries are central to behavioral sleep medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, yet daily completion is difficult to sustain, and static forms often provide limited context for interpreting night-to-night sleep variation. We designed an LLM-powered conversational voice diary that delivers clinically grounded morning and evening sleep diary questions through proactive smart-speaker prompts, structured conversational intake, and adaptive follow-up dialogue. We evaluated the system in a four-week between-subjects field study with 30 university students, comparing it with a text-based mobile diary using matched diary items, reporting windows, and reminder intervals. Compared with the text-based diary, the conversational voice diary showed higher adherence and elicited more detailed contextual self-report about routines, stressors, environmental conditions, and other sleep-related factors. Participants also described the voice diary as easier to integrate into daily routines, despite longer perceived completion time. However, voice-based conversational intake produced lower completeness for some structured diary fields, revealing a trade-off between expressive richness and structured precision. These findings show both the promise and the challenge of using LLM-powered conversational voice assistants for longitudinal health self-report.

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

Resource-Aware LLM Reasoning for Mobile Edge General Intelligence

arXiv:2509.23248v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled an emergence of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) with powerful reasoning and autonomous decision-making capabilities. This integration with edge computing has led to the development of Mobile Edge General Intelligence (MEGI), which brings real-time, privacy-preserving reasoning to the network edge. However, deploying LLM-based agentic AI reasoning in MEGI environments poses significant challenges due to the high computational demands of reasoning and the limited resources of edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose a joint optimization framework for efficient LLM reasoning deployment in MEGI. First, we systematically review enhancement methods to identify mechanisms suitable for edge adaptation. Subsequently, we present a distributed framework that synergizes reasoning enhancement via adaptive CoT prompting with scalable deployment through a distributed MoE architecture. An important innovation of this approach involves modeling reasoning depth as a dynamic network resource variable, which is optimized jointly with expert activation and transmission power. This mechanism allows the system to dynamically regulate expert networks and reasoning complexity according to task requirements and device capabilities. Experimental evaluations in mobile edge environments demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively balances reasoning quality and resource efficiency. The results show that with less than one second of additional inference time, both accuracy and latency satisfaction rate can reach 90\%, validating the practical viability of deploying sophisticated LLM reasoning in resource-constrained MEGI systems.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Approximation Properties of Evolutionary Dynamics in Continuous-Time Finite State Space Games

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11193v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This thesis studies the convergence of finite-population stochastic evolutionary dynamics to their deterministic mean-field limit in continuous-time finite state space games. We first develop refined ergodic theorems for Markov chains with a single positive-recurrent class, guaranteeing the existence of a unique invariant distribution and almost-sure convergence of time averages. Next, we prove that the mean-field model, described by a system of Lipschitz-continuous ordinary differential equations, admits a unique solution that depends continuously on its initial condition and that constitutes the almost-sure limit for the empirical distributions with fixed policy. Furthermore, we show that every Mixed Stationary Nash Equilibrium of the mean-field game is approximated by a Nash equilibrium of the corresponding $N$-player game within an error $\epsilon$ for sufficiently large $N$. We finally demonstrate, by Kurtz's theorem, that the empirical state-policy distribution converges in probability to the mean-field trajectory. Numerical simulations conducted in MATLAB confirm the theoretical $\mathcal{O}(N^{-1/2})$ convergence rate in both models across a range of population sizes.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

A Leakage-Aware Comparative Benchmark of Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Transformer Models for Reliable Leukemia Detection

Automated classification of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) from peripheral blood smear images has often reported near-perfect performance on the C-NMC 2019 dataset. We show that such results can be inflated by patient-level data leakage caused by random image-level partitioning, where cells from the same subject may appear in both training and test folds. We establish a leakage-aware benchmark under a strict subject-disjoint protocol, comparing LightGBM, RBF-SVM, EfficientNet-B0, EfficientNet-B1, and ViT-Tiny. Models are developed using three subject-disjoint folds from 73 subjects and evaluated on an external preliminary-phase test set of 1,867 images from 28 unseen subjects with zero patient overlap. Beyond discrimination, we assess calibration using expected calibration error, Brier score, and temperature scaling. Under honest evaluation, EfficientNet-B1 achieves the best performance, with AUROC 0.913, sensitivity 0.87, specificity 0.80, and calibrated ECE 0.024. Frozen-feature classifiers and ViT-Tiny show high sensitivity but poor specificity, indicating a tendency to over-predict the malignant class. A random-versus-subject-disjoint ablation shows that random splitting inflates AUROC by about 0.04 even in the conservative frozen-feature setting. These findings caution against image-level evaluation on C-NMC 2019 and provide a reproducible, calibration-aware benchmark for future work.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Generative Engine Optimization at Scale: Measuring Brand Visibility Across AI Search Engines

People increasingly get answers straight from AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini rather than scrolling search results. Brands that once focused on search engine optimization (SEO) must now optimize for how these engines represent, cite, and recommend them – a shift variously called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and AI Search Visibility. We treat AEO and AI Visibility as part of GEO, and study how to measure brand visibility across AI engines: what they value when they cite a brand, which sources they rely on, and what content large language models surface. The hard case is everyone outside the already-authoritative top brands – SMEs, D2C brands, creators, and early-stage startups. We analyze 100K+ prompt responses across 100+ brands tracked on Ranqo between March and May 2026. First visibility runs form a clear three-tier brand-stature ladder: global household names (e.g., Stripe, Nike) appear in 73% of relevant AI answers on their first run; established mid-market and regional brands (e.g., Olipop, Klaviyo) in 44%; niche and small brands in just 11% – about 30 percentage points per step. When engines cite sources, about 78% go to corporate websites; among non-corporate sources YouTube leads, ahead of Reddit, editorial media, and Wikipedia. The highest-leverage page is the ranked "best-of" listicle, the most-cited content format at about 21% of all citations. Sentiment is the unstable signal: whether a brand is framed positively or negatively flips about 6.7 times more often than whether it is mentioned at all. These findings provide a first large-scale baseline for measuring GEO: AI brand visibility can be measured, differs by platform, and varies strongly by brand maturity. We close by proposing seven v1.1 protocols to test whether specific recommendations can causally improve AI visibility.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

From Task-Guided Conversational Graphs to Goal-Oriented Dialogue Runtimes

Graph and multi-agent orchestration frameworks make production large language model (LLM) workflows practical, but they do not by themselves solve conversational continuity when users maintain several interdependent objectives. This conceptual systems paper focuses on the high-complexity end of that design space, where goals can be suspended, resumed, revised, and invalidated by actions in other goals. We introduce the Goal-Oriented Dialogue Runtime (GODR), a framework-neutral design pattern that treats goals, task frames, lifecycle state, invalidation rules, and resumption contracts as first-class runtime objects while delegating bounded execution to graph runtimes, agents, tools, or application programming interfaces (APIs). GODR is not proposed as a replacement for workflow graphs in simple guided processes; it is intended for complex, multi-domain, interruptible conversations where objective continuity cannot be recovered reliably from agent identity, chat history, or execution-graph position alone. The paper formalizes the problem, proposes runtime objects and architecture-selection criteria, and frames evaluation as an agenda for future empirical validation rather than as a measured performance claim.

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

Improving Cross-Format Robustness in Language Models with Multi-Format Training

Large language models often remain sensitive to answer format: a question solved correctly in one form may fail in another semantically equivalent form. To study this gap, we define cross-format robustness as the extent to which a model answers the same underlying question consistently across formats. We then compare full-format training with FormatMix, which expands only a subset of training items into multiple equivalent formats using either random or targeted selection. Across GLM4 and Llama-3.1, multi-format supervision consistently improves both task performance and cross-format robustness, whereas Multiple-choice question (MCQ)-only supervision alone brings little benefit and can even reduce robustness. We further find that expanding only about 30% of the training set into multiple formats often recovers most of the gain from full-format training, and this effect appears across the model families and sizes we study. These results suggest that format diversity, rather than additional supervision alone, is the key driver of robustness. That lightweight multi-format augmentation is a practical way to make LLMs less sensitive to answer format without changing the base model.

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

VCG: A Multimodal Retrieval Framework for E-Commerce Video Feeds under Extreme Cold-Start Conditions

arXiv:2606.19627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The digital commerce landscape is shifting from static, search-driven catalogs to dynamic, immersive video feeds. This transition introduces an ``extreme cold-start'' problem: unlike traditional items, new short-form videos lack the dense interaction history required for collaborative filtering. Furthermore, immersive feeds introduce strong position and duration biases that distort standard engagement signals. In this paper, we demonstrate the Video Candidate Generation (VCG) system, a scalable multimodal retrieval engine designed to solve these challenges in a large-scale e-commerce environment. By leveraging a domain-adapted vision-language model (based on CLIP), we map users and videos into a shared semantic space, enabling zero-shot retrieval based on visual content rather than behavioral history. We detail the system's architecture and present a rigorous evaluation comparing generative (LLM) vs. discriminative (CLIP) embeddings. Our results show that while generative models excel at attribute prediction, they suffer from embedding space collapse in retrieval tasks. Online A/B testing demonstrates that VCG effectively mitigates engagement biases, yielding a 50\% uplift in deep video completion. To showcase the system's capabilities, we present an interactive demonstration featuring three bi-directional retrieval scenarios: Product-to-Video, Video-to-Product, and Zero-Shot Semantic Search.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

AI tool spots antibiotics that fight drug-resistant gonorrhoea

Authors: Unknown Author

The bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae has evolved resistance to most antibiotics used to treat it, but a machine-learning screen reveals potential therapies. The bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae has evolved resistance to most antibiotics used to treat it, but a machine-learning screen reveals potential therapies.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Age as a moderator of a brief alcohol intervention among injury patients in Northern Tanzania

Background: Alcohol use is a leading modifiable risk factor for injury in sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, young people ([≤]24 years) experience greater alcohol-related harm despite drinking less frequently than adults. Punguza Pombe kwa Afya Yako (PPKAY) is a culturally adapted, brief intervention for injury patients in Tanzania. This study examined whether age moderates its effectiveness. Methods: We conducted an exploratory secondary analysis of baseline and 3-month data from the PPKAY randomized trial among injury patients aged [≥]18 years at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, Tanzania. Eligible participants reporting alcohol use before injury, AUDIT [≥]8, or positive breathalyzer were randomized to usual care or PPKAY with SMS boosters. The primary outcome was binge drinking days. Count outcomes were analyzed using negative binomial regression with robust SEs and continuous outcomes using mixed-effects models. Effect modification was assessed using a three-way interaction (Time x intervention x Age). Results: Among 543 participants (mean age 36.8 years; 16.2% aged 18–24), age moderated the intervention effect for drinking days (IRR = 0.27, 95% CI 0.07 – 0.98; p = 0.046) and drinks consumed (IRR = 0.17, 95% CI 0.04 – 0.77; p = 0.021). The intervention reduced 4 drinking days (95% CI -7.1 to -0.8) and 27.5 drinks (95% CI -42.8 to -12.2) among young people, while adults showed reductions in both arms, without intervention-specific effect. Conclusion: The effects of ED-based brief alcohol interventions are not uniform, varying across both age groups and alcohol-related outcomes. We found a greater responsiveness in drinking frequency and quantity reported among young people.

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

SDS-LoRA: Overcoming Anisotropic Gradient Scaling in Low-Rank Adaptation

arXiv:2606.16454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables efficient adaptation of large pre-trained models to downstream tasks by parameterizing weight updates with low-rank matrices. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of the LoRA parameterization from a geometric perspective. Specifically, we show that when a full fine-tuning gradient is backpropagated to the low-rank matrices, it undergoes anisotropic scaling driven by their singular values. We argue that this phenomenon is undesirable because it distorts the full fine-tuning gradient by skewing it toward dominant singular directions while suppressing others. Our analyses demonstrate that anisotropic gradient scaling reduces the effective rank of the low-rank matrices' gradients and results in suboptimal alignment between the full fine-tuning gradient and its low-rank approximation in LoRA, thereby exacerbating the gap to full fine-tuning. To address these limitations, we propose a new low-rank parameterization, SDS-LoRA, which structurally decouples singular values from the backward pass. Our method ensures that the full fine-tuning gradient backpropagates only through the orthonormal bases of the low-rank matrices' subspaces, independent of their scales. Convergence analysis demonstrates that while LoRA's convergence rate degrades with the condition number of the low-rank matrices, SDS-LoRA remains independent of it. Experimental results across natural language and vision benchmarks show that SDS-LoRA improves loss convergence and reduces the gap to full fine-tuning, significantly enhancing adaptation performance.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Heat kernel estimates for Markov processes with blowing-up jump kernels

arXiv:2512.24807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we establish sharp two-sided heat kernel estimates for a large class of purely discontinuous symmetric Markov processes on closed subsets $F$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$, whose jump kernels blow up on a Borel subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. We assume that $F\setminus \Sigma$ is a $\kappa$-fat set and is dense in $F$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work establishing sharp heat kernel estimates for jump processes whose jump kernels blow up on part of the state space. The jump kernels under consideration take the form $J(x,y)=|x-y|^{-d-\alpha}{\mathcal B}(x,y)$, where $\alpha\in (0,2)$ and the function ${\mathcal B}(x,y)$ blows up at a subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. A fundamental obstacle is that the tails of the jump measures are not uniformly bounded, and hence standard techniques in heat kernel analysis do not provide a priori off-diagonal estimates. To overcome this difficulty, we develop a new approach based on weighted integral estimates for the heat kernel that are sensitive to both the blow-up behavior of the jump kernel and the geometry of $F\setminus \Sigma$. Examples of processes falling within our general framework include traces of isotropic $\alpha$-stable processes in $C^{1,\rm Dini}$ sets, processes in Lipschitz sets arising in connection with the nonlocal Neumann problem, and a large class of resurrected self-similar processes in the closed upper half-space.