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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

On the evolution of the company we keep: Implications for infectious disease modeling

by Joël Mossong Whom we meet shapes how infections spread. Where earlier focus of mathematical epidemiology was on incorporating age, more recent work has begun to reveal the importance of socioeconomic aspects for understanding and managing future epidemics. In this Perspective, Joël Mossong discusses the importance of understanding social contacts and how they have evolved for infectious disease modeling, and the need to factor in additional considerations such as ethic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

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

Influence-Guided Concolic Testing of Transformer Robustness

arXiv:2509.23806v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Concolic testing for neural networks alternates concrete execution with constraint solving to search for inputs that flip model decisions. We present a concolic tester for Transformer classifiers that uses SHAP estimates to rank pending path predicates by their impact on the current prediction. To support self-attention with multiple heads in execution backed by SMT solving, we implement attention semantics in pure Python that are compatible with the solver and make the softmax boundary explicit by concretizing exponentiation arguments. We evaluate our method on CIFAR-10 across three compact Transformer classifiers, ResNet18, and VGG16 under a one-pixel budget and a 900s horizon. Across the 500 model–input pairs in this matched comparison, our method achieves 60% success, compared with 15% for a differential evolution baseline that treats the model as a black box. In the primary two-layer Transformer branch-ordering study, SHAP-based predicate prioritization raises success from 56% to 60% and reduces median attack time by 51%. These results show that influence-guided path exploration can make concolic testing a practical way to find adversarial examples in Transformer models.

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

Towards Functional Correctness of Large Code Models with Selective Generation

arXiv:2505.13553v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The hallucination of code generation models hinders their applicability to systems requiring higher safety standards. One critical bottleneck in addressing code hallucination is the difficulty of identifying the functional correctness of generated code, due to its unnatural form. We address this core bottleneck by automatically generating unit tests using dynamic code analysis tools, leveraging the executable nature of code. Accordingly, we propose a selective code generator that abstains from uncertain generations – based on the functional correctness evaluated by generated unit tests – to theoretically control the correctness among non-abstained answers, \ie the false discovery rate. Finally, we propose to use generated unit tests in evaluation as well as in learning for precise code evaluation, calling this paradigm FuzzEval. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method along with the controllability of code hallucination and reasonable selection efficiency.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Sure-almost-sure and Sure-limit-sure Window Mean Payoff in Markov Decision Processes

arXiv:2605.12191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Given rationals $\alpha$ and $\beta$, the sure-almost-sure problem for a threshold Boolean objective $\varphi$ in a Markov decision process (MDP) asks if one can simultaneously ensure that all outcomes of the MDP have $\varphi$-value at least $\alpha$ (i.e. sure $\alpha$ satisfaction) and with probability $1$ the outcome has $\varphi$-value at least $\beta$ (i.e. almost-sure $\beta$ satisfaction). The sure-limit-sure problem asks if for all $\varepsilon > 0$ one can simultaneously ensure that all outcomes have $\varphi$-value at least $\alpha$ and with probability at least $1 - \varepsilon$ the outcome has $\varphi$-value at least $\beta$. Moreover, if simultaneous satisfaction of objectives is possible, then one would also like to construct a strategy (for sure-almost-sure) or a family of strategies (for sure-limit-sure) that achieves this. In this paper, we solve the sure-almost-sure and sure-limit-sure problems for window mean-payoff objectives. The window mean-payoff objective strengthens the standard mean-payoff objective by requiring that eventually, from every point in the infinite run, the average payoff becomes greater than a given threshold within a finite window length. We study two variants of window mean payoff: in the fixed variant, the window length $\ell$ is given, while in the bounded variant, the length is not given but is required to be bounded throughout the run. We show that the sure-almost-sure problem and the sure-limit-sure problem are both in P for the fixed variant (if $\ell$ is given in unary) and are both in NP $\cap$ coNP for the bounded variant, matching the computational complexity of sure satisfaction and almost-sure satisfaction when considered separately for these objectives. We also give bounds for the memory requirement of winning strategies for all considered problems.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Hybrid Sequence Modeling and Reinforced Verification for Controllable Target-Conditioned Decision Making

arXiv:2508.16420v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Target-conditioned sequence models provide a simple interface for controllable offline decision making, but the requested target return can be an unreliable control signal, especially when the target return lies in underrepresented regions of the dataset. This paper proposes Doctor, a hybrid sequence modeling and reinforced verification framework for controllable target-conditioned offline decision making. Doctor trains a shared masked trajectory Transformer with two complementary objectives: masked trajectory reconstruction for candidate generation and in-sample value learning for action-value verification. At inference time, the model samples multiple nearby target returns, generates candidate actions in parallel, and selects the action whose verified value is closest to the requested target return. We analyze this verifier-guided selection rule and show that its value-level alignment error is bounded by candidate-value coverage around the target return and verifier accuracy. Experiments on D4RL and EpiCare show that Doctor improves target-return alignment under reduced high-return coverage, remains competitive on standard offline return-maximization benchmarks, and enables a single policy to modulate between conservative and aggressive operating points in a simulated clinical decision-making task. These results suggest that reinforced verification can improve the controllability of target-conditioned policies.

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

Universal Crossovers of Stabilizer Entropy Beyond Criticality

arXiv:2606.13810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stabilizer Rényi entropy has emerged as a probe of nonstabilizerness in quantum many-body systems, but its scaling structure beyond critical points remains poorly understood compared with entanglement entropy. Recent field-theory approaches indicate that stabilizer entropy contains universal critical data and boundary-sensitive terms, raising the question of how these structures extend into massive and crossover regimes. We address this problem for a broad class of finite-range spin chains at Rényi index one-half. We derive exact finite-size formulas for both full periodic chains and finite intervals of the infinite chain, making the universal crossover from critical to noncritical behavior analytically accessible. In periodic geometry, the entropy obeys a volume law away from criticality and exhibits a universal finite-size crossover controlled by the competition between system size and correlation length. We also show that the large-scale SRE density develops a cusp across the field-tuned critical line, while the XX endpoint is governed by a distinct scaling regime associated with the saturation point. In the subsystem geometry, the interval entropy separates bulk critical behavior from boundary contributions generated by the way the finite region cuts the infinite chain. The crossover from critical to massive behavior is then encoded in boundary constants and universal functions controlled by the correlation length. Through exact stabilizer-entropy correspondences, the scaling theory extends to internal XY reductions, Finite-range spin chains, and Cluster–Ising representatives. Our results provide an exact lattice benchmark for the emerging QFT description of stabilizer entropy beyond isolated conformal points.

07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS

Interstellar objects provide the only directly observable samples of icy planetesimals formed around other stars, and can therefore provide insight into the diversity of physical and chemical conditions occurring during exoplanet formation1−3. Here we report isotopic measurements of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which reveal an elemental composition unlike any Solar System body. The water in 3I/ATLAS is enriched in deuterium, at a level of D/H = (0.98 ± 0.06)%, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than in known comets, while its range of 12C/13C ratios (141–191 for CO2 and 123–172 for CO) exceeds typical values found in the Solar System, as well as nearby interstellar clouds and protoplanetary disks. Such extreme isotopic signatures indicate formation at temperatures  ≲ 30 K in a relatively metal-poor environment. When interpreted with respect to models for Galactic chemical evolution, the carbon isotopic composition implies that 3I/ATLAS may have accreted as long ago as 12 billion years, following a period of intense, early star formation. 3I/ATLAS thus represents a preserved fragment of an ancient planetary system.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LaQual: An Automated Framework for LLM App Quality Evaluation

arXiv:2508.18636v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Representing a new paradigm in software distribution, LLM app stores are rapidly emerging, offering users diverse choices for content generation, coding assistance, education, and more. However, current ranking and recommendation mechanisms in LLM app stores predominantly rely on static metrics, such as user interactions and favorites, making it challenging for users to efficiently identify high-quality apps. At the same time, current academic research focuses on specific vertical fields and lacks a general, automated evaluation framework applicable to the diverse LLM app ecosystem. To address the above challenges, we present LaQual, an automated framework for LLM app quality evaluation. LaQual integrates three key stages: (1) LLM app labeling and hierarchical classification for precise scenario mapping; (2) static indicator evaluation using time-weighted user engagement and functional capability indicators to filter low-quality apps; and (3) dynamic scenario-adapted evaluation, where an LLM generates scenario-specific evaluation metrics, scoring criteria, and tasks for comprehensive quality evaluation. Experiments on a mainstream LLM app store demonstrate the effectiveness of LaQual. Its automated scores show high consistency with human judgments. Through effective screening, LaQual can reduce the candidate LLM app pool by 66.7% to 81.3%. User studies further validate its significant outperformance over baseline systems, particularly in comparison efficiency (mean 5.45 vs. 3.30) and value of explanatory information (4.75 vs. 2.25). These results demonstrate that LaQual provides a scalable, objective, and user-centric solution for high-quality discovery and recommendation of LLM apps in real-world scenarios.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Zero-Shot Test-Time Canonicalization using Out-of-Distribution Scoring

arXiv:2606.24178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained vision models often misclassify inputs that are rotated, scaled, or sheared, even though these affine transformations leave the object class unchanged. Robustness is usually restored either by building equivariance into the architecture or by retraining with augmentation, both of which require changing or retraining the model. Test-time canonicalization instead leaves the classifier untouched. It undoes the transformation of each input, mapping it to a canonical form near the training distribution before classification. Existing canonicalizers, however, rely on a narrow set of logit-based energy scores and bespoke search procedures, leaving the design space of scoring functions and optimizers unexplored. We reframe canonicalization as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, which lets any OOD score serve as the energy minimized over transformations. Across benchmarks ranging from handwritten characters and sketches to natural images and 3D point clouds, we systematically evaluate around twenty OOD scores and nine search algorithms, finding that distance-based scores paired with random search and local refinement perform best overall. Because canonicalizing an already-aligned input can hurt accuracy, we add a gated mechanism that transforms an input only when its OOD score indicates this is needed, preserving most in-distribution accuracy while retaining the robustness gains on transformed inputs. Code is available at github.com/johschm/its.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MapAgent: An Industrial-Grade Agentic Framework for City-scale Lane-level Map Generation

arXiv:2606.04513v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lane-level maps are critical infrastructure for autonomous driving and lane-level navigation, yet constructing and maintaining standardized lane networks for hundreds of cities remains highly labor-intensive. Recent end-to-end vectorized mapping methods can predict lane geometry and topology directly from sensor data, but they typically treat mapping specifications and traffic regulations as implicit, dataset-dependent supervision. Moreover, in complex scenes (e.g., worn or missing markings and occlusions), correct lane configurations are often under-determined by visual evidence alone, making specification violations a major source of human post-editing. We propose MapAgent, an industrial-grade agentic architecture that augments a vectorization backbone for specification-compliant lane-map production. Rather than merely adding an agent loop to map prediction, MapAgent couples backbone perception with explicit specification verification, constraint-aware reasoning, and deterministic map editing under a bounded, verification-driven Judge-Planner-Worker loop. A vision-language Judge diagnoses errors by jointly inspecting visual evidence and draft vectors, while a tool-calling Planner generates minimal corrective edits with post-edit re-validation. To remain scalable for city-scale production, MapAgent is selectively triggered only on tiles with low backbone confidence, adding modest overhead while preserving throughput. Experiments on real-world datasets show consistent gains over strong production baselines, especially in complex and long-tail scenarios. Additionally, MapAgent has been integrated into Baidu Maps, supporting lane-level map generation for over 360 cities nationwide and elevating the overall production automation to over 95%, demonstrating MapAgent's practicality and effectiveness for large-scale lane-level map generation.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Mixing times of one-sided $k$-transposition shuffles

arXiv:2112.05085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study mixing times of the one-sided $k$-transposition shuffle. We prove that this shuffle mixes relatively slowly, even for $k$ big. Using the recent ``lifting eigenvectors'' technique of Dieker and Saliola and applying the $\ell^2$ bound, we prove different mixing behaviors and explore the occurrence of cutoff depending on $k$.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

CrossFusion: A Multi-Scale Cross-Attention Convolutional Fusion Model for Cancer Survival Prediction

Cancer survival prediction from whole slide images (WSIs) is a challenging task in computational pathology due to the large size, irregular shape, and high granularity of the WSIs. These characteristics make it difficult to capture the full spectrum of patterns, from subtle cellular abnormalities to complex tissue interactions, which are crucial for accurate prognosis. To address this, we propose CrossFusion, a novel multi-scale feature integration framework that extracts and fuses information from patches across different magnification levels. By effectively modeling both scale-specific patterns and their interactions, CrossFusion generates a rich feature set that enhances survival prediction accuracy. We validate our approach across six cancer types from public datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, when coupled with domain-specific feature extraction backbones, our method shows further gains in prognostic performance compared to general-purpose backbones. The source code is available at: https://github.com/RustinS/CrossFusion

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

Examining Human-Like Behaviors in LLMs: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Model Behaviors, User Factors, and System Prompts

arXiv:2606.18258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of human-like behaviors, from expressing thoughts and emotions, to engaging in relationship-building with users, to refusing requests and maintaining boundaries. Despite their prevalence, researchers and practitioners lack methods and empirical insights to make informed decisions about when and what types of human-like behaviors LLMs should exhibit. To fill this gap, we present a multi-dimensional analysis of the prevalence, potential effects, and controllability of these behaviors using LLM-as-a-judge and human evaluation. Across 21,000 multi-turn conversations from four widely used models (gpt-4o, gpt-4.1-mini, claude-sonnet-4.6, gemini-2.5-flash), we find that human-like behaviors are pervasive but vary across models and user factors (conversation goals and user profiles). In terms of perceived appropriateness, human evaluators judged self-referential and relationship-building behaviors as less appropriate from LLMs than from humans, but boundary-maintaining behaviors more appropriate from LLMs than from humans. Finally, we show that system prompting can control these behaviors, though it requires careful evaluation to avoid unintended effects. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for responsible LLM design and evaluation.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Nonlocal Quantum Phase Transitions

arXiv:2606.25061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phase transitions are paradigmatic examples of emergent phenomena, in which symmetries present at the microscopic level can be spontaneously broken in the thermodynamic limit. Two primary physical mechanisms can drive this symmetry breaking: thermal fluctuations in classical phase transitions and quantum fluctuations in quantum critical phenomena. Here, we introduce $nonlocal$ $quantum$ $fluctuations$ as a new fundamental mechanism to drive phase transitions. We show that entanglement shared between environmental modes can induce a correlated symmetry breaking in remote systems, independent of their spatial separation. Using the framework of driven-dissipative phase transitions, we theoretically investigate a system composed of two nonlinear quantum resonators placed at arbitrarily large spatial separations, each coupled to independent local Markovian baths. We consider the regime in which remote environmental modes are prepared in broadband entangled states. We show that near the critical point, where the susceptibility to weak perturbations diverges, quantum correlations in the environments govern the system critical behavior. While these correlations manifest locally only as effective thermal fluctuations, at the global level they give rise to an emergent nonlocal phase transition, marked by the spontaneous symmetry breaking of a collective mode shared by the two remote systems.

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

Deep Spectral Learning of Embedded Latent Transfer Operators for Stochastic Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.14079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a spectral learning method for stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems represented with embedded latent transfer operators in deep feature spaces. We instantiate the method as Deep Spectral Encoder (DSE), an operator-based latent state-space model in which a time-invariant neural encoder implements learnable nonlinear feature maps from observations, and these features define Markovian latent states whose temporal evolution and observation mapping are described by the transfer and observation operators, respectively. Functional canonical correlation analysis in a learnable Galerkin-projected feature space provides state coordinates from past and future observations, and the two linear operators are estimated on the state coordinates as ridge-regularized closed-form solutions that coincide with Galerkin projections of the associated covariance operators. On this representation, we generalize sequential Bayesian filtering and Koopman spectral mode decomposition in feature space. Experiments on several scenarios show stable and superior performance with sequential Bayesian filtering and dynamic mode decomposition baselines even under noise and partial observability.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Three multimodal large language models fail at clinically actionable breast pathology in three different directions

Background. Breast cancer treatment depends on histopathological features, such as grade and receptor-defined subtype; however, specialist pathologist access is constrained when the workforce is limited. Commercial multimodal large language models (MLLMs) accept hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) image tiles through paid interfaces without local hardware or fine-tuning. However, prior pathology evaluations addressed only coarse tasks. Whether they reach treatment-determining accuracy and whether vendors agree remain unclear. Methods. We aimed to evaluate three vendor-designated flagship MLLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-5.5) in 427 invasive breast cancer cases. Each case went to all three with identical H&E tiles and prompts, and the subtype was inferred in the second call. The reference was an institutional sign-out report of an immunohistochemistry-derived subtype. We calculated the concordance, sensitivity, specificity, Cohen's kappa, and pairwise McNemar and Bowker tests. Findings. Claude ranked highest by raw histologic-type concordance but lowest by kappa, classifying all 23 lobular and seven micropapillary carcinomas as invasive breast carcinoma of no special type. The models anchored the Nottingham grade to three modal grades. None of the models reliably identified human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive disease. The failure direction was vendor-specific: Claude and GPT-5.5 were under-detected, whereas Gemini was over-called. Twelve prompt variants (4,056 calls) did not recover sensitivity. Interpretation. No current commercial MLLM reaches deployment-ready accuracy for any treatment-determining feature of breast pathology. As each vendor fails in its own fixed direction, changing vendors alters the type of error rather than removing it; therefore, the value of these models is assistive rather than autonomous. At USD 0.20-0.50 per case, they may serve as supervised draft generators that leave the diagnosis with the pathologist.

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

Quantifying Consistency in LLM Logical Reasoning via Structural Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.17312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can arrive at the same answer through reasoning paths that are unstable, contradictory, or difficult to rank consistently – a failure mode especially prevalent in multi-step deductive reasoning. Existing methods assess reliability primarily through output dispersion – measuring how much sampled answers differ – but this discards a complementary signal: whether the model can consistently rank competing reasoning candidates. We propose structural uncertainty, a consistency-aware framework derived from the stability of self-preference-induced rankings over sampled reasoning solutions. Given a query, we generate multiple candidate solutions and ask the model to judge pairwise preferences among its own outputs. We aggregate self-preferences into ranking distributions via Bradley-Terry modeling with PageRank, and decompose the signal into two entropy-based components: across-trial ranking instability and within-trial candidate ambiguity. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, structural signals provide information complementary to answer dispersion: on logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, the combination improves identification of unreliable instances, while on factual retrieval the structural signal collapses toward uniformity, diagnosing a regime boundary where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is uninformative. The two components relate differently to accuracy: within-trial ambiguity correlates positively with correctness – consistent with settings where multiple plausible solution paths remain competitive – while across-trial instability correlates negatively, signaling unreliable reasoning. Structural uncertainty is best understood not as a universal confidence estimator, but as a regime-sensitive evaluator of logical reasoning consistency.

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

Rule Taxonomy and Evolution in AI IDEs: A Mining and Survey Study

arXiv:2606.12231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI-powered Integrated Development Environments (AI IDEs) has introduced "Rules" as a novel software artifact, allowing developers to persistently inject project-specific constraints and architectural guidelines into the context of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite their role in aligning AI behavior with developer intent, the taxonomy, evolution, and practical impact of these rules remain largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods empirical study on AI IDE rules. By mining 83 open-source projects and extracting 7,310 rules, we established a comprehensive taxonomy comprising 5 primary and 25 secondary categories. We then triangulated these artifacts with survey responses from 99 practitioners. Our analysis identified a contrast between developer priorities and actual configurations: while practitioners rate architectural constraints as highly important, rule files in repositories primarily consist of low-level workflow and code formatting constraints. Furthermore, our analysis of 1,540 rule evolution events revealed that rules are updated frequently. Repository data further indicate that rule evolution is primarily driven by constructive context expansions (29.17%) and enrichments (26.59%). In contrast, surveyed developers reported modifying rules primarily to correct AI errors (77.78%), typically by adding new negative constraints rather than editing existing ones. Finally, an artifact compliance assessment of 160 rule evolution events revealed that updating rules significantly improves the adherence of software artifacts, with the average artifact compliance rate increasing by 22.99% (from 49.14% to 72.13%) following an update. Our study provides empirical insights that can help developers optimize prompting strategies and guide tool builders in designing automated conflict-detection and context-management mechanisms for AI IDEs.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Kerr-induced nonreciprocal transparency and group delay in a hybrid cavity magnomechanical system

arXiv:2606.13412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a scheme for realizing nonreciprocal transparency, Fano resonances, and slow/fast light in a hybrid cavity magnomechanical system containing two YIG spheres and a mechanical resonator. The nonreciprocal behavior originates from the magnon Kerr nonlinearity, which induces direction-dependent frequency shifts and modifies the interference pathways among cavity photons, magnons, and phonons. We show that the hybrid system supports multiple transparency windows arising from magnon- and magnomechanical-induced interference processes. The Kerr interaction strongly reshapes these transparency features, producing asymmetric Fano line shapes and enabling controllable nonreciprocal transmission. Furthermore, the associated dispersion exhibits pronounced directional asymmetry, leading to giant differences in the group delay for opposite propagation directions and allowing reversible switching between slow- and fast-light regimes. We investigate the roles of hybrid coupling strengths and dissipation channels and identify parameter regimes where the nonreciprocal response is maximized. These findings establish Kerr-engineered magnomechanical systems as promising platforms for integrated nonreciprocal microwave photonics and quantum information technologies.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FAConformer: Frequency-Aware Convolutional Transformer for Auditory Attention Decoding

arXiv:2606.14120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Auditory attention decoding (AAD) aims to infer the attended speaker from neural responses in multi-speaker acoustic environments and is a key problem for neuro-steered hearing systems. Although recent studies have achieved encouraging progress, existing AAD models still do not fully exploit frequency domain electroencephalography (EEG) information. In particular, most approaches introduce multi-band information through handcrafted feature extraction or direct cross-band feature concatenation, which mainly exploit frequency information at a shallow level and may overlook band-specific patterns and cross-band interactions. To address these limitations, this paper proposes FAConformer, a frequency-aware CNN-Transformer framework for AAD that explicitly integrates band-specific encoding and adaptive cross-band interaction. Specifically, FAConformer first decomposes EEG signals into multiple frequency bands and assigns each band to an independent CNN-Transformer encoder for band-specific modeling. The resulting band-wise features are then adaptively fused by a carefully designed frequency-aware attention (FAA) module that models cross-band dependencies by treating band-wise features as tokens. Further, band-wise auxiliary supervision (BAS) is introduced to prevent weakly contributing branches from being under-optimized during joint training. In this way, FAConformer performs frequency-aware modeling that more effectively exploits frequency domain information. Extensive experiments on two public AAD datasets with three decision-window lengths demonstrated that FAConformer consistently outperformed 12 competitive baselines, surpassing the current state-of-the-art model by 4.9%. Further analyses of band importance, ablation, and parameter sensitivity verify the effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability of the proposed framework. Code is available at https://github.com/wzwvv/FAConformer.

21.
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.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Routine use of oral iron for people with heart failure and iron deficiency in primary care; retrospective cohort study

Aims: Iron deficiency is common among people with heart failure and associated with morbidity and mortality. While intravenous iron improves clinical outcomes, oral iron continues to be prescribed in routine practice despite limited evidence of benefit. Methods: We completed a retrospective primary care cohort study (2016 to 2021) to investigate the proportion of people with an incident diagnosis of heart failure who had iron deficiency identified (defined as ferritin

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

WAND: Windowed Attention and Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Autoregressive Text-to-Speech Models

Recent decoder-only autoregressive text-to-speech (AR-TTS) models produce high-fidelity speech, but their memory and compute costs scale quadratically with sequence length due to full self-attention. In this paper, we propose WAND, Windowed Attention and Knowledge Distillation, a framework that adapts pretrained AR-TTS models to operate with constant computational and memory complexity. WAND separates the attention mechanism into two: persistent global attention over conditioning tokens and local sliding-window attention over generated tokens. To stabilize fine-tuning, we employ a curriculum learning strategy that progressively tightens the attention window. We further utilize knowledge distillation from a full-attention teacher to recover high-fidelity synthesis quality with high data efficiency. Evaluated on three modern AR-TTS models, WAND preserves the original quality while achieving up to 66.2% KV cache memory reduction and length-invariant, near-constant per-step latency.

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

InSight: Self-Guided Skill Acquisition via Steerable VLAs

arXiv:2606.24884v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models can learn manipulation skills from demonstrations, but their capabilities are bounded by the skills in the training data. We present InSight, a framework that unlocks autonomous skill acquisition by rendering VLAs steerable at the primitive-action level (e.g., "move gripper to the bowl", "lift upward", "pour the bottle"). InSight consists of two primary stages: (1) an automated segmentation pipeline that partitions demonstrations into labeled primitives via VLM plan decomposition and end-effector poses to enable VLA primitive steerability, and (2) a VLM-guided data flywheel that identifies missing primitives required to accomplish a novel task, autonomously attempts demonstrations of the missing primitives with VLM-proposed low-level control, and automatically labels, stores, and integrates successful demonstrations into the VLA training set. We evaluate InSight across simulation and real-world manipulation tasks, including block flipping, drawer closing, sweeping, twisting, and pouring, without any human demonstrations of these target skills. Once learned, these primitives can be composed to execute novel, long-horizon tasks without additional human demonstrations. Our findings demonstrate that primitive steerability provides a practical foundation for continual skill acquisition in VLA policies. Project website: https://insight-vla.github.io.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Two-Phase Bilevel Search for the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Moving Obstacles

arXiv:2606.18730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem (MT-TSP) seeks a minimum cost trajectory for an agent that departs from a static depot, visits a set of moving targets, each within one of their assigned time windows, and returns to the depot. In this article, we study the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Moving Obstacles (MT-TSP-MO), a generalization of the MT-TSP where the agent trajectory must avoid moving obstacles. We present a Mixed-Integer Conic Programming (MICP) formulation that can be solved using off-the-shelf solvers, as well as a fast and scalable Two-Phase Bilevel Search (TPBS) algorithm that computes high-quality feasible solutions for the problem. We evaluate our approaches against an existing baseline algorithm on a broad range of problem instances with up to 40 targets and 40 obstacles. The results demonstrate that both the proposed methods significantly outperform the baseline with respect to success rates, solution costs, and computation time.