Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Fully Quantum Algorithm for the 1-dimensional linear Lattice Boltzmann Method

arXiv:2606.16514v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A fully quantum algorithm for solving the one-dimensional linear advection-diffusion equation using the Lattice Boltzmann method as a numerical procedure is presented in this work. We start by presenting a state of the art of the current usage of quantum algorithms for solving ordinary and partial differential equations. We then describe two algorithms for the one-dimensional Lattice Boltzmann method with two degrees of freedom. The first one is an existing hybrid quantum-classical algorithm with measurements at each time step, and the second one is our improved version, viz. a fully quantum algorithm where only one measurement is needed at the end of the algorithm. The fully quantum algorithm is first executed on a quantum simulator and then compared with a classical approach. Subsequently, the fully quantum algorithm is run on a quantum system with 133 qubits to investigate the effect of noise and the depth of the circuit on the output state. We find fluctuations in the final result due to the decoherence noise of the qubits.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

MorphoStat: A Statistics-Aware Pipeline for Morphological Profiling Analysis

作者:

High-content imaging produces thousands of morphological measurements per cell. Interpreting these measurements requires normalization to remove plate effects, statistical tests selected on the basis of data distribution, and control over false discoveries across many features tested at once. MorphoStat is an open-source Python pipeline that applies this sequence of steps automatically. Given a CSV file from CellProfiler or a compatible imaging platform, it removes low-quality wells, normalizes each plate against DMSO controls using a MAD-scaled z-score, routes each feature to a parametric or nonparametric test based on a distributional check, applies Benjamini Hochberg correction, and writes out results and publication-ready figures. On the BBBC021 benchmark (MCF-7 breast-cancer cells, 632 wells, 473 features), MorphoStat recovered 12 of 13 known mechanism-of-action classes in principal component space, confirming that the normalization and statistical routing work as intended. The tool is available at https://github.com/Almunthir334/morphostat (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20354069) under the MIT license.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

GPU-accelerated semidefinite programming for causal games

arXiv:2606.20519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The process matrix formalism describes quantum correlations in scenarios without a fixed causal order between local laboratories. Operational signatures of such correlations can be investigated through causal games. A paradigmatic example is the Guess-Your-Neighbour's-Input game, in which two parties attempt to guess each other's inputs. Correlations compatible with any definite, or probabilistically mixed, causal order cannot achieve a winning probability exceeding $1/2$. The best process-matrix strategy currently known attains a value of approximately $0.6218$ using local dimension $d=5$, while the strongest known dimension-independent upper bound is $0.7592$. In this work, we investigate whether increasing the local dimension beyond $d = 5$ can narrow this gap. To this end, we employ a see-saw optimization scheme in which each step is formulated as a semidefinite program. For scalability, we develop a custom implementation of the SCS solver in which the dominant computational cost, the projection onto the positive-semidefinite cone, is offloaded to a GPU, yielding a six-fold speedup. Using this implementation, we explore local dimensions up to $d = 8$, and we do not find significant improvements over the value at $d=5$. Our results suggest that either qualitatively different strategies are required to approach the known upper bound, or that the bound itself is not tight.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The Protective Role of Belonging and Socioeconomic Status in Dropout Intent Among Minority Ethnic Students: A Mixed Methods Study

Improving minority ethnic student retention is a global higher education priority. This mixed-methods study investigated how institutional belonging and socioeconomic status interact to shape dropout intentions among minority university students in the UK (N = 182). Quantitative results revealed that perceived course difficulty and lower subjective socioeconomic status were the strongest predictors of dropout intent. While the interaction between socioeconomic status and difficulty was non-significant, qualitative accounts showed distinct structural vulnerabilities. Financial strain restricted social integration, turning socioeconomic disparities into campus isolation. Conversely, representative curricula, diverse peer networks, and stable cultural in-groups (e.g., religious affiliations, living in the parental home) functioned as essential psychological buffers against academic exhaustion and alienation. Universities must shift from transactional models to sustained structural equity to protect vulnerable student groups.

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

C2FL: Clustered Continual Federated Learning under Spatial and Temporal Drift

arXiv:2606.18003v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collective Adaptive Systems (CAS) increasingly rely on machine learning to let each node learn from locally sensed data, aligning its behavior with the surrounding environment. Scaling this intelligence, however, raises fundamental challenges: sensed data is often privacy-sensitive, preventing centralized collection; nodes are mobile, traversing regions where nearby nodes perceive similar phenomena while distant ones observe radically different conditions, creating natural spatial clusters; and these distributions evolve over time due to mobility, introducing temporal drift that makes local models progressively stale. These dynamics arise across domains - vehicular sensing, drone-based monitoring, smartphone crowdsensing - yet the interplay of privacy, spatial heterogeneity, and temporal drift severely undermines conventional learning strategies. Therefore, we propose C2FL, a fully distributed Federated Learning (FL) approach where nodes self-organize into learning groups through spatial clustering, reflecting the geographic structure of the environment. To counteract temporal drift, each node combines experience replay with a dwell-time-aware adaptive averaging step, progressively incorporating the regional consensus as it remains longer within the same area, while preserving previously acquired knowledge under evolving distributions. We evaluate our approach on synthetic experiments that systematically reproduce spatial and temporal shifts, showing that standard federated strategies degrade significantly under these conditions and that our method restores robust collective adaptation.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Uptake of minimal intervention dentistry among Romanian dental professionals and trainees: an exploratory cluster and network analysis

Background Minimal intervention dentistry (MID) is promoted as a prevention-oriented approach to caries management, but its integration into routine practice remains uneven. Existing research often examines MID-related knowledge, attitudes, or practices separately, offering limited insight into how these dimensions co-occur within individuals or are conditionally associated. Methods This exploratory cross-sectional survey examined multidimensional MID uptake among 327 Romanian dental students, residents, and specialists from five university centers. Ten MID-related scores were analyzed, including nine formative composites and one single-item peer-norm indicator. K-means clustering examined uptake profiles, and Gaussian graphical model network analysis with stepwise BIC selection examined conditional associations among constructs. Results A two-cluster solution was highly reproducible but modestly separated (n = 144 vs n = 183; average silhouette width = 0.13; mean Jaccard similarities = 0.92 and 0.94). The profiles reflected broadly lower versus higher uptake across knowledge-, belief-, and practice-related dimensions, while perceived peer norms for hygiene instruction showed the opposite pattern. Profile membership was not clearly patterned by gender, age band, professional status, or clinical experience. The primary network included 14 non-zero edges out of 36 possible edges, all positive; the strongest partial association linked diagnostic knowledge to diagnostic methods used in practice (partial r = .22). Familiarity, diagnostic knowledge, and general practices occupied more interconnected positions descriptively, but limited centrality stability precluded interpreting them as intervention targets. Conclusions MID uptake in this sample was better represented as a continuum of modestly differentiated profiles than as sharply separated participant types. The findings provide an exploratory map of multidimensional MID uptake and may inform future survey validation, implementation research, and dental education studies. Because the study was cross-sectional, convenience-sampled, and based on self-report, findings should be interpreted as hypothesis-generating rather than causal or population-representative.

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

GRACE: Step-Level Benchmark for Faithful Reasoning over Context

Many reasoning tasks require models to reason over input context, from document-grounded question answering to rule-based deduction. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting produces traces that appear transparent, yet individual steps can silently deviate from the source evidence, even when the final answer is correct. Existing methods detect hallucinations at the response level but fail to identify where in the chain a failure occurs or what type it is. We introduce GRACE, the first human-annotated step-level faithfulness benchmark with a data-driven error taxonomy for context-grounded textual reasoning. GRACE covers CoT traces from 10 models across 4 source datasets, with each step annotated for faithfulness, error category, and natural language explanation. A data-driven taxonomy, discovered bottom-up via unsupervised clustering, organizes failures into two tracks: GRACE-Inference (deductive errors) and GRACE-Grounding (factual grounding errors), with four categories each. The evaluation set is human-annotated and challenging by design. Our experiments reveal substantial headroom for current models. In addition, integrating step-level faithfulness signals into reinforcement learning pipelines improves both downstream accuracy and reasoning reliability.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Neural Posterior Estimation of Terrain Parameters from Radar Sounder Data

arXiv:2605.08179v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Radar sounders are electromagnetic instruments that can probe deep into the subsurface of Earth and other planetary bodies by processing the echo of transmitted radar waves. Conventional approaches for analyzing such data rely on approximate assumptions and often produce point estimates that ignore parameter correlations as well as galactic and measurement noise. We propose a simulation-based inference approach to terrain parameter inversion from radar sounder data, where synthetic observations from a GPU-based simulator are used to train a neural network-based density estimator for neural posterior estimation (NPE). By explicitly conditioning on reference surface assumptions, the proposed framework allows systematic evaluation of posterior robustness to reference surface variability. We demonstrate that our NPE model is well calibrated on simulated data and transferable to real Mars radar profiles, where we analyze terrain parameters using literature-informed reference values.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Beyond Single Biomarkers: A Graph Neural Network Framework for Multivariable Prediction of Clinical Outcomes from Brain Imaging

Understanding brain-behavior relationships requires models capturing the distributed, interactive, and multiscale nature of neural systems. Traditional univariate approaches and single-biomarker models are inherently limited in this context, as they fail to represent dependencies across regions and the hierarchical organization of brain networks. In this study, we propose a graph-based multivariable framework for brain imaging analysis that integrates key organizational principles of brain function-including segregation, integration, modularity, and temporal dynamics-within a unified graph neural network architecture. The framework represents brain data as hierarchical graphs, where node features encode regional activation and temporal variability, and graph structure captures interactions within and between functional modules. The proposed approach is evaluated using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data as a case study, where subject-specific brain graphs are constructed from task-based recordings acquired shortly after cochlear implant activation to predict speech understanding outcomes one year later. Under leave-one-subject-out validation, the model demonstrates strong predictive performance (R = 0.73, p < 0.001), outperforming previously reported single-biomarker approaches. Perturbation-based analyses further show that predictions are driven by distributed patterns of activity and interaction across regions and modalities, rather than isolated features. These results illustrate the capability of the proposed framework to capture complex brain organization and highlight its potential as a generalizable platform for multivariable analysis and prediction in neuroimaging applications beyond the specific clinical use case considered here.

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

A Decision-Theoretic View of Test-Time Training: When, How Far, and Which Directions to Adapt

arXiv:2606.15569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time training (TTT) adapts a pretrained model to each prompt via parameter updates, improving accuracy under pretraining-to-test distribution shifts. Yet, its performance often suffers from instability and sensitivity to hyperparameters such as update steps and subspace. We explain this behavior through a decision-theoretic lens, treating TTT as implicit Bayesian inference in the kernel regime. Under a Gaussian process benchmark, we show that TTT reduces prediction error when updates are spectrally matched to the prompt's signal-to-noise ratio and aligned with query-relevant eigen-directions. This perspective underpins the following results: (1) we show when fixed update steps and subspaces fail under distribution shifts, motivating adaptive strategies; (2) we prove that selecting update steps via prompt evidence admits a PAC-Bayes guarantee against overfitting; and (3) we characterize the Bayes-optimal update subspace under a linear-Gaussian correction model, yielding a scoring rule for selecting Transformer blocks and heads. Our theory helps explain the empirical instability of TTT, taking a step toward principled guidance for when, how far, and which directions to adapt.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Europe as science superpower: what it will take to rival the US and China

Amid chaos in US science and geopolitical turmoil, Europe wants to position itself as a research haven — but questions about funding and innovation remain. Amid chaos in US science and geopolitical turmoil, Europe wants to position itself as a research haven — but questions about funding and innovation remain.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

How rare are Markovian quantum dynamics?

arXiv:2606.24511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A profound understanding of decoherence and dissipation in quantum dynamics is crucial for the realistic modeling of the evolution of quantum systems. In open quantum dynamics one distinguishes between a memoryless, so-called Markovian evolution and dynamics incorporating memory effects, termed non-Markovian. In this work we study how prevalent memory effects are in the set of all such dynamics. We thus investigate how often a Markovian description is applicable. This question is approached by investigating randomly generated two-step qubit dynamics with respect to different concepts and witnesses of non-Markovianity. We observe that almost all dynamics are non-Markovian, and only a small (yet finite) fraction is Markovian. Furthermore, we study how this proportion changes when considering certain subclasses such as lower rank or mixed-unitary dynamics. Importantly, our results shed light on the relative ratios of – and interrelations between – the sets of dynamics that are non-Markovian with respect to different criteria. Finally, we investigate the fraction of dynamics in which the memory effects are necessarily of quantum nature and establish a connection between two recently developed concepts that characterize the quantumness of memory in non-Markovian dynamics.

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

Detecting Hate and Inflammatory Content in Bengali Memes: A New Multimodal Dataset and Co-Attention Framework

Internet memes have become a dominant form of expression on social media, including within the Bengali speaking community. While often humorous, memes can also be exploited to spread offensive, harmful, and inflammatory content targeting individuals and groups. Detecting this type of content is exceptionally challenging due to its satirical, subtle, and culturally specific nature. This problem is magnified for low-resource languages like Bengali, as existing research predominantly focuses on high-resource languages. To address this critical research gap, we introduce Bn-HIB (Bangla Hate Inflammatory Benign), a novel dataset containing 3,247 manually annotated Bengali memes categorized as Benign, Hate, or Inflammatory. Significantly, Bn- HIB is the first dataset to distinguish inflammatory content from direct hate speech in Bengali memes. Furthermore, we propose the MCFM (Multi-Modal Co-Attention Fusion Model), a simple yet effective architecture that mutually analyses both the visual and textual elements of a meme. MCFM employs a co-attention mechanism to identify and fuse the most critical features from each modality, leading to a more accurate classification. Our experiments show that MCFM significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art models on the Bn-HIB dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in this nuanced task. To facilitate reproducibility and future research, the Bn-HIB dataset has been made publicly available through Mendeley Data. Warning: This work contains material that may be disturbing to some audience members. Viewer discretion is advised

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

MET-Bench: Multimodal Entity Tracking for Evaluating the Limitations of Vision-Language and Reasoning Models

Entity state tracking is a necessary component of world modeling that requires maintaining coherent representations of entities over time. Previous work has benchmarked entity tracking performance in purely text-based tasks. We introduce MET-Bench, a multimodal entity tracking benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of vision-language models to track entity states across modalities. Using three domains, we assess how effectively current models integrate textual and image-based state updates. Our findings reveal a significant performance gap between text-based and image-based entity tracking. We empirically show this discrepancy primarily stems from deficits in visual reasoning rather than perception. We further show that explicit text-based reasoning strategies improve performance, yet limitations remain, especially in long-horizon multimodal tasks. We apply reinforcement learning to improve entity tracking in open-source VLMs. This yields substantial in-modality gains, but does not transfer robustly across input modalities. Our results highlight the need for improved multimodal representations and reasoning techniques to bridge the gap between textual and visual entity tracking.

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

Runtime Enforcement of Hybrid System Properties

arXiv:2606.12022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Runtime enforcement has emerged as a promising approach for ensuring the safety of autonomous and cyber-physical systems operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. Unlike traditional runtime verification, runtime enforcement actively intervenes during execution to prevent property violations by modifying unsafe system behaviors. Existing enforcement frameworks primarily focus on untimed or discrete-time specifications and are often limited to delaying or suppressing events, making them inadequate for reactive systems exhibiting complex continuous dynamics. In this paper, we propose a runtime enforcement framework where safety requirements are modeled using Hybrid Automata (HA). The framework combines discrete-event editing with continuous-time monitoring to support enforcement actions such as suppression, delay, and insertion of events at arbitrary time instants. Upon observing environmental inputs, the automaton is initialized, and runtime reachability analysis is used to synthesize safe corrective actions. We formally define the enforcement problem for safety hybrid automata, establish enforceability conditions, and present an online enforcement algorithm for reactive systems. A detailed case study on an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach in maintaining safety properties under unsafe controller behaviors. Experimental results show that the framework introduces minimal computational overhead while ensuring continuous compliance with safety requirements in real time.

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

Cost-Optimal LLM Routing with Limited User Feedback under User Satisfaction Guarantees

arXiv:2606.19376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference costs for large language model (LLM) applications are rapidly growing, driven by surging demand and rising infrastructure cost. Users expect high-quality responses, and in commercial settings this is formally codified in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), creating a fundamental tension between cost and quality. Recent progress on cost-aware LLM request routing has shown potential to resolve this tension, but existing approaches rely on complete feedback signals, offline training, extensive per-workload tuning, and most lack SLA guarantees or inference-time adaptivity. We introduce SLARouter, an online routing algorithm that learns a cost-optimal policy from the sparse, one-sided user feedback available in production systems. SLARouter provides theoretical guarantees for both cost optimality and strict SLA compliance. Experiments across a wide range of LLM benchmarks show that SLARouter satisfies SLA constraints without the need for per-benchmark tuning, reducing operating cost by up to 2.2x over existing baselines.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp connectivity bounds for the vacant set of random interlacements

arXiv:2504.02777v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider percolation of the vacant set of random interlacements at intensity $u$ in dimensions three and higher, and derive lower bounds on the truncated two-point function for all values of $u>0$. These bounds are sharp up to principal exponential order for all $u$ in dimension three and all $u \neq u_\ast$ in higher dimensions, where $u_*$ refers to the critical parameter of the model, and they match the upper bounds derived in the article arXiv:2503.14497. In dimension three, our results further imply that the truncated two-point function grows at large distances $x$ at a rate that depends on $x$ only through its Euclidean norm, which offers a glimpse of the expected (Euclidean) invariance of the scaling limit at criticality. The rate function is atypical, it incurs a logarithmic correction and comes with an explicit pre-factor that converges to $0$ as the parameter $u$ approaches the critical point $u_*$ from either side. A particular challenge stems from the combined effects of lack of monotonicity due to the truncation in the super-critical phase, and the precise (rotationally invariant) controls we seek, that measure the effects of a certain "harmonic humpback" function. Among others, their derivation relies on rather fine estimates for hitting probabilities of the random walk in arbitrary direction $e$, which witness this invariance at the discrete level, and preclude straightforward applications of projection arguments.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Opportunistic CKD Screening in Hospitalized Patients

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

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Collaborative Multi-Modal Coding for High-Quality 3D Generation

3D content inherently encompasses multi-modal characteristics and can be projected into different modalities (e.g., RGB images, RGBD, and point clouds). Each modality exhibits distinct advantages in 3D asset modeling: RGB images contain vivid 3D textures, whereas point clouds define fine-grained 3D geometries. However, most existing 3D-native generative architectures either operate predominantly within single-modality paradigms-thus overlooking the complementary benefits of multi-modality data-or restrict themselves to 3D structures, thereby limiting the scope of available training datasets. To holistically harness multi-modalities for 3D modeling, we present TriMM, the first feed-forward 3D-native generative model that learns from basic multi-modalities (e.g., RGB, RGBD, and point cloud). Specifically, 1) TriMM first introduces collaborative multi-modal coding, which integrates modality-specific features while preserving their unique representational strengths. 2) Furthermore, auxiliary 2D and 3D supervision are introduced to raise the robustness and performance of multi-modal coding. 3) Based on the embedded multi-modal code, TriMM employs a triplane latent diffusion model to generate 3D assets of superior quality, enhancing both the texture and the geometric detail. Extensive experiments on multiple well-known datasets demonstrate that TriMM, by effectively leveraging multi-modality, achieves competitive performance with models trained on large-scale datasets, despite utilizing a small amount of training data. Furthermore, we conduct additional experiments on recent RGB-D datasets, verifying the feasibility of incorporating other multi-modal datasets into 3D generation.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frozen Foundation-Model Embeddings Discard Small-Lesion Signal in Chest Radiography: Implications for Pre-Deployment Evaluation

Frozen vision-transformer (ViT) foundation-model embeddings increasingly serve as the substrate for downstream chest-radiography (CXR) pipelines, yet where small-scale, low-contrast signal is retained or lost in the frozen forward pass has not been systematically quantified across architectures, pretraining domains, and objectives. We probed five frozen ViTs (RAD-DINO, DINOv2-B/14, DINOv3 ViT-7B, BiomedCLIP, MedSigLIP) and a frozen DINO-pretrained ResNet-50 architectural control across three large CXR cohorts (NIH-CXR14, MIMIC-CXR, Emory-CXR; aggregate pool n=492,724) and ChestX-Det10 (n=3,543; 1,462 small-lesion bounding boxes across Calcification, Nodule, Mass). Each model was evaluated with a small-scale-perturbation panel and a region-aware bounding-box-stratified probe on real lesions, comparing three pooling modes from the same forward pass: classification token (CLS), patch-mean (mean over all final-layer patch tokens), and bounding-box-restricted patch-local. On the perturbation panel, CLS embeddings sat at the chance floor (area under the ROC curve [AUC] 0.500-0.524); patch-mean was indistinguishable from CLS on iso-blur and reticular-fine cells but rose with CLS on larger directional-blur footprints, while disease AUC on globally decided tasks ranged 0.642-0.913. Patch-local probes recovered AUC ~1.0 from the same forward pass (per-model mean improvement +0.412 to +0.488); the ResNet-50 control reproduced the chance floor. On ChestX-Det10, image-level CLS classification showed within-class small-versus-large stratum gaps up to +0.243 AUC; bounding-box-level patch-local pooling on the same forward pass recovered AUC >= 0.899 on every (model x class) cell. Frozen ViT embeddings silently suppress small-scale signal at the global-aggregation step; the signal is recoverable from patch tokens conditional on a region of interest.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

A Simplex Witness Certificate and Escape Force for Constant Collapse in Variational Autoencoders

arXiv:2605.18224v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study exact constant collapse in variational autoencoders: the deterministic encoder mean becomes independent of the input. The prior remains the standard Gaussian. Before VAE training, we select a fixed teacher posterior from a GMM-based view of the data and attach a fixed latent-only simplex witness to the encoder mean. This construction yields two linked objects. The first is a certificate: if the witness prediction improves on the best constant predictor of the teacher, the encoder mean cannot be input-independent constant. The second is a local escape direction: on the collapsed manifold, the teacher residual gives a sample-dependent descent direction for the alignment loss. For any full-support teacher posterior, the same geometry also gives a closed-form latent code with zero teacher-witness alignment error. Its scaled versions trace a margin-energy path from the constant predictor to the exact teacher code, which quantifies non-collapse inside the protected witness subspace. We instantiate the method on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100. With searched unsupervised PCA-GMM teachers, vanilla VAEs fail the teacher-witness certificate in all five seeds on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, while RST variants pass in all five seeds. Under collapse-stress settings with \(\beta_{\mathrm{KL}}\in\{2,4,8\}\), vanilla VAE again fails in all seeds, whereas RST-alpha-prefit remains certificate-positive. Escape trajectories on both natural-image datasets increase the witness margin from a low-margin initialization and exhibit nonzero teacher-induced gradient norms. The analysis is confined to exact constant collapse of the encoder mean; generation quality, decoder use, and other collapse modes remain separate questions.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Frequency-dependent cognitive effects of Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) improves levodopa-induced motor complications and cardinal motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), but stimulation frequency may differentially shape outcomes. This is evident for axial and gait symptoms, which may respond differently to lower-frequency stimulation. Whether frequency-dependent effects extend to cognition remains unclear. Objective: To investigate the cognitive effects of DBS at distinct frequencies in PD. Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis (PROSPERO - CRD42024618253). PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE were searched for studies assessing cognitive outcomes under different stimulation frequencies. Eight cognitive domains were defined: verbal fluency, cognitive flexibility, executive control, working memory, attention, processing speed, episodic memory, and time processing. Multilevel random-effects meta-analyses were performed, with effect sizes expressed as Hedges' g. Results: Forty-three studies met the inclusion criteria, the majority (n = 31) involving STN-DBS. Twenty-one STN-DBS studies, including 355 patients, were included in the meta-analysis. Compared with HFS ([&ge;] 130 Hz), lower frequencies (4-80 Hz) were associated with better verbal fluency (g = 0.27) and cognitive flexibility (g = 0.38), with consistent effects across sensitivity and leave-one-out analyses. Accuracy-based executive control measures also favored lower-frequency stimulation. OFF-stimulation comparisons showed a concordant pattern. Evidence for other targets (PPN and NBM) was limited. Conclusions: Lower-frequency STN-DBS was associated with modest benefits in specific cognitive domains compared with HFS. These findings highlight the need for future research to determine how frequency interacts with stimulation location and symptom-specific networks to shape cognitive and cognitive-motor outcomes in PD.

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

VISA: VLM-Guided Instance Semantic Auditing for 3D Occupancy World Models

Semantic 3D occupancy provides a voxelized world state for autonomous driving and robot decision making, but object and rare-class errors can affect free-space interpretation, collision checking, and temporal state propagation. We show that a common VLM strategy, aligning 3D voxel or object features with crop-caption embeddings, improves text-space similarity without reliably improving closed-set occupancy mIoU. Motivated by this mismatch, we propose VISA, a training-time semantic auditing approach for existing occupancy world models. VISA queries an offline VLM on a representative crop of each physical object instance, obtains a structured audit with class hypotheses, plausible confusions, reliability, attributes, and evidence, and propagates it along the object track. The audit is grounded to matched 3D object voxels and distilled into semantic logits through reliability-weighted taxonomy, attribute-factor, and scene-level audit graph losses, while inference remains unchanged and requires no VLM. On nuScenes, averaged across three runs, VISA improves OccWorld from 19.06 to 20.05 mIoU and GaussianWorld from 21.36 to 21.91 mIoU; on GaussianWorld, object mIoU improves from 18.18 to 19.16 and rare-class mIoU from 15.60 to 16.79. These results suggest that VLMs are better suited to closed-set occupancy as reliability-aware semantic auditors than as generic caption-embedding targets.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Development of iADJUST: a theory-informed, patient co-designed digital psychological intervention for adjustment in chronic kidney disease

Background: Psychological distress is common in chronic kidney disease (CKD) and is associated with reduced quality of life, treatment non-adherence, and worse clinical outcomes. Distress in CKD is also linked to difficulties adjusting to the demands of illness management. Despite this, psychological support remains inconsistently integrated within kidney care pathways, and existing interventions often lack clear theoretical specification and explicit targeting of mechanisms underpinning adjustment to CKD. Objectives: To describe the systematic development of iADJUST, a theory-informed patient co-designed digital psychological intervention targeting key cognitive and behavioural mechanisms involved in adjustment to CKD. Methods: Intervention development was guided by the Medical Research Council framework for complex interventions. A structured, iterative process integrated empirical evidence, psychological theory, and patient and public involvement and engagement. The Common-Sense Model of Self-Regulation and cognitive behavioural theories informed the identification of modifiable maintaining mechanisms associated with adjustment to CKD. Intervention components were mapped onto these mechanisms and refined through co-design with people living with CKD. Results: iADJUST is a six-session self-guided digital psychological intervention delivered over 12 weeks and supplemented by therapist contact. The intervention targets illness-related uncertainty, fatigue-related activity dysregulation, catastrophic what-if thinking, self-critical evaluation, and behavioural withdrawal. It integrates psychoeducation, cognitive and behavioural strategies, maintenance planning, and elements from acceptance and commitment therapy and compassion-focused approaches. Content is delivered through video, audio, and guided tasks and activities. Conclusion: iADJUST provides a theory-informed, evidence-based psychological intervention for CKD explicitly mapping intervention components to maintaining cognitive and behavioural mechanisms implicated in adjustment. Feasibility evaluation is underway.