Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

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

01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Associations between hematologic dynamics during pregnancy and obstetric complications: A retrospective observational study

by Veronica Tozzo, Rachel Petherbridge, Kaitlyn James, Sarah Hsu, Deepti Pant, Chloe Michalopoulos, Brody H. Foy, Tanayott Thaweethai, Christopher Mow, Jacqueline Maya, Carolina Batlle Camero, Lydia Shook, Kathryn J. Gray, Logan Mauney, John M. Higgins, Camille E. Powe Background Pregnancy alters hematologic state as measured by complete blood count (CBC), but the longitudinal changes in CBC indices that define healthy pregnancies are not well established. In a large cohort based at an academic health system in the United States, we aimed to define reference intervals and typical longitudinal changes in CBC indices during pregnancy. We then tested for associations between extreme CBC values for gestational age or extreme longitudinal changes in CBC indices and obstetric complications. Methods and findings We studied nine CBC indices in individuals with singleton pregnancies who delivered after 30 weeks’ gestation and presented for prenatal care prior to 20 weeks. The electronic health record (EHR)-based Maternal Health Cohort (Massachusetts General Hospital; 1998–2016) formed our discovery cohort of 45,992 pregnancies, 18% of which had relevant complications. We developed a validation cohort of 48,868, 27% with complications from EHR data in the Mass General Brigham healthcare system from 2016 to 2024. In pregnancies without complications in the discovery cohort, we derived gestational-age-specific reference intervals (2.5th–97.5th percentile) and established typical intra-pregnancy longitudinal changes. In the validation cohort, we then tested CBC values outside of the 26–29 weeks’ gestation reference interval and CBC rare changes (uncommon changes in magnitude and direction) between 7–14 and 26–29 weeks’ gestation for association with a composite outcome (hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, small for gestational age birthweight, preterm birth) and its individual components using generalized estimating equations. Derived reference intervals differed from those in the literature for mean red cell volume, mean red cell hemoglobin, red cell count, and mean red cell hemoglobin concentration; reference intervals for other indices were similar to those previously published. In validation, hematocrit, hemoglobin, and red cell count values above their gestational-age specific reference intervals were associated with increased risk of the composite obstetric outcome: odds ratios (ORs) of 1.4 (95% CI [1.2, 1.5] p 

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

URDF Synthesis from RGB-D Sequences via Differentiable Joint Inference and Energy-Consistent Verification

作者:

Reconstructing simulation-ready digital twins of articulated objects from sensor observations remains constrained by two persistent gaps: (i) part-level geometric reconstruction is decoupled from kinematic-parameter estimation, and (ii) the recovered models often violate basic dynamic invariants such as energy conservation, leading to drift when the URDF is replayed in physics simulators. We present KinemaForge, a constraint-driven pipeline that jointly infers part-level shape, joint topology, and joint parameters from short RGB-D sequences and validates the result against an energy-consistent verifier built on differentiable rigid-body dynamics. The pipeline introduces three components: a kinematic constraint graph that encodes joint-part incidences as soft edges; a differentiable screw-axis solver that backpropagates from rendered observations through Featherstone's articulated-body algorithm to joint parameters; and an energy residual loss that penalises non-physical free responses of the reconstructed model. Across five PartNet-Mobility categories and an internal RGB-D benchmark, KinemaForge reduces the average joint-axis error from 4.52 degrees to 2.83 degrees (-37.4%) over the strongest geometric baseline (PARIS) and from 5.30 degrees to 2.83 degrees (-46.6%) over the interaction-based Ditto baseline, lowers long-horizon simulation drift by 64% (vs. PARIS) over 50 s rollouts, and yields URDFs whose closed-loop manipulation success rate improves by 14.6 percentage points over Ditto in our preliminary evaluation. Code and reconstruction data will be released upon acceptance.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Tokens to Faces: Investigating Discrete Speech Representations for 3D Facial Animation

The choice of speech representation is critical in speech-driven 3D facial animation. Representations differ in what they encode: SSL features emphasize segmental and semantic cues, neural codecs yield latents optimized for acoustic reconstruction, and ASR-style objectives produce label-based spaces. We evaluate four speech representation families for 3D facial synthesis, comparing their facial reconstruction quality across two facial decoders using objective metrics and a perceptual evaluation. We additionally conduct probing analyses that relate tokenized representations to phonetic units and to articulatory deformations. We found that encoding phonetic classes is beneficial for accurate facial animation prediction on both semantic and label-based representations with comparable facial animation quality. From the latter, we introduce an Audio Visual Text-to-Speech (AVTTS) pipeline that leverages, as a shared space, discrete representations to decode speech and 3D facial motion.

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

KGEdit: Ambiguity-Aware Knowledge Graphs for Training-Free Precise Video Generation and Editing

In recent years, training-free video generation has progressed remarkably. However, when handling complex textual instructions, existing methods still suffer from semantic ambiguity, incorrect concept binding, and cross-frame inconsistency. To address these issues, we propose KGEdit, a structured semantic control framework for text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models. Specifically, we first construct an ambiguity-aware knowledge graph (AAKG) to disentangle and disambiguate the input prompt, converting it into four types of structured semantics: identity, relation, attribute, and negative constraints. We then design a structured semantic injection module (SSIM) to inject these semantic signals into key layers of the diffusion Transformer, enabling fine-grained semantic control. In addition, we introduce a temporal-aware semantic control (TASC) module that dynamically schedules semantic objectives according to the stage-wise characteristics of the denoising process, further improving semantic alignment and temporal consistency. Experiments show that KGEdit outperforms existing methods in editing precision and temporal stability, while offering higher efficiency and controllability in text-driven interaction scenarios.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Detectors for Open-Set RF Fingerprinting

arXiv:2606.12718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Radio-frequency (RF) fingerprinting systems must operate in open-world environments where signals from unknown transmitters and temporal drift introduce distribution shift at test time. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection provides a natural framework for this problem, yet its application to RF fingerprinting (RFF) remains limited. A key barrier to their adoption is that most OOD detectors require auxiliary OOD data for parameter tuning, an assumption that is difficult to satisfy in RF environments where representative OOD data is impractical to collect. In this work, we introduce a promising set of OOD detection methods from the machine learning literature to open-set RFF domain. We present these methods within a unified mathematical framework based on information theory, which is a natural framework for communication systems. Our framework allows for the systematic analysis of methods and development of new methods. We further demonstrate the applicability of recent work on tuning OOD detectors without given OOD tuning data for open-set RFF. We evaluate on the POWDER RF fingerprinting dataset, showing that detectors tuned without any given OOD data achieve performance comparable to baselines with access to true OOD tuning data and greatly out-perform baseline approaches without access to true OOD tuning data, showcasing the practical viability for the RFF problem.

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

Beyond Tokenization: Direct Timestep Embedding and Contrastive Alignment for Time-Series Question Answering

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have given rise to time-series question answering (TSQA), which formulates time-series analysis as natural-language question answering. However, directly feeding raw numerical series into LLMs suffers from a tokenization bottleneck: Byte Pair Encoding fragments continuous values into unstable tokens whose embeddings lack meaningful metric structure, resulting in the loss of magnitude, scale, and trend information. Prior methods use patch-based encoders that split the series into fixed windows, locking in one granularity that breaks patterns and hides exact timesteps, through a separate module that rarely transfers across datasets with different lengths or sampling rates. To address this challenge, we propose CADE (Contrastive Alignment with Direct Embedding), a novel framework for TSQA built upon two key components: direct timestep embedding and semantic alignment. The proposed framework maps each timestep directly into the LLM embedding space through a point-wise linear encoder and MLP projector, preserving exact index-level access while eliminating the need for patching and padding. To further bridge the semantic gap between time-series and language representations, we introduce a novel one-directional supervised contrastive loss that aligns time-series embeddings with frozen class-name text anchors. Experimental results on the public Time-MQA benchmark demonstrate that our framework consistently improves performance across six TSQA tasks, outperforming both open-source and proprietary LLM baselines.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Efficient Neural Network Model Selection for Few-Class Application Datasets

arXiv:2606.19712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While much effort has focused on developing and benchmarking high-performance neural networks, less attention has been given to how dataset properties, known to practitioners, can guide efficient model selection. Neural models are typically evaluated on datasets with thousands of classes, yet many real-world applications involve fewer than ten. To address this understudied but common setting, we develop a measure of classification difficulty based on data-side properties and show how it enables more efficient model selection for few-class datasets, where traditional approaches are less effective. We term this phenomenon "few-class distinctiveness". Our metric allows comparison of models and datasets 6 to 29$\times$ faster than repeated training and testing. Leveraging this insight, we extend scaled model families below the smallest published models, achieving greater efficiency at similar accuracy, for example models up to 42% smaller than YOLOv5-nano for a mobile robot task. Targeting resource-constrained applications, we demonstrate few-class model selection across mobile robot, drone, and IoT scenarios, highlighting practical gains in efficiency without sacrificing performance.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Diffusion Offline Reinforcement Learning for Fair and Energy-Efficient UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks

arXiv:2606.16331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of generative artificial intelligence with wireless communication and signal processing systems has opened new avenues for intelligent, data-driven decision-making in future 6G networks. This work proposes a diffusion soft actor-critic (Diffusion-SAC) approach that leverages offline reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced by denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) to optimize trajectory and scheduling control in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. While offline RL methods, such as conservative Q-learning (CQL), can learn from static datasets, they often struggle to generalize in low-data or dynamic conditions. To address this, we combine the robustness of CQL with the generative power of diffusion models, enabling expressive and signal-aware policy learning that generalizes beyond behavior policies. Applied to a UAV-assisted wireless network, the proposed framework minimizes transmission energy and improves fairness among devices. Simulations show that Diffusion-SAC outperforms standard offline RL baselines, achieving more stable convergence and higher rewards even with limited datasets. The method enhances data efficiency, reduces energy consumption, and increases throughput by more than 35 % compared to existing algorithms, demonstrating its potential for robust policy learning in next-generation wireless control systems.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

"We don't complain; it's just part of being a woman": frequency, knowledge, and sociocultural beliefs about dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort

Introduction Dysmenorrhoea is highly prevalent globally and interferes with engagement in education, work, social participation, and quality of life. Although evidence suggests that sociocultural beliefs influence how menstrual pain is understood and managed, relatively little research has explored dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and beliefs within South Africa. This study aimed to (1) determine the frequency of dysmenorrhoea, (2) assess dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge and compare knowledge between menstruating and non-menstruating individuals, and (3) explore commonly held generational, cultural, and religious beliefs related to dysmenorrhoea in a South African university cohort. Methods We analysed data collected as part of a cross-sectional survey conducted among staff and students at a South African university. Participants completed demographic questions, items assessing dysmenorrhoea-related knowledge, and an adapted Working Ability, Location, Intensity, Days of Pain, Dysmenorrhoea (WaLIDD) questionnaire. Participants were also invited to provide free-text responses describing generational, cultural, and religious beliefs about dysmenorrhoea. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively and compared between menstruating and non-menstruating participants. Free-text responses were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results A total of 863 participants completed the survey, including 578 current or past menstruators. The frequency (95%CI) of dysmenorrhoea was 75.4% (71.7-78.9). Most participants were classified as having moderate (53%) or severe (31%) dysmenorrhoea on the WaLIDD scale. Awareness of dysmenorrhoea was higher among participants who had menstruated than among those who had never menstruated (80.4% vs 55.3%, p

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Physics-Distilled Neural Network enabled by Large Language Models for Manufacturing Process-Property Predictive Modeling

arXiv:2606.11605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting process-property relationships in manufacturing is often challenged by high experimental costs and the limited interpretability of complex 'black-box' models. This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation framework designed to achieve high-accuracy predictions in data-scarce scenarios. The framework integrates analytical physics priors, which are systematically extracted from scientific literature via Large Language Models, into a privileged teacher model. We employ a Graph-Masked Attention layer to capture the complex physical dependencies among input variables showing strict setpoints or a combination of static and high-frequency temporal signatures. This privileged knowledge is distilled into a lightweight student predictor for inference. The feasibility and robustness of the framework are evaluated through a comprehensive experiment across five diverse manufacturing processes. To ensure statistical reliability, given the small dataset sizes, a repeated K-fold cross-validation technique is employed to quantify model stability and generalization. Results indicate that the proposed framework consistently achieves high predictive accuracy across all evaluated domains. Most importantly, the architecture demonstrates significant fault tolerance by maintaining robust predictive performance even in scenarios where LLM-derived analytical priors are suboptimal or incomplete. Furthermore, the student predictor achieves an inference frequency exceeding 6000 Hz, which facilitates real-time edge deployment on standard industrial hardware. This work provides a scalable solution for bridging the gap between theoretical physics and real-time industrial monitoring in data-limited environments.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DINO-Med3D: Bridging Dimension and Domain Gaps in Volumetric Segmentation via Progressive Adaptation

Although DINOv3 has demonstrated remarkable semantic discrimination in natural imagery, its direct application to volumetric medical segmentation is hindered by inherent dimension and domain disparities. To resolve these issues, we propose DINO-Med3D, a two-stage progressive framework that repurpose the pre-trained DINOv3 encoder for 3D medical tasks. In the first stage, we mitigate the dimension gap by introducing a multi-slice embedding module that incorporates pseudo-3D context, while simultaneously employing a segmentation proxy task to adapt representations learned from natural scenes to the medical domain. Subsequently, we further enhance volumetric understanding by adding lightweight 3D adapters into the frozen backbone to enforce global inter-slice continuity. Finally, to compensate for the spatial information loss inherent in the embedding process, we design a parallel detail recovery stream to explicitly preserve high-frequency boundary cues. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that our approach successfully adapts DINOv3 to the medical domain and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

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

Ride, Track, and Recover: Pilot Randomized Trial of a Wearable Digital Self-Management Intervention During a Veteran Endurance-Cycling Program

arXiv:2606.13529v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans is characterized by persistent hyperarousal and comorbid anxiety and depressive symptoms that are difficult to monitor and manage outside clinical settings. Thirteen veterans participating in a Project Hero cycling event in Texas were randomized by computer-generated sequence in a naturalistic setting to two arms: (1) digital intervention plus physical activity, or (2) physical activity only, plus a third at-home monitoring control cohort consisting of 7 veterans selected from the broader Project Hero veteran community. Continuous smartwatch sensing combined heart rate and accelerometer features to detect hyperarousal events, which were confirmed in real time by participants. Weekly self-report measures of anxiety, depression, and PTSD severity were collected. Generalized additive mixed models characterized nonlinear trajectories over time. Baseline-normalized hyperarousal trajectories differed significantly across conditions, with the digital intervention group (n=7) showing structured stabilization compared to late-study escalation in the physical-only group (n=3). Both cycling groups exhibited acute symptom improvements during the endurance event; however, the digital intervention group demonstrated a higher overall maintenance of gains. The at-home control group (n=4) showed gradual symptom declines. Perceived precision of ML detections varied substantially across individuals and was positively associated with symptom severity, with higher-severity participants confirming a greater proportion of detected events. These results suggest that coupling wearable detection with digital self-management tools may support stabilization of hyperarousal and symptom improvement while emphasizing the importance of personalization and human-centered design in wearable mental health systems.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Multi-Task Bayesian In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606.20538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bayesian predictive inference provides a principled framework for uncertainty quantification, data efficiency, and robust generalization. However, exact inference is often intractable, and scalable approximations may remain computationally expensive or require restrictive modeling assumptions that degrade predictive performance. Prior-Data Fitted and in-context models have recently emerged as an amortized alternative by learning to map datasets directly to predictive distributions, but existing approaches are tightly coupled to the support of the training prior and lack explicit mechanisms for adapting to new priors at test time, resulting in limited robustness under distribution shift. We introduce a multi-task in-context learning framework for amortized hierarchical Bayesian predictive inference that explicitly represents prior information as a prefix of in-context datasets. A transformer trained on sequences of prior and target tasks learns to adapt its predictions across families of priors. On a suite of evaluations with increasing difficulty, including out-of-meta-distribution priors and priors with high-dimensional latent structures, our method matches oracle Bayesian predictors while being orders of magnitude faster. We further demonstrate its practical relevance on a real-world spatiotemporal temperature prediction benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/martianmartina/multi-task-bayesian-icl/.

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

WavSLM: Single-Stream Speech Language Modeling via WavLM Distillation

Large language models show that simple autoregressive training can yield scalable and coherent generation, but extending this paradigm to speech remains challenging due to the entanglement of semantic and acoustic information. Most existing speech language models rely on text supervision, hierarchical token streams, or complex hybrid architectures, departing from the single-stream generative pretraining paradigm that has proven effective in text. In this work, we introduce WavSLM, a speech language model trained by quantizing and distilling self-supervised WavLM representations into a single codebook and optimizing an autoregressive next-chunk prediction objective. WavSLM jointly models semantic and acoustic information within a single token stream without text supervision or text pretraining. Despite its simplicity, it achieves competitive performance on consistency benchmarks and speech generation while using fewer parameters, less training data, and supporting streaming inference.

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

JGRA: Jacobian Geometry Robustness Assessment in NISQ Noise-Aware Quantum Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.09964v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The NISQ era places stringent constraints on quantum computation, where noise and decoherence fundamentally limit performance. In classical deep learning, model robustness and resilience to perturbations are well studied: deep neural networks (DNNs) maintain high performance despite pruning, noise injection, and structural perturbations due to inherent redundancy in their representations. A central challenge in quantum machine learning is to transfer this notion of robustness to quantum neural networks (QNNs) under realistic NISQ noise. While classical deep learning exhibits robustness through structural redundancy, analogous principles for QNNs remain underdeveloped. We propose JGRA: a framework for assessing robustness in noise-aware QNNs via Jacobian geometry, capturing model sensitivity to parameter perturbations induced by noise. Our method includes entropy-matched noise calibration, noise-aware training, and noise-conditioned Jacobian extraction, yielding geometric descriptors that link clean-regime structure to noisy inference behaviour. We also empirically demonstrate that these descriptors encode predictive information about robustness under unseen noise.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

VitalAgent: A Tool-Augmented Agent for Reactive and Proactive Physiological Monitoring over Wearable Health Data

arXiv:2605.29483v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Wearable devices enable continuous monitoring of physiological signals such as ECG and PPG, but existing mHealth systems are largely limited to task-specific prediction pipelines or reactive question answering over static summaries. They lack the ability to support temporal reasoning, persistent physiological context, and proactive monitoring over long-term signal streams. We propose VitalAgent, a tool-augmented agentic framework for ECG/PPG-based mHealth that supports both reactive question answering and proactive monitoring. VitalAgent is built on a longitudinal physiological memory and a tool-augmented reasoning interface that enables dynamic computation over raw signals. We further introduce VitalBench, a longitudinal physiological monitoring benchmark dataset comprising 1,862 QA pairs for reactive question answering and 90.2 hours of continuous ECG/PPG recordings for proactive monitoring, covering cardiac, physical activity, and stress-related tasks. Experiments demonstrate that VitalAgent achieves over 25% improvement over prompt-based and ReAct baselines in reactive evaluation and supports proactive alert monitoring over long-term physiological signals, highlighting the importance of dynamic tool use and long-term physiological monitoring.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Cumulant expansion approach to the decay dynamics of interacting Mössbauer nuclei after strong impulsive excitation

arXiv:2510.00970v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent progress in accelerator-based x-ray sources brings higher excitation of ensembles of Mössbauer nuclei closer to experimental feasibility. Yet, a theoretical modeling of the decay dynamics of the interacting nuclear ensemble after the impulsive excitation is still an open challenge. Here, we derive a set of nonlinear equations which is capable of efficiently modeling large nuclear ensembles for arbitrary degrees of excitation. As key signature for higher excitation, we identify a non-linear time-evolution of the nuclear dipole phase, which can be tuned via the scattering geometry, and interferometrically be measured. Furthermore, we identify interesting finite-size effects in the nuclear dynamics of small ensembles. Our results provide important guidance for future experiments aiming at the non-linear excitation of nuclei. We further envision the exploration of finite size-effects in Mössbauer spectroscopy with highest spatial resolution, i.e., small sample volumes.

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

Helping Figures Tell their Story! Paper-Grounded Video Generation Explaining Complex Scientific Figures

Scientific figures compress complex pipelines into a single canvas, yet understanding them requires paper-grounded, step-by-step narration aligned with visual highlights a capability missing from current video generation systems and benchmarks. To address this, we introduce paper-grounded figure-to-video generation: generating narrated, region-grounded walkthrough videos from a figure and its paper. We propose MINARD (Multimodal Interpretation of Narrated Architecture via Region Decomposition), a pipeline that generates paper-grounded narrations and sequentially grounds them to figure regions. We also release FigTalk, a benchmark with new sequential and component-level grounding metrics derived. On FigTalk, MINARD generates humanlike, paper-faithful narrations and outperforms narration-conditioned figure spatial grounding compared to existing approaches in both automatic and human evaluation

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Exact Markovian Dissipation Requires Singular Energy Resources

arXiv:2606.19510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Gorini–Kossakowski–Lindblad–Sudarshan (GKLS) equation describes irreversible quantum dynamical semigroups. We show that this description cannot be exact under physically regular energy conditions. We prove that the open-system survival probability under physically regular energy conditions has sublinear decay, whereas any dissipative GKLS semigroup has a linear short-time decay. Hence exact Markovian dissipation requires singular energy resources: an unbounded-below total Hamiltonian or infinite initial energy, and a divergent interaction-energy moment. Therefore, a dissipative time-independent GKLS equation should be regarded as an effective description rather than the exact reduced dynamics of a Hamiltonian dilation satisfying physically regular energy conditions.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Use of the Pharmacy First service in England in the first 12 months: geographic variation and health system context

Objectives: The Pharmacy First (PF) service was introduced across England from 31 January 2024 to expand the clinical role of community pharmacies and improve access to primary care. This paper describes use of PF in its first 12 months, in terms of uptake, access routes, consultation outcomes, geographic variations, service costs and antimicrobial supply. Methods: A descriptive analysis of all PF consultations submitted for payment to NHS Business Services Authority in England between 31 January 2024 and 31 January 2025. Pharmacy-level consultation data were linked to national data on population, location and pharmacy characteristics. PF use was examined using population-standardised consultation rates and consultations per pharmacy. Results: During the first year of implementation, 2,205,731 PF consultations were recorded as delivered across 11,349 pharmacies, with payment of GBP123 million to pharmacies. Uptake increased steadily over time. Most consultations were for acute sore throat (33%) and uncomplicated urinary tract infection (27%), with corresponding antibiotics, phenoxymethylpenicillin and nitrofurantoin being the most supplied. Most people self-referred (74%) into the service, with 95% of consultations managed without onward referral. Substantial geographic variation was observed. Northern regions had higher use based on the eligible population. The South East and Midlands had higher activity per pharmacy. London showed a distinct pattern, with higher self-referral into the service, lower medication supply and higher referral to other healthcare services. Higher consultation volume was weakly associated with pharmacy characteristics, including opening hours, pharmacy type and retail setting, and local context, in terms of socio-economic and geographic factors. Conclusions: PF had immediate uptake and is operating primarily as a direct-access model for common acute conditions. Findings suggest that PF is contributing to improved access to care and may shift demand away from general practice. However, the service uptake appears to be shaped by geographic location, proximity to other healthcare services and pharmacy characteristics.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Nightjar: Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Decoding for Large Language Models Serving

arXiv:2512.22420v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates LLM inference by verifying draft tokens in parallel. However, this method presents a critical trade-off: it improves throughput in low-load, memory-bound systems but degrades performance in high-load, compute-bound environments due to verification overhead. Existing speculative decoding methods use fixed lengths and cannot adapt to workload changes or decide when to stop speculation. The cost of restarting speculative inference also remains unquantified. Under high load, the benefit of speculation diminishes, while retaining the draft model reduces KV cache capacity, limiting batch size and degrading throughput. To overcome this, we propose Nightjar, a resource-aware adaptive speculative framework. It first adjusts to the request load by dynamically selecting the optimal speculative length for different batch sizes. Crucially, Nightjar proactively disables speculative decoding when the MAB planner determines that speculation is no longer beneficial, and during the disabled phase, offloads the draft model to the CPU only under GPU memory pressure. This reclaims memory for the KV cache, thereby facilitating larger batch sizes and maximizing overall system throughput. Experiments show that Nightjar achieves up to 14.76% higher throughput than standard speculative decoding and up to 20.18% lower latency in the main benchmark suite under dynamic request arrival rates for real-time LLM serving scenarios.

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

MemSlides: A Hierarchical Memory Driven Agent Framework for Personalized Slide Generation with Multi-turn Local Revision

Personalized presentation generation requires more than conditioning on a current prompt or template: agents must preserve stable user preferences across tasks, retain newly introduced preferences and constraints during multi-turn revision, and carry out local edits reliably. We propose MemSlides, a hierarchical memory framework for personalized presentation agents that separates long-term memory from working memory and further divides long-term memory into user profile memory and tool memory. User profile memory stores intent-conditioned profiles for round-0 personalization, working memory carries active preferences and session constraints across revision rounds, and tool memory stores reusable execution experience for reliable localized editing. MemSlides pairs this memory design with scoped slide-local revision, so targeted updates act on the smallest affected region instead of repeatedly regenerating the full deck. In controlled experiments, user profile memory improves persona-alignment judgments on a multi-persona, multi-intent profile bank, tool-memory injection improves closed-loop modify behavior in diagnostic matched-pair settings, and qualitative cases illustrate working memory's ability to carryover preferences. Taken together, these results suggest that effective personalization in presentation authoring depends on separating persistent user profiles, session-level working memory, and reusable execution experience across generation and localized revision.

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

Self-Attention as Transport: Limits of Symmetric Spectral Diagnostics

When a language model processes a hallucinated response, its attention routing tends to fail in one of two shapes: over-concentrating on a narrow set of positions, or spreading so diffusely that relevance is diluted, and the shape of the failure carries diagnostic signal. We study these shapes as a diagnostic characterization, computed from attention matrices under forced scoring of benchmark-labeled responses rather than during live generation. A widely used family of spectral methods analyzes the symmetric component of the degree-normalized attention operator, which governs transport capacity; we prove that every transpose-invariant spectral diagnostic of this operator is structurally orientation-blind (it cannot distinguish an operator from its transpose, and therefore cannot detect information-flow direction), with a converse to the blindness theorem bounding any Lipschitz diagnostic's transpose sensitivity by the asymmetry coefficient $G$. Pairing this with a closed-form bipartite-Cheeger landscape for canonical causal architectures, we show that uniform causal attention satisfies an $n$-independent floor $\phi \ge 1/5$, while window attention pierces the floor as $O(w/n)$; failure modes are shape-different, not just value-different. This floor is an idealized-architecture benchmark, not an empirical attractor: the fraction of real attention heads that pierce it is itself an architectural signature. The resulting two-axis diagnostic ($\phi$ for capacity, $G$ for direction) yields a falsifiable polarity prediction: bottleneck- and diffuse-dominated benchmarks should exhibit opposite polarity. Under length-controlled evaluation, transport features retain interpretable signal (0.62-0.84 LC-AUROC) across the tested decoder-only, encoder-only, and encoder-decoder models, with polarity reversing as predicted between HaluEval and MedHallu.