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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Investigating shared genetic overlap of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases and cardiometabolic diseases

Abstract Background: Immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs) are associated with increased risk of cardiometabolic diseases. Investigating genetic overlap among these conditions can provide insights into their clinical management. Methods: Genetic correlation was assessed using linkage disequilibrium score regression (LDSC). Then, a meta-analysis was conducted using Association Analysis Based on SubSETs (ASSET) to pinpoint independent single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) shared across the diseases. Each independent SNP was then used to define a genomic window (+/-500KB) for colocalisation analysis and Local Analysis of [co]Variant Association (LAVA) to offer multiple layers of regional pleiotropic evidence. Over-representation analysis was then run to identify enriched biological pathways, which then were used for drug target analysis. Results: The LDSC analysis showed a significant global genetic correlation for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and cardiometabolic diseases including hypertension, coronary artery disease (CAD), heart failure (HF), stroke, atrial fibrillation (AF), and type two diabetes mellitus (T2DM) ranging from rg = 0.09 to 0.24. ASSET meta-analysis identified 164 independent SNPs shared across RA and the cardiometabolic diseases with P < 5 x 10- in the overall one-sided meta-analysis P-value, FDR < 0.05 in both individual GWASs, and TRUE phenotype matrix. Colocalisation analysis revealed multiple loci with strong evidence (Posterior probabilities [&ge;] 80) of single causal SNPs between the trait pairs. LAVA analysis was then used as an additional layer of confirmation for the findings generated by ASSET and colocalisation and thus several loci were highlighted. Over-representation analysis showed significant enriched immune-related pathways across RA-hypertension, RA-CAD, RA-AF, and RA-T2DM trait pairs. Drug target analysis highlighted several drugs which could be further tested for their effectiveness in RA and its common comorbidities. Conclusion: The findings revealed a shared genetic architecture and key immune-related biological pathways underlying RA and its associated cardiometabolic comorbidities. The identified genes and drugs provide opportunities for further therapeutic assessment which could improve clinical management strategies.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Perron–Frobenius theorem for a general tree-valued growth-fragmentation-isolation process

arXiv:2606.24599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A general tree-valued dynamics is considered in continuous time: new vertices are added, and the percolation happens on the links, and the connected components can be frozen. The model is an infinite-type branching process. The main result establishes the Perron–Frobenius type theorem on this model, which extends the previous work [Ann. Appl. Probab. 33 (6B) 5233 - 5278]. The proof does not rely on any property of the uniform random recursive tree.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum-enabled active matter at the atomic scale

arXiv:2606.24615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active matter comprises particles that extract energy from their local environment and convert it into motion. Although active particles have been miniaturized down to the nanoscale, realizing activity at the fundamentally smaller scale of individual atoms remains an open challenge, where quantum effects become increasingly relevant. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that individual Cs-133 atoms confined in an optical dipole trap extract energy from an ultracold bath of Rb-87 atoms via quantum-mechanical spin interactions and convert it into active motion. We quantitatively reproduce the resulting dynamics using a parameter-free active Langevin model derived from kinetic theory and support it with event-driven Monte Carlo collision simulations. The microscopic origin of activity is identified as quantum spin exchange, which transfers discrete internal spin energy into kinetic motion. Our work establishes a quantum-enabled route to active matter at the fundamental size limit of single atoms and opens perspectives for exploring the interplay of activity, quantum physics, and mesoscopic non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Precision Is Not Faithfulness: Coverage-Aware Evaluation of Grounded Generation with a Complete Oracle

Reference-free faithfulness metrics verify each atomic claim a model makes against ground truth, and are increasingly used to evaluate grounded generation. We show they share a blind spot: they measure only precision – are the stated claims supported? – and therefore reward abstention, since a model can score near-perfect faithfulness by saying almost nothing. We make this measurable using Formula 1 telemetry, a domain where strategic ground truth is derived deterministically and, crucially, completely: for each decision we know the full set of facts that mattered. This completeness – absent in open-domain faithfulness benchmarks – lets us measure recall (coverage of the relevant facts) exactly, alongside precision. On a multilingual (EN/ES/PT) benchmark of 7,253 decision instances spanning 157 races, the most precise frontier model covers under half of the relevant facts and ranks last by F1, so requiring coverage reorders the systems; the same effect reappears in a second complete-oracle domain (NOAA weather forecasts). Fine-tuning small models (1B-7B) on the complete oracle closes the precision-recall gap entirely (F1 ~0.98), beating every zero-shot frontier system regardless of scale. We pair faithfulness with coverage into a single score, validate the metric (controlled perturbation; agreement across a model-free regex extractor and a cross-family LLM extractor, system-level Spearman 1.0), and give a verifier-guided generation method that improves precision and recall without references. We release the benchmark, structured annotations, metric, baselines, and an interactive demo.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Higher-Order Adiabatic Elimination in Atom-Cavity Systems and Its Impact on Spin-Squeezing Generation

arXiv:2506.22383v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Spin-squeezed states are metrologically useful quantum states where entanglement allows for enhanced sensing with respect to the standard quantum limit. Key challenges include the efficient preparation of spin-squeezed states and the scalability of estimation precision with the number $N$ of probes. Recently, in the context of the generation of spin-squeezed states via coupling of three-level atoms to an optical cavity, it was shown that increasing the atom-cavity coupling can be detrimental to spin squeezing generation, an effect that is not captured by the standard second-order adiabatic cavity removal approximation. We describe adiabatic elimination techniques to derive an effective Lindblad master equation up to third order for the atomic degrees of freedom. Numerical simulations show that the spin squeezing scalability loss is correctly reproduced by the reduced open system dynamics, highlighting the role of higher-order contributions. Furthermore, we conjecture an extension beyond leading order of the adiabatic elimination technique to the case of conditional dynamics under quantum non-demolition continuous measurement and fast cavity loss, whose reliability is again confirmed by numerical simulation of the dynamics and the corresponding behavior of spin squeezing as a function of $N$.

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

Detecting Lookahead Bias in LLM Forecasts

arXiv:2512.23847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a statistical procedure to detect lookahead bias in economic forecasts generated by large language models (LLMs). Using a date-only recall query for a firm-date pair, we estimate the probability that the LLM has internalized information about the realized outcome, a statistic we term Lookahead Propensity (LAP). LAP is materially positive throughout the in-sample period and collapses essentially to zero right after the training-data cutoff. We show that a positive interaction between LAP and the LLM forecast in an accuracy regression indicates lookahead-bias contamination, and apply the test to two forecasting tasks: news headlines predicting stock returns and earnings call transcripts predicting capital expenditures. In both applications, the LLM forecast's predictive power is amplified on high-LAP firm-date pairs, and the interaction loses significance on post-training-cutoff samples. Our test provides a cost-efficient, diagnostic tool for assessing the validity and reliability of LLM-generated forecasts.

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

Distribution Alignment for One-Shot Federated Learning via Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.16655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One-Shot Federated Learning (OSFL) addresses extreme communication regimes in which clients interact with the server only once, amplifying the impact of heterogeneous client data distributions. In particular, the interaction of domain shift and label shift across clients induces misaligned feature representations that cannot be corrected through iterative optimization. Existing OSFL methods rely on distillation, server-side generation or ensemble-based aggregation, but assume aligned representations or address domain and label shift separately. We introduce SLOT-Align (Single-round, Learning-free Optimal Transport Alignment), a geometry-aware feature harmonization framework for OSFL. SLOT-Align uses a shared frozen encoder to extract compact feature statistics, constructs a global reference via Bures-Wasserstein barycenters, and aligns local representations using closed-form geodesic optimal transport maps. The method is computationally efficient and can be combined with existing OSFL pipelines relying on frozen encoders without modifying their training procedures. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks, pretrained backbones, and OSFL methods show that SLOT-Align consistently improves accuracy and robustness under joint domain and label shift.

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

Iterative Visual Thinking: Teaching Vision-Language Models Spatial Self-Correction through Visual Feedback

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong singleshot spatial grounding, yet lack any mechanism to observe and correct their own predictions. We find that naively prompting a VLM to iterate over rendered visualizations of its predictions causes catastrophic failure: Acc@0.5 on referring expression comprehension collapses from 79.6% to 48.7% (a 31 percentage point drop), revealing a fundamental gap between grounding capability and self-correction ability. We propose Iterative Visual Thinking (IVT), a closed-loop framework in which the model predicts a bounding box, observes the prediction rendered on the image, and iteratively refines through visual feedback. A two-phase training recipe closes the self-correction gap: first, we exploit the base model's own predictions as realistic errors and prompt a teacher VLM to generate corrective reasoning traces, yielding supervised data without human annotation; second, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a simple IoU reward to stabilize multi-step refinement. On a mixed benchmark spanning RefCOCOg, Ref-Adv, and Ref-L4 (505 test samples), SFT warm-up with IVT surpasses the single-shot base model on every metric: Acc@0.5 rises to 82.0% (+2.4pp), Acc@0.7 to 74.1% (+3.2pp), and Acc@0.9 to 48.3% (+2.8pp). GRPO further reduces per-step IoU degradation by 5x, stabilizing the refinement trajectory. All training uses only 2,400 samples on a single GPU, demonstrating that spatial self-correction is a learnable capability that can be instilled at modest scale.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

AIPatient Arena: EHR-grounded evaluation of large language models in end-to-end clinical consultation workflows

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for use in clinical consultation tasks, yet most medical evaluations remain static, single-turn, or narrowly outcome-based, limiting their ability to reflect the sequential, uncertain, and interactive nature of real-world care. Here, we propose AIPatient Arena, an EHRs-grounded evaluation framework for assessing the clinical utility of LLMs across eight dimensions of clinical competence. The framework integrates EHR data into patient-specific knowledge graphs, enabling multi-turn physician-patient interactions. We applied AIPatient Arena on a primary cohort of 437 patients and two out-of-distribution validation cohorts of 119 and 67 patients. We observe that LLMs performed well in medical interview questioning skills (QS; mean scores, 4.43-4.99/5), ethical and professional conduct (ET; 4.38-4.93/5), and clarity and transparency of clinical explanations (EX; 3.80-4.72/5). Performance was moderate in information integration (II; 3.19-4.21/5) and medication safety and justification (MS; 3.13-3.78/5), but persistent weaknesses were observed in handling of ambiguous patient responses (HR; 2.57-3.32/5), information coverage (IC; 2.08-3.02/5), and diagnostic accuracy and reasoning (Dx; 2.63-3.55/5). Process-based evaluation revealed recurrent interaction failures, including repetitive questioning, omission of past medical history, and inadequate handling of uncertainty. Richer conversational context improved diagnostic reasoning but yielded limited gains in treatment planning. These findings indicate that final-answer accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating clinical readiness and highlight the importance of assessing how models gather, interpret, and communicate information throughout a consultation. AIPatient Arena provides an EHR-grounded framework for workflow-oriented pre-deployment evaluation of medical LLMs.

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

ZeroSyl: Simple Zero-Resource Syllable Tokenization for Spoken Language Modeling

Pure speech language models aim to learn language directly from raw audio without textual resources. A key challenge is that discrete tokens from self-supervised speech encoders result in excessively long sequences, motivating recent work on syllable-like units. However, methods like Sylber and SyllableLM rely on intricate multi-stage training pipelines. We propose ZeroSyl, a simple training-free method to extract syllable boundaries and embeddings directly from a frozen WavLM model. Using L2 norms of features in WavLM's intermediate layers, ZeroSyl achieves competitive syllable segmentation performance. The resulting segments are mean-pooled, discretized using K-means, and used to train a language model. ZeroSyl outperforms prior syllabic tokenizers across lexical, syntactic, and narrative benchmarks. Scaling experiments show that while finer-grained units are beneficial for lexical tasks, our discovered syllabic units exhibit better scaling behavior for syntactic modeling.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Beyond the Autoregressive Horizon: A Comprehensive Survey of Diffusion Models, World Modelling, and State Space Models for Code

arXiv:2606.23690v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) language models have driven significant progress in automated software engineering, enabling powerful code generation and assistance systems. However, the next-token prediction paradigm introduces structural limitations for code reasoning, including restricted global planning, challenges in maintaining long-range dependencies, and limited grounding in program execution semantics. Noting the heavy skewness of existing literature towards AR models, we discuss emerging paradigms that could potentially overcome the logic and scaling bottlenecks of next-token prediction by unlocking next-generation architectural capabilities for code intelligence. Specifically, we discuss the potential of Diffusion Models, which generate code via holistic denoising that captures long-range syntactic constraints often missed by AR models. We also discuss Code World Models (CWMs), which simulate execution states to support reasoning, and State Space Models (SSMs), which provide linear-time efficiency for massive contexts. By connecting these developments with findings from cognitive neuroscience, we outline directions for developing "System 2" code generation agents.

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

A Training-Free Mixture-of-Agents Framework for Multi-Document Summarization using LLMs and Knowledge Graphs

Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) plays a critical role in distilling essential information from collections of textual data. Existing approaches often struggle to capture complex inter-document relationships, rely heavily on large amounts of labeled data for supervised training, or exhibit limited generalization across domains and languages. To address these limitations, we present a training-free mixture-of-agents framework for MDS that leverages the complementary strengths of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs. Our approach decomposes summarization into specialized agent tasks: extractive selection, knowledge-aware abstraction, and iterative refinement, each operating without task-specific fine-tuning. We unify their outputs using a multi-perspective consistency mechanism guided by LLMs. Experiments across four datasets in English and Vietnamese demonstrate state-of-the-art or competitive performance, validating the effectiveness and adaptability of our modular design.

13.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Post-adjuvant chemotherapy in ctDNA-positive patients with resected colorectal cancer: a randomized phase 3 trial

Tumor-informed circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) enables detection of molecular residual disease (MRD) after curative resection of colorectal cancer (CRC), but whether early intervention improves outcomes remains uncertain. ALTAIR was a randomized, double-blind, phase 3 trial embedded in the CIRCULATE-Japan platform evaluating a post-adjuvant ctDNA surveillance strategy with treatment initiation upon molecular recurrence. Patients with resected stage 0–IV CRC who became ctDNA positive after completion of standard-of-care therapy and had no radiological evidence of disease were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive trifluridine/tipiracil (FTD/TPI) or placebo for 6 months. The primary endpoint was investigator-assessed disease-free survival (DFS). Between July 2020 and June 2023, 243 patients were randomized to FTD/TPI (n = 122) or placebo (n = 121). Median DFS was 9.30 months with FTD/TPI and 5.55 months with placebo (hazard ratio = 0.79, 95% confidence interval: 0.60–1.05, P = 0.107), and the primary endpoint was not met. FTD/TPI increased grade 3 or higher hematologic adverse events (73.0% versus 3.3%) without new safety signals. These findings indicate that post-adjuvant intervention with FTD/TPI did not significantly improve DFS in ctDNA-positive patients without radiological disease. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04457297 . In the randomized, double-blind phase 3 ALTAIR trial, patients with resected colorectal cancer who became positive for circulating tumor DNA during post-adjuvant surveillance received trifluridine/tipiracil hydrochloride therapy, which did not significantly prolong disease-free survival compared with placebo.

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

Weibull Weight-Scale Parameter Evolution under AdamW Training Dynamics

作者:

arXiv:2606.19367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building on a two-parameter Weibull framework for diagnosing transformer weight distributions, we study why the Weibull weight-scale parameter $\lambda$ grows, overshoots, and then relaxes during AdamW training. We derive a leading-order three-force decomposition of the squared weight norm from the AdamW update: an alignment force measuring the correlation between weights and the adaptive update direction, an injection force from adaptive step magnitude, and a decay force from decoupled weight decay. On self-trained Pythia-70M models with ground-truth optimizer moments, alignment dominates the rise phase, contributing 88-94% of the absolute force budget across four random seeds and remaining robust to super-weight removal. Near saturation, alignment and decay approach balance, explaining the transition from weight-scale growth to relaxation. These force dynamics directly govern the squared-norm component underlying $\lambda(t)$; the remaining RMS-to-Weibull reconstruction offset is measurable and decomposes into bridge and integration components, totaling approximately 5-6% in densely sampled regions. To extend the analysis to real models where optimizer moments are unavailable, we introduce a spline displacement method that recovers the alignment force from sparse checkpoints with approximately 92-94% accuracy, about twice the naive two-point baseline. We further observe that the peak value of $\lambda(t)$ varies with training-data coherence in our experiments, suggesting a data-dependent component of weight-scale growth that we leave to a controlled follow-up study. Code and data are available at https://github.com/tiexinding/NPM-Weibull-public.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Percolation phase transition on planar spin systems

arXiv:2105.13314v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article we study the continuity and sharpness of the phase transition for percolation models defined on top of planar spin systems. The two examples that we treat in detail concern the Glauber dynamics for the Ising model and a Dynamic Bootstrap process. For both of these models we prove that their phase transition is continuous and sharp, providing also quantitative estimates on the two point connectivity. The techniques that we develop in this work can be applied to a variety of different percolation models based on spin-flip dynamics. We also discuss some of the problems that can be tackled in a similar fashion.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Perceptual compensation for tonal context in self-supervised speech models

This study examines the extent to which the wav2vec2.0 architecture exhibits evidence of compensation for phonological context. We conducted a pseudo-replication of a perceptional compensation experiment on Mandarin Chinese tones, and compared the embedding similarities and probing classifier outputs between a purely self-supervised pre-trained model and a model fine-tuned for Mandarin ASR. No evidence of compensation was found in the embedding similarities of the purely pre-trained model. Probing classifiers showed some evidence of compensation in addition to the expected layer-wise improvements in categorization, but failed to replicate human performance on isolated test syllables. Our findings contrast with previous reports of sensitivity to phonological structure emerging through pre-training alone, and suggest that supervised objectives may be necessary to encourage the abstraction of at least some types of phonological regularities.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Topological Codes Based on Space Groups

arXiv:2606.20548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Topological codes form one of the most important classes of stabilizer codes. Most existing algebraic constructions and analyses of topological codes assume translation invariance. Here we show that topological codes can arise in more general settings by incorporating point group operations. The central construction is a class of Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes called space-group codes, whose check operators are built from group-algebra templates over space groups that combine translations with point-group operations. We develop methods for analyzing topological properties of space-group codes using ring-modules and their invariant theory. At first glance, space-group codes might appear to complicate practical implementation; however, we find that they can exhibit greater locality than previous codes based purely on translations. Our framework thus extends the landscape of topological codes and opens up a broader design space for the co-design of topological codes with quantum computing platforms.

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

Fast Speech Foundation Model Distillation Using Interleaved Stacking

Distilling a large speech foundation model (SFM) into an efficient student model has been successfully applied to low-resource environments. Although distillation reduces inference latency, it requires an additional student model training. However, the training efficiency of SFM distillation remains underexplored. In this work, we explore training acceleration of SFM distillation to speed up model deployment. We examine the potential of stacking, in which the model depth is progressively increased through training until the target model depth is reached. While existing stacking methods improve training speed, they suffer from performance degradation. To handle this limitation, we propose interleaved stacking, a novel stacking method that consistently preserves layer position throughout the stacking process. This property is particularly critical in SFMs, in which each layer encodes distinct layer-specific knowledge. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on SUPERB.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Jacobian Scopes: token-level causal attributions in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) make next-token predictions based on clues present in their context, such as semantic descriptions and in-context examples. Yet, elucidating which prior tokens most strongly influence a given prediction remains challenging due to the proliferation of layers and attention heads in modern architectures. We propose Jacobian Scopes, a suite of gradient-based, token-level causal attribution methods for interpreting LLM predictions. Grounded in perturbation theory and information geometry, Jacobian Scopes quantify how input tokens influence various aspects of a model's prediction, such as specific logits, the full predictive distribution, and model uncertainty (effective temperature). Through case studies spanning instruction understanding, translation, and in-context learning (ICL), we demonstrate how Jacobian Scopes reveal implicit political biases, uncover word- and phrase-level translation strategies, and shed light on recently debated mechanisms underlying in-context time-series forecasting. To facilitate exploration of Jacobian Scopes on custom text, we open-source our implementations and provide a cloud-hosted interactive demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Typony/JacobianScopes.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

AoiZora: Topology-Aware Auto-Parallel Optimization for Inference of Diffusion Transformers

arXiv:2606.17566v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video diffusion has quickly grown into a key generative serving workload, yet producing each clip demands many denoising iterations over large spatio-temporal latents, which puts low-latency inference out of reach on a single device. A denoising step is therefore typically distributed across multiple accelerators, and TPU sub-slices have become an attractive and practical fabric for doing so. Current auto-parallel systems, however, search almost exclusively over logical device meshes and disregard how a chosen sharding is actually laid out on the physical TPU interconnect – an oversight that leaves large, topology-dependent performance on the table. We address this gap with AoiZora, a compiler-mediated topology planner built for low-latency video diffusion inference on TPU sub-slices. Its guiding principle is to reconnect logical sharding with physical placement by drawing on different points in the compilation flow: AoiZora first eliminates weak sharding candidates from inexpensive pre-compilation IRs, then compiles only the ones that survive and orders their physical placements using compiled HLO together with a topology-aware communication model. The winning plan is realized along the ordinary compiler path, leaving model code, compiler lowering, collective kernels, and network routing entirely intact. On TPU v5e sub-slices, AoiZora reduces Wan 2.1 one-step denoising latency by as much as 1.42x relative to existing solutions.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AlignCoder: Aligning Retrieval with Target Intent for Repository-Level Code Completion

arXiv:2601.19697v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Repository-level code completion remains a challenging task for existing code large language models (code LLMs) due to their limited understanding of repository-specific context and domain knowledge. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches have shown promise by retrieving relevant code snippets as cross-file context, they suffer from two fundamental problems: misalignment between the query and the target code in the retrieval process, and the inability of existing retrieval methods to effectively utilize the inference information. To address these challenges, we propose AlignCoder, a repository-level code completion framework that introduces a query enhancement mechanism and a reinforcement learning based retriever training method. Our approach generates multiple candidate completions to construct an enhanced query that bridges the semantic gap between the initial query and the target code. Additionally, we employ reinforcement learning to train an AlignRetriever that learns to leverage inference information in the enhanced query for more accurate retrieval. We evaluate AlignCoder on two widely-used benchmarks (CrossCodeEval and RepoEval) across five backbone code LLMs, demonstrating an 18.1% improvement in EM score compared to baselines on the CrossCodeEval benchmark. The results show that our framework achieves superior performance and exhibits high generalizability across various code LLMs and programming languages.

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

Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation

Zero-shot segmentation has recently shown notable improvement by leveraging the rich visual priors in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion. However, current diffusion-based methods often face limitations due to the trade-off between spatial resolution and contextual information, as well as their reliance on a single static timestep for feature extraction. To overcome these challenges, our work introduces two key advancements. First, our Contextual Similarity Maps fuse high-resolution attention maps with rich U-Net encoder features, providing both fine-grained and robust per-pixel representations. Second, we identify an emergent hierarchical semantic progression within the denoising process of various diffusion models: representations transition from part-level abstractions at earlier timesteps to object-level abstractions at later stages. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a mechanism to adaptively select the optimal timestep for each pixel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing zero-shot segmentation baselines, validating the efficacy of combining contextual features with dynamic, hierarchical timestep selection.

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

Retro-Expert: Collaborative Reasoning for Interpretable Retrosynthesis

arXiv:2508.10967v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrosynthesis prediction aims to infer the reactant molecules based on a given product molecule, which is a fundamental task in chemical synthesis. However, existing methods rely on a static pattern-matching paradigm, which limits their ability to perform effective logical decision-making from chemical data, leading to a black-box process. We propose Retro-Expert, an interpretable retrosynthesis framework that performs collaborative reasoning by combining the complementary strengths of Large Language Models and specialized models via pure reinforcement learning. It outputs natural language explanations grounded in chemical logic through three components: (1) specialized models provide chemical knowledge that is distilled into a high-quality chemical decision space, (2) LLM-driven critical reasoning to generate predictions with an interpretable reasoning path, and (3) knowledge-grounded policy optimization refines the interpretable decision policy. Experiments show that Retro-Expert surpasses both LLM-based and specialized models across different metrics, while generating chemically grounded explanations that enhance chemists' trust in practice. The source code for this paper is available at https://github.com/MagixRab-ll/Retro-Expert.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Cardiometabolic multimorbidity and care experiences in primary healthcare among Brazilian adults aged 50 and over (ELSI-Brazil)

Background: Population aging and the rising burden of non-communicable diseases have increased the prevalence of cardiometabolic multimorbidity (CM-MM) among older adults. Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) are recognized as essential components of healthcare quality assessment, yet evidence on primary care experiences among individuals with CM-MM remains scarce. Objective: To analyze primary care experiences according to the presence of cardiometabolic multimorbidity among Brazilians aged 50 years and older. Methods: Cross-sectional study using data from the second wave of the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSI-Brazil, 2019-2021; n = 9,949). CM-MM was defined as the self-reported coexistence of two or more of the following conditions: hypertension, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia, acute myocardial infarction, and stroke. Primary care experiences were assessed using a validated 12-item instrument organized into four domains: first-contact access, longitudinality, communication, and care coordination. Associations were estimated using Poisson regression adjusted for sociodemographic, health conditions, and healthcare utilization variables, with stratified analysis by Family Health Strategy (FHS) coverage. Results: CM-MM prevalence was 25.5%, with a progressive increase by age and an inverse gradient by education. Individuals with CM-MM reported significantly more positive experiences in longitudinality (mean index 2.53 vs. 2.34; adjusted PR = 1.22; 95%CI 1.12-1.33; p < 0.001) and, to a lesser extent, in communication (mean index 2.68 vs. 2.58; adjusted PR = 1.10; 95%CI 1.00-1.20; p = 0.041). No statistically significant differences were found in first-contact access or care coordination. After stratified by FHS coverage, the observed differences in longitudinality and communication were no longer statistically significant. Conclusions: CM-MM was associated with more positive primary care experiences in longitudinality and communication. The absence of differentiated experiences in first-contact access and coordination highlights structural gaps in primary care responsiveness to individuals with greater clinical complexity. Keywords: Multimorbidity; Cardiometabolic diseases; Primary Care; Patient-reported experience measures; Older adults; ELSI-Brazil.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fodor and Pylyshyn's Systematicity Challenge Still Stands

The recent successes of neural networks producing human-like language have caused significant stir in cognitive science, with many researchers arguing that classical puzzles about human cognition and challenges to artificial intelligence are being solved by neural networks. A notable case is the argument from systematicity due to Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, argues that humans display systematic biconditional dependencies. For example, someone can understand the sentence "John saw Mary" just in case that they understand the sentence "Mary saw John." Symbolic systems explain this systematicity of language and thought, while neural networks offer no immediate explanation. Several recent articles argue that this challenge has now been met by neural networks. In particular, Brenden Lake and Marco Baroni argue that their meta-learning for compositionality protocol matches and perhaps explains human systematicity. We demonstrate that these conclusions are premature. Among other results, we found that their model struggles to learn rules that are even slightly out of distribution compared to their training data. Furthermore, the model behaves unsystematically even on many within-distribution problems. We conclude that Fodor and Pylyshyn's challenge to neural networks remains unmet.