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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Exact Fourier dimensions of dyadic Mandelbrot cascades on curves of nonvanishing curvature under minimal integrability

arXiv:2606.11758v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove an exact Fourier-dimension formula for scalar dyadic Mandelbrot cascades pushed forward to fixed C^2 Jordan curves with nonvanishing curvature. Let W be in the minimal Kahane-Peyriere regime, let the scalar dyadic cascade live on T = R/Z, and let gamma map T to R^2 be a fixed C^2 Jordan curve with nonvanishing curvature, parametrized at constant speed. For the push-forward measure mu_gamma, we prove that, almost surely on non-extinction, its Fourier dimension is A_loc(W), the usual local exponent obtained by optimizing over q>1 from the moment expression involving E[W^q]. The upper bound follows from the scalar circle local-dimension theorem, bi-Lipschitz transfer to the fixed curve, and a deterministic curved-support obstruction for Fourier dimension. The lower bound follows from a fixed-curve finite-r annular theorem, which gives summable annular Fourier decay under a single finite moment witness. The main analytic input is a deterministic phase-geometry package for fixed nondegenerate C^2 curves: stationary tubes, derivative bands, and phase-bin coefficient estimates replacing the explicit trigonometric structure available on the unit circle.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Sensitivity of polaron-molecule observables to MDR/GUP-like ultraviolet deformations at low energies via quantum computing

arXiv:2606.14479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that impurity many-body observables can display enhanced sensitivity to ultraviolet deformations of generalized-uncertainty-principle and modified-dispersion-relation type at accessible energy scales. Using a deformed polaron-molecule Hamiltonian constructed to preserve the infrared sector, we quantify the impact of such deformations on spectral and Ramsey observables and implement the corresponding dynamics in a controlled quantum computing setting. We identify regimes near the polaron-molecule crossover where small ultraviolet deformations are strongly amplified, leading to experimentally resolvable changes in quasiparticle properties and spectral response. Our results establish a concrete sensitivity-based route to low-energy quantum-gravity phenomenology in a well-defined many-body platform and delimit the validity of the effective description. Furthermore, we report experimental validation on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS).

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

STaR-DRO: Stateful Tsallis Reweighting for Group-Robust Structured Prediction

arXiv:2604.09737v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structured prediction with large language models requires outputs that are label-accurate, ontology-constrained, structurally valid, and evidence-grounded under label imbalance and heterogeneous group difficulty. We present a unified framework for ontology-constrained generation. First, we introduce a modular prompt-engineering architecture combining XML-style structure, expert disambiguation rules, chain-of-thought reasoning, metadata-aware decision logic, schema contracts, and a self-validation gate. It targets recurrent in-context failures, including format drift, label ambiguity, evidence hallucination, and metadata-conditioned confusion. Second, we propose STaR-DRO, combining Tsallis mirror ascent, sparse entmax-style primal mapback, EMA-smoothed group-loss tracking, rescaled ascent signals, and bounded excess-only multipliers. Unlike conventional DRO, which relies on dense Shannon-entropy exponentiated-gradient updates, can introduce high-variance stochastic reweighting, assigns positive adversarial mass to groups that are not persistently hard, and incurs costs through simplex competition, STaR-DRO upweights only persistently hard groups without suppressing easier ones. We evaluate the framework on EPPC Miner, a clinically grounded high-stakes structured-prediction task requiring hierarchical label prediction and evidence-span extraction from patient-provider secure messages. Across 1B-70B Llama models, prompt engineering improves zero-shot extraction, yielding an average label F1 gain of +14.46 and a Span F1 gain of +17.40. Building on supervised fine-tuning, STaR-DRO further improves accuracy and robustness, increasing average label F1 by +1.08 and +2.20 while reducing mean groupwise validation cross-entropy by 21.3% and 14.8% relative to SFT and standard DRO, respectively. These results advance reliable automated communication mining for patient-centered clinical care analysis.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Probabilistic representation and classical solutions of wave equations with complex polynomial nonlinearities

arXiv:2606.18919v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We review the probabilistic representation of solutions of wave equations with polynomial nonlinearities in spatial dimensions d=1,2,3 using stochastic branching processes. Under regularity assumptions on the initial data, we derive conditions ensuring the integrability of the corresponding Monte Carlo estimator, and the existence and smoothness of mild and classical solutions. We also present numerical results and comparisons with grid-based algorithms for the solution of nonlinear wave equations.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Chronological Blindness: Benchmarking Temporal Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with CHRONOSIGHT

Human perception of visual scenes is inherently temporal. We instinctively recognise whether a fruit is ripening or rotting, whether construction is progressing or being demolished, and approximately how much time separates two photographs of the same subject. Whether large vision-language models (VLMs) share this competence remains an open and practically important question. We introduce CHRONOSIGHT, a rigorously controlled benchmark evaluating five dimensions of visual temporal reasoning: CHRONORANK (chronological ordering of image sequences), CHRONOLOCATE (ordinal stage localisation from a single image), CHRONODELTA (estimation of time elapsed between two images on a logarithmic scale), CHRONOREVERSE (detection of temporally reversed sequences), and CHRONOODD (identification of a temporal outlier within a set). The benchmark comprises 1{,}000 items across eight process families (biological growth, food transformation, physical weathering, construction, environmental change, human ageing, astronomical phenomena, and urban dynamics) spanning timescales from minutes to millennia. We evaluate eight open-source VLMs (500 M to 19 B parameters) under two prompting regimes and collect human performance baselines. Human performance averages 0.89 across tasks; the best open model (Qwen2.5-VL-7B) reaches 0.40 under direct prompting, a gap we term chronological blindness. Lightweight LoRA fine-tuning on 151 examples raises CHRONODELTA accuracy from near-zero to 0.43, transferring zero-shot to related tasks (CHRONOODD: 0.37; CHRONOREVERSE: 0.64)suggesting the bottleneck is partly instruction following rather than visual perception. Benchmark, code, and predictions will be released upon acceptance.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Beyond the canonical: The role of post-transcriptional regulation in drug-target interaction prediction

by Md Istiaq Ansari, Khandakar Tanvir Ahmed, Debby D. Wang, Kirill Medvedev, Wei Zhang Protein isoforms produced from the same gene through post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms, such as alternative splicing, can substantially alter protein structure and function, including drug-binding properties. However, most existing drug-target interaction (DTI) and drug-target affinity (DTA) prediction models rely exclusively on a single representative protein sequence per gene, typically the canonical or longest isoform, thereby overlooking the functional diversity introduced by alternative isoforms. This assumption can introduce bias, limit generalizability, and compromise the biological validity of model predictions. In this study, we systematically investigate the impact of protein isoform variation on DTI prediction accuracy. Our results show that substituting the canonical sequence with an alternative isoform often leads to substantial declines in predictive performance. Structural and binding affinity analyses further reveal that these discrepancies are frequently associated with changes in predicted binding-site configurations, which we further examine through controlled perturbations of binding-site residues. These experiments suggest that even subtle alterations in binding regions can lead to inconsistent DTI predictions. Overall, our findings uncover a critical limitation in current DTI modeling frameworks and underscore the importance of incorporating isoform-specific information to better reflect biological reality and improve therapeutic relevance. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/compbiolabucf/DTIVariant.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Self-Generated Error Training for Token Editing in Diffusion Language Models

Authors:

Token-to-token (T2T) editing lets LLaDA2.1 revise committed tokens during block-diffusion decoding. The released recipe trains this editor on random vocabulary corruptions, but at inference the editor sees the model's own fluent, high-confidence draft errors instead. We study this training-inference mismatch and propose self-generated T2T, which performs a no-gradient draft pass, fills masked positions with predicted tokens, and supervises recovery in a second pass under these self-generated corruptions. We implement the update as a short LoRA continued-pretraining pass on LLaDA2.1-mini and evaluate on several benchmarks under the official Q-Mode T2T procedure with unchanged inference parameters. The method generally improves accuracy while reducing T2T edit intensity, mitigating failure modes such as final-digit transcription errors after otherwise correct reasoning and excessive self-correction before short factual answers.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

HydraMPP: A lightweight library for distributed massive parallel processing in Python - threading at scale.

We now exist in the era of massive datasets from genomics, large language models, and all the known knowledge of humanity right at our fingertips. Much of this data is becoming more accessible; however, processing such data remains an ongoing issue across systems including high performance computing (HPC) infrastructures. Massively parallel computing (MPP) has solved this using a divide and conquer approach by splitting workloads across independent nodes (i.e., central processing units (CPU) allowing for higher scaling of data). The main engine for this in python is Ray; however, it has many issues including a large code space, security issues, debugging opacity, and memory management issues. Here, we present HydraMPP, a lightweight, ease of use and utilization, with high auditability, and with SLURM ergonomics.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver for Accelerating Generative Modeling

arXiv:2601.21542v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) models have emerged as a leading paradigm for high-fidelity synthesis. However, their reliance on iterative Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solving creates a significant latency bottleneck. Existing solutions face a dichotomy: training-free solvers suffer from significant performance degradation at low Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs), while training-based one- or few-steps generation methods incur prohibitive training costs and lack plug-and-play versatility. To bridge this gap, we propose the Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver (BA-solver). BA-solver retains the versatility of standard training-free solvers while achieving significant acceleration by introducing a lightweight SideNet (1-2% backbone size) alongside the frozen backbone. Specifically, our method is founded on two synergistic components: 1) Bidirectional Temporal Perception, where the SideNet learns to approximate both future and historical velocities without retraining the heavy backbone; and 2) Bi-Anchor Velocity Integration, which utilizes the SideNet with two anchor velocities to efficiently approximate intermediate velocities for batched high-order integration. By utilizing the backbone to establish high-precision ``anchors'' and the SideNet to densify the trajectory, BA-solver enables large interval sizes with minimized error. Empirical results on ImageNet-256^2 demonstrate that BA-solver achieves generation quality comparable to 100+ NFEs Euler solver in just 10 NFEs and maintains high fidelity in as few as 5 NFEs, incurring negligible training costs. Furthermore, BA-solver ensures seamless integration with existing generative pipelines, facilitating downstream tasks such as image editing.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Optimal Decoding of Small Codes by Density Matrix Propagation

arXiv:2606.14455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate and efficient decoding is a crucial component for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing. Realistic circuit-level noise introduces temporal correlations and degeneracy, making optimal (maximum-likelihood) decoding computationally intractable in general. As a result, practical decoders rely on heuristic approximations, and it is generally difficult to quantify how suboptimal they are, as this strongly depends on the code and noise model considered. In this work, we study the accuracy of practical decoding algorithms under circuit-level noise by comparing them against a maximum likelihood decoding benchmark. Our approach propagates the density matrix through the full memory experiment and computes the optimal decoding decision for each syndrome history. We introduce pruning techniques with rigorous bounds, allowing us to access larger numbers of syndrome-extraction rounds. We apply this framework to small instances of the repetition code and a cellular automaton code, and benchmark minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM), belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding (BP+OSD), Tesseract, and Planar decoders against optimal decoding. While standard decoders remain close to optimal for the repetition code, we find significant deviations for the cellular automaton code, with BP+OSD deteriorating already in experimentally relevant noise regimes. Moreover, the pruning method developed here highlights that, at low physical error rates, only a narrow fraction of syndrome histories contributes significantly to the logical error rate.

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

Decoupled Object-Centric Video Understanding for Generating Robotic Manipulation Commands

Translating video demonstrations into executable robot commands remains challenging because existing methods often fail to identify which objects are functionally involved in the demonstrated action. As a result, they may generate commands that are linguistically plausible but operationally ambiguous. We propose an object-centric video understanding framework that decouples action recognition from object identification to generate precise, grammar-free manipulation commands. Our approach integrates Temporal Shift Modules (TSM) for efficient spatio-temporal action classification with a novel Object Selection algorithm that identifies task-relevant objects through trajectory-based role classification, blur detection, and overlap minimization. The selected objects are then processed by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for robust category recognition and zero-shot generalization. Evaluated on a modified Something-Something V2 dataset, our method achieves 86.79\% action classification accuracy and BLEU-4 scores of 0.337 on standard objects and 0.261 on novel objects. These results improve over the strongest task-specific baseline by 80.2\% and 143.9\%, respectively. Larger gains are observed in METEOR and CIDEr, reaching 157.9\% and 171.7\% on novel objects. Across all semantic metrics, our approach consistently outperforms task-specific methods and remains competitive with, or surpasses, large general-purpose VLMs while retaining a modular, object-centric design.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On two overlooked stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian process

arXiv:2606.19306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We shed light on two alternative stick-breaking constructions of the normalized inverse Gaussian (NIG) random discrete distribution which appear to have been overlooked so far in the Bayesian nonparametric setting. The first is derived from a result in Aldous and Pitman (1998) for the conditional Brownian excursion partition, mixing over the local time at zero up to time one. The second arises as a particular case of a result in James (2013) for priors obtained by a random spatial and temporal change of the normalized generalized Gamma subordinator. Both constructions are in terms of straightforward transformations of standard random variables and can be easily generalized to provide the stick-breaking construction of any element, respectively, in a) the family of mixed Poisson-Kingman models driven by the $1/2$ stable Lévy measure and b) the family of Poisson-Gamma processes driven by the Inverse Gaussian subordinator.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Towards Steering without Sacrifice: Principled Training of Steering Vectors for Prompt-only Interventions

arXiv:2605.05983v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as an effective and lightweight approach to steer behaviors of large language models (LLMs), among which fine-tuned SVs are more effective than optimization-free ones. However, current approaches to fine-tuned SVs suffer from two limitations. First, they require careful selection of steering factors on a per-SV basis to balance steering effectiveness and generation quality at inference time. Second, they operate as full-sequence SVs (FSSVs), which can sacrifice generation quality regardless of factor selection due to excessive intervention on the model generation process. To address the first limitation, we propose joint training of steering factors and directions, such that post-hoc factor selection is no longer required. Using neural network scaling theory, we find that moderately large initialization sizes and learning rates for steering factors are essential for stability and efficiency of joint training. To tackle the second limitation, we draw inspiration from representation fine-tuning and introduce Prompt-only SV (PrOSV), an SV that intervenes only on a few prompt tokens. Our empirical results show that PrOSV outperforms traditional FSSVs on AxBench when using our joint training scheme. We also find that PrOSV achieves a better tradeoff between general model utility and adversarial robustness than FSSV.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum-Accelerated Self-Consistent Field: A Hybrid Algorithm

arXiv:2606.20176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the Grover adaptive search self-consistent field (GAS-SCF) algorithm. GAS-SCF leverages quantum arithmetic to construct an efficient oracle that marks target states (Fock states) which improve upon some initial classical energy estimate. Amplitude amplification then increases the probability of measuring these states. This approach offers a theoretical quadratic speed-up for the optimization problem encountered in SCF quantum chemistry and establishes a baseline against which structured optimization algorithms, such as QAOA and DQI may be compared. In this work, we classically simulate three examples as proofs of concept of the algorithm, the largest consisting of 26 qubits. We then extend our analysis to two larger systems, with O3 representing the largest case at 330 qubits. These examples are chosen to probe classically challenging SCF regimes. Achieving chemically relevant applications of GAS-SCF will require large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum hardware.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Development of a Novel Blood-Based Assay for Brain-Derived Tau and Its Validation in Traumatic Brain Injury

Brain-derived tau (BD-tau) is an emerging blood-based biomarker for neurodegeneration, yet there are currently limited well validated BD-tau assays available for research and clinical use. To enhance access to this vital biomarker for neurological disorders including traumatic brain injury (TBI), we developed a novel blood-based immunoassay for BD-tau on the ultra-sensitive Quanterix HD-X platform using Single Molecule Array technology. Analytical validation assessed dilution linearity, specificity, precision, detection limits, and spike recovery, each recording robust metrics in agreement with international expert recommendations. The assay demonstrated robust validation metrics, achieving between-run stability of 95% when analyzing aliquots from six independent plasma and serum samples across five analytical runs. It also showed strong dilution linearity when diluted four-fold and achieved over 90% recovery when spiked with cerebrospinal fluid. Next, we evaluated the clinical utility of the assay in cohorts of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI), where strong performances were recorded whether using the 2-step or 3-step assay formats ({rho}= 0.94; p < 0.0001). Furthermore, plasma BD-tau distinguished samples from TBI patients based on time from injury and severity (AUC=0.93). Plasma BD-tau differentiated between favorable and unfavorable functional outcomes in the acute-severe group. Our findings underscore the significant potential of the BD-tau assay as a biomarker for TBI in the severe phase.

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

Conformal Bayes under Label Shift: Post-Hoc Calibration vs. In-Training Adaptation

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11865v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conformal Bayes combines Bayesian posterior predictives with conformal calibration to produce prediction sets that are both statistically valid and geometrically efficient. We study conformal Bayes under label shift from a unified perspective, identifying two complementary approaches that restore nominal target-domain coverage through importance-weighted conformal calibration but operate through independent mechanisms. Post-hoc calibration tilts the posterior predictive toward the target domain and corrects the conformal threshold via an importance-weighted quantile, leaving the parameter posterior unchanged. In-training adaptation tilts the parameter posterior itself to the target domain, producing a corrected predictive whose highest predictive density region serves as the highest predictive density (HPD) based prediction set under the fitted target predictive; efficiency is model-dependent and does not imply finite-sample conditional optimality. Two controlled experiments show that in an unbiased training regime both strategies achieve valid coverage equally, while in a lead-optimization regime in-training adaptation acts as a debiasing operator, reducing interval width at unchanged coverage.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

From Argument Components to Graphs: A Multi-Agent Debate with Confidence Gating for Argument Relations

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly assessed and utilized in the field of Argument Mining (AM), thanks to their strong general reasoning capabilities. However, standard training-free models often miss sophisticated details, specifically in contexts where two parts of the text have to be analyzed together. Furthermore, self-correction mechanisms tend to reinforce initial hallucinations in reasoning. Overcoming these limitations typically requires expensive, domain-specific supervised fine-tuning. Recent work has shown that a multi-agent paradigm can address such weaknesses for the component classification task through dialectical refinement with a Proponent-Opponent-Judge architecture, setting a promising direction for training-free approaches in the field. In this paper, we extend and evaluate this framework on the Argument Relation Identification and Classification (ARIC) task, reformulating it as a debate over component pairs. Besides that, we introduce a confidence gating mechanism that enables debating only on the uncertain cases and accepting the initial prediction when confidence is high. On the UKP Argument Annotated Essays v2 corpus, we demonstrate that the selective debate achieves the highest Macro F1 among all training-free methods, while debate over all samples degrades performance below that of one of the baselines. All generative approaches also outperform fine-tuned RoBERTa models on Macro F1, suggesting that the under-representation of the Attack class was more damaging to supervised fine-tuning than to inference-only models. Additionally, our framework produces human-readable debate transcripts, offering interpretability absent from both single-agent and supervised classifiers.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Sex-Specific TMPRSS2 Response and Reduced Peripheral RNA Concentration Following AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccination in Nigeria.

Background: ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 remains a cornerstone COVID-19 vaccine in sub-Saharan Africa, yet population-specific molecular responses are understudied. We examined peripheral blood ACE2 and TMPRSS2 expression, total RNA concentration, and coagulation indices in Nigerians >=6 months post-vaccination. Methods: In a case-control study in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, 51 ChAdOx1-vaccinated adults and 51 age/sex-matched unvaccinated controls provided venous blood for RNA extraction, qRT-PCR, and coagulation assays. Multivariable linear models assessed effects of vaccination, sex, and age on molecular parameters. Results: Vaccinated participants had 37% lower total RNA concentration than controls (4.02 +/- 0.09 vs 6.38 +/- 0.14 ng/uL, p=6 months post-ChAdOx1, Nigerians show reduced peripheral blood RNA without sustained ACE2/TMPRSS2 upregulation. The sex-specific TMPRSS2 pattern suggests hormone and vaccine interactions previously unreported in African cohorts and highlights the need for sex-disaggregated molecular surveillance. Region-specific reference gene validation is recommended for Nigerian transcriptomic studies.

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

Searching Neural Architectures for Sensor Nodes on IoT Gateways

arXiv:2505.23939v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents an automatic method for the design of Neural Networks (NNs) at the edge, enabling Machine Learning (ML) access even in privacy-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The proposed method runs on IoT gateways and designs NNs for connected sensor nodes without sharing the collected data outside the local network, keeping the data in the site of collection. This approach has the potential to enable ML for Healthcare Internet of Things (HIoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), designing hardware-friendly and custom NNs at the edge for personalized healthcare and advanced industrial services such as quality control, predictive maintenance, or fault diagnosis. By preventing data from being disclosed to cloud services, this method safeguards sensitive information, including industrial secrets and personal data. The outcomes of a thorough experimental session confirm that – on the Visual Wake Words dataset – the proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art results by exploiting a search procedure that runs in less than 10 hours on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

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

Authors:

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.

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

Finite-Time Convergence of Distributionally Robust Q-Learning with Linear Function Approximation

arXiv:2510.01721v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) seeks policies that perform well when the deployment transition model differs from the nominal model generating the data. Most finite-sample guarantees for DRRL are tabular, model-based, rely on generative access, or obtain function-approximation guarantees only under additional structure, such as linear-transition models or restrictive discount-factor conditions. We study discounted model-free robust Q-learning under an $(s,a)$-rectangular chi-square uncertainty set, with linear approximation of the robust Q-function, using only a single Markovian trajectory from an unknown nominal model. Our algorithm combines a target-network outer loop with a dual function-approximation scheme for the chi-square robust Bellman update. The dual procedure uses moment-tracking critics, suffix averaging, a fresh-evaluation stage for the variance-like moment, and a tunable smoothing parameter to have a Lipschitz-continuous chi-square dual gradient. We prove a finite-time convergence bound to the optimal robust Q-function up to approximation error, without imposing a small-discount-factor assumption. Our results help close a gap between the empirical use of robust RL algorithms and the non-asymptotic guarantees available for their non-robust counterparts.

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

SPDA-SAM: A Self-prompted Depth-Aware Segment Anything Model for Instance Segmentation

Recently, Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated strong generalizability in various instance segmentation tasks. However, its performance is severely dependent on the quality of manual prompts. In addition, the RGB images that instance segmentation methods normally use inherently lack depth information. As a result, the ability of these methods to perceive spatial structures and delineate object boundaries is hindered. To address these challenges, we propose a Self-prompted Depth-Aware SAM (SPDA-SAM) for instance segmentation. Specifically, we design a Semantic-Spatial Self-prompt Module (SSSPM) which extracts the semantic and spatial prompts from the image encoder and the mask decoder of SAM, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a Coarse-to-Fine RGB-D Fusion Module (C2FFM), in which the features extracted from a monocular RGB image and the depth map estimated from it are fused. In particular, the structural information in the depth map is used to provide coarse-grained guidance to feature fusion, while local variations in depth are encoded in order to fuse fine-grained feature representations. To our knowledge, SAM has not been explored in such self-prompted and depth-aware manners. Experimental results demonstrate that our SPDA-SAM outperforms its state-of-the-art counterparts across twelve different data sets. These promising results should be due to the guidance of the self-prompts and the compensation for the spatial information loss by the coarse-to-fine RGB-D fusion operation.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Long-term exposure to PM2.5 components and lipid profiles in WTC Health Program general responders

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) was found to be associated with elevated blood lipids, but fewer studies have examined the associations with specific constituents of PM2.5. We studied the associations between exposure to annual PM2.5 and its 14 constituents, and repeated blood lipid measurements among general responders enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program between 2003 and 2019 (n = 44,876). We used generalized additive mixed effect models to investigate the single-pollutant associations with repeated measures of blood total cholesterol (TC), high and low-density lipoprotein (HDL-C and LDL-C) levels. We then used linear generalized weighted quantile sum regression with a random intercept for participant ID to account for the clustering of repeated measures and evaluate the combined associations with the component mixture. A decile increase in the mixture of 14 PM2.5 chemical components was associated with 0.375 mg/dL increase in TC levels (95% confidence Interval (CI): 0.174-0.577) and 0.302 mg/dL increase in LDL-C (95% CI: 0.063, 0.540). Lead, organic carbon, and iron were major drivers of both associations. Component-specific models also show higher TC and LDL levels associated with interquartile range increases in organic carbon (0.472, 95% CI [0.027, 0.918] and 0.648 95% CI [0.136, 1.160]) and iron exposure (1.081, 95% CI [0.630, 1.532] and 0.748, 95% CI [0.318, 1.178]). In conclusion, we found PM2.5 exposure to be associated with elevated lipid levels. The associations differed by PM2.5 composition, highlighting organic carbon, lead, and iron and major drivers. These findings are highly significant for a population exposed to extreme air pollution event and susceptible to lipid alterations that might trigger cardiovascular events.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

HOLO-MPPI: Multi-Scenario Motion Planning via Hierarchical Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.16480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world must plan motions across diverse scenarios without per-scenario retuning. End-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) can generalize across scenarios but often becomes brittle under distribution shift, reward misspecification, and stochastic interactions. Model predictive path integral (MPPI) control enables strong real-time refinement without gradients, but its performance depends on a well-shaped sampling prior, while manually designing the priors does not scale to multi-scenario deployment. We present HOLO-MPPI (High-level Offline, Low-level Online MPPI), a multi-scenario motion planning framework that combines high-level policy learning with low-level stochastic optimal control. Offline, we learn a high-level policy that proposes scenario-robust plans in an abstract action space, with a learned world model for online rollout. Online, the policy serves as a data-driven prior generator that parameterizes MPPI's sampling distribution conditioned on the current observation and goal. MPPI then optimizes low-level control sequences around this prior in real time to adapt to local disturbances. We instantiate HOLO-MPPI in autonomous driving by designing an effective high-level action space and tailored model architectures. Our evaluation across diverse driving scenarios shows that HOLO-MPPI improves upon MPPI and end-to-end RL baselines while maintaining real-time control.