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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

HTS-Oracle v2: Prospective AI-Guided Discovery and Experimental Validation of Small Molecule Modulators Across Multiple Targets

High-throughput screening (HTS) remains the cornerstone of early-phase small molecule discovery yet consistently underperforms against immunotherapy targets, yielding validated hit rates below 0.1%. Here we introduce HTS-Oracle v2, which features rigorous cross-validation that ensures honest performance estimates. HTS-Oracle v2 was trained and validated across four clinically significant immune checkpoint targets (CD28, ICOS, LAG-3, and TIGIT) achieving ROC-AUC values of 0.968, 0.969, 0.875, 0.928 respectively under rigorous cross-validation. For prospective experimental validation, HTS-Oracle v2 was applied to an 8,960-compound Enamine Protein Mimetic Library, selecting only 25 compounds per target for experimental testing using temperature-related intensity change (TRIC) technology, a 99.7% reduction in screening burden. HTS-Oracle v2 identified 4, 5, 4, and 6 validated binders from 25 prospectively selected compounds per target, corresponding to validated hit rates of 16%, 20%, 16%, and 24%, respectively. Notably, 67-80% of all experimentally confirmed hits across the full 8,960-compound library were captured within just 25 model-selected compounds per target. For CD28, this represents a 28-fold improvement over HTS-Oracle v1 (239x versus 8.4x), establishing HTS-Oracle v2 as an efficient platform for AI-guided prospective hit discovery across immunotherapy targets.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DataEvolver: Automatic Data Preparation for Large Language Models through Multi-Level Self-Evolving

arXiv:2606.07001v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: High-quality training data is essential to large language models (LLMs) and typically requires extensive and costly manual curation. Existing automatic data preparation methods rely on predefined pipelines or customized human instructions, which limits their adaptability to diverse data distributions and lacks principled guidance from high-quality examples. In this paper, we introduce DataEvolver, the first self-evolving data preparation system that automatically constructs pipelines to transform raw data into high-quality data. DataEvolver employs a multi-level mechanism to ensure both pipeline executability and effectiveness. At the operator level, it incrementally expands the operator set to construct a logical plan while resolving dependency conflicts. At the pipeline level, it instantiates logical plans into executable code and iteratively refines pipeline orchestration through a feedback loop that reduces the distribution gap between prepared data and high-quality examples. Experiments on seven benchmarks show that DataEvolver substantially improves data quality and achieves an average 10\% gain in downstream LLM performance compared with training on original data, highlighting new opportunities for the iterative co-evolution of LLMs and data.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Tackling GNARLy Problems: Graph Neural Algorithmic Reasoning Reimagined through Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2509.18930v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural algorithmic reasoning (NAR) is a paradigm that trains neural networks to execute classic algorithms by supervised learning. Despite its successes, important limitations remain: inability to construct valid solutions without post-processing and to reason about multiple correct ones, poor performance on combinatorial NP-hard problems, and inapplicability to problems for which strong algorithms are not yet known. To address these limitations, we reframe the problem of learning algorithm trajectories as a Markov decision process, which imposes structure on the solution construction procedure and unlocks the powerful tools of imitation and reinforcement learning (RL). We propose the GNARL framework, encompassing the methodology to translate problem formulations from NAR to RL and a learning architecture suitable for a wide range of graph-based problems. We achieve very high graph accuracy results on several CLRS-30 problems, performance matching or exceeding much narrower NAR approaches for NP-hard problems and, remarkably, applicability even when lacking an expert algorithm.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Finite-Sample Bounds for Expected Signature Estimation under Weak Dependence

arXiv:2605.20541v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The expected signature uniquely determines the law of a random rough path under a moment-growth condition, yet finite-sample bounds for estimating its truncations from a single long dependent trajectory remain unavailable. We study a strictly stationary stochastic process equipped with a geometric rough-path lift, observed in non-overlapping blocks of equally-spaced samples, and prove a non-asymptotic mean-squared error (MSE) bound for the block-averaging estimator of its truncated expected signature. Under moment and stationarity assumptions together with a direct covariance-decay condition on block signatures – strictly weaker than $\alpha$-mixing and applicable to long-range-dependent processes – the error separates into a discretization term and a fluctuation term, with rates determined respectively by path regularity and dependence strength. A levelwise rough-factorial variance analysis keeps finite-truncation constants explicit and yields an optimal allocation rule under a fixed observation budget. We verify the assumptions for independent-coordinate fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes in three regimes: short-range (Hurst $1/41/2$. Monte Carlo experiments show empirical slopes steeper than the guaranteed upper-bound rates.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

A global cross-sectional survey of health professionals' interest-confidence gaps in value-based health care implementation: a learning needs assessment

Abstract Objectives Value-Based Health Care (VBHC) increasingly guides health system redesign internationally. Despite the increasing availability of VBHC education, gaps remain between health professionals' conceptual understanding of VBHC and their confidence to implement it in practice. This study assessed perceived learning needs and preferences of healthcare professionals across foundational topics essential to VBHC implementation. Design Cross-sectional online survey study Setting and participants The survey was distributed to the global VBHC community and yielded 518 responses. Most respondents were based in the UK and Ireland (51%) and 65% had more than 10 years of experience in the health sector. Participants represented a variety of professional backgrounds, including clinicians (34%), operational or executive managers and leaders (22%), and life sciences or procurement professionals (13%). Primary and secondary outcome measures Primary outcome measures included self-reported interest and confidence across 15 VBHC domains and the magnitude of the gap between them. Secondary outcomes included perceived implementation challenges and preferred VBHC learning approaches, including prior engagement with VBHC-related learning. Results Respondents identified substantial VBHC implementation challenges, including implementing outcome measurement (62.4%), conflicting priorities (57.7%), and resistance to change (56.8%). Interest in all VBHC domains was high (median >= 80/10), while confidence to implement remained substantially lower across most domains (median

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Physical Atari: A Robust and Accessible Platform for Real-time Reinforcement Learning on Robots

arXiv:2606.19357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We built a robot called the Robotroller that actuates an Atari CX40+ controller and a device called the Atari Devbox that renders the game frame and the reward signal from the Arcade Learning Environment on a screen. The Robotroller and the Atari Devbox, together with an off-the-shelf camera and a desktop computer, constitute a system that can be used to study reinforcement learning algorithms in the physical world. We call the full system Physical Atari. In this paper, we detail the key decisions that make Physical Atari a robust and accessible platform. To make the system robust, we designed the Robotroller so that all movement is done through bearings, which reduces wear. Additionally, we wrote software that monitors the state of the servos at a high frequency and intervenes to limit stress. To make the system accessible, we used affordable off-the-shelf components and parts that can be manufactured using consumer 3D printers. Physical Atari can be built for under $1,000 and has been used for weeks of non-stop reinforcement learning experiments without any mechanical failures. We used it to validate that reinforcement learning algorithms can learn directly on robots and show that even small distribution shifts between learning and deployment can significantly degrade the performance of policies. Our results underscore the importance of on-device adaptation for strong performance on robots.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

What Drives Test-Time Adaptation for CLIP? A Controlled Empirical Study from an Update Perspective

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have become a standard backbone for open-vocabulary recognition, yet their zero-shot predictions remain vulnerable to distribution shifts encountered at deployment. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) has recently been extended to CLIP as a lightweight solution, leading to a rapidly growing body of TTA4CLIP methods. However, empirical progress in this area has largely outpaced our understanding of what truly drives adaptation, where their gains originate, and under which shifts they remain reliable. In this paper, we take a step back from the pursuit of state-of-the-art accuracy and conduct a systematic controlled study of TTA4CLIP. We first organize existing methods into three unified paradigms according to what is updated at test time. We then introduce TTABC, an open-source TTA Benchmark for CLIP, which standardizes evaluation protocols and integrates more than 20 representative methods. Our controlled empirical analysis focuses on three key areas. First, we determine the driving factors in parameter-based methods, revealing that adaptation gains are primarily driven by test-time evidence and reliable proxies rather than heavy optimization. Second, we explore evidence utilization beyond heavy parameter tuning, showing that competitive and efficient performance can be achieved through cross- or current-sample evidence and lightweight prototype updates. Finally, we demonstrate that there is no silver bullet for TTA: no single adaptation paradigm is universally optimal, and the preferred paradigm depends on the nature of shift. We hope our benchmark and study provide a clearer understanding of the current TTA4CLIP landscape and establish a foundation for further research.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Spin correlations, low-energy scales, and anisotropy scaling in kagome frustrated magnets

arXiv:2606.12512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neutron scattering is central to identifying quantum states of magnetic materials. In the search for quantum spin liquids, broad spectral features of inelastic spectra have been cited as evidence for spinon excitations, but can also arise from magnon excitations excitations in the presence of quenched disorder and strong magnon interactions. We develop a new approach to this problem, based on the adiabatic continuity in the $XXZ$ Heisenberg model on geometrically frustrating (GF) lattices as a function of the model's anisotropy. Using this approach, we identify universal features and energies of finite-temperature spin correlators. Focusing on the kagome lattice, we show that the low-energy spin spectral function contains robust, momentum-independent peaks with frequencies: $\omega_1 \approx 3.4 T^*$ and $\omega_2 \approx 6.3 T^*$, where the ``hidden energy scale'' $T^*$ is the characteristic scale of a low-temperature peak in the heat capacity, at which many GF magnets also display spin-glass freezing. We show that the spectral features at low energies $\omega\lesssim T^*$ arise from single-magnon scattering and identify the magnetizations of the respective excitations. We explore the evolution of the spectral features with temperature and discuss extensions to other GF lattices. Our results provide a sharp spectroscopic criterion for interpreting neutron scattering in kagome and other GF quantum magnets.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Path integral control of open quantum systems

arXiv:2410.18635v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate open-loop quantum state preparation for a class of open quantum systems whose dynamics follow a Gorini-Kossakowski-Lindblad-Sudarshan (GKLS) master equation that admits a trajectory-based stochastic representation. The deterministic control objective is reformulated as a stochastic optimal control problem – interpreting stochasticity as a methodological tool akin to stochastic Schrödinger equation unravelings – which situates the problem within the path integral control framework. For the class of GKLS generators under consideration, this reformulation leads to an explicit expression for the optimal control as a weighted average over stochastic quantum trajectories, thereby eliminating the need for gradient evaluations. Building on this theoretical result, we derive a control update rule for piecewise-constant control pulses and demonstrate that adaptive importance sampling progressively enhances the control estimator during optimization, culminating in the algorithm we term Path integral Quantum Control (PiQC). We further introduce an annealed variant of PiQC, wherein a synthetic noise schedule gradually steers open-system trajectories toward closed-system dynamics, enabling high-fidelity unitary state preparation. Numerical studies on a dissipative single-qubit system and a multi-qubit Nuclear Magnetic Resonance model verify that PiQC yields precise open-loop controls and displays robustness to Hamiltonian perturbations. We propose PiQC as a trajectory-based alternative to gradient-based approaches, which might offer a viable solution in quantum control problems where gradient computation is infeasible or computationally demanding.

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

Odds Law: The Decomposition Algebra On How Intelligence Organizes Itself to Solve Difficult Problems Reliably

作者:

arXiv:2606.15712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We ask a structural question: given unreliable elementary problem-solvers, what organizations of them solve hard problems reliably, and what are the limits? We develop a $decomposition~algebra$: elementary solvers are morphisms in a stochastic category, and four combinators (sequential composition, parallel ensembling, verification gating, and recursive reduction) generate the space of compound solvers. We equip this algebra with two homomorphisms, a $reliability$ valuation into the ordered monoid $([0,1],\le)$ and a $cost$ valuation into a commutative semiring, and we derive the composition laws that govern how reliability flows through structure. Our central results are (i) a $verification~odds~law$ (the result that names this report), showing that a verification gate multiplies the odds of correctness by the verifier's likelihood ratio $\Lambda$, so that $k$ conditionally independent gates yield geometric amplification; (ii) a $reliability~amplification~theorem$, giving target reliability $1-\delta$ at $O(\log 1/\delta)$ verification depth whenever $\Lambda>1$; and (iii) a $threshold~dichotomy$: above the critical parameters reliability can be driven arbitrarily close to one at logarithmic cost, while at or below them no amplification is possible. We then show that $self-organization$ is the least fixed point of a monotone improvement operator on the complete lattice of strategies, and that this fixed point equalizes marginal log-odds gain per unit cost. Finally, we prove matching limits: an information ceiling bounds per-gate amplification by a divergence quantity; shared error causes create a strictly positive voting floor, so diversity is $necessary$ for unbounded amplification. Reliability, in short, is neither free nor magical: it is bought with independent information, arranged by composition, and bounded by the verifier.

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

Selecting Samples on Graphs: A Unified Dataset Pruning Framework for Lossless Training Acceleration

The rapid growth of modern training datasets has significantly increased computational cost, motivating dataset pruning~(DP) methods which retain only a subset of informative samples to reduce training cost. Existing pruning criteria typically rely on either intrinsic signals that assess samples independently or extrinsic signals that promote diversity via pairwise relations. While effective in their own specific regimes, each captures only one aspect of sample utility and lacks robustness across different pruning ratios or data distribution. In this work, we present a unified graph-based DP framework. By modeling the dataset as a weighted graph, where node weights encode intrinsic value and edge weights encode extrinsic value, DP can be cast as a Maximum Weight Clique Problem (MWCP). Although MWCP is NP-hard, its structure admits a principled greedy solution based on sample-wise marginal gains. Under a few mild conditions, we further prove that this unified objective enjoys a formal approximation guarantee, which applies to a broad family of importance metrics and provides practical design guidelines. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing DP methods while substantially reducing training cost, reducing training time by over 40\% without sacrificing accuracy on ImageNet-1k with ResNet-50.

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

Moonlight in Latent Space: Chirality and Structural Correspondence Between Beethoven's Op. 27 No. 2 and Machine Learning Mechanisms

arXiv:2606.14612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the three movements of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" (Op. 27 No. 2) instantiate three distinct machine learning architectures – not by analogy, but by structural correspondence. Through computational analysis of the score (entropy, Jensen-Shannon divergence, dissonance, hand distributional overlap, self-similarity matrices, temporal memory decay, and contextual pitch embeddings), we establish four counterintuitive findings: (1) perceived musical "temperature" is governed by throughput, not distributional width; (2) the lightest movement carries the highest dissonance; (3) the movements implement streaming, recurrent, and periodic positional encoding memory architectures; and (4) the same pitch class acquires different contextual identities across movements, analogous to contextual vs.static embeddings in NLP – and unsupervised clustering recovers the tonal structure without music-theoretic input. We construct a reverse sonification (decoding analytical features back into MIDI) and quantify the chirality of the encode-decode cycle: what distributions preserve and sequential ordering destroys. Prompted by a listener's observation that the decoded piece sounds like "mirror isomers that can't be superimposed," the chirality measurement reveals reconstruction loss increasing monotonically with n-gram order. Bootstrap baselines and subsample checks confirm all movements carry sequential information above noise, though raw values are confounded by sample size. Cross-domain comparison shows natural language has higher chirality than music, reflecting stronger sequential constraints.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ARGUS: Stacked Multi-View Identity Mosaic Injection for Subject-Preserving Video Generation

Subject-preserving video generation is not solved by frontal-face similarity alone: a generated person must remain recognizable across motion, large viewpoint changes, expression shifts, occlusion, scale variation, and conflicts among text, first-frame, and identity references. We argue that the central bottleneck is the point-reference paradigm, which collapses identity into a single static observation entangled with pose, accessories, lighting, background, and camera statistics. We introduce Argus, a Wan-based framework centered on Stacked Multi-View Identity Mosaic Injection (SMII). SMII converts MLLM-selected image/video identity evidence into a 3*3 stacked mosaic, synchronizes the mosaic with the current diffusion time, and injects it as negative-time read-only memory in Wan's native token space. This turns identity from an external clean adapter or a single reference image into a compact dynamic distribution. Around SMII, an MLLM Identity Director selects informative identity moments and resolves condition conflicts, while no-cross-pair counterfactual training, Temporal Identity Annealing, and Adaptive Self-Likeness Guidance improve robustness without paired subject-video supervision. We further release HardID-Celeb, a public-figure identity-stress benchmark, and introduce YawScore and OccScore to probe large-yaw and first-frame-occlusion robustness. Argus achieves state-of-the-art results on OpenS2V-Eval Human-Domain, reaching 64.38 Total Score, 71.86 FaceSim, 51.62 NexusScore, and 79.14 NaturalScore. On HardID-Celeb, Argus obtains 76.80 FaceSim and improves YawScore and OccScore by 12.60 and 15.10 points over the strongest baselines, demonstrating that dynamic identity memory and large-scale counterfactual self-supervision are highly effective for subject-preserving video generation.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Singular Vector Finite Element Basis Functions for Tetrahedra in Complex Electromagnetic Geometries

arXiv:2606.18140v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electromagnetic finite element method (FEM) implementations using traditional basis functions struggle to accurately represent field behavior near singular features such as conducting wedges. To combat this, specialized singular basis functions have been introduced to directly model the singular fields in these regions, leading to substantially improved performance. While these efforts have been pursued extensively in 2D, few functions have been developed for 3D elements. In this work, we develop basis functions for this in tetrahedra. Unlike prior functions, these basis functions are additive, meaning they are included alongside the standard vector basis functions to achieve more robust performance. Further, these functions are designed to be adaptable to tetrahedra touching several unique singular features by using combinations of basis functions singular with respect to each node and edge in the element, making them applicable to highly complex geometries. Higher-order interpolatory versions of the basis functions for modeling singular behavior with greater accuracy are also provided. These basis functions lead to substantial improvements in accuracy relative to the standard basis functions, and allow otherwise expensive simulations to be performed at far lower costs. As an application example, we perform simulations to extract critical quantities for designing superconducting qubits that significantly depend on the behavior of singular fields. In Ansys HFSS, this took 21.27 hours and a peak memory usage of 6.23 TB with 800 processors available, while using our singular basis functions achieved comparable results in 196 seconds while using 27.24 GB of memory and only 16 processors. Due to these benefits, our singular basis functions could be applied to enable design optimization of electromagnetic geometries with dominantly singular behavior, such as superconducting qubits.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

An Introduction to the Foundations and Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

arXiv:2603.09818v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article surveys a selection of key conceptual and interpretational developments in quantum mechanics, tracing the theory from its foundational postulates to contemporary discussions of measurement, nonlocality, and the emergence of classicality. Beginning with the structure of Hilbert space and the postulates governing state evolution and measurement, the epistemic stance of the Copenhagen interpretation and its modern reformulations are examined. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument, Bell's theorem, and Hardy's paradox are then discussed as probes of locality and realism, alongside the deterministic but explicitly nonlocal de Broglie-Bohm theory. The measurement problem and the implications of contextuality are analyzed in relation to objective collapse models, which introduce new physical dynamics to account for definite outcomes. Finally, the role of decoherence in the suppression of interference and the emergence of classical behavior is explored, together with the interpretational frameworks of many-worlds and consistent histories. This material aims to provide a coherent introductory overview of how several of the most prominent interpretations address the central concern of what quantum mechanics tells us about the nature of physical reality.

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

Robust Transformer-Based One-Step Stock Index Forecasting via Shifted Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606.15701v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers have shown remarkable success in sequence modeling, yet their direct application to financial time series remains challenging due to noisy signals, short-memory dynamics, and distributional shifts. This paper proposes a modified Transformer architecture for one-step stock index forecasting, combined with advanced learning-rate scheduling and a novel Shifted Data Augmentation (SDA) technique. We evaluate the proposed framework on two benchmark stock index datasets, VN30 and S&P 500. Experimental results demonstrate that cosine annealing with warmup consistently improves forecasting accuracy over the generalized inverse-power scheduler. Furthermore, SDA substantially reduces forecasting errors and run-to-run variability while improving robustness to hyperparameter selection. The combination of cosine annealing scheduling and SDA achieved the best performance on both datasets, indicating that data augmentation can play a more important role than increasing model complexity in Transformer-based financial forecasting. These findings provide a practical and computationally efficient approach for robust stock index forecasting in noisy financial environments.

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

Veriphi: Attack-Guided Neural Network Verification with Dataset-Dependent Training Methods

arXiv:2606.18454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Veriphi, a GPU-accelerated neural network verification system that combines fast adversarial attacks with formal bound certification using alpha,beta-CROWN methods. Through systematic experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 using three training methodologies (standard, adversarial, certified), we demonstrate that training method effectiveness is fundamentally dataset-dependent. Interval Bound Propagation (IBP) achieves 78% certified accuracy on simple MNIST (784 dimensions) but provides negligible certification performance on the more complex CIFAR-10 dataset, where PGD adversarial training dominates with 94% certification at small perturbations. We achieve 5x verification speedup through attack-guided falsification and scale our approach to production-size models (105.8M parameters) for real-world aerospace logistics optimization. Our results challenge the assumption that certified training universally outperforms adversarial training, showing context matters critically for verification strategy selection.

19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

CoDaLoMic: An R package for modeling microbiome compositional and longitudinal data

by Irene Creus-Martí, Andrés Moya, Francisco J. Santonja In this paper we present CoDaLoMic, an R package for analyzing longitudinal and compositional microbiome datasets. The CoDaLoMic package implements three models specifically designed for the analysis of microbiome data that are both compositional and longitudinal. Unlike many existing methods that focus solely on pairwise interactions, CoDaLoMic also captures interactions among groups of bacteria, providing a more robust methodological framework for studying microbial relationships at the community level. In addition, the package facilitates the analysis of microbiome variability in relation to host health status and allows for the identification of groups of taxa that exhibit similar temporal dynamics. Working with time series data makes it possible to understand not only the current state of a microbial community but also its dynamics over time, which is essential for identifying patterns of ecological succession, detecting events of dysbiosis or recovery, and inferring potential causal relationships between taxa. On the other hand, focusing on interactions among groups of bacteria, rather than analyzing only pairwise relationships, enables a more integrated and functionally meaningful view of the microbiome. Many key ecological functions are the result of the collective behavior of functionally related groups of taxa. Two datasets have been considered in CoDaLoMic, one real and one simulated. The real dataset contains the information of the genera present in the microbiome of the Blatella germanica cockroach at 105 time points. The simulated dataset is defined taking Lotka-Volterra structure into account. CoDaLoMic is available at CRAN.

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

Retrieval-Augmented Foundation Models for Water Level Prediction in the Everglades

arXiv:2508.04888v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate water level forecasting in the Everglades is essential for flood mitigation, drought management, water resource planning, and biodiversity conservation. While recent time-series foundation models have shown strong performance on generic tasks (represented in their pre-training), their effectiveness in domain-specific applications remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we curate a domain-specific dataset for water-level forecasting in the Everglades and observe that the performance of current state-of-the-art models remains limited. To address this gap, we leverage a retrieval-augmented mechanism that retrieves analogous multivariate hydrological episodes from an external archive of historical observations to enrich the input context of those pre-trained models. We study two retrieval strategies, statistical similarity-based retrieval and mutual information-based retrieval, and analyze how incorporating retrieved historical contexts affects predictive performance. Extensive experiments show that retrieval augmentation consistently improves long-horizon water level forecasts and yields disproportionately larger gains during extreme events, which is particularly critical for environmental decision-making. Our study provides empirical evidence that analog-based retrieval can benefit pretrained time-series foundation models in environmental science, offering practical insights into their strengths, limitations, and failure modes when applied to hydrological forecasting in the Everglades. Although evaluated in the Everglades, the proposed framework is general and can be applied to other hydrological systems given time series data. The code and data have been made publicly available at https://github.com/rahuul2992000/WaterRAF.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

High coverage, persistent gaps: quality of Antenatal Care and its determinants in Zambia based on the 2024 Demographic and Health Survey.

Abstract Background Evaluating antenatal care (ANC) quality is critical to reducing maternal and neonatal mortality. In Zambia, despite high basic ANC attendance, comprehensive national evidence on the clinical content and quality of services remains limited. This study assessed the coverage of WHO-recommended ANC interventions and identified factors associated with care quality using the latest national data. Methods A cross-sectional analysis was conducted using data from the 2024 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey. The final analytic sample comprised 4,829 women aged 15-49 with a live birth in the preceding 5 years. A composite index of 15 selected, equally weighted WHO-recommended components evaluated clinical assessment, counseling/screening, preventive interventions, and utilization. Survey-weighted Poisson regression estimated adjusted incidence rate ratios (aIRRs) for the count of ANC components received. Results The mean ANC quality score was 12.5 out of 15 (95% CI: 12.4-12.6), and 78.5% (95% CI: 77.0-80.0) of women achieved adequate ANC ([≥] 12/15 components). While individual clinical and counseling coverage generally exceeded 90%, only 47.2% (95% CI: 45.3-49.0) of women initiated care during the first trimester, and just 4.8% (95% CI: 4.1-5.6) achieved [≥] 8 ANC contacts. Maternal education was the strongest and most stable predictor of quality across all models. Compared to no education, higher education was associated with an 8.0% higher expected quality score (aIRR = 1.080, 95% CI: 1.051-1.110). Lower ANC quality was significantly associated with unwanted pregnancies (aIRR = 0.970, 95% CI: 0.956-0.993) and with residence in Western (aIRR = 0.923, 95% CI: 0.897-0.951) and North Western (aIRR = 0.966, 95% CI: 0.937-0.996) provinces. Absence of distance barriers and residence in Eastern, Luapula, and Copperbelt provinces were associated with higher quality scores. Conclusion While average ANC component coverage in Zambia is high, critical gaps persist in early initiation and total contact frequency. Care adequacy is strongly influenced by maternal education, relationship status, pregnancy intention, and regional inequities. These findings underscore the need for interventions targeted at uneducated women, preventing unintended pregnancies, and underserved regions such as Western and North Western Provinces. Keywords: Antenatal care quality, ANC content, Zambia, maternal education.

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

Constitutional Value Potentials: reading and steering internal priority margins in language models

arXiv:2606.15420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A constitution tells a language model what to value, but little tells us whether it does. Adherence is judged from outputs, and output evidence is most fragile on value conflicts, where what matters is not which value a model mentions but which one it is willing to sacrifice. We provide evidence that this arbitration can be read from activations in a structured margin readout. We introduce Constitutional Value Potentials (CVP). For each value we learn a scalar potential from the hidden state: an internal pressure to preserve that value, supervised not by the prompt but by an independent judge's verdict on which value the model's own response actually preserved. The signed difference of two potentials is a priority margin. A constitutional clause becomes the claim that a margin stays positive, and a single monitor score flags when it does not. The monitor predicts conflict violations with AUROC up to 0.95, beats a strong hidden-state probe, and generalizes to held-out synthetic conflicts across three Qwen2.5 scales. The signal appears as the answer begins, from the prompt tail and first response token. Read this early, the same signal reveals whether an adversarial priority hack has actually pushed the model toward a violation, rather than only whether the prompt looks adversarial. The same directions also support intervention tests: under selected steering settings, moving along a value direction shifts judged trade-offs in the intended direction. Together, these results suggest that some constitution-relevant priorities are accessible as activation-space margins, rather than only as output behavior.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reasoning Text-to-Video Retrieval for Operating Room Clips via Action-Driven Digital Twins

Text-to-video retrieval in operating rooms (OR) is an enabling technology for OR safety, as it allows stakeholders to retrieve and inspect recordings of specific events. However, because the most safety-critical events may not follow the common structure, to unlock its full potential text-to-video retrieval must be able to handle implicit queries that require reasoning to identify the right video (e.g., the step right before clipping). However, existing methods rely on global embeddings that cannot reason over such queries. We propose OR3, a text-to-video retrieval method that converts clips into action-driven digital twins (ActDTs), grouping concurrent subject-action-object triplets under non-overlapping temporal intervals. Moreover, rather than cross-modal matching through paired encoders, OR3 performs imagination-based retrieval where an LLM generates hypothetical ActDTs from queries. This enables intra-modal matching via a single encoder trained with ActDT-tailored hard negatives. Finally, evidence-grounded refinement revises imagined ActDTs based on discrepancies with top candidates to capture procedure-specific patterns. We construct a benchmark from MM-OR with 276 implicit queries across four reasoning categories over 386 clips from robotic knee procedures. OR3 achieves 57.6 R@1 and 77.3 R@5, outperforming the strongest baseline. These results demonstrate that OR3 enables fine-grained discrimination between visually similar OR video clips through temporal action reasoning.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Using Explainability as a Training-Time Reliability Signal for Efficient ECG Classification

arXiv:2606.12252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training deep neural networks for clinical time-series analysis is computationally demanding, yet many healthcare settings lack the resources required for repeated model development and deployment. This challenge is particularly evident in electrocardiogram classification, where large datasets and long training schedules make efficiency practically important. Progressive Data Dropout reduces training cost by excluding samples from gradient updates once they are learned, but it relies on model confidence and may retain samples that are difficult due to noise or ambiguity rather than useful signal. In this work, we introduce ERTS, an explainability-based reliability training signal for efficient ECG classification. ERTS uses explanation quality during training to distinguish between informative and unreliable uncertainty. Building on progressive data selection, we compute Grad-CAM attention maps for candidate samples and derive a focus score that measures whether model predictions are supported by coherent and localised patterns. Samples with low focus are filtered out, while those with meaningful attention are prioritised for gradient updates. We evaluate ERTS across three ECG datasets and multiple backbone architectures, showing consistent improvements in macro-F1 alongside reduced effective training cost. These results suggest that explanation quality can serve as a practical signal for improving both efficiency and reliability in clinical time-series learning. Code will be released.