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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Localized Centered Second-Chaos Operator

arXiv:2606.26065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a localized continuous-frequency operator estimate for centered Gaussian chaoses of order two. The result applies to operator-valued centered second chaoses, including Wick-centered same-family variants, between Hilbert spaces. In the model, two Gaussian frequency legs at scale $N$, an input leg at scale $Q$, and an output leg at scale $M$ are coupled through a soft incidence kernel; non-orthogonal Gaussian profiles are represented by covariance synthesis maps. The proof combines four oriented flattenings, rectangular non-commutative Khintchine inequalities, soft-incidence Schatten bounds, and Sobolev–Besov dyadic summation. The time lift gives $L^p$ operator convergence, while a Galerkin stabilization hypothesis gives pathwise full-cutoff convergence by the first Borel–Cantelli lemma. Under $\mathcal G(N)\lesssim N^{-\Gamma}$ one obtains the window \[ \Gamma>\frac d2, \qquad s

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Evaluation Protocols and Validation for Cameras in Indoor Healthcare Monitoring

Camera-based monitoring systems are increasingly adopted in healthcare settings for the continuous assessment of patient movement and activities. However, their technical performance under real-world indoor conditions remains insufficiently characterised, preventing appropriate camera selection for clinical or home adoption and reproducibility. Existing validation studies typically assess either device metrological performance or algorithm accuracy in isolation, and often do not systematically account for practical deployment factors, such as lighting variability, occlusions, and camera positioning. We present two technical validation protocols: the first evaluates the metrological performance of RGB and RGB-D cameras, and the second assesses their use in supporting human pose estimation, validated using state-of-the-art pose estimators. The proposed protocols systematically assess five cameras, four RGB-D and one RGB, under controlled variations in lighting, camera height, viewing angle, and occlusion level within representative indoor scenarios. The experimental results show that metrological performance varies substantially across cameras, with depth bias at 5 m ranging from 50 mm to over 1400 mm depending on the device. For 2D pose estimation, all cameras achieve broadly comparable accuracy, with mean mAP between approximately 78% and 90% across cameras and estimators, whereas 3D reconstruction error differs markedly across devices, with MPJPE ranging from 104 mm to 365 mm, closely reflecting underlying depth-sensing quality. Environmental factors have a camera- and estimator-dependent effect on 3D performance, while camera mounting height has minimal influence within the evaluated range. This work provides evidence-based guidance for the selection and deployment of cameras in healthcare monitoring applications, addressing an important gap in current technical validation practice.

03.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

scMagnifier: Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes via GRN-informed perturbations and consensus clustering

Authors:

by Zhenhui He, Dong Kangning Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data remains challenging, as their subtle transcriptional differences are often obscured by technical noise and data sparsity. Here, we present scMagnifier, a consensus clustering framework that leverages gene regulatory network (GRN)-informed in silico perturbations to amplify subtle transcriptional differences and uncover latent cell subpopulations. scMagnifier perturbs candidate transcription factors (TFs), propagates perturbation effects through cluster-specific GRNs to simulate post-perturbation expression profiles, and integrates clustering results across multiple perturbations into stable subtype assignments. Additionally, scMagnifier introduces regulatory perturbation consensus UMAP (rpcUMAP), a perturbation-aware visualization that provides clearer separation between cell subtypes and guides the selection of the optimal number of clusters. In both single-batch and multi-batch benchmarks, scMagnifier consistently improves the resolution and accuracy of fine-grained cell type identification. Notably, when integrated with spatial clustering methods such as STAGATE, scMagnifier is compatible with spatial transcriptomics workflows and effectively reveals tumor cell subtypes and their spatial organization in ovarian cancer.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Tool-IQA: Augmenting Image Quality Assessment with Simple Tools

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been increasingly adopted for Image Quality Assessment (IQA). However, current methods typically employ a static one-shot scoring paradigm, despite the fact that humans assess image quality through dynamic visual inspection, e.g., selectively adjusting views to verify details and subtle artifacts. Specifically, relying solely on a single-pass observation introduces two primary limitations: first, perceiving the image only at a global scale restricts the assessment of finer local details; second, the original intensity distribution of the image may overwhelm the visibility, leading to insufficient inspection of image quality. To address these issues, we propose Tool-IQA, shifting the assessment mechanism from passive scoring to a tool-augmented workflow. In particular, we equip VLMs with simple yet effective view tools: a Magnifier to inspect local details, and a Gamma Corrector to uncover visibility and hidden artifacts. The assessment follows a structured pipeline that consists of an initial observation with rubric notes, a tool-augmented in-depth inspection, and a final quantification for calibrated quality score. Furthermore, to ensure efficient and purposeful tool callings, we introduce a batch-aware training strategy to reward tool interactions that can yield positive contributions rather than simply encouraging usage. Experiments on a variety of IQA benchmarks demonstrate that, with effective tool calling and calibrated assessment, our proposed Tool-IQA significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, e.g., it achieves a PLCC of 0.854 on the challenging CLIVE dataset.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Contrast-Informed Augmentation and Domain-Adversarial Training for Adult-to-Neonatal MR Reconstruction Generalization

Purpose: To investigate whether contrast-informed data augmentation and domain-adversarial training improve the adult-to-neonatal generalization of the E2E-VarNet. Methods: Three training regimes were investigated: (1) adult-only training with unaugmented adult data, (2) mixed training with paired unaugmented and neonatal-informed augmented adult data, and (3) mixed training with a domain-adversarial objective. Models were trained on retrospectively undersampled multi-coil adult T2-weighted brain MR data and evaluated on neonatal and adult test data at acceleration factors $R=4$ and $R=8$ using quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluation. Feature analyses assessed whether domain-adversarial training altered the latent representations of unaugmented adult, augmented adult, and neonatal test samples. Results: Mixed training (Mixed) and mixed domain-adversarial training (Mixed-DAT) outperformed unaugmented adult-only training (Unaug-Only) when evaluated on neonatal data. At R=4, Mixed-DAT achieved the best performance (SSIM = 0.924 +/- 0.027, PSNR = 33.98 +/- 1.15 dB). At R=8, Mixed-DAT performed best when measured using SSIM (0.848 +/- 0.031 vs. 0.766 +/- 0.037 for Unaug-Only and 0.814 +/- 0.035 for Mixed) and Mixed performed best when measured using PSNR (29.56 +/- 0.83 dB vs. 26.26 +/- 0.78 dB for Unaug-Only and 29.43 +/- 0.83 dB for Mixed-DAT). Qualitative assessment of t-SNE plots suggested that Mixed-DAT increased the overlap among the latent representations of the unaugmented adult, augmented adult, and neonatal test data. Conclusion: Contrast-informed augmentation and domain-adversarial training improved adult-to-neonatal generalization of deep learning-based MR reconstruction. These findings suggest that contrast-informed data augmentation combined with adversarial training may improve robustness to domain shift in undersampled neonatal MR reconstruction.

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

RegMix-D: Dynamic Data Mixing via Proxy Training Trajectories

Data mixture selection is critical for Large Language Model pretraining. Existing methods such as RegMix select a single static mixture by fitting a regression model on small-scale proxy runs. We propose RegMix-D, a simple extension of RegMix to dynamic mixing. Our key observation is that proxy runs produce not only endpoint losses, but also full loss trajectories, which can be used to further improve data mixture. By training regression model on these trajectories, we can predict optimal mixtures at multiple training stages. RegMix-D supports two deployment modes: an offline variant that generates a complete mixture schedule before target training, and an online variant that adapts the mixture during training using observed loss. Experiments on 25B tokens of the Pile dataset with a 1B parameter target model show that RegMix-D consistently improves over RegMix and DoReMi across 13 downstream tasks while remaining proxy-efficient: it surpasses RegMix even with only 128 proxy models (25% of RegMix's proxy compute budget).

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Instrumental Activities of Daily Living in Older Adults with Epilepsy: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Multicenter Study

Objective: Instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) represent a critical but understudied measure of day-to-day function in persons with epilepsy(PWE). In the multicenter Brain Aging and Cognition in Epilepsy (BrACE) study of PWE aged greater than or equal to 55 years, we examined the proportion, clinical correlates, epilepsy-related predictors, and longitudinal trajectory of IADL impairment. Methods: IADLs were assessed using the Functional Activities Questionnaire (FAQ; range=0 to 30; higher=more impaired); a FAQ greater than or equal to 2 defines MCI-level impairment, and a FAQ greater than or equal to 5 defines dementia-level functional impairment. Multivariable logistic regression identified predictors of baseline function. Global cognition (Montreal Cognitive Assessment [MoCA]), individual cognitive measures, and quality of life (QOL) were compared between the impaired and unimpaired groups. Linear regression evaluated predictors of longitudinal functional decline. Results: Of 57 participants (mean age=66.6 years; female=52.6%), 38.6% (n=22) had MCI-level functional impairment and 17.5% (n=10) had dementia-level functional impairment. In univariate analyses, worse FAQ scores were associated with lower education, higher area deprivation index, early-onset epilepsy (EOE less than 60 years), antiseizure medication polytherapy, and epilepsy localization. In multivariable analysis, temporal lobe epilepsy (OR=4.46, 95% CI=1.09, 21.83,p=0.047), EOE(OR=7.14, 95% CI=1.16, 59.97, p=0.046), and lower education(OR=0.70,95% CI=0.49, 0.93, p=0.025) remained independently associated with baseline MCI-level functional-impairment. Lower education (OR=0.55,95% CI=0.29, 0.84, p=0.021) was the only factor associated with dementia-level IADL-impairment. IADL-impaired participants demonstrated lower verbal memory scores (adjusted p=0.041) and MoCA scores (adjusted p

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Distributed General-Purpose Agent Networks: Architecture, Key Mechanisms, and Prototypes

arXiv:2606.17368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models have accelerated the transition from passive conversational assistants to autonomous agents that can understand goals, plan actions, invoke tools, and execute multi-step tasks. Yet the capability of a single agent remains constrained by its local data, tool permissions, runtime environment, and governance boundary. This paper studies distributed general-purpose agent networks: open peer-to-peer networks in which heterogeneous agents deployed on personal devices, edge nodes, or autonomous computing environments can discover one another, establish trust, negotiate cooperation rules, and execute open-ended tasks. We argue that such networks cannot be obtained by simply combining existing peer-to-peer overlays with conventional multi-agent systems. Unlike traditional P2P networks, agent networks must propagate semantic declarations about intentions, capabilities, states, and cooperation constraints. We therefore propose a layered architecture centered on a protocol adaptation layer that connects upper-level task semantics with lower-level network operations. Based on this architecture, the paper identifies three core mechanism problems: semantic announcement propagation for collaborator discovery, verifiable identity and multi-topic reputation for cooperation governance, and semantic-gradient mechanism design for open task execution. For each problem, we present a technical route, including bodyless gossip with sequential logs, BAID-based identity binding with MG-EigenTrust reputation, and a Stackelberg-style mechanism-generation loop driven by semantic attribution feedback. We further report prototype overhead results for BAID-style tiered verification and mechanism-level simulations of MG-EigenTrust under cross-topic disguise-collusion attacks. The resulting framework provides a system-level foundation for open, trustworthy, and scalable agent collaboration.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

V-JEPA 2.1: Unlocking Dense Features in Video Self-Supervised Learning

We present V-JEPA 2.1, a family of self-supervised models that learn dense, high-quality visual representations for both images and videos while retaining strong global scene understanding. The approach combines four key components. First, a dense predictive loss uses a masking-based objective in which both visible and masked tokens contribute to the training signal, encouraging explicit spatial and temporal grounding. Second, deep self-supervision applies the self-supervised objective hierarchically across multiple intermediate encoder layers to improve representation quality. Third, multi-modal tokenizers enable unified training across images and videos. Finally, the model benefits from effective scaling in both model capacity and training data. Together, these design choices produce representations that are spatially structured, semantically coherent, and temporally consistent. Empirically, V-JEPA 2.1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks, including 7.71 mAP on Ego4D for short-term object-interaction anticipation and 40.8 Recall@5 on EPIC-KITCHENS for high-level action anticipation, as well as a 20-point improvement in real-robot grasping success rate over V-JEPA-2 AC. The model also demonstrates strong performance in robotic navigation (5.687 ATE on TartanDrive), depth estimation (0.307 RMSE on NYUv2 with a linear probe), and global recognition (77.7 on Something-Something-V2). These results show that V-JEPA 2.1 significantly advances the state of the art in dense visual understanding and world modeling.

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

Federated Medical Image Segmentation under Real-World Label Noise: A Benchmark Suite for Noisy Label Learning Method Selection

While federated learning (FL) enables collaborative medical image segmentation without centralizing sensitive data, real-world deployment is frequently complicated by cross-site label imperfections such as contour disagreement, missing or additional structures, and confused labels. Federated noisy label learning (FNLL) aims to mitigate these effects, yet remains underused in practice as existing evidence is largely based on synthetic noise, simplified settings, and limited real-world noisy evaluation. We address this gap by introducing a benchmark suite that combines diverse real-world noisy datasets, deployment-relevant client-noise scenarios, and label-noise-targeted evaluation to support systematic FNLL assessment and informed method selection. The suite combines curated real-world noisy medical image segmentation datasets from diverse sources with a comprehensive federated segmentation framework including various client-noise scenarios and noise-targeted evaluation. The presented suite provides a realistic and discriminative basis for FNLL evaluation in medical image segmentation and establishes a reusable foundation for fair benchmarking, dataset-specific label-noise characterization, and future method development under realistic federated settings. Code is available at https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/FedSegNoiseBench.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Observable Patterns Are Not Explanations: A Causal-Geometric Analysis of Latent Reasoning Models

Latent reasoning models (LRMs) replace explicit chain-of-thought with continuous thoughts. Recent work treats observable latent-state patterns, such as BFS-like frontiers and decodable arithmetic computation, as evidence for internal reasoning mechanisms. Evaluating two LRMs (Coconut and CODI) against controls lacking the proposed recurrence or curriculum, we find these patterns also appear in the controls and do not always causally affect behavior. Causal interventions reveal that latent-thought utilization is not binary but graded, scaling with a thought's causal effect on model behavior. Geometric analyses reveal this effect concentrates in low-rank directions whose step-to-step geometry grows more structured as their behavioral influence increases. Latent thoughts should therefore be treated as hidden computation, not hidden explanation: decodability, attention, or static structure alone cannot establish mechanism. LRM interpretability thus requires matched controls and causal tests.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Synthetic Data Generation for Domain Generalization in Fetal Brain MRI Segmentation

Fetal brain tissue segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for studying neurodevelopment, but remains challenging due to data heterogeneity and limited annotations. Domain randomization (DR) has recently emerged as a promising strategy for single-source domain generalization by synthesizing training images with randomized artifacts, contrast, and resolution. In this work, we investigate how to maximize the out-of-domain (OOD) generalization of DR-based methods. We evaluate several synthetic data generation strategies for DR, with a particular focus on our recently proposed framework, FetalSynthSeg. We show that simple Gaussian mixture-based intensity modeling outperforms more complex physics-based simulations, and that intensity clustering (subdividing tissue classes based on intensity) improves OOD robustness. Evaluated on 348 fetal subjects from four sites spanning 0.55-3T and both T1w and T2w contrasts, FetalSynthSeg reaches state-of-the-art performance on several FeTA 2024 testing datasets (80-85 Dice score) and, for the first time, offers robust segmentation on modalities other than T2w for fetal brain segmentation (80 Dice on dHCP-T1w dataset). Compared with state-of-the-art methods such as BOUNTI, nnU-Net ensemble, and the FeTA 2024 winner, FetalSynthSeg delivers comparable or superior accuracy while maintaining strong robustness across domain shifts. Our code, model weights, and Docker image ready for easy inference are available at https://hub.docker.com/r/vzalevskyi/fetalsynthseg.

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

Neuro-Relational Programs: Unifying Queries and Neural Computation over Structured Data

arXiv:2606.11946v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The conventional approach to deep learning over relational databases applies neural models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), to a graph representation of the database. Recent approaches instead operate on databases directly, associating tuples with embeddings and extending query mechanisms to jointly process embeddings and relational content. Inspired by these developments, we introduce Neuro-Relational Programs (NRPs), a declarative query language for relational databases whose facts carry numeric vector embeddings. NRPs extend Datalog-style rules with operations that combine, aggregate, and transform embeddings, thereby interleaving relational reasoning and learnable neural components within a single formalism. This yields a general approach to neural computation over relational data: an NRP can be read both as a query plan with trainable components and as a neural architecture with relational structure built in. Natural syntactic fragments of NRPs recover existing architectures and query formalisms. Zero-ary NRPs correspond to non-adaptive query algorithms; monadic NRPs generalize GNN-style message passing and precisely capture Deep Homomorphism Networks, a connection that we extend to frontier-guarded NRPs over databases with row-ids. We characterize the expressive power of unrestricted NRPs with ReLU-FFN transformations by FOCQ, an extension of first-order logic with counting interpreted over real-weighted structures, yielding a precise connection with uniform TC$^0$ over ordered databases. Together, these results establish NRPs as a broad declarative framework for querying and neural computation over relational data.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

EPIG: Emotion-Based Prompting for Personalised Image Generation

arXiv:2606.13247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved impressive results in synthesizing high-quality images from natural language prompts. However, commonly used prompting strategies remain relatively generic, limiting the model's ability to accurately express emotional intent and nuanced affective attributes. This work proposes EPIG, a method that enhances emotional expressiveness at the prompt level prior to image generation. Grounded in psychologically informed emotion representations (valence-arousal) and leveraging structured, role-aware prompt enrichment, EPIG enriches emotion-related components of prompts without modifying or retraining the image generation backbone. The resulting emotion-aware prompts guide the generative process toward more emotionally coherent visual outputs, with particular effectiveness in controlling arousal. EPIG is lightweight, training-free, and well suited for resource-constrained and personalized image generation scenarios. Experimental results on a benchmark of 10 diverse prompts show that EPIG reduces mean arousal error compared to strong baselines, including naive insertion and LLM-based prompt expansion, with reductions of 14% and 12%, respectively. These improvements are statistically significant. EPIG also preserves valence alignment and semantic consistency, as measured by CLIPScore and supported by ablation studies. The effect is more pronounced on prompts containing explicit subjects such as humans, children, or animals, where the reduction reaches 17%, highlighting the subject-sensitive behavior of the proposed method.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Polygenic risk scores associate with asthma phenotypes and proteomic analyses implicate IL1R1 in two family-based studies

Despite its high prevalence and the discovery of hundreds of genetic associations, the genetic determinants and heterogeneous manifestations of asthma remain incompletely understood. Incorporating polygenic risk scores (PRS) into asthma research offers a powerful approach to quantify inherited susceptibility, refine risk profiles, and advance mechanistic understanding of disease development. For this study, we leveraged whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data from two family-based cohorts of childhood asthma - the Genetics of Asthma in Costa Rica Study (GACRS) and the Childhood Asthma Management Program (CAMP) - to examine the transmission profiles of externally derived asthma PRS and their associations with clinical phenotypes in children with asthma. To further elucidate molecular mechanisms, we integrated large-scale external genome-wide association study (GWAS) summary statistics and genetic prediction models of protein abundance in a two-step proteome-wide association study (PWAS) of asthma. Our findings provide robust evidence supporting the validity of externally derived asthma PRS (asthma PRS association p-value p={10}^{-24} [GACRS and CAMP trios combined] for the Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative [GBMI]) and reveal consistent associations with spirometry measures and atopy markers across both studies, as 13 of 21 traits (62%) were significantly associated with the GBMI-PRS in the meta-analysis after multiple-testing correction. Moreover, the results of the integrative proteomic analysis implicate IL-1 signaling in the etiology of asthma, reinforcing the candidacy of IL1R1 antagonists for drug repurposing.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Context-Aware Multimodal Claim Verification in Spoken Dialogues

Every day, millions absorb claims from podcasts and streams that no fact-checker ever sees. Spoken misinformation is built through conversation, where credibility comes not from facts alone but from how claims are framed, reinforced, or left unchallenged across turns. Yet fact-checking has focused on isolated text, leaving dialogue audio under-studied. We introduce MAD2, a new Multi-turn Audio Dialogues benchmark for spoken claim verification, containing 1,000 two-speaker dialogues with 3,368 check-worthy claims and approximately 10 hours of audio, and propose calibrated multimodal fusion of a context-aware audio encoder and a dialogue-aware text model. Across settings, adding dialogue context improves verification, but the gains depend on scenario type. Using only preceding context often matches offline performance, supporting live-moderation settings, and audio contributes most when transcript-based models are destabilized by additional context. Overall, conversational structure matters more for verification than misinformation framing.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking attention-based methods for vision transformers' interpretability in retinal fundus imaging

Deep learning models based on Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown strong performance in retinal fundus imaging, but their interpretability remains poorly understood. In particular, attention-based attribution methods are widely used to explain ViT predictions, despite limited evaluation of their faithfulness and biological relevance in medical imaging. Here, we systematically benchmark four attention-based interpretability methods for RETFound, a retinal ViT-based foundation model, that we previously fine-tuned to predict 17 retinal vascular phenotypes from UK Biobank fundus images1. We compare raw attention, attention rollout, gradient-weighted attention rollout, and Chefer's hybrid relevance-based method using both qualitative visualisation and quantitative evaluation frameworks. To assess attribution faithfulness, we perform perturbation-based deletion and insertion experiments, quantifying changes in model predictions as highly attended image regions are progressively removed or restored. To evaluate biological specificity, we run structure-aware analyses combining attribution maps with vessel segmentation and artery-vein labels through the Relative ratio of Attention Intensity (RAI) metric. Across models, attribution maps differed substantially depending on the selected interpretability method, highlighting the need for rigorous quantitative evaluation. Among the evaluated approaches, gradient-weighted attention rollout consistently achieved the strongest perturbation performance and produced attribution maps most closely aligned with the anatomical definition of the predicted retinal traits. Furthermore, vessel-type specific models systematically concentrate attention on the corresponding vascular structures despite being trained using only a single scalar value per image as supervision. These findings demonstrate that attention-based attribution methods capture biologically meaningful vascular representations, while also revealing method-dependent variability in attribution behaviour. This work provides a quantitative framework for evaluating interpretability methods in medical imaging with annotated segmentation and contributes toward more transparent and biologically grounded medical AI systems.

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

PoQ-Judge: A Multi-Architecture Evaluation Framework for Cost-Aware Proof-of-Quality in Decentralized LLM Inference

Decentralized LLM inference networks need lightweight, reference-free quality evaluation for Proof of Quality (PoQ). We present PoQ-Judge, a framework that trains dedicated judge models to score query-output pairs without ground-truth references. We study three architectures across the quality-cost tradeoff: a TextCNN judge, a MiniLM cross-encoder, and a DeBERTa judge. Using two-stage training on UltraFeedback plus GPT-labeled in-domain data, the best model reaches 0.747 Pearson correlation with the ground-truth proxy on a held-out test set, outperforming reference-based evaluators from prior work. As a reference-free component in composite scoring, it achieves 0.645 Pearson correlation, matching the best single reference-based evaluator while removing the need for reference answers. We also show that online calibration identifies semantic quality as the dominant dimension and that cascade evaluation reduces cost by 72.7 percent with only modest quality loss. Results are much stronger on QA than summarization, pointing to proxy quality as the main remaining limitation.

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

HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) 2025: Benchmark of Segmentation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis in Multimodal PET/CT

Head and neck cancers (HNC) represent a significant global health burden, with accurate tumor delineation being essential for effective radiotherapy planning. The complexity of the oropharyngeal anatomy, combined with the heterogeneous appearance of tumors on imaging, makes manual segmentation time-intensive and subject to inter-observer variability. Beyond segmentation, predicting long-term clinical outcomes, such as recurrence-free survival (RFS), and determining human papillomavirus (HPV) status from noninvasive imaging, remain challenging yet clinically valuable goals. The HECKTOR 2025 challenge addresses these needs by establishing a comprehensive benchmark for automated HNC analysis using multimodal PET/CT imaging and electronic health records. Building on previous editions (2020-2022), this challenge features an expanded multi-institutional dataset comprising over 1,100 patients from 10 centers worldwide. Participants were tasked with three complementary objectives: (1) segmenting primary gross tumor volumes (GTVp) and metastatic lymph nodes (GTVn), (2) predicting recurrence-free survival, and (3) classifying HPV status. The challenge attracted 35 registered teams, with 15 final submissions evaluated on a held-out test set. Top-performing algorithms achieved a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.75 for segmentation, a concordance index of 0.66 for survival prediction, and a balanced accuracy of 0.56 for HPV classification. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the submitted methodologies, evaluates their performance across different lesion characteristics, and discusses their implications for clinical translation in automated oncology workflows and decision support systems.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Quantum Error Correction-like Noise Mitigation for Wave-like Dark Matter Searches with Quantum Sensors

arXiv:2511.03253v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a quantum error correction-like noise mitigation protocol for enhancing the sensitivity of wave-like dark matter searches with quantum sensors. Our protocol uses multiple sensors to mitigate the noise affecting each sensor individually, allowing for the suppression of excitation noise that is parallel to the dark matter signal. We demonstrate that our protocol can improve the sensitivity to dark matter signals by a factor of $\sqrt{N}$, where $N$ is the number of sensors used, for small $N$. Furthermore, for sufficiently large $N$, we find that our protocol achieves the same performance as the standard quantum limit by the ideal measurement, which non-entangled sensors with parallel noise cannot reach due to the unknown phase of the dark matter field. Our work can be widely applied to various types of signals with unknown phases, and has the potential to enhance the sensitivity of quantum sensors such as arrays of resonant cavities.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

YOLO-AMC: An Improved YOLO Architecture with Attention Mechanisms for Building Crack Detection

Crack detection plays an important role in infrastructure inspection and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). However, cracks typically appear as thin, low-contrast structures and are easily affected by background noise, posing challenges for existing object detection models. This study proposes an improved YOLO-based architecture with integrated attention mechanisms, termed YOLO-AMC (YOLO with Attention Mechanisms for Crack Detection), to enhance automated crack detection performance. Based on YOLOv11, the original C2PSA module is removed, and multiple attention mechanisms, including Global Attention Mechanism (GAM), Residual Convolutional Block Attention Module (Res-CBAM), and Shuffle Attention (SA), are introduced into the multi-scale feature fusion layers of the Neck to strengthen cross-scale feature integration. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLO-AMC consistently outperforms baseline models YOLOv11n and YOLOv8n across multiple evaluation metrics. Among the evaluated attention modules, GAM achieves the best detection performance, obtaining mAP@0.5 = 0.9917 and mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.9506 on the test dataset, which are higher than those of YOLOv11 (0.9833 / 0.9112) and YOLOv8 (0.9707 / 0.8921). Furthermore, while maintaining a computational complexity of 7.6 GFLOPs, the proposed model achieves 110.95 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 4090 platform and approximately 5 FPS on a Raspberry Pi 5 edge device, demonstrating a favorable trade-off between accuracy and deployment efficiency. The implementation code for this study is available on GitHub at https://github.com/CY-Tsai24/YOLO-AMC.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Representing Time Series as Structured Programs for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.12481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and instruction-following capabilities, making them potentially powerful tools for time-series analysis. However, time series lie outside their native textual modality, raising a fundamental question: how should time series be represented so that LLMs can reason about them effectively? Existing work typically serializes raw numerical sequences or fine-tunes pre-trained LLMs on time-series data. These approaches place the burden of extracting temporal structure directly on the LLM, creating a modality mismatch that often degrades performance on long sequences and introduces substantial computational overhead. In this work, we introduce Time-Series-to-Structured-Program representation (T2SP), a deterministic, training-free method that represents a time series as a structured symbolic program. T2SP decomposes time series into trends, periods, and salient events, expressing them in a program-friendly format aligned with the textual and code-like modalities on which LLMs are natively trained. By shifting temporal-structure extraction from the model to the representation itself, T2SP enables off-the-shelf LLMs to leverage their existing reasoning capabilities for time-series understanding. We evaluate T2SP on three reasoning tasks – editing, captioning, and question answering – where it consistently improves performance, reduces reasoning time, and lowers failure rates compared with raw-string representations. Our results demonstrate that T2SP provides an effective interface between time series and LLMs.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Invisible to humans, visible to machines: a preregistered audit of Unicode fidelity across four biomedical bibliographic APIs

Biomedical text mining, scientometrics, and the construction of training corpora for biomedical large language models (LLMs) all assume that the abstract text returned by a bibliographic API faithfully reproduces the published abstract. This pre-registered audit (OSF osf.io/269b5) tests that assumption for four widely used public APIs (PubMed E-utilities, Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar) against PubMed Central (PMC) JATS XML as a common ground truth. From a complete enumeration of the PMC Open Access subset for 2024 (about 700,000 records), a simple random sample of 4,000 English-language research articles was drawn; for each, we recorded whether Unicode characters from four pre-specified classes present in the JATS abstract (typographic punctuation, mathematical/scientific symbols, Greek letters, special whitespace) were preserved by each API. Two systematic, deterministic losses met the pre-registered criterion (upper 95% CI bound below 5%): the PubMed AbstractText field preserved typographic punctuation in only 0.6% of eligible abstracts (95% CI 0.3-1.0%), and OpenAlex preserved special whitespace in 0% (0.0-0.4%). A blinded mechanism audit attributed the first loss to character substitution and the second to inverted-index serialization. Mathematical symbols and Greek letters were preserved faithfully (over 95%) by all four APIs. Separately, Crossref returned no abstract for 24.6% of papers (coverage 75.4%, 95% CI 74.1-76.7%), concentrated in specific publishers (Elsevier and ACS: 0%). Character-level fidelity is therefore API-dependent and undocumented: the same publisher-deposited JATS text carries different surface signatures depending on the serving API, with direct consequences for tokenization-sensitive bibliometrics, corpus construction, and character-level indicators of LLM-assisted writing.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The KG-ER Conceptual Schema Language

arXiv:2508.02548v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose KG-ER, a conceptual schema language for knowledge graphs that describes the structure of knowledge graphs independently of their representation (relational databases, property graphs, RDF) while helping to capture the semantics of the information stored in a knowledge graph.

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

K-Forcing: Joint Next-K-Token Decoding via Push-Forward Language Modeling

Autoregressive (AR) language modeling is the dominant paradigm for text generation, yet its sequential token-by-token decoding makes inference memory-bound and inefficient. Existing acceleration approaches, such as speculative decoding and diffusion language models, can yield speedups under certain conditions but do not directly address high-load batch serving–the scenario most critical for industrial-scale deployment. We introduce K-Forcing, a push-forward language modeling paradigm for joint next-k-token decoding. K-Forcing distills an existing AR model into a conditional push-forward mapping–one that transforms independent uniform noise variables into a joint sample of multiple future tokens in a single forward pass. This design preserves fixed-length outputs, reuses the AR teacher backbone, and remains compatible with standard AR serving infrastructure. We train this mapping via progressive self-forcing distillation, which gradually expands the prediction window while enabling the student to closely match the sequence distribution of the AR teacher. We evaluate K-Forcing on LM1B and OpenWebText using a standard causal Transformer backbone. When aggressively configured to generate k = 4 tokens per forward pass, K-Forcing delivers approximately 2.4-3.5x speedup across different batch sizes, while incurring modest quality degradation relative to its AR teacher. As inference increasingly dominates the lifetime compute cost of modern LLMs, K-Forcing offers a promising route toward accelerating AR generation under real-world high-load deployment.