Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:48d8b1b220fcf5cfee28c9967b1ce872

Sex-Specific Hemostatic Responses and Diagnostic Potential of Platelet Distribution Width (PDW) and D-Dimer in Mild COVID-19, Malaria, and Co-Infection in a Tropical Setting: A Case-Control Study in Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Authors:

Ekprikpo↗E. S↗Jeremiah↗Z. A↗Ken-Ezihuo↗S. U↗

Background: In malaria-endemic tropical regions, the overlapping coagulopathy in COVID-19 and malaria poses diagnostic and prognostic challenges, particularly with potential sex differences. This study evaluated sex-specific variations in platelet indices and fibrinolytic markers and assessed the utility of Platelet Distribution Width (PDW) and D-dimer in mild/asymptomatic cases. Methods: A case-control study was conducted with 220 participants (55 each in healthy controls, malaria-positive, COVID-19-positive, and COVID-19+malaria co-infected groups), aged 20-65 years, in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Platelet indices were analysed using Sysmex XP-300 haematology analyser, while D-dimer and fibrinogen were measured by ELISA. Data were analysed using SAS 9.4 with ANOVA, Tukey's HSD, Pearson correlation, and sex-stratified comparisons. Results: PDW was significantly elevated in all infected groups compared to controls (malaria: 15.21 +/- 0.22 fL; COVID-19: 15.21 +/- 0.22 fL; co-infection: 15.61 +/- 0.21 fL vs. control: 13.26 +/- 0.17 fL; F=25.850, p < 0.001). D-dimer levels were highest in the co-infected group (553.42 +/- 59.74 ng/ml, F=2.816, p = 0.040). No significant changes were observed in other platelet indices or fibrinogen across groups. No significant correlation existed between platelet indices and the fibrinolytic markers. Males exhibited significantly higher D-dimer levels across all infected groups (p < 0.05) and higher fibrinogen in COVID-19 subjects (p = 0.036). Sex exerted a stronger influence on parameters than age. Conclusion: Males show heightened fibrinolytic activation in COVID-19 and malaria co-infection. PDW and D-dimer are promising, cost-effective biomarkers for screening mild infections in resource-limited tropical settings.

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02.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2603.02715

Correction scheme for molecular total energies from quantum phase estimation under limited qubit resources

Authors:

Nobuki Inoue↗Hisao Nakamura↗

arXiv:2603.02715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a practical method for accurately evaluating molecular total energies using a hybrid approach that integrates fault-tolerant quantum computers with classical computing. Our scheme consists of two complementary components: quantum dominant orbital selection (QDOS) and subspace dynamical correlation (SDC). QDOS extracts only the essential active orbitals from the complete active space (CAS) configuration interaction (CI) state on a quantum computer, yielding a compact active space suitable for classical CASCI calculations. SDC then evaluates dynamical-correlation corrections for the CASCI energy using this compact state, which remains tractable on classical machines. To demonstrate that the CAS energy obtained on a quantum computer can be post-corrected by SDC, we examine two frameworks: multireference perturbation theory and tailored coupled-cluster theory. Our scheme enables effective treatment of relatively large molecular systems by combining limited quantum and classical resources.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16168

Fi-Gaussian: Frequency-Aware Implicit Gaussian Splatting for Single Image Dehazing

Authors:

Yuhan Chen↗Ying Fang↗Guofa Li↗Wenxuan Yu↗Yicui Shi↗Kunyang Huang↗Wenbo Chu↗Keqiang Li↗

Single image dehazing continues to be hindered by the loss of high-frequency details and the difficulty of accurate physical scattering modeling. To address these issues, we propose Fi-Gaussian, a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting network for single image dehazing. Unlike explicit rendering methods that rely on 3D point clouds, our method employs implicit Gaussian splatting to adaptively model the underlying distribution of clear images as a continuous representation in 2D feature space. The core of the network is a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting module, which decouples low-frequency structural information and high-frequency texture information in the frequency domain and then performs adaptive Gaussian aggregation with complex-valued weights to recover fine details. In addition, a physics-driven scattering renormalization mechanism is introduced to estimate the transmission map and atmospheric light under the guidance of implicit Gaussian priors. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fi-Gaussian achieves state-of-the-art quantitative performance and produces visually superior dehazed results, validating the effectiveness of implicit Gaussian splatting for low-level vision tasks.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18786

R2D-RL: A RoboCup 2D Soccer Environment for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Haobin Qin↗Baofeng Zhang↗Hidehisa Akiyama↗Keisuke Fujii↗

arXiv:2606.18786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot soccer is a challenging testbed for multi-agent reinforcement learning because it combines partial observability, cooperative and adversarial interaction, sparse rewards, and long-horizon tactical behavior. RoboCup 2D Soccer Simulation (RCSS2D) provides a mature robot-soccer platform, but its competition-oriented server-client architecture is difficult to use directly with modern Python-based MARL workflows. We introduce R2D-RL, a reinforcement learning environment that connects RCSS2D and HELIOS-based player clients to a Python MARL interface through shared-memory communication and cycle-level synchronization. R2D-RL supports full-field and scenario-based training with configurable opponents, Base discrete and Hybrid parameterized action spaces, action masks, expected possession value (EPV)-based reward shaping, and parallel execution. We provide front-goal scenarios and an 11-vs-11 full-field benchmark, together with baseline results.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11473

CRUMB: Efficient Prior Fitted Network Inference via Distributionally Matched Context Batching

Authors:

Jamie Heredge↗Mattia J. Villani↗Pranav Deshpande↗Akshay Seshadri↗Niraj Kumar↗

arXiv:2606.11473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prior-fitted networks (PFNs) are a promising class of tabular foundation models that perform in-context learning, whereby the entire labelled training set is supplied as context, and predictions for test queries are produced in a single forward pass. However, the quadratically scaling self-attention mechanism in many PFN architectures makes inference prohibitive for very large training datasets. We propose CRUMB (Clustered Retrieval Using Minimised-MMD Batching), a three-stage inference wrapper that (i) clusters the test queries, (ii) selects a small, distributionally matched training subset for each cluster by greedily minimising the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), and (iii) runs exact PFN inference on each reduced-context batch. CRUMB is architecture-agnostic and requires no retraining. On the 51-dataset TabArena benchmark, evaluated across three PFN architectures (TabPFNv2, TabICLv1, TabICLv2), we show that CRUMB outperforms similar state-of-the-art context selection strategies. We also show that CRUMB is resilient to covariate drift, as the MMD-minimisation step naturally helps align the training context distribution to match the current test batch distributions.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11712

Substrate Asymmetry in User-Side Memory: A Diagnostic Framework

Authors:

Youwang Deng↗

User-side memory in LLMs is typically scored as a single "personalization" capability: given a user's history, is the output more user-aware? We show this aggregate metric hides opposite-direction failures. Memory factorises into at least three orthogonal axes – behavioral consistency (style, voice), factual presence (recall facts in history), and factual absence (abstain when a fact is absent) – and no single substrate wins all three. Comparing per-user gamma-LoRA (a small LoRA adapter trained on each user's history; gamma denotes per-user, not per-task) against BGE-large dense top-K retrieval on a controlled 50-user synthetic corpus and a real-data probe (LaMP-3), we find gamma-LoRA decisively wins behavioral style while RAG decisively wins factual absence – and the same query-projection cells in attention layers 21-35 causally load-bear both effects in opposite directions (zeroing those LoRA weights raises absence-probe TPR by +33 pp and drops presence-probe TPR by 20 pp). On the more heavily RLHF-tuned Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct the asymmetry strengthens, not heals: parametric memory's behavioral advantage collapses while its absence-calibration deficit against retrieval widens – an alignment tax on parametric user-memory. On real-data LaMP-3, gamma-LoRA underperforms a majority baseline; a 9-condition mitigation sweep diagnoses this as instruction-following collapse, not substrate failure (a 9x2 cross-product shows the eval-time {1..5} logit mask drives main_acc to >=0.995 on every recipe), and the best training-time fix replicates bit-identically on Llama. Finally, substrate-selection routing is question-classification, not calibration: a 110M DistilBERT on the question text alone beats every logit-based router. We contribute the diagnostic framework, the diagnosed real-data negative, the alignment-tax replication, and the routing-as-classification finding.

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07.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23727

Certifying Quantum Optimization and Circuit Cutting by Using Quantum-Classical Moment Duality

Authors:

Ammar Daskin↗

arXiv:2606.23727v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We establish a direct quantum-classical duality based on the degree-$2$ Sum-of-Squares (SoS) semidefinite programming cone: the matrix of two-qubit Pauli-$Z$ correlation functions obtained from any quantum state $\rho$ is automatically a feasible point of the classical Goemans-Williamson (GW) relaxation. This observation provides a universal ``safety net'' for quantum optimization algorithms: applying GW random hyperplane rounding to the quantum-driven moment matrix yields a certified expected cut value $\mathbb{E}[\mathrm{Cut}] \ge \alpha_{\mathrm{GW}}\langle\mathcal{H}\rangle_\rho$, valid for every state produced by variational algorithms such as QAOA or the Variational Quantum Power Method (VQPM), regardless of convergence quality. We further show that the same moment matrix reveals the tensor-product structure of the underlying unitary circuit, enabling a polynomial-time, correlation-based circuit cutting procedure with rigorous error bounds. The framework is validated numerically on Max-Cut instances for variational quantum algorithms and on random states for circuit cutting, demonstrating that the cheap two-point correlation data are sufficient to locate near-optimal bipartitions and that the theoretical error bounds hold in practice.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13411

An End-to-End Hybrid Framework for Rumour Detection in Low-Resources Algerian Dialect

Authors:

Dihia Lanasri↗Fatima Benbarek↗

The rapid growth of social media has intensified the spread of rumours. This issue is more challenging in the Algerian context due to the informal and code-switched nature of dialectal content, the scarcity of annotated resources, and the limited effectiveness of standard Arabic NLP tools on dialect text. This paper presents an end-to-end rumour detection hybrid framework for Algerian dialect social media content. We build a domain-specific annotated dataset by combining real social media posts, synthetic data, and the FASSILA corpus, with automatic labeling based on a similarity-based annotation process. A transliteration pipeline is also introduced to generate parallel datasets in Arabic script and Arabizi. We evaluate multiple approaches, including classical machine learning, deep learning, transformers, and hybrid models. Experimental results show that a hybrid approach combining transformer embeddings with a classical classifier achieves the best performance, reaching an F1-score of 0.84. We also find that domain-specific pre-training is more important than model size, with social media-trained models outperforming larger models trained on formal Arabic corpora. These results demonstrate the feasibility of rumour detection in low-resource Algerian dialect settings.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25278

Heterogeneous and Adept Snapshot Distillation for 3D Semantic Segmentation

Authors:

Xiaopei Wu↗Yuenan Hou↗Junkai Xu↗Wenxiao Wang↗Binbin Lin↗Yu Li↗Ping Li↗Haifeng Liu↗Deng Cai↗Wanli Ouyang↗

Multi-modal fusion and multi-model ensembling are prevalent in enhancing the performance of 3D semantic segmentation. Despite the impressive performance, these methods either rely on auxiliary input signals or suffer from costly computational expense. To efficaciously enhance the segmentation performance without introducing intolerable costs, we propose to transfer the rich knowledge from the multi-modal model (i.e., point clouds and images) and multiple model experts to the point-cloudbased network through knowledge distillation. Specifically, we present Information-oriented Heterogeneous Distillation (IHD) to help the uni-modal model absorb the complementary knowledge from the multi-modal teacher. We design the Information-Oriented Filtering (IOF) strategy to select informative images from the continuous image sequence for multi-modal fusion. This practice can boost the performance of the multi-modal teacher, thus benefiting the learning of the student. Besides, as opposed to vanilla model ensembling that requires the separate training of each expert, we propose Adept Snapshot Distillation (ASD). ASD treats the freely available model snapshots generated during the training phase as multiple experts, which significantly reduces the training cost for model ensembling. For each expert teacher, it only provides supervision to the student in the class where it is adept. The resulting Heterogeneous and Adept Snapshot Knowledge Distillation, dubbed HAS-KD, attains state-of-the-art results on ScanNetV2 and S3DIS datasets. HAS-KD can be seamlessly integrated into contemporary 3D segmentation algorithms and bring considerable gains without introducing extra inference burdens. The code will be made publicly available upon publication.

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10.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:58f2747a9adbd0e64461bec9c25fcfc9

Food Colorings in Child-Targeted Ultra-Processed Foods in Brazil: Market Prevalence and Parental Perceptions

Authors:

Silva Nunes↗Pereira Eberle↗M. F↗F. Grilo↗Zancheta↗C. Sylvetsky↗Duran↗A. C↗

Child-targeted marketing on packaged foods can shape children's food preferences and parents' purchasing decisions, yet many products with child-targeted marketing are ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and contain cosmetic additives such as food colorings, which have raised concerns about adverse effects on children's health and behavior. This mixed-methods study examined the prevalence of food colorings in child-directed UPFs and explored parents' perceptions and knowledge of these additives in beverages commonly consumed by children. Quantitative data were obtained from the Mintel Global New Products Database to identify child-directed products launched in Brazil between 2018 and 2021, measured as having at least one child-targeted marketing strategy in the food package, and whether they contained food colorings. Qualitative data came from seven focus groups with parents of children aged 2-5 and 6-11 years in Brazil, alongside a brief survey assessing participants' ability to identify food colorings on product labels. Among 5,078 UPFs launched during the study period, 23.0% contained child-targeted marketing, and 40.3% of these had food colorings. The highest prevalence was observed in carbonated beverages, candies, and ice creams, in which more than half of products contained food colorings. Parents generally understood that food colorings are used to make products more attractive to children and associated them with potential health risks, but reported difficulties avoiding them. These findings highlight the widespread presence of food colorings in child-targeted UPFs in Brazil and underscore the need for stronger regulatory measures to restrict the use of food colorings and improve labelling on food packages.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2501.02211

Homogeneity Bias in Open-Weight LLMs Is Robust to Decoding Hyperparameters

Authors:

Messi H. J. Lee↗

Large language models (LLMs) reproduce homogeneity bias – the tendency to portray marginalized groups as more internally similar than dominant groups – but whether this bias is stable or an artifact of inference settings has only been studied in single proprietary models. We map homogeneity bias across a 5x5 temperature-by-top-p grid in seven open-weight instruction-tuned LLMs (7-20B parameters). Hispanic and Asian Americans are portrayed as more homogeneous than White Americans in at least 18 of 20 hyperparameter configurations across six of seven models, including at extreme sampling settings. African American and gender bias show model-specific variation in direction. A conservative cell-level re-analysis confirms Hispanic and Asian homogeneity as robust, while weaker African American and gender signals largely do not survive, establishing group-specific robustness. We also apply the same grid to a names-based paradigm in which group identity is signaled via racially distinctive surnames rather than explicit labels. The names paradigm corroborates Hispanic and Asian homogeneity bias, but Black-coded surnames elicit robustly less homogeneous outputs than White-coded names in every model tested – a reversal absent from the label paradigm – showing that how group identity is operationalized shapes which biases surface and in which direction.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23705

Event-Aligned Analysis of Multi-Rater Pain Assessments Using Continuous Wearable Physiology

Authors:

Saba A. Farahani↗Elahe Khatibi↗Thomas D. Hughes↗Ariana M. Nelson↗Hung Cao↗Amir M. Rahmani↗

arXiv:2606.23705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pain is assessed differently by patients, nurses, and clinicians, yet most computational approaches assume a single ground-truth label - effectively ignoring who is doing the rating. We introduce a rater-aware, event-aligned framework that converts sparse, rater-specific pain ratings into discrete pain-change events and aligns continuous wearable physiological signals to these events, preserving rater identity throughout. Applied to multimodal wearable data collected during spine-related pain procedures, the framework identifies substantial disagreement across rater groups and provides preliminary, exploratory evidence of rater-dependent physiological differences preceding reported pain increases. These findings suggest that pain-physiology relationships may not be rater-invariant, and that aggregating assessments across raters may mask meaningful physiological patterns. A rater-aware, event-aligned perspective is therefore a promising direction for interpreting wearable data in real-world clinical pain assessment.

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13.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14542

Boltzmann-Like Occupation of Nonequilibrium Steady States on Dense Networks

Authors:

Jacob Calvert↗

arXiv:2606.14542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central problem in statistical physics is to extend the Boltzmann distribution to nonequilibrium steady states (NESS). We prove that NESS on large dense networks have Boltzmann-like occupation despite extensive entropy production. We further show that the active-matter heuristic of "low rattling" is asymptotically exact. Intuitively, these NESS spend a greater fraction of their time in states they leave more slowly. This explanation extends to the broader class of "equiaccessible" steady states, which play a role in our analysis akin to that of equilibrium in linear response.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23744

Performance and Interpretability of Convolutional, Transformer, and Hybrid Deep Learning Models in Colorectal Histology Classification

Authors:

Reza Bozorgpour↗

Deep learning has become an important tool in computational pathology, enabling automated analysis of histopathological images. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have traditionally dominated this field, transformer-based and hybrid architectures have recently demonstrated promising performance. However, comprehensive comparisons of these approaches for colorectal histopathology remain limited. This study evaluated twelve ImageNet-pretrained CNN, transformer, and hybrid architectures using the Kather colorectal histopathology dataset containing 5,000 image tiles from eight tissue classes. All models were trained using a standardized transfer-learning and fine-tuning protocol and assessed using multiple performance metrics, including accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, ROC-AUC, Cohen's kappa, and Matthews correlation coefficient. All evaluated models achieved high classification performance, with accuracies ranging from 93.2% to 97.1%. EVA-02 achieved the highest overall performance (97.1% accuracy, 97.0% F1-score), closely followed by ViT-B/16. Among CNNs, ResNet34 and ConvNeXt-Tiny demonstrated highly competitive performance, achieving accuracies of 96.4% and 96.3%, respectively. Transformer architectures generally produced the strongest results across evaluation metrics, although the performance gap between the best transformer and CNN models was relatively small. Per-class analysis showed consistently strong classification performance across all tissue categories, with Complex Stroma representing the most challenging class. Overall, transformer-based architectures achieved the highest predictive performance, whereas modern CNNs provided a favorable balance between accuracy and model complexity. These findings provide a comprehensive benchmark of major deep learning paradigms for colorectal histopathology classification.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18765

SpectralDiT: Timestep-Conditioned Spectral Residual Correction for Flow-Matching DiTs

Authors:

Jiayu Tian↗

We propose SpectralDiT, a lightweight modification to flow-matching Diffusion Transformers that adds timestep-conditioned spectral correction to the MLP residual branch. The module decomposes each residual update into low- and high-frequency components on the patch-token grid, then learns a zero-initialized additive gate so the model initially matches the baseline DiT. On CIFAR-10 pixel-space generation, SpectralDiT improves FID from 20.78 to 19.71 at patch size 1 and reduces the radial Fourier spectrum gap. Furthermore, we scale our method to latent diffusion on ImageNet-100. With 0.6% additional theoretical FLOPs and 1.36% additional parameters, SpectralDiT improves latent flow-matching, achieving an 8.7% relative FID reduction under classifier-free guidance (CFG 2.0). All reported results are averaged over five seeds. Ablations and gate visualizations on CIFAR-10 reveal stable block-specific spectral correction patterns.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2605.22748

Superhuman Safe and Agile Racing through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Ismail Geles↗Leonard Bauersfeld↗Markus Wulfmeier↗Davide Scaramuzza↗

arXiv:2605.22748v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous systems have achieved superhuman performance in isolation or simulation, yet they remain brittle in shared, dynamic real-world spaces. This failure stems from the dominant single-agent paradigm for physical applications, where other actors are ignored or treated as environmental noise, preventing effective coordination. Here we show that multi-agent reinforcement learning provides the essential safety scaffolding required for real-world interaction. Using high-speed quadrotor racing as a high-stakes testbed, we train agents to navigate complex aerodynamic interactions and strategic maneuvering with a variable number of racers. Through league-based self-play, agents evolve sophisticated anticipatory behaviors, including proactive collision avoidance, overtaking, and handling multi-agent physical interactions, including aerodynamic downwash. Our agents outperform a champion-level human pilot in multi-player races at speeds exceeding 22 m/s, while simultaneously reducing collision rates by 50 % compared to state-of-the-art single-agent baselines. Crucially, training with diverse artificial agents enables zero-shot generalization to safer human interaction. These results suggest that the path to robust robotic co-existence lies not in isolated safety constraints, but in the rigorous demands of multi-agent interaction. Multimedia materials are available at: https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/marl

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19494

Hidden Anchors in Multi-Agent LLM Deliberation

Authors:

Apurba Pokharel↗Ram Dantu↗

arXiv:2606.19494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM deliberation, where agents exchange and revise answers over several rounds, is increasingly used to improve reasoning and accuracy, yet how and why it works is rarely modelled. Such deliberation mirrors how humans reach decisions. As social animals we are pulled both by the group, the herd effect that classical opinion-dynamics models such as DeGroot and Friedkin–Johnsen capture, and by our own internal belief, which they do not. We model multi-agent deliberation as a closed-loop dynamical system in which each agent carries a hidden internal belief, its anchor, that continually pulls its opinion regardless of its neighbours. We show this anchor can be recovered from the deliberation alone, and that it explains a behaviour classical consensus rules forbid: an agent's confidence in the correct answer can climb past where any agent started, escaping the space (convexhull) formed by the initial beliefs. Checking whether the recovered anchor also predicts held-out runs (generalizes) gives a simple test for when a model is truly driven bysuch an anchor. Across three open-weight model families this is a spectrum, not all-or-nothing. All anchors' influence are about equally strongly, but they differ in where the anchor sits, and only when it sits far from the initial opinions does deliberation escape the hull and need the full closed-loop model.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18610

SC3-Eval: Evaluating Robot Foundation Models via Self-Consistent Video Generation

Authors:

Wei-Cheng Tseng↗Gashon Hussein↗Yuzhu Dong↗Allen Z. Ren↗Lucy X. Shi↗XuDong Wang↗Sergey Levine↗Zhaoshuo Li↗Jinwei Gu↗Florian Shkurti↗Ming-Yu Liu↗Quan Vuong↗…

Evaluating generalist robot manipulation policies in the real world is expensive, slow, and difficult to scale. Action-conditioned video world models offer a scalable alternative by simulating policy rollouts. Autoregressive rollouts accumulate compounding errors, observations across multiple camera views must remain mutually consistent, and the evaluator must generalize to policies whose behaviors lie outside the training distribution. We address these challenges with SC3-Eval, a self-consistent video generation recipe that adapts a pre-trained video foundation model into an accurate policy evaluator by enforcing three complementary forms of consistency. First, forward-inverse dynamics consistency jointly trains the model to predict frames from actions and to recover actions from frames, anchoring generated rollouts to a physically plausible action manifold and counteracting the drift a forward-only model cannot penalize. Second, cross-view consistency trains the model to inpaint each camera view from the other, keeping the multi-camera observation coherent over long rollouts without any explicit memory mechanism. Third, test-time consistency reuses the inverse dynamics mode at inference as a per-action-chunk uncertainty signal that terminates rollouts whose generated frames drift away from the requested actions. We also demonstrate SC3-Eval rollouts reproduce the failure modes that policies exhibit in real-world rollouts, supporting fine-grained diagnostic comparison rather than aggregate ranking alone. Across seven real-world vision-language-action policies, SC3-Eval attains a closed-loop Pearson correlation of $0.929$ and MMRV of $0.119$, outperforming three strong prior video-model-based baselines, and generalizes to new tasks.

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2605.11558

A Composite Activation Function for Learning Stable Binary Representations

Authors:

Seokhun Park↗Choeun Kim↗Kwanho Lee↗Sehyun Park↗Insung Kong↗Yongdai Kim↗

arXiv:2605.11558v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation functions play a central role in neural networks by shaping internal representations. Recently, learning binary activation representations has attracted significant attention due to their advantages in computational and memory efficiency, as well as interpretability. However, training neural networks with Heaviside activations remains challenging, as their non-differentiability obstructs standard gradient-based optimization. In this paper, we propose Heavy Tailed Activation Function (HTAF), a smooth approximation to the Heaviside function that enables stable training with gradient-based optimization. We construct HTAF as a sigmoid hyperbolic tangent composite function and theoretically show that it maintains a large gradient mass around zero inputs while exhibiting slower gradient decay in the tail regions. We show that Spiking Neural Networks, Binary Neural Networks and Deep Heaviside neural Networks can be trained stably using HTAF with gradient-based optimization. Finally, we introduce Implicit Concept Bottleneck Models (ICBMs), an interpretable image model that leverages HTAF to induce discrete feature representations. Extensive experiments across various architectures and image datasets demonstrate that ICBM enables stable discretization while achieving prediction performance comparable to or better than standard models.

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20.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:92dad982b75d8c867dfd3de7268f145e

The Unsteady Return of Command-Following: Recovery and Instability of Bedside Motor Command-Following After Acute Brain Injury

Authors:

Gorenshtein↗Adiniaev↗Omar↗Barash↗Klang↗Daniel↗

Background/Objective: Following a verbal command marks the bedside transition from unresponsiveness to overt recovery of consciousness after acute brain injury. Its timing across phenotypes, stability once present, and dependence on sedation are uncharacterized at scale. Methods: Retrospective cohort of adults with acute brain injury, first intensive care unit stay, MIMIC-IV. Command-following was the Glasgow Coma Scale motor response "Obeys Commands." Among patients not following commands at admission, cumulative incidence was estimated with death or hospice and discharge without recovery as competing events. Instability was quantified as transient first recovery and threshold crossings; examinations were tagged for concurrent sedation. Principal findings were externally validated in the multicenter eICU Collaborative Research Database. Results: Of 13,900 brain-injured patients with three or more motor examinations, 5,498 (39.6%) were not following commands at admission. The cumulative incidence of first command-following was 43.5% by 24 hours and 65.0% by 14 days, ranging at 14 days from 36.9% in anoxic injury to 77.2% in ischemic stroke (anoxic versus ischemic stroke at 72 hours, difference 0.41; adjusted P = .002). Among 3,573 patients who recovered, the first recovery was transient in 22.2%, and 62.4% crossed the threshold repeatedly. Non-following was strongly associated with sedation, consistent with an arousal-dependent examination. In eICU, the 14-day incidence was 64.8%, and transient first recovery was 22.7%, closely matching the primary cohort. Conclusions: After acute brain injury, overt bedside command-following returns early but unsteadily, with phenotype-dependent timing, threshold fluctuation, and strong dependence on sedation. A single charted observation is an unreliable index of the underlying state.

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21.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:1cf973aafa93507cab684f5c9cc58815

Antibodies against influenza A/H1N1pdm2009 and B/Victoria strains but not A/H3N2 are increased in recent onset type 1 narcolepsy versus matched controls

Authors:

Yan↗Lin↗Guillard↗Zhang↗Macaubas↗Pizza↗Biscarini↗Plazzi↗Mallajosyula↗Davis↗Maecker↗Mignot↗…

Study Objectives: Onsets of Narcolepsy type-1 (NT1) increased following A/H1N1 vaccination with PandemrixTM in Europe and with A/H1N1pdm2009 infections in China and other countries. To test if other strains could trigger narcolepsy, we measured strain-specific antibodies in patients with recent onset NT1 compared to controls. Methods: Antibodies against hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) were tested in 62 patients with very recent onset (onset and blood collection following a single flu season, mean +/- SEM: 0.44 +/- 0.06 years since onset) and 100 controls matched by age, sex, season and year of collection (2000-2025). Results were next extended to 181 recent onset patients (mean +/- SEM: 1.00 +/- 0.05 years) versus 260 controls, matched by sex, season and year, but having a slightly higher mean age. HA inhibition (HAI) and NA inhibition (NAI) assays were conducted using flu strains known to circulate during the corresponding flu seasons. HAI results are shown as % positive (titers >= 40) and NAI results as geometric mean titers. Odds ratio (OR) and coefficient were used to compare antibody titers in NT1 versus controls. The contribution of each assay to prediction was finally quantified in the larger sample set using Shapley decomposition. Results: NT1 patients had increased anti-HA and anti-NA antibodies against A/H1N1pdm2009 (anti-HA OR = 3.86, anti-NA coefficient = 0.35) and B/Victoria (anti-HA OR =1.90, anti-NA coefficient = 0.22), but not A/H1N1pre2009, A/H3N2, or B/Yamagata, independent of HLA-DQB1*06:02 status, age, sex, and flu season. Correlations between anti-HA and anti-NA antibodies titers were weak to moderate but significant (r2=-0.10 to 0.34). Multivariable model outperformed age-only baseline (McFadden R2 = 0.19 vs. 0.03; AUC = 0.79 vs. 0.64; likelihood-ratio test X2 = 51, p

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2512.14937

Improving Pre-trained Adult Glioma Segmentation Models Using only Post-processing Techniques

Authors:

Abhijeet Parida↗Daniel Capell\'an-Mart\'in↗Zhifan Jiang↗Nishad Kulkarni↗Krithika Iyer↗Austin Tapp↗Syed Muhammad Anwar↗Mar\'ia J. Ledesma-Carbayo↗Marius George Linguraru↗

Gliomas are the most common malignant brain tumors in adults and are among the most lethal. Despite aggressive treatment, the median survival rate is less than 15 months. Accurate multiparametric MRI (mpMRI) tumor segmentation is critical for surgical planning, radiotherapy, and disease monitoring. While deep learning models have improved the accuracy of automated segmentation, large-scale pre-trained models generalize poorly and often underperform, producing systematic errors such as false positives, label swaps, and slice discontinuities in slices. These limitations are further compounded by unequal access to GPU resources and the growing environmental cost of large-scale model training. In this work, we propose adaptive post-processing techniques to refine the quality of glioma segmentations produced by large-scale pretrained models developed for various types of tumors. We demonstrated the techniques in multiple BraTS 2025 segmentation challenge tasks, with the ranking metric improving by 14.9 % for the sub-Saharan Africa challenge and 0.9% for the adult glioma challenge. This approach promotes a shift in brain tumor segmentation research from increasingly complex model architectures to efficient, clinically aligned post-processing strategies that are precise, computationally fair, and sustainable.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12917

Where Computation Lives Inside TabPFN: Causal Localisation of Attention Head Function

Authors:

Atharva Gupta↗Dhruv Kumar↗Murari Mandal↗Saurabh Deshpande↗

arXiv:2606.12917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the first causal mechanistic analysis of a tabular foundation model, investigating how TabPFN 2.5's feature wise attention heads distribute computation across layers. Using activation patching, ablation, and attention entropy across two synthetic regression datasets, we find clear temporal specialisation: one head's causal necessity dominates that of the others by 2 to 5 times at peak layer, with its dominant layer shifting across tasks of different complexity, while the remaining heads exhibit symmetric late layer profiles. Attention entropy and patching provide convergent evidence for the computationally active layers of the dominant head. We additionally investigate inference time steerability via contrastive activation steering, which fails to transfer across samples. We attribute this result to TabPFN's in context learning mechanism, which encodes task structure through context dependent attention rather than the stable parametric directions that make steering tractable in language models.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16244

SPARK: Security Knowledge Priming and Representation-Guided Knowledge Activation for LLM-based Secure Code Generation

Authors:

Xiaoyun Xu↗Lichao Wu↗Jona te Lintelo↗Siyu Zhang↗Stjepan Picek↗

arXiv:2606.16244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models routinely generate code with exploitable security flaws. Prior literature attributes this limitation to a lack of security expertise, steering current defense mechanisms toward heavy fine-tuning or external knowledge retrieval, which introduces significant computational overhead and data bias through redundant code examples. Contrary to this view, we argue that pretraining corpora are already rich in security material. The bottleneck is activation: without an explicit and brief cue, statistical pressure toward common training-distribution patterns suppresses the model's safety-relevant representations. We present SPARK, an inference-time security harness that activates this latent knowledge without any retraining. The harness has two parts. Component~I retrieves a few of the relevant Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) entries for each coding task and appends a short structured cue to the prompt; this alone is enough to surface the model's existing security representations. Component~II adds a precomputed token bias to the logits at every decoding step. We obtain the bias by projecting a safe-direction vector, the unit difference between the mean safe and mean unsafe last-layer hidden states, through the language model head. The bias is computed once offline; applying it costs a single vector addition per generated token. We evaluate SPARK on 9 open-source models across C++, Java, and Python, and compare with 7 baselines spanning fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented methods. SPARK matches or improves on the best baseline in every setting while preserving HumanEval utility. We further test Component~I in a black-box setting on 7 of today's strongest models, including Claude, DeepSeek, and GPT, demonstrating the bottleneck of insecure code generation and the improvements enabled by our method.

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25.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23698

FP8 is All You Need (Part 2): Efficient Ozaki-Bailey Style FFT Through Tensor-core Garner Reformulation and Kulisch Escape Route

Authors:

Satoshi Matsuoka↗

arXiv:2606.23698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra (B300) cuts FP64 vector throughput to ~1.3 TFLOPS per GPU, roughly 30x below B200 and well below the level at which bandwidth-limited FP64 workloads stay memory-bound. The Ozaki Scheme II framework recovers FP64-equivalent throughput by routing dense matrix multiply through FP8 tensor cores with a mantissa-sliced Chinese-remainder reconstruction. A companion Part (1) paper covers dense GEMM, batched GEMV, stencils, and SpMV; this paper adds the fifth canonical primitive, the 3-D FFT. We present Ozaki-Bailey FFT, an emulated 3-D FFT via the Bailey six-step decomposition with both 1-D FFT GEMMs on FP8 tensor cores. Bailey's small inner factor k ~ sqrt(N) (k=32 for N=1024) puts the kernel in the regime k

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