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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Association of circulating endothelial progenitor cell count and functional outcome in patients with acute ischemic stroke due to intracranial large vessel occlusion

Background: Circulating endothelial progenitor cells (cEPCs) contribute to vascular repair following an ischemic stroke. The aim of the study was to evaluate the association between cEPCs and functional outcomes in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) due to large vessel occlusion (LVO) who received endovascular therapy (EVT). Methods: Prospective study of patients with LVO-AIS who received EVT. Blood samples were obtained within 24 +- 12 hours and on day 7+-1 from stroke onset. cEPCs were detected using flow cytometry (CD34+/VEGFR2+/CD133+). The primary endpoint was a favourable functional outcome (modified Rankin Scale 0-2) at three months of follow-up. Secondary endpoints include baseline to 24 hours/day 7 changes in the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score and collateral circulation (CC) status. Bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed. Results: Included were 90 patients (73.2+-12.7 years, 41.1% women) in 42 of whom (46.7%) cEPCs were detected at 24 hours. On day 7, cEPCs were detected in 27 (43.6%) of 62 patients for which this information was available. Atrial fibrillation, prior anticoagulant treatment and stroke onset-to-door time

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DNA-binding specificity recognition from predicted homologous protein-DNA structures

Predicting protein DNA-binding specificity is essential for understanding gene regulation and disease mechanisms. Existing deep learning methods typically infer specificity from a single protein-DNA complex structure, which limits their ability to capture the diverse geometric patterns underlying protein-DNA recognition. Homologous protein-DNA interfaces provide complementary structural evidence and richer geometric features related to interatomic interactions. To address the limited diversity and coverage of experimentally determined complexes, we constructed a large-scale library of predicted homologous protein-DNA complex structures. Building on this resource, we propose HomoDSP, a template-retrieval-based framework for accurate DNA-binding specificity prediction. Benchmark evaluations and validation on newly released JASPAR 2026 samples indicate that HomoDSP outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and generalization, with particularly substantial gains on high-error samples. Moreover, this performance is largely retained when AlphaFold3-predicted complex structures are used as input. Template- and residue-level interpretability analyses suggest that HomoDSP improves prediction by focusing on DNA-affinity residues across multiple homologous templates. Finally, universal Protein Binding Microarrays evaluations on AI-designed DNA-binding proteins show that HomoDSP rescues a baseline failure mode in which the baseline method produces incorrect predictions because of training-set bias. Together, these results support the use of homologous template interfaces as informative structural priors for decoding protein DNA-binding specificity.

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

VEPHand: View-Efficient Photometric Hand Performance Capture at Scale

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Fault Lines: Navigating Ethics and Responsible AI Where National Policy Meets Local Practice in Public Sector Transformation

arXiv:2606.13039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The UK government has adopted a pro-AI stance to help transform public service delivery in the face of severe financial pressures, but the path to translate this vision into responsible AI practice remains ill-defined. While UK policy is often set at the national level, local authorities are responsible for most public service delivery, and the rapid advance of AI-first narratives in the public sector is exposing fault lines in knowledge and practice at this national-local interface. This paper examines how responsible AI is interpreted and implemented at the interface between the UK's central government and local authorities, taking the high-stakes area of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) as a case study. We present a thematic analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, practitioners, and third-sector professionals to identify barriers and enabling conditions for responsible AI where national policy meets local practice. We identify five interconnected challenges facing local authorities: shadow usage of AI and data privacy risks, market-government asymmetry in AI provision, insufficient workforce readiness, a lack of standardised definitions and measurements, and gaps in human accountability. For each, participants proposed actionable steps, from strengthening data protection frameworks and rebalancing the market-government relationship to enhancing workforce capacity. Our examination of SEND brings these challenges into sharper focus, showing how high-stakes decisions affecting vulnerable children and families intensify tensions around accountability, fairness, and human oversight, exposing the limits of a principle-based regulatory approach. We argue that responsible public sector AI requires both national policy adjustments and structural reforms to institutional capacity, values, and governance mechanisms at the local level.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ThinkJEPA: Empowering Latent World Models with Large Vision-Language Reasoning Model

Recent progress in latent world models (e.g., V-JEPA2) has shown promising capability in forecasting future world states from video observations. Nevertheless, dense prediction from a short observation window limits temporal context and can bias predictors toward local, low-level extrapolation, making it difficult to capture long-horizon semantics and reducing downstream utility. Vision–language models (VLMs), in contrast, provide strong semantic grounding and general knowledge by reasoning over uniformly sampled frames, but they are not ideal as standalone dense predictors due to compute-driven sparse sampling, a language-output bottleneck that compresses fine-grained interaction states into text-oriented representations, and a data-regime mismatch when adapting to small action-conditioned datasets. We propose a VLM-guided JEPA-style latent world modeling framework that combines dense-frame dynamics modeling with long-horizon semantic guidance via a dual-temporal pathway: a dense JEPA branch for fine-grained motion and interaction cues, and a uniformly sampled VLM thinker branch with a larger temporal stride for knowledge-rich guidance. To transfer the VLM's progressive reasoning signals effectively, we introduce a hierarchical pyramid representation extraction module that aggregates multi-layer VLM representations into guidance features compatible with latent prediction. Experiments on hand-manipulation trajectory prediction show that our method outperforms both a strong VLM-only baseline and a JEPA-predictor baseline, and yields more robust long-horizon rollout behavior.

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

Think Fast: Estimating No-CoT Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models

arXiv:2606.07157v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many efforts to ensure frontier AI models are safe rely on monitoring their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. If models become able to perform sufficiently complex reasoning internally, without explicit thinking tokens, this would undermine such oversight. We measure how well frontier models reason without CoT across a suite of over 30,000 questions spanning 43 benchmarks in domains including math, coding, puzzles, causality, theory-of-mind, and strategic reasoning. To compare models against humans, we estimate the $50\%$-task-completion time horizon (TH): the human time required for tasks a model completes with $50\%$ success rate. We complement this with a $50\%$ reasoning token horizon: the minimum number of o3-mini reasoning tokens needed for tasks a model solves with $50\%$ success rate. We find that the no-CoT $50\%$ TH of frontier models has been doubling roughly every year over the past six years, with GPT-5.5's TH reaching over 3 minutes and reasoning token horizon exceeding 1,500 tokens. Our median estimates predict that frontier no-CoT THs could exceed 7 minutes by 2028, and 25 minutes by 2030, though these projections carry substantial uncertainty. We recommend frontier developers track this explicitly.

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

Communication Complexity of Distributed Unitary Synthesis

arXiv:2511.04250v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study space-bounded communication complexity for unitary implementation in distributed quantum processors, where we restrict the number of qubits per processor to ensure practical relevance and technical non-triviality. We model distributed quantum processors using distributed quantum circuits with nonlocal two-qubit gates, defining the distributed communication complexity of a unitary as the minimum number of such nonlocal gates required for its realization, up to permutations of data qubit positions. Our contributions are twofold. First, for general $n$-qubit unitaries, we improve upon the trivial $O(4^n)$ communication bound. Considering $k$ pairwise-connected processors (each with $n/k$ data qubits and $m$ ancillas), we prove the communication complexity satisfies $O\left(\max\{4^{(1-1/k)n - m}, n\}\right)$ – for example, $O(2^n)$ when $m=0$ and $k=2$ – and establish the tightness of this upper bound. We further extend the analysis to approximation models and general network topologies. Second, for special unitaries, we show that both the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT) and Clifford circuits admit linear upper bounds on communication complexity in the exact model, outperforming the trivial quadratic bounds applicable to these cases. In the approximation model, QFT's communication complexity reduces drastically from linear to logarithmic, while Clifford circuits retain a linear lower bound. These results offer fundamental insights for optimizing communication in distributed quantum unitary implementation, advancing the feasibility of large-scale DQC systems.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

TextMesh4D: Zero-shot Text-to-4D Mesh Generation

Large-scale, high-quality dynamic 3D (4D) assets are essential for learning physically grounded representations, but remain costly to capture and annotate at scale. This limits the viability of supervised 4D learning and motivates zero-shot text-to-4D generation leveraging pretrained diffusion priors. To model complex dynamics, prior methods typically adopt implicit 3D representations (e.g., NeRFs or 3DGS) for their deformation capacity. However, their implicit nature provides limited control over surface topology, which hinders high-fidelity geometry and makes temporally coherent surface reconstruction challenging. To address these limitations, we explore zero-shot text-to-4D mesh generation. However, a structural mismatch arises when combining diffusion-based guidance with topology-constrained meshes: the guidance is noisy and spatially inconsistent, while meshes impose severe topological constraints, making direct vertex-level deformation unstable. In this paper, we introduce TextMesh4D, the first zero-shot framework for text-to-4D that directly generates dynamic meshes by addressing the above challenge at two complementary levels. Geometrically, we shift deformation modeling from vertices to faces via a Jacobian Deformation Field (JDF), enabling topology-aware surface reconstruction through an integrability-enforcing integration formulation. Semantically, we propose a Local-Global Semantic Regularizer (LGSR) that preserves identity over time by jointly constraining local deformation plausibility and global shape consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art temporal consistency, structural fidelity, and visual quality, while remaining efficient on a single 24GB GPU.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Uniform integrability of the distance to the nearest leaf in random trees

arXiv:2606.15339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the distance from the root to the nearest leaf, the analogous quantity for a uniformly chosen vertex, and its protection number, in size-conditioned simply generated trees. We prove a uniform exponential tail bound for each of these quantities, valid for arbitrary offspring distributions. As a consequence, these random variables are uniformly integrable of every order. This yields convergence of all moments to those of the corresponding local limit. The argument is probabilistic and unified across the three quantities.

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

From Physics to Representation: Audio Learning with Synthetic Pre-training via Procedural Generation

arXiv:2606.14791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised learning advances audio representation for multimedia analysis. However, prevailing data-centric approaches rely on massive real-world corpora, increasing training costs, curation burdens, and privacy barriers. To address this, we present AudioPG, a procedural synthesis framework eliminating real audio recordings during pre-training. AudioPG trains a Transformer-based masked autoencoder on waveforms generated on-the-fly from basic acoustic primitives and composition rules. The encoder transfers effectively to real audio benchmarks, achieving 90.60% accuracy on ESC-50, 0.546 mAP on FSD50K, 88.17% on UrbanSound8K, and 97.03% on Speech Commands V2. Notably, pre-training completes in under 20 minutes on a single GPU. Latent space analysis reveals physical factors, including fundamental frequency and relative intensity, emerge in orthogonal subspaces, making representations linearly decodable. These results establish procedural synthesis as an efficient, interpretable pre-training signal when large-scale corpora are unavailable. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Freyliu0516/audioPG.

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

Steering the Noise: Turning Random Perturbations into Effective Descent for Memory-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) achieves strong performance but is often limited by the memory overhead of backpropagation. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization avoids this overhead by estimating gradients through forward passes alone, yet it typically converges slowly because random Gaussian perturbations yield high-variance gradient estimates in high-dimensional parameter spaces. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play framework that turns random perturbations into more effective descent directions. The key idea is to draw a small pool of candidate perturbations, evaluate their loss values, and then select or combine those that are best aligned with the optimization objective. We develop two instantiations of this idea: MeZO-GV, which forms a guiding vector from the contrast between low-loss and high-loss perturbation groups, and MeZO-Greedy, which keeps the single best perturbation within a fixed evaluation budget. We theoretically show that both strategies yield a larger per-step reduction in the objective than standard ZO estimation, leading to improved convergence rates. Experiments on LLMs of different scales and architectures confirm that the proposed methods integrate naturally with existing ZO optimizers and consistently improve convergence speed and task accuracy. On OPT-13B, our approach outperforms all ZO baselines across 11 benchmarks and exceeds gradient-based methods on 9 of them, while retaining the memory efficiency of forward-only optimization.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Revealing Artifacts via Noise Amplification: A Novel Perspective for AI-Generated Video Detection

With the rapid advancement of video generation models, distinguishing between AI-generated and authentic videos has emerged as a challenging endeavor. The majority of existing research endeavors concentrate on the development of detectors for identifying samples generated by generative adversarial networks. Nevertheless, the detection of AI-generated videos, particularly those produced by text-to-video models, still remains an uncharted territory. Although state-of-the-art text-to-video models can generate realistic visual content similar to real videos, they fall short of generating the details of the images and the changes in details within the videos. Inspired by this, we address AI-generated video detection from a novel perspective of bit-planes, which can effectively describe the details or noises in images or videos. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective approach called Noise Amplification. This approach first extracts noise signals based on bit-planes, then amplifies these noise signals, and finally feeds them into the discriminator networks for video fake classification. Noise amplification is comprehensively constructed by incorporating three aspects: pixel-level intensity enhancement, region-level spatial amplification, and frame-level temporal aggregation. To evaluate methods of AI-generated video detection in challenging scenarios, we also introduce a benchmark named HardGVD. Extensive experiments on both the large-scale dataset GenVidBench and HardGVD show that our simple approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Focus, Align, and Sustain: Counteracting Gradient Dilution in Incremental Object Detection

Adapting Detection Transformers to Incremental Object Detection (IOD) poses a systemic challenge, as set-based optimization is inherently destabilized by sequential learning. In this work, we identify Gradient Dilution as the root cause of performance degradation, wherein optimization signals required to preserve old knowledge are progressively weakened. This phenomenon manifests as a cascading erosion of preservation gradients in magnitude, direction, and support coverage, driven by three tightly coupled factors: Signal Dispersion, where foreground gradients are overwhelmed by background noise; Assignment Drift, where stochastic query-target matching induces inconsistent gradient trajectories; and Support Attrition, where gradients from retained samples insufficiently cover the old-class feature space, weakening decision boundaries under interference from new classes. To counteract this, we propose FAS, a unified framework that Focuses, Aligns, and Sustains gradient flow throughout incremental learning. Specifically, we introduce prior-injected queries to focus discriminative signals by filtering background interference at the source. We further propose deterministic anchor distillation to align query-target assignments and enforce semantic consistency across stages under unstable matching. Finally, we devise manifold-support replay to sustain distributional support of old classes, counteracting representational erosion induced by continual updates. Extensive experiments show that FAS restores robust optimization dynamics and outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving over 5.0 AP improvement in the challenging 40+10x4 incremental setting.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Not Just How Much, But Where: Decomposing Epistemic Uncertainty into Per-Class Contributions

arXiv:2602.21160v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In safety-critical classification, the cost of failure is often asymmetric, yet Bayesian deep learning summarises epistemic uncertainty with a single scalar, mutual information (MI), that cannot distinguish whether a model's ignorance involves a benign or safety-critical class. We decompose MI into a per-class vector $C_k(x)=\sigma_k^{2}/(2\mu_k)$, with $\mu_k{=}\mathbb{E}[p_k]$ and $\sigma_k^2{=}\mathrm{Var}[p_k]$ across posterior samples. The decomposition follows from a second-order Taylor expansion of the entropy; the $1/\mu_k$ weighting corrects boundary suppression and makes $C_k$ comparable across rare and common classes. By construction $\sum_k C_k \approx \mathrm{MI}$, and a companion skewness diagnostic flags inputs where the approximation degrades. After characterising the axiomatic properties of $C_k$, we validate it on three tasks: (i) selective prediction for diabetic retinopathy, where critical-class $C_k$ reduces selective risk by 34.7\% over MI and 56.2\% over variance baselines; (ii) out-of-distribution detection on clinical and image benchmarks, where $\sum_k C_k$ achieves the highest AUROC and the per-class view exposes asymmetric shifts invisible to MI; and (iii) a controlled label-noise study in which $\sum_k C_k$ shows less sensitivity to injected aleatoric noise than MI under end-to-end Bayesian training, while both metrics degrade under transfer learning. Across all tasks, the quality of the posterior approximation shapes uncertainty at least as strongly as the choice of metric, suggesting that how uncertainty is propagated through the network matters as much as how it is measured.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ERTS: Adversarial Robustness Testing of Ethical AI via Semantic Perturbation in a Bounded Consequence Space

arXiv:2606.13282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems are deployed in high-stakes ethical contexts such as healthcare triage, autonomous vehicle control, and employment screening, formal methods for evaluating their robustness against adversarial manipulation of ethical reasoning remain underdeveloped. This paper introduces the Ethical Robustness Testing System (ERTS), a closed-pipeline framework that: (1) encodes ethical dilemmas into a 22-dimensional Ethical Consequence Space (ECS) grounded in established ethical theory; (2) applies 17 semantic perturbation functions subject to 6 validity constraint classes including a novel semantic coherence constraint; (3) measures decision deviation via a 4-component Ethical Instability Index (EII); and (4) produces domain-adaptive pre-deployment robustness assessment verdicts. We evaluate 4 structured baseline models and 2 production LLMs (Gemini 2.0 Flash and Llama 3.2) across 50 ethical scenarios spanning 8 deployment domains, generating 1,500 adversarial test cases. Results demonstrate that only 33% of models achieve assessment clearance, with the local Llama-3.2 model proving particularly vulnerable to fairness corruption and information degradation attacks (ERS = 0.737). To the best of our knowledge, no existing framework combines a bounded ethical consequence space, semantic coherence constraints, and domain-adaptive assessment in a single adversarial testing pipeline.

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

Virtual Speech Therapist: A Clinician-in-the-Loop AI Speech Therapy Agent for Personalized and Supervised Therapy

This paper develops Virtual Speech Therapist (VST), an intelligent agent-based platform that streamlines stuttering assessment and delivers customized therapy planning through automated and adaptive AI-driven workflows. VST integrates state-of-the-art deep learning-based stuttering classification, and multi-agent large language model (LLM) reasoning to support evidence-based clinical decision-making. The VST begins with the acquisition and feature extraction of patient speech samples, followed by robust classification of stuttering types. Building on these outputs, VST initiates an agentic reasoning process in which specialized LLM agents autonomously generate, critique, and iteratively refine individualized therapy plans. A dedicated critic agent evaluates all generated therapy plans to ensure clinical safety, methodological soundness, and alignment with peer-reviewed evidence and established professional guidelines. The resulting output is a comprehensive, patient-specific therapy draft intended for clinician review. Incorporating clinician feedback, the system then produces a finalized therapy plan suitable for patient delivery, thereby maintaining a clinician-in-the-loop paradigm. Experimental evaluation by expert speech therapists confirms that VST consistently generates high-quality, evidence-based therapy recommendations. These findings demonstrate the system's potential to augment clinical workflows, reduce clinician burden, and improve therapeutic outcomes for individuals with speech impairments. An interactive user interface for the proposed system is available online at: https://vocametrix.com/ai/stuttering-therapy-planning-agent , facilitating real-time stuttering assessment and personalized therapy planning.

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

Revisiting LLM Adaptation for 3D CT Report Generation: A Study of Scaling and Diagnostic Priors

Recent advances in multimodal learning, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), have demonstrated strong adaptability to natural images. However, extending their use to the medical domain, particularly for volumetric (3D) images, is challenging due to high computational complexity, volumetric dependencies and the semantic gap between visual features and clinical terminology. Naively fine-tuning LLMs on limited medical data often leads to overfitting and clinical hallucination, where linguistic fluency is prioritized over clinical factuality. In this study, we investigate parameter-efficient adaptation strategies for volumetric CT report generation and introduce RAD3D-Prefix, a lightweight diagnostic-prior conditioning framework that minimizes the need for extensive parameter training. This module integrates image embeddings with multi-label diagnostic classification logits, preserving critical clinical details while bridging the semantic gap. By keeping the LLM frozen, our method requires minimal trainable parameters and mitigates the risk of overfitting on small, domain-specific datasets. Through a systematic study spanning LLMs from 96.1M to 1.6B parameters, we find that fine-tuning is most beneficial for smaller LLMs, whereas freezing larger (~1B+ LLMs and training only lightweight projection layers provides a superior trade-off between performance, generalization, and computational efficiency. Across multiple automatic metrics and a clinical reader study, RAD3D-Prefix outperforms comparable parameter-efficient baselines and demonstrates strong out-of-domain generalization while using substantially fewer trainable parameters than fully fine-tuned alternatives.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Multi-floor generalization of TASEP

arXiv:2603.13610v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider an interacting particle system, which generalizes the classical totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP), in that each site can contain up to a fixed finite number of particles, and the particle movement is governed by a back-pressure (BP) algorithm (also often called MaxWeight). There are $N$ sites (with $N$ finite or infinite), each may contain at most $c$ particles, $1 \le c < \infty$. New particles enter the system at the left-most site $1$ as a Poisson process of rate $\alpha\le 1$, unless site $1$ has $c$ particles. Particles (if any) are removed from the right-most site $N$ as a Poisson process of rate $\beta \le 1$. The left-to-right movement of particles between neighboring sites is governed by the BP rule: one particle moves from site $n$ to $n+1$ at epochs of a rate $1$ Poisson process, as long as the former site has strictly more particles than the latter. When $c=1$, this is the standard TASEP. Our main results address the asymptotics of the stationary distribution of a finite system, and especially the limit of the flux (current) as $N\to\infty$. In particular, we prove that interesting non-trivial phase transitions take place in a system with $c>1$. For example, if $c>1$ and $1/2 \le \beta \le 1$, the maximum limiting flux $1/4$ is achieved as long as $\alpha \ge \alpha_c^*$, where $\alpha_c^* < 1/2$ is some non-trivial threshold. (For the standard TASEP the threshold is $1/2$.) We also put forward a general conjecture about the stationary distribution asymptotics under an arbitrary parameter setting. We illustrate our formal results and the conjecture by simulations, and identify interesting directions for further research.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adjusted Cup-Product Neural Layer

arXiv:2606.13568v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many important observables in physics and geometry are cup products of cochains. The adjusted cup product neural layer has been introduced in this paper. It is a neural primitive that hard wires the cup product with an adjustment term from higher gauge theory. This creates a readout that is gauge invariant by design. Their main theoretical result shows that on a closed cycle the output relies entirely on the adjustment coefficient. Setting this coefficient to zero removes the output completely regardless of other parameters. Thus the adjustment is the only source of gauge invariant signal. They prove this observable is a nonzero quadratic form and is exactly invariant under one and two gauge transformations.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Impact of Early Treatment on Symptom Improvement and Procedural Events among Men with BPH and Bothersome Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms: A Contemporary Analysis of the American Urological Association Quality (AQUA) Registry

PURPOSE: As the armamentarium of BPH therapies continues to expand, it remains imperative to maximize patient satisfaction and minimize decisional regret. We sought to determine the impact of time from BPH diagnosis to index treatment on symptom improvement and subsequent procedural events. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We queried the American Urological Association Quality Registry for men [&ge;] 40 years old with BPH, available IPSS data, and no receipt of prior BPH treatment. Index treatment included medication, surgery, or minimally invasive surgical therapy (MIST). Outcomes included IPSS over 3 years of follow-up, change in percentage of mild lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) by 3 months, and time to procedural event. Patients were stratified by time from index diagnosis to treatment by 3 years. Outcomes were compared across time-to-treatment cohorts with appropriate statistical tests with p < 0.05 as significant. RESULTS: 43,919 patients met criteria with 19,642 pursuing treatments. Patients pursued treatment at comparably lower baseline IPSS compared to prior prospective series. Patients undergoing surgery and MIST had significantly higher baseline IPSS, while medical comorbidities were significantly more common among men initiating pharmacotherapy. Early surgery and MIST were associated with significant improvement in IPSS within 6-12 months and an increase in mild LUTS by 3 months. All forms of early treatment were associated with delayed time to procedural events, including catheterization and fulguration. CONCLUSIONS: Early procedural intervention for BPH is associated with early symptom improvement and delayed time to procedural events among real-world, contemporary practice.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

A More-Than-Human Approach to Designing for Mental Health: Remixing Prototypes for the Contexts of Complex Healthcare Infrastructures

Digital mental health tools (DMHTs) often fail to be successfully implemented in clinical settings. While user- and human-centred design frameworks are frequently proposed for developing effective tools, they are insufficient to address the sociotechnical complexity of healthcare environments. This paper addresses this limitation by detailing the application of a more-than-human design framework to incorporate wider contextual factors into design decisions. To demonstrate the application of this more-than-human design framework, we present a case study showcasing the design of one specific feature within a DMHT intended to support Health Improvement Practitioners (HIPs) in New Zealand's Integrated Primary Mental Health and Addictions (IPMHA) service. Our process blends usage-context storyboards with interface prototypes, using think-aloud interviews to test the contextual fit of our prototypes. The initial design concept failed due to contextual factors such as inconsistent wait times and the administrative burden on clients and clinic staff. This led to a pivot to a more context-appropriate, practitioner-focused, in-session concept for digital psychometric administration and automated scoring. This case study demonstrates that for DMHTs to be viable within complex healthcare environments, design must focus on more than the needs of a single user, incorporating multiple stakeholders and contextual variables across the wider service-delivery context.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Evolving Agents in the Dark: Retrospective Harness Optimization via Self-Preference

AI agents rely on a harness of skills, tools, and workflows to solve complex problems. Continually improving this harness is essential for adapting to new tasks. However, existing optimization methods typically require ground-truth validation sets, yet such labeled data is difficult to acquire in practical deployment settings. To address this problem, we introduce Retrospective Harness Optimization (RHO), a self-supervised method that optimizes the agent harness using only past trajectories. Specifically, RHO selects a diverse coreset of challenging tasks from past trajectories and re-solves them in parallel. The agent analyzes these rollouts using self-validation and self-consistency, then generates candidate harness updates and selects the most effective one by its own pairwise self-preference. We evaluate RHO across three diverse domains, spanning software engineering, technical work, and knowledge work. Notably, a single optimization round improves the pass rate on SWE-Bench Pro from 59% to 78% without any external grading. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that RHO effectively targets prior failure modes. As a result, the optimized harness alters the agent's behavior patterns and sustains higher accuracy during long-horizon sessions.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Machine-learning-based multipoint optimization of fluidic injection parameters for improving nozzle performance

arXiv:2409.12707v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fluidic injection offers a promising solution to improve the performance of the overexpanded single expansion ramp nozzles (SERNs) during vehicle acceleration. However, determining the injection parameters that yield the best overall performance across multiple nozzle operating conditions remains a challenge. The gradient-based optimization method requires gradients of injection parameters at each design point, which can lead to high computational costs when using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. This paper uses a pretrained neural network to replace CFD during optimization, enabling quick calculation of the nozzle flow field at multiple design points. Considering the physical characteristics of the nozzle flow field, a prior-based prediction strategy is adopted to enhance the model's accuracy. In addition, the neural network's back-propagation algorithm computes gradients quickly by running the computation only once, thereby greatly reducing gradient computation time compared to the finite difference method. As a test case, the average nozzle thrust coefficient of an SERN at seven design points is optimized, resulting in a 1.14\% improvement. The time cost is greatly reduced compared with traditional optimization methods, even when the time required to establish the training database is included.

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

Masked and Predictive Self-Supervised Foundation Models for 3D Brain MRI

Self-supervised foundation models have shown strong promise in medical imaging. However, existing MRI foundation-model studies have primarily emphasized segmentation and dense prediction tasks, while systematic investigation of self-supervised foundation models for MRI-based disease detection remains limited. In this work, we investigate two major self-supervised pretraining paradigms for MRI-based disease detection: reconstruction-based learning via Masked Autoencoders (MAE) and predictive representation learning via Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA). We study the role of auxiliary objectives by introducing a novel spectral-domain reconstruction loss for MAE to enhance sensitivity to fine-grained anatomical structure, and by integrating variance–covariance regularization (VCR) within our JEPA framework to encourage decorrelated latent representations. Our models are pretrained on heterogeneous single-contrast MRI volumes in a contrast-agnostic setting, without modality concatenation. Across five downstream disease detection tasks, our results highlight the importance of self-supervised objective design for medical foundation model pretraining, demonstrating that the downstream benefit of each objective is determined by its relevance to the task's structure. Specifically, spectral regularization yields the largest improvements when the downstream discriminative signal is characterized by strong high-frequency anatomical structures, while covariance regularization is most beneficial when discriminative information spans multiple decorrelated feature dimensions. MAE with spectral-domain supervision consistently achieves superior downstream performance for MRI-based disease detection. These findings suggest that self-supervised objectives in medical imaging encode specific biases, and their downstream benefit is fundamentally conditioned on the task's structure.

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

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.