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01.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-05

Structural motif search across the protein universe with Folddisco

作者:

Detecting similar protein structural motifs in large structure collections is computationally expensive. We developed Folddisco, a fast structural motif search tool that uses an index of position-independent geometric features, including side-chain orientation, combined with a rarity-based scoring system. Folddisco is 20-fold faster in querying and fourfold more storage-efficient than existing methods while improving accuracy. Folddisco is freely available online ( https://folddisco.foldseek.com ), along with a webserver ( https://search.foldseek.com/folddisco ). Folddisco enables protein structural motif search in million scale databases.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

The interaction between chronic hepatitis B (CHB) and Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) in a diverse central London population

Introduction: The overlap between chronic hepatitis B (CHB) and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) is an emerging global health challenge. We investigated the impact of MASLD and metabolic comorbidity in a diverse London viral hepatitis clinic. Methods: This retrospective cross-sectional study (May 2018-Feb 2024) included adults with CHB having controlled attenuation parameter (CAP) measurements. MASLD was defined as CAP >264 dB/m plus [≥]1 cardiometabolic factor (CMF). We used univariable and multivariable models to examine MASLD's relationship with liver stiffness and hepatitis B viral load (HBV VL). Results: Among 323 individuals (67% male, median age 36), most were from Black (35%) or non-white British/Irish (29%) backgrounds. Overall, 64% had [≥]1 CMF, and 20% had MASLD. The CHB/MASLD group was significantly older (median 43 vs 35 years, p

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

FusionRS: A Large-Scale RGB-Infrared Remote Sensing Dataset for Dual-Modal Vision-Language Foundation Models

Remote sensing vision-language models have advanced Earth observation understanding, but most existing work remains centered on RGB imagery, leaving the complementary information in infrared data underexplored. Infrared images provide distinctive cues, including thermal intensity structures, object boundaries, and illumination-invariant scene features, which can enrich visual-language learning beyond conventional RGB observations. However, a large-scale RGB-infrared-text dataset for remote sensing vision-language modeling is still absent. To address this gap, we introduce FusionRS, the first large-scale RGB-infrared-text dataset designed for dual-modal vision-language learning in remote sensing. FusionRS is constructed by translating diverse public RGB remote sensing images into infrared-style counterparts, forming aligned RGB-IR image pairs. Each pair is associated with conventional scene captions and IR-aware captions that explicitly describe infrared-specific visual properties while preserving semantic content. Based on FusionRS, we train dual-modal vision-language foundation models for RGB-IR joint understanding. We first train CLIP-style models for RGB-IR-text alignment, and then fine-tune generative VLMs for dual-modal RGB-IR captioning. Experiments show that FusionRS improves RGB-IR alignment, infrared-to-text retrieval, and dual-modal captioning over RGB-only and non-IR-aware training settings. Ablation studies further verify that IR-aware captions are crucial for strengthening infrared-language alignment, highlighting the importance of modality-specific textual supervision for more scalable RGB-infrared remote sensing vision-language representation learning.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

SPARK: A Systems-level Computational Framework for Reconstructing Transcriptomic State Organisation in Lung Adenocarcinoma

Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) exhibits substantial molecular heterogeneity, which complicates tumour stratification and limits the ability of mutation-centric models to capture tumour behaviour and predict patient outcomes. This study investigates whether coordinated transcriptomic programs can provide a systems-level representation of tumour states. Bulk RNA-sequencing data from the TCGA-LUAD cohort were analysed to reconstruct pathway-level transcriptomic organisation using a stability-optimised network framework (SPARK). This analysis identified eight transcriptomic modules representing coordinated biological processes active across tumours. Module activity scores were subsequently used to derive a composite Transcriptomic Risk Score through elastic-net Cox proportional hazards modelling. The resulting risk score showed a significant association with overall survival in the discovery cohort and improved prognostic discrimination beyond clinical variables. An independent evaluation in the CPTAC-LUAD cohort confirmed the prognostic signal and preserved risk stratification across patient groups. Unsupervised clustering of module activity further revealed three transcriptomic patient groups characterised by distinct biological programs, genomic alteration patterns, and survival outcomes. Single-cell analysis also demonstrated that the identified transcriptomic modules reflect coordinated organisation of the tumour-immune-stromal ecosystem across cellular compartments. Together, these findings suggest that LUAD heterogeneity can be organised into coordinated transcriptomic programs with measurable clinical relevance, providing a systems-level framework for representing tumour molecular states.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Oxidative Stress Biomarker Profile Dynamics across Blood and Cerebrospinal Fluid

Peripheral blood measurements dominate oxidative stress research, yet whether they reflect central nervous system (CNS) redox status remains untested in humans. We simultaneously profiled five biomarkers, total antioxidant capacity (TAC), glutathione (GSH), thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances (TBARS), ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP), and hydroxyl radical scavenging activity (HRSA), in paired blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from 140 adults in the ALBION cohort. Only FRAP showed a significant positive cross-compartment correlation ({rho} = +0.49, FDR-p < 0.001), supporting its role as a systemic antioxidant signal. TBARS showed a significant inverse cross-compartment association ({rho} = -0.20, FDR-p = 0.042), suggesting compartmental compensation in lipid peroxidation regulation rather than parallel dynamics. TAC and GSH showed no meaningful intercompartmental alignment. Individual biomarker levels were largely stable across the 40-85 year age range in both compartments, suggesting that age effects operate through coordinated latent networks rather than single-marker trajectories. Principal component extraction with varimax rotation identified four latent factors explaining 66.6% of total variance, dominated by a coherent CSF-centred redox axis alongside multiple partially opposing peripheral components. Age stratification revealed progressive fragmentation: middle-aged adults retained four coherent cross-compartment factors, whereas older adults exhibited five more dispersed components. Sex-stratified analyses showed that females exhibited four-factor modular organisation centred on glutathione, while males showed a simpler three-factor structure with tighter cross-compartment coupling anchored by FRAP. Blood and CSF oxidative stress biomarkers are not interchangeable, a finding with direct implications for biomarker selection in clinical trials targeting neurological conditions.

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

TMASC: Transmasculine Attitude and Speech Corpus

作者:

We introduce the Transmasculine Attitudes and Speech Corpus (TMASC), a multimodal corpus of 196 transmasculine individuals, including questionnaire responses and 66 audio recordings. The questionnaire includes items exploring the vocal health of transmasculine individuals. The audio recordings include cough and throat-clearing samples, a reading passage, and additional session-specific questions. This paper outlines the development of this corpus and the data collection procedures. To illustrate the utility of this corpus, we present three case studies demonstrating how this crowd-sourced multimodal corpus can be used to support transmasculine individuals. These include the integration of perceptual and acoustic data, the identification of group-level characteristics, and the calibration of acoustic measurements.

07.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-23

CARGO: A cytometry analysis framework via Regularized graph optimal-transport

by Abida Sanjana Shemonti, Grzegorz B. Gmyrek, Katrien L. A. Quintelier, Sofie Van Gassen, Yvan Saeys, Marcella Willemsen, Joachim G. J. V. Aerts, Eva V. E. Madsen, J. Paul Robinson, Alex Pothen, Bartek Rajwa Conventional data visualization techniques in single-cell analysis (such as two-dimensional dot plots, SPADE, PCA, t-SNE, or UMAP) often fall short in enabling an intuitive understanding of high-parameter flow cytometry data. These methods tend to oversimplify complex biological relationships, lack biologically meaningful interpretations, and offer no principled framework for downstream quantitative analysis. To address these limitations, we present a graph-based (network-based) visualization framework grounded in optimal transport theory. In this framework, cell populations are defined by their marker-expression profiles, and inter-population similarity is quantified using an efficiently computable optimal transport formulation known as the Sinkhorn distance. Our approach produces biologically consistent two-dimensional graph layouts using a phenotype-aware Hamming distance. Structural differences between sample graphs are characterized through a customized graph-edit distance that captures changes in population size, marker expression, and relationships between populations. We demonstrate our methods on two flow cytometry datasets: one from a clinical trial of dendritic cell-based immunotherapy in malignant peritoneal mesothelioma, involving 14 patients sampled at three time points with 14-color panels, and another from FlowCAP-II, which involved 43 acute myeloid leukemia patient samples analyzed with 7-color panels. Our framework produces robust, quantitative visual summaries of cell populations and supports statistical analysis based on graph edit distances, thereby offering new insights into disease progression and treatment response. Ultimately, our method bridges the gap between flow cytometry data visualization and biological interpretation.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Excitation-Inhibition Balance in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: EEG Criticality Reflects Frontal Metabolites and a Potential Compensatory Mechanism

Background The excitation-inhibition (E-I) balance is essential for normal brain functioning, while deviations from this balance have been implicated in several psychiatric disorders. However, the extent to which electroencephalography (EEG) and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) E-I markers are altered in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), how they converge across modalities, and how they relate to cognitive performance and clinical symptoms remain insufficiently characterized. Methods We recruited 111 healthy controls (HC) and 113 individuals with SSD. All participants underwent resting-state EEG and 1H-MRS. Metabolites were measured either in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; NSSD = 63, NHC = 58) or in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC; NSSD = 50, NHC = 53), from which gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), glutamate + glutamine (Glx), and the Glx/GABA ratio were extracted. Extracted EEG E-I markers included oscillatory activity, aperiodic activity, functional E-I, microstates, multiscale entropy, and neuronal avalanche criticality. Results MRS results showed no group differences in GABA, Glx, or the Glx/GABA ratio. In contrast, most EEG-derived E-I markers indicated increased cortical inhibition in SSD, including steeper aperiodic exponents, prolonged microstate durations, and greater prevalence of subcritical states. However, functional E-I showed a divergent pattern, suggesting balanced dynamics in SSD and relatively inhibition-weighted dynamics in HC. Across groups, higher ACC and lDLPFC GABA predicted a lower kappa index, whereas a higher lDLPFC Glx/GABA ratio was associated with a higher kappa index. In SSD, reduced avalanche criticality was associated with better cognition and less severe symptoms. Conclusion Several EEG-derived E-I proxies, but not MRS measures, indicate an increased cortical inhibition in SSD. Criticality indices best capture frontal neurochemical metabolites and improvements in clinical symptoms, potentially reflecting inhibitory compensation mechanisms in SSD.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum Entanglement, Stratified Spaces, and Topological Matter: Towards Entanglement-Sensitive Langlands Data

arXiv:2601.13467v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using the spinless Haldane model, we study the witness-filtered Berry curvature, quantum geometric tensor, and quantum Fisher information on the gapped strata of the parameter space and evaluate them through the Fukui-Hatsugai-Suzuki discretization. The filtered quantities isolate the part of the geometric response carried by sublattice coherence: they suppress contributions from regions where the occupied Bloch state is locally A/B-separable and emphasize regions where curvature and coherence coexist. We derive exact lattice identities, reconstruction formulas for the curvature-weighted coherence, and bounds relating the filtered quantum geometric tensor and quantum Fisher information to single-particle mode entanglement. Across the gap-closing stratum, the quantized response changes admit a natural description in terms of Hecke modifications. We elicit a corresponding Langlands viewpoint – not as a full correspondence, but as an organizational principle and as the mathematical shadow of these physical geometric constructions.

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

Feynman–Kac formula for the heat equation with a one-center point interaction in $d=3$

arXiv:2606.11677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Schrödinger operators with a one-center point interaction, formally defined by \begin{align*} -\Delta_\alpha=-\Delta+\alpha\,\delta_0(\cdot), \end{align*} for $\alpha\in\mathbb{R}$, and the associated heat equation \begin{align} \partial_t u=\tfrac{1}{2}\Delta_{\alpha} u,\quad u(0,x)=u_0(x)\in C_c^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\}).\label{eq:HEapp} \end{align} Here $\Delta$ denotes the Laplacian (self-adjoint on $L^2(\mathbb{R}^3)$) and $\delta_x$ the Dirac measure at $x$. The operator $-\Delta_\alpha$ can be realized either as a self-adjoint extension of $-\Delta|_{C_0^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\})}$ in $L^2(\mathbb{R}^3)$, or as the norm-resolvent limit of $-\Delta+\lambda_\varepsilon V(\cdot/\varepsilon)$ for suitable $\lambda_\varepsilon$ and $V:\mathbb{R}^3\to\mathbb{R}$. In this paper we construct, for each $t>0$ and $x\in\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\}$, a probability law on path space and a normalizing function $G_t^\alpha(x)$ giving the following probabilistic representation of the solution to the associated equation: \begin{align*} u(t,x)=G_t^\alpha(x)\,\mathbb{E}\bigl[u_0\bigl(W^{t,x}(t)\bigr)\bigr], \end{align*} where $\{W^{t,x}(s):0\le s\le t\}$ is a continuous process depending on $(t,x,\alpha)$. The result provides a Feynman–Kac type formula for the heat equation with a one-point interaction in three dimensions.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Spatial Analysis and Multilevel Determinants of Hypertension in Zambia: Analysis of the 2017 WHO STEPS Survey

Background: Hypertension is the leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor globally, with the fastest-growing burden in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to estimate national hypertension prevalence, map provincial patterns, assess spatial clustering, and identify individual and community-level determinants among Zambian adults using the 2017 WHO STEPS survey. Methods: This cross-sectional study used data from the 2017 WHO STEPS survey, a nationally representative sample of 4,301 adults aged 18-69 years. Hypertension was defined as systolic BP [&ge;]140 mmHg, diastolic BP [&ge;]90 mmHg, or current antihypertensive use. Spatial autocorrelation was assessed via Moran's I and LISA. Four nested generalised linear mixed models with PSU-level random intercepts identified individual and community-level determinants. Results: Overall weighted hypertension prevalence was 24.0%. Lusaka recorded the highest prevalence (30.2%), followed by Southern (29.9%) and Muchinga (28.3%) provinces; Western Province had the lowest (12.4%). Spatial clustering was statistically significant but modest (Moran's I = 0.0247, p < 0.001). Between-cluster variation reduced from ICC = 5.9% to 1.8% in the full model, indicating geographic differences were largely explained by individual characteristics. Age was the strongest predictor; adults aged 60-69 had nearly sevenfold higher odds than those aged 18-29 (AOR 6.92, 95% CI: 4.95-9.66). Women had lower odds than men (AOR 0.64, 95% CI: 0.52-0.79). Obesity (AOR 2.34), overweight (AOR 1.65), high cholesterol (AOR 1.40), diabetes (AOR 1.35), and single marital status (AOR 1.34) were independently significant. Western Province showed consistently lower odds than Central Province (AOR 0.48). Conclusion: Hypertension affects one in four Zambian adults, driven primarily by age, sex, obesity, dyslipidaemia, and diabetes. Geographically prioritised interventions, including community health worker-led screening programmes in Lusaka and Southern Province, would maximise population-level impact. Population-level salt reduction and alcohol policies represent cost-effective complementary strategies. Longitudinal studies with finer spatial resolution are needed to clarify causal pathways underlying observed geographic clustering and inform SDG Target 3.4 progress.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mapping AI Programs in the U.S: A Status Report from Early 2026 and an Analysis of AI Majors and Minors

arXiv:2606.12428v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a report on the status of undergraduate Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the United States in Spring 2026. In so doing, we 1) describe our scraping and mapping tools, which dynamically update to track the state of AI education in the U.S., and 2) create a historic record at a time of great upheaval. The tool we developed, available at https://cicmap.ai, detects, scrapes, and displays data from more than 350 undergraduate AI programs–majors, minors, concentrations, and certificates–at 4-year universities. Our tool searched over 560 institutions to locate these programs, a sample that represents 86\% of all undergraduate Computer Science (CS) graduates in the U.S. This tool allows prospective students, guidance counselors, administrators, and faculty to easily access AI program requirements and is designed to continually update as new programs emerge. To the best of our knowledge, this survey represents the most comprehensive snapshot of the state of AI programs in the U.S. to date. With this work we offer three important contributions: 1) a record of AI programs in the U.S. at a time of great upheaval; 2) a tool to explore AI programs and their requirements; and 3) an analysis of the courses required for 66 AI majors and 87 AI minors. Our analysis of majors and minors shows great variability in the size and the requirements of these degrees, but we note two takeaways. First, not all majors require a general AI course, but if they don't, they do require a Machine Learning (ML) course. Second, while more than a third of majors require an Ethics in AI course, just under a quarter of AI minors do.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Uniform integrability of the distance to the nearest leaf in random trees

arXiv:2606.15339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the distance from the root to the nearest leaf, the analogous quantity for a uniformly chosen vertex, and its protection number, in size-conditioned simply generated trees. We prove a uniform exponential tail bound for each of these quantities, valid for arbitrary offspring distributions. As a consequence, these random variables are uniformly integrable of every order. This yields convergence of all moments to those of the corresponding local limit. The argument is probabilistic and unified across the three quantities.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimal learning of quantum channels in diamond distance

arXiv:2512.10214v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum process tomography, the task of estimating an unknown quantum channel, is a central problem in quantum information theory. A long-standing open question is how many uses of an unknown channel are required to learn it in diamond distance, the standard metric for distinguishing quantum processes. While quantum state tomography is well understood, for general channels the problem remained open beyond the unitary case. Here we establish the query complexity of channel tomography with optimal dependence on the dimension parameters, at any fixed constant accuracy. We design an algorithm showing that any channel with input/output dimensions $d_{\mathrm{in}},d_{\mathrm{out}}$ and Kraus rank at most $k$ can be learned to accuracy $\varepsilon$ using $O(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k/\varepsilon^{2})$ channel uses. Conversely, we prove that $\Omega(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k)$ uses are necessary at constant accuracy and that, for non-minimal Kraus rank, a separate $\Omega(1/\varepsilon^{2})$ contribution is unavoidable. Since channels subsume states, unitaries, isometries, and measurements as special cases, our protocol provides a unified framework for these tomography tasks, yielding new guarantees for isometry and measurement tomography while recovering known optimal scalings for state and unitary tomography. Our algorithm follows the natural strategy of performing optimal tomography on the Choi state. The main technical contribution is to show that this suffices to control the induced diamond-distance error, avoiding the dimension loss incurred by a naive conversion from Choi-state trace distance to channel diamond distance. The protocol uses the channel non-adaptively to prepare Choi-state copies, purifies them in parallel, and performs optimal pure-state tomography on the resulting purifications. Hence, we reduce channel tomography to pure-state tomography.

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

Anatomically Conditioned Recurrent Refinement for Topology-Aware Circle of Willis Segmentation

Segmenting the Circle of Willis (CoW) from Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) is challenging due to complex topology and thin vascular structures that are prone to fragmentation. Standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) often fail to capture these topological constraints, resulting in "broken vessel" artifacts. To address this, we propose the Anatomically Conditioned Recurrent Refinement U-Net (AC2RUNet). Our architecture decouples segmentation into two streams: a Static Stream that extracts invariant anatomical features and a lightweight Dynamic Stream that iteratively refines topological errors over time. We further introduce a dynamic curriculum learning strategy that transitions from high-recall geometric supervision to topology-aware constraints. Validated on the TopCoW dataset, AC2RUNet substantially reduces Hausdorff Distance (4.72 mm vs 9.17 mm) and Betti number errors (0.19 vs 0.40), improving topological connectivity over the nnU-Net baseline while maintaining comparable volumetric Dice.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Pushing the Boundaries of Natural Reasoning: Interleaved Bonus from Formal-Logic Verification

arXiv:2601.22642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities, yet their stochastic next-token prediction creates logical inconsistencies and reward hacking that formal symbolic systems avoid. To bridge this gap, we introduce a formal logic verification-guided framework that dynamically interleaves formal symbolic verification with the natural language generation process, providing real-time feedback to detect and rectify errors as they occur. Distinguished from previous neuro-symbolic methods limited by passive post-hoc validation, our approach actively penalizes intermediate fallacies during the reasoning chain. We operationalize this framework via a novel two-stage training pipeline that synergizes formal logic verification-guided supervised fine-tuning and policy optimization. Extensive evaluation on six benchmarks spanning mathematical, logical, and general reasoning demonstrates that our 7B and 14B models outperform state-of-the-art baselines by average margins of 10.4% and 14.2%, respectively. These results validate that formal verification can serve as a scalable mechanism to significantly push the performance boundaries of advanced LLM reasoning.

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

ShapeBench: A Scalable Benchmark and Diagnostic Suite for Standardized Evaluation in Aerodynamic Shape Optimization

arXiv:2605.20763v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rapid progress in aerodynamic shape optimization (ASO) has outpaced currently-available standardized evaluation frameworks. Fair comparison requires a unified benchmark spanning diverse shape classes, objective formulations, and matched-budget state-of-the-art baselines. We introduce ShapeBench, an open-source ASO benchmark with a unified API spanning 103 tasks across eight shape categories and multiple optimization regimes. Each ShapeBench task includes a validated surrogate for fast search; when feasible, a high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) pipeline for final verification is available, enabling systematic fidelity-gap analysis. ShapeBench provides a reproducible protocol with well-configured baselines to compare fairly using a consistent budget metric, allowing for comparison among both classical and LLM-driven methods, including general-purpose optimizers and a new domain-specialized evolutionary LLM baseline, ShapeEvolve. Results on ShapeBench demonstrate substantial variance in optimizer rankings across shape categories and problem formulations, with mean pairwise Spearman $\rho = 0.013$, so single-task conclusions do not reliably generalize across problem classes. The benchmark is also far from saturation; classical methods are rarely applicable across all shape categories and tasks, further highlighting the need for more general-purpose approaches.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Beyond a Single Explanation of the Adam–SGD Gap

arXiv:2606.14259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has identified several factors that can contribute to the performance gap between Adam and SGD, spanning data aspects, architecture design, and optimization properties. Yet these explanations are often studied in isolation, leaving their relative importance unclear. In this work, we revisit these hypotheses through a controlled empirical study across vision, language, genomics, and graph tasks, spanning modern and classical architectures, and carefully designed training setups. Our results suggest that no single factor consistently explains the Adam–SGD gap. For instance, the Adam advantage can (1) persist under a uniform vocabulary distribution yet nearly disappear under a heavy-tailed one; (2) reverse in favor of SGD in softmax-attention models; and (3) become larger under soft architectural modifications, e.g., when ReLU is replaced by a GeLU nonlinearity. This suggests that the gap arises from nontrivial data and architecture interactions, rather than from a single common factor. Yet, we observe a pattern across our settings: a crossover batch size at which the relative advantage shifts from SGD to Adam as the batch size scales. These empirical results are captured by our theoretical gap model, which predicts this batch-size-dependent crossover. Our perspective helps reconcile several existing hypotheses while offering practical insights across domains.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

What level of expertise is necessary to generate ACLS training test questions: pre-med students vs. artificial intelligence?

Abstract Introduction In-hospital cardiac arrest carries high mortality despite standardized ACLS training. Educators face increasing time constraints in developing assessment tools for ACLS training. Two possible solutions to this problem are using pre-medical students or using artificial intelligence to generate test questions. This study compared the quality of pre-medical student-generated ACLS test questions vs. AI-generated ACLS test questions, testing the hypothesis that AI-generated questions are non-inferior to student-generated questions. Methods Ten pre-medical students created ACLS questions following predefined criteria, while an AI model (Northwell's Artificial Intelligence Hub) generated comparable questions. A blinded ACLS-certified physician evaluated questions on the qualities of Alignment, Clarity, Cognitive Level, and Question Design using a standardized rubric (Likert scale: 1 = poor quality, 5 = excellent). Student's T-test and Chi-square analysis were used to compare the quality of questions on different rubric domains within each arm (student vs. AI) and within one domain (eg, question Clarity) between arms. The Student's T test was used when 2 comparator groups were compared (eg, Clarity of student-generated vs. AI-generated questions) within one arm. The ANOVA test was used when comparing more than 2 comparator groups (eg, Alignment vs. Clarity vs. Cognitive Level) within one arm. Statistical significance was set as a priority at p

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

StreamKL: Fast and Memory-Efficient KL Divergence for Boosting Attention Distillation

arXiv:2606.20005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention distillation, which trains one attention distribution to match another by minimizing their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, is widely used in knowledge distillation, model compression, continual learning, and sparse-attention LLM training. However, existing approaches materialize both attention distributions before computing the KL reduction, incurring $O(N_QN_K)$ memory and IO costs that become prohibitive at long context lengths. We present StreamKL, the first fused GPU primitive for attention KL divergence that eliminates this quadratic materialization. StreamKL derives a novel online formulation for the coupled two-distribution KL reduction, enabling a single one-pass forward kernel that streams query-key tiles through on-chip SRAM. For the backward pass, StreamKL recomputes attention probabilities tile-by-tile, avoiding storage of quadratic intermediates. We further design and implement efficient GPU kernels with dedicated optimizations. Experiments show StreamKL delivers up to $43\times$ and $14\times$ speedups over baseline methods in the forward and backward passes, respectively. Most importantly, StreamKL reduces the extra HBM footprint of attention distillation from $O(N_QN_K)$ to $O(1)$, enabling long-context distillation on a single GPU.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

KATANA: A Fast, Low-Power Mapping of Kalman Filters onto Edge NPUs for Real-Time Tracking

arXiv:2606.14992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State estimation is the closed-loop core of every real-time tracking system, from radar surveillance and counter-UAV defense to autonomous driving and robotics. These deployments run on edge platforms, where defense systems mount on vehicles and drones, and civilian pipelines live on cars and handheld devices. Here, every additional watt of compute erodes mission duration or operational range. Two hard constraints follow: each new measurement must be fused before the next control cycle, and the total compute must fit within a strict battery and thermal power envelope. The Linear and Extended Kalman Filters (LKF, EKF) are dominant estimators on these systems, but today they execute almost exclusively on CPUs, which serialize multi-object tracking (MOT) updates, or on custom FPGA/ASIC accelerators that lengthen design cycles. Contemporary AI-PC SoCs, like the Intel Core Ultra Series 1 and 2, integrate a low-power, data-parallel Neural Processing Unit (NPU). We therefore ask whether the Kalman filter can be mapped onto this existing matrix engine to meet real-time and low-power budgets simultaneously, avoiding a dedicated accelerator and keeping the CPU and GPU free for primary workloads. We present KATANA, an NPU-aware optimization framework delivering the first end-to-end mapping of the LKF and EKF onto a commercial NPU, alongside a cross-platform characterization on shipping AI-PC silicon. KATANA applies three algebraic graph rewrites: subtract-to-add reformulation via a precomputed negative-projection matrix H_neg, static-shape tensor fusion, and block-diagonal batched parallelization, ensuring 100% of operations execute on the DPU matrix engine. On the Series 2, the optimized batched EKF reaches 223.35 FPS at 13.43 W active power, and the LKF reaches 408.73 FPS at 14.05 W, delivering up to a 97.9% reduction in dynamic energy versus the CPU implementation.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Sovereign Execution Brokers: Enforcing Certificate-Bound Authority in Agentic Control Planes

arXiv:2606.20520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous agents are increasingly connected to cloud, deployment, and data-control workflows, but production mutation authority should not reside inside non-deterministic reasoning processes. Existing access-control mechanisms authorize identities, while assurance layers certify proposed actions; neither alone provides a mandatory enforcement point for certified authority at the moment of mutation. This paper introduces the Sovereign Execution Broker (SEB), a runtime enforcement boundary for certificate-bound agentic infrastructure. SEB consumes certificates issued by the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), verifies that the requested mutation matches the certified execution contract, checks validity windows, policy epochs, revocation epochs, and live-state drift, mints scoped execution identity, invokes infrastructure APIs, and records signed decision and outcome records. By separating proposal, admission, and execution, SEB turns certified authority into a short-lived, revocable, auditable runtime capability, provided that production mutation APIs reject non-broker identities. We present the SEB execution model, certificate and replay-verification predicates, scoped identity semantics, bypass-prevention deployment patterns, failure behavior, and a concrete prototype implementation. We evaluate the prototype on AWS and Kubernetes clusters, measuring latency overheads, revocation propagation, drift detection, and security under fault injection.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

The Circumplex Degeneracy Behind the Rare-Class Limit in Affect Recognition

In-the-wild expression recognition persistently fails on a few rare emotions, and the standard explanation is class imbalance. Through a controlled multi-task study on two benchmarks, we show the failure is instead a property of affect geometry: the rare classes are degenerate on Russell's circumplex, and that degeneracy bounds what any loss or cost can achieve. Our instrument is a circumplex-cost optimal-transport term that prices expression confusions by their valence-arousal distance. The term improves the official score and expression macro-F1, but a control most studies omit shows the gain is not geometric: a uniform cost, equivalent to a generic confidence penalty, matches it on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.625) and significantly exceeds it on AffectNet (+0.057 over base, larger than the circumplex). What the geometry reshapes is the structure of the errors, making them affectively nearer the truth on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.031 against the uniform control), an effect that does not survive on AffectNet, where a visual confound at the far corner of the circumplex overwhelms it. The rare-class failure, by contrast, is stable across both datasets we examine: the degenerate pairs (anger-fear on Aff-Wild2, anger-contempt on AffectNet) resist frequency-based interventions, the transport term, and an action-unit-augmented cost built specifically to separate them. We conclude that progress on rare expressions requires representations that distinguish the classes, not supervision that reprices their confusions, and we provide the controls and metrics needed to tell the two apart.

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

Why Depth Matters in Parallelizable Sequence Models: A Lie Algebraic View

arXiv:2603.05573v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scalable sequence models, such as Transformer variants and structured state-space models, often trade expressivity power for sequence-level parallelism, which enables efficient training. Here we examine the bounds on error and how error scales when models operate outside of their expressivity regimes using a Lie-algebraic control perspective. Our theory formulates a correspondence between the depth of a sequence model and the tower of Lie algebra extensions. Echoing recent theoretical studies, we characterize the Lie-algebraic class of constant-depth sequence models and their corresponding expressivity bounds. Furthermore, we analytically derive an approximation error bound and show that error diminishes exponentially as the depth increases, consistent with the strong empirical performance of these models. We validate our theoretical predictions using experiments on symbolic word and continuous-valued state-tracking problems.