中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

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

Sign In Register
01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Linking mpox wastewater surveillance with reported clinical cases in three countries in Sub-Saharan Africa

Authors:
Sgarabotto↗Tiwari↗Kabena↗Lyimo↗Lompo↗Shea↗Ngelesi↗Mushumbusi↗J. P↗Zakaria↗Msoma↗Kabore↗…

The emergence of the novel monkeypox virus (MPXV) clade Ib in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and neighboring countries in late 2023 highlighted the need for rapid, scalable surveillance approaches to support outbreak detection and response. As part of the ODIN-Mpox project, wastewater surveillance (WWS) systems were established as an emergency public health measure in three Sub-Saharan African countries (DRC, Tanzania, and Burkina Faso) to evaluate the feasibility of wastewater-based monitoring for mpox and strengthen local surveillance capacity. Between January 2025 and April 2026, 117 wastewater samples were collected from selected sites and analyzed for MPXV DNA using targeted qPCR assays. Clinical mpox data were obtained from national surveillance systems and WHO reports to assess epidemiological linkages between wastewater detections and reported infections. Six wastewater samples tested positive for MPXV DNA. During the study period, DRC experienced the highest disease burden, with weekly reported cases peaking at about 3,000 in January 2025, while Tanzania reported a peak of 20 weekly cases in March 2025. No confirmed clinical cases were reported in Burkina Faso. No clear relationship was observed between reported case numbers and qPCR Ct values in positive wastewater samples. Despite the low detection frequency, the project demonstrated the operational feasibility of implementing MPXV wastewater surveillance in resource-limited settings and established laboratory capacity for environmental monitoring of emerging infectious diseases. Given the early stage of WWS implementation in the region, the study identified opportunities for further system strengthening, including optimization of sample processing and reporting workflows, improved access to laboratory supplies, and enhanced integration of environmental and clinical surveillance data streams. These findings highlight the value of WWS as a complementary component of integrated public health surveillance systems and emphasize the need for continued investment in laboratory capacity, harmonized methodologies, governance frameworks, and knowledge exchange to enhance outbreak preparedness and response in low-resource settings.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PragReST: Self-Reinforcing Counterfactual Reasoning for Pragmatic Language Understanding

Authors:
Jihyung Park↗Minchao Huang↗Leqi Liu↗Elias Stengel-Eskin↗

Natural language understanding often depends on meanings that are implied rather than explicitly stated, requiring pragmatic reasoning. Despite strong performance on math and logical reasoning, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with making pragmatic inferences, often choosing literal interpretations. To improve LLM pragmatic reasoning, we introduce PragReST, a self-supervised framework that constructs pragmatic QA data, generates counterfactual reasoning traces, and trains models to internalize them through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, without human-labeled training data or distillation from a stronger teacher. Across four pragmatic benchmarks (PragMega, Ludwig, MetoQA, and AltPrag), PragReST improves over backbone models, task-specific pragmatic tuning baselines, and non-counterfactual variants of the same pipeline. On accuracy-based benchmarks, PragReST improves over the instruct backbone by 5.37 and 5.50% (absolute) for Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B, respectively. Our error analysis and ablations underscore the importance of counterfactual reasoning: PragReST primarily reduces errors caused by failures to contrast observed utterances with plausible alternatives, and removing counterfactual reasoning substantially reduces performance. Moreover, our training preserves out-of-domain performance on general-knowledge and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Long-sought chemical inhibitors of β-arrestin proteins

Authors: Unknown Author

Proteins called β-arrestins regulate signalling through members of the G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) superfamily. Small molecules that bind directly to the β-arrestins and inhibit their activities are the first chemical tools to probe their biology, opening avenues for transducer-targeted, pathway-specific GPCR therapeutics. Three small molecules disrupt the engagement of β-arrestins with G-protein-coupled receptor proteins.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

S3OD: Towards Generalizable Salient Object Detection with Synthetic Data

Authors:
Orest Kupyn↗Hirokatsu Kataoka↗Christian Rupprecht↗

Salient object detection exemplifies data-bounded tasks where expensive pixel-precise annotations force separate model training for related subtasks like DIS and HR-SOD. We present a method that dramatically improves generalization through large-scale synthetic data generation and ambiguity-aware architecture. We introduce S3OD, a dataset of over 139,000 high-resolution images created through our multi-modal diffusion pipeline that extracts labels from diffusion and DINO-v3 features. The iterative generation framework prioritizes challenging categories based on model performance. We propose a streamlined multi-mask decoder that handles the inherent ambiguity in salient object detection by predicting multiple valid interpretations. Models trained only on synthetic data achieve 20-50% error reduction in cross-dataset generalization, while fine-tuned versions reach state-of-the-art performance across DIS and HR-SOD benchmarks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

An example of Ensemble Kalman Filter with resampling

Authors:
Sylvain Rubenthaler↗

arXiv:2606.25539v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces the Exact Ensemble Kalman Filter (ExEnKF), a novel algorithm for state estimation in discrete-time nonlinear filtering problems with linear observations. Unlike traditional Ensemble Kalman Filters (EnKFs), which approximate the filtering distribution using ensembles of Dirac measures, the ExEnKF employs Gaussian measures, enabling more efficient exploration of the state space and potentially alleviating the curse of dimensionality. We prove the algorithm's asymptotic consistency with the optimal filter (Theorem 3.1), establishing a convergence rate of order 1/ $\sqrt$ N for N particles. Numerical experiments on the Lorenz-96 multiscale model demonstrate that the ExEnKF outperforms the standard EnKF under model misspecification and poor initialization, particularly in highly stochastic regimes. The algorithm's robustness is further highlighted by its ability to track hidden components of the true signal, even when observations are generated from a different model (e.g., multiscale vs. single-scale). This work advances the theoretical understanding of ensemble methods in nonlinear filtering and provides a practical alternative to sequential Monte Carlo methods for high-dimensional systems

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

PLaID++: A Preference Aligned Language Model for Targeted Inorganic Materials Design

Authors:
Andy Xu↗Rohan Desai↗Larry Wang↗Ethan Ritz↗Gabriel Hope↗

arXiv:2509.07150v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising approach to improve correctness in LLMs, however, in many scientific problems, the objective is not necessarily to produce the correct answer, but instead to produce a diverse array of candidates which satisfy a set of constraints. We study this challenge in the context of materials generation. To this end, we introduce PLaID++, an LLM post-trained for stable and property-guided crystal generation. We find that performance hinges on our crystallographic representation and reward formulation. First, we introduce a compact, symmetry-informed Wyckoff text representation which improves computational efficiency and encourages generalization from physical priors. Second, we demonstrate that temperature scaling acts as an entropy regularizer which counteracts mode collapse and encourages exploration. By encoding symmetry constraints directly into text and guiding model outputs towards desirable chemical space, PLaID++ generates structures that are thermodynamically stable, unique, and novel at a $\sim$50\% greater rate than prior methods and conditionally generates structures with desired space group properties. Our work demonstrates the potential of adapting post-training techniques from natural language processing to materials design, paving the way for targeted and efficient discovery of novel materials.

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

Mitigating Content Shift and Hallucination in GenAI Image Editing via Structural Refinement

Authors:
Luxi Zhao↗Michael S. Brown↗

Generative AI (GenAI) image editors, such as Nano Banana, produce visually compelling results for retouching tasks, enabling non-experts to edit images through text prompts alone. However, the generative nature of these models often introduces spatial misalignment, texture distortion, and content hallucination, all of which are detrimental to downstream workflows that require pixel-level fidelity. We identify a problem setting we call "structure-preserving GenAI fusion" for black-box GenAI image retouching: retain the perceptual enhancements of a GenAI output while enforcing structural faithfulness to the original input image. To address this problem, we propose a post-processing framework that fuses an input image with its GenAI-enhanced counterpart by first establishing coarse spatial and photometric correspondences, then performing a fusion stage that transfers desired enhancements while suppressing hallucinated content. In the absence of direct prior work in this setting, we evaluate our framework against representative methods from photorealistic style transfer and image fusion. Our experiments demonstrate that our method better preserves aesthetic quality while maintaining pixel-level structural consistency and the input resolution.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

LoMime: Query-Efficient Membership Inference using Model Extraction in Label-Only Settings

Authors:
Abdullah Caglar Oksuz↗Anisa Halimi↗Erman Ayday↗

arXiv:2602.18934v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Membership inference attacks (MIAs) threaten the privacy of machine learning models by revealing whether a specific data point was used during training. Existing MIAs often rely on impractical assumptions, such as access to public datasets, shadow models, confidence scores, or knowledge of the training data distribution, making them vulnerable to defenses like confidence masking and adversarial regularization. Label-only MIAs, even under strict constraints, suffer from high query requirements per sample. We propose a cost-effective label-only MIA framework based on transferability and model extraction. By querying the target model $M$ using active sampling, perturbation-based selection, and synthetic data, we extract a functionally similar surrogate model $S$ on which membership inference is performed. This shifts the query overhead to a one-time extraction phase, eliminating repeated queries to $M$. Our method matches the performance of state-of-the-art label-only MIAs while significantly reducing query costs and operating under strict black-box constraints. On benchmark tabular datasets, we show that a query budget equivalent to testing the membership of approximately $1%$ of the training samples is sufficient to extract $S$ and achieve membership inference accuracy within $\pm 1%$ of that obtained when attacking $M$ directly. We also evaluate the effectiveness of standard defenses, including DP-SGD and regularization, proposed for label-only MIAs against our attack. Finally, we present preliminary results extending our framework to deep neural networks trained on image datasets, demonstrating promising transferability and membership inference performance under label-only access while highlighting directions for further optimization.

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

Allure of Craquelure: A Variational-Generative Approach to Crack Detection in Paintings

Authors:
Laura Paul↗Holger Rauhut↗Martin Burger↗Samira Kabri↗Tim Roith↗

Recent advances in imaging technologies, deep learning and numerical performance have enabled non-invasive detailed analysis of artworks, supporting their documentation and conservation. In particular, automated detection of craquelure in digitized paintings is crucial for assessing degradation and guiding restoration, yet remains challenging due to the possibly complex scenery and the visual similarity between cracks and crack-like artistic features such as brush strokes or hair. We propose a hybrid approach that models crack detection as an inverse problem, decomposing an observed image into a crack-free painting and a crack component. A deep generative model is employed as powerful prior for the underlying artwork, while crack structures are captured using a Mumford–Shah-type variational functional together with a crack prior. Joint optimization yields a pixel-level map of crack localizations in the painting.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Interaction-enabled topological pumping of Rydberg electrons

Authors:
Chenxi Huang↗Tao Chen↗Kaden R. A. Hazzard↗Jacob P. Covey↗Bryce Gadway↗

arXiv:2606.15126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Topological pumping is a paradigmatic realization of quantized transport in band systems, yet its fate in strongly correlated regimes, especially with long-range interactions, remains largely unexplored. Here we report the experimental observation of interaction-enabled topological pumping of correlated Rydberg electrons in a synthetic lattice. We show that dipolar exchange interactions induce a controllable shift of the underlying topological singularity in parameter space, such that a fixed pumping trajectory can be driven through successive topological transitions by tuning the interaction strength alone. This leads to the emergence and breakdown of quantized transport. The observations are consistent with an effective Rice-Mele description with interaction-renormalized onsite potentials and are supported by characterizing the adiabaticity and robustness to control trajectory imperfections. Our results establish a platform for exploring interaction-controlled topological transport beyond perturbative regimes and open a route toward engineering correlated topological matter in synthetic quantum systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

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

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

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

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Quantitative Experimental Repeated Measures Study of Training Dynamics in a Small Llama Style Language Model Under a Compute-Aware Token Budget

Authors:
Joe Dwyer↗

arXiv:2606.13370v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study examines training dynamics in a small Llama-style language model trained under a fixed, compute-constrained token budget. Rather than evaluating efficiency solely through endpoint performance, the study uses a quantitative experimental repeated measures design to analyze how validation loss, validation perplexity, rolling volatility, backslide behavior, spike behavior, and between-seed variability change across token-based training intervals. Six independent training runs were conducted on a 4.26-million-parameter model using the TinyStories corpus, CPU-based full-precision training, and a target budget of approximately 20 million cumulative training tokens. Metrics were collected across 21 intervals, producing 126 seed-by-interval observations. Repeated measures ANOVA showed statistically significant interval effects for validation loss, validation perplexity, and rolling volatility. Descriptive trajectories revealed rapid early improvement followed by non-monotonic degradation during later training intervals. Mean validation loss decreased from 8.3552 at initialization to 2.7996 near 4 million tokens, but increased to 3.9010 by the final checkpoint. Validation perplexity followed the same pattern, falling sharply early in training before rising later. Derived telemetry further showed recurrent validation-loss backslides and no interval-summary evidence of a stable phase under the predefined criteria. These findings suggest that compute-aware language model evaluation should examine training trajectories rather than endpoint metrics alone. In constrained compute settings, additional token exposure may increase computational cost without producing proportional generalization gains, and interval-level telemetry can reveal instability, regression, and diminishing returns that final metrics may obscure.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

No-deleting principle for two unitary copies

Authors:
Dafa Li↗

arXiv:2606.24522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pati and Braunstein defined a deleting machine and showed the impossibility of deleting one of two identical copies of an unknown quantum state. So far, no one has defined two non-identical copies of a quantum state, of course no one has discussed the impossibility of deleting one of two non-identical copies of an unknown quantum state. In this paper, we define $u|{\psi}>$ and $U|{\psi}>$, where $u$ and $U$ are any unitary operators, as two unitary copies of a quantum state $|{\psi}>$, and show that it is impossible to delete one of two unitary copies of an unknown state.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Multiscale Hypersonic Boundary Layer Reconstruction via Spectral Binning and Subdomain-wise Conditional Diffusion

Authors:
Hojin Kim↗Dibyajyoti Chakraborty↗Takahiko Toki↗Carlo Scalo↗Romit Maulik↗

arXiv:2606.15023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a multiscale probabilistic reconstruction framework for hypersonic Couette flow, where near-wall states are inferred from limited top-wall observations using conditional diffusion model. The boundary layer is divided into overlapping wall-normal subdomains, and a single height- and Mach-conditioned Elucidating Diffusion Model (EDM) is trained jointly for M=6,7,8 to sample velocity, density, pressure, and temperature fields conditioned on a top-wall boundary slice. A soft overlap inpainting strategy assembles subdomain predictions into full-volume reconstructions while maintaining inter-subdomain continuity and small-scale variability. To improve the spectral fidelity of the generated fields, we introduce a novel bounded binned spectral power (BSP) loss that preserves high-wavenumber content while remaining numerically stable across the diffusion noise schedule. Validation against direct numerical simulation data shows that the model recovers instantaneous structures, spectra, statistical profiles, correlations, and wall quantities across all training Mach numbers, while providing spatially structured uncertainty estimates. The reconstructed Mach-conditioned profiles also collapse under the Trettel-Larsson transformation, indicating consistency with compressibility scaling. These results establish the domain decomposed conditional diffusion model with a bounded binned spectral loss as an effective probabilistic surrogate for near-wall reconstruction in hypersonic wall-bounded turbulence.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FedSPC: Shared Parameter Correction for Personalized Federated Learning

Authors:
Kannanthodath Induchoodan Ajay Menon↗Christian Prehofer↗Yunfei Xu↗Toru Hirano↗

arXiv:2606.13748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized federated learning (PFL) is one of the important approaches in federated learning for addressing statistical heterogeneity while enabling client-specific adaptation. Many PFL methods split the model into shared and personalized parameters, which are jointly trained on each client. However, this creates an optimization issue: shared parameters are updated by clients optimizing different local objectives, which can lead to inconsistent shared updates and weaken the shared representation. To address this problem, we propose Federated Shared Parameter Correction (FedSPC), a modular correction method for PFL. FedSPC applies control-variate correction only to the shared parameters of a given PFL method, while leaving personalized parameters unchanged. It can be integrated into three common PFL settings: shared feature extractors, shared classifiers, and fully shared models with local regularization. Experiments on CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet with ViT, ResNet-34, and VGG-11 show that FedSPC improves performance across representative PFL methods, including FedPer, FedRep, FedBABU, LG-FedAvg, and Ditto.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

sebis at CRF Filling 2026: A Two-Stage Local LLM Pipeline for Medical CRF Filling

Authors:
Katharina Sommer↗Tristan Till↗Florian Matthes↗

The extraction of structured clinical information from unstructured EHR notes is a persistent bottleneck in healthcare informatics. While large language models (LLMs) offer high performance, their deployment in clinical settings is hindered by privacy risks, inference costs, and the tendency to hallucinate beyond textual evidence. We address these challenges for the CL4Health 2026 Case Report Form (CRF) filling task by proposing a fully local, domain-adapted pipeline using the MedGemma-27B model. Our two-stage architecture, which separates binary presence classification from value extraction, enforces strict adherence to textual evidence and ensures deterministic outputs for negated, uncertain, or unknown states. By leveraging item-specific, few-shot in-context learning without external API calls or fine-tuning, our approach achieves a macro-F1 score of 0.55 on the official English test track. This result secures second place among all locally-hosted, open-source submissions. Our work demonstrates that privacy-preserving, on-premise LLM pipelines can achieve near-competitive performance with proprietary frontier models, providing a practical, data-sovereign framework for clinical NLP.

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

E-mem: Multi-agent based Episodic Context Reconstruction for LLM Agent Memory

Authors:
Kaixiang Wang↗Yidan Lin↗Jiong Lou↗Zhaojiacheng Zhou↗Bunyod Suvonov↗Jie Li↗

arXiv:2601.21714v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) agents towards System~2 reasoning, characterized by deliberative, high-precision problem-solving, requires maintaining rigorous logical integrity over extended horizons. However, prevalent memory preprocessing paradigms suffer from destructive de-contextualization. By compressing complex sequential dependencies into pre-defined structures (e.g., embeddings or graphs), these methods sever the contextual integrity essential for deep reasoning. To address this, we propose E-mem, a framework shifting from Memory Preprocessing to Episodic Context Reconstruction. Inspired by biological engrams, E-mem employs a heterogeneous hierarchical architecture where multiple assistant agents maintain uncompressed memory contexts, while a central master agent orchestrates global planning. Unlike passive retrieval, our mechanism empowers assistants to locally reason within activated segments, extracting context-aware evidence before aggregation. Evaluations on the LoCoMo benchmark demonstrate that E-mem achieves over 54\% F1, surpassing the state-of-the-art GAM by 7.75\%, while reducing token cost by over 70\%.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Active Sampling for Ultra-Low-Bit-Rate Video Compression via Conditional Controlled Diffusion

Authors:
Amirhosein Javadi↗Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti↗Tara Javidi↗

Diffusion models provide a powerful generative prior for perceptual reconstruction at ultra-low bitrates, but effective video compression requires controlling the generative process using highly compact conditioning signals. In this work, we present ActDiff-VC, a diffusion-based video compression framework for the ultra-low-bitrate regime. Our method partitions videos into variable-length segments, transmits keyframes only when needed, and summarizes temporal dynamics using a compact set of tracked point trajectories. Conditioned on these sparse signals, a conditional diffusion decoder synthesizes the remaining frames, enabling perceptually realistic reconstruction under severe rate constraints. To support this design, we introduce two mechanisms: content-adaptive keyframe selection and budget-aware sparse trajectory selection, which together enable compact yet effective conditioning for generative reconstruction. Experiments on the UVG and MCL-JCV benchmarks show that ActDiff-VC achieves up to 64.6\% bitrate reduction at matched NIQE, improves KID by up to 64.6\% and FID by up to 37.7\% at comparable bitrates against strong learned codecs, and delivers favorable perceptual rate–distortion trade-offs relative to learned and diffusion-based baselines in the ultra-low-bitrate regime.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Granularity-Regulated Adaptive Computational Efficiency for Optimal Verification in Test-Time Scaling

Authors:
Ardit Krasniqi↗Luan Vejsiu↗Elira Dervishi↗

Test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by investing additional compute at inference time. A central component of TTS is the verifier, which selects or scores candidate solutions to guide the search process. While prior work has explored the benefit of verification, a fundamental question remains underexplored: what is the optimal granularity of verification under a given compute budget? Coarse-grained outcome reward models (ORMs) and fine-grained process reward models (PRMs) represent two extremes, yet neither alone achieves compute-optimality across all regimes. In this paper, we establish a unified theoretical framework, called GRACE (\underline{G}ranularity-\underline{R}egulated \underline{A}daptive \underline{C}omputational \underline{E}fficiency), that characterizes the optimal verification granularity as an explicit function of problem difficulty, verifier accuracy, and compute budget. We prove that there exists a phase transition: fine-grained verification dominates when either the compute budget is large or the problem is hard, whereas coarse-grained verification is preferred in the low-budget, easy-problem regime. Our theory unifies Best-of-$N$, beam search, and step-level MCTS within a single Pareto-optimality framework, and motivates an adaptive granularity strategy that provably achieves the compute-performance Pareto frontier. Empirical results on MATH-500, GSM8K, and AIME benchmarks corroborate all four theoretical claims, with our adaptive strategy outperforming fixed-granularity baselines by up to 3.1\% accuracy at matched compute.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Experimentation for Different Scheduling Policies on Queues: Mixed Differences-in-Q Estimators Based on Little's Law

Authors:
Nanshan Jia↗Ramesh Johari↗Nian Si↗Zeyu Zheng↗

arXiv:2605.29641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In data centers, tasks are dispatched to various servers to evenly distribute the workload. When a data center considers implementing a new scheduling algorithm, it typically conducts an A/B test prior to deployment to assess the real-world impact of this new method. However, a straightforward A/B test might be interfered with so-called ``Markovian'' interference. We utilized the Differences-in-Q estimator, as developed by Farias et al. (2022), and introduced mixed Differences-in-Q estimators grounded in Little's Law. We show that our A/B testing methods significantly reduce bias and variance when testing various scheduling policies. Extensive simulations were conducted under scenarios like non-stationary arrival rates, heterogeneous service rates, and communication delays. These simulations highlight the robustness and efficacy of our A/B testing approach.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Hyperlipidemia Pharmacotherapy in Skilled Nursing Facilities: A Real-World Evidence Study

Authors:
Ashraf↗Mathers↗K. E↗Wagner↗Saumur↗

Objectives: To estimate hyperlipidemia medication order prevalence and associated variables in U.S. skilled nursing facility (SNF) residents. Design: Retrospective, observational study. Setting and Participants: Electronic Health Record data from 447,080 SNF residents with a hyperlipidemia diagnosis identified in PointClickCare's Life Sciences clinical database (January-April 2025) were reviewed. Methods: The presence and absence of medication orders for hyperlipidemia treatments recommended by the American Heart Association were assessed. Descriptive analyses summarized demographic and clinical characteristics, and a modified Poisson regression model was used to estimate risk ratios for having a medication order, adjusting for demographic, clinical, and facility characteristics. Results: Overall, 83.3% of residents diagnosed with hyperlipidemia had at least one hyperlipidemia medication order. Statins were ordered by 96.2% of active order residents, while other medication classes i.e., omega-3 fatty acids, cholesterol absorption inhibitors, fibrates were less common (

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Shift Variant Image Degradation and Restoration Using Singular Value Decomposition

Authors:
Arun D. Kulkarni↗

Shift-variant image degradation is frequently encountered in practical imaging systems where the point spread function (PSF) varies across the image field due to motion, optical aberrations, atmospheric turbulence, or sensor-related effects. Unlike shift-invariant, shift-variant degradation presents significant challenges for image restoration because the degradation process cannot be represented by a single convolution kernel. This paper proposes a singular value decomposition (SVD)-based framework for restoring images degraded by shift-variant motion blur. The proposed approach determines the contribution of small singular values using a singular-value energy retention criterion. Specifically, the number of small singular values is selected based on a specified percentage of cumulative singular-value energy, providing a systematic approach for controlling noise amplification while preserving useful image information. The degradation model is formulated using a position-dependent PSF represented by a shift-variant imaging operator. Three representative one dimensional shift-variant motion PSFs are considered: bidirectional linear motion, Gaussian motion, and simple harmonic motion. The image degradation process is modeled as a linear system, and SVD is employed to analyze and invert the corresponding degradation operator. The singular-value representation provides insight into the ill-conditioned nature of the restoration problem and enables the development of stable inversion techniques. The proposed SVD-based restoration algorithm is applied to three degraded images. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in recovering image details and reducing blur artifacts under different motion models.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Antibody-Antigen Affinity Prediction with Chain-Aware Protein Language Modeling

Authors:
Singh↗Malhotra↗Srivastava↗S. P↗R. K↗Gorantla↗

Motivation: Antibody-antigen affinity determines which antibodies advance in therapeutic discovery, repertoire analysis and affinity maturation, but experimental measurements are sparse relative to the scale of sequence libraries. Structure-based predictors can exploit interface geometry when reliable complexes are available, yet early discovery often requires ranking many heavy-light chain pairs against antigens for which no complex structure exists. Existing sequence-based models are scalable, but frequently compress heavy and light chains into a single antibody representation or concatenate antibody and antigen features obscuring the chain-specific and epitope-specific signals that drive binding. Results: We present AbAffinity, a sequence-only chain-aware three-stream architecture that maintains heavy chain, light chain and antigen as distinct streams. It integrates frozen ESM-2 embeddings with heavy-chain CDR-focused pooling, heavy-light self-attention, adaptive fusion gating and gated cross-attention, training only a compact interaction module. On the SAAINT-DB benchmark, AbAffinity achieves strong predictive performance under ten-fold cross-validation and maintains robust accuracy on novel antigens. It consistently outperforms recent sequence-based models across external benchmarks including SAbDab, AB-Bind and SKEMPI 2.0. Ablation studies highlight the contributions of chain-specific representations, CDR-focused pooling and the gated interaction pathway. Integrated Gradients attributions recover known paratope and epitope residues at structurally validated interfaces. AbAffinity provides a lightweight, explainable sequence-first framework for antibody triage and prioritisation when structural information is limited or unavailable.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Hyperleukocytosis and outcomes in pediatric B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia: A report from the REDIAL Consortium

Authors:
Kim↗J. J↗Brown↗A. L↗Gramatges↗Hoang↗Sok↗Garcia-Morales↗Taylor↗O. A↗Huynh↗Ludwig↗…

Hyperleukocytosis (white blood cell [WBC] count >100 000/uL) at diagnosis is an important prognostic risk factor in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), though its significance with contemporary therapy is unclear. We analyzed 1 826 pediatric ALL patients from a multi-institution cohort to determine whether hyperleukocytosis independently predicts outcomes using multivariable Cox proportional hazard modeling. Hyperleukocytosis occurred in 211 patients (12%), with 121 having B-ALL, and showed no prognostic significance in T-ALL patients. In B-ALL, 5-year event-free survival (EFS) was 65% versus 89% for non-hyperleukocytosis patients, and overall survival (OS) was 78% versus 93%. After adjustment for age, cytogenetic risk, central nervous system disease status, and treatment site, hyperleukocytosis remained an independent predictor of end-of-induction minimal residual disease (MRD) positivity (odds ratio 2.53 [95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.71-3.94; p

Read & Discuss → View Source →