Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ParseFixer: An Agentic Framework for Document Parsing via Selective Multimodal Correction

In this report, we present our third-place solution for the DataMFM Challenge Track 1: Document Parsing. This track requires models to recover structured Markdown documents from document page images while preserving textual content and document structure. To address the complementary requirements of accurate content recovery and faithful structure reconstruction, we propose ParseFixer, an agentic framework for backbone parsing and selective correction. ParseFixer consists of two key modules: Full-Page Backbone Parsing (FBP) and Agentic Selective Correction (ASC). FBP produces stable initial Markdown outputs with MinerU2.5 Pro, while ASC detects high-value parsing failures and repairs them through a verify-and-rollback correction process. By placing selective multimodal correction after open-source backbone parsing, ParseFixer improves the recovery of key document elements without rewriting reliable backbone predictions. On the test set, our final system achieves an overall score of 61.78 and ranks third in Track 1, demonstrating its effectiveness for accurate document parsing. Our code will be released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/CVPRW26-ParseFixer.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Online Reward-Punishment Learning from Fixed-Channel Perceptual Event Streams without Environment Rewards

作者:

arXiv:2606.18963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study online reward-punishment learning when the environment provides no scalar reward or evaluative label. At each step the agent receives only a fixed-channel perceptual packet, and quantities such as pain, energy, contact, damage, or cognitive error are treated as perceptual dimensions whose valence must be inferred from transition consequences. OHIRL separates four roles: M_psi learns next-packet prediction, D_omega models residual dynamics, C_eta is a fixed internal post-transition trajectory evaluator, and B_xi learns to use the resulting value evidence for later policy updates and action scoring. C_eta uses a recovery-positive and persistence/growth-negative residual-regulation orientation; a coefficient-origin audit shows that equal-unit, raw-equal, and random monotone variants preserve more than 92% of the released top-action rankings, while sign inversion preserves 0%. The reward-free protocol exposes observation transitions while withholding environment rewards, delayed external evaluators, success labels, and action-goodness labels. A conditional error decomposition separates B_xi evidence-estimation error from residual policy-optimization error. In a 2x2-XOR packet task, medicine and chili acquire opposite value under visual XOR contexts, and the same pain or spice increase can be positive or negative depending on consequence structure; B_xi reaches 0.952 balanced reward-sign accuracy. In a full online-interleaved audit, M_psi reaches holdout R2=0.907, B_xi reaches 0.940 sign accuracy, and the policy reaches 0.979 optimal-action accuracy, while immediate packet scores, prediction-error rewards, shuffled targets, zero reward, and error-reduction controls collapse. Hidden-reward CartPole and Taxi controls, public-context no-leakage audits, and module-role ablations further test information boundaries and component necessity.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Learning to Hear Hesitation: Continual Learning for Disfluency-Aware ASR

Despite advances in large-scale Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), disfluent speech remains challenging, as state-of-the-art systems are often optimized to omit disfluencies, leading to information loss and hallucinations. Prior work has focused on verbatim transcription and the integration of disfluency markers, but adapting models on limited datasets can lead to catastrophic forgetting of general-domain knowledge. We address this gap by leveraging continual learning (CL) with explicit disfluency tokens. We first introduce these tokens into a pretrained ASR model to establish stable token mechanisms, and then continue training on additional datasets with varying disfluency distributions. Through a detailed analysis of model dynamics during training, we identify a trade-off between marker learning and ASR performance, and a consistent cross-attention head mechanism shared across CL methods.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Independent-Component-Based Encoding Models of Brain Activity During Story Comprehension

Encoding models provide a powerful framework for linking continuous stimulus features to neural activity; however, traditional voxelwise approaches are limited by measurement noise, inter-subject variability, and redundancy arising from spatially correlated voxels encoding overlapping neural signals. Here, we propose an independent component (IC)-based encoding framework that dissociates stimulus-driven and noise-driven signals in fMRI data. We decompose continuous fMRI data from naturalistic story listening into ICs using one subset of the data, and train encoding models on independent data to predict IC time series from large language model representations of linguistic input. Across subjects, a subset of ICs exhibited consistently high predictivity. These ICs were spatially and temporally consistent across subjects and included cognitive networks known to respond during story listening (auditory and language). Auditory component time series were strongly correlated with acoustic stimulus features, highlighting the interpretability of identified component time series. Components identified as noise or motion-related artifacts by ICA-AROMA showed uniformly poor predictive performance, confirming that highly predicted components reflect genuine stimulus-related neural signals rather than confounds. Overall, IC-based encoding models enable analyses at the level of functional networks, accommodating the variability in network locations across individuals and providing interpretable results that are easy to compare across subjects. Code provided at: https://github.com/kamyahari/IC-Encoding-Models.git

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

GateMem: Benchmarking Memory Governance in Multi-Principal Shared-Memory Agents

Memory benchmarks for LLM agents largely assume single-user settings, leaving shared assistants for hospitals, workplaces, campuses, and households understudied. In these deployments, multiple principals write to a common memory pool and query it under different roles, scopes, and relationships, so memory quality requires governance as well as recall. We introduce GateMem, a benchmark for multi-principal shared-memory agents. GateMem jointly evaluates utility for legitimate long-horizon requests with state updates, access control across contextual authorization boundaries, and agent-facing active forgetting after explicit deletion requests. It spans medical, office, education, and household domains, with long-form multi-party episodes, incremental memory injection, hidden checkpoints, structured judging, and leak-target annotations. Across diverse baselines and backbone models, no method simultaneously achieves strong utility, robust access control, and reliable forgetting. Long-context prompting often yields the best governance score at high token cost, while retrieval-based and external-memory methods reduce cost yet still leak unauthorized or deleted information. These results show current memory agents remain far from reliable shared institutional deployment.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Probing picometre-scale interlayer deformations via hyperbolic polaritons

作者:

The resilience of van der Waals (vdW) materials to large strain fields makes them an ideal platform for tuning electronic, optical and magnetic properties1–4. Although in-plane strain is readily mapped, non-invasive and quantitative characterization of out-of-plane strain remains a formidable challenge, particularly for picometre-scale deformations buried at interfaces. Here we demonstrate a polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons (oHPs) mode to detect interlayer deformations in prototypical vdW polar insulator–hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). This method uses the softening mechanism of out-of-plane transverse optical (oTO) phonons induced by interlayer strain, enabling highly sensitive detection of picometre-scale deformations. Although these oTO phonon modes are typically spectroscopically ‘dark’, their strain response is activated through the oHPs, achieving an atomic displacement sensitivity of about 10 pm (about 8 × 10−7 times the probing wavelength), enabling ultradeep-subwavelength mechanical interlayer deformation detection. This is experimentally validated in both planar hBN and at the buried interface of quantum dot–hBN nanotube heterostructures. This polariton-based picometrology bridges nanomechanics and photonics, providing a non-destructive lens to visualize hidden stress landscapes with atomic precision. A new polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons mode is described and experimentally validated to allow the examination of picometre-scale interlayer deformations, providing a bridge between nanomechanics and photonics.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Twin-beam advantage in quantum LiDAR under correlated noise

arXiv:2606.17908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum light promises improved precision in optical remote sensing, but its practical advantage depends critically on whether nonclassical resources remain useful under realistic noise and experimentally accessible detection. This question becomes especially relevant for LiDAR systems, where a quantum advantage has been demonstrated for target detection and joint range-velocity estimation, but mostly under idealized conditions or simple noise models, such as optical loss and thermal background. A key open point is whether entanglement provides an operational advantage when the dominant disturbance is not independent noise, but structured interference across sensing modes. Here, we address this question by studying the joint estimation of target range and velocity with bright two-mode Gaussian probes and homodyne detection, comparing coherent, separable squeezed, and twin-beam states at a fixed resource budget. Our results reveal a hierarchy of quantum resources set by the noise structure: separable squeezing provides a robust advantage over coherent illumination under loss and thermal background, whereas twin-beam probes become superior under correlated jamming when the receiver is adaptively optimized. These results establish correlated noise as the operational regime in which entanglement provides a robustness advantage beyond local squeezing, opening a receiver-aware route to quantum-enhanced LiDAR in realistic and potentially adversarial environments.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Mapping molecular polariton transport via pump-probe microscopy

arXiv:2504.15501v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate how the transport properties of molecular polaritons in optical cavities can be extracted from a microscopic modeling of pump-probe spectroscopy. Our approach combines a mean-field treatment of the light-matter Hamiltonian with a perturbative expansion of both light and matter components, along with spatial coarse-graining. This approach extends semiclassical cavity spectroscopy to multimode light-matter interactions, providing full access to spatially resolved transient spectra. By simulating a microscopy experiment with counter-propagating pump and probe pulses, we compute the differential transmission and show how molecular dephasing and persistent dark exciton populations drive sub-group-velocity transport of the root-mean-square displacement. We analyze transport across the polariton dispersion, showing how velocity renormalization correlates with excitonic weight, consistent with experimental observations, and further its dependence on the rate of molecular dephasing. Our results highlight the need to consider measured spectroscopic observables when characterizing transport in polaritonic systems.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Conflict-Aware Retriever Editing for Knowledge Injection Attacks on LLM-Based RAG Systems

arXiv:2606.18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Injecting malicious knowledge into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can manipulate retrieved evidence and mislead downstream generation, posing a serious security threat for AI applications. Existing RAG injection attacks mainly rely on manipulating external knowledge bases, such as crafting malicious corpus. However, the synthetic text crafted by such data-centric methods could be detectable, leading to the failure of attacks. Beyond corpus manipulation, open-source retrievers are increasingly exposing RAG systems to model-centric attacks. In this paper, we propose conflict-aware retriever editing, i.e., CAREATTACK, a model-centric retriever attack framework for malicious knowledge injection in RAG. Specifically, CAREATTACK consists two stages of conflict-aware retriever editing and attack-preserving anchor repair. Conflict-aware retriever editing adapts efficient closed-form parameter editing to the dense retrieval model, promoting malicious knowledge above benign competing passages and resolving potential parameter conflicts through graph-based conflict detection and parameter editing projection. Then, attack-preserving anchor repair performs lightweight calibration on the edited retriever to further eliminate the impact on non-target prompts while preserving the attack effectiveness for target prompts. We instantiate CAREATTACK on Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B and BGE-M3, and conduct evaluation on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate our method substantially promote malicious passages into the retrieved knowledge of RAG systems and can perform attacks for batches of target prompts and passages, given the access of retrieval model parameters. Since most RAG systems are built upon open-source retrieval models, this work reveals a practical attack surface in RAG systems. Codes are public accessible at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CareAttack-3F1C.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Percolation on hierarchical lattices

arXiv:2606.11503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider independent Bernoulli percolation on top of sequences of hierarchical graphs. Given a graph $G_{1}$ with two distinguished vertices $a_{1}$ and $b_{1}$, the hierarchical graph with seed $G_{1}$ is the sequence $\big( G_{k} \big)_{k \geq 1}$ resulting from the inductive procedure, where the graph $G_{k+1}$ is obtained from $G_{k}$ by replacing each of its edges with a copy of $G_{1}$, attached by the vertices $a_{1}$ and $b_{1}$. We prove that, under sharp hypotheses, percolation on these graphs presents a unique phase transition. Second, we establish the existence of several critical exponents in this context, such as the critical exponents for the correlation length $\nu$, the surface tension $\mu$, the one-arm exponent $\alpha_{1}$. Several results are also obtained for their infinite counterpart $G_\infty$, which is the Benjamini-Schramm limit of $G_k$: uniqueness of the infinite cluster, continuity of $\theta(p)$, existence of the percolation-probability exponent $\beta$ and scaling relations for the critical exponents $\alpha_1$, $\nu$ and $\beta$. Furthermore, we analyze noise sensitivity for crossing functions in $G_{k}$ and establish sharp noise sensitivity in this setting. Finally, we propose a setup where it is possible to verify the locality hypothesis, stating that the critical threshold for percolation is a local property, while critical exponents are determined by the global geometry of the graph. As a consequence of the techniques developed here, we also provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a unique fixed point for the map $p \mapsto \mathbb{E}_p[g]$ in $(0,1)$, where $g:\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ is a nontrivial monotone Boolean function.

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

Neural-Parameterized Cellular Automata for Wildfire Spread

arXiv:2606.11676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional wildfire models rely on rigid, low-dimensional parameters and static fuel maps, frequently underpredicting fire spread. To address this weakness, we introduce a hybrid deep-learning parameterized Probabilistic Cellular Automata (CA) framework implemented in JAX. Our approach employs a Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network to dynamically generate spatially varying parameters that govern fire-spread probability, wind alignment, and slope influence. This hybrid design captures complex, nonlinear environmental interactions while preserving the physical interpretability of the underlying three-state CA. The JAX implementation enables hardware acceleration and gradient-based parameter calibration. Evaluated on six large-scale wildfires in the western United States, the model maintains IoU > 0.6 over 72-hour forecast horizons after a 10-day data assimilation window during which the model is fitted incrementally to observed perimeters; the resulting forecast is a conditional projection of fire growth under the suppression regime already ncoded in those observations.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Somatic variant detection in normal tissues from single-cell sequencing data

A crucial advantage of single-cell sequencing (SCS) is its ability to identify somatic variants in individual cells, enabling phylogenetic analysis of cellular populations within bulk tissues. While identifying somatic variants in tumor tissues via SCS has become a common practice, doing so in normal tissues remains challenging due to the rarity of somatic variants in normal cells. To evaluate the feasibility of somatic variant calling from widely available single-nucleus RNA-seq (snRNA-seq) and single-nucleus ATAC-seq (snATAC-seq) data, we profiled a Cell-line mix of six HapMap samples prepared by the SMaHT consortium using 10x Genomics 5' snRNA-seq (12k cells with 36k mean reads per cell) and snATAC-seq (11k cells with 14k median high-quality fragments per cell) for variant calling. PacBio long-read whole genome sequencing (WGS) data (109x) generated from individual cell lines were used as ground truth. Two computational tools, Monopogen and SComatic, were used for somatic variant calling from the SCS data. Monopogen achieved single nucleotide variant (SNV) detection accuracies of 93.30% in the snRNA-seq and 99.64% in the snATAC-seq data, both of which outperformed SComatic (74.35% and 94.29%, respectively). Monopogen also consistently detected somatic SNVs at cellular fractions as low as 0.5% (2.54% in snRNA and 0.81% in snATAC) in individual samples. Notably, snATAC-seq exhibited higher genomic coverage breadth and larger number of variants detected than snRNA-seq. While the SCS data have lower overall genome coverage than that of the bulk WGS, the single-cell level variant resolution allows Monopogen to assign variants to their cells of origin with over 80% accuracy in both RNA and ATAC modalities, thereby facilitating studies of clonal evolution and cell-type-specific mutagenesis. Other benchmarking methods were also evaluated (DeepVariant, Cellsnp-lite and Mutect2) for comparison. In conclusion, our study demonstrated the feasibility of performing reliable single-cell somatic mutation calling in a cell-line mixture and discussed the strengths and limitations of current computational methods when applied to normal tissues.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Context-Aware Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling of IVF Laboratory Environmental Conditions

arXiv:2606.20459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: IVF pregnancy rates are routinely modeled using patient-level variables, while high-resolution laboratory environmental data remain underutilized. We show that this is a missed opportunity. Rather than relying on raw sensor averages, we engineer 55 context-aware temporal features, including rolling thermal stability, simultaneous temperature-humidity adherence, peak stress duration, and post-stress recovery speed, that capture the dynamics of incubator microenvironments. On 61 weeks of data from an Asian IVF clinic, these features reduce cross-validated prediction error to 1.27%, compared to 3-5% for raw averages. We then train a hierarchical Bayesian Beta regression model that shares environmental effects across an Asian and a Northern European clinic via partial pooling, while preserving site-specific baselines. On held-out data from the Northern European clinic, the model achieves R2 = 0.86 and a 64% error reduction for the 35-39 age group over a naive baseline, demonstrating that structured environmental monitoring contains clinically meaningful, transferable signal.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

MAPS: A Novel Multi-Axial Projective Sphere for Geometrically Visualizing Higher d-Valued Quantum State-Space of Qudits

arXiv:2606.15801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visualizing the d-valued quantum state-space of quantum systems serves as a foundational pillar for the scientific research and practical applications in quantum computing and information science, where d >= 2. The 2-valued quantum states of a qubit are elegantly visualized on the three-dimensional Bloch sphere. In contrast, expanding this geometrical paradigm to visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit (d >= 3), e.g., a qutrit (d=3), ququadit (d=4), and quintit (d=5), leads to severe structural and topological complexities. This paper introduces a new generalized three-dimensional framework to effectively visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit, in the aspects of ease of illustration, structural simplicity, and natural representation for researchers and engineers. We called this new framework the "multi-axial projective sphere (MAPS)", which consists of n projectional intersecting spatial axes, where d-1

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

NetCause: Counterfactual Learning for Root Cause Analysis in Large-Scale Networks

arXiv:2606.13543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a learned model capture how faults propagate through a large-scale network and use this knowledge to causally attribute customer impact to its underlying root cause? Existing root cause analysis techniques often rely on static rules, correlation heuristics, or topology-local reasoning, which struggle to generalize in dynamic environments where faults propagate across complex physical and logical dependencies. We present NetCause, a self-supervised learning-based framework that models network incidents as graph-temporal processes and uses counterfactual simulation to rank candidate root causes. This approach produces an interpretable ranking of root cause hypotheses and integrates naturally with operator-defined mitigation and remediation actions. We train the model on over 1,500 incidents collected over six months from a leading cloud provider's production network and evaluate it on 31 expert-labeled incidents. NetCause consistently improves root cause ranking quality in the regime most relevant to operational decision-making, achieving a 16.1% accuracy improvement over a rule-based heuristic baseline. While training is computationally intensive, inference is lightweight, requiring only seconds of GPU runtime per incident (well below typical telemetry collection latencies).

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices Regarding Maternal Nutrition Counselling Among Frontline Health Workers in Udupi, Karnataka, India: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed-Methods Study

Background Indias maternal nutrition profile is undergoing a dual-direction shift, with persistent undernutrition coexisting alongside rising overweight and micronutrient deficiencies. Despite national efforts through Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and the National Health Mission (NHM), maternal dietary diversity remains suboptimal in India. Frontline health workers (FLWs) play a central role in delivering nutrition counselling; however, gaps remain between knowledge and its translation into practice, highlighting the need to strengthen training, applied competencies, and health system support within primary care settings. Objective To assess knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) regarding maternal nutrition counselling among FLWs and to explore contextual factors influencing counselling delivery. Methods A sequential explanatory mixed-methods study was conducted in Udupi, Karnataka, India. In phase one, 46 FLWs- Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), Community Health Officers (CHO), and Primary Health Care Officers (PHCO) completed a validated Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) questionnaire. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Kruskal-Wallis test, Spearman correlation, and exploratory multiple linear regression. In phase two, one focus group discussion with 21 participants was conducted and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results FLWs demonstrated moderate KAP scores (37.50 {+/-} 5.09), with lower scores observed in dietary diversity knowledge and counselling practices. CHOs and PHCOs had significantly higher knowledge (p < 0.001) and practice scores (p = 0.002) compared to ASHAs, while attitudes were similar across cadres. Knowledge was positively associated with practice ({rho} = 0.389, p = 0.008). Exploratory regression indicated that cadre and knowledge were associated with practice, while attitude was not statistically significant. Qualitative findings suggested that counselling was largely protocol-based and constrained by workload, limited counselling tools, economic barriers, and cultural food practices. Conclusion Despite positive attitudes towards maternal nutrition counselling, frontline health workers demonstrated gaps in knowledge and counselling practices. Mixed-methods findings suggest that counselling delivery is shaped by both provider competencies and health-system constraints, highlighting the need for implementation-focused strategies to strengthen maternal nutrition counselling in routine antenatal care.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Genetic Susceptibility to Incisional Hernia: Evaluation of Hernia Polygenic Risk Scores

Objectives: Incisional hernia (IH) affects 13-30% of people after abdominal surgery, resulting in substantial morbidity and costs. While clinical risk factors have been studied extensively, genomic risk for IH is incompletely understood. We aimed to evaluate the impact of polygenic risk scores (PRS) on IH risk prediction. Methods] We created and evaluated three PRS for abdominal hernia, ventral hernia and latent hernia susceptibility for prediction of IH in an institutional biobank. The primary outcome was defined as the diagnosis or repair of an IH based on ICD-9/10-CM/PCS and CPT codes. Clinical covariates included age, sex, body mass index (BMI), smoking status, index procedure type, and perioperative surgical site infection. A phenome-wide association study (PheWAS) was performed to assess clinical associations with increased PRS. We then tested the ability of the PRS to improve prediction for IH by modeling clinical covariates with and without PRS in patients who underwent abdominal surgery. Model performance was assessed using 10 iterations of 5-fold cross-validation to estimate Brier scores and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), which were compared using cross-model Bayesian analysis of variance. Results: In 55,809 subjects, assessed PRS was significantly associated with incisional, umbilical, and ventral hernia on PheWAS, with 1.19 greater odds of developing IH per 1-SD increase in PRS (95% CI: 1.13-1.25, P < 0.001). Of 9,909 subjects who underwent qualifying abdominal surgery, 706 developed IH. In this cohort, the latent hernia susceptibility PRS was associated with a 16% increased hazard of developing IH per 1-SD increase (HR 1.16; 95% CI: 1.07-1.26; P < 0.001). Compared to a predictive model using clinical covariates (Brier score = 0.047, 95% CI: 0.046-0.048; AUROC = 0.660, 95% CI: 0.653-0.666), addition of the PRS showed similar Brier score and AUROC estimates (Brier score = 0.047, 95% CI: 0.046-0.048; AUROC: 0.667, 95% CI: 0.661-0.673) at five years. Cross-model Bayesian analysis demonstrated >99% probability of practical equivalence when trying to detect a difference of [&ge;] 0.02. Conclusion: All three PRS for hernia were independently associated with IH, suggesting that genomic factors contribute significantly to IH development. However, none of the three PRS meaningfully improved clinical IH risk prediction in patients who underwent abdominal surgery. This suggests that clinical comorbidities and surgical techniques may be equally as important as genomic architecture.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

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

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.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp connectivity bounds for the vacant set of random interlacements

arXiv:2504.02777v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider percolation of the vacant set of random interlacements at intensity $u$ in dimensions three and higher, and derive lower bounds on the truncated two-point function for all values of $u>0$. These bounds are sharp up to principal exponential order for all $u$ in dimension three and all $u \neq u_\ast$ in higher dimensions, where $u_*$ refers to the critical parameter of the model, and they match the upper bounds derived in the article arXiv:2503.14497. In dimension three, our results further imply that the truncated two-point function grows at large distances $x$ at a rate that depends on $x$ only through its Euclidean norm, which offers a glimpse of the expected (Euclidean) invariance of the scaling limit at criticality. The rate function is atypical, it incurs a logarithmic correction and comes with an explicit pre-factor that converges to $0$ as the parameter $u$ approaches the critical point $u_*$ from either side. A particular challenge stems from the combined effects of lack of monotonicity due to the truncation in the super-critical phase, and the precise (rotationally invariant) controls we seek, that measure the effects of a certain "harmonic humpback" function. Among others, their derivation relies on rather fine estimates for hitting probabilities of the random walk in arbitrary direction $e$, which witness this invariance at the discrete level, and preclude straightforward applications of projection arguments.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SleepMaMi: A Universal Sleep Foundation Model for Integrating Macro- and Micro-structures

arXiv:2602.07628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While the shift toward unified foundation models has revolutionized many deep learning domains, sleep medicine remains largely restricted to task-specific models that focus on localized micro-structure features. These approaches often neglect the rich, multi-modal context of Polysomnography (PSG) and fail to capture the global macro-structure of a full night's sleep. To address this, we introduce SleepMaMi , a Sleep Foundation Model engineered to master both hour-long sleep architectures and fine-grained signal morphologies. Our framework utilizes a hierarchical dual-encoder design: a Macro-Encoder to model full-night temporal dependencies and a Micro-Encoder to capture short-term characteristics from biosignals. Macro-Encoder is trained via Demographic-Guided Contrastive Learning, which aligns overnight sleep patterns with objective subject metadata, such as age, sex and BMI to refine global representations. Micro-Encoder is optimized via a hybrid Masked Autoencoder (MAE) and multi-modal contrastive objective. Pre-trained on a massive corpus of $>$20,000 PSG recordings (158K hours),SleepMaMi outperforms or matches state-of-the-art existing foundation models across a diverse suite of downstream tasks, demonstrating superior generalizability and label-efficient adaptation for clinical sleep analysis.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LOCUS: Local Visual Cue Search for Enhancing Fine-Grained Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on fine-grained visual perception, even when high-resolution inputs preserve the necessary local details. We identify this limitation as visual context rot: decisive evidence may exist in the full image, yet fail to be reliably selected and used amid redundant visual context. We propose LOCUS (LOcal visual CUe Search), a training framework that teaches MLLMs to internalize local evidence search through a verifiable proxy task. During training, LOCUS provides a local crop as a visual cue and optimizes the model to recover its spatial support in the full image using an IoU-based reward. The visual cue is used only during training, leaving the standard image-question inference interface unchanged. Experiments across fine-grained perception, hallucination, general understanding, and reasoning benchmarks show that LOCUS improves localization-sensitive visual understanding while preserving broad capabilities. Attention analyses further indicate stronger focus on task-relevant evidence regions, suggesting that training-time visual cue search provides an effective route to internalized fine-grained evidence selection.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Hantavirus Disease in Uruguay: Trends and Mortality Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Introduction: Hantavirus disease is an emerging and potentially severe zoonosis of global distribution. In Uruguay, it is transmitted by rodents inhabiting peridomestic, suburban, and rural areas. Global incidence is estimated at 150,000 to 200,000 cases per year, with up to 300 annual cases in the Americas. Since 1997, Uruguay's Ministry of Public Health (MPH) has monitored Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), the most common clinical presentation in the region. By 2019, a total of 271 cases had been identified in the country, with an estimated mortality rate of nearly 50%. Objectives: To describe the clinical, epidemiological, and occupational characteristics of patients with Hantavirus disease in Uruguay during the pre-pandemic (2018-2019) and pandemic (2020-2021) periods. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional, observational study was conducted, including all serologically confirmed cases of Hantavirus infection reported to the MPH between 2018 and 2021. Clinical and demographic data were extracted from the mandatory reporting form for zoonotic diseases. Incidence and case fatality rates were calculated, and factors associated with fatal outcomes were analyzed. Results: A total of 58 confirmed cases were identified between 2018 and 2021. Most patients were male (62%), with a mean age of 36.5 years (SD 16). A decline in incidence was observed during 2020-2021, with no significant change in case fatality. Direct rodent exposure was the most frequently associated risk factor. Montevideo and Canelones were the most affected departments. Renal and pulmonary involvement were significantly associated with mortality. Conclusion: Hantavirus remains a relevant public health concern in Uruguay. Although a decrease in incidence was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic years, case fatality rates remained high. The findings underscore the need for sustained surveillance and early recognition, particularly in urbanizing regions.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantifying Consistency in LLM Logical Reasoning via Structural Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.17312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can arrive at the same answer through reasoning paths that are unstable, contradictory, or difficult to rank consistently – a failure mode especially prevalent in multi-step deductive reasoning. Existing methods assess reliability primarily through output dispersion – measuring how much sampled answers differ – but this discards a complementary signal: whether the model can consistently rank competing reasoning candidates. We propose structural uncertainty, a consistency-aware framework derived from the stability of self-preference-induced rankings over sampled reasoning solutions. Given a query, we generate multiple candidate solutions and ask the model to judge pairwise preferences among its own outputs. We aggregate self-preferences into ranking distributions via Bradley-Terry modeling with PageRank, and decompose the signal into two entropy-based components: across-trial ranking instability and within-trial candidate ambiguity. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, structural signals provide information complementary to answer dispersion: on logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, the combination improves identification of unreliable instances, while on factual retrieval the structural signal collapses toward uniformity, diagnosing a regime boundary where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is uninformative. The two components relate differently to accuracy: within-trial ambiguity correlates positively with correctness – consistent with settings where multiple plausible solution paths remain competitive – while across-trial instability correlates negatively, signaling unreliable reasoning. Structural uncertainty is best understood not as a universal confidence estimator, but as a regime-sensitive evaluator of logical reasoning consistency.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

StatefulDiscovery: Evidence-Calibrated Claim Formation in Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

arXiv:2606.11851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended scientific discovery asks agents to move beyond executing analyses for predefined questions. Across multiple rounds of exploration, a discovery agent must decide which phenomena warrant investigation while avoiding overinterpretation, where emerging claims exceed the evidential scope of the analyses supporting them. This creates an evidence-calibration problem: the exploration trajectory must be coupled with claim status so that evidence can guide both what to investigate next and what can be claimed. We introduce StatefulDiscovery, a discovery framework that externalizes investigation state and uses it to coordinate frontier selection, evidence acquisition, and claim adjudication. We evaluate StatefulDiscovery across 40 real-data discovery tasks. Compared with several baselines, StatefulDiscovery produces more claims overall judged to be both well-supported and high-value. Ablations indicate that structured hypotheses, local adjudication, and frontier control contribute to performance. Together, these results suggest that explicit discovery state can couple exploration with evidence-calibrated claim formation.

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

Generalizing Beyond Suboptimality: Offline Reinforcement Learning Learns Effective Scheduling through Random Solutions

arXiv:2509.10303v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Online reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have demonstrated strong performance on Job Shop Scheduling (JSP) and Flexible JSP (FJSP) problems by learning scheduling policies through direct interaction with simulated environments. However, these methods often require extensive training interactions, limiting their sample efficiency and practical applicability. Motivated by this challenge, we introduce Conservative Discrete Quantile Actor-Critic (CDQAC), an offline RL algorithm that learns effective scheduling policies directly from static, suboptimal datasets. CDQAC couples a quantile-based critic with delayed policy updates to estimate the return distribution of machine-operation pairs. Extensive experiments on JSP and FJSP benchmarks demonstrate that CDQAC consistently outperforms the data-generating heuristics, surpasses state-of-the-art offline and online RL baselines, and is highly sample efficient, requiring only 1 to 5% of the original dataset to learn high-quality policies. Our analysis suggests that, in scheduling, offline RL performance is governed mainly by state-action coverage rather than the quality of individual trajectories. Scheduling couples a dense reward aligned with the makespan objective with equal-length trajectories across heuristics, enabling effective learning from a broad range of behaviors. Consistent with this observation, datasets generated by a simple random heuristic with broader coverage let it outperform policies trained on datasets produced by stronger heuristics such as Genetic Algorithms.