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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-14

Antibody fine specificity correlates with protection from malaria for the RTS,S vaccine in young African children: A post hoc analysis of a phase IIb randomised controlled trial

作者:
Alessia Hysa↗

by Alessia Hysa, D. Herbert Opi, Joshua Waterhouse, Sandra Chishimba, Jessica L. Horton, Natalie Kingston, Hans J. Netter, David Wetzel, Michael Piontek, Gaoqian Feng, Jahit Sacarlal, Carlota Dobaño, Liriye Kurtovic, James G. Beeson Background The RTS,S/AS01 malaria vaccine was recently approved for implementation in children, but only provides modest and short-lived efficacy against malaria. RTS,S targets a portion of the Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) circumsporozoite protein (CSP), comprising the central NANP-repeat region and C-terminal domain. Mechanisms of immunity and correlates of protection for the RTS,S vaccine are not well defined, hindering progress towards generating highly effective CSP-based vaccines. Methods and findings We investigated epitope specificity and cross-reactivity of vaccine-induced antibodies to six peptides representing CSP epitopes in the N-terminal and central NANP-repeat region. We evaluated antibody reactivity in preclinical mouse vaccine studies, among CSP-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), and in a large RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial in young children 1–4 years old (n = 735).The preclinical mouse vaccine studies and CSP-specific mAbs were used to initially evaluate IgG responses to the six peptides. Mice immunised with the central NANP-repeat region had IgG with cross-reactivity to an epitope in the N-terminal region. Additionally, we demonstrated that a single CSP-specific mAb could display cross-reactivity to several CSP epitopes. Through post hoc quantification and analysis of antibody responses in the RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial, we found that a subset of children generated IgG with specificity for a short NANP-repeat epitope (NANP2; amino acid sequence: NANPNANP) and cross-reactivity to an N-terminal epitope (J1; amino acid sequence: KQPADGNPDPNANPN). Notably, children with high IgG responses to NANP2 and J1 had a significantly reduced risk of clinical malaria, compared to children with low responses (IgG to NANP2 (aHR: 0.838 (95% CI [0.716, 0.981]; p = 0.028)) and J1 (aHR: 0.718 (95% CI [0.611, 0.844]; p 

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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Active Quantum Reservoir Engineering: Using a Qubit to Manipulate its Environment

作者:
Marcelo Janovitch↗Matteo Brunelli↗Patrick P. Potts↗

arXiv:2505.16898v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum reservoir engineering leverages dissipative processes to achieve desired behavior, with applications ranging from entanglement generation to quantum error correction. Therein, a structured environment acts as an entropy sink for the system and no time-dependent control over the system is required. We develop a theoretical framework for active reservoir engineering, where time-dependent control over a quantum system is used to manipulate its environment. In this case, the system may act as an entropy sink for the environment. Our framwork captures the dynamical interplay between system and environment, and provides an intuitive picture of how finite-size effects and system-environment correlations allow for manipulating the environment by repeated initialization of the quantum system. We illustrate our results with two examples: a superconducting qubit coupled to an environment of two-level systems and a semiconducting quantum dot coupled to nuclear spins. In both scenarios, we find qualitative agreement with previous experimental results, illustrating how active control can unlock new functionalities in open quantum systems.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Conversational Speech for Respiratory Triage in Primary Care: A Pilot Study

作者:
Ravi↗Noufi↗

Background. Respiratory complaints account for a substantial share of adult ambulatory care visits, and triaging them accurately has direct consequences for antibiotic stewardship and pathogen-specific therapy. Prior work has investigated voice as a triage signal, but that literature is dominated by single-condition detection from scripted speech in crowdsourced or controlled clinical settings and has not been evaluated at primary care scale on conversational ambient audio. Methods. A dataset of 514,377 ambient-recorded primary care visits from 379,225 adult patients at a US clinic network was used, with per-visit clinically assigned ICD-10 diagnosis codes and de-identified demographic and geographic metadata. Patient audio was extracted from each doctor-patient conversation, and spectral, voice quality, and prosodic features were computed. Eleven binary classification tasks were defined, aligned with a respiratory triage cascade (e.g., acute respiratory versus acute non-respiratory illness, and lower versus upper respiratory tract infection). An acoustic model (feed-forward network) was trained independently for each task using patient-stratified five-fold cross-validation and evaluated on a held-out test set. Each task's model was also compared against six non-acoustic baselines using a single demographic, geographic, or temporal variable. The 11 trained classifiers were composed into a hierarchical cascade and illustrated as case studies on selected patients. Results. Test-set AUC across the 11 tasks ranged from 0.602 (95% CI: 0.588-0.614) to 0.745 (95% CI: 0.742-0.748), with a mean expected calibration error of 0.018. Six of eleven binaries outperformed all confounder baselines. Four binaries showed median within-stratum AUC of 0.62-0.70 when the confounder was held fixed, indicating acoustic discrimination beyond what the confounder alone explains. The exception was the pneumonia versus non-pneumonia lower respiratory tract infection binary, which failed against the patient-city confounder baseline, plausibly reflecting a clinic-level difference in ICD-10 coding. Conclusion. Conversational primary care audio carries acoustic signal that discriminates clinically meaningful respiratory contrasts. Absolute performance is moderate, but the conditions are stricter than prior work: conversational speech and differential-diagnosis contrasts among sick patients. This pilot study is a baseline for voice-based clinical AI moving beyond sick-versus-healthy detection toward differential-diagnosis panels and a proof-of-concept for hierarchical reasoning.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DiffCold: A Diffusion-based Generative Model for Cold-Start Item Recommendation

作者:
Kangning Zhang↗Yingjie Qin↗Weinan Zhang↗Yong Yu↗Jianghao Lin↗

arXiv:2606.12245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cold-start item recommendation remains a persistent challenge in real-world systems due to the absence of interaction histories. While prior models attempt to bridge this gap using item content features, they universally suffer from the seesaw dilemma: enhancing performance for cold items inevitably degrades performance for warm items, and vice versa. We identify that this dilemma stems from a fundamental distributional disparity: warm item embeddings occupy a complex ``behavioral manifold" shaped by rich interaction signals, whereas cold item embeddings are constrained to a ``semantic manifold" derived solely from auxiliary content. Existing methods often force a rigid mapping between these inconsistent spaces, causing the model to sacrifice the precision of warm representations to accommodate cold ones. To address this, we propose DiffCold, a diffusion-based generative model that unifies warm and cold representations. Unlike GANs or VAEs, DiffCold leverages conditional diffusion to reconstruct warm item embeddings from content, preserving the underlying manifold structure without degradation. We further tailor this paradigm with two specific designs: a Retrieval-enhanced Aggregator that initializes generation using semantically similar warm items to bypass inefficient noise, and a Simulation-based Representation Alignment module that enforces distribution consistency between generated and real embeddings via contrastive learning. Experiments on three benchmarks confirm that DiffCold resolves the seesaw dilemma, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods across all metrics.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Inflationary branch decoherence and the cosmological arrow of time

作者:
Ali Nayeri↗

arXiv:2602.21263v3 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze branch decoherence in inflationary quantum cosmology by computing reduced density matrices and branch-overlap factors for long-wavelength perturbations. The Hartle-Hawking no-boundary state is real in the semiclassical regime and contains both expanding and contracting WKB components, whereas the tunneling state is selected as an outgoing complex WKB branch; expanding-contracting decoherence is therefore central for the former and mainly diagnostic for the latter. Using the influence-functional formalism, we derive the noise kernel for a light spectator environment and evaluate decoherence under horizon-based and EFT-motivated coarse grainings. We then compute the single-mode branch overlap directly from the Bunch-Davies mode functions, obtaining $|\mathcal{D}_k(z)|=[z^2/(z^2+1)]^{1/4}$ in the massless limit and $|\mathcal{D}_k(z)|\sim z^\nu$ on superhorizon scales for massive fields, where $z=-k\eta$ is the dimensionless wavenumber with $\eta$ the conformal time. In the massless case, the accumulated geometric branch functional is evaluated in closed form, with a leading cutoff-sensitive phase-space term and a universal subleading contribution. The calculation provides an explicit quantitative bridge between quantum-cosmological boundary conditions, inflationary squeezing, and the emergence of effectively classical cosmological histories.

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

Risk Under Pressure: Compute-Aware Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness in Language Models

作者:
Malikeh Ehghaghi↗Bogl\'arka Ecsedi↗Marsha Chechik↗Colin Raffel↗

arXiv:2606.11409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial robustness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) typically report attack success rate (ASR) under fixed query budgets, implicitly treating all attacks as equally costly. In practice, the computational expense of different attack strategies can vary by orders of magnitude. Consequently, ASR at a fixed budget can obscure the true effort required to jailbreak a model, thereby making it hard to determine whether an attack's cost justifies its payoff to the attacker. We propose a compute-aware evaluation framework based on computational pressure, measured in cumulative floating-point operations (FLOPs), as a proxy for adversarial effort. We introduce risk-compute curves, which map compute budgets to attack risk, and derive two metrics that summarize the average pressure required for a given attack to succeed. Across ten models spanning three families and four different stages in language model training and alignment, evaluated with three attack strategies (gradient-based, iterative refinement, and template-based) on two jailbreak robustness benchmarks, we find: (1) alignment training has non-monotonic effects on compute-space robustness; (2) scaling model size reduces gradient-based attack effectiveness but has limited impact on cheaper template-based attacks; (3) gradient-based attacks optimized on a surrogate model can transfer to a separate target model, providing a way to reduce attacker costs; (4) compute cost varies by up to ${\approx}5{\times}$ across harm categories within a single model; and (5) safety-aligned RL increases aggregate cost while leaving some categories disproportionately accessible. We release our framework to enable compute-aware risk assessment and evaluation.

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

Landmark-free Assessment of Lower-limb Alignment with Implicit Neural Shape Functions from Knee Radiographs

作者:
Zhisen Hu↗Antti Kemppainen↗David Johnson↗Egor Panfilov↗Huy Hoang Nguyen↗Timothy Cootes↗Claudia Lindner↗Aleksei Tiulpin↗

Radiographic assessment of lower-limb alignment (LLA) is important for predicting joint health and surgical outcomes in total knee arthroplasty. Traditional measurement methods are manual and time-consuming, while recent machine learning approaches typically rely on locating a fixed set of anatomical landmarks. This dependence limits flexibility and may require re-annotation when clinical definitions change. To address this, we propose an automated workflow using Implicit Neural Shape Functions (INSF). Rather than relying on explicit landmark coordinates, we encode the anatomy into a compact latent space and regress clinical alignment measurements directly from these latent codes. This architecture allows for rapid extendability to new tasks without altering the backbone representation. We trained our method on an internal dataset of 566 knee radiographs, each annotated with the outline of the femur and tibia. We evaluated it on both an internal test dataset of 50 patients and a separate external set of 402 preoperative cases from the MRKR dataset. Manual clinical measurements are available for these data, and the MRKR measurements will be made publicly accessible. Performance was comparable to state-of-the-art landmark-based methods and manual agreement, while offering a flexible shape representation that can be extended to additional measurement tasks.

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

Geometric Consistency Protocol for Foundation Model Features in Multi-View Satellite Imagery

作者:
Qiyan Luo↗Jie Yang↗Yingdong Pi↗Lekang Wen↗Mi Wang↗

Standardized evaluation protocols are indispensable for robust benchmarking in remote sensing, particularly as foundation features are increasingly transferred across diverse sensors and complex imaging geometries. In satellite multi-view reconstruction, conventional evaluations relying on unconstrained 2D global matching are often misleading. The Rational Function Model (RFM) and its Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPC) dictate a curved, height-dependent epipolar geometry that render flat 2D search spaces physically inconsistent. We propose a geometry-faithful and reproducible protocol tailored for the RPC framework. Our approach integrates an RPC-projected 3D consistency metric with a geometry-constrained dense matching proxy, specifically evaluating whether similarity responses remain localized and unique under physically plausible search manifolds. A pivotal finding of our joint reporting strategy is the decoupling of semantic agreement and geometric localization: high cross-view similarity at a projected 3D point does not guarantee reliable matchability in practical inference. Our benchmark demonstrates that incorporating geometric constraints is fundamental to the problem definition in satellite imagery. Furthermore, we show that state-of-the-art 2D backbones remain remarkably competitive against specialized 3D-aware models when subjected to this RPC-consistent evaluation.

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

EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environments

作者:
Jundong Xu↗Qingchuan Li↗Jiaying Wu↗Yihuai Lan↗Shuyue Stella Li↗Huichi Zhou↗Bowen Jiang↗Lei Wang↗Jun Wang↗Anh Tuan Luu↗Caiming Xiong↗Hae Won Park↗…

Large language model (LLM) agents have achieved strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks, yet most evaluations assume static environments. In contrast, real-world deployment is inherently dynamic, requiring agents to continually align their knowledge, skills, and behavior with changing environments and updated task conditions. To address this gap, we introduce EvoArena, a benchmark suite that models environment changes as sequences of progressive updates across terminal, software, and social domains. We further propose EvoMem, a patch-based memory paradigm that records memory evolution as structured update histories, enabling agents to reason about environmental evolution through changes in their memory. Experiments show that current agents struggle on EvoArena, achieving an average accuracy of 39.6% across evolving terminal, software, and social-preference domains. EvoMem consistently improves performance, yielding an average gain of 1.5% on EvoArena and also improving standard benchmarks such as GAIA and LoCoMo by 6.1% and 4.8%. Beyond individual tasks, EvoMem further improves chain-level accuracy by 3.7% on EvoArena, where success requires completing a consecutive sequence of related evolutionary subtasks. Mechanistic analysis shows that EvoMem improves evidence capture in the memory, indicating better preservation of complete evolving environment states. Our results highlight the importance of modeling evolution in both evaluation and memory for reliable agent deployment.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CD-RCM: Generalizable Continuous-Depth Novel View Synthesis for Reflectance Confocal Microscopy

作者:
Tooba Imtiaz↗Milind Rajadhyaksha↗Kivanc Kose↗Jennifer Dy↗

Reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) provides noninvasive, cellular-resolution "optical biopsies" of human skin in vivo by acquiring en-face images at successive depths, forming a sparse z-stack. Due to optical limitations, these stacks are anisotropic 3D volumes with lateral resolution (0.5 $\mu$m) $\sim$6 times higher compared to axial resolution, which is defined by the optical sectioning (3 $\mu$m), limiting the interpretation of tissue. Our goal is to provide continuous-depth visualization by interpolating intermediate sections and making the 3D volume isotropic. Such a representation permits arbitrary-direction sectioning, including histopathology-like cross-sectional examination, without requiring per-patient optimization. To that end, we introduce the first RCM-specific novel-view synthesis (NVS) approach, CD-RCM, a feedforward model that predicts realistic, unseen depths from sparsely sampled RCM stacks. Classical neural rendering methods focus on reconstruction from surface-level multi-view observations. In contrast to surface-level camera views, RCM can acquire optically sectioned en-face images of tissue beyond the surface up to 200 $\mu$m. However, during visualization of the RCM stacks, observations of the shallower sections (towards the surface) obscure the deeper ones. This unique axial imaging geometry and layer-dependent anatomical organization motivated our development of a tailored architectural and training framework that explicitly accounts for RCM's depth-resolved, occlusive imaging physics. Experiments demonstrate that CD-RCM achieves high-fidelity novel-view synthesis with sub-second inference time.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

OneFocus: Enabling Real-World X-ray Security Screening with a Unified Vision-Language Model

作者:
Jiali Wen↗Hongxia Gao↗Litao Li↗Yixin Chen↗Kaijie Zhang↗Qianyun Liu↗Xiaoqin Wen↗

X-ray contraband detection is critical for security in large-scale logistics and transportation, yet conventional detectors struggle to adapt to emerging contraband types and lack fundamental visual understanding. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer strong generalization but are hindered by the scarcity of high-quality X-ray image-caption data. To bridge this critical gap, we present MMXray, a meticulously curated benchmark of 52,124 image-caption pairs spanning 28 fine-grained classes of X-ray contraband. To enrich MMXray with realistic occlusion patterns, we further introduce CleanDET, a dedicated synthesis dataset containing clean foreground contraband images from 28 categories and background images with diverse density levels, together with AnyContraSyn, a controllable synthesis method designed to operate on CleanDET. We also develop OnePipe, an extensible pipeline for systematic data curation. Built on MMXray, we propose OneFocus, a unified VLM that supports four core tasks: visual question answering, contraband localization, classification, and image understanding. OneFocus achieves state-of-the-art performance in X-ray contraband understanding and demonstrates robust cross-domain generalization, establishing a strong vision-language baseline for security screening.

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

MaskWAM: Unifying Mask Prompting and Prediction for World-Action Models

作者:
Hanyang Yu↗Haitao Lin↗Jingbo Zhang↗Wenyao Zhang↗Chenghao Gu↗Heng Li↗Ping Tan↗

World Action Models (WAMs) present a promising paradigm for robotic control via video prediction. However, current WAMs suffer from fundamental spatial bottlenecks: standard text inputs introduce referential ambiguity in cluttered scenes, while unstructured RGB predictions lack semantic grounding and remain biased by task-irrelevant backgrounds. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MaskWAM, an object-centric world-action model. By jointly integrating masks as both explicit inputs and predictions via a unified Mixture of Transformers (MoT), MaskWAM unlocks robust policy generalization. This design provides two key benefits: (1) predicting future masks yields object-centric semantic supervision that suppresses visual noise, significantly enhancing even standard text-conditioned WAMs; and (2) coupling this predictive supervision with first-frame visual prompts, such as target object masks, establishes a precise spatial anchor that substantially reduces language ambiguity. Crucially, as WAMs are inherently vision-driven architectures, direct mask conditioning yields substantially stronger guidance than text alone, establishing a precise and robust paradigm for manipulating unseen objects. Evaluations on LIBERO, RoboTwin, and real-world tasks demonstrate that MaskWAM significantly outperforms baselines in both language-clear and language-ambiguous tasks.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks

作者:
Shoumik Saha↗Jifan Chen↗Sam Mayers↗Sanjay Krishna Gouda↗Zijian Wang↗Varun Kumar↗

arXiv:2510.01359v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code-capable large language model (LLM) agents are embedded in software engineering workflows where they can read, write, and execute code, raising "jailbreak" stakes beyond text-only settings. Prior evaluations emphasize refusal or harmful-text detection, leaving open whether agents compile and run malicious programs. We present JAWS-Bench (Jailbreaks Across WorkSpaces), a benchmark spanning three escalating workspace regimes mirroring attacker capability: empty (JAWS-0), single-file (JAWS-1), and multi-file (JAWS-M). We pair this with a hierarchical, executable-aware Judge Framework that tests (i) compliance, (ii) attack success, (iii) syntactic correctness, and (iv) runtime executability, to measure deployable harm. Across seven LLM backends from five families, prompt-only attacks in JAWS-0 achieve 61% compliance; 58% are harmful, 52% parse, and 27% run end-to-end. In JAWS-1, compliance reaches ~100% for stronger models with a mean ASR (Attack Success Rate) ~71%; JAWS-M raises mean ASR to ~75%, with 32% runnable attack code. Wrapping an LLM in an agent increases ASR by 1.6$\times$, by overturning initial refusals during planning and tool use. Similar trends hold for OpenHands, SWE-Agent, and OpenAI Codex, suggesting our JAWS-Bench is agent-agnostic. Category analyses identify which attack classes are most vulnerable and deployable, motivating execution-aware defenses and refusal-preserving agent designs.

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

Characterizing Admissible Objective Functions for Hierarchical Clustering

作者:
Ryuki Tsukuba↗Kazutoshi Ando↗

arXiv:2604.23628v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hierarchical clustering is a fundamental task in data analysis, but classical methods have long lacked a principled objective function. Dasgupta [STOC~2016] took an important step toward addressing this gap by proposing a well-motivated objective function for cluster trees. Cohen-Addad et al. [J. ACM 2019] subsequently introduced the notion of admissibility: an objective function is admissible if, whenever the input similarity matrix admits generating trees, its minimizers are precisely those generating trees.They also gave a necessary and sufficient condition for admissibility within a family of objective functions based on aggregate intercluster similarity. We refer to this family as sum-type objective functions. However, apart from Dasgupta's original objective function, no explicit admissible objective functions in this family were provided. In this paper, we study admissible objective functions for hierarchical clustering in two directions. For sum-type objective functions, we give a complete characterization when the scaling function is a symmetric polynomial of degree at most two, and we derive sufficient conditions for degree-three polynomials. We also show that the recursive sparsest cut algorithm achieves an O$(\phi)$-approximation ratio for the admissible objective functions covered by our characterization, where $\phi$ is the approximation factor of the sparsest cut subroutine. We then introduce max-type objective functions, where cluster interaction is measured by maximum, rather than aggregate, intercluster similarity. For this class, we characterize which objective functions are admissible for arbitrary symmetric scaling functions and give a complete characterization when the scaling function is a symmetric polynomial of degree at most two.

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

SkillWiki: A Living Knowledge Infrastructure for Agent Skills

作者:
Dingcheng Huang↗Yuda Ding↗Bingshuo Liu↗Qingbin Liu↗Xi Chen↗Jiang Bian↗Hongliang Sun↗Zhiying Tu↗Dianhui Chu↗Xiaoyan Yu↗Dianbo Sui↗

While knowledge is managed through Wikipedia and software through GitHub, agent skills still lack an infrastructure for large-scale production, governance, and evolution. SkillWiki is a living knowledge infrastructure that supports the organization, grounding, and continuous evolution of agent skills by transforming heterogeneous knowledge into reusable skill assets linked to their originating evidence. Our demonstration presents the complete skill lifecycle, from knowledge ingestion and skill production to provenance-aware exploration, governance, and execution-driven evolution. SkillWiki highlights a future in which knowledge, skills, and execution experience co-evolve within a shared infrastructure. The live demonstration and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/Huangdingcheng/SkillWiki.

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

EFIQA: Explainable Fundus Image Quality Assessment via Anatomical Priors

作者:
Pengwei Wang↗Jos\'e Morano↗Qian Wan↗Hrvoje Bogunovi\'c↗

arXiv:2606.20108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image quality control is vital for a wide range of downstream applications. Deep learning-based image quality assessment methods typically train classifiers on dataset-specific quality labels, inheriting two limitations: (1) generalization is tied to the labeling criteria of the training set and (2) these methods cannot provide spatial feedback on where the quality is degraded, lacking explainability. In this work, we propose EFIQA, a framework that requires no quality-related supervision and produces spatial quality maps by design. Rather than learning ``what is degradation" from human-annotated labels, EFIQA learns ``what should be there" by leveraging anatomical priors. For fundus photography, we instantiate this as a two-stage approach, by first training an unsupervised anomaly detector via masked anatomical inpainting to identify regions of missing vasculature, and then distilling this prior knowledge into a shallow adapter mapping features of a frozen foundation model to precise quality maps. External-dataset evaluation demonstrates that this label-free approach with minimal adaptation achieves better performance and explainability compared with supervised methods across benchmarks with different quality criteria, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Towards Conditional Feature Alignment for Cross-Domain Counting

作者:
Zhuonan Liang↗Dongnan Liu↗Jianan Fan↗Yaxuan Song↗Qiang Qu↗Runnan Chen↗Yu Yao↗Peng Fu↗Weidong Cai↗

Object counting models often degrade under cross-domain deployment because density composition varies across domains and is itself task-relevant. Standard feature alignment methods tend to suppress such variation by encouraging global domain invariance, which can be harmful when source and target domains contain different proportions of background, sparse foreground, and dense foreground. We propose Conditional Feature Alignment (CFA), a cross-domain counting framework that aligns representations within label-induced conditions rather than across full marginal feature distributions. Given density annotations or pseudo-density predictions, CFA constructs foreground/background or density-level conditions and aligns only features belonging to matching conditions. We formalise this idea through a conditional divergence perspective, showing that conditional alignment removes within-condition discrepancy while preserving condition-marginal density shift. For unsupervised domain adaptation, CFA estimates source conditions from annotations and target conditions from detached pseudo-density maps, then performs condition-wise adversarial alignment with full-image consistency regularisation. For source-domain generalisation, we instantiate the same principle with MPCount by enforcing condition-wise memory-consistency between generated source-domain views. Experiments on crowd and cell counting benchmarks show competitive or improved performance across diverse UDA and DG settings. For example, on JHU-CROWD++ FH$\rightarrow$SN, CFA-DG reduces MAE/RMSE from MPCount's 216.3/421.4 to 90.5/169.9, indicating that condition-wise alignment is especially effective under large weather- and density-induced shifts. These results suggest that condition-wise alignment is a promising design principle for domain-adaptive counting.

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

Self-attention-based non-linear basis transformations for compact latent space modelling of dynamic optical fibre transmission matrices

作者:
Yijie Zheng↗Robert J. Kilpatrick↗David B. Phillips↗George S. D. Gordon↗

arXiv:2406.07775v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimode optical fibres are hair-thin strands of glass that efficiently transport light. They promise next-generation medical endoscopes that provide unprecedented sub-cellular image resolution deep inside the body. However, confining light to such fibres means that images are inherently scrambled in transit. Conventionally, this scrambling has been compensated by pre-calibrating how a specific fibre scrambles light and solving a stationary linear matrix equation that represents a physical model of the fibre. However, as the technology develops towards real-world deployment, the unscrambling process must account for dynamic changes in the matrix representing the fibre's effect on light, due to factors such as movement and temperature shifts, and non-linearities resulting from the inaccessibility of the fibre tip when inside the body. Such complex, dynamic and nonlinear behaviour is well-suited to approximation by neural networks, but most leading image reconstruction networks rely on convolutional layers, which assume strong correlations between adjacent pixels, a strong inductive bias that is inappropriate for fibre matrices which may be expressed in a range of arbitrary coordinate representations with long-range correlations. We introduce a new concept that uses self-attention layers to dynamically transform the coordinate representations of varying fibre matrices to a basis that admits compact, low-dimensional representations suitable for further processing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on diverse fibre matrix datasets. We show our models significantly improve the sparsity of fibre bases in their transformed bases with a participation ratio, p, as a measure of sparsity, of between 0.01 and 0.11. Further, we show that these transformed representations admit reconstruction of the original matrices with < 10% reconstruction error, demonstrating the invertibility.

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

QG-MIL: A Gated Transformer Aggregator for Domain-Agnostic Multiple Instance Learning in Medical Imaging

作者:
Luca Zedda↗Davide Antonio Mura↗Cecilia Di Ruberto↗Maurizio Atzori↗Muhammed Furkan Dasdelen↗Carsten Marr↗Andrea Loddo↗

Attention-based Multiple Instance Learning aggregators in medical imaging are prone to attention concentration, producing overconfident and unstable predictions. We introduce QG-MIL, a gated transformer aggregator that addresses this through four synergistic architectural components: RMSNorm-based pre-normalization, per-head QK normalization, fine-grained attention output gating, and SwiGLU-style feed-forward modules. Together, these design choices stabilize training and distribute attention more uniformly across instances without auxiliary losses, masking, or multi-stage regularization. We evaluate QG-MIL across six benchmarks spanning whole-slide pathology and cell-level hematology, covering two fundamentally different MIL scales. The best-performing QG-MIL variants outperform leading baselines on all six benchmarks, with an average improvement of +6.1 mean macro F1 points. Attention overlays and attention mass analysis confirm more distributed instance weighting. Ablation studies show that while individual components can match the full model on specific datasets, the QG-MIL design provides the most consistent cross-domain performance and tightest variance when compared to selected baselines. We release a configurable implementation to support reproducibility at: https://github.com/unica-visual-intelligence-lab/QG-MIL

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MAStrike: Shapley-Guided Collusive Red-Teaming on Multi-Agent Systems

作者:
Chejian Xu↗Zhaorun Chen↗Jingyang Zhang↗Freddy Lecue↗Avni Kothari↗Sarah Tan↗Wenbo Guo↗Bo Li↗

arXiv:2606.12918v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hierarchical multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly being deployed in high-stakes workflows across domains such as finance and software engineering. In these systems, safety and security are inherently distributed across role-specialized agents, significantly expanding the attack surface, particularly under coordinated adversarial behaviors such as privilege escalation and cross-agent collusion. Existing red-teaming approaches for MAS remain limited: they rely on heuristic selection of target agents and perturb isolated message streams, leaving critical questions unanswered as which agents are most responsible for system safety, and how compromised agents can coordinate to bypass defenses. We propose MAStrike, a closed-loop framework for collusive red-teaming in hierarchical MAS. We propose the first agent-level Shapley value analysis for MAS, quantifying each agent's marginal contribution to system robustness under task-specific distributions. GGuided by this attribution, MAStrike identifies vulnerable agent coalitions and generates coordinated, role-aware adversarial manipulations. These attacks are iteratively refined through structured causal diagnosis, attributing failure cases to uncompromised agents that block adversarial attempts. We further build a comprehensive MAS red-teaming benchmark and controllable environments spanning diverse hierarchical topologies and domains, including finance, software engineering, and CRM. Extensive experiments across MAS built on multiple frontier models show that MAStrike substantially outperforms heuristic baselines. Our analysis further uncovers non-trivial Shapley value distributions and higher-order interaction structures among agents, revealing critical vulnerabilities and coordination patterns that are overlooked by prior single-agent or template-based methods.

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21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

segSHAPE: RNA secondary structure prediction from nanopore direct RNA sequencing

作者:
Cheng↗Härtsiä↗Änkö↗M.-L↗

RNAs adopt complex structures that regulate key biological processes, making accurate structure prediction essential. Chemical probing coupled with Nanopore direct RNA sequencing (DRS) offers a route to single-molecule structural inference, but current tools are limited by inaccurate signal-to-sequence alignment, which degrades modification-rate estimation and downstream structure prediction. Here we introduce segSHAPE for RNA secondary structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data (both RNA002 and RNA004 chemistries), a probe-agnostic framework that improves signal alignment using prior information of basecalling and per-read signal baseline shift correction, learns position-specific k-mer raw signal parameters, and estimates per-nucleotide modification rates with an unsupervised anomaly detector. On three public RNA002 DRS datasets spanning different chemical probes (AcIm, NAI-N3) and RNAs from 421 to 1552 nt, segSHAPE achieves the highest F1 score and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) on all RNAs, exceeding the strongest baseline by 3.4 to 5.8 percentage points in MCC. It additionally captures the ligand-induced conformational change of the thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) riboswitch RNA directly from RNA002 DRS data using the DEPC probe. On a public RNA004 DRS dataset, segSHAPE improves over the sm-PORE-cupine baseline by 17 ROC-AUC points in modification rate estimation and by 6.7 MCC points in structure prediction. These results establish segSHAPE as a unified, probe-agnostic pipeline for RNA structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

On chip, multifunctional quantum sensing using single spins in a van der Waals crystal

作者:
James Liddle-Wesolowski↗Konosuke Shimazaki↗Jiyun Kim↗Benjamin Whitefield↗Kenji Watanabe↗Takashi Taniguchi↗Mehran Kianinia↗Igor Aharonovich↗

arXiv:2606.19978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Nanoscale thermometry and magnetometry are in high demand across a wide range of scientific and technological applications. In this context, optically addressable spins in solids have emerged at the forefront of on-chip quantum sensing. However, simultaneous quantum sensing of multiple parameters (e.g., temperature and magnetic field) using the same spin sensor remains challenging due to cross-sensitivity to multiple physical quantities. Here, we demonstrate independent dual sensing of temperature and magnetic field using single quantum emitters in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). We experimentally verify the independent response of the zero-phonon line (ZPL) position to temperature and of optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) to magnetic fields. Furthermore, we demonstrate local temperature sensing of a microcircuit while simultaneously measuring an external magnetic field. Our results establish quantum emitters in hBN as a robust platform for multifunctional quantum sensing under realistic operating conditions.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Towards Truly Multilingual ASR: Generalizing Code-Switching ASR to Unseen Language Pairs

作者:
Gio Paik↗Hyunseo Shin↗Soungmin Lee↗

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has become a key technology for human–AI interaction. However, code-switching ASR (CS-ASR) remains particularly challenging due to the severe scarcity of multilingual CS speech resources across diverse language pairs. Existing approaches primarily improve CS-ASR performance through synthetic CS speech generation or pair-specific fine-tuning on limited bilingual datasets. Nevertheless, these approaches face an inherent scalability limitation, as support for CS must be developed separately for language pairs whose number grows combinatorially with the number of supported languages. In this work, we investigate whether CS capabilities learned from a limited set of seen language pairs can generalize to unseen language pairs through model merging and domain generalization methods. Our experiments show that merged bilingual CS-ASR models modestly generalize to unseen language pairs, suggesting limited transfer of bilingual CS capabilities across language pairs.

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

Sample-Efficient Hypergradient Estimation for Decentralized Bi-Level Reinforcement Learning

作者:
Mikoto Kudo↗Takumi Tanabe↗Akifumi Wachi↗Youhei Akimoto↗

arXiv:2603.14867v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov decision process (MDP) conditioned on the leader's decisions. In many situations, a fundamental challenge arises when the leader cannot intervene in the follower's optimization process; it can only observe the optimization outcome. We address this decentralized setting by deriving the hypergradient of the leader's objective, i.e., the gradient of the leader's strategy that accounts for changes in the follower's optimal policy. Unlike prior hypergradient-based methods that require extensive data for repeated state visits or rely on gradient estimators whose complexity can increase substantially with the high-dimensional leader's decision space, we leverage the Boltzmann covariance trick to derive an alternative hypergradient formulation. This enables efficient hypergradient estimation solely from interaction samples, even when the leader's decision space is high-dimensional. Additionally, to our knowledge, this is the first method that enables hypergradient-based optimization for 2-player Markov games in decentralized settings. Experiments highlight the impact of hypergradient updates and demonstrate our method's effectiveness in both discrete and continuous state tasks.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement

作者:
Yuhan Chen↗Kunyang Huang↗Fuchen Li↗Zhuohan Qin↗Guofa Li↗Wenbo Chu↗Keqiang Li↗

Existing low-light image enhancement methods often face a bottleneck between the representation capacity of illumination-field modeling and computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Adaptive Illumination Gaussian Splatting Network (AIGS-Net), an ultra-lightweight architecture for fast low-light enhancement. Unlike conventional static priors, AIGS-Net constructs an input-adaptive 2D Gaussian Splatting illumination field. The opacity of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically modulated by relative luminance statistics of the input image, and spatially varying illumination compensation is rendered through ordered alpha compositing. To guide adaptive illumination compensation efficiently, a zero-parameter nonlinear multiscale contextual encoding module is introduced to extract low-frequency structures and local contrast cues without additional convolutional weights. To suppress noise amplification and sensor-induced color bias, AIGS-Net integrates noise-mask estimation, locked single-channel Gamma mapping, cross-channel consistency regularization, and target color-alignment constraints. Experiments on LOL and LSRW benchmarks show that AIGS-Net improves detail recovery and color fidelity while requiring only approximately 40 learnable parameters, achieving an effective trade-off between enhancement quality and extreme inference efficiency.

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