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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Mathematicians are developing rules for AI use — other fields should follow

Authors: Unknown Author

The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach. The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach.

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

NeuroClaw Technical Report

Agentic artificial intelligence systems promise to accelerate scientific workflows, but neuroimaging poses unique challenges: heterogeneous modalities (sMRI, fMRI, dMRI, EEG), long multi-stage pipelines, and persistent reproducibility risks. To address this gap, we present NeuroClaw, a domain-specialized multi-agent research assistant for executable and reproducible neuroimaging research. NeuroClaw operates directly on raw neuroimaging data across formats and modalities, grounding decisions in dataset semantics and BIDS metadata so users need not prepare curated inputs or bespoke model code. The platform combines harness engineering with end-to-end environment management, including pinned Python environments, Docker support, automated installers for common neuroimaging tools, and GPU configuration. In practice, this layer emphasizes checkpointing, post-execution verification, structured audit traces, and controlled runtime setup, making toolchains more transparent while improving reproducibility and auditability. A three-tier skill/agent hierarchy separates user-facing interaction, high-level orchestration, and low-level tool skills to decompose complex workflows into safe, reusable units. Alongside the NeuroClaw framework, we introduce NeuroBench, a system-level benchmark for executability, artifact validity, and reproducibility readiness. Across multiple multimodal LLMs, NeuroClaw-enabled runs yield consistent and substantial score improvements compared with direct agent invocation. Project homepage: https://cuhk-aim-group.github.io/NeuroClaw/index.html

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Reward hacking in physical reinforcement learning revealed by turbulent drag reduction

arXiv:2606.06227v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A reinforcement-learning agent maximises its reward, which can diverge from the outcome its designer intended. In physical control the reward rarely closes that gap, and drag reduction in wall turbulence makes it concrete. A mass-conservation projection couples agents' outputs and erases the per-agent credit the policy gradient needs; a memoryless policy cannot resolve the slow near-wall cycle it acts on; and a pressure-gradient reward pays for nominal drag reduction by pumping power through the wall. Two degenerate controllers achieve large drag reductions while total dissipation rises, so the reported figure can mask a more wasteful flow. We trace each fault to its cause and fix it: a differentiable projection that restores credit, a recurrent policy with a widened sensing stencil, and a reward scored on the true wall power. The corrected controller acts on the flow within a closed energy budget, earning a conservative $17\%$ under honest accounting.

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

MIRAGE: Auditing Anti-Muslim Bias in Frontier LLMs Across Reasoning, Agentic, and Time-Coupled Conditions

arXiv:2606.16562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Five years after the discovery of persistent anti-Muslim bias in large language models, most evaluations remain confined to single-turn prompt completion, a setting that no longer reflects how frontier LLMs are deployed. We introduce MIRAGE (Muslim-Identity Reasoning and Agentic Generation Evaluation), a benchmark of 1{,}200 prompts spanning three deployment-realistic conditions: direct completion, chain-of-thought reasoning, and simulated agentic decision-making across content moderation, lending triage, refugee claim summarization, and hiring screens. Across six frontier models, we find that (i) chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies rather than suppresses Muslim-violence associations by 12–34\% relative to direct completion, (ii) agentic decisions exhibit a 9–22 percentage-point asymmetry between Muslim and matched non-Muslim cases on identical evidence, and (iii) bias is sharply time-coupled to retrieved news context, increasing 18–27\% under recent-conflict retrieval. Existing prompt-based mitigations transfer poorly across our three conditions, suppressing direct-completion bias while leaving agentic asymmetry largely intact. We release MIRAGE and an open evaluation harness to support targeted mitigation research.

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

Utility-Constrained Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.14029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained MDPs (CMDPs) are a widely adopted framework for incorporating safety into RL agents; however, the framework does not support risk-sensitive constraints. This can be problematic: For example, CMDPs allow for optimal solutions that, in order to satisfy the risk-neutral constraints, mix infrequent catastrophic behaviors and frequent, overly conservative ones. Moreover, prior empirical results suggest that enforcing stricter, risk-sensitive constraints can improve performance even under risk-neutral evaluation. The natural framework to incorporate risk-sensitive constraints is utility-constrained MDPs (UCMDPs), but no practical solutions for this problem existed. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful methodology for UCMDPs and constrained RL. Besides allowing for risk-sensitive constraints, our framework does not require us to fix constraint limits in advance of training the agent, provided that a sensible range is known. This increases policy flexibility and, in practice, allows for adjustments to these limits at no extra training cost. Besides benefiting from the generality of the framework, our agent shows strong performance in practice, consistently matching or outperforming existing baselines in several Safety Gymnasium benchmark tasks.

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

From Detection to Recovery: Operational Analysis on LLM Pre-training with 504 GPUs

arXiv:2605.09370v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale AI training is fundamentally a distributed systems problem, where hardware failures are routine operating conditions rather than rare exceptions, yet public operational evidence from production training clusters remains limited. This report presents an empirical analysis of a 63-node NVIDIA B200 production cluster (504 GPUs), using 55 days of Prometheus time-series data and 73 days of operational logs covering 224 multi-node training sessions. The environment is cross-organizational: five parties (SKT, Upstage, Lablup, NVIDIA Korea, VAST Data) share a unified monitoring pipeline. This enabled joint diagnosis of a 60-node-scale storage I/O bottleneck absent in 2-4-node tests, a production-scale phenomenon no single team could isolate alone. We perform three quantitative analyses yielding four findings. First, over 751 Prometheus metrics and 10 XID-identified GPU failures, no single metric is consistently dominant across failure types, motivating multi-signal detection. Second, 523 checkpoint events trace the save/load path from GPU VRAM to the NFS server: restart loading reaches 21.5% of maximum read bandwidth (700 GB/s) and save bursts 16.0% of maximum write bandwidth (250 GB/s), with NFS/RPC queueing and transport-layer backlog rising together. Third, across 224 sessions over 73 days, node exclusions concentrate so the top 3 of 63 nodes account for over 50%. Fourth, auto-retry chain analysis shows a 33.3% success rate over 12 chains (73 attempts), 2.7x the 12.5% manual rate, with a median retry interval of 11 minutes (IQR 10-11). All analyses are grounded in production infrastructure providing session-level workload management, GPU-centric scheduling, and unified observability.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

LLM-Powered Personalized Glycemic Assessment in Type 2 Diabetes with Wearable Sensor Data

arXiv:2606.12699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) poses an increasing global health threat, demanding effective glycemic assessment to support personalized and improved diabetes care. Wearable sensors such as continuous glucose monitors (CGM) and fitness trackers offer many valuable insights for glycemic assessment. However, effectively analyzing these data requires integration with essential individual-level context. Existing methods are often based on traditional machine learning (ML) and rely primarily on historical blood glucose measurements and overlook personalized information, which limits their performance across diverse diabetes populations. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to integrate diverse data modalities while modeling sequential dependencies, motivating the exploration of their potential for personalized glycemic assessment. In this paper, we propose GlyLLM, an LLM-powered framework for modeling CGM-based glycemic dynamics through the integration of wearable sensor data and structured metadata. GlyLLM can leverage the extensive prior knowledge of pre-trained LLMs and achieve sensor-text semantic abstraction at decision time. Experiments on two related tasks on the AI-READI dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms traditional ML methods by an average of 13.66\% in Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) for glucose forecasting and 13.08\% in Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUROC) for diabetes categorization. Additionally, our ablation study shows that diabetes surveys and biometric tests are more critical than other health information for glycemic assessment. Our work presents a promising step toward harnessing the power of LLMs to advance personalized glycemic assessment in T2D care.

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

WorkflowPerturb: Calibrated Stress Tests for Evaluating Multi-Agent Workflow Metrics

arXiv:2602.17990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems that generate structured workflows from natural-language requests are now deployed in production across cloud automation, DevOps, and enterprise process orchestration. Operating such systems exposes a recurring change-management problem. Routine updates, such as re-running the same input, swapping the underlying LLM, or refactoring an agent's prompt or orchestration code, frequently produce workflows that differ substantially from previously validated references. Engineers are then left without a principled way to decide whether a change is safe to ship. Automatic workflow evaluation is the natural tool for answering this question. In practice, however, metric scores are poorly calibrated, and a numeric change rarely communicates the severity of the underlying degradation. We introduce WorkflowPerturb, a controlled benchmark for studying workflow evaluation metrics by applying realistic, graded perturbations to golden workflows. WorkflowPerturb contains 4,973 golden workflows and 44,757 perturbed variants across three perturbation types (Missing Steps, Compressed Steps, and Description Changes), each applied at severity levels of 10%, 30%, and 50%. We benchmark multiple metric families and analyze their sensitivity and calibration using expected score trajectories and residuals. Our results characterize systematic differences across metric families and support severity-aware interpretation of workflow evaluation scores in change-management settings. Our dataset will be released upon acceptance.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Opportunistic CKD Screening in Hospitalized Patients

Background. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects 10-13% of adults worldwide but remains largely undiagnosed until advanced stages. Hospitalization provides an opportunity for early detection through opportunistic urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) measurement. Methods. We conducted a prospective three-arm study of opportunistic CKD screening in general internal medicine wards at Hadassah Mt. Scopus (MS), Hadassah Ein Kerem (EK), and Shaare Zedek Medical Center (SZMC) in Jerusalem (Protocol HMO-23-0300). Adult inpatients without known CKD or recent UACR were enrolled. Pathological UACR was defined as [≥]30 mg/g. Confirmed CKD required two pathological measurements [≥]90 days apart (KDIGO-compatible). eGFR was computed using the 2021 CKD-EPI race-free equation. Pooled proportions were estimated by fixed-effects logit meta-analysis; odds ratios by DerSimonian-Laird random-effects models. Results. A total of 158 patients were enrolled (MS n=50, EK n=57, SZMC n=51). Pathological first UACR was identified in 43/158 patients (27.2%; 95% CI 21.3-34.1%; I2=0% across centers). Of 24 patients with a second UACR available, 14 (58%) confirmed CKD, yielding a pooled confirmed-CKD rate of 8.9% of all screened patients. In-hospital mortality was significantly higher among patients with pathological UACR (9.3% vs ~2%; Fisher's exact p=0.012). In per-center multivariate logistic regression, three predictors reached pooled significance: BUN (OR 1.10 per mg/dL, 95% CI 1.04-1.17, p=0.002, I2=0%), heart failure (OR 3.21, 95% CI 1.34-7.70, p=0.009, I2=0%), and diabetes mellitus (OR 2.54, 95% CI 1.11-5.82, p=0.028, I2=17%). Cardiac/vascular admissions had the highest pathological UACR rate (~42%); GI/hepatic admissions had 0%. Conclusions. Opportunistic inpatient UACR screening identifies previously unrecognized CKD in approximately 9% of general internal medicine patients, with consistent results across three independent centers. BUN elevation, heart failure, and diabetes are the strongest independent predictors. Pathological UACR carries significant short-term mortality risk, supporting integration of routine screening into inpatient care pathways.

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

Multi-Sensor Fusion for UAV Classification Based on Feature Maps of Image and Radar Data

arXiv:2410.16089v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The unique cost, flexibility, speed, and efficiency of modern UAVs make them an attractive choice in many applications in contemporary society. This, however, causes an ever-increasing number of reported malicious or accidental incidents, rendering the need for the development of UAV detection and classification mechanisms essential. We propose a methodology for developing a system that fuses already processed multi-sensor data into a new Deep Neural Network to increase its classification accuracy towards UAV detection. The DNN model fuses high-level features extracted from individual object detection and classification models associated with thermal, optronic, and radar data. Additionally, emphasis is given to the model's Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based architecture that combines the features of the three sensor modalities by stacking the extracted image features of the thermal and optronic sensor achieving higher classification accuracy than each sensor alone.

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

DTT-BSR+: A Generative-Regression Cascade for Music Source Restoration

arXiv:2606.24127v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Music source restoration (MSR) requires jointly addressing source unmixing and the inversion of non-linear production effects. Current methods struggle to achieve accurate target signal reconstruction while maintaining semantic consistency. To address this limitation, we propose DTT-BSR+, a two-stage cascade MSR system that decouples distribution fitting from signal reconstruction into separate stages. A generative DTT-BSR separator in the first stage produces stems matching the prior of clean sources, and a modified Demucs network in the second stage enhances the first stage output using time-domain and multi-resolution spectral losses. DTT-BSR+ improves multi-mel signal-to-noise ratio (MMSNR) over the single-stage DTT-BSR across all stems, and surpasses the state-of-the-art X-LANCE MSR system on five stems. We also reveal through Fréchet Audio Distance (FAD) decomposition an implicit trade-off between signal reconstruction accuracy and semantic distribution fitting across stems.

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

FLUX3D: High-Fidelity 3D Gaussian Generation with Diffusion-Aligned Sparse Representation

arXiv:2606.24874v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse voxel representation has emerged as a scalable foundation for image-to-3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) generation, yet current methods struggle to preserve high-frequency visual details of input images due to two structural bottlenecks. First, they adopt discriminative 2D features optimized for semantic abstraction to construct sparse voxel latents, which suppress reconstructive cues and induce a representation bottleneck. Second, in the generation stage, standard diffusion transformers lack effective mechanisms to align dense 2D image tokens with sparse 3D voxel latents, resulting in a cross-modal correspondence bottleneck. To address these issues, we propose FLUX3D, a scalable image-to-3DGS framework that boosts both representation learning and cross-modal alignment during generation. We first revisit 2D feature selection for sparse-voxel-based 3D representation learning, propose Diffusion-Aligned Structured Latents (DA-SLAT) and couple it with a decoder-only architecture to improve 3DGS reconstruction fidelity. We also design a sparse-structure-aware diffusion framework, which integrates the Sparse-structure Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (SMDiT) and Modal-Aware Rotary Positional Embedding (MARoPE) to achieve geometry-agnostic 2D-3D alignment. Extensive benchmark experiments demonstrate that FLUX3D yields substantial improvements in appearance fidelity and significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in generating high-quality 3DGS assets.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Entangled states are typically incomparable

arXiv:2406.03335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Consider a bipartite quantum system, where Alice and Bob jointly possess a pure state $|\psi\rangle$. Using local quantum operations on their respective subsystems, and unlimited classical communication, Alice and Bob may be able to transform $|\psi\rangle$ into another state $|\phi\rangle$. Famously, Nielsen's theorem [Phys. Rev. Lett., 1999] provides a necessary and sufficient algebraic criterion for such a transformation to be possible (namely, the local spectrum of $|\phi\rangle$ should majorise the local spectrum of $|\psi\rangle$). In the paper where Nielsen proved this theorem, he conjectured that in the limit of large dimensionality, for almost all pairs of states $|\psi\rangle, |\phi\rangle$ (according to the natural unitary invariant measure) such a transformation is not possible. That is to say, typical pairs of quantum states $|\psi\rangle, |\phi\rangle$ are entangled in fundamentally different ways, that cannot be converted to each other via local operations and classical communication. Via Nielsen's theorem, this conjecture can be equivalently stated as a conjecture about majorisation of spectra of random matrices from the so-called trace-normalised complex Wishart-Laguerre ensemble. Concretely, let $X$ and $Y$ be independent $n \times m$ random matrices whose entries are i.i.d. standard complex Gaussians; then Nielsen's conjecture says that the probability that the spectrum of $X X^\dagger / \operatorname{tr}(X X^\dagger)$ majorises the spectrum of $Y Y^\dagger / \operatorname{tr}(Y Y^\dagger)$ tends to zero as both $n$ and $m$ grow large. We prove this conjecture, and we also confirm some related predictions of Cunden, Facchi, Florio and Gramegna [J. Phys. A., 2020; Phys. Rev. A., 2021].

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HorusEye: Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis

Authors:

We introduce HorusEye, Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis. Our investigation followed five stages. The first one is benchmarking RefCOCO-Degraded, a dataset of 15,244 images (3,811 base images x 4 conditions: Clean, Fog, Smoke and Thermal) with systematic visual degradation. Through four research questions, we evaluate multiple VLMs (Gemini, Qwen2-VL, BLIP-2, LLaVA, Kosmos-2) across visual grounding the second stage, language feedback recovery the third one, health VQA tasks the fourth, and hallucination analysis the final stage. Our key finding is that language feedback effectiveness is model-dependent: Gemini achieves +47.3% improvement in thermal conditions through iterative language feedback, while Qwen2-VL shows -5.1% degradation under the same protocol. We also identify the 'Thermal Paradox' where cropping strategies that improve RGB performance catastrophically fail in thermal imagery. Furthermore, BLIP-2 uniquely hallucinates more under degradation, making it unsuitable for emergency deployment

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

Progressive Knowledge-Guided Large Language Model Framework for Bearing Fault Diagnosis

Vibration-based bearing fault diagnosis requires resolving three interrelated measurement challenges, including the trade-off between global statistical feature efficiency and local transient signal fidelity, insufficient traceability of measurement features to underlying fault physics, and ineffective multi-source measurement information fusion across diagnostic scales. This paper presents a progressive physics-guided multi-scale vibration signal processing framework that addresses all three challenges within a unified diagnostic pipeline. An 81-dimensional measurement descriptor, derived from bearing kinematic theory and characteristic defect frequencies, establishes a physically traceable feature space enabling real-time fault screening at approximately 20 ms per sample. A fault-adaptive signal segmentation mechanism then directs analytical attention toward fault-relevant waveform regions guided by physics-based priors, without manual feature engineering. Structured fault mechanism knowledge is further encoded implicitly in model parameters during training, enabling autonomous multi-scale measurement fusion without external knowledge dependencies at inference. Validated on four public benchmark datasets under diverse operating conditions, the framework achieves 98.49% diagnostic accuracy with a 12.6-fold reduction in computational cost relative to signal-level baselines. Interpretability analysis confirms that diagnostic feature activations align with established bearing fault mechanics, supporting measurement traceability in safety-critical industrial systems.

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

"I Didn't Make the Micro Decisions": Measuring, Inducing, and Exposing Goal-Level AI Contributions in Collaboration

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape how users form, refine, and extend their goals, attributing contributions in human-AI collaboration becomes critical for users calibrating their own reliance and for evaluators assessing AI-assisted work. Yet existing methods focus on final artifacts, missing the process through which goals themselves are jointly shaped. We introduce a goal-level attribution framework, CoTrace, that decomposes explicit goals into verifiable requirements and traces both direct contributions and indirect influences across dialogue turns. Applying CoTrace to 638 real-world collaboration logs, we find that while models account for only 11-26% of goal-shaping contribution, they contribute substantially more on introducing lower-level concrete requirements, and make various kinds of indirect contributions. Through controlled simulations, we show that interaction design choices significantly affect model goal-shaping behavior. In a user study, exposing participants to goal-level analyses shifts their perceived contributions by nearly 2 points on a 5-point scale, revealing systematic miscalibration in how users understand their own AI-assisted work.

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

Statistical Properties of Training & Generalization

arXiv:2606.20299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning has managed to evade numerous intuitions from classical statistics to achieve unprecedented performance on a number of real-world tasks. In this article, we investigate the key features and surprises of deep learning from a physics-informed perspective, taking care to point out and justify where possible the many choices inherent in constructing a deep learning model. In particular, we review the phenomenon of neural scaling laws and discuss their interplay with the constraints and inductive biases which may be present when applying machine learning to problems in physics.

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

Cost-Optimal Decision Diagrams for Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation

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

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

Upper Bounds on the Generalization Error of Deep Learning Models via Local Robustness and Stability

arXiv:2606.16883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalization is a critical property of data-driven models, particularly deep learning models deployed in safety-critical applications. Robustness-based generalization bounds have gained attention as a principled way to link robustness properties to generalization performance, often in a data-dependent manner. However, most existing bounds suffer from vacuousness in practical settings, yielding loose upper bounds that greatly exceed the actual error rates and limiting their usefulness for real-world evaluation. While this issue is often attributed to the uncertainty term, a substantial part of the problem originates from the robustness term itself, particularly for the 0-1 loss. Existing approaches typically treat the robustness term as a global measure, ignoring its variation across different sub-regions of the input space. In this work, we propose a generalization bound that addresses this limitation by scaling the robustness term according to the number of stable and unstable samples within each sub-region. Our bounds incorporate both data- and model-dependent factors while maintaining practical relevance (yielding tighter upper bounds on true error). Experiments on models trained on the ImageNet dataset show that our bounds remain consistently non-vacuous and achieve the tightest estimates among existing methods, closely aligning with empirical performance across a range of robust deep neural networks.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Afrispeech Semantics: Evaluating Audio Semantic Reasoning in Spoken Language Models Across Domains and Accents

Audio language models (ALMs) are increasingly used for speech-based understanding, yet their ability to perform semantic reasoning beyond transcription, Text-to-Audio Retrieval, Captioning, and Question-Answering accuracy remains insufficiently benchmarked. In particular, the effects of accent variation, domain shift, and semantic over-inference on audio reasoning are poorly understood. We evaluate audio language models across five semantic and paralinguistic reasoning tasks: entailment, consistency, plausibility, accent drift, and accent restraint. Collectively, these tasks assess a model's ability to reason over spoken audio as the primary evidence source, including whether a textual hypothesis can be inferred, contradicted, or left undetermined by the audio, whether statements align or conflict with spoken content, whether claims are plausible given the discourse, and whether model predictions remain stable or appropriately constrained across accent variation. These findings highlight critical limitations in current audio reasoning evaluations and hope to provide guidance for more robust and equitable ALM design and assessment

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

Analyzing and Improving Fine-grained Preference Optimization in Medical LVLMs

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

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Active commuting, anxiety symptoms and mental wellbeing: a dose-response study

Climate change draws attention to the planetary health perspective in sport and exercise sciences, that is, to physical activity that supports both human wellbeing and environmental sustainability. Active commuting is a sustainable form of physical activity with well-established somatic health benefits. However, more knowledge is needed on its relationship with mental health. We examined dose-response associations between active commuting, anxiety symptoms, and mental wellbeing among Finnish adults, and whether green commuting environment moderates these relationships. We used data from the cross-sectional Environment and Health Survey collected in June-September 2023 in the ten largest cities in Finland. Employed participants with data on anxiety symptoms (Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7, GAD-7), mental wellbeing (World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index, WHO-5), commuting profile over a year (mode, frequency, distance, and perceived greenness along the commute route), and sociodemographic and lifestyle factors were included (n=1,672; mean age 45.3 years; 53.8% women). Active commuting was defined as travelling the entire commute by walking or cycling (including e-biking) that was converted into approximated annual km/week and MET-h/week. We used linear and logistic regression with restricted cubic splines to evaluate dose-response associations, adjusted for key covariates. The role of perceived greenness was tested using an active commuting x commute greenness interaction term. We found no dose-response relationships between active commuting and anxiety symptoms or mental wellbeing in any of the models. No effect modification by commute greenness was observed. More research on how active commuting may support planetary health from a mental health perspective is needed.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Shadowing Program for Medical Students in the Basic Sciences Phase

Introduction Shadowing, as an educational method based on active observation, can foster a realistic understanding of professional roles and enhance the communication skills of medical students. This study aimed to design, implement, and evaluate a shadowing program for basic sciences medical students. Methods This development study was conducted based on the ADDIE model in five phases. The study population consisted of 799 medical students in semesters 2 to 5. The stages included Analysis (determining needs through literature review and expert panels), Design (specifying learning environments and evaluation methods), Development (preparing guides and educational tools), Implementation (within the Medical Ethics course), and Evaluation (using questionnaires and reflection forms). Findings This study aimed to design and evaluate an educational shadowing program based on the ADDIE model. In the Analysis phase, the profiles of 799 students and learning objectives were determined. In the Design phase, a structured program for four types of shadowing was designed. In the Development phase, all guides and educational tools were prepared. In the Implementation phase, the program was carried out with complete coverage and adherence to ethical considerations. Finally, the program evaluation showed that "Motivation to become a good physician" (3.75-3.95) and "Enhancing empathy" (3.50-3.94) received the highest scores, while "Increasing understanding of the basic science-clinical connection" (2.53-2.89) and "Willingness to attend on holidays" (1.87-2.31) received the lowest scores. Conclusion The findings indicate that implementing the shadowing program is an effective method for strengthening the professional attitudes and academic motivation of medical students. However, the program did not significantly improve students perception of the basic science-clinical connection, indicating a need for curricular refinement. The continuation and extension of this program to other levels and fields of medical sciences are recommended.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

GRACE-DS: a Guarded Reward-guided Agent Correction Environment in Data Science

We introduce GRACE-DS, a Guarded Reward-guided Agent Correction Environment in Data Science for pre-deployment evaluation of LLM-powered AutoML agents. GRACE-DS is a set of evaluation metrics in an isolated environment that can be applied to tabular ML tasks specific to a particular organization. It exposes agents to realistic workflow stages, from planning and data inspection through feature engineering, model development, validation, and code repair to final submission, while hidden executable validators measure not only final predictive performance but also leakage avoidance, reproducibility, protocol validity, correction behavior, and reward alignment. The strongest structured regime, flexible iterative interaction (our approach), achieves higher end-to-end normalized hidden-test quality than single-shot generation, unstructured interaction, and restart-based baselines, while also improving protocol-valid completion. Validated across more than 7,000 episodes, these results establish GRACE-DS as a robust platform for assessing the capacity of LLM-based AutoML agents to execute machine learning workflows under production-like conditions and in accordance with organization-specific requirements.

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

Majority-of-Three is Optimal

arXiv:2606.13614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a short proof that the majority vote of three independent consistent classifiers is an optimal learner in the realizable PAC setting. This proves optimality for the simplest voting scheme, while simplifying both the algorithmic structure and the probabilistic analysis of previous voting learners, including the algorithm of S. Hanneke and the analysis of bagging by K. Green Larsen.