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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Multi-omics biomarkers of endothelial dysregulation preceding chronic lung allograft dysfunction: A prospective cohort study

by Giulia Iacono, Christina Begka, Bailey Cardwell, Carmel Daunt, Roxanne Chatzis, Celine Pattaroni, Alana Butler, Matthew Macowan, Bronwyn Levvey, Gregory I. Snell, Glen P. Westall, Benjamin J. Marsland Background Long-term survival of lung transplant recipients remains limited by chronic lung allograft dysfunction (CLAD). CLAD is only diagnosed following a persistent and substantial decline in lung function, after which irreversible damage to the lungs has occurred, limiting opportunities to effectively intervene at an early stage. There is a critical need for earlier detection prior to its clinical manifestation. The immunological drivers of CLAD remain unclear, limiting the development of predictive biomarkers and new therapies. Methods and findings In this hypothesis-generating, prospective cohort study, we profiled the microbial, metabolic, lipidomic, and gene expression dynamics of longitudinally collected broncho-alveolar lavages (BALs) from 56 CLAD-free lung transplant recipients up to 30 months post-transplant, and compared BALs from 13 CLAD-free patients to BALs from 13 patients who developed CLAD. In CLAD-free patients, the first 6 months post-transplant were hallmarked by diminished microbial diversity and increased abundance of Staphylococcus and Candida, coupled with upregulated innate and adaptive immune responses, and elevated nitric oxide metabolism (FDR 

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

Hard or Just Unreached? Diagnosing the Sampling Blind Spot in Math-Reasoning Difficulty Estimation

arXiv:2606.19636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Math and science reasoning benchmarks rely on pass@k, the fraction of sampled chains that reach gold, as the canonical per-example difficulty signal. The same signal drives RL with verifiable rewards, math data curation, synthetic curricula, and verifier training. We show this proxy has a persistent blind spot on its hardest stratum: on the eight free-form math cells we test (GSM8K and MATH across four open-weight models), 10.3-22.9% of the examples that no sampling seed solves in six tries are instead solved at matched compute by a six-chain deterministic regime. These are greedy decoding plus five cheap residual-stream perturbations applied via activation grafting, while greedy alone solves at most 6% on these math cells. Recovery scales with the additional budget, across perturbations whose mechanistic distinctness we verify across all twelve cells (cross-kind fix-set Jaccard

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum-Classical Hierarchical Equations of Motion

作者:

arXiv:2606.14363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a quantum-classical hierarchical equations of motion (QC-HEOM) approach for simulating non-Markovian open quantum systems. The method combines the ensemble-averaged classical path reference of the quantum-classical path integral formalism with a hierarchy of auxiliary quantum influence functionals. By incorporating thermal fluctuations through an ensemble average over reference trajectories, the hierarchy is required to represent only the residual quantum memory associated with the imaginary part of the bath response function. Consequently, unlike conventional hierarchical equations of motion, QC-HEOM does not require Matsubara or Padé expansions of the thermal kernel and exhibits only weak temperature dependence of the hierarchy size. Furthermore, because thermal fluctuations are supplied through reference classical trajectories, the framework naturally extends beyond harmonic baths and enables the incorporation of anharmonic and molecular environments through externally generated trajectories. We derive the formalism and demonstrate its exactness for a harmonic bath. Applications to an asymmetric spin-boson model and the seven-site Fenna–Matthews–Olson complex illustrate the accuracy of QC-HEOM. It reproduces benchmark quasi-adiabatic path integral and hierarchical equations of motion results while requiring substantially fewer auxiliary objects, particularly at low temperatures. These results establish QC-HEOM as an efficient framework for treating residual quantum memory in quantum-classical descriptions of open-system dynamics. The separation of thermal fluctuations from residual quantum memory through the use of Wigner trajectories provides an approximate route toward hierarchical treatments of complex anharmonic environments that are inaccessible to conventional HEOM approaches.

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

Region-Adaptive Sampling for Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion models (DMs) have become the leading choice for generative tasks across diverse domains. However, their reliance on multiple sequential forward passes significantly limits real-time performance. Previous acceleration methods have primarily focused on reducing the number of sampling steps or reusing intermediate results, failing to leverage variations across spatial regions within the image due to the constraints of convolutional U-Net structures. By harnessing the flexibility of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) in handling variable number of tokens, we introduce RAS, a novel, training-free sampling strategy that dynamically assigns different sampling ratios to regions within an image based on the focus of the DiT model. Our key observation is that during each sampling step, the model concentrates on semantically meaningful regions, and these areas of focus exhibit strong continuity across consecutive steps. Leveraging this insight, RAS updates only the regions currently in focus, while other regions are updated using cached noise from the previous step. The model's focus is determined based on the output from the preceding step, capitalizing on the temporal consistency we observed. We evaluate RAS on Stable Diffusion 3 and Lumina-Next-T2I, achieving speedups up to 2.36x and 2.51x, respectively, with minimal degradation in generation quality. Additionally, a user study reveals that RAS delivers comparable qualities under human evaluation while achieving a 1.6x speedup. Our approach makes a significant step towards more efficient diffusion transformers, enhancing their potential for real-time applications.

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

Bayesian Tensor Decomposition with Diffusion Model Prior

arXiv:2606.03212v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Low-rank tensor decomposition (TD) is usually effective on clean, fully observed data, but it often degrades under severe missingness or noise. Low-rankness is itself a useful but limited structural prior, and additional handcrafted priors (e.g., sparsity or smoothness) still fall short of capturing the rich statistics of real-world data. To compensate for this weak inductive bias under heavy corruption, one would like to inject a learned, data-driven prior; however, the state-of-the-art diffusion models are not readily compatible with current TD and tractable posterior inference. To address these challenges, we introduce DiffBCP, a hybrid-prior Bayesian CP decomposition framework that couples a cumulative shrinkage process prior over the CP factors for automatic rank selection with an off-the-shelf pre-trained diffusion model as an implicit data prior on the reconstructed tensor. To make posterior inference tractable despite the coupling among the likelihood, low-rank constraint, and diffusion prior, we develop a split Gibbs sampler: CP factors admit conjugate updates, while the diffusion block is sampled via low-rank-guided denoising. A noise-adaptive coupling schedule further reduces sensitivity to hand-tuned annealing. Experiments on image inpainting and denoising, including high-resolution out-of-distribution images, show consistent gains over Bayesian, nonlinear, and plug-and-play TD baselines.

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

When Sample Selection Bias Precipitates Model Collapse

arXiv:2606.13732v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The proliferation of recursive training on synthetic data can alleviate data scarcity but risks model collapse, where repeated training erodes distributional tails and homogenizes outputs. Data selection is widely viewed as a remedy, yet its reliability depends critically on the reference distribution used by the verifier. We show that in low-resource verification regimes, where each verifier observes only a small, fragmented, and biased slice of the target manifold, selection itself becomes biased. This situation naturally arises in low-resource data silos such as healthcare consortia or proprietary financial institutions, where raw data cannot be pooled and local references are inherently incomplete. As a result, selection preferentially retains samples aligned with the local manifold while pruning globally relevant tail modes, turning from a safeguard against collapse into a mechanism that precipitates it. We theoretically prove that such siloed selection accelerates collapse and induces power-law diversity decay. As an initial mitigation, we construct Wasserstein proxy references from multiple silos without sharing raw data. Empirical results confirm that local-reference selection fails on skewed distributions, whereas collaborative proxy references mitigate diversity degradation, suggesting that recursive synthetic-data pipelines require particular caution when real-data coverage is fragmented or scarce.

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

Latent Confounded Causal Discovery via Lie Bracket Geometry

arXiv:2606.19610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work on Kan-Do-Calculus (KDC) has established that the boundary between passive observation and active intervention in causal inference is a category-theoretic bi-adjunction, with interventions modeled by left Kan extensions and conditioning by right Kan extensions. This paper introduces two causal discovery algorithms under latent confounding, building on the information-geometric and categorical consequences of KDC. In smooth statistical settings, Radon-Nikodym derivatives between observational and interventional measures induce local causal vector fields; failures of these fields to close under Lie brackets become computable Frobenius residuals, which we interpret as witnesses of failed visible integrability and possible latent or unmodeled structure. Our first algorithm, BRIDGE (Bracket Residuals for Interventional Discovery and Geometric Estimation), combines an interventional density or Radon-Nikodym-ratio engine with a geometric screen that proposes a high-recall family of admissible arrows, identifies non-closing visible pairs as latent-obstruction candidates, and passes the reduced family to downstream score-based or differentiable discovery routines. The second algorithmic contribution, Spectral Kan-Do Flow Matching (SKFM), learns amortized intervention fields and factors latent curvature spectrally, exposing the direct Lie-space endpoint toward which BRIDGE points. A detailed set of experiments show that both algorithms are capable of discovering causal models with latent confounders while collapsing the super-exponential space of possible DAGs by many orders of magnitude. This paper introduces a new paradigm in causal discovery, where latent structure is inferred directly from the geometry of intervention-induced flows.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Thermodynamic assessment of machine learning models for solid-state synthesis prediction

arXiv:2602.04075v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning models have recently emerged to predict whether hypothetical solid-state materials can be synthesized. These models aim to circumvent direct first-principles modeling of solid-state phase transformations, instead learning from large databases of successfully synthesized materials. Here, we assess the alignment of several recently introduced synthesis prediction models with material and reaction thermodynamics, quantified by the energy with respect to the convex hull and a metric accounting for thermodynamic selectivity of enumerated synthesis reactions. A dataset of successful synthesis recipes was used to determine the likely bounds on both quantities beyond which materials can be deemed unlikely to be synthesized. With these bounds as context, thermodynamic quantities were computed using the CHGNet foundation potential for thousands of new hypothetical materials generated using the Chemeleon generative model. Four recently published machine learning models for synthesizability prediction were applied to this same dataset, and the resultant predictions were considered against computed thermodynamics. We find these models generally overpredict the likelihood of synthesis, but some model scores do trend with thermodynamic heuristics, assigning lower scores to materials that are less stable or do not have an available synthesis recipe that is calculated to be thermodynamically selective. In total, this work identifies existing gaps in machine learning models for materials synthesis and introduces a new approach to assess their quality in the absence of extensive negative examples (failed syntheses).

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RLPR: Radar-to-LiDAR Place Recognition via Two-Stage Asymmetric Cross-Modal Alignment for Autonomous Driving

All-weather autonomy is critical for autonomous driving, which necessitates reliable localization across diverse scenarios. While LiDAR place recognition is widely deployed for this task, its performance degrades in adverse weather. Conversely, radar-based methods, though weather-resilient, are hindered by the general unavailability of radar maps. To bridge this gap, radar-to-LiDAR place recognition, which localizes radar scans within existing LiDAR maps, has garnered increasing interest. However, extracting discriminative and generalizable features shared between modalities remains challenging, compounded by the scarcity of large-scale paired training data and the signal heterogeneity across radar types. In this work, we propose RLPR, a robust radar-to-LiDAR place recognition framework compatible with single-chip, scanning, and 4D radars. We first design a dual-stream network to extract structural features that abstract away from sensor-specific signal properties (e.g., Doppler or RCS). Subsequently, motivated by our task-specific asymmetry observation between radar and LiDAR, we introduce a two-stage asymmetric cross-modal alignment (TACMA) strategy, which leverages the pre-trained radar branch as a discriminative anchor to guide the alignment process. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that RLPR achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy with strong zero-shot generalization capabilities.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Human-in-the-Loop Label Error Detection Framework Applied to Arabic-Script HTR Datasets

Despite recent advances, Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script languages still lags behind Latin-script HTR. Part of the problem is dataset quality. To help closing this gap, we propose a two-stage framework (CER-HV) for detecting label errors. Stage 1 (CER) is a Character-Error-Rate-based noise detector built on a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) architecture. Stage 2 (HV) is the Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) Verification of noisy samples detected by the first stage. Applying the CER-HV framework on multiple Arabic-script datasets can identify samples with label errors including transcription, segmentation, orientation, and non-text content errors that can markedly affect HTR performance. These errors were identified by the first stage of the framework with up to 90percent (top-50) precision. We also show that our CRNN achieves state-of-the-art performance across five of the six evaluated datasets, reaching 8.46 percent Character Error Rate (CER) on KHATT (Arabic), 8.22 percent on PHTI (Pashto), 10.59 percent on Ajami, and 10.11% on Muharaf (Arabic), all without any data cleaning. We establish a new baseline of 11.3 percent CER on the PHTD (Persian) dataset. Applying CER-HV improves evaluation CER by up to 1.8 percentage points after dataset cleaning and retraining. Although our experiments focus on documents written in an Arabic-script language, the framework is general and can be applied to other text recognition datasets

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PolicyGuard: Towards Test-time and Step-level Adversary Defense for Reinforcement Learning Agent

arXiv:2606.12896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under standard conditions but executes malicious actions when a specific trigger is activated. Existing backdoor defenses for RL either require access to the agent's internal parameters, operate only at the model or trajectory level, or are limited to specific attack types. To ensure the security of RL agents, we propose \texttt{PolicyGuard}, a test-time step-level backdoor defense which leverages Gaussian Process (GP) posterior variance and adapts pseudo trajectories to enable uncertainty computation for individual time step. Besides, we also provide theoretical foundations to explain the efficacy of GP posterior variance. Extensive experiments across seven RL games demonstrate that PolicyGuard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in most cases, with average AUROC of 0.856 for perturbation-based attacks and 0.859 for adversary-agent attacks.

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

From Memorization to Creation: Evaluating the Cognitive Depth of LLM-Generated Educational Questions

arXiv:2606.18257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LLMs show promise in automating educational content creation, their ability to generate questions that stimulate higher-order thinking remains understudied. This work evaluates six widely-used LLMs through a Bloom's Taxonomy lens, focusing on their capacity to transcend rote memorization and achieve cognitive leaps. Using a hybrid human–AI evaluation protocol, we generate and analyze 20{,}700 questions across computer science, K–12 math, and social-science domains. Key contributions include: (1) a fine-grained prompting strategy that reduces question repetitiveness by 24.45\% for Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, and increases the proportion of higher-order cognitive level outputs by 11.53\% for InternLM3-8B-Instruct; (2) quantitative metrics for cognitive shift intensity (CogShift) and category drift, revealing InternLM3's superior performance in multi-level transitions; (3) an interpretability analysis revealing metric-level correlations that enhance the transparency of Chain-of-Thought prompting. Our findings highlight the importance of cognitive-aware prompt design and provide benchmarks for deploying LLMs in personalized learning systems.

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

Geometry of Lightning Self-Attention: Identifiability and Dimension

arXiv:2408.17221v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider function spaces defined by self-attention networks without normalization, and theoretically analyze their geometry. Since these networks are polynomial, we rely on tools from algebraic geometry. In particular, we study the identifiability of deep attention by providing a description of the generic fibers of the parametrization for an arbitrary number of layers and, as a consequence, compute the dimension of the function space. Additionally, for a single-layer model, we characterize the singular and boundary points. Finally, we formulate a conjectural extension of our results to normalized self-attention networks, prove it for a single layer, and numerically verify it in the deep case.

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

A Low-Rank Subspace Analysis of LLM Interventions

arXiv:2606.14388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interventions designed to modify a particular behavior in LLMs, such as refusal or sycophancy, often produce unintended changes in other behaviors. This lack of targeted control makes it difficult to design and implement reliable safety controls. To understand these side-effects, we introduce a diagnostic framework for analyzing interacting behaviors in LLMs. We model behaviors as low-rank subspaces in activation space, and study how interventions influence across behaviors. Across multiple instruction-tuned models (7B-70B) and across refusal, jailbreak, and sycophancy settings, we find that different behaviors share internal representations, and intervening on one behavior alters others in asymmetric ways. Some behaviors act as upstream control points whose interventions propagate broadly across other behaviors, while others remain more isolated. We relate these effects to two geometric quantities: (i) the overlap between behavior subspaces, measured as the average squared cosine of principal angles, and (ii) the angle between each behavior subspace and the decision subspace (capturing the model's final decision e.g., refuse vs. comply). Empirically, intervention effects on other behaviors tend to be larger for behavior pairs with higher subspace overlap, and for source behaviors whose subspaces lie closer (smaller angle) to the decision subspace. These findings highlight a challenge for targeted behavior control: behaviors are difficult to modify independently, as interventions can propagate through shared representations and asymmetric interactions.

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

HiRo: A Compact Four-Directional Hierarchical Reservoir Token-Mixer for Efficient Image Classification

Recent image classification models must balance local feature modeling, cross-window interaction, and parameter efficiency. Many high-performing architectures rely on fully trainable token-mixers, which improve representation learning but increase parameter count, optimization complexity and computational cost. We propose a parameter-efficient image classification model called HiRo that integrates shifted-window partitioning with multi-directional hierarchical reservoir computing. Images are divided into non-overlapping patches (treated as tokens), linearly projected, normalized, and enriched with 2D sinusoidal positional encodings, then processed within local windows. Inside each window, tokens are scanned in four directions and passed through a two-stage slice-and-mix reservoir module. In the first stage, directional sequences are split into contiguous slices, each processed by its own fixed reservoir with a trainable closed-loop readout. The resulting slice outputs are summarized using the start, end, and mean representations, and then mixed by a second-stage fixed reservoir for each direction. The mixed slice representations are expanded back to the token level and fused with the first-stage outputs, after which the four directional outputs are realigned and averaged. Consecutive blocks alternate between regular and shifted windows to enable cross-window interaction, followed by layer normalization, a residual feed-forward network, and global pooling for classification. This design combines regular and shifted window partitioning with hierarchical multi-directional reservoirs to make an efficient local-to-cross-window token-mixing framework for image classification. Despite using under 1M trainable parameters and significantly lower memory and time than transformer-style baselines, HiRo also achieves 99.46%, 85.57%, and 59.10% accuracy on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100, respectively.

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

A Comparative Study of Pretrained Transformer Models for Quranic ASR: Speech Representations, Label Formats, and Dataset Composition

arXiv:2606.19747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quran Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert Quranic recitation into text, enabling applications such as aided memorisation tools and Quranic search engines. However, existing ASR models often exhibit high Word Error Rates (WER) on user-recited verses and lack full coverage of the Quranic corpus. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of domain-specific fine-tuning of pretrained Transformer-based models for Quranic ASR, using advanced speech feature extraction methods: Wav2Vec2.0, HuBERT, and XLS-R. These models apply self-supervised learning by masking portions of input audio and using Transformer architectures to learn context-aware speech features. The pretrained models are fine-tuned on a filtered Quranic dataset exceeding 870 hours of professional and user recitations. Through comprehensive ablation studies across feature extractors, output label formats, training strategies, and clip durations, we identify the key factors that affect transcription accuracy in this domain. Our best-performing configuration achieves a WER of 0.08 on the EveryAyah subset and 0.11 on the combined EveryAyah+Tarteel setting, representing roughly a five-percentage-point gain over the Citrinet baseline (WER = 0.163) while reducing combined-model training time from 140 hours to 40 hours. Arabic text without diacritics yields the best fine-tuning results, and Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 provides the strongest overall representation. Future work includes improving dataset quality and developing phoneme-aware models to extract deeper speech feature representations for Tajweed-sensitive applications.

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

RC-GeoCP: Geometric Consensus for Radar-Camera Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception (CP) enhances scene understanding through multi-agent information sharing. While LiDAR-centric systems offer precise geometry, high costs and performance degradation in adverse weather necessitate multi-modal alternatives. Despite dense visual semantics and robust spatial measurements, the synergy between cameras and 4D radar remains underexplored in collaborative settings. This work introduces RC-GeoCP, the first framework to explore the fusion of 4D radar and images in CP. To resolve misalignment caused by depth ambiguity and spatial dispersion across agents, RC-GeoCP establishes a radar-anchored geometric consensus. Specifically, Geometric Structure Rectification (GSR) aligns visual semantics with geometry derived from radar to generate spatially grounded, geometry-consistent representations. Uncertainty-Aware Communication (UAC) formulates selective transmission as a conditional entropy reduction process to prioritize informative features based on inter-agent disagreement. Finally, the Consensus-Driven Assembler (CDA) aggregates multi-agent information via shared geometric anchors to form a globally coherent representation. We establish the first unified radar-camera CP benchmark on V2X-Radar and V2X-R, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance with significantly reduced communication overhead. Code will be released soon.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Orbital-optimized spin-adapted multistate contracted VQE for excited states and properties on quantum hardware

arXiv:2606.15489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the orbital-optimized multistate contracted variational quantum eigensolver (oo-MC-VQE) method with spin-adapted operators for the computation of ground and excited states, as well as state-specific and transition properties. The use of spin-adapted operators ensures that the spin symmetry of the reference states is conserved throughout the VQE optimization. In multistate variational approaches, achieving a balanced description of an increasing number of electronic states places growing demands on the expressibility of the underlying ansatz, thereby introducing a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and circuit complexity. We consider the effects of this trade-off explicitly and find that the number of circuit parameters required to obtain accurate results is reported to scale approximately linearly in the number of states. We further present an explicit quantum-circuit implementation of the oo-MC-VQE method and demonstrate its integration with quantum error mitigation techniques. Finally, we execute the method on real quantum devices to compute absorption spectra for two benchmark molecular systems.

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

Minimisation of Quasar-Convex Functions Using Random Zeroth-Order Oracles

arXiv:2505.02281v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper explores the performance of a random Gaussian smoothing zeroth-order (ZO) scheme for minimising quasar-convex (QC) and strongly quasar-convex (SQC) functions in both unconstrained and constrained settings. For the unconstrained problem, we establish the ZO algorithm's convergence to a global minimum along with its complexity when applied to both QC and SQC functions. For the constrained problem, we introduce the new notion of proximal-quasar-convexity and prove analogous results to the unconstrained case. Specifically, we derive complexity bounds and prove convergence of the algorithm to a neighbourhood of a global minimum whose size can be controlled under a variance reduction scheme. Beyond the theoretical guarantees, we demonstrate the practical implications of our results on several machine learning problems where quasar-convexity naturally arises, including linear dynamical system identification and generalised linear models.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-20

EpiLink: a simulation-based compatibility model for genomic transmission clustering in infectious disease surveillance

Identifying recently linked infections from pathogen genome sequences is central to infectious disease surveillance, yet many clustering approaches rely on fixed genetic distance thresholds whose relationship to transmission is often unclear. This limitation is especially important in rapidly growing outbreaks and superspreading events, where many cases may be sampled close together in time and share little genetic variation, making true transmission links difficult to distinguish from other closely related infections. Supervised models can improve discrimination, but they require labelled transmission data that are rarely available during outbreak response. We developed EpiLink, a threshold-free method that estimates whether two cases are compatible with recent transmission. Here, compatibility means how well the observed genetic distance and sampling-time difference between two cases fit what would be expected if they were linked by defined recent transmission scenarios. EpiLink simulates plausible recent transmission histories while accounting for uncertainty in infection timing, testing delay, and mutation accumulation, then assigns higher scores to pairs whose observed differences are typical of those simulations. EpiLink was evaluated using both synthetic and empirical SARS-CoV-2 outbreak data from the 2020 Boston epidemic. Two EpiLink variants were compared to a logistic regression model trained on labelled transmission data. One EpiLink variant assumed deterministic mutation accumulation, with genetic differences proportional to elapsed evolutionary time; the other accounted for stochasticity by sampling mutation counts from a Poisson distribution. The logistic regression model performed better at distinguishing linked from unlinked pairs, but EpiLink achieved comparable clustering accuracy. In the Boston data, EpiLink recovered clusters enriched for documented conference and skilled nursing facility outbreaks. EpiLink thus provides an interpretable, simulation-based approach for identifying recent transmission clusters when fixed thresholds are difficult to justify and labelled transmission data are unavailable.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Neural Network Compression (HiReLC): Pruning and Quantization

arXiv:2606.26002v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present HiReLC, a hierarchical ensemble-reinforcement learning framework for automated joint quantization and structured pruning of deep neural networks. The framework decomposes the compression search across two levels of abstraction: low-level agents (LLAs) operate independently per block, selecting per-kernel configurations over a multi-discrete action space spanning bitwidth, pruning keep-ratio, quantization type, and granularity, while high-level agents (HLAs) coordinate global budget allocation via ensemble voting guided by Fisher Information-based sensitivity estimates. To mitigate the computational cost of policy evaluation, an iterative active learning loop interleaves surrogate-guided RL optimization with post-compression fine-tuning, using a lightweight MLP surrogate to amortize expensive evaluations and a logit-MSE proxy during cold-start. The surrogate is used for reward shaping rather than as a replacement for final post-compression evaluation. The controller is architecture-agnostic by design, with a modular layer abstraction decoupling the RL environment from the underlying network topology. Experiments across Vision Transformer and CNN benchmarks demonstrate effective parameter-storage compression ratios of 5.99 - 6.72$\times$ with a 3.83 % gain in one setting and 0.55 - 5.62 % accuracy drops elsewhere, supporting hierarchical policy decomposition and sensitivity-aware guidance as practical design choices for joint neural network compression.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Cost-Optimal Decision Diagrams for Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation

arXiv:2606.24672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many decision-making scenarios, acquiring information incurs different costs. We consider the problem of constructing a deterministic evaluation strategy that minimizes the expected cost of evaluating a propositional formula under variable costs and a probability distribution over truth assignments. We present a branch-and-bound algorithm with variable-selection heuristics, pruning, and caching. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first practical exact algorithm for this level of generality. Experiments on random instances demonstrate scalability and quantify the efficiency-quality trade-off of a greedy beam-search variant. We additionally evaluate a structured heart-disease diagnosis instance. Finally, we prove that the problem is $\#P$-hard and contained in $\mathrm{PSPACE}$.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

The Market in the Model: Latent Diffusion as Neural Economy

Valuable critique of generative image models within visual culture and the humanities has emphasized the role of datasets in shaping the images they produce. Yet, close studies of the ideological positions embedded into the mechanism of the models have been neglected, leaving them imagined as "black boxes." In a bid to expand, rather than replace, dataset critique, this paper examines the mechanisms of the latent diffusion model in terms of the problems they were brought in to solve on behalf of computer vision engineers, and the decisions each component was tasked with automating. I interpret that ensemble through the histories of its parts and the theory of vision the system inscribes into every generated image. Drawing on Impett and Offert's notion of neural exchange value, I offer this analysis to argue that the model operates as a neural economy: a contained symbolic system that abstracts social communication into commensurable vectors as it transfers the social sphere into parcels for sale. Tracing the training and generation pipelines component by component reveals what each operation displaces, and how it further entrenches the logics of platform and attention economies over social communication. The paper warns that any critique fixated exclusively on copyright and commodity defenses risks reaffirming the very fetishism the model produces, and argues instead for centering social exchange.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

GEN-Guard: Correcting Generalization Failures for Deployable Federated Surgical AI

Federated Learning (FL) in surgical video AI enables collaborative model training without sharing sensitive data. However, standard evaluation practices - selecting the "best" global model based only on validation data from participating hospitals - can lead to suboptimal deployment choices. We identify this critical failure mode as performance leakage, where the selected model overfits internal federation data and fails to generalize to unseen institutions. We propose GEN-Guard, a practical post-hoc framework to detect and correct generalization failures in federated surgical AI. It integrates Generalization Detection via Client-Blocked Evaluation (CBE), which validates performance on isolated client distributions to prevent performance leakage, and Generalization Correction through Disagreement-Aware Distillation (DAD), which learns adaptive feature-level corrections for cross-institutional robustness. Both components operate after standard FL convergence while providing robust support for zero-shot adaptation to unseen environments. We first quantify the severity of performance leakage, observing Model Selection Failures (MSFs) exceeding 80% under standard evaluation. GEN-Guard is evaluated on two multi-center clinical challenges: surgical phase recognition in laparoscopic cholecystectomy and polyp segmentation in colonoscopy. Across both datasets, GEN-Guard consistently corrects these failures, improving in-federation F1 scores by up to 2 points, unseen-institution performance by up to 3 points, and worst-case institutional performance by 3-9 points. Performance leakage represents a systematic and previously under-recognized risk in federated surgical AI. GEN-Guard provides a practical solution for detecting and correcting such failures. By improving cross-institutional robustness and zero-shot generalization, it strengthens the reliability of FL for real-world surgical deployment.