Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11361

A PubMed-Scale Dataset of Structured Biomedical Abstracts

Authors:

Chia-Hsuan Chang↗Haerin Song↗Brian Ondov↗Hua Xu↗

Structured abstracts are important for biomedical literature processing, by facilitating information retrieval, text mining, and knowledge synthesis. However, a vast portion of abstracts indexed in PubMed remain unstructured, presenting a significant bottleneck for downstream text-processing workflows and applications. To resolve this limitation, we introduce Structured PubMed, a comprehensive corpus of section-labeled biomedical abstracts compiled from the complete PubMed database, encompassing over 23.2 million research-article records. The corpus is divided into two distinct subsets: a collection of 5.9 million author-structured abstracts parsed from official XML files, and an automatically labeled collection of 17.2 million originally unstructured abstracts structured via a verbatim-extraction Large Language Model pipeline. Every record is harmonized under a unified five-section schema and mapped to its original PubMed identifier, publication type, and publication date. This dataset can be utilized to train sentence-classification models, benchmark text-segmentation architectures, and perform large-scale, section-specific information extraction at an unprecedented PubMed-wide scale.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20477

Scalable Training of Spatially Grounded 2D Vision-Language Models for Radiology

Authors:

Yusuf Salcan↗Simon Ging↗Robin Schirrmeister↗Philipp Arnold↗Elmar Kotter↗Behzad Bozorgtabar↗Thomas Brox↗

We study how to train visually grounded vision-language models (VLMs) for radiology without manual spatial annotations. We introduce RefRad2D, a large-scale bilingual (German/English) dataset of 1.2M CT and MR image-text pairs derived from clinical practice, with task-specific VQA and spatial grounding subsets generated automatically via LLM-based curation and automated segmentation. Trained on this data, our model RadGrounder jointly performs report generation, visual question answering, and spatial grounding via bounding-box detection or segmentation. On external VQA benchmarks (Slake, VQA-RAD), RadGrounder achieves competitive results with specialized medical VLMs. Adding our clinical data to the training mixture improves open-ended VQA over fine-tuning on the downstream datasets alone, showing the transferability of our dataset. Crucially, adding grounding supervision does not degrade language quality, enabling spatially verifiable outputs at no cost to VQA performance.

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13637

The Stable Recovery Manifold: Geometric Principles Governing Recoverability in Continual Learning

Authors:

Ayushman Trivedi↗Bhavika Melwani↗

arXiv:2606.13637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting is often viewed as the destruction of previously learned knowledge during sequential learning. Building on the Accessibility Collapse framework, we investigate the geometric structure of recoverability in continual learning. Using Split CIFAR-100 and a sequentially trained ResNet-18, we analyze recoverability, representational drift, and recovery complexity across ten tasks. We introduce Recovery Subspace Dimensionality (k_t), a measure of the minimum number of singular directions required to preserve 90 percent of full probe performance. Contrary to our Recoverability Diffusion hypothesis, recovery dimensionality remains stable throughout training (mean k_t = 8.0) despite substantial representational drift. Principal-angle drift strongly predicts recoverability (r = -0.862), and a simple geometric model explains 82.2 percent of recoverability variance. These findings support the Stable Recovery Manifold hypothesis, suggesting that forgotten knowledge remains compactly decodable despite representational reorganization. The results indicate that catastrophic forgetting is primarily an accessibility and manifold-alignment problem rather than information destruction.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2511.19314

PRInTS: Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Information Seeking

Authors:

Jaewoo Lee↗Archiki Prasad↗Justin Chih-Yao Chen↗Zaid Khan↗Elias Stengel-Eskin↗Mohit Bansal↗

Information-seeking is a core capability for AI agents, requiring them to gather and reason over tool-generated information across long trajectories. However, such multi-step information-seeking tasks remain challenging for agents backed by language models. While process reward models (PRMs) can guide agents by ranking candidate steps at test-time, existing PRMs - designed for short reasoning with binary judgment - cannot capture richer dimensions of information-seeking steps, such as tool interactions and reasoning over tool outputs, nor handle the rapidly growing context in long-horizon tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce PRInTS, a generative PRM trained with dual capabilities: (1) dense scoring based on the PRM's reasoning across multiple dimensions of step quality (e.g., interpretation of tool outputs, tool call informativeness) and (2) trajectory summarization that compresses the growing context while preserving essential information for step evaluation. Extensive evaluations across FRAMES, GAIA (levels 1-3), and WebWalkerQA (easy-hard) benchmarks on multiple models reveal that best-of-n sampling with PRInTS enhances information-seeking in open-source models as well as specialized agents, matching or surpassing frontier models with a much smaller backbone agent and outperforming other strong reward modeling baselines.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24313

Prob-BBDM: a Probabilistic Brownian Bridge Diffusion Model for MRI sequence image-to-image translation

Authors:

Martin Valls↗Pascal Bourdon↗Christine Fernandez-Maloigne↗Guillaume Herpe↗David Helbert↗

arXiv:2606.24313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-driven image-to-image synthesis is rapidly advancing, with growing applications in medical imaging. Multi-modal image analysis plays a crucial role in optimizing examination quality, yet acquiring multiple imaging modalities in clinical settings remains resource-intensive and time-consuming, especially for 3D imaging. To address this challenge, we propose a novel image-to-image translation model based on Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models (BBDM), which synthesizes magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences from 2D axial slices. Our approach integrates a variational encoder-guided diffusion mechanism, leveraging probabilistic image distributions to enhance synthesis quality. Evaluated on the BraTS 2021 dataset, our Probabilistic-BBDM (Prob-BBDM) achieves superior performance across multiple translation tasks, reaching up to 88.46% SSIM and 26.09 dB PSNR, with consistent improvements over baselines. Notably, our diffusion process requires only 4 steps, making it computationally efficient while maintaining high-quality synthesis. To further validate generalizability, we test Prob-BBDM on an external third-party dataset, demonstrating consistent performance across domains. Additionally, we assess the clinical utility of the synthesized slices by using them as input to a pre-trained segmentation model. Tumor segmentation yields a Dice score of 88.71% and an HD95 of 3.49 mm, confirming that the synthesized slices preserve critical diagnostic information. These results highlight the potential of Prob-BBDM for high-quality, efficient, and generalizable MRI synthesis, offering a promising step toward improved medical image translation.

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06.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2510.00970

Cumulant expansion approach to the decay dynamics of interacting Mössbauer nuclei after strong impulsive excitation

Authors:

Miriam Gerharz↗J\"org Evers↗

arXiv:2510.00970v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent progress in accelerator-based x-ray sources brings higher excitation of ensembles of Mössbauer nuclei closer to experimental feasibility. Yet, a theoretical modeling of the decay dynamics of the interacting nuclear ensemble after the impulsive excitation is still an open challenge. Here, we derive a set of nonlinear equations which is capable of efficiently modeling large nuclear ensembles for arbitrary degrees of excitation. As key signature for higher excitation, we identify a non-linear time-evolution of the nuclear dipole phase, which can be tuned via the scattering geometry, and interferometrically be measured. Furthermore, we identify interesting finite-size effects in the nuclear dynamics of small ensembles. Our results provide important guidance for future experiments aiming at the non-linear excitation of nuclei. We further envision the exploration of finite size-effects in Mössbauer spectroscopy with highest spatial resolution, i.e., small sample volumes.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24712

TACTFUL: Tactile-Driven Exploration For Object Localization and Identification in Confined Environments

Authors:

Shivani Kamtikar↗Chung Hee Kim↗Camilla Tabasso↗Tye Brady↗Joshua Migdal↗Taskin Padir↗

arXiv:2606.24712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans effortlessly locate and identify objects by touch alone, even without vision. In contrast, robotic systems rely heavily on vision and struggle with autonomous tactile exploration and object identification. We present TACTFUL, a vision-free tactile exploration framework that enables a multi-fingered robot to autonomously explore confined workspaces, discover objects through contact, and identify them via tactile reconstruction. Trained entirely on real hardware without simulation, our system learns a single policy that balances global workspace exploration with local surface refinement through a dynamic reward schedule. Our results demonstrate that tactile sensing, when paired with structured learning, can serve as an effective primary modality for object-level reasoning, achieving 77% success with 0.015 m average reconstruction error and outperforming baseline approaches on real-world objects.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.16835

NeST: Neuron Selective Tuning for LLM Safety

Authors:

Sasha Behrouzi↗Lichao Wu↗Mohamadreza Rostami↗Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi↗

arXiv:2602.16835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing approaches often rely on heavyweight fine-tuning that is costly to update, audit, and maintain across model families. Full fine-tuning incurs substantial computational and storage overhead, while parameter-efficient methods, e.g., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), trade efficiency for inconsistent safety gains and sensitivity to design choices. Safety intervention mechanisms reduce unsafe outputs without modifying model weights, but do not directly shape or preserve the internal representations that govern safety behavior. We present NeST, a Neuron-Selective Tuning framework for efficient post-hoc safety alignment. NeST identifies safety-relevant feed-forward neurons via activation probing on vanilla harmful and benign prompts, clusters neurons with similar activation profiles, and trains shared cluster-level updates while freezing the rest of the model. Importantly, NeST is trained only on vanilla malicious prompts, without using jailbreak-specific attack data, yet generalizes robustly to diverse jailbreaks. The learned updates are then folded into the original weights, incurring no inference-time overhead. Evaluated on 14 open-weight language and multimodal models, NeST outperforms lightweight baselines and approaches full fine-tuning robustness with significantly fewer trainable parameters. On text-only models, NeST reduces average jailbreak attack success rate from 44.5% to 1.1% while training only 0.4M parameters on average. Across multimodal settings, it reduces ASR from 55.3% to 1.1%, and for downstream fine-tuned variants, it restores safety by reducing ASR from 53.8% to 0.8%. These results show that robust, maintainable safety alignment can be achieved by concentrating adaptation on localized, functionally coherent safety structures.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2601.22777

RASST: Retrieval-Augmented Simultaneous Speech Translation

Authors:

Jiaxuan Luo↗Siqi Ouyang↗Jiaxing Xu↗Lei Li↗

Simultaneous speech translation produces target text incrementally from partial speech input. Recent speech large language models have markedly improved SST quality but still struggle with rare and domain-specific terminology. Retrieval augmentation has helped in automatic speech recognition and neural machine translation, but extending it to SST is non-trivial: retrieval must be fast and accurate under partial speech, and the model must decide whether and when to apply retrieved terms during incremental generation. We propose Retrieval-Augmented Simultaneous Speech Translation (RASST), which addresses both challenges. For accurate cross-modal retrieval under partial input, RASST trains a lightweight speech-text retriever that produces chunkwise terminology hints for the Speech LLM via multi-scale retrieval. To use these hints correctly, we synthesize training data that teaches the Speech LLM to decide whether and when to apply each retrieved term. Experiments on ACL 60/60 dev set and the ESO test set show that RASST improves terminology accuracy by nearly 40% and overall translation quality by up to 3 BLEU points, with negligible computational overhead.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18444

TMR-GGNN: Credit Card Fraud Detection based on Time-Aware Multi-Relational Guided Graph Neural Network

Authors:

Rohit Tewari↗Shubhankar Shilpi↗Navin Chhibber↗Devendra Singh Parmar↗Sunil Khemka↗Piyush Ranjan↗

arXiv:2606.18444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, credit card fraud detection has faced significant challenges due to highly imbalanced data, evolving fraud patterns, and complex relational structures among transaction entities. To address these issues, this research proposes a novel framework called Timeaware Multi Relational Guided Graph Neural Network (TMR GGNN). Particularly, the proposed TMR GGNN extends the encoder decoder Graph Neural Network GNN architecture by modeling heterogeneous interactions across customers, merchants, devices, and IPs over temporal windows. Subsequently, the proposed TMR GGNN approach constructs a dynamic, multi relational graph and incorporates a time aware relational attention mechanism within the encoder to adaptively weigh the transaction relevance based on temporal proximity and semantic context. Consequently, the decoder employs a contrastive learning module to distinguish between real and synthesized transaction patterns, while improving the models generalization of rare fraud cases. Additionally, to effectively manage severe class imbalances and emphasize discriminative learning, a composite loss function combining Information Noise Contrastive Estimation (InfoNCE) based contrastive loss with Focal Loss is introduced. This integration assists in improving fraud identification while mitigating false negatives.

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20431

Sparsity, Superposition, and Forgetting: A Mechanistic Study of Representation Retention in Continual Learning

Authors:

Jan Wasilewski↗J\k{e}drzej Kozal↗Micha{\l} Wo\'zniak↗Bartosz Krawczyk↗

arXiv:2606.20431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning (CL) systems often forget previously acquired knowledge, yet the mechanisms driving forgetting remain hard to isolate in practice because real datasets entangle many factors. We present a controlled, toy-world framework that makes these mechanisms observable and testable. Using a synthetic generator-separator pipeline, we define ground-truth latent features, build tasks with tunable sparsity and overlap, and introduce measurable quantities for representation strength and superposition (directional overlap among features). We then study retention dynamics-the temporal change of representation strength by fitting sparse dynamical relations (via SINDy) between retention, superposition, and exposure history. A complementary task-level analysis based on effective rank characterizes how representational capacity is allocated across tasks. Our controlled experiments yield three takeaways. (1) Superposition tends to increase over time with transient dips at task boundaries, suggesting boundary-specific interference rather than steady drift. (2) Higher feature sparsity induces more superposition yet does not inevitably cause forgetting; when representations remain strong, forgetting can be reduced despite overlap. (3) Task-level effective rank grows with sparsity, indicating broader capacity usage under sparse regimes. Together, these results nuance the common intuition that more superposition leads to more forgetting by showing that overlap interacts with representation strength and capacity allocation. Our toy analysis provides falsifiable hypotheses and diagnostic tools for CL.

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12.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18140

Singular Vector Finite Element Basis Functions for Tetrahedra in Complex Electromagnetic Geometries

Authors:

Samuel T. Elkin↗Ghazi Khan↗Ebrahim Forati↗Brandon W. Langley↗Dogan Timucin↗Reza Molavi↗Thomas E. Roth↗

arXiv:2606.18140v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electromagnetic finite element method (FEM) implementations using traditional basis functions struggle to accurately represent field behavior near singular features such as conducting wedges. To combat this, specialized singular basis functions have been introduced to directly model the singular fields in these regions, leading to substantially improved performance. While these efforts have been pursued extensively in 2D, few functions have been developed for 3D elements. In this work, we develop basis functions for this in tetrahedra. Unlike prior functions, these basis functions are additive, meaning they are included alongside the standard vector basis functions to achieve more robust performance. Further, these functions are designed to be adaptable to tetrahedra touching several unique singular features by using combinations of basis functions singular with respect to each node and edge in the element, making them applicable to highly complex geometries. Higher-order interpolatory versions of the basis functions for modeling singular behavior with greater accuracy are also provided. These basis functions lead to substantial improvements in accuracy relative to the standard basis functions, and allow otherwise expensive simulations to be performed at far lower costs. As an application example, we perform simulations to extract critical quantities for designing superconducting qubits that significantly depend on the behavior of singular fields. In Ansys HFSS, this took 21.27 hours and a peak memory usage of 6.23 TB with 800 processors available, while using our singular basis functions achieved comparable results in 196 seconds while using 27.24 GB of memory and only 16 processors. Due to these benefits, our singular basis functions could be applied to enable design optimization of electromagnetic geometries with dominantly singular behavior, such as superconducting qubits.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12797

The Containment Gap: How Deployed Agentic AI Frameworks Fail Public-Facing Safety Requirements

Authors:

Md Jafrin Hossain↗Mohammad Arif Hossain↗Weiqi Liu↗Nirwan Ansari↗

arXiv:2606.12797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic large language model systems that autonomously invoke tools, maintain persistent memory, and execute multi-step plans are increasingly deployed in public-facing domains, including government services, healthcare triage, and financial advising. We ask whether the frameworks used to build these systems provide architectural-level structural safety guarantees. Applying six containment principles derived from a compositional model of agentic architectures, we audit three dominant frameworks (LangChain, AutoGPT, and OpenAI Agents SDK) and find no native compliance in any of them. Memory integrity, a defense against one of the most prevalent vulnerability classes, is not observed in any of the three evaluated frameworks. We validate these findings empirically: in a simulated government benefits agent built on LangChain, a single memory-poisoning write induces persistent targeted corruption across all tested seeds and backends, increasing the wrongful denial rate for targeted applicants to 88.9%. Under a complex five-factor policy, the same attack preserves aggregate accuracy while increasing targeted wrongful denials by 3.5x, rendering the corruption difficult to detect through standard monitoring. We then introduce two lightweight containment mechanisms: a memory integrity validator and a policy gate, which eliminate both attack vectors with sub-millisecond overhead (

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14.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24 DOI: HASH:3e26031ca46986a1e35061f59215bb4b

Breaking The Pain-Stiffness Cycle- Supraclavicular Catheter Facilitated Rehabilitation Of Post-Surgical Elbow stiffness- A Retrospective Observational Study

Authors:

mukundan↗Arulanandham↗V. G↗

ABSTRACT Background: Post-traumatic elbow stiffness is a recognised complication following orthopaedic trauma surgery, occurring in 10-15% of trauma patients sustaining injuries. Pain remains the primary barrier to physiotherapy compliance, with surgical arthrolysis carrying recurrence rates of up to 34%. The supraclavicular brachial plexus block, referred to as the 'spinal of the arm', provides anaesthesia and analgesia to the entire upper limb below the shoulder. A structured non-surgical approach combining continuous catheter analgesia with timed rehabilitation was identified as an unmet need in this patient group. Methods: A single-centre retrospective observational study was conducted on data of patients treated for post-surgical upper limb stiffness between January 2022 and April 2026. Of 30 patients identified, 28 with elbow involvement formed the primary analysis group following exclusion of 2 patients with isolated wrist stiffness and complex regional pain syndrome. Ultrasound- guided supraclavicular brachial plexus catheters were inserted using the Contiplex system. Patients received 0.5% Bupivacaine (10-15ml) for initial blockade, followed by daily top-up doses of 0.2% Ropivacaine(20ml) given 30 minutes prior to structured physiotherapy and CPM sessions for up to 5 days. The primary outcome was change in arc of elbow motion in degrees, measured by the attending orthopaedic consultant using standard goniometry. Results: Complete pre- and post- intervention data were available for all 28 patients. Mean pre-intervention arc of elbow motion was 39.1{degrees}(SD+/-23.2{degrees}), improving to 104.2{degrees}(SD+/- 30.0{degrees}) post-intervention. Mean improvement was 65.1{degrees}(SD+/- 30.6{degrees} ); 95% CI 53.8{degrees} to 76.4{degrees} ; range 10{degrees}-140{degrees} ; paired t-test t=-11.27, p

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15.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19313

Stability of Khintchine-type inequalities via log-monotonicity

Authors:

\'Angel Ch\'avez↗Sam Sheng↗

arXiv:2606.19313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate Khintchine-type inequalities for the weighted sums $S=\sum_ka_kX_k$ of independent copies of a symmetric random variable $X$. We show how log-monotonicity of the sequence $r_k(X)=k! \mathbb{E}[X^{2k}]/(2k)!$ implies sharp comparisons between the $L_p$ and $L_2$ norms of $S$ for every even integer $p\geq 2$, extending classic Khintchine-type inequalities and yielding new results in the log-convex setting. We also investigate the stability of our inequalities. Our first stability inequality sharpens the classic inequality by a deviation of the coefficient vector from the coordinate extremizers, while the second quantifies deviation from the Gaussian limit. Our results recover recent stability inequalities for random signs and apply to a broad class of distributions, including type-$\mathscr{L}$ random variables, ultra sub-Gaussian random variables and Gaussian mixtures.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2601.15828

Can professional translators identify machine-generated text?

Authors:

Michael Farrell↗

This study investigates whether professional translators without prior specialized training can reliably identify short stories generated in Italian by artificial intelligence (AI). Sixty-nine translators took part in an in-person experiment, where they assessed three anonymized short stories - two written by ChatGPT-4o and one by a human author. For each story, participants rated the likelihood of AI authorship and provided justifications for their choices. While average results were inconclusive, a statistically significant subset (16.2%) successfully distinguished the synthetic texts from the human text, suggesting that their judgements were informed by analytical skill rather than chance. However, a nearly equal number misclassified the texts in the opposite direction, often relying on subjective impressions rather than objective markers, possibly reflecting a reader preference for AI-generated texts. Low burstiness and narrative contradiction emerged as the most reliable indicators of synthetic authorship, with unexpected calques, semantic loans and syntactic transfer from English also reported. In contrast, features such as grammatical accuracy and emotional tone frequently led to misclassification. These findings raise questions about the role and scope of synthetic-text editing in professional contexts.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19747

A Comparative Study of Pretrained Transformer Models for Quranic ASR: Speech Representations, Label Formats, and Dataset Composition

Authors:

Nabil Mosharraf Hossain↗Riasat Islam↗Unaizah Obaidellah↗

arXiv:2606.19747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quran Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert Quranic recitation into text, enabling applications such as aided memorisation tools and Quranic search engines. However, existing ASR models often exhibit high Word Error Rates (WER) on user-recited verses and lack full coverage of the Quranic corpus. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of domain-specific fine-tuning of pretrained Transformer-based models for Quranic ASR, using advanced speech feature extraction methods: Wav2Vec2.0, HuBERT, and XLS-R. These models apply self-supervised learning by masking portions of input audio and using Transformer architectures to learn context-aware speech features. The pretrained models are fine-tuned on a filtered Quranic dataset exceeding 870 hours of professional and user recitations. Through comprehensive ablation studies across feature extractors, output label formats, training strategies, and clip durations, we identify the key factors that affect transcription accuracy in this domain. Our best-performing configuration achieves a WER of 0.08 on the EveryAyah subset and 0.11 on the combined EveryAyah+Tarteel setting, representing roughly a five-percentage-point gain over the Citrinet baseline (WER = 0.163) while reducing combined-model training time from 140 hours to 40 hours. Arabic text without diacritics yields the best fine-tuning results, and Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 provides the strongest overall representation. Future work includes improving dataset quality and developing phoneme-aware models to extract deeper speech feature representations for Tajweed-sensitive applications.

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18.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:714fa8811b28f86b97ee80e37f04643e

Development and Initial Validation of the Quality of life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST) Assessment

Authors:

Merker↗V. L↗Carias↗S. C↗Ferner↗R. E↗Golding↗J. F↗Plotkin↗S. R↗Buono↗F. D↗…

Individuals with NF2-related schwannomatosis (NF2-SWN) experience a complex constellation of physical, emotional, and social symptoms that substantially impact quality of life (QoL). Although disease-specific patient-reported outcome measures are increasingly important for evaluating treatment benefit in clinical trials, existing NF2-SWN QoL measures have limitations in content coverage and sensitivity to change. This study describes the development and initial validation a new disease-specific QoL assessment – the Quality of Life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST). Using a three-phase, mixed-methods approach, items were generated through concept elicitation interviews with individuals with NF2-SWN and clinicians, prioritized via patient survey data, and refined through iterative cognitive debriefing procedures. The resulting 21-item QUEST assesses the extent to which NF2-SWN has negatively impacted a persons daily life over the past seven days. Initial psychometric evaluation was conducted in an international sample of 174 individuals with NF2-SWN aged 15 years and older (117 women (67%), 158 White individuals (89%)). Exploratory factor analysis supported a four-factor structure, and the total score demonstrated excellent internal consistency and strong test-retest reliability. Evidence of construct validity was demonstrated through hypothesized associations with disease-specific, generic, and domain-specific QoL measures, as well as known-groups validity based on self-reported disease severity and number of prior surgeries. Incremental validity analyses indicated that QUEST explained unique variance beyond existing measures. Together, findings support the QUEST as a reliable and valid disease-specific QoL measure with strong content validity and feasibility for use as a clinical trial endpoint in NF2-SWN.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17591

Closing the Feedback Loop: From Experience Extraction to Insight Governance in Verbal Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Yanwei Cui↗Xing Zhang↗Yulong Zhang↗Li Shao↗Xiaofeng Shi↗Guanghui Wang↗Peiyang He↗

arXiv:2606.17591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training-free verbal reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn from world feedback – objective signals such as dynamic task outcomes, market returns, or demand forecasts – by extracting verbal rules from experience and injecting them as context, updating the agent's behavior without parameter changes. However, in non-stationary environments these agents face a retention-forgetting dilemma: retaining stale insights causes negative transfer, while discarding them causes catastrophic forgetting when conditions recur. We identify four requirements for navigating this dilemma – outcome-driven evaluation, persistent structured evidence, non-monotonic knowledge lifecycle, and compositional governance – and show that existing methods invest heavily in experience extraction while underinvesting in insight governance. We propose a three-layer architecture – rules, evidence, and skills – connected by a feedback-driven curation loop that closes the governance gap. Rules capture distilled experience from world outcomes; evidence logs track each rule's reliability across episodes; skills govern which rules to apply, how to resolve conflicts, and when to abstain. On financial forecasting as a case study, where world feedback is naturally abundant, noisy, and non-stationary, we show that the same accumulated experience either degrades performance below the zero-shot baseline or dramatically improves accuracy and risk-adjusted returns, depending on whether the curation loop is present.

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13146

Robust State-Conditional Feature-Weighted Jump Models for Temporal Clustering

Authors:

Federico P. Cortese↗Alessio Farcomeni↗

arXiv:2606.13146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a robust feature-weighted jump model for time-dependent clustering. A penalty is used to encourage smoothness of transitions over time, while robustness is achieved through the use of a Tukey's biweight loss function. An additional parameter controls the variability of feature weights across states, allowing the model to assign state-specific relevance to each feature. We illustrate in simulation how the method accurately recovers the true cluster sequence and reliably identifies relevant features, outperforming competing approaches, particularly in the presence of outliers. We conclude with two empirical applications, one on the number of conflict-related homicides in Kosovo in the period 1998-2000, and another on macroeconomic performance of twelve European countries in the period 1949-2024.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2509.18428

Latent Action Pretraining Through World Modeling

Authors:

Bahey Tharwat↗Yara Nasser↗Ali Abouzeid↗Ian Reid↗

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have gained popularity for learning robotic manipulation tasks that follow language instructions. State-of-the-art VLAs, such as OpenVLA and $\pi_{0}$, were trained on large-scale, manually labeled action datasets collected through teleoperation. More recent approaches, including LAPA and villa-X, introduce latent action representations that enable unsupervised pretraining on unlabeled datasets by modeling abstract visual changes between frames. Although these methods have shown strong results, their large model sizes make deployment in real-world settings challenging. In this work, we propose LAWM, a model-agnostic framework to pretrain imitation learning models in a self-supervised way, by learning latent action representations from unlabeled video data through world modeling. These videos can be sourced from robot recordings or videos of humans performing actions with everyday objects. Our framework is able to transfer learned knowledge across tasks, environments, and embodiments. It outperforms models pretrained with ground-truth robot actions and other similar pretraining methods on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world setup, while being efficient and practical for real-world settings.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15566

LLM-Assisted Stance Detection in Scientific Discourse: A Test Case in Bayesian Cognitive Science

Authors:

Eyup Engin Kucuk↗Tarik Kelestemur↗\"Omer Da\u{g}lar Tanrikulu↗

Qualitative coding is central to social science, but expert annotation is difficult to scale. LLMs offer a possible extension, yet require careful validation when the target construct is interpretive, theoretically loaded, and only indirectly expressed. We study this problem in a difficult case: detecting whether authors treat Bayesian models as descriptions of mental and neural mechanisms (realism) or as useful mathematical tools (instrumentalism). Our method combines a theory-driven codebook, expert-coded reference annotations, a diagnostic-gated prompt-optimization search yielding a shared zero-shot prompt for three frontier LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro Preview), and multi-rater reliability analysis. The final prompt achieved a held-out combined reliability score of 0.76 (harmonic mean of ICC = 0.79 and $\alpha$ = 0.74), with all diagnostics satisfied. Deployed on 6,858 quotes from 210 articles, the three LLMs reached substantial quote-level agreement (ICC = 0.80; $\alpha$ = 0.76; combined = 0.78) and near-perfect article-level rank stability ($r$ = 0.96-0.97 across rater pairs). The corpus was predominantly weakly realist, but article-level stances were rarely uniform: only 1.4% of articles used a single band, while 59.5% spanned four or more. Low-level perception/motor articles scored 8.8 Realism points higher than high-level cognition articles ($p < .001$, $d = 0.60$), quantifying a long-held qualitative intuition. We present this as an expert-led case study; the framework is intended to generalize to similar theoretically demanding tasks, not to all qualitative analysis.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2507.20208

From Benchmarks to Skills: Low-Rank Factors for LLM Evaluation

Authors:

Aviya Maimon↗Amir DN Cohen↗Gal Vishne↗Shauli Ravfogel↗Reut Tsarfaty↗

Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) rely heavily on a growing collection of benchmarks and on aggregate benchmark scores, yet it remains unclear what this comparison actually captures, and what these scores reveal about models' underlying capabilities. Here, we propose a new paradigm for LLM evaluation, by asking whether benchmark performance reflects many independent abilities, or rather relies on a small number of shared dimensions. To answer this, we apply Factor Analysis (FA) to a massive performance matrix of LLMs versus benchmarks \((60\times44)\) revealing an intrinsically low-rank structure of that matrix. That is, a small number of latent factors captures most of the structure in the full task space. This low-rank geometry reveals substantial redundancy across existing tasks and explains why many benchmarks appear to be measuring overlapping abilities. We further show that these latent factors correspond to coherent, skill-like, dimensions of LLM behavior. Leveraging this latent skill-space, we deliver three practical tools for LLM evaluation and downstream users: (i)~identifying redundant tasks, (ii)~profiling new models using a small subset of tasks, and (iii)~selecting models aligned with desired skill profiles. Our method provides a solid alternative to the de-facto standard of a single aggregate score, and establishes an interpretable and practical framework for understanding and benchmarking LLM core capabilities.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16202

EgoPhys: Learning Generalizable Physics Models of Deformable Objects from Egocentric Video

Authors:

Hyunjin Kim↗Ri-Zhao Qiu↗Guangqi Jiang↗Xiaolong Wang↗

Humans naturally understand object physics through everyday interactions, but faithfully predicting complex deformable dynamics, such as elastic materials and fabrics, remains a major challenge for computer vision and robotics. We present EgoPhys, a framework that constructs deformable physical digital twins from egocentric RGB-only video using generalizable priors. EgoPhys overcomes the limitations of existing methods to enable controllable deformable digital twin generation from egocentric videos by distilling per-object inverse-physics solutions into a compact codebook, enabling prediction of dense spring stiffness fields for unseen objects without per-spring test-time optimization. Trained with generalizable priors from diverse egocentric interactions, EgoPhys outperforms baselines in reconstruction, future prediction, and zero-shot generalization. To support training and evaluation, we curate an egocentric interaction dataset covering diverse deformable objects, scenes, and manipulation styles. We deploy EgoPhys on a real xArm6 robot, demonstrating that a digital twin initialized from a single egocentric human play video can serve as an internal world representation to aid in deformable-object planning, highlighting egocentric RGB observations as a scalable path toward real-to-sim pipelines.

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25.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2605.00327

DynamicPO: Dynamic Preference Optimization for Recommendation

Authors:

Xingyu Hu↗Kai Zhang↗Jiancan Wu↗Shuli Wang↗Chi Wang↗Wenshuai Chen↗Yinhua Zhu↗Haitao Wang↗Xingxing Wang↗Xiang Wang↗

arXiv:2605.00327v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In large language model (LLM)-based recommendation systems, direct preference optimization (DPO) effectively aligns recommendations with user preferences, requiring multi-negative objective functions to leverage abundant implicit-feedback negatives and sharpen preference boundaries. However, our empirical analyses reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon, preference optimization collapse, where increasing the number of negative samples can lead to performance degradation despite a continuously decreasing training loss. We further theoretically demonstrate that this collapse arises from gradient suppression, caused by the dominance of easily discriminable negatives over boundary-critical negatives that truly define user preference boundaries. As a result, boundary-relevant signals are under-optimized, weakening the model's decision boundary. Motivated by these observations, we propose DynamicPO (Dynamic Preference Optimization), a lightweight and plug-and-play framework comprising two adaptive mechanisms: Dynamic Boundary Negative Selection, which identifies and prioritizes informative negatives near the model's decision boundary, and Dual-Margin Dynamic beta Adjustment, which calibrates optimization strength per sample according to boundary ambiguity. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that DynamicPO effectively prevents optimization collapse and improves recommendation accuracy on multi-negative preference optimization methods, with negligible computational overhead. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/xingyuHuxingyu/DynamicPO.

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