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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Minimum measurements quantum protocol for band structure calculation

arXiv:2511.04389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protocols for quantum measurement are an essential part of quantum computing. Measurements are no longer confined to the final step of computation but are increasingly embedded within quantum circuits as integral components of noise-resilient algorithms. However, each observable typically requires a distinct measurement basis, often demanding a different circuit configuration. As the number of such configurations typically grows with the number of qubits, measurements constitute a major bottleneck. Focusing on electronic structure calculations in crystalline systems, we propose a measurement protocol that restricts the required measurement configurations to an absolute minimum of just three, independent of the number of qubits. This makes it one of the few known protocols that do not scale with qubit number. In particular, we derive the measurement protocol from the symmetries of tight-binding (TB) Hamiltonians and implement it within the Orthogonal-Ansatz Variational Quantum Eigensolver (OA-VQE) algorithm. We demonstrate its performance on three systems, namely a two-dimensional CuO$_2$ square lattice (3 qubits), bilayer graphene with hexagonal (Honeycomb) lattice (4 qubits) and three-dimensional diamond lattice (10 qubits). Beyond tight-binding systems, the protocol can be extended to enable efficient initial state preparation for many-body Hamiltonians, such as multi-orbital Hubbard models in a momentum space.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol and Dementia Risk: Integrating Mendelian Randomization and Target Trial Emulation Within the Heart-Brain Axis

Background: The heart-brain axis links cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease through shared vascular and inflammatory mechanisms. Although low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is an established causal factor in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), its relationship with dementia remains uncertain, with midlife elevations associated with increased risk but late-life associations often appearing null or inverse. To address this cholesterol paradox, we integrated mendelian randomization (MR) with an active-comparator new-user target trial emulation. Methods: We applied a triangulated causal inference framework integrating two-sample MR with observational target trial emulation. Genetic variants associated with LDL-C were used as instrumental variables to evaluate Alzheimer disease (AD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and any dementia (AnyDem), with causal estimates derived using inverse-variance weighted models and sensitivity analyses for heterogeneity and pleiotropy. In parallel, an active-comparator new-user design compared statin versus ezetimibe initiation among adults aged 60 years or older using propensity score (PS) overlap weighting and Cox proportional hazards models to evaluate cardiovascular and dementia outcomes. Results: Genetically predicted LDL-C was associated with increased risk of DLB (OR 1.65, 95% CI 1.30-2.10; p

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CogniFold: Always-On Proactive Memory via Cognitive Folding

Existing agent memory remains predominantly reactive and retrieval-based, lacking the capacity to autonomously organize experience into persistent cognitive structure. Toward genuinely autonomous agents, we introduce CogniFold, a brain-inspired "always-on" agent memory designed for the next generation of proactive assistants. CogniFold continuously folds fragmented event streams into self-emerging cognitive structures, bootstrapping progressively higher-level cognition from incoming events and accumulated knowledge. We ground this by extending Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory from two layers (hippocampus, neocortex) to three, adding a prefrontal intent layer. Emulating the prefrontal cortex as the locus of intentional control and decision-making, CogniFold achieves this through graph-topology self-organization: cognitive structures proactively assemble under the stream, merge when semantically similar, decay when stale, relink through associative recall, and surface intents when concept-cluster density crosses a threshold. We evaluate structural formation using CogEval-Bench, demonstrating that CogniFold uniquely produces memory structures that match cognitive expectations and concept emergence. Furthermore, across eight downstream benchmarks – two probing long-term conversational memory (LoCoMo, LongMemEval) and six spanning other cognitive domains – we validate that CogniFold simultaneously performs robustly on conventional memory tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/OpenNorve/CogniFold.

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

A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Well-posedness of stochastic parabolic equations with gradient nonlinearities and applications to phase-field models

作者:

arXiv:2606.15425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study well-posedness of stochastic parabolic equations with gradient nonlinearities. Our analysis is based on recent maximal-regularity frameworks for nonlinear stochastic parabolic equations in critical spaces. We extend the existing results by controlling drift and noise coefficient separately. This way we can allow for less regular driving noise in case of subcritical dispersion coefficients. Our approach, based on gluings of local solutions, moreover implies new continuation criteria. We then apply our existence result and the continuation criteria to show global well-posedness of phase-field models of moving boundary problems.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Shapley-Inspired Feature Weighting in $k$-means with No Additional Hyperparameters

arXiv:2508.07952v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Clustering algorithms often assume all features contribute equally to the data structure, an assumption that usually fails in high-dimensional or noisy settings. Feature weighting methods can address this, but most require additional parameter tuning. We propose SHARK (Shapley Reweighted $k$-means), a feature-weighted clustering algorithm motivated by the use of Shapley values from cooperative game theory to quantify feature relevance, which requires no additional parameters beyond those in $k$-means. We prove that the $k$-means objective can be decomposed into a sum of per-feature Shapley values, providing an axiomatic foundation for unsupervised feature relevance and reducing Shapley computation from exponential to polynomial time. SHARK iteratively re-weights features by the inverse of their Shapley contribution, emphasising informative dimensions and down-weighting irrelevant ones, and is equivalent to replacing the arithmetic mean of feature dispersions with their harmonic mean. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets show that SHARK consistently matches or outperforms existing methods, achieving superior robustness and accuracy, particularly in scenarios where noise may be present. Software: https://github.com/rickfawley/SHARK.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Korzhinskii-Net: Physics-Informed Neural Network for Sub-Surface Mineral Prospectivity Modelling

作者:

arXiv:2606.13695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mineral prospectivity modelling (MPM) underpins exploration economics, yet most operational pipelines reduce to data-driven classifiers trained on shallow surface proxies. Such models are blind to the subsurface physics that actually localises ore: heat advection, fluid flow, and lithology-dependent precipitation. We present Korzhinskii-Net, a 2-D radial physics-informed neural network (PINN) that couples Darcy flow, advective-diffusive heat transport, and a softplus-saturated reaction rate into a single differentiable forward model, weakly supervised by surface and remote-sensing proxies. The network is named after Dmitri S. Korzhinskii (1899-1985), whose theory of infiltration metasomatism provides the physical scaffold. We evaluate Korzhinskii-Net on five ore provinces spanning four commodity classes – Norilsk (Ni-Cu-PGE), Pechenga (Ni-Cu sulphide), Udokan (sandstone-hosted Cu), Sukhoi Log (orogenic Au), and Mirny (kimberlitic diamond) – under a fair, leakage-controlled 5-fold cross-validation protocol with hard ring-shaped negatives. Korzhinskii-Net attains a mean PR-AUC of 0.885 versus 0.281 for the strongest classical baseline (gradient boosting), and a mean fractional rank of 0.019 versus 0.413. The improvement is consistent across all five provinces and four commodity systems, suggesting that physics-informed differentiable simulators, even when constrained only by global open-data proxies, can recover localisation patterns that pure feature-based learners systematically miss. We release the full pipeline and evaluation harness as open source.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Resonant Minds: Closed-Loop Social Avatars with Theory of Mind

Creating lifelike digital humans with genuine social intelligence requires unifying cognitive reasoning and multimodal generation within a coherent framework. Current approaches treat these as separate tasks: Large Language Models excel at dialogue but lack embodied expression, while diffusion-based talking head models achieve visual fidelity but ignore social cognition. To bridge this gap, we propose a closed-loop dual-agent framework integrating perception, social reasoning, and expression into a continuous interaction cycle. The perception module analyzes partners' multimodal behaviors from video, while the social reasoning module infers hidden mental states through Theory of Mind and selects responses via an ensemble mechanism. The expression module then generates emotion-controllable videos that jointly synthesize speaker speech and facial expressions with listener reactive behaviors, capturing bidirectional dynamics absent in prior work. We further construct a hierarchical Persona-Scenario dataset with psychologically grounded personas and private social goals to support evaluation under information asymmetry. Experiments on this dataset demonstrate competitive or superior performance on both dialogue quality and video generation metrics. Notably, our method surpasses even the full-information Script mode on key dialogue quality dimensions, suggesting that explicit mental state inference under uncertainty can elicit more thoughtful dialogue than unrestricted information access. Project page: https://resonantminds.github.io/.

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

Token Complexity Theory for AI-Augmented Computing

作者:

arXiv:2606.12647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-augmented computing delegates natural language queries, code generation requests, and other open-ended tasks to a cluster of AI models that processes queries and generates responses. This paradigm introduces a resource dimension that neither classical time nor space complexity captures: the cost of sending queries to and receiving responses from such a cluster. We introduce token complexity, a formal resource measure defined as the minimum expected token cost to achieve a specified level of output quality on a task, and develop a taxonomy classifying AI systems by the strength of their probabilistic properties. We develop token complexity within the framework of AI-Oracle Turing machines, in which a probabilistic Turing machine interacts with a stochastic oracle via dedicated query and response tapes. We prove basic theorems establishing that token complexity behaves as expected: monotonicity (higher quality costs more tokens), convexity (quality improvements become progressively more expensive), price sensitivity (small price changes produce bounded cost changes), and price-relativity of task ordering (the token complexity ordering of tasks can reverse depending on the query-to-response cost ratio). We prove that the complexity frontier, defined as the set of all feasible resource bounds in tokens, time, and space, is non-empty, upward-closed, and convex.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Bridging Spherical Black-Box Optimizers

arXiv:2606.25761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When gradient information is unavailable, black-box optimization (BBO) methods provide a practical alternative. While Evolution Strategies (ES), Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO), Optimization via Integration (OVI), and related methods have each been studied independently, their connections remain underexplored. We unify these approaches within a common theoretical framework, revealing that they differ primarily in two design choices: fitness aggregation (controlling sharpness preference) and consensus scope (controlling modality). Leveraging these insights, we introduce hybrid optimizers that interpolate between existing methods. Our ES-OVI hybrid allows explicit control over the preference for flat minima, enabling a trade-off between performance and robustness in continuous control tasks. Our CBO-OVI hybrids combine the higher-dimensional efficiency of parametric methods with the multimodal capabilities of particle-based approaches, achieving competitive results on language model merging under limited evaluation budgets. We validate our methods on standard BBO benchmarks and higher-dimensional locomotion tasks, demonstrating that the hybrid methods can outperform their constituent algorithms.

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

A theory of learning data statistics in diffusion models, from easy to hard

arXiv:2603.12901v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models, their learning dynamics remain poorly understood. We address this issue first by empirically showing that standard diffusion models trained on natural images exhibit a distributional simplicity bias, learning simple, pair-wise input statistics before specializing to higher-order correlations. We reproduce this behaviour in simple denoisers trained on a minimal data model, the mixed cumulant model, where we precisely control both pair-wise and higher-order correlations of the inputs. We identify a scalar invariant of the model that governs the sample complexity of learning pair-wise and higher-order correlations that we call the diffusion information exponent, in analogy to related invariants in different learning paradigms. Using this invariant, we prove that the denoiser learns simple, pair-wise statistics of the inputs at linear sample complexity, while more complex higher-order statistics, such as the fourth cumulant, require at least cubic sample complexity. We also prove that the sample complexity of learning the fourth cumulant is linear if pair-wise and higher-order statistics share a correlated latent structure. Our work describes a key mechanism for how diffusion models can learn distributions of increasing complexity.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Synthetic Resonance: A Framework for Growth-Oriented Human-AI Relationships

arXiv:2606.18265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As human relationships with artificial intelligence systems become increasingly frequent and sustained, existing language and theory fail to accurately capture the nature of these affiliations. Common descriptors such as mutual understanding, connection, or friendship risk anthropomorphizing systems that lack subjective experience, while dominant frameworks tend to reduce AI to either a tool or a threat. In this paper, I introduce the concept of synthetic resonance as an integrative framework for understanding human-AI relationships. Synthetic resonance describes how relationships humans define as meaningful can emerge between a human and an AI system without the need to attribute shared feelings or mutual awareness. I argue that synthetic resonance is best understood as a structured, dynamic pattern of interaction that can produce a sense of relationship without the presence of a second experiencing subject. By clarifying this distinction, the concept of synthetic resonance offers a more precise way of conceptualizing human-AI relationships and highlights their potential value and ethical implications. I also call for more research that tests the processes and outcomes of synthetic resonance.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Navigating Distribution Shifts in Medical Image Analysis: A Survey

Medical Image Analysis (MedIA) has become indispensable in modern healthcare, enhancing clinical diagnostics and personalized treatment. Despite the remarkable advancements supported by deep learning (DL) technologies, their practical deployment faces challenges posed by distribution shifts, where models trained on specific datasets underperform on others from varying hospitals, or patient populations. To address this issue, researchers have been actively developing strategies to increase the adaptability of DL models, enabling their effective use in unfamiliar environments. This paper systematically reviews approaches that apply DL techniques to MedIA systems affected by distribution shifts. Rather than organizing existing methods by technical characteristics, we explicitly bridge real-world clinical constraints – such as limited data accessibility, strict privacy requirements, and heterogeneous collaboration protocols – with the technical paradigms able to address them. By establishing this connection between operational constraints and methodological evolution, we categorize existing works into Joint Training, Federated Learning, Fine-tuning, and Domain Generalization, each aligned with specific healthcare scenarios. Beyond this taxonomy, our empirical analysis suggests that, as domain information becomes progressively less accessible across these paradigms, performance improvements become increasingly constrained, and further uncovers a gradual shift in methodological focus from explicit distribution alignment toward uncertainty-aware modeling, ultimately pointing to the need for more deployability-aware design in real-world MedIA.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

AutoSpecNER: A Fine-Grained Named Entity Recognition Dataset for Vehicle Specification Extraction

Vehicle advertisements contain rich specification information, but automotive NER resources remain limited. We introduce AutoSpecNER, an expert-annotated dataset for fine-grained entity recognition in vehicle listings. The dataset includes 659 advertisements from a popular car-selling website, with over 10,000 entities annotated across 15 categories, including MODEL, ENGINE_SPEC, and BATTERY_CAPACITY. Annotation quality was validated through inter-annotator agreement, achieving an average score of 91.5%. We benchmark rule-based extraction, fine-tuned transformer encoders, and large language models. DeBERTa achieves the best performance with a 90% micro-F1 score, outperforming the rule-based baseline (43%) and the strongest large language model (77.8%).

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Interactor: Agentic RL oriented Iterative Creation for Ad Description Generation in Sponsored Search

This paper focuses on automatically generating informative ad descriptions in sponsored search. Unlike ad titles which are usually optimized to attract user click feedbacks, ad descriptions have a longer text span and possess the potential of incorporating world knowledge to address user search intents while presenting the fine-grained selling points of the ads. We propose Interactor, a multi-turn iterative creation framework optimized with agentic RL for ad description generation. The generation model acts as a policy that interacts with a customized environment consisting of multiple generative reward models. Given initial generations by the policy, the customized GenRMs evaluate multi-dimensional qualities including knowledge capacity and landing page consistency, providing both binary signals and reasoning feedbacks. The policy then iteratively refines the descriptions based on such feedbacks to ensure continuous improvement. Experiments on industrial datasets show that the Interactor framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in generating knowledge-rich and faithful ad descriptions. Since May 2026, it has been deployed online in a leading search ads system, contributing to both ad revenue and user experience.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Experimental probe of quantum coherence in top-quark pair production

arXiv:2602.21069v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate quantum coherence in top–antitop spin states produced at the LHC using the $l_1$-norm of coherence applied to the reconstructed spin density matrix. Combining Standard Model predictions with recent CMS measurements of spin-correlation coefficients, we study the dependence of coherence on the invariant mass $M_{t\bar t}$ and the scattering angle. We find that coherence is large both near the production threshold and in boosted central events, whereas an intermediate-mass region exhibits reduced interference strength and enhanced sensitivity to radiative effects. This non-monotonic kinematic behavior originates from the helicity-interference structure of the underlying QCD production amplitudes. Recasting the CMS measurements in terms of quantum coherence yields values that are broadly consistent with Standard Model expectations. Our results establish quantum coherence as an experimentally accessible probe of spin dynamics in top-quark pair production and demonstrate its potential as a precision observable for studies of the top-quark spin-density matrix at hadron colliders.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Repeated Shared Access Enables Grokking, but Edit Propagation Depends on an Addressable Memory

作者:

arXiv:2606.20737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study factual edit propagation in a controlled synthetic knowledge-graph QA setting using a 2x2 grid that crosses loop recurrence with shared-memory access: a dense transformer (Dense), a looped transformer (Loop), a dense backbone with shared memory (Dense+Mem), and a looped backbone with shared memory (loop-memory coupling, LMC). The two factors dissociate. For learning, both routes to repeated shared access – looped recomputation and repeated memory rereading – cross the out-of-distribution (OOD) grokking barrier that Dense fails, so repeated shared access is the behavioral regularity, not a specific architecture. For editing, the substrates split along a different axis: applying a single localized factual edit (conditioned on direct success) and measuring 2-hop propagation on a shared pre-edit-correct set, the edit propagates strongly in both memory-bearing cells (LMC 0.78-0.92, Dense+Mem 0.71-0.96) and only weakly in the memory-free ones (Loop 0.04-0.30, Dense 0.00-0.03). The split is along the memory axis, not the loop axis: every memory-bearing seed exceeds every memory-free seed, with no detectable difference between the two memory cells. Crucially Dense+Mem has no recurrence, so the propagating ingredient is an addressable site that an edit can write to and later computation rereads, not loop recomputation; Loop is at best a partial intermediate. The affordance survives coarsening the store (N=128 to N=13): propagation attenuates but the memory/no-memory split persists, so fine granularity buys precision rather than the affordance itself. These results dissociate learning competence from editing affordance – repeated shared access suffices to grok, but edit propagation depends on whether the substrate exposes an addressable memory that the forward computation can write to and later reread, an affordance that loop recurrence provides only partially.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human-on-the-Loop Orchestration for AI-Assisted Legal Discovery

arXiv:2606.19812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in electronic discovery (e-discovery), where compounding errors across multi-step reasoning chains can constitute legal malpractice. Unlike single-turn retrieval, agentic workflows operating over privileged document corpora exhibit a class of failure we term "trajectory collapse": an early misclassification silently propagates, rendering an entire privilege review invalid. This paper makes three contributions. First, we propose a structured taxonomy of agentic failures in legal information retrieval, organized by functional stage. Second, we introduce a four-layer verification architecture – spanning planning, reasoning, execution, and uncertainty quantification – designed to intercept these failures before they compound. Third, we present a preliminary simulation study on a synthetic e-discovery corpus that demonstrates how mandatory Human-on-the-Loop (HOTL) escalation thresholds reduce privilege-waiver risk relative to fully autonomous baselines. Our results suggest that calibrated uncertainty thresholds can reduce privilege-waiver risk by up to 61% versus fully autonomous deployment, while routing fewer than one quarter of documents to attorney review.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

CoBit: Language Modeling with Bitstream Diffusion

Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel, order-agnostic generation, but on standard benchmarks they have historically lagged behind autoregressive models in sample quality and diversity. Recent continuous flow and diffusion approaches have narrowed this gap. In this work, we further close the autoregressive gap by modeling text as a continuous diffusion process over fixed-width binary bitstreams. We refer to the resulting model as CoBit (Continuous Bitstream Diffusion). Our approach represents semantic tokens as analog bit sequences and uses a matched-filter residual parameterization to isolate contextual learning from analytic independent-bit posteriors. Crucially, we adopt a stochastic sampler that applies Langevin-type corrections gated by the entropy-rate profile, concentrating stochasticity in high-information regions while remaining nearly deterministic elsewhere. On LM1B, our 130M-parameter model reaches a generative perplexity (GenPPL) of 59.76 at matched real-data entropy (4.31) using 256 neural function evaluations (NFEs), outperforming prior DLM baselines and reaching the autoregressive reference. On OpenWebText (OWT), our sampler establishes a new continuous-DLM Pareto frontier, achieving GenPPL 27.06 at entropy 5.26 using 4x fewer steps than previous 1024-NFE baselines. Scaling the same recipe to a 462M-parameter model (CoBit-M) further improves the OWT GenPPL-entropy frontier over the 130M model (CoBit-S) and over medium-scale continuous and discrete DLM baselines, reaching GenPPL 19.5 at entropy 5.40, near real-data entropy (5.44), and approaching pretrained GPT-2 Medium over the high-quality region. As an additional benefit, bitstream diffusion removes the O(V) vocabulary scaling bottleneck of standard DLMs: by predicting O(log V) bitwise logits via semantic bit-patching, it lowers memory and raises throughput, a scalable paradigm as vocabulary sizes grow.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Where Did the Variability Go? From Vibe Coding to Product Lines by Regeneration

arXiv:2606.19042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In vibe coding, an emerging AI-driven paradigm, an LLM generates an entire program from a natural language prompt, but what happens to the variability that traditional software engineering carefully builds into code? To answer this question, we conducted an exploratory analysis on 10 vibe coded C/C++ projects, which suggests that there is near-zero in-artifact variability, i.e., at compile and runtime. All variability decisions are resolved at a single new binding time, generation time, the moment the LLM produces the source code. Rather than treating this as a defect to fix, we propose Variability by Regeneration (VbR), to our knowledge the first product-line approach in which the LLM acts as the derivation engine, generating a purpose-built, free of dead code binary for each variant from a declarative specification, while a variant dispatcher transparently routes user requests to the matching binary. We formalise VbR, contrast it with classical SPL derivation, and demonstrate its full pipeline on a wc product family. For SPL engineering, variability in AI-generated software belongs in the specification, not in the code.

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

Thinking with Visual Grounding

arXiv:2606.16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) can produce natural-language reasoning traces, these traces often leave the supporting image regions implicit, making them hard to verify and difficult to supervise. We introduce visually grounded thinking, a reasoning process in which models interleave natural-language thoughts with explicit point or box groundings of the visual evidence used at each step. This lets the model express intermediate reasoning in language while grounding key objects in the image regions they refer to. To train this behavior, we construct a scalable synthesis pipeline that distills correct visual reasoning traces, extracts the visual objects required by the traces, grounds them with a SAM3-based agent, and derives aligned point and box supervision from the resulting masks. We further propose grounding-aware reinforcement learning, which combines answer correctness rewards with dense grounding rewards that score whether generated object references match the correct image evidence. Across two counting benchmarks and four spatial reasoning benchmarks, adding visually grounded thinking to Gemma3-4B-IT consistently improves performance over the original model and the non-grounded thinking baseline. On spatial reasoning, the visually grounded thinking 4B models match, and in some cases surpass, Gemma3-27B-IT from the same model family. Our analysis shows that point grounding is well suited to counting, while box grounding benefits most from explicit grounding rewards on spatial tasks. Overall, our results show that VLMs think better when their intermediate thoughts are tied to the image regions that make them true.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Beyond AHI: An Interpretable Causal-Discovery-Guided Framework for Sleep Recovery in Connected Health

arXiv:2606.18506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Objective sleep assessment relies on polysomnography (PSG), yet clinical impact is often better reflected in patient-reported outcomes (PROs) such as sleepiness and fatigue. Existing summary indices, including the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI), provide limited insight into the multidomain physiology underlying functional recovery. We propose an interpretable, causal-discovery–guided framework for deriving a hierarchical Sleep Recovery Score (SRS) from multimodal PSG. Using two large population cohorts (MESA: n=1540; MrOS: n=825), we apply directed acyclic graph (DAG) learning to identify candidate physiological drivers spanning respiratory burden, hypoxic burden, sleep fragmentation, sleep architecture, and autonomic regulation. Although derived from clinical PSG, these domains map naturally to sensing streams increasingly available in connected health technologies, including wearable ECG, oximetry, and sleep-stage estimation devices. To preserve mechanistic plausibility, we introduce a two-stage screening process that combines physiology-based constraints with constrained LLM-assisted auditing to identify and remove structural confounders and construct-overlapping variables. Across cohorts, these five domains emerge as recurrent physiological domains associated with recovery, and the resulting SRS shows up to 2.5$\times$ stronger alignment with perceived recovery than AHI. By linking multimodal sleep physiology to patient-centered outcomes through an interpretable, bias-aware, and domain structured framework, this work provides a practical foundation for recovery modeling across both clinical sleep studies and emerging smart and connected health settings.

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

FlexiBrain: Resolution-Agnostic Voxel-Level Encoding for Native fMRI

arXiv:2606.11500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The success of large-scale deep learning models in neuroscience is fundamentally constrained by severe data heterogeneity. Native fMRI data aggregated from diverse sources exhibit substantial variation in both spatial and temporal resolutions. Consequently, most existing frameworks rely on lengthy, rigid preprocessing pipelines that enforce uniformity across datasets. This practice introduces two critical limitations: (1) potential degradation of subject-specific anatomical information; (2) significant computational overhead, often requiring hours of processing per subject. Here, we propose FlexiBrain, a resolution-agnostic voxel-level encoding framework for native fMRI based on Mamba-JEPA. FlexiBrain defines patch sizes in real-world physical units and employs a dynamic patch resizing, thereby bypassing destructive spatial standardization while enabling direct ingestion of data in native space. We instantiate the framework using an efficient Mamba-JEPA backbone to model high-dimensional 4D fMRI signals. Across five diverse downstream neuroscience tasks, FlexiBrain consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving gains of up to 12 percentage points without external data augmentation. Importantly, FlexiBrain functions as a seamless plug-in module, substantially reducing preprocessing costs and accelerating the development of robust voxel-level fMRI foundation models. Code is available at https://github.com/OneMore1/FlexiBrain.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

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

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.