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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A tensor network approach for chaotic time series prediction

arXiv:2505.17740v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Making accurate predictions of chaotic time series is a complex challenge. Reservoir computing, a neuromorphic-inspired approach, has emerged as a powerful tool for this task. It exploits the memory and nonlinearity of dynamical systems without requiring extensive parameter tuning. However, selecting and optimizing reservoir architectures remains an open problem. Next-generation reservoir computing simplifies this problem by employing nonlinear vector autoregression based on truncated Volterra series, thereby reducing hyperparameter complexity. Nevertheless, the latter suffers from exponential parameter growth in terms of the maximum monomial degree. Tensor networks offer a promising solution to this issue by decomposing multidimensional arrays into low-dimensional structures, thus mitigating the curse of dimensionality. This paper explores the application of a previously proposed tensor network model for predicting chaotic time series, demonstrating its advantages in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency compared to conventional echo state networks. Using a state-of-the-art tensor network approach enables us to bridge the gap between the tensor network and reservoir computing communities, fostering advances in both fields.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Comparing Commercial Depth Sensor Accuracy for Medical Applications

Depth estimation has numerous medical and surgical applications. We benchmark four depth sensors on a porcine bone specimen, a porcine belly specimen, and a silicone kidney phantom using stylus-sampled references. These objects contain several real-world challenges, including homogeneous surfaces, specular surfaces, and subsurface scattering. The comparison includes stereo, structured-light, and time-of-flight sensors at a distance of approximately 50 cm. Specifically, the Intel RealSense D405 (Intel RealSense, United States), PMD Flexx2 (pmdtechnologies, Germany), Stereolabs ZED 2i (Stereolabs, France), and Zivid 2M+ 60 (Zivid, Norway) are compared. The Zivid 2M+ 60 performed best across all objects and metrics considered in this work. The ZED ranked second for real tissue, but last on the phantom.

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

AI Contagion in Social Networks

arXiv:2606.15206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study how artificial intelligence (AI) interacts with social communication networks to shape the stability of collective knowledge. Agents exchange information through a network while receiving AI-generated content, and AI systems retrain on the aggregate social information they influence. This interaction generates two feedback forces: an AI contagion channel, through which distortions diffuse across the network, and an AI social distortion multiplier, through which retraining amplifies past errors. Despite the high dimensionality of the environment, we show that the long-run behavior of the system admits a two-dimensional representation whose spectral radius determines whether AI-mediated information systems are dynamically stable or unstable. We characterize a sharp regulatory frontier identifying the minimum filtering required for stability and show how network topology shapes systemic informational risk.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Midwifery Practice in Conflict Contexts: Lived Experiences from Somalia and Nigeria

Background: Midwives are a central cadre in the health system, particularly in conflict-affected settings where they are sometimes the primary or even only skilled providers available. Yet, despite their critical role, there is limited qualitative evidence capturing their lived experiences and how these shape workforce entry, retention, and overall well-being. Methods: Drawing on a phenomenological research methodology, this qualitative study was embedded within a larger prospective longitudinal cohort of midwifery students and graduates in Somalia and Nigeria. We conducted focus group discussions with graduate midwives (n=48 in Nigeria; n=63 in Somalia) to explore their experiences transitioning into the workforce and their realities working in health systems impacted by conflict and violent insecurity. Data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Results: Five themes emerged from the data: (1) job search and workforce entry, which was described as fraught with challenges and shaped by a set of formal systems in Nigeria but informal networks and structural barriers in Somalia (2) working conditions that were marked by resource scarcity, infrastructural challenges, and heavy and unreasonable workloads, (3) safety, security and coping strategies that differed across the two contexts but reflected persistent exposure to violence and a reliance on ad hoc and personal coping in lieu of systematic protection, (4) community perceptions of midwives, shaped and constrained by social and gender norms and (5) mental health and emotional wellbeing, highlighting stress, burnout and moral injury experienced by this cadre. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the profound challenges faced by midwives working in conflict-affected settings, and they shine a light on the urgent need to support and invest in this critical and predominantly female health workforce.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this limitation, we propose Rabtriever, which independently encodes queries and documents, while providing comparable cross query-document comprehension capabilities to rerankers. We start from training a LLM-based generative reranker, which puts the document prior to the query and prompts the LLM to generate the relevance score by log probabilities. We then employ it as the teacher of an on-policy distillation framework, with Rabtriever as the student to reconstruct the teacher's contextual-aware query embedding. To achieve this effect, Rabtriever is first initialized from the teacher, with parameters frozen. The Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) paradigm is then adopted, which integrates a lightweight, trainable predictor between LLM layers and heads, projecting the query embedding into a new hidden space, with the document embedding as the latent vector. JEPA then minimizes the distribution difference between this projected embedding and the teacher embedding. To strengthen the sampling efficiency of on-policy distillation, we also add an auxiliary loss on the reverse KL of LLM logits, to reshape the student's logit distribution. Rabtriever optimizes the teacher's quadratic complexity on the document length to linear, verified both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that Rabtriever outperforms different retriever baselines across diverse rationale-based tasks, including empathetic conversations and robotic manipulations, with minor accuracy degradation from the reranker. Rabtriever also generalizes well on traditional retrieval benchmarks such as MS MARCO and BEIR, with comparable performance to the best retriever baseline.

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

A Hybrid LSMC-PDE Method for Bermudan Option Pricing under the Gatheral Double Mean-Reverting Model

arXiv:2606.11237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study Bermudan option pricing under the Gatheral Double Mean-Reverting (GDMR) stochastic volatility model. The model features a variance process together with a stochastic long-run mean variance process and allows Constant Elasticity of Variance (CEV)-type exponents in the diffusion coefficients. This model is attractive since it provides a flexible specification for volatility dynamics. However, the pricing of early-exercise derivatives under the GDMR model remains largely unexplored in the literature. To address this challenge, we adapt a Hybrid Least-Squares Monte Carlo-Partial Differential Equation (LSMC-PDE) framework to the GDMR model and provide a detailed model-specific implementation. Conditioning on simulated variance paths, the pricing problem reduces to a one-dimensional problem in the asset price, which is solved by a Fourier-based approach, while the remaining dependence on the variance variables is approximated by least-squares regression. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the Hybrid LSMC-PDE approach yields accurate pricing estimates and often lower pricing errors than plain LSMC, particularly for low and moderate numbers of simulation paths, showing the benefit of using the model structure in early-exercise option pricing.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A short proof of the modified Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner conjecture

作者:

arXiv:2606.16418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $\Phi_1, \Phi_2 : \mathbb{M}_d(\mathbb{C})\to \mathbb{M}_n(\mathbb{C})$ be two quantum channels with respective Stinespring isometries $V_1, V_2 : \mathbb{C}^{d}\to \mathbb{C}^{n} \otimes \mathbb{C}^{m}$ on any common dilation space $\mathbb{C}^{m}$. We prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on $\mathbb{C}^{m}$ such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond},$ thus resolving vom Ende's modification of the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner conjecture in the affirmative.

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

Adaptive inference and function vectors in deep transformers

arXiv:2606.16694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformers are widely used as a general-purpose substrate for learning complex correlations between a large collection of coupled variables, but their internal mechanisms have remained mysterious. We introduce a theory of a deep transformer as a mean-field interacting system that implements distributed inference, subject to constraints on communication, locality and depth. We show that such a system can exploit internal state representations ('function vectors') to infer a latent context variable at increasingly finer scales over its layers. In an in-context regression task, the theory predicts a non-trivial relationship between non-Gaussian, hierarchical structure in the latent context variable, and transformer depth. Predictions are tested using constrained linear attention transformers and demonstrate adaptive inference in deep architectures. Feedforward blocks and depth enable transformers to implement a much richer class of in-context learning algorithms than previously described.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Associations of Chemical Exposures with Psychological Distress and Depression Diagnosis among Waste Pickers in Brasilia, Brazil: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Waste pickers face chemical exposures. We evaluated whether chemical exposure is associated with psychological distress and depression. Methods: A 2017 cross-sectional survey included 1,141 waste pickers working in the Estrutural open dump in Brasilia, Brazil. Participants self-reported occupational exposure to 11 chemical categories, 17 psychological distress symptoms, and depression diagnoses. Associations of chemical exposure with mean psychological distress scores and depression prevalence were assessed, adjusted for age, sex, marital status, and income. Results: Mean psychological distress score was higher among those exposed to any chemical (mean of 8.1 vs 6.1; adjusted mean difference [aMD]: 1.8 [0.9, 2.7]) and higher among those exposed to each of 11 chemical categories, for example, smoke (aMD: 1.2 [0.6, 1.7]), batteries (aMD: 1.5 [1.0, 1.9], and oils (aMD: 1.3 [0.9, 1.8]). Depression was more prevalent among those exposed to oils (16.6% vs 10.6%; adjusted prevalence difference [aPD]: 6.3% [95% CI: 2.3, 10.2]), cleaning products (aPD: 5.4% [1.2, 9.5]), medications (aPD: 4.7% [0.6, 8.8]), and aerosols (aPD: 5.3% [1.3, 9.3]) but, not smoke, batteries, greases, insecticides, solvents, paints, chemical containers, or any chemical. Conclusion: These associations highlight the need to consider policy level protections for waste pickers to reduce chemical exposure and guard against psychological distress. Further research is necessary to explore which specific chemicals, within broad chemical categories, are associated with psychological distress and depression.

10.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-11

Microglia at a key inflection point in Alzheimer’s disease

作者: 未知作者

We analyzed brains from octogenarians and cognitively resilient centenarians to understand why some individuals with substantial Alzheimer’s disease pathology develop dementia whereas others remain cognitively intact. Spatial transcriptomics revealed gene expression changes in discrete tissue domains surrounding amyloid plaques and tau pathology that distinguish early, clinically silent, disease from later stages associated with cognitive decline.

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

AutoMine Solution for AV2 2026 Scenario Mining Challenge

arXiv:2606.11874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the development of autonomous driving systems, mining high-value, safety-critical, and planning-relevant scenarios from large-scale driving logs has become essential for data-driven evaluation. In this paper, we propose AutoMine, a robust self-refining scenario mining method based on LLMs and VLMs. AutoMine uses semantics-preserving prompt augmentation to reduce LLM prompt sensitivity, combines robust trajectory atomic functions with VLM-based functions to handle perception noise and open-world visual cues, and refines generated code through execution feedback from real logs. In the Argoverse 2 Scenario Mining Competition at CVPR 2026, AutoMine achieves a HOTA-Temporal score of 36.38 and a Timestamp BA score of 77.21.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

X-REFINE: XAI-based RElevance input-Filtering and archItecture fiNe-tuning for channel Estimation

arXiv:2602.22277v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI-native architectures are vital for 6G wireless communications. The black-box nature and high complexity of deep learning models employed in critical applications, such as channel estimation, limit their practical deployment. While perturbation-based eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) solutions offer input filtering, they often neglect internal structural optimization. We propose X-REFINE, an XAI-based framework for joint input-filtering and architecture fine-tuning. By utilizing a decomposition-based, sign-stabilized LRP epsilon rule, X-REFINE backpropagates predictions to derive high-resolution relevance scores for both subcarriers and hidden neurons. This enables a reliable optimization that identifies the most reliable model components. Simulation results demonstrate that X-REFINE achieves a superior performance-complexity-interpretability trade-off compared to the external perturbation-based XAI frameworks, significantly reducing computational complexity while maintaining robust bit error rate (BER) performance.

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

Fourier Multi-Component and Multi-Layer Neural Networks: Unlocking High-Frequency Potential

arXiv:2502.18959v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The architecture of a neural network and the choice of its activation function are both fundamental to its performance. Equally important is ensuring that these two elements are well matched, as their alignment is key to effective representation and learning. In this paper, we introduce the Fourier Multi-Component and Multi-Layer Neural Network (FMMNN), a model that combines sine-type activations with the multi-component and multi-layer structure of MMNNs. In an FMMNN, each component is represented as a trainable linear combination of fixed random sine-type basis functions, while multi-layer composition generates more complex and adaptive high-frequency features. We establish that FMMNNs retain exponential expressive power for function approximation even under a low-rank architectural structure. We also analyze the optimization landscape of FMMNNs and find it to be substantially more favorable than that of standard fully connected neural networks, especially for high-frequency targets. In addition, we propose a scaled random initialization method for the first-layer weights in FMMNNs, which accelerates training and improves final performance when sufficient samples are available. Extensive numerical experiments support our theoretical insights, showing that FMMNNs achieve strong accuracy and favorable convergence behavior on oscillatory function-approximation benchmarks.

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

Learning When to Denoise: Optimizing Asynchronous Schedules for Latent Diffusion

Multi-representation diffusion models can improve visual synthesis by denoising complementary views of an image, but their performance depends critically on the asynchronous schedule that determines when each representation is denoised. We propose to learn this schedule. Our method formulates asynchronous flow matching over multiple representation spaces and uses a schedule-corrected objective that keeps each representation's local noising-time weights fixed as the schedule changes. We instantiate the schedule with a flexible parametric class that is convex and monotone by construction, and learn it using a fast joint probe with less than 1% additional training compute. On ImageNet 256x256, the learned schedule substantially improves both convergence speed and final quality under a matched 675M-parameter XL backbone. With AutoGuidance, our 200-epoch model reaches FID 1.05, matching the 800-epoch SFD-XL baseline with 4x less training. Training to 600 epochs further improves to FID 1.02, outperforming the 1B-parameter SFD-XXL result of FID 1.04 while using a smaller model. In the unguided setting, our 200-epoch model reaches FID 2.37, already below the best 800-epoch SFD-XL result (2.54) at 4x less training, and improves to FID 2.14 at 600 epochs. Code is available at https://github.com/bsq532087/LWD

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.18844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.

16.
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.

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

Mitigating Scoring Errors and Compensating for Nonverbal Subtests in Speech-Based Dementia Assessment

Early detection of cognitive impairment relies on neuropsychological tests to minimize subjectivity by assessing multiple cognitive domains. Speech-based evaluation can support diagnostics and improve accessibility, but transcription errors and the omission of nonverbal subtests (e.g., motor skills) limit accuracy. Beyond conventional test scores, speech-derived features can provide additional insights into cognitive status. This study investigates the speech-based evaluation of the German "Syndrom-Kurz-Test," a standardized dementia screening test comprising verbal and motor subtests. We train models that integrate transcript-derived scores and Whisper embeddings per verbal subtest to reduce scoring errors. To compensate for missing motor subtests, we then leverage these fused representations to approximate expert overall ratings. Despite omitting subtests, our models strongly correlate with expert ratings and efficiently and accurately discriminate between cognitive status groups.

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

DYNA-PRUNER: Input-Adaptive Data-Model Co-Pruning for Efficient and Scalable Spatio-Temporal Media Prediction

Spatio-temporal prediction supports radar/satellite nowcasting and city-scale traffic monitoring, but modern models are often too expensive for real-time deployment. This stems from a mismatch between dense computation and strong input-dependent redundancy (e.g., calm seas or clear skies). To enable automated, resource-aware architecture optimization in scalable media analysis, we propose Dyna-Pruner, an end-to-end framework for input-dependent co-pruning of data and model structure. A shared-importance synchronization mechanism generates coupled masks that prune redundant regions and their corresponding computational units (e.g., convolutional filters), yielding per-sample sparse sub-networks at inference time. Experiments on WeatherBench, SEVIR, and TaxiBJ show seamless integration with CNN, RNN, and Transformer backbones, reducing FLOPs by up to $70\%$ and achieving a $2.5\times$ speedup on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin with negligible accuracy loss ($

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

Environment-Grounded Automated Prompt Optimization for LLM Game Agents

LLM agents in interactive environments are highly sensitive to their prompts, yet prompt engineering remains a manual, task-specific process. We introduce an automated prompt optimization framework for LLM agents that decomposes the observation-to-action pipeline into a goal-conditioned descriptor agent and an action selection agent, and iteratively refines each module's prompt through an LLM-driven evolutionary loop guided by environment returns. We propose a behavior analyzer to attribute episode outcomes to specific prompt components, and a mutator to propose targeted revisions to the prompt, before validating them through environment rollouts. We evaluate on all five BabyAI tasks in the BALROG benchmark, comparing our pipeline against BALROG's RobustCoTAgent under both plain and guided prompt initializations. Optimization improves performance consistently across tasks and conditions, without requiring updates to the model weights. On PutNext, a multi-step coordination task where the RobustCoTAgent achieves 0% success, our framework reaches up to 72.5% success rate using the same underlying LLM with optimized prompts. These results suggest that a multi-agent framework, combined with automatic prompt optimization, enhances LLMs without the need for fine-tuning or extensive human supervision.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Secondary terms for first moments of Selmer groups of twists of elliptic curves over global function fields

作者:

arXiv:2606.14274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $E$ be a non-isotrivial elliptic curve over a global function field $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$ of characteristic coprime to $2$ and $3$. Under some explicit conditions, we determine the secondary terms for the first moments of prime Selmer groups of cyclic prime twist families of $E$ over $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$.

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

Leveraging systems' non-linearity to tackle the scarcity of data in the design of Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Systems

arXiv:2606.20323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Transfer Learning (DTL) allows for the efficient building of Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Systems (IFDS). On the other hand, DTL methods still heavily rely on large amounts of labelled data. Obtaining such an amount of data can be challenging when dealing with machines or structures faults. This document proposes a novel approach to the design of vibration-based IFDS using DTL in condition of strong data scarcity. A periodic multi-excitation level procedure leveraging intrinsic non-linearities of real-world systems is used to produce images that can be conveniently analysed by pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to diagnose faults. A new data visualization method and its augmentation technique are proposed in this paper to tackle the typical lack of data encountered during the design of IFDS. Experimental validation on a railway pantograph structure provides effective support for the proposed method.

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

Not What, But How: A Framework for Auditing LLM Responses across Positioning, Generalization, Anthropomorphism, and Maxims

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly used to answer subjective, information-seeking questions, where users are sensitive to how responses are communicated, not just whether the answers are correct. Existing LLM evaluations for subjective cultural queries largely focus on factual correctness, ignoring how the response is framed. To this end, we introduce FRANZ, an automated FRAmework for respoNse characteriZation to conduct communicative audit of LLM responses along four dimensions: cultural positioning, use of generalizing language, anthropomorphic cues, and adherence to conversational maxims. To enable this evaluation, we contribute SQUARE - a corpus of 376k subjective questions sourced from 57 subreddits, and mapped to 7 countries and 19 question categories. We demonstrate FRANZ's applicability by scoring responses from three open-weight LLMs. We observe that LLMs show statistically significant differences in the frequency with which they employ each response characteristic. Unlike single-dimensional audits, FRANZ reveals that insider positioning and anthropomorphism are positively coupled, with the degree of coupling varying by country, providing a diagnostic lens for identifying framing divergences.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Analyzing and Improving Fine-grained Preference Optimization in Medical LVLMs

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved strong performance across medical imaging tasks, yet they remain prone to factual inconsistencies, poor visual grounding, and misalignment with clinically meaningful feedback. Existing post-training alignment approaches, including Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants, face three critical limitations in the medical domain: (1) sequence-level reward signals treat clinically critical tokens identically to generic filler text; (2) reliance on static supervised fine-tuning references as preferred responses introduces an off-policy distribution shift, steering optimization toward stylistic artifacts over clinical correctness; and (3) alignment objectives lack explicit visual grounding constraints, leaving models insensitive to subtle yet diagnostically decisive pathological features. Our method leverages a bidirectional token-wise KL regularizer alongside a visual-contrastive grounding objective that pairs clean and lesion-corrupted images to penalize responses generated without adequate visual evidence. Together, these components form a fine-grained, on-policy alignment framework that constructs preference pairs by minimally editing model-generated outputs, correcting only clinically erroneous spans while preserving the original linguistic style. Extensive experiments across medical imaging tasks and clinical text generation benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MCR-VQGAN: A Scalable and Cost-Effective Tau PET Synthesis Approach for Alzheimer's Disease Imaging

Tau positron emission tomography (PET) is a critical diagnostic modality for Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its widespread clinical adoption is hindered by radiation exposure, limited availability, high clinical workload, and substantial financial costs. To address these limitations, we propose the Multi-scale CBAM Residual Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network (MCR-VQGAN) to synthesize high-fidelity tau PET images from structural T1-weighted MRI. MCR-VQGAN advances the standard VQGAN architecture through three enhancements: multi-scale convolutions, ResNet blocks, and Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAM), which collectively improve the capture of local and global features. Using 222 paired T1-weighted MRI and tau PET scans from the ADNI database, we trained and compared MCR-VQGAN against cGAN, WGAN-GP, CycleGAN, and baseline VQGAN. MCR-VQGAN achieved superior image synthesis performance across all metrics (MSE = 0.0056 +/- 0.0061, PSNR = 30.65 +/- 4.47 dB, SSIM = 0.9263 +/- 0.0469). A CNN-based AD classifier trained on real tau PET achieved comparable accuracy on real (63.64%) and synthetic (65.91%) images, indicating that diagnostically relevant features are preserved. Regional SUVR-equivalent analysis across Braak-defined ROIs further indicated strong agreement between real and synthetic tau PET (Pearson r = 0.78-0.88; ICC = 0.71-0.84), with the strongest agreement in Braak V/VI (ICC = 0.838). Together, these results suggest that MCR-VQGAN offers a promising and scalable surrogate for conventional tau PET imaging, potentially improving the accessibility of tau biomarkers for AD research and clinical workflows.

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

FineREX: Fine-Tuned NER-RE for Human Smuggling Knowledge Graphs

Court proceedings contain valuable evidence about human smuggling networks, but this information is often buried within unstructured, jargon-heavy legal documents. While large language models (LLMs) can support knowledge graph construction through automated information extraction, existing approaches rely on general-purpose models that are not tailored to the entity and relationship definitions required in this domain. We introduce FineREX, a streamlined knowledge graph construction pipeline built around a fine-tuned LLM for named entity recognition and relationship extraction (NER-RE). Using a manually annotated dataset of $512$ text chunks, FineREX achieves absolute improvements of 15.50% and 31.46% in entity and relationship F1-score, respectively, compared to a larger general-purpose baseline. These gains translate into higher-quality knowledge graphs, reducing legal noise by nearly half and lowering node duplication on long documents from 17.78% to 11.17%. By eliminating document rewriting and redundant extraction stages, FineREX also reduces end-to-end processing time by 50.0%. Our results demonstrate that domain-specific fine-tuning can substantially outperform larger general-purpose models while improving both the quality and efficiency of knowledge graph construction for illicit network analysis.