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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Multi-Center Benchmark for Abdominal Disease Diagnosis and Report Generation from Non-Contrast CT

Multiphasic contrast-enhanced CT (CECT) is widely used for abdominal lesion characterization, yet it carries inherent risks of contrast-induced nephropathy, escalates acquisition burden, and heavily contributes to radiologist workload. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel multi-center benchmark for multi-organ abdominal disease diagnosis and automated radiology report generation, which learns to synthesize contrast-enhanced findings from single-phase non-contrast CT (NCCT). To support this, we curated a large-scale dataset of paired NCCT-CECT studies and their corresponding contrast-enhanced radiology reports from two centers, partitioned into internal sets and an external validation cohort. Under a unified evaluation protocol, we benchmarked five contemporary deep learning architectures encompassing chest-specific, abdomen-specific, and general-purpose multimodal domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NCCT retains diagnostic signals, achieving an average multi-organ AUC of 69.1% on the internal cohort and 63.1% on the external cohort, respectively. By releasing this dataset and standardized benchmark publicly, this study aims to catalyze future research into safer, resource-efficient, and globally accessible contrast-free abdominal imaging workflows. Code is available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/TriALS-Report.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

IHBench: Evaluating Post-Interruption Recovery in Voice Agents with Structured Workflows

arXiv:2606.19595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice agents deployed in structured workflows (customer service, healthcare scheduling, account management) must handle frequent user interruptions while maintaining progress through multi-step procedures. Existing benchmarks for speech-capable models focus on the timing of interruptions: barge-in detection, endpointing, and turn-taking dynamics. They leave unmeasured what happens after the interruption: does the agent resume the workflow at the correct step? Does it address the user's interjection? Does it avoid re-delivering content the user already heard? We introduce IHBench (Interruption Handling Benchmark), a benchmark that evaluates post-interruption recovery in voice agents executing state-machine-driven workflows across 10 enterprise domains. Six interruption types are injected at controlled points mid-utterance, with per-interruption evaluation rubrics generated alongside the data. Each interruption is scored on two axes: task fulfillment and recovery quality. We evaluate 27 audio-language model configurations from OpenAI, Google, and the open-weight community. Models vary widely, and recovery quality depends strongly on the interruption type. Across our experiments, closed-weight models are consistently more robust to interruptions than open-weight ones: they win far more often on task fulfillment, degrade roughly 3.3x more slowly as conversations grow longer, and show no audio-versus-text modality gap, whereas the open-weight models lose ground on all three. A human study validates the LLM judge against human annotators, and a cross-benchmark analysis against AudioMultiChallenge indicates that recovery quality is a largely distinct capability axis.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SorryDB: Can AI Provers Complete Real-World Lean Theorems?

arXiv:2603.02668v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SorryDB, a dynamically-updating benchmark of open Lean tasks drawn from 78 real world formalization projects on GitHub. Unlike existing static benchmarks, often composed of competition problems, hillclimbing the SorryDB benchmark will yield tools that are aligned to the community needs, more usable by mathematicians, and more capable of understanding complex dependencies. Moreover, by providing a continuously updated stream of tasks, SorryDB mitigates test-set contamination and offers a robust metric for an agent's ability to contribute to novel formal mathematics projects. We evaluate a collection of approaches, including generalist large language models, agentic approaches, and specialized symbolic provers, over a selected snapshot of 1000 tasks from SorryDB. We show that current approaches are complementary: even though an agentic approach based on Gemini Flash is the most performant, it is not strictly better than other off-the-shelf large-language models, specialized provers, or even a curated list of Lean tactics.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Eyring-Kramers asymptotics for infinite-dimensional stochastic gradient systems

arXiv:2606.16083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study small-noise asymptotics for a class of reversible stochastic evolution equations in infinite dimensions. The dynamics are of the form \[ dX_t=-A\nabla F(X_t)\,dt+\sqrt{2\beta^{-1}A}\,dW_t, \] where $F$ is a regular multi-well potential, $A$ is a selfadjoint mobility operator, $W$ is a cylindrical Brownian motion and $\beta\gg 1$ is the inverse noise strength. The invariant measure is a Gibbs perturbation of a Gaussian reference measure, and the resulting framework covers, in particular, the stochastic Allen-Cahn and stochastic Cahn-Hilliard equations on bounded intervals. In the double-well case, we derive a sharp asymptotic formula for the first nonzero eigenvalue of the generator. This gives an infinite-dimensional Eyring-Kramers law for the spectral gap, with exponential rate determined by the communication height and leading prefactor determined by the local quadratic behavior at the relevant minima and saddle points. Our approach provides a general strategy for lifting finite-dimensional Eyring-Kramers analysis to infinite-dimensional stochastic gradient systems.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Gen-VCoT: Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Diffusion-Based RGB Intermediate Representations

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual reasoning but rely on text-based chain-of-thought (CoT), lacking interpretable visual intermediates. Existing methods use opaque tokens or external tools, missing key properties. We propose Gen-VCoT, a framework using expert vision models to generate RGB images as reasoning intermediates. It has three stages: visual grounding (SAM segmentation), geometric reasoning (Marigold depth maps), and semantic reasoning (Qwen2-VL integration). An adaptive router selects reasoning depth. Evaluations show Gen-VCoT improves spatial (25% better) and depth (50% better) questions, but may hurt simple factual queries. Text CoT outperforms visual intermediates on CLEVR (91.2% vs 62.5%), showing task-dependent optimal representations. Gen-VCoT establishes a new paradigm for interpretable multimodal reasoning.

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

The Algorithm Is Not the Behavior: Learned Priors Override Look-Ahead in a Chess-Playing Neural Network

arXiv:2508.21380v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent mechanistic work has uncovered learned algorithms within neural networks, from modular arithmetic to search and planning in game-playing agents. But does algorithmic structure guarantee algorithmic behavior? We investigate this in Leela Chess Zero, the strongest neural chess engine, where prior work identified learned look-ahead. By extending the logit lens to its move-selecting policy network, we discover that correct puzzle solutions-including immediate checkmates-often appear in intermediate layers but are systematically overridden in the final output, a phenomenon we term "forgotten puzzles". Replicating prior analyses on these positions, we find that look-ahead operates normally-future moves of the correct continuation are represented, causally important, and linearly decodable-ruling out a failure of the algorithm itself. Instead, late layers increasingly shift toward prioritizing safe play over aggression. To test whether this shift drives the override, we steer the model against these preferences and recover 61.7% of forgotten puzzles, providing causal evidence that safety priors override algorithmically computed solutions. These findings demonstrate that algorithmic structure does not guarantee algorithmic behavior: a model can internally solve a problem and still output the wrong answer.

07.
Science (Express) 2026-04-23

Structural N- and O-glycans revealed by high-resolution cryo-EM analysis of tubular mastigonemes | Science

作者: 未知作者

The chemical complexity and non-templated biosynthesis of glycans have posed significant challenges for establishing sequence-structure relationships. Here we report cryo-EM structures of tubular mastigonemes from a golden alga species, Ochromonas danica , in which a large number of N- and O-glycans are resolved at 1.8-2.2 Å resolution. Beyond high-mannose and complex N-glycans, we identify a non-canonical N-glycan on the Ala- Asn -Asp (A N D) motif. The surface spikes comprise dense O-glycans coating PSXX tetrapeptide repeats, with two glycans linked on trihydroxylated proline and one on serine per repeat. In addition to various types of sugars and their covalent modifiers, water molecules (>10% of resolved volume) and cations are clearly resolved and mediate the structural assembly. Our study establishes a framework for investigating glycan folding in high-order biological assemblies.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

HTS-Oracle X: AI-Guided Prospective Discovery of Small Molecule Immune Checkpoint Binders

Targeting immune checkpoint protein-protein interactions (PPIs) using small molecules remains limited by the shallow, featureless binding surfaces of co-stimulatory and co-inhibitory receptors and the characteristically low hit rates of conventional high-throughput screening against these interfaces. Here we report HTS-Oracle X, a multimodal deep learning platform that integrates bidirectional cross-attention fusion of ChemBERTa SMILES embeddings with extended RDKit descriptors, trains on continuous biophysical binding signals rather than binary labels, and employs Monte Carlo Dropout uncertainty quantification for uncertainty-adjusted compound selection. Trained on 45,760 Dianthus TRIC-screened compounds per target under scaffold-aware cross-validation, HTS-Oracle X was applied prospectively to a 100,160-compound Enamine library against CD28, TIM-3, and VISTA. From 150 model-selected compounds, 45 dose-response confirmed binders were identified (30.0% overall hit rate), yielding enrichment factors of 234-408x over experimentally established random prospective baselines and 16 sub-micromolar hits. The top hits, HX-CD28-1 (KD = 233 nM), HX-TIM3-1 (KD = 249 nM), and HX-VISTA-1 (KD = 345 nM), demonstrated on-target functional activity in immune cell and tumor co-culture assays. HTS-Oracle X represents a scalable AI-guided framework for small molecule discovery against non-enzymatic immune checkpoint targets.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DPRM: A Plug-in Doob h transform-induced Token-Ordering Module for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2604.24357v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models generate without a fixed left-to-right order, leaving token ordering as a central algorithmic choice. Existing systems mainly use random masking or confidence-driven ordering, which respectively suffer from train–test mismatch and myopic exploration. We introduce DPRM (Doob -transform Process Reward Model), a plug-in token-ordering module that keeps the host architecture, denoising objective and supervision unchanged, and modifies only the ordering policy. DPRM starts from confidence-driven ordering and gradually shifts to process-reward-guided ordering through online estimates. We characterize the exact DPRM policy as a reward-tilted Gibbs reveal law, prove convergence of its stagewise Soft-BoN approximation, show that the online bucketized controller tracks the exact DPRM score at empirical-Bernstein rates, and establish a sample-complexity advantage under tractable optimization assumptions. Across nine hosts covering language reasoning, test-time scaling, protein, single-cell, molecular, DNA, text-to-image generation, and VQA, DPRM order variants improve several language, DNA, and multimodal settings while also identifying boundary cases where confidence-only ordering or task-specific utilities are preferable. Code is available at: https://github.com/DakeBU/DPRM-DLLM

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Pfaffian quantum Hall state of ultracold bosons

arXiv:2606.12409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fractional quantum Hall states are a cornerstone of topological physics, hosting fractionally charged quasiparticles with exotic statistics that promise to enable topologically protected quantum information processing. Among these, the Pfaffian state introduced by Moore and Read implements a p-wave pairing structure that supports excitations with non-Abelian exchange statistics. Despite extensive study in electronic systems, direct access to its pairing structure has remained limited. Here we realize a three-particle bosonic Pfaffian state of ultracold $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms in an optical lattice subject to a Floquet-engineered synthetic magnetic field. Using a Bayesian-optimized adiabatic protocol, we prepare a state exhibiting Pfaffian pairing correlations. Site-resolved measurements of multi-point density correlations reveal a pronounced suppression of short-range three-body coincidences, reflecting the underlying pairing structure. We further probe the state's transport response through Hall drift measurements. Our results establish a bottom-up approach to engineering non-Abelian topological order and lay the groundwork for future explorations of anyonic braiding in synthetic matter.

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

Symbolic Informalization: Fluent, Productive, Multilingual

作者:

Symbolic informalization enables a reliable conversion of formal mathematics to natural language. It has the potential to make machine-checked content human-readable without loss of precision. In a traditional proof system usage, symbolic informalization generalizes the limited mechanisms of syntactic sugar into the ordinary language of mathematics. In a setting where proofs are constructed by artificial intelligence and autoformalization, symbolic informalization can explain what precisely has been constructed. This paper outlines the project Informath, which aims to show how symbolic informalization can produce fluent text with a reasonable development effort and address multiple formal and natural languages. Informath is based on an interlingual architecture, where Dedukti works as a hub between different proof systems (Agda, Lean, Rocq) and Grammatical Framework (GF) takes care of linguistic correctness and variation in different natural languages.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Targeting Cancer-Specific Mutations with RNA-Triggered Chromatin Shredding

作者:

Genetic mutations that drive cancer often occur in tumor suppressor proteins, including the p53 transcription factor which is altered in ~40-50% of cases1,2. However, current therapies fail to target most such mutations because the mutant proteins typically lack defined drug-binding pockets, and restoring the endogenous function has proven challenging. Here, we programmed CRISPR-Cas12a2, an RNA-guided nuclease with trans-nucleolytic cleavage activities3,4, to selectively kill cancer cells by targeting cancer-specific transcripts. This approach limits cell growth by inducing trans shredding of chromatin, triggering DNA damage responses and cell death. Unlike existing methods, RNA-guided Cas12a2 senses cellular RNA signatures, enabling precise targeting of undruggable mutations. Transcript-activated chromatin shredding provides a new approach to precision disease treatments for undruggable targets.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Generative models for decision-making under distributional shift

arXiv:2604.04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many data-driven decision problems are formulated using a nominal distribution estimated from historical data, while performance is ultimately determined by a deployment distribution that may be shifted, context-dependent, partially observed, or stress-induced. This tutorial presents modern generative models, particularly flow- and score-based methods, as mathematical tools for constructing decision-relevant distributions. From an operations research perspective, their primary value lies not in unconstrained sample synthesis but in representing and transforming distributions through transport maps, velocity fields, score fields, and guided stochastic dynamics. We present a unified framework based on pushforward maps, continuity, Fokker-Planck equations, Wasserstein geometry, and optimization in probability space. Within this framework, generative models can be used to learn nominal uncertainty, construct stressed or least-favorable distributions for robustness, and produce conditional or posterior distributions under side information and partial observation. We also highlight representative theoretical guarantees, including forward-reverse convergence for iterative flow models, first-order minimax analysis in transport-map space, and error-transfer bounds for posterior sampling with generative priors. The tutorial provides a principled introduction to using generative models for scenario generation, robust decision-making, uncertainty quantification, and related problems under distributional shift.

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

StainFlow: Entity-Stain Tracking and Evidence Linking for Process Rewards in GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.07027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a promising approach for improving GUI Agents in long-horizon, stochastic digital environments, but trajectory-level success feedback is too sparse to provide reliable credit assignment for intermediate exploration steps. To mitigate this issue, recent studies introduce Process Reward Models (PRMs), which provide finer-grained training feedback through global milestone verification or local step-level evaluation. However, these methods still suffer from two level-specific limitations: global milestone decomposition is subjective and singular, making it difficult to accommodate the multiple valid execution paths in real GUI tasks, while fixed local judging windows may miss long-range key evidence or dilute the decision signal with irrelevant frames. Inspired by stain-tracing mechanisms in network flow analysis, we propose StainFlow, an entity-stain-flow process reward model for GUI Agents. To reduce the subjectivity of global partitioning, we introduce the Global Entity Stain Tracking module, which extracts visually verifiable task entities and tracks how their stain concentrations and states evolve along the trajectory, allowing task phases to be objectively separated by changes in the entity evidence flow. To improve the accuracy of local verification, we introduce the Local Stain Evidence Linking module. Centered on the triggering entities of each candidate key node, it retrieves relevant steps based on their stain concentrations and state changes, and dynamically constructs high-density evidence windows for verifying true key nodes. Extensive experiments on AndroidWorld and OGRBench show that StainFlow relatively improves online RL success by 3.2% and trajectory completion judgment accuracy by 1.8%.

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

Dialogue SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Dialogue-Driven Coding Agents

AI coding agents have rapidly transformed software engineering, powering widely used interactive coding assistants. Despite their interactive real-world use, existing benchmarks evaluate them as fully-autonomous systems. In this work, we introduce Dialogue SWE-Bench, an automatic benchmark dataset for evaluating the ability of coding agents to resolve real-world software engineering problems through dialogue with a user. We design a novel, persona-grounded user simulator to support our task evaluation, and augment our task evaluation with automatic evaluations of dialogue quality. We also propose a new schema-guided agent, aimed at improving the dialogue capabilities of off-the-shelf coding agents, which improves over strong baselines by 3-14%. Our results indicate that better coding models do not always correspond to better dialogue models, suggesting that dialogue capability is a distinct and currently understudied dimension of coding agent performance.

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

Improved Baselines with Representation Autoencoders

Representation Autoencoders (RAE) replace traditional VAE with pretrained vision encoders. In this paper, we systematically investigate several design choices and find three insights which simplify and improve RAE. First, we study a generalized formulation where the representation is defined as sum of the last k encoder layers rather than solely the final layer. This simple change greatly improves reconstruction without encoder finetuning or specialized data (e.g., text, faces). Second, we study the prevalent assumption that RAE (using pretrained representation as encoder) replaces representation alignment (REPA), which distills the same representation to intermediate layers instead. Through large-scale empirical analysis, we uncover a surprising finding: RAE and REPA exhibit complementary working mechanisms, allowing the same representation to be used as both encoder and target for intermediate diffusion layers. Finally, the original RAE struggles with classifier-free guidance (CFG) and requires training a second, weaker diffusion model for AutoGuidance (AG). We show that REPA itself can be viewed as x-prediction in RAE latent space. By simply re-parameterizing the output of the DiT model, it can provide guidance for "free". Overall, RAEv2 leads to more than 10x faster convergence over the original RAE, achieving a state-of-the-art gFID of 1.06 in just 80 epochs on ImageNet-256. On FDr6, RAEv2 achieves a state-of-the-art 2.17 at just 80 epochs compared to the previous best 3.26 (800 epochs) without any post-training. This motivates EPFID@k (epochs to reach unguided gFID < k) as a measure of training efficiency. RAEv2 attains an EPFID@2 of 35 epochs, versus 177 for the original RAE. We also validate our approach across diverse settings for text-to-image generation and navigation world models, showing consistent improvements. The code is available at https://raev2.github.io.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

AI Sandboxes: A Threat Model, Taxonomy, and Measurement Framework

arXiv:2606.18532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI systems are increasingly evaluated in bounded environments that combine isolation, simulation, instrumentation, supervision, and evidence capture. For physical AI, AIoT, and cyber-physical systems, this shift is not a matter of terminology: the system under test may sense, decide, actuate, communicate, and fail through physical processes, networked devices, and human operators. This article develops an assurance-oriented account of AI sandboxes as controlled environments for testing, evaluation, verification, and validation across digital AI, embodied autonomy, and cyber-physical deployments. We formalize the sandbox boundary and a weakest-link rule for composing per-dimension evidence into a bounded deployment claim; separate major sandbox archetypes; define a cyber-physical threat model that includes attacks on the assurance apparatus itself; and introduce a measurement framework spanning fidelity, controllability, observability, containment, reproducibility, and governance artifacts, instantiated on three worked case studies of real sandboxes. The resulting threat model, taxonomy, and measurement framework clarify what a sandbox can validly test, which risks it can contain, and what forms of evidence it can support for safety, security, and regulatory assurance.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Understanding Scam Trends and Rail Paths from Reddit Self-Disclosure Narratives

Online scam behavior is inherently multi-stage, and the lifecycle includes temporally ordered rails and events rather than isolated signals. Existing works analyze characteristics of scam types and rails, but they do not track scam trends across years. Moreover, the work on the relations between rails is hampered due to the lack of open-source datasets with annotations and coverage of different scam types. To address these gaps, we build a dataset to analyze the yearly trend of scam characteristics and rail paths using Reddit self-disclosure narratives from 2023 to 2025. We collect 21,304 posts from scam-related subreddits with at least one rail among identity, communication, platform, and payment for trend analysis by heuristic annotation. Then, we label 1,800 posts containing explicit or recoverable scam chains by an LLM-assisted method for scam path analysis. The method is evaluated with human annotation. Lastly, we run a topic model on the comments of the posts to analyze the community support behavior. The results reveal that scam processes are predominantly multi-rail. Across years, different scam types and rail components dominate. Different scam types vary systematically in path complexity. Reddit support behaviors have become more detailed over time. This work supports synthetic scam chain data simulation and AI-related scam risk assessment, though findings may not generalise to other platforms.

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

RoboPIN: Grounded Embodied Reasoning via Pinned Chain-of-Thought

arXiv:2606.15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning. However, current vision-language models rely on text-only or coordinate-augmented chain-of-thought, where entity references remain implicit and ambiguous. This may cause the reasoning process to decouple from visual evidence, entity references to drift across steps, and a causal disconnection between the reasoning trajectory and the final answer, with these problems further amplified in multi-view scenarios due to cross-view appearance changes. To address these issues, we propose Pinned Chain-of-Thought (\pincot{}), a structured reasoning paradigm that pins every reasoning step to visual evidence. \pincot{} introduces the concept of \reasoninganchor{}, which binds each task-relevant entity to a structured visual anchor with entity name, unique identity, view index, and spatial grounding, enabling consistent entity tracking across reasoning steps and views. We build a fully automated data generation pipeline to construct \dataset{}, a high-quality \pincot{}-formatted reasoning dataset. We then train \method{} through three-stage post-training that progressively injects embodied knowledge, structured reasoning ability, and process-supervised alignment, with rewards that directly constrain both anchor localization and identity consistency during reasoning. On 14 benchmarks covering embodied spatial reasoning, multi-view reasoning, and pointing, \method{} with only 4B parameters consistently outperforms 7B level open-source embodied models, achieving a 12\% average improvement over the strongest 7B baseline, Mimo-Embodied. Further analysis shows that \pincot{} improves grounding accuracy and cross-step identity consistency, validating the effectiveness of process supervision.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

fuzzyfold: a high-performance framework for stochastic RNA folding kinetics

作者:

The analysis of nucleic acid secondary structures is overwhelmingly dominated by methods that analyze the thermodynamic equilibrium distribution and which ignore all dynamic aspects of nucleic acid folding. Yet, there are numerous popular examples of nucleic acid folding that rely on kinetic models, such as RNA riboswitches or DNA strand displacement systems. Here, I am presenting fuzzyfold, a Rust-based software package for nucleic acid secondary structure analysis with an explicit focus on stochastic modeling. The framework introduces three-way and four-way shift moves with a biophysically motivated rate-model parameterization, and it is developed with an emphasis on both model flexibility and performance, e.g. allowing for the generation of single co-transcriptional trajectories for thousand-nucleotide long RNA molecules in just a few minutes. The main strength of the fuzzyfold package, however, is its focus on user and developer interfaces for long-term development. It provides easily installable command-line interfaces, e.g. for aggregating data from multiple parallel trajectories efficiently into an ensemble-level dynamic analysis. For developers, the code-base supports straight-forward substitution of thermodynamic and kinetic free-energy models, and a flexible library interface with Python bindings, enabling integration of individual components into custom computational workflows.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Generalizing GNNs with Tokenized Mixture of Experts

arXiv:2602.09258v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deployed graph neural networks (GNNs) are frozen at deployment yet must fit clean data, generalize under distribution shifts, and remain stable to perturbations. We show that static inference induces a fundamental tradeoff: improving stability requires reducing reliance on shift-sensitive features, leaving an irreducible worst-case generalization floor. Instance-conditional routing can break this ceiling, but is fragile because shifts can mislead routing and perturbations can make routing fluctuate. We capture these effects via two decompositions separating coverage vs selection, and base sensitivity vs fluctuation amplification. Based on these insights, we propose STEM-GNN, a pretrain-then-finetune framework with a mixture-of-experts encoder for diverse computation paths, a vector-quantized token interface to stabilize encoder-to-head signals, and a Lipschitz-regularized head to bound output amplification. Across nine node, link, and graph benchmarks, STEM-GNN achieves a stronger three-way balance, improving robustness to degree/homophily shifts and to feature/edge corruptions while remaining competitive on clean graphs.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Understanding and Usefulness of Effect Size and Certainty of Evidence: A Cross-sectional Survey of Evidence-Based Practice Competencies Among Registered Dietitians

Introduction: Understanding of absolute and relative estimates (i.e., effect size), and certainty of evidence corresponding to those estimates, is a fundamental evidence-based practice competency to promote informed clinical decision-making. While research has been conducted in the medical profession, there is no published research on these competencies in the nutrition and dietetics profession. Methods: Among registered dietitians, our main objectives were to assess (1) their understanding and perceived usefulness of three absolute and two relative estimate approaches to assess effect size, (2) their perceived usefulness of certainty of evidence, and (3) factors influencing their understanding and perceived usefulness. We conducted a web-based, cross-sectional survey among dietitians recruited from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (United States). Participants received effect estimates based on hypothetical dietary interventions vs. usual diet for reducing myocardial infarction risk. Results: Of the 11,050 dietitians who received the survey link, 210 participated (2.0% response rate), and only completers (n=114) were included in the analysis. Participants demonstrated a similar understanding of the relative (27.6%) and absolute (27.5%) estimates, with Risk Difference (30.7% correct responses) being the best understood approach and Number Needed to Treat (24.6%) being the least. The understanding of five approaches was not different than random guessing (p>0.05). While perceived usefulness scores were similar between five approaches, they were highest when data was presented as Relative Risk [mean (SD): 4.82 (1.50)]. Dietitians rated the usefulness of certainty of evidence favorably [mean (SD): 5.07 (1.83), on a 7-point scale), and no factors were associated with correct understanding. Conclusion: Dietitians may have limited understanding of how to interpret effect sizes, a finding consistent with surveys of other health professionals. To optimize informed decision-making between dietitians and clients, dietetic programs and continuing education platforms should consider additional training on interpreting effect sizes and certainty of evidence for effect sizes.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Thinking Outside the [Chat]Box: Bridging Computer Science and Industrial Design for Cognitive-Inclusive Generative AI

arXiv:2606.14306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Generative AI (GenAI) interfaces remain largely constrained to chatbox interaction, which can impose high cognitive demands on users and create substantial barriers for people with intellectual disabilities (ID), including prompt formulation difficulties, response overload, and limited mechanisms to assess information reliability. To explore alternative interaction models for cognitive accessibility, we conducted a cross-disciplinary co-design challenge in which two student cohorts (Computer Science and Industrial Design) developed interface concepts from the same set of functional requirements (e.g., prompt scaffolding, structured output, GUI-based refinement, transparency, and personalization). Comparing the resulting proposals reveals both convergence on foundational requirements (notably initial calibration, proactive prompting, and direct manipulation of response fragments) and complementary contributions that outline a multi-layered support system. Computer Science teams primarily produced structural scaffolding, emphasizing predictability, navigability, and trust through mechanisms such as reliability indicators, explicit sources, and context management for long conversations. Industrial Design teams emphasized experiential scaffolding, focusing on pacing, attention guidance, multimodality, and proactive agency, including step-by-step response flows, focus modes, and assistant-like integrations. We synthesize these findings into a dual-layer scaffolding framework that expands the design space for cognitively accessible GenAI interaction beyond chat-centric models and motivates future work on expert refinement, technical feasibility, and empirical validation with users with ID.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Hidden Evolution of Disguised Visual Context inside the VLM

arXiv:2606.20077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals. How they are transformed into meaningful representations and interact with the language space depends entirely on the integration architecture. Whether by treating visual tokens as in-context prompts within the input sequence or injecting them directly into the LLM's intermediate layers. A controlled comparison and understanding of how these architectural choices affect visual information and its internal transformation to integrate with the LLM remains underexplored. We provide a fair comparison by evaluating in-context and layer-wise injection VLM integration paradigms under identical training conditions across single image, multi-image, and video benchmarks. In doing so, we uncover a hidden evolution where visual tokens enter the LLM as disguised visual context, raw representations lacking linguistic structure, but are progressively reshaped depending on the integration paradigm, each capturing fundamentally different frequency characteristics of the visual signal. We show that this evolution inside the LLM determines what visual features the VLM can utilize effectively, how visual representations align with the language space, and ultimately how each paradigm performs across different tasks. We further demonstrate that attention allocation alone is insufficient, and that performance is driven by the quality of visual representations at each layer.

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

A Physics-Inspired Optimizer: Velocity Regularized Adam

arXiv:2505.13196v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Velocity-Regularized Adam (VRAdam), a physics-inspired optimizer for training deep neural networks that draws on ideas from quartic terms for kinetic energy with its stabilizing effects on various system dynamics. Previous algorithms, including the ubiquitous Adam, operate at the so-called adaptive edge of stability regime during training, leading to rapid oscillations and slowed convergence of loss. However, VRAdam adds a higher order penalty on the learning rate based on the velocity such that the algorithm automatically slows down whenever weight updates become large. In practice, we observe that the effective dynamic learning rate shrinks in high-velocity regimes, and damping oscillations. By combining this velocity-based regularizer for global damping with per-parameter scaling of Adam, we create a powerful hybrid optimizer. For this optimizer, we provide rigorous theoretical analysis of operation at the edge of stability from a physical and control perspective for the momentum. Furthermore, we derive convergence bounds with the rate $\mathcal{O}(\ln(N)/\sqrt{N})$ for a stochastic non convex objective under mild assumptions. We demonstrate that VRAdam exceeds the performance against standard optimizers including AdamW. We benchmark various tasks such as image classification, language modeling, and generative modeling using diverse architectures and training methodologies including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Transformers, and GFlowNets.