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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

DICE: Diffusion Large Language Models Excel at Generating CUDA Kernels

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, owing to their capacity for parallel token generation. This paradigm is particularly well-suited for code generation, where holistic structural planning and non-sequential refinement are critical. Despite this potential, tailoring dLLMs for CUDA kernel generation remains challenging, obstructed not only by the high specialization but also by the severe lack of high-quality training data. To address these challenges, we construct CuKe, an augmented supervised fine-tuning dataset optimized for high-performance CUDA kernels. On top of it, we propose a bi-phase curated reinforcement learning (BiC-RL) framework consisting of a CUDA kernel infilling stage and an end-to-end CUDA kernel generation stage. Leveraging this training framework, we introduce DICE, a series of diffusion large language models designed for CUDA kernel generation, spanning three parameter scales, 1.7B, 4B, and 8B. Extensive experiments on KernelBench demonstrate that DICE significantly outperforms both autoregressive and diffusion LLMs of comparable scale, establishing a new state-of-the-art for CUDA kernel generation.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Improving Neural Network Training by Decoupling the Magnitude and Direction of Weight Vectors

arXiv:2606.25971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern neural network training relies on optimizers such as Adam and Muon which act on each weight matrix as a single object. Yet every weight matrix carries two distinct quantities – a magnitude and a direction – and all optimizers stepping in the matrix as a whole couple their dynamics: the directional change from an update depends on the current magnitude, while the magnitude drifts as a byproduct of learning the direction, so neither is governed directly by the learning rate. Typical training therefore leans on surrounding recipes such as weight decay and warmup to keep learning stable at scale, though these regulate the coupling only indirectly; other recent methods instead constrain the weight to a fixed-norm sphere, but add no learnable magnitude, leaving scale control to normalization layers alone. We propose Magnitude–Direction (MD) Decoupling, an optimizer modification that factorizes each weight into a fixed-norm direction on a hypersphere and learnable per-row and per-column magnitude gains, updated at separate learning rates, all while the model still sees a single fused weight tensor. The method is agnostic to the base optimizer and removes the need for weight decay and warmup. Across both Adam and Muon, MD Decoupling improves on well-tuned baselines, transfers the optimal LR across model width without retuning, and continues to help at scale on large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. Treating magnitude and direction as separately controlled quantities thus yields more predictable training dynamics and a simple, broadly applicable improvement to modern optimizers.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

FedSteer: Taming Extreme Gradient Staleness in Federated Learning with Corrective Projections and Caching

arXiv:2606.10124v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is often subject to aggregation variance if clients do not consistently participate in training rounds. While reusing stale model updates from inactive clients is a common technique to reduce this variance, we find that with skewed client participation, the resulting update staleness can become severe enough to destabilize training. To remedy this, we propose FedSteer, a novel method that constructs a gradient subspace from a cache of recent client gradients to serve as a low-dimensional representation of the current optimization landscape. FedSteer projects an active client's true gradient onto this subspace to find a set of optimal coordinates. For an inactive client, FedSteer reuses these coordinates with the now-evolved subspace drifted by other active clients. This process effectively "steers" outdated gradients toward the current global objective. This is complemented by a selective caching strategy that identifies a representative client subset to form the subspace, reducing server memory. Experiments demonstrate that FedSteer significantly outperforms baselines, preventing performance collapse in challenging scenarios while delivering accuracy gains of over 7% in others.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

REVEAL++: Differentiable Phenotypic Grouping for Vision-Language Retinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Risk

arXiv:2606.19522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The retina offers a noninvasive window into neurodegenerative disease, capturing subtle structural patterns associated with a risk of future cognitive decline. Vision-language alignment frameworks such as REVEAL have shown that pairing retinal fundus images with structured clinical risk narratives improves early prediction of Alzheimer's disease (AD). A key design choice in these approaches is the use of phenotypic grouping, where individuals with similar risk profiles are treated as multi-positive pairs during contrastive learning. However, existing methods operationalize phenotypic similarity as a discrete construct, relying on hard group assignments that impose rigid supervision and decouple group formation from representation learning. We propose a continuous formulation of phenotypic structure within contrastive learning. Rather than assigning samples to fixed clusters, we model inter-subject similarity as a differentiable weighting function derived from intra-modality embedding similarities in both retinal images and risk profiles. These weights define soft multi-positive relationships through a continuous aggregation operator, enabling graded supervision that reflects the spectrum nature of disease risk. We further introduce a soft-target contrastive objective that jointly learns cross-modal alignment and phenotypic structure in an end-to-end manner. Evaluated on UK Biobank retinal imaging data for incident AD prediction, the proposed framework consistently outperforms discrete group-based contrastive learning and standard vision-language baselines. By treating phenotypic similarity as a learnable, continuous signal rather than a fixed grouping rule, our approach provides a principled and robust foundation for population-scale neurodegenerative risk modeling from multi-modal retinal and clinical data.

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

Generalised Medical Phrase Grounding

Medical phrase grounding (MPG) maps textual descriptions of radiological findings to corresponding image regions. These grounded reports are easier to interpret, especially for non-experts. Existing MPG systems mostly follow the referring expression comprehension (REC) paradigm and return exactly one bounding box per phrase. Real reports often violate this assumption. They contain multi-region findings, non-diagnostic text, and non-groundable phrases, such as negations or descriptions of normal anatomy. Motivated by this, we reformulate the task as generalised medical phrase grounding (GMPG), where each sentence is mapped to zero, one, or multiple scored regions. To realise this formulation, we introduce the first GMPG model: MedGrounder. We adopted a two-stage training regime: pre-training on report sentence–anatomy box alignment datasets and fine-tuning on report sentence–human annotated box datasets. Experiments on PadChest-GR and MS-CXR show that MedGrounder achieves strong zero-shot transfer and outperforms REC-style and grounded report generation baselines on multi-region and non-groundable phrases, while using far fewer human box annotations. Finally, we show that MedGrounder can be composed with existing report generators to produce grounded reports without retraining the generator.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.14941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting models often benefit from historical patterns. Inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), recent research explored retrieving relevant historical time series segments to enhance forecasting. However, relying solely on time series similarity is often insufficient for retrieval under non-stationarity. To address this, we propose a multimodal approach: a Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting framework, SERAF. Unlike mainstream approaches that depend only on time series similarity, SERAF conducts dual retrieval over the time series and their self-generated textual descriptions. It retrieves two complementary sets of historical patterns and corresponding futures, which are selectively and jointly used to guide future predictions. Experiments across seven real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SERAF in bridging numerical and semantic views of time series compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Artificial Intelligence-informed mobile behavioural interventions to support adolescents mental health in schools: protocol for a randomised controlled trial using the MindCraft app

Background: Children and young people (CYP) are particularly affected by mental health problems. Mobile apps provide a scalable and accessible approach to adolescent mental health support, and schools are well-positioned to address multiple risk factors and deliver large-scale interventions. By combining active (self-reported) and passive (sensor-derived) data, mobile apps can model mental states and deliver context-aware support. Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables adaptive, context-aware recommendations tailored to each user. However, there is limited research on AI-based mental health interventions in community CYP. MindCraft is a mobile app designed to monitor adolescents mental health using active and passive data and provide AI-informed recommendations ("nudges"). This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of personalised AI nudges delivered through MindCraft on improving mental health outcomes among adolescents in schools in the United Kingdom. Methods: The study is a three-arm RCT using a prospective cohort of secondary school students aged 14-19. Following informed consent, participants complete a baseline online assessment at school and download MindCraft. The primary outcome is the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire global and subscale scores. Secondary outcomes include the Eating Disorders Diagnostic Scale, the Sleep Condition Indicator Questionnaire, the Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviours Interview, the Self-Efficacy Questionnaire for Children and the World Health Organisation-Five Well-Being Index. Participants are randomised to: (1) an AI-informed intervention group receiving personalised nudges, (2) an active control receiving non-personalised nudges, or (3) a control group with self-monitoring only. Participants use the app for four weeks, with follow-up at one month. Repeated-measures analyses will assess changes across time points. Discussion: We hypothesise that AI nudges will have a greater positive effect on mental health outcomes at one month than general nudges and self-monitoring. Our findings will provide key evidence on the effectiveness of personalised mobile AI recommendations for adolescents mental health and inform school-based mental health prevention and early intervention. This study will contribute evidence on the ethical, acceptable, and scalable integration of AI-enabled digital mental health tools within public health and educational systems, with implications for the design of future digital public health interventions and policies supporting their safe integration in schools.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Plan, Don't Pose: Long Composite Motion Generation with Text-Aligned BFM

arXiv:2605.29906v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Text-to-motion (T2M) generation has broad applications in character animation, virtual avatars, and human-robot interaction. Existing methods typically generate pose trajectories or motion tokens directly from language, forcing a single model to handle semantic interpretation, long-horizon structure, and low-level physical realization. This coupling makes them costly and often unreliable for long, compositional, or semantically dense prompts. We propose Text2BFM, the first framework that aligns natural language with pretrained Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) for T2M generation without relying on heavy end-to-end motion generators. Text2BFM operates in the latent policy space of a frozen BFM, using it as an executable motion prior. A text-aligned variational behavioral bottleneck compresses BFM policy-latent sequences into compact motion representations that are compatible with language and preserve long-horizon behavioral structure. Generation is performed in this compact behavioral manifold with a lightweight conditional generator, and the resulting latent encoded behaviors are decoded into policy latents that drive the pretrained frozen BFM. By decoupling semantic planning from motion execution, Text2BFM achieves efficient, robust T2M generation and strong performance on long, compositional textual descriptions.

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

Auditing Machine Unlearning: A Systematic Research on Whether Models Truly Forget

arXiv:2606.16110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements. However, auditing whether unlearning algorithms have truly erased the influence of specific data remains an open challenge. The lack of reliable and practical auditing mechanisms can lead to critical privacy risks, such as residual information leakage. This paper initiates a systematic investigation into whether existing unlearning algorithms can truly forget the designated data. We propose the first practical and general-purpose auditing framework for machine unlearning, inspired by the concept of proof of ignorance. Our framework addresses the key practicality limitations of existing methods by eliminating the need for retraining-from-scratch baselines, avoiding the training of large numbers of shadow models, and requiring no intrusive intervention in the original training process. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we first conduct validation experiments to verify its soundness and completeness. We then perform comprehensive experiments across six datasets and ten representative unlearning methods. The results demonstrate that our framework reliably distinguishes between successful and failed unlearning. In particular, we observe that retraining-based and fine-tuning-based methods can achieve effective unlearning, even when the target data remain in the original dataset. In contrast, de-optimization-based methods fail to achieve true unlearning and instead degrade the model's performance. Fisher/Hessian-based methods also fail to unlearn requested data, even formal certification is provided. Moreover, we show that our framework is robust against fake unlearning attempts and generalizes well to large language models.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Accuracy: Measuring Logical Compliance of Predictive Models

arXiv:2606.20208v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models are predominantly evaluated through predictive performance metrics such as ranking quality, prediction error, or classification accuracy. While these metrics effectively quantify how closely predictions match the ground truth, they do not assess whether model outputs respect predefined logical or domain-specific constraints. In high-stakes applications, including healthcare, finance, and autonomous systems, logical consistency can be as critical as predictive accuracy, yet no standard metric captures this dimension. We introduce the Rule Violation Score (RVS), a complementary evaluation metric that quantifies the extent to which a predictive model respects a given set of logical rules, independently of predictive accuracy. RVS treats hard rules (strict constraints) and soft rules (statistical regularities) differently, can be evaluated on any dataset and on any predictive model expressed over a relational vocabulary, and can be computed using SQL queries that are automatically generated for Horn rules. Beyond evaluating models, RVS can also evaluate the logical consistency of training datasets and help identify poorly defined rules. We evaluate RVS on three benchmarks covering knowledge graph link prediction and relational regression, including rule-based, embedding-based, and neuro-symbolic predictive models. Our results demonstrate that two models achieving comparable predictive accuracy can exhibit substantially different levels of logical compliance, revealing differences in model behavior that standard metrics fail to capture.

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

VISUALSKILL: Multimodal Skills for Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents (CUAs) approach human-level performance on standardised benchmarks but still struggle on long-horizon tasks and unseen software. Existing skill libraries address this with reusable skills, but represent the skill artifact as text only, despite the visual nature of GUI interaction. We propose VISUALSKILL: a hierarchical multimodal skill, tailored to each target application and organised as a central index over per-topic files, which the agent consumes through a load_topic MCP tool that fetches the relevant topic's text and figures on demand. We construct each skill with a two-stage pipeline that combines authored documentation with live-application UI exploration. On two CUA benchmarks, CUA-World and OSExpert-Eval, a Claude Code CLI agent backed by Claude Opus 4.6 reaches an average score of 0.456 with VISUALSKILL, a +15.3 point absolute lift over the no-skill baseline (0.303). Against a matched text-only skill that is generated from the same source content and differs from VISUALSKILL only in modality, VISUALSKILL yields a further +8.3 point absolute gain over the matched text-only skill (0.373 vs. 0.456), providing direct evidence that retaining visual figures in the skill artifact, rather than verbalizing them away, helps the agent both identify UI elements and verify workflow state after each action. Our code is available at https://github.com/XMHZZ2018/VisualSkills.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Fidelity-Derived Quantum Dissimilarity-Enhanced k-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm for Arterial Hypertension Prediction

We present a quantum-enhanced version of the classic k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) classification algorithm, applied to the prediction of arterial hypertension. The traditional Euclidean distance metric of the kNN algorithm is replaced with a Fidelity-derived quantum dissimilarity measure to evaluate the similarity between data samples. We map classical real-world clinical and ECG-derived data features into quantum states via the Dense-Angle Encoding, which efficiently utilizes parameterized rotation gates to pack multiple features into minimal qubits while maintaining pure states. We evaluate the performance of the dissimilarity measure using both the noiseless state vector Simulator and the IBM Qiskit Estimator primitives. The quantum circuit demonstrates robust predictive capabilities comparable to the classical model. While it does not claim computational supremacy over the classical baseline, the framework proves that fidelity-based similarity is a physically meaningful and efficient approach for hybrid quantum classical classification.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dose-efficient Quantum Phase Estimation in Lossy Optical Interferometry

arXiv:2606.14254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optical interferometry is a cornerstone technique for precise phase measurements across various fields. In many applications, for example, biological imaging, it often necessitates stringent limits on light intensity to prevent adverse effects on light-sensitive samples, a condition known as dose-limited regimes. Maximizing the precision per dose is therefore crucial. In quantum metrology, quantum correlations enable high precision in phase estimation while adhering to dose constraints. Nevertheless, photon loss, including absorption by a sample, substantially diminishes the benefits of quantum enhancement in interferometry. In this work, we experimentally investigate a dose-efficient approach to quantum phase estimation using sequential strategies in the presence of loss. Performance of sequential strategies with and without control is evaluated through quantum Fisher information (QFI) per dose. Experimental results show that both sequential strategies exceed the classical limit and outperform the parallel strategy using unbalanced N00N states. Notably, the control-enhanced sequential strategy attains superior QFI per dose, approaching the quantum limit. These results highlight the promise of sequential strategy for imaging and sensing in resource-constrained scenarios, marking a significant step toward practical and efficient quantum metrology in lossy environments.

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

CORE-BREW: LLR-Based Soft Decoding for Robust Multi-Bit LLM Watermarking

Reliable provenance for LLM outputs requires multi-bit watermarks that remain robust under editing while maintaining strict false-positive control. Existing ECC-based LLM watermarks rely largely on hard-decision decoding, discarding token-level reliability information. We propose CORE-BREW, a Constant-hit-Rate Embedding extension of block-wise BREW for robust multi-bit watermarking. CORE-BREW calibrates the watermark channel by targeting a fixed hit rate p-star, yielding closed-form per-token log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) for principled soft-decision decoding. It supports two detection modes: Strict-Safe, which preserves the bounded-distance designated-codeword acceptance region, and FPR-Calibrated, which uses likelihood-based scoring and lightweight list decoding to characterize the FPR-TPR trade-off. Experiments on open-source LLMs under token-level edits and paraphrasing demonstrate improved low-FPR discrimination and robustness over prior multi-bit watermarking baselines while maintaining comparable semantic quality.

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

Depth-Attention: Cross-Layer Value Mixing for Language Models

Self-attention selects information freely across the sequence, but across depth, Transformers merely add each layer's output to the residual stream, so later layers cannot selectively reuse earlier-layer representations. Recent cross-layer methods improve this flow but operate on hidden states outside attention, adding state beyond the key-value cache at inference–a cost that becomes increasingly salient as modern LLMs compress the cache with grouped-query and multi-head latent attention. We introduce Depth-Attention, which performs this selection inside the attention module itself: before a layer attends over the sequence, its query attends over the keys of earlier layers at the same token position and mixes their values into the value that self-attention then reads. Because Depth-Attention reuses the standard attention queries, keys, and value-cache slots, storing depth-mixed values in place of the original values, it adds no parameters and introduces no persistent inference state beyond the standard key-value cache–the same cache size as a vanilla decoder and less than hidden-state-based cross-layer methods. On Qwen3-style decoders at 1.5B and 3B parameters, Depth-Attention attains the lowest perplexity and the highest average downstream accuracy, improving over the vanilla Transformer by up to 2.3 accuracy points and surpassing strong cross-layer baselines in perplexity and average accuracy, while adding under 0.01% extra arithmetic FLOPs and no additional persistent inference state. The gains hold from 360M to 3B parameters and extend to looped Transformers.

17.
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.

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

Causal Clothes-Invariant Feature Learning for Cloth-Changing Person Re-ID

In cloth-changing person re-identification (CCReID), it is critical to learn clothes-invariant feature, which can provide discriminative ID features that remain robust against clothing changes. However, a spurious correlation currently limits existing ReID methods from effectively extracting these clothing-invariant features. This spurious correlation arises from clothing ownership: clothing is rarely shared across different identities, so models tend to memorize clothing cues for identity recognition, and this strategy generalizes poorly to unseen clothing. In this paper, we propose Causal Clothes-Invariant Learning (CCIL), which explicitly shifts CC-ReID from likelihood learning P (Y|X) to causal intervention learning P (Y|do(X)) to block the clothing shortcut. CCIL realizes this intervention through three modules: a Confounder Dictionary, an Intervention Module, and Disentangle Regularization. The causality-based modeling makes the entire model naturally clothes-invariant, effectively preventing the capture of spurious correlations in feature learning. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of CCIL. On PRCC and DeepChange datasets, CCIL achieves Rank-1 accuracies of 66.4% and 59.2%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 1.4 and 4.1 percentage points, respectively.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Pembrolizumab, Temozolomide and HSPPC-96 Vaccine in Newly Diagnosed Glioblastoma Post-Chemoradiation: Results from a Multi-institutional, Phase 2, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial

Background: GBM is one of the most common and most aggressive brain tumors in adults, and upfront standard of care treatment has limited efficacy. Immune checkpoint inhibitor strategies have significantly improved outcomes in various solid tumors but have not proven effective in GBM, suggesting other strategies may be needed to realize their full potential. Methods: GBM patients were treated with upfront standard of care chemoradiation with temozolomide and pembrolizumab, followed by adjuvant temozolomide and pembrolizumab for six nine-week cycles. Depending on production of sufficient vaccine, patients were randomized into HSPPC-96 vaccine or placebo group (q4 weeks) while those with failed vaccine production continued on study unblinded as an ancillary group. The primary objective was overall survival at one year, and secondary endpoints were progression-free survival at six months, overall and progression-free survival, radiographic response, and tolerability by patient-reported outcomes and adverse event documentation. Results: 90 patients were screened, 32 were treated (8 vaccine, 9 placebo, 15 ancillary), and 26 were evaluable for radiographic responses prior to accrual termination. The study did not meet its primary endpoint of overall survival at one year (65.5% in vaccine group, 75% in placebo). Progression-free endpoints were mildly improved in the vaccine group but were not significant, and response rates were not significantly different. The regimen was well-tolerated and safe. Conclusions: Though limited by early discontinuation, these findings do not support the combination of pembrolizumab and HSPPC-96 vaccine with standard of care therapy. Trials Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03018288

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Physically Motivated Ansatz for Open Fermionic Systems on Quantum Computer

arXiv:2606.16823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Determining non-equilibrium steady states (NESS) of open fermionic systems is a fundamental problem akin to finding ground states of closed systems. To address this, variational quantum algorithms can be used to solve the Lindblad master equation, much like the Schrödinger equation, yet ansatz design for NESS remains challenging. Existing approaches rely mostly on hardware-efficient ansätze (HEA), which suffer from the barren plateau problem. Here, we introduce a physically motivated ansatz named NE-UCC. Numerical simulations demonstrate that NE-UCC reliably converges to the steady state even in strongly correlated regimes far from equilibrium, reducing the infidelity by up to ten orders of magnitude compared to HEA. Furthermore, NE-UCC facilitates the exploration of excited eigenmodes with specific symmetries.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Meta-Learning Transformers to Improve In-Context Generalization

arXiv:2507.05019v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context learning enables transformer models to generalize to new tasks based solely on input prompts, without any need for weight updates. However, existing training paradigms typically rely on large, unstructured datasets that are costly to store, difficult to evaluate for quality and balance, and pose privacy and ethical concerns due to the inclusion of sensitive information. Motivated by these limitations and risks, we propose an alternative training strategy where we leverage a collection of multiple, small-scale, and domain-specific datasets. We empirically demonstrate that the increased quality and diversity of such data improve the generalization abilities of in-context learners beyond their training domain, while achieving comparable performance with models trained on a single large-scale dataset. We investigate this paradigm by leveraging meta-learning to train an in-context learner on the Meta-Album collection under several settings. Firstly, we show the performance in a controlled environment, where the test domain is completely excluded from the training knowledge. Secondly, we explore the robustness of these models to forgetting in a continual scenario where the information is accessible for a limited time. Finally, we explore the more challenging unsupervised scenario. Our findings demonstrate that transformers still generalize for in-context prediction when trained on a curated dataset collection while offering advantages in modularity and replaceability.

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

Fusion is not one-size-fits-all: Cross-Modal Representation Alignment for Time-to-Event Modeling

arXiv:2606.15038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate time-to-event (TTE) prediction from multimodal clinical data remains challenging due to modality imbalance and distribution shift. We introduce a foundation model-driven framework for cross-modal representation alignment between CT imaging and longitudinal EHR data, designed to generalize across tasks and institutions. CT and EHR modalities are encoded independently using domain-specific foundation models and aligned in a shared latent space through four principled fusion strategies: late fusion, contrastive alignment, cross-attention, and co-attention. We evaluate two clinically distinct TTE tasks: pulmonary embolism (PE) mortality and cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcomes, on large-scale multi-institutional cohorts (PE: N=3,099 train; 1,098 internal; 435 external; CVD: N=2,951 train; 837 internal; 682 external). Fusion consistently improves concordance index by 1.5-5.4% over unimodal baselines when modalities contribute comparably. Overall, contrastive multimodal fusion, particularly with CLMBR representations, provided the most consistent and statistically robust improvements, especially for PE mortality prediction. For MACE, cross-attention (one-hot) achieved the highest internal performance and image-guided co-attention achieved the best external performance. We therefore introduce a generalizable foundation model-based cross-modal alignment framework and provide the first systematic analysis of fusion behavior under modality imbalance in TTE prediction. Our results establish task-aware multimodal alignment as a necessary design principle for robust generalization and scalable clinical deployment.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Reform of the intermediate level of the health system in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Adaptations and limits in the stabilization of the personnel of the Provincial Health Division: A cohort study.

Background: Human resources are one of the pillars of health systems. Since the World Health Organization's report on human resources issues, several countries have integrated this component into the various reforms aimed at strengthening their health systems. This study aims to explore the effects of reforming the intermediate level of a health system operating in a fragile state context. Methodology Our study was conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It was a cohort study of the staff of the 14 Provincial Health Divisions (PHD) out of the 26 existing in the DRC. We established a database of the staff of these 14 PHD from 2016, just after the implementation of the intermediate level reform and the allocation of this staff by the Ministry of Health. We did a recall in 2021, in each of these PHD to survey this staff through a structured questionnaire and supplemented by the files of the agents available in each PHD. Sociodemographic, economic and academic variables were collected and analyzed. Data were entered into an Excel 2016 database and processed with SPSS software version 25. The chi-square test was used for comparison of proportions with a statistical significance level of p < 0.05. Risk ratios ratios (RR) and their 95% confidence intervals were calculated as measures of association. The error threshold was set at 5%. Results A total of 657 agents with an average age of 45.2 years had been identified in 2016 at the start of the survey and in 2021, 118 or 18% of them were no longer part of the PHD agents. Among the causes of absence noted: 48% of agents placed on leave, 16% promoted to other functions within the health system, 16% desertion and dismissal and 11% cases of death. 19.8% of absentees are executives, 19.5% men against 10.3% women; 22.3% of absentees in unstable provinces against 16.6% in stable ones. The factors associated with the absence of agents in the PHD remain the reaching of retirement age [RR (95% CI) = 5.5 (1.2-24.9) ]and male agents [RR (95% CI) = 3.2 (1.3-7.9)]. Among the agents who remained, 92% kept their initial position, 6% were subject to an internal permutation accompanied by a promotion. The factors associated with the stability of human resources at the level of the Provincial Health Division are: female gender, manager with experience or seniority > 5 years, Age > 35 years, Stable province, Presence of a partner bonus. Conclusion Even in a crisis and fragile context, health system reform is possible. It is possible to organize staff recruitment through a selection process independent of the political authorities of the Ministry of Health and supported by the technical services of the Ministry and partners . Experience and the presence of a financial bonus are motivating factors for staff stability. The involvement of Technical and Financial Support Partners in the recruitment process helped the Ministry of Health to minimize political influence in the recruitment of middle-level executives.

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

Gefen: Optimized Stochastic Optimizer

AdamW is a default optimizer for modern deep learning, but its first and second moment states add roughly two parameter-sized buffers to training memory. We propose Gefen, a memory-efficient optimizer that automatically shares second-moment estimates across parameter blocks and quantizes the first moment using a learned codebook, thereby reducing AdamW's memory footprint by ~8x while maintaining the same performance, corresponding to a reduction of 6.5 GiB per billion parameters. The method is motivated by a theoretical result showing that large mixed Hessian entries constrain the ratio of squared gradients toward one, suggesting that Hessian-aligned parameters are natural candidates for sharing second-moment statistics. Since computing Hessians is impractical at scale, Gefen infers block structure from the initial squared gradients, requiring no architecture-specific metadata or hyperparameters beyond AdamW defaults. Gefen learns an exact histogram-based dynamic-programming quantization codebook and reuses the same blocks for first-moment scaling. Across diverse experiments, Gefen achieves the lowest peak optimizer memory among the compared AdamW-like methods while maintaining AdamW-level performance. In FSDP and DDP training, the reduced memory footprint enables larger microbatches and improves throughput significantly over AdamW, providing a practical drop-in replacement with lower memory usage that can increase throughput and enable training larger models or using larger batch sizes. We provide the complete Python implementation, including fused CUDA kernels at https://github.com/ndvbd/Gefen

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

When Smaller Wins: Dual-Stage Distillation and Pareto-Guided Compression of Liquid Neural Networks for Edge Battery Prognostics

arXiv:2601.06227v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Battery management systems increasingly require accurate battery health prognostics under strict on-device constraints. This paper presents DLNet, a practical framework with dual-stage distillation of liquid neural networks that turns a high-capacity model into compact and edge-deployable models for battery health prediction. DLNet first applies Euler discretization to reformulate liquid dynamics for embedded compatibility. It then performs dual-stage knowledge distillation to transfer the teacher model's temporal behavior and recover it after further compression. Pareto-guided selection under joint error-cost objectives retains student models that balance accuracy and efficiency. We evaluate DLNet on a widely used dataset and validate real-device feasibility on an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense using int8 deployment. The final deployed student achieves a low error of 0.0066 when predicting battery health over the next 100 cycles, which is 15.4% lower than the teacher model. It reduces the model size from 616 kB to 94 kB with 84.7% reduction and takes 21 ms per inference on the device. These results support a practical smaller wins observation that a small model can match or exceed a large teacher for edge-based prognostics with proper supervision and selection. Beyond batteries, the DLNet framework can extend to other industrial analytics tasks with strict hardware constraints.