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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

TriFlow: Generating Artist-Like 3D Mesh Topology via Nearest-Vertex Vector Fields

We present TriFlow, a new generative approach for producing compact 3D meshes with artist-like triangle topology directly from input geometry conditions such as signed distance fields. Our key insight is to represent mesh topology as a nearest-vertex vector field (NVF) defined over the surface, where each point encodes its association to the nearest triangle vertex in the local barycentric frame. We train a latent flow-matching model to synthesize this field, enabling topology generation conditioned on the input geometry. To extract a coherent mesh, we cluster surface regions using the generated NVF and guide a constrained quadric error metric (QEM) mesh simplification with topology-aware optimization. This yields output meshes that closely match the input geometry while exhibiting structured, artist-like connectivity. Experiments demonstrate that TriFlow achieves stronger generalization and significantly improved topology quality compared to state-of-the-art learning-based approaches, alongside 90% lower Chamfer Distance and an 8x speedup.

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

Be Your Own Teacher: Steering Protein Language Models via Unsupervised Reward Optimization

arXiv:2606.18961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for controllable biomolecular design, yet their post-training adaptation typically relies on costly wet-lab validation or curated preference datasets. To overcome this supervision bottleneck, we introduce unsupervised reward optimization of PLMs, a comprehensive framework for steerable protein generation without ground-truth labels. Our key insight is that task-agnostic rewards, which combine intrinsic model uncertainty with extrinsic semantic consistency informed by protein representation models, exhibit strong correlation with controllability measures across base models and temperature regimes. Building upon this discovery, we propose two offline algorithms: Soft Reward Optimization (SRO) and Binarized Reward Optimization (BRO), which effectively maximize the classical RLHF objective induced by these proxy rewards. Extensive experiments on compositional out-of-distribution prompts demonstrate that both methods significantly outperform competitive baselines (DPO, KTO), while approaching oracle performance across multiple sampling temperatures, model scales and protein families. Moreover, PLMs fine-tuned with unsupervised rewards can achieve consistently higher coverage compared to their base model in pass@k evaluations. By enabling self-improvement of PLMs through their own generated experience, our framework provides a scalable pathway toward controllable biomolecular design in settings where labeled preferences or experimental feedback are scarce or unavailable.

03.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Machine learning-driven identification of virulence determinants in <i>Borrelia burgdorferi</i> associated with human dissemination

by Hoa Thanh Nguyen, Catherine A. Brissette Lyme disease, the most common tick-borne infectious disease in the United States, presents with highly variable clinical outcomes, ranging from localized erythema migrans to severe disseminated complications affecting the heart, joints, and nervous system. The bacterial determinants underlying this phenotypic variation remain largely unknown, limiting our ability to predict disease progression and optimize treatment strategies. Here, we applied machine learning (ML) approaches to identify specific amino acid residues within surface-exposed virulence factors that predict human dissemination phenotypes. Utilizing the published whole genome sequences from 299 clinical Borrelia burgdorferi isolates collected from the United States and Slovenia over a 30-year period (1992–2021), we extracted and characterized translated amino acid sequences (variants) of seven known virulence factors (BB_0406, BBK32, DbpA, OspA, OspC, P66, and RevA). Protein variants were classified based on their association with disseminated versus localized infections using clinical metadata. Cramér’s V analysis revealed possible strong associations between dissemination phenotypes and five adhesins: BBK32, DbpA, OspC, P66, and RevA. We developed ML models using five algorithms with multiple feature selection strategies, achieving robust predictive performance for DbpA, OspC, and RevA variants (all performance metrics > 0.7). Feature importance analysis identified 57, 29, and 42 key predictive residues for DbpA, OspC, and RevA, respectively. Notably, B-cell epitope prediction revealed significant enrichment of ML-identified residues within predicted epitope regions for OspC (11 overlapping residues, OR = 3.57, p = 0.006) and RevA (12 overlapping residues, OR = 2.37, p = 0.048), suggesting these residues may influence immune recognition and bacterial persistence. This study establishes the first computational framework linking Borrelia protein sequence variants to clinical dissemination phenotypes, providing molecular insights into Lyme disease pathogenesis that may inform the development of improved diagnostics and therapeutic targets.

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

TimeVista: Exploring and Exploiting Vision-Language Models as Judges for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality time series forecasting is pivotal for real-world decision-making. However, traditional point-wise metrics often fail to reveal complex temporal patterns and align poorly with human intuitive preferences. While the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' paradigm has revolutionized text evaluation by providing flexible, human-aligned judgment, its application to time series remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as judges for time series forecasting, harnessing their ability to comprehend time series plots grounded in textual information. Specifically, we propose a novel framework integrating micro- and macro-level judgments informed by contextual information to evaluate time series forecasting. To this end, we introduce TimeVista, a comprehensive VLM-as-a-Judge benchmark comprising 5563 time series samples paired with detailed evaluation rubrics. Extensive meta-evaluations demonstrate that VLMs are highly reliable judges, achieving significantly higher consistency with human preferences than conventional metrics. Building upon our benchmark, we comprehensively assess recent Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) under the VLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Our results demonstrate that VLMs serve as robust and interpretable judges, providing a comprehensive, human-aligned standard for evaluating time series models.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Development and Validation of Machine Learning Models for Predicting Initiation of Emergency Dialysis in Advanced Chronic Kidney Disease

Background: Initiation of emergency dialysis, often requiring temporary catheter owing to unprepared definitive vascular access, is associated with infectious and vascular complications and suggests advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD) care gaps. Previous studies focused on kidney failure or dialysis timing. This study aimed to predict initiation of emergency dialysis using machine learning and baseline data. Methods: This retrospective cohort study used the Japan Medical Data Center claims data (2014-2022). Adults with an estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR)

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

NSVQ: Mitigating Codebook Collapse by Stabilizing Encoder Drift in Vector Quantization

Vector quantization is central to modern generative modeling pipelines, but large-codebook VQ models often suffer from codebook collapse. We identify encoder drift as a key driver of this failure: as the encoder moves the latent distribution, sparsely updated code vectors can lag behind, lose assignments, and increase quantization error, creating a feedback loop through the straight-through estimator. We propose NSVQ, a non-stationary-aware VQ training strategy that combines a dense non-stationary embedding loss, codebook replacement, and stage-wise encoder freezing. NSVQ first helps the codebook track encoder drift during early training, then freezes the encoder to consolidate the codebook under a fixed latent geometry, and finally reintroduces adversarial refinement. Experiments on ImageNet-1k show that NSVQ improves reconstruction quality while maintaining full codebook utilization. On ImageNet-1k at 128$\times$128 with 65,536 codes, NSVQ reduces rFID from 2.39 to 2.10 compared with SimVQ, while both methods maintain 100\% utilization. Additional latent diffusion experiments show that NSVQ also improves downstream ImageNet generation FID.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

COVID-19 containment policies and hyperglycemia in pregnancy: correlation with the Stringency Index in a nationwide Belgian cohort

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, gestational diabetes (GD) prevalence showed variable changes across regions, with most reporting increases and others decreases; however, its association with perinatal outcomes in Belgium remains unknown. We aimed to compare the prevalence of hyperglycemia in pregnancy (HIP) in 2020 versus 2019 and examined the correlation between HIP prevalence and pandemic-related restrictions measured by the Stringency Index (SI) and evaluate neonatal weight percentiles changes. Methods: We included all singleton live births in Belgium in 2019 and 2020 from Belgian birth registry data. We compared monthly proportions of HIP prevalence and Small for gestational age (SGA) and Large for gestional age (LGA) newborns in 2019 and 2020. Crude and adjusted odds ratios (ORs, aORs) were estimated with logistic and multinomial regression. The Spearman correlation coefficient was used to assess the correlation between the monthly average SI and the monthly aORs of HIP. Results: For deliveries from January to June 2020, no significant differences in HIP prevalence were observed compared with 2019. From July to December 2020, there was a significant increase in HIP, with peaks in July (GD screening in April) (aOR 1.41, 1.26-1.58) and November (GD screening in August) (aOR 1.33, 95% CI 1.18-1.49). There was no significant change in neonatal weight percentiles. The Spearman correlation coefficient between the SI and HIP aORs was 0.86 (p = 0.02). Conclusion During the pandemic, we observed an increase in the prevalence of HIP, compared to 2019, without a measurable impact on LGA or SGA newborns. The aOR of HIP in a given month was strongly correlated with the corresponding SI.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

New Identity for Cayley's First Hyperdeterminant with Applications to Symmetric Tensors and Entanglement

作者:

arXiv:2512.03093v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article, a new formula for computing Cayley's first hyperdeterminant in terms of the Levi-Civita symbol is given. It is then shown that this formula can be used to compute the hyperdeterminant of symmetric tensors in polynomial time with respect to their order (assuming fixed side length). Applications to quantifying the entanglement of states of bosonic quantum systems are then discussed. Additionally, in order to obtain the fast calculation of the hyperdeterminant on symmetric tensors, generalized elimination and duplication matrices are defined and their explicit formulas are derived.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Adv-TGD: Adversarial Text-Guided Diffusion for Face Recognition Impersonation Attacks

The widespread adoption of face recognition (FR) technologies raises serious privacy concerns, as facial data can be exploited without consent. To address this challenge, we propose Adv-TGD, a generative adversarial attack framework that synthesizes photorealistic faces capable of impersonating target identities and deceiving face recognition systems. Built upon Stable Diffusion, Adv-TGD performs per-sample LoRA fine-tuning conditioned on concise textual prompts to generate natural yet adversarially manipulated identities. Unlike conventional identity-attack approaches, our method optimizes lightweight cross-attention adapters for each source-target pair within a single-step denoising process. Latent blending is constrained by a face-local heatmap mask to ensure spatially precise identity manipulation while preserving non-sensitive regions. We introduce a composite objective that integrates masked epsilon-MSE reconstruction, thresholded identity divergence in FR embedding space, directional feature alignment, and source-similarity suppression to balance adversarial attack and visual realism. Optionally, LLaVA-generated attribute prompts enhance fine-grained semantic details without reintroducing identity cues. Under the black-box evaluation protocol, Adv-TGD attains an average attack success rate (ASR) of 85.90% across IR152, IRSE50, MobileFace, and FaceNet, surpassing the semantic SOTA baseline Adv-CPG by +6.25 points, diffusion-based makeup method DiffAIM by +3 points, and noise-based P3-Mask by +16 points. Despite its strong attack efficacy, Adv-TGD preserves high visual fidelity (PSNR = 27.15 dB, SSIM = 0.981). Furthermore, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by successfully extending it to in-the-wild datasets (LADN), general object classification (ImageNet), and transformer-based diffusion models (FLUX.1).

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) 2026-06-17

Translating the Untranslatable: An Operationalizable Ontology for Untranslatability

Untranslatability, cases where meaning cannot be directly preserved across languages, is well-studied in linguistics but underexplored in NLP. As machine translation (MT) systems improve on standard benchmarks, their limitations increasingly concentrate in such cases, where translation cannot be reduced to one-to-one equivalence. We introduce a structured ontology of untranslatability along with a taxonomy of compensation strategies, which are specific techniques to convey meaning under these untranslatable circumstances. We operationalize this framework into a multilingual dataset of untranslatable sentences paired with strategy-based translations, enabling controlled analysis of translation behavior. Initial human preference studies suggest that translation quality depends on the strategy used, with consistent preferences for outputs that include explanatory context, known as the Annotation compensation strategy. Our framework and dataset provide a foundation for studying and modeling strategy-informed machine translation.

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

DiskChunGS: Large-Scale 3D Gaussian SLAM Through Chunk-Based Memory Management

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated impressive results for novel view synthesis with real-time rendering capabilities. However, integrating 3DGS with SLAM systems faces a fundamental scalability limitation: methods are constrained by GPU memory capacity, restricting reconstruction to small-scale environments. We present DiskChunGS, a scalable 3DGS SLAM system that overcomes this bottleneck through an out-of-core approach that partitions scenes into spatial chunks and maintains only active regions in GPU memory while storing inactive areas on disk. Our architecture integrates seamlessly with existing SLAM frameworks for pose estimation and loop closure, enabling globally consistent reconstruction at scale. We validate DiskChunGS on indoor scenes (Replica, TUM-RGBD), urban driving scenarios (KITTI), and resource-constrained Nvidia Jetson platforms. Our method uniquely completes all 11 KITTI sequences without memory failures while achieving superior visual quality, demonstrating that algorithmic innovation can overcome the memory constraints that have limited previous 3DGS SLAM methods.

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

Variational Network with Wavelet-based UNET in Accelerated MRI Reconstruction from Under Sampled K-space Data

Fully sampled MRI requires dense k-space acquisition, leading to long scan times, reduced clinical throughput, and increased sensitivity to patient motion. Accelerated MRI addresses this by acquiring undersampled k-space data and reconstructing the missing information computationally. However, reconstruction from undersampled measurements is highly ill-posed and can introduce aliasing artifacts, noise amplification, and loss of anatomical detail. Although conventional parallel imaging and compressed sensing methods mitigate these issues, and deep learning methods have further improved reconstruction quality, preserving high-frequency structures under aggressive undersampling remains challenging. In this work, we propose a Variational Network with a Wavelet-based U-Net (W-UNet) for accelerated MRI reconstruction. The framework combines physics-guided iterative reconstruction with learnable multi-scale frequency representations. Standard pooling operations are replaced with Discrete Wavelet Transform and Inverse Wavelet Transform modules, enabling lossless downsampling while preserving low-frequency structure and high-frequency edge details. Integrated into the refinement and sensitivity map estimation stages, the proposed design improves artifact suppression, feature preservation, and reconstruction fidelity in both single-coil and multi-coil settings. Experiments on fastMRI knee and M4Raw brain datasets show state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of wavelet-based feature decomposition for accelerated MRI reconstruction.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

NeST: Neuron Selective Tuning for LLM Safety

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

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

StereoGeo: an end-to-end stereo camera calibration method

In this work, we propose StereoGeo, an end-to-end network-based approach for stereo camera calibration. Our method estimates the focal lengths and gravity directions of the left and right cameras, as well as the relative extrinsic transformation relating them. Existing methods often rely on calibration patterns in structured environments or address only a single camera configuration, being limited to either intrinsic or extrinsic estimation, and depending on a multi-view setups. StereoGeo extends the GeoCalib algorithm, integrating deep neural network feature extraction with a differentiable optimizer. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that StereoGeo achieves competitive performance for intrinsic calibration and provides accurate stereo extrinsic estimation, outperforming existing methods that are limited to monocular settings. The dataset used in this work is partially publicly available at https://github.com/meddourimane/StereoGeo-dataset.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Relativistic Locality from Electromagnetism to Quantum Field Theory

arXiv:2412.11532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electromagnetism is the paradigm case of a theory that satisfies relativistic locality. This can be proven by demonstrating that, once the theory's laws are imposed, what is happening within a region fixes what will happen in the contracting light-cone with that region as its base. The Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations meet the same standard. We show that this standard can also be applied to quantum field theory (without collapse), examining two different ways of assigning reduced density matrix states to regions of space. Our preferred method begins from field wave functionals and judges quantum field theory to be local. Another method begins from particle wave functions (states in Fock space) and leads to either non-locality or an inability to assign states to regions, depending on the choice of creation operators. We take this analysis of quantum field theory (without collapse) to show that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is local at the fundamental level. We argue that this fundamental locality is compatible with either local or global accounts of the non-fundamental branching of worlds, countering an objection that has been raised to the Sebens-Carroll derivation of the Born Rule from self-locating uncertainty.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ProcessThinker: Enhancing Multi-modal Large Language Models Reasoning via Rollout-based Process Reward

Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning. Recent post-training with reinforcement learning under verifiable rewards (RLVR) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) can improve multimodal reasoning, but most approaches rely on sparse outcome-only rewards. As a result, they struggle to tell whether an incorrect answer comes from a small mistake late in the reasoning or from an unhelpful trajectory from the start. A common solution is to train a process reward model (PRM) for step-level supervision, but this typically requires large-scale high-quality chain-of-thought annotations and additional training cost. We propose ProcessThinker, a practical post-training pipeline that provides step-level process rewards without training an explicit PRM. ProcessThinker first rewrites reasoning traces into a step-tagged format for cold-start supervised fine-tuning, then applies GRPO with a standard format reward and our rollout-based process reward. Concretely, for each intermediate step, we sample multiple continuations from that step and use the empirical success rate (final-answer verification) as the step reward. This gives dense credit assignment and encourages reasoning steps that more reliably support a correct conclusion, helping reduce inconsistent or self-contradictory progress across steps – a key issue in logical reasoning. Across four challenging video benchmarks (Video-MMMU, MMVU, VideoMathQA, and LongVideoBench), ProcessThinker consistently improves over the baseline model Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct

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

Meta Flow Maps enable scalable reward alignment

arXiv:2601.14430v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling generative models is computationally expensive. This is because optimal alignment with a reward function–whether via inference-time steering or fine-tuning–requires estimating the value function. This task demands access to the conditional posterior $p_{1|t}(x_1|x_t)$, the distribution of clean data $x_1$ consistent with an intermediate state $x_t$, a requirement that typically compels methods to resort to costly trajectory simulations. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Meta Flow Maps (MFMs), a framework extending consistency models and flow maps into the stochastic regime. MFMs are trained to perform stochastic one-step posterior sampling, generating arbitrarily many i.i.d. draws of clean data $x_1$ from any intermediate state. Crucially, these samples provide a differentiable reparametrization that unlocks efficient value function estimation. We leverage this capability to solve bottlenecks in both paradigms: enabling inference-time steering without inner rollouts, and facilitating unbiased, off-policy fine-tuning to general rewards. Empirically, our single-particle steered-MFM sampler outperforms a Best-of-1000 baseline on ImageNet across multiple rewards at a fraction of the compute.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Study of Belief Revision Postulates in Multi-Agent Systems (Extended Version)

arXiv:2605.02249v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the belief revision problem in epistemic planning, i.e., what will be the beliefs of all agents in a multi-agent system after an agent gains the belief in some state property. Based on the standard representation in epistemic planning of agents' beliefs via a single multi-agent Kripke model, we generalize the classical AGM belief revision postulates to the multi-agent setting, with the aim to provide a formal framework for evaluating dynamic epistemic reasoning frameworks in which the beliefs of all agents as the result of actions are computed. As an example of a simple operator that satisfies all of the generalized AGM postulates, we present generalized full-meet multi-agent belief revision. We moreover define a generalization of the standard postulates for iterated revision, present a more sophisticated, event model based revision operator, and discuss the potential issues in defining an epistemic operator on Kripke models that can satisfy all of the generalized postulates for iterated multi-agent belief revision.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Folding the unfoldable 2: using AlphaFold and ESMFold to explore spurious proteins

Motivation: Spurious protein sequences, resulting from gene prediction errors, theoretically should not yield folded structures. AlphaFold2 was previously shown to predict short spurious sequences with high pLDDT scores and was therefore unlikely to distinguish between real proteins and spurious proteins which are usually short. We evaluate whether newer structure prediction methods (ESMFold and AlphaFold3) similarly predict short sequences with high pLDDT or if they better discriminate between spurious and real proteins. Results: All three structure prediction methods (ESMFold, AlphaFold2, and AlphaFold3) predict short spurious sequences from AntiFam with unexpectedly high pLDDT scores, however the discrimination between spurious and real proteins improves beyond 100 amino acids. By analysing sequences with disparate pTM and pLDDT scores, we identified two likely spurious shadow ORFs in Swiss-Prot and one potentially non-spurious AntiFam entry. Using the structure prediction scores, we developed a Gaussian Process Model and evaluated its performance on AlphaFold DB, identifying potential spurious proteins at scale. While limited on its own, this model can increase confidence in spurious protein identification when combined with other methods.

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

Near-Optimal Regret for Distributed Adversarial Bandits: A Black-Box Approach

arXiv:2602.06404v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study distributed adversarial bandits, where $N$ agents cooperate to minimize the global average loss while observing only their own local losses. We show that the minimax regret for this problem is $\tilde{\Theta}(\sqrt{(\rho^{-1/2}+K/N)T})$, where $T$ is the horizon, $K$ is the number of actions, and $\rho$ is the spectral gap of the communication matrix. Our algorithm, based on a novel black-box reduction to bandits with delayed feedback, requires agents to communicate only through gossip. It achieves an upper bound that significantly improves over the previous best bound $\tilde{O}(\rho^{-1/3}(KT)^{2/3})$ of Yi and Vojnovic (2023). We complement this result with a matching lower bound, showing that the problem's difficulty decomposes into a communication cost $\rho^{-1/4}\sqrt{T}$ and a bandit cost $\sqrt{KT/N}$. We further demonstrate the versatility of our approach by deriving first-order and best-of-both-worlds bounds in the distributed adversarial setting. Finally, we extend our framework to distributed linear bandits in $R^d$, obtaining a regret bound of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{(\rho^{-1/2}+1/N)dT})$, achieved with only $O(d)$ communication cost per agent and per round via a volumetric spanner.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Chest X-Ray as a critical screening tool for Household Contacts of TB: Lessons from Three Years of Programmatic Data in India

Introduction: Household contacts (HHCs) of pulmonary TB patients remain at high risk for TB infection and disease progression, yet many remain asymptomatic and are missed by symptom-screening pathways. While India expanded its TB preventative guidelines to include all HHCs in 2021, chest X-ray (CXR) screening continues to be used selectively, representing a missed opportunity in early case detection. Methods: The analysis uses programmatic data from Project JEET 2.0 (Joint Effort for Elimination of Tuberculosis), implemented by the William J. Clinton Foundation in India, between October 2021 and March 2024. Eligible HHCs (>=5 years) were offered CXR screening as part of TB preventive therapy (TPT) evaluation. Descriptive and multivariable analyses examined predictors of CXR uptake and TB yield. A two-stage logistic regression model estimated potential TB yield under universal CXR coverage. Model performance was evaluated using the area under the curve (AUC), and bootstrap simulations generated counterfactual estimates of missed TB cases. Results: Among 1,034,621 HHCs, 1.02% individuals were found positive for TB, which includes 7,786 HHCs who were on TB treatment already, while an additional 2,812 were identified during pre-TPT evaluation. Among eligible HHCs (n = 1,026,835), 70% were screened with CXR, of which 2.4% had suggestive TB findings. Of these, 79% went for further TB assessment. Symptomatic HHCs were more likely to be CXR screened (84% vs 69%) and assessed for TB, yet two-thirds of all detected TB cases were asymptomatic. It is estimated that universal CXR coverage and TB testing for suggestive cases can increase TB detection by at least 87%. Conclusion: The study provides a scalable approach to expand CXR coverage through public-private partnerships, enabling early TB detection among HHCs, especially among asymptomatic contacts. Future implementations will benefit from integrating AI-enabled reading, along with systematic follow up for those with suggestive findings.

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

Toward Accessible Psychotherapy Training Using AI-Driven Interactive Patient Avatars

Training psychotherapists in evidence-based interventions such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) requires repeated practice with meaningful feedback, yet opportunities for safe, standardized training are limited by ethical, logistical, and resource constraints. We introduce a system designed to support ACT-oriented psychotherapy training through spoken dialogue with an embodied virtual patient. The system uses large language models to simulate patient behavior conditioned on profiles derived from real therapy sessions and configurable clinical scenarios, while a separate automated evaluator provides turn-by-turn feedback on therapist responses based on established ACT fidelity criteria. Rather than aiming to replace supervision, the system is intended to support deliberate practice by enabling experimentation, reflection, and immediate feedback in low-risk settings. Expert evaluation with practicing psychologists confirmed high realism in patient behavior and demonstrated that immediate turn-by-turn ACT feedback increased therapists' awareness of intervention choices and enabled effective experimentation with alternative responses. Quantitative evaluation across 49 therapy transcripts identified GPT-4o-mini as the optimal feedback model, achieving the lowest mean absolute error (MAE = 6.12) in replicating human supervisor ACT fidelity ratings with statistically significant agreement. This work demonstrates the potential of fidelity-aware simulated patients as a scalable complement to psychotherapy training.

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

SegDINO: Introducing Multi-Scale Structure into DINO for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation

Self-supervised DINO models provide strong transferable visual representations, yet applying them directly to image segmentation remains challenging. Existing approaches commonly rely on heavy decoders with complex upsampling, introducing substantial parameter and computational overhead. We observe that introducing scale into DINO features is far more critical than increasing decoder capacity. In this work, we present SegDINO, an efficient segmentation framework that integrates a DINOv3 backbone with lightweight scale modeling. SegDINO introduces Token Pyramid Adaptation (TPA) to reorganize intermediate DINO features into a pseudo multi-scale hierarchy, and Scale-Aware Decoding (SAD) for efficient intra-scale refinement and top-down multi-scale propagation. We further curate PanCT, a new CT dataset containing 284 patients with expert-annotated pancreatic tumors, to assess SegDINO's ability to handle difficult small-lesion cases. Extensive experiments on PanCT and three public benchmarks demonstrate that SegDINO achieves state-of-the-art results with high efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/script-Yang/segdino_v2.

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

RSTR: Reducing SpatioTemporal Redundancy in Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved remarkable success in image generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high computational costs. We identify two sources of redundancy. First, temporal redundancy: Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) applies costly dual forward passes at every timestep, yet guidance matters only at specific steps, and variable scales at critical steps can compensate for skipping others. Second, spatial redundancy: under variable guidance, different transformer blocks exhibit heterogeneous sensitivity, yet uniform calibration across all blocks wastes computation while failing to address their varying requirements. We present RSTR, the first framework to jointly reduce spatiotemporal redundancy in diffusion transformers. Stage-1 addresses temporal redundancy through evolutionary search, discovering sparse guidance schedules with variable scales. Stage-2 addresses spatial redundancy through adaptive rank allocation, assigning calibration capacities to transformer regions based on their sensitivity. Experiments on DiT-XL/2, PixArt-$\alpha$, FLUX, and state-of-the-art Qwen-Image demonstrate 50%-70% compute savings while maintaining or improving quality. On DiT-XL/2, RSTR achieves 57% savings with 15% FID improvement; on Qwen-Image, 3.43$\times$ speedup with preserved quality.