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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

IHBench: Evaluating Post-Interruption Recovery in Voice Agents with Structured Workflows

arXiv:2606.19595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice agents deployed in structured workflows (customer service, healthcare scheduling, account management) must handle frequent user interruptions while maintaining progress through multi-step procedures. Existing benchmarks for speech-capable models focus on the timing of interruptions: barge-in detection, endpointing, and turn-taking dynamics. They leave unmeasured what happens after the interruption: does the agent resume the workflow at the correct step? Does it address the user's interjection? Does it avoid re-delivering content the user already heard? We introduce IHBench (Interruption Handling Benchmark), a benchmark that evaluates post-interruption recovery in voice agents executing state-machine-driven workflows across 10 enterprise domains. Six interruption types are injected at controlled points mid-utterance, with per-interruption evaluation rubrics generated alongside the data. Each interruption is scored on two axes: task fulfillment and recovery quality. We evaluate 27 audio-language model configurations from OpenAI, Google, and the open-weight community. Models vary widely, and recovery quality depends strongly on the interruption type. Across our experiments, closed-weight models are consistently more robust to interruptions than open-weight ones: they win far more often on task fulfillment, degrade roughly 3.3x more slowly as conversations grow longer, and show no audio-versus-text modality gap, whereas the open-weight models lose ground on all three. A human study validates the LLM judge against human annotators, and a cross-benchmark analysis against AudioMultiChallenge indicates that recovery quality is a largely distinct capability axis.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Disentangling Hallucinations: Orthogonal Semantic Projection for Robust Interpretability

As Vision-Language Models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, the trustworthiness of their explanations becomes crucial. Explainable AI (XAI) methods for Vision-Language Models often suffer from semantic hallucination, where attribution maps highlight prominent image regions even when prompted with incorrect text descriptions (e.g., highlighting a dog when prompted ``cat''). Although this problem is widespread, a formal mathematical analysis of XAI methods and CLIP embeddings is largely missing in the literature. We demonstrate that this phenomenon is not specific to a single architecture but is a fundamental consequence of Linear Semantic Leakage in high-dimensional embedding spaces. We propose a unified theoretical framework, Linear Semantic Attribution (LSA), which generalizes across discriminative methods. We introduce OSP, a geometric intervention that utilizes the residual property of OMP to disentangle unique semantic signals from shared concepts. We prove theoretically and demonstrate empirically that OSP minimizes hallucination by orthogonalizing the query vector against distractor concepts, rendering the attribution model blind to shared features while preserving fidelity for correct prompts. Our code is available at: https://github.com/emirhanbilgic/Orthogonal-Semantic-Projection

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Beyond Layer Importance in Layer-wise Sparsity: An Inter-Layer Perturbation-Absorption Perspective

The considerable layer-wise redundancy in large language models (LLMs) has established non-uniform sparsity allocation across layers as the standard pruning approach for efficient compression. Existing layer-wise allocation methods that estimate allocation strategy from local signals such as activation outliers or weight spectra mainly derive from local layer importance, whereas the final post-pruning performance is also influenced by the network's subsequent compensatory capacity. In this paper, we directly characterize this property through controlled perturbation experiments. We make the following empirical findings. First, layers exhibit highly heterogeneous responses to pruning-scale perturbations. In most cases, early layers amplify perturbations, while middle and late layers actively absorb them, with relative L2 drift decreasing monotonically across depth and direction realigning toward the unperturbed hidden-state trajectory. Second, absorption is a large-perturbation phenomenon. Under small perturbations the network exhibits amplification across all layers, and the transition to absorption occurs smoothly as perturbation magnitude grows to pruning scale. This enriches the linearized accumulation theory underlying related works. Building on these findings, we define an absorption coefficient per layer and propose absorption-aware correction, an orthogonal augmentation that improves OWL and AlphaPruning by reducing perplexity by 7.13% and boosting zero-shot accuracy by 1.02% across multiple model families at 70% sparsity.

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

UniDDT: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Decoupled Diffusion Transformer

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have emerged as a critical direction for general-purpose multimodal intelligence, integrating understanding and generation into a single framework. However, existing UMMs face prominent challenges: (1) the inherent learning conflicts between visual understanding and generation tasks, leading to suboptimal modeling in both tasks; (2) different understanding and generation visual spaces impeding scalability; (3) over-reliance on task-specific data that neglects the duality of text-image understanding and generation. To address these challenges, we propose UniDDT, which leverages a Noisy ViT encoder along with an LLM to unify semantic encoding for visual generation and understanding tasks, while employing a separate diffusion decoder to decouple diffusion decoding from text decoding. With this Noisy ViT encoder, UniDDT is able to leverage the latent space as a unified visual representation, enabling seamless compatibility between understanding and generation tasks. Thus, the scalability within the generation tasks and the semantic expressiveness within understanding tasks can be balanced. Also, we construct dual data structures from the same image-text pairs, fostering interdependence between the generation and understanding data to exploit their inherent duality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniDDT achieves effective unification of multimodal understanding and generation with enhanced semantic consistency and scalability. For visual generation tasks, our UniDDT achieves 0.87 GenEval score and 86.9 DPG overall score. For multimodal understanding tasks, our UniDDT achieves 1699.5 score on MME benchmark and 76.5 overall score on SEEDbench.

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

An RRAM-based Hardware Implementation of a Radial Basis Function Neuron for Edge Classifiers

arXiv:2606.14739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The deployment of modern machine learning (ML) solutions on resource-constrained edge devices highlights implementation challenges. This is especially true for extreme edge applications that include safety-critical components, such as autonomous navigation tasks. This paper demonstrates an artificial neural network (ANN) design leveraging Metal-Oxide Resistive RAM (RRAM) -based Analogue Content Addressable Memory (ACAM) as an efficient hardware substrate for performing metric-based classification and online adaptation on the edge. The proposed design is based on a custom Template piXeL (TXL) cell used for building the ACAM module, where each TXL cell acts as a configurable receptive field neuron. These cells employ a Radial Basis activation function to calculate the distance of an input from the programmed receptive field. The TXL can be organised into dense arrays for calculating the distance of a high-dimensional input against all stored prototypes, effectively performing fast and energy efficient similarity search. This hardware engine enables on-the-fly learning, where the receptive field parameters can be tuned to track domain shift. Through simulation of the proposed TXL-RBF classifier we can achieve 89.1\% accuracy on the MNIST dataset while consuming 185fJ per cell per operation when operating at 100MHz.

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

Extending Item Response Theory for Efficient and Meaningful Multilingual Evaluation

Multilingual benchmarks are central to evaluating large language models (LLMs) across languages, but they suffer from three issues: exhaustive evaluation scales linearly with the number of languages, automatic translation introduces errors that are easily missed at scale, and some items conflate general and culture-specific knowledge. We address all three with a unified statistical framework, Multilingual-IRT, which extends Item Response Theory with per-language difficulty deviations, split discriminability separating content from language effects, and per-language ability residuals. Fitting Multilingual-IRT on 25 LLMs across 29 languages of MMLU-Pro-X, we show that its fitted parameters support three practical applications: predicting unobserved (item, LLM, language) instances with 11-16% lower binary cross-entropy than the strongest accuracy-based baseline, surfacing candidate translation errors distributed across all 28 non-English languages, whereas accuracy-based baselines concentrate detections in a few languages, and recovering culture-specific items that accuracy-based baselines miss.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Benchmarking Large Language Models for Safety Data Extraction

Accurate extraction of structured information from Safety Data Sheets (SDS) remains challenging in industrial safety due to heterogeneous document formats and the limitations of traditional rule-based methods. This study benchmarks state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated SDS data extraction, comparing text-based and multimodal processing pipelines. We systematically evaluate four models: Gemini 1.5 Pro, GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Llama 3.1-70B, across three prompting strategies: zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought. The evaluation framework assessed accuracy, latency, and cost across more than 50,000 extracted data fields. Results show that text-based extraction consistently outperforms multimodal processing across all metrics. Gemini 1.5 Pro combined with a Chain-of-Thought prompt achieved the highest accuracy (84%), outperforming GPT-4o (81%) and Claude 3.7 Sonnet (79%). However, no model surpassed the 90% accuracy threshold commonly required for reliable real-world deployment. These findings indicate that general-purpose LLMs are not yet robust enough for unsupervised industrial use, though performance suggests strong potential with task-specific fine-tuning. Future research should focus on domain-adapted training, model calibration, and the integration of Human-in-the-Loop verification to ensure safety-critical reliability.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Multi-Agent Transactive Memory

The decentralized deployment of LLM agents with diverse capabilities across diverse tasks motivates infrastructure for knowledge sharing across heterogeneous agent populations. Just as search engines index human-generated artifacts to support human problem solving, retrieval systems can organize agent-generated artifacts for reuse across agent populations. We extend retrieval-augmented generation - which demonstrates the value of human-authored artifacts to individual agents - to retrieval of agent-generated artifacts supporting a population of agents. In particular, agent trajectories encode reusable procedural knowledge, yet these artifacts are typically discarded after a single use or retained only by the producing agent, forcing newly instantiated agents to repeatedly rediscover existing solutions. We propose Multi-Agent Transactive Memory (MATM), a framework for population-level storage and retrieval of agent-generated trajectories, where producer agents contribute trajectories to a shared repository and consumer agents retrieve them to improve task execution. We focus on interactive environments (ALFWorld and WebArena), where trajectories are long and encode especially rich procedural structure. Our experiments demonstrate that retrieving trajectories from MATM improves downstream task performance and reduces interaction steps without coordination or joint training. These results position MATM as a design pattern for population-level experience sharing in open agent ecosystems.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

PeptiDIA: A Machine Learning Framework for Enhanced Peptide Identification in Fast-Gradient Data-Independent Acquisition Proteomics

Data-independent acquisition (DIA) mass spectrometry has become increasingly prevalent in proteomics as advances in instrumentation, chromatography, and computational analysis have enabled robust proteome identification across complex biological samples. However, analytical depth achieved with fast chromatographic gradients remains lower than that obtained using long-gradients, reflecting a throughput-depth trade-off. Here, we present PeptiDIA, a machine learning framework that enhances peptide identification in fast-gradient DIA data by leveraging paired fast and long-gradient acquisitions from identical samples. PeptiDIA processes DIA-NN outputs generated at relaxed false discovery rate thresholds to obtain expanded candidate peptide pools and trains gradient-boosted decision tree models using long-gradient identifications as reference labels. The model integrates DIA-NN features with engineered peptide descriptors and applies isotonic regression to calibrate probabilities, enabling controlled peptide recovery relative to the long-gradient reference. Applied to human and murine datasets spanning six tissues acquired on an Orbitrap Exploris 480, PeptiDIA increased peptide identifications by 25-34% at 1% target reference-discordance rate (RDR) and increased the number of protein groups containing at least one rescued peptide by 15-17%. Overall, PeptiDIA improves the identification depth of fast-gradient DIA-NN workflows without altering acquisition strategies. The framework is available as a web application and command-line tool at https://github.com/Jordano700/PeptiDIA.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

From Values to Tokens: An LLM-Driven Framework for Context-aware Time Series Forecasting via Symbolic Discretization

arXiv:2508.09191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time series forecasting plays a vital role in supporting decision-making across a wide range of critical applications, including energy, healthcare, and finance. Despite recent advances, forecasting accuracy remains limited due to the challenge of integrating historical numerical sequences with contextual features, which often comprise unstructured textual data. To address this challenge, we propose TokenCast, a large language model (LLM) driven framework that leverages language-based symbolic representations as a unified intermediary for context-aware time series forecasting. Specifically, TokenCast employs a discrete tokenizer to transform continuous numerical sequences into temporal tokens, enabling structural alignment with language-based inputs. To effectively bridge the semantic gap between modalities, both temporal and contextual tokens are embedded into a shared representation space via a pre-trained LLM, further optimized with generative objectives. Building upon this unified semantic space, the aligned LLM is subsequently fine-tuned in a supervised manner to predict future temporal tokens, which are then decoded back into the original numerical space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and highlight its potential as a generative framework for context-aware time series forecasting. The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/TokenCast.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

An Attention-based Model for Robust Forecasting with Missing Modality

arXiv:2606.13970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning with missing modalities is a fundamental challenge in multimodal robot learning, as real-world robotic systems often operate in environments with incomplete sensor data. Attention-based models are appealing for processing multimodal data because they can handle multiple modalities with a single backbone network. However, most multimodal models assume that all modalities are available during both training and inference, limiting their applicability in robotic perception and decision-making. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal model designed to handle missing modalities during both training and inference. The model is formulated as a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) and incorporates a transformer-based architecture that leverages attention mechanisms to learn a unified, fixed-dimensional representation, even when some modalities are missing. We show that our proposed model can be trained with missing modalities while approximating a robust representation of all modalities. We evaluate our approach on five multimodal datasets across two robot learning tasks: human trajectory prediction and robot manipulation forecasting. Experimental results demonstrate that our model effectively learns from incomplete data and is superior to prior multimodal fusion approaches.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DesignMaster: A Multi-Conditional Diffusion Framework for Rational PROTAC Design

Motivation: Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) enable targeted protein degradation through ternary complex formation with E3 ubiquitin ligase. However, the rational design of PROTACs remains highly challenging due to limited structure-activity relationship data and the vast conformational diversity of linkers. Existing computational approaches can be broadly divided into structure-based ternary modelling methods and fragment-based linker generation models. Although these approaches have advanced PROTAC design, they typically neglect key physicochemical constraints and linker-length control during the generation process, causing the generated PROTACs to lack balanced structural properties required for effective ternary complex formation with drug-like characteristics. Results: To address these limitations, we propose DesignMaster, a diffusion-based generative framework that explicitly incorporates linker length and physicochemical properties as controllable conditioning signals. DesignMaster employs an E(3)-equivariant graph Transformer with a gated multi-condition fusion module to inject linker length and physicochemical constraints throughout the diffusion process, enabling fine-grained and constraint-aware molecular generation. Experiments on PROTAC-DB 2.0 and 3.0 demonstrate that DesignMaster outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with a 3.2% improvement in validity and a 34.4% improvement in recovery. The Case study shows DesignMaster achieves a 51.78% reduction in RMSD when predicting the linker of PROTAC BCPyr targeting 6W7O, highlighting its potential for practical structure-guided PROTAC design. Availability: The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/ABILiLab/DesignMaster.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Intrinsic Pointer Basis and Irreversible Classicality from Coherence Contraction

arXiv:2604.23304v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work analyzes an operational route to classical behavior for reduced quantum states using the intrinsic reference basis (IRB). Relative to a fixed physical conjugation, the IRB separates intrinsic populations from a real antisymmetric cohesion sector. A globally bounded cohesion index is defined and its exponential contraction is proved for phase-free dephasing dynamics aligned with the IRB; for general aligned dephasing, the corresponding modulus-based coherence functional contracts at the same computable rates. The results provide distance bounds to the IRB-diagonal description and a logarithmic upper bound on the time required to reach a prescribed experimental tolerance. The IRB projectors constitute state-derived candidate pointer sectors, and they become dynamically stable pointer sectors when the effective dephasing generator is aligned with them and damps the relevant inter-sector coherences. Degenerate population sectors lead naturally to block-classicality and protected intra-block coherence. In a two-level active sector, the cohesion index equals fringe visibility, giving a direct interferometric test of the contraction law. The construction is independent of any spacetime- or unification-emergence hypothesis and is intended as a channel-level complement to environment-induced einselection.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Supersymmetry of dissipative Bose-Fermi systems with application to Jaynes-Cummings and Dicke models

arXiv:2606.12682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate how supersymmetries of Hamiltonians for coupled Bose-Fermi systems can be used to place the Hamiltonians of the Jaynes-Cummings model and Dicke model under the rotating wave approximation in matrix form and provide explicit analytic solutions for their eigenvalues. We then use this supersymmetry to place the Liouvillians of the associated Markovian open systems in matrix form and provide explicit solutions for their eigenvalues. These results are a consequence of the fact that the Hamiltonian of the Jaynes-Cummings model commutes with the linear Casimir invariant of the superalgebra $u(1|1)$ and that the Hamiltonian of the Dicke model commutes both with the linear invariant of $\sum_{i} u_{i}(1|1)$ and with the invariant of an additional $su(2)$ algebra. Our methods apply to various coupled Bose-Fermi systems with $u(1|1)$ and more generally with $u(n|m)$ dynamical superalgebras, and may provide efficient tools for studying more complicated examples.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

''Circumstantial Determinants'': An Efficient Approach to Reaching People in Need of HIV Prevention?

HIV prevention and testing programmes primarily reach people who self-refer or attend routine health services. Higher-risk individuals are missed if they are healthy, under-estimate their risk of infection or under-report sexual risk-behaviours. We assess a new approach to address limitations in existing programmes by targeting HIV services on ''Circumstantial Determinants'' (CDs) of HIV risk - the social circumstances, settings, and norms associated with behaviours that increase risk of HIV acquisition. Data on potential CDs and sexual behaviour were collected in a population survey in Zimbabwe in 2018/19 (N=9141). HIV-negative individuals reporting [≥] 1 sexual risk-behaviours were defined as the 'priority population' for HIV prevention. For each sex, six circumstantial determinants were associated with being in the priority population (aOR [≥] 1.30; p [≤] 0.01). Reach and efficiency of CDs (and combinations) were calculated; ROC curve algorithms evaluated their ability to identify priority population membership; and HIV prevention condom cascades were compared between CD-defined priority population subgroups. Example findings include that targeting men at bars and beerhalls could reach 48.5% of the priority population and 25.1% of lower-risk men. These percentages increase to 77.1% and 53.7% if men with poor mental health, no religious affiliation, negative social capital, or living on agricultural estates are also targeted. Targeting women with poor mental health could reach 32.0% of the priority population and 21.3% of lower-risk women. Targeting additional circumstantial determinants increases these percentages to 54.1% and 37.5%, respectively. Cascade barriers to condom use differed between CD-defined subgroups. The Circumstantial Determinants approach demonstrates proof-of-concept potential to strengthen HIV prevention services.

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

Localized Kernel Projection Outlyingness: A Two-Stage Approach for Multi-Modal Outlier Detection

arXiv:2510.24043v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents Two-Stage LKPLO, a novel multi-stage outlier detection framework that overcomes the coexisting limitations of conventional projection-based methods: their reliance on a fixed statistical metric and their assumption of a single data structure. Our framework uniquely synthesizes three key concepts: (1) a generalized loss-based outlyingness measure (PLO) that replaces the fixed metric with flexible, adaptive loss functions like our proposed SVM-like loss; (2) a global kernel PCA stage to linearize non-linear data structures; and (3) a subsequent local clustering stage to handle multi-modal distributions. Comprehensive 5-fold cross-validation experiments on 10 benchmark datasets, with automated hyperparameter optimization, demonstrate that Two-Stage LKPLO achieves state-of-the-art performance. It significantly outperforms strong baselines on datasets with challenging structures where existing methods fail, most notably on multi-cluster data (Optdigits) and complex, high-dimensional data (Arrhythmia). Furthermore, an ablation study empirically confirms that the synergistic combination of both the kernelization and localization stages is indispensable for its superior performance. This work contributes a powerful new tool for a significant class of outlier detection problems and underscores the importance of hybrid, multi-stage architectures.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Burden of Cardiovascular Disease in Brazil, 1996-2023: A Retrospective Descriptive Study of the Epidemiology and Impact on Public Healthcare with Emphasis on Acute Myocardial Infarction

Background Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of death worldwide, and their epidemiology is correlated with genetic predisposition, exposure to risk factors, sex, age, access to medical care, and other sociodemographic characteristics. Brazil is a developing country with a vast territory, which leads to structural inequalities. Estimates of CVD in Brazil, in its regions, and in its population are poorly evaluated and analysed. Methods We obtained CVD-related data from the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS) and analysed mortality and morbidity from 1996 to 2023 by sex, race/ethnicity, age, and region. We calculated the risk of death from the most prevalent diseases, the average length of hospital stay, and the costs associated with heart transplantation. Findings In Brazil, acute myocardial infarction was the pathology that led to the highest number of deaths across all variables analysed during the evaluated period. Other CVD were also related to causes of death and morbidity, such as hypertensive diseases and heart failure. Interpretation Brazil presents a serious challenge to the public health system due to the high number of deaths and the progressive mortality rate. This study represents a fundamental contribution to the basis for formulating public health policies aimed at reducing the growing impact associated with these diseases. Funding CNPq, CAPES, FAPEMIG, INCT

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Open-Source LLMs for Multi-Label ATT&CK Technique Classification on CTI Reports

arXiv:2606.18166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifying Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) using MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) is essential for proactive defense, but historically required extensive human effort. Pre-Large Language Model (LLM) automation sped up this process, but could not resolve the complex language and multi-step attack patterns found in unstructured CTI reports. LLMs addressed previous limitations by using contextual reasoning to understand unstructured text. However, current evaluations rely on simplified, single-technique sentences that ignore the complexity of real-world CTI reports, which often leads to inflated performance results. Consequently, the baseline performance of open-source LLMs on complex unstructured CTI reports remains unevaluated. To address this gap, we constructed a ground-truth dataset of 2,076 human-annotated sentences (1,281 technique-positive, 795 negative) from 83 complex unstructured CTI reports. These sentences were mapped to 114 unique ATT&CK techniques using a six-phase annotation process, achieving \k{appa} = 0.68 inter-annotator agreement. Using this dataset, we evaluated seven open-source LLMs ranging from 8B to 236B parameters across prompt strategy and temperature configurations. The highest-performing LLM achieved a micro-averaged F1 score of 0.22, establishing the empirical baseline for multi-label ATT&CK classification on complex unstructured CTI. Parameter size showed a statistically significant positive correlation with F1 score. Prompt strategy and temperature produced no statistically significant gains across model configurations. These results indicate that current open-source LLMs are insufficient for production-grade ATT&CK classification. The dataset, benchmark, and findings provide a reproducible foundation for future CTI research.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Comparing Commercial Depth Sensor Accuracy for Medical Applications

Depth estimation has numerous medical and surgical applications. We benchmark four depth sensors on a porcine bone specimen, a porcine belly specimen, and a silicone kidney phantom using stylus-sampled references. These objects contain several real-world challenges, including homogeneous surfaces, specular surfaces, and subsurface scattering. The comparison includes stereo, structured-light, and time-of-flight sensors at a distance of approximately 50 cm. Specifically, the Intel RealSense D405 (Intel RealSense, United States), PMD Flexx2 (pmdtechnologies, Germany), Stereolabs ZED 2i (Stereolabs, France), and Zivid 2M+ 60 (Zivid, Norway) are compared. The Zivid 2M+ 60 performed best across all objects and metrics considered in this work. The ZED ranked second for real tissue, but last on the phantom.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Automated Airways Characterization and Assessment of Cystic Fibrosis from CT Imaging

Background Advancements in medical imaging have enabled non-invasive diagnosis and staging of cystic fibrosis (CF) using CT scans, revealing dilated airways, an increased number of visible airways, and airway generation splits in these patients. However, manual characterization of airways remains time-consuming and challenging due to the numerous structural changes, thereby limiting clinical feasibility. This study aims to develop an automated algorithm to characterize airways from segmented lung CT scans and apply this to a retrospective population. This approach reduces the time required to analyze images and obtain disease-staging results. Methods This framework consists of two stages. The first stage extracts and skeletonizes the airway tree from lung CTs, while the second stage measures lung features, including airway volumes, branch counts, generation splits, diameters, and cross-sectional areas. This permits comprehensive characterization for use in clinical assessment. Results The airways analysis was performed on 169 CT volumes ranging in age from 6 to 18 years of age, revealing substantial differences in detected airway branches, generation splits, and normalized airway volume between the control and CF groups. The framework also measures airway diameters and cross-sectional areas, revealing an increase in the number of small airways in cystic fibrosis patients, due to early bronchiectasis. These findings align with previous research and demonstrate the framework's ability to accurately quantify airway changes in patients with CF. Discussion The framework extracts entire airway trees, facilitating measurements of volume, branch count, diameters, and cross-sectional areas, which change with CF severity and/or treatment. However, partial lung atelectasis can limit the accuracy of airway detection in moderate-to-severe cases. Funding NIA U54 AG054345 and NIA R21 AG07857501

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Improving Code-Switching ASR with Code-Mixing Guided Synthetic Speech

arXiv:2606.19381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Code-switch (CS) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) remains challenging due to limited availability of high quality CS text-speech pairs for training. Although synthetic data augmentation via Text-to-speech (TTS) has been explored, existing CS TTS approaches primarily optimise reconstruction fidelity and do not explicitly enforce language-boundary consistency, thereby limiting their effectiveness for CS ASR augmentation. This paper proposes a code-mixing guided preference-learning framework that steers synthetic speech generation toward improved code-switching fidelity using the Code Mixing Index (CMI). Experiments on the SEAME Mandarin-English conversational corpus demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the utility of synthetic data for ASR fine-tuning. Specifically, when fine-tuning Whisper Large, the proposed approach reduces Mixed Error Rate (MER) from 12.1%/17.8% to 8.9%/14.2% on the DevMAN and DevSGE sets, respectively.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Predictability as a Fine-Grained Measure for Privacy

arXiv:2606.20546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) ensures rigorous individual-level privacy guarantees against even the most knowledgeable attackers, but its worst-case nature can impose a costly privacy-accuracy tradeoff. We introduce privacy via predictability, a fine-grained framework that explicitly incorporates the attacker's core knowledge, a compromised portion of the dataset generated by a stochastic process, and a specified family of queries. Predictability measures privacy leakage as the incremental gain in an attacker's ability to predict sensitive information about unknown individuals after observing the algorithm's output, beyond what can already be inferred from the compromised data. We show that predictability and DP are generally incomparable: each can be small while the other is large. However, in the worst-case regime where all but one individual is compromised, and all binary queries are considered sensitive, predictability implies mutual-information DP. More generally, predictability provides a finer-grained privacy metric tailored to specific sensitive information and specific attacker models. We introduce a general framework, using the generalized method of moments (GMM), to analyze asymptotic predictability when the compromised data is generated by a stationary, ergodic, mixing process. Using this analysis, we derive a predictability-calibrated output perturbation scheme for ERM. Our approach is complementary to DP and can be used alongside DP to provide fine-grained privacy control.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

HOMED enables hierarchical and multimodal optimization of DNA methylation deconvolution across tissues

Cellular heterogeneity is a major confounder in bulk DNA methylation data for epigenome-wide association studies. Existing reference-based DNAm deconvolution methods often ignore hierarchies among related cell types and may generalize poorly across datasets due to limited variability in reference profiles. We developed HOMED (Hierarchically Optimized Methylation Deconvolution), a framework that integrates cell-lineage hierarchies, single-cell RNA sequencing-guided deconvolution, and paired bulk RNA-seq/DNAm data for CpG signature optimization. Across simulated and real peripheral blood mononuclear cell, lung, and placental datasets, HOMED consistently yielded the highest PCCs and lowest RMSEs, outperforming existing scRNA-seq-guided DNAm deconvolution methods, improving accuracy, resolution, and cross-tissue generalizability.

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

A Generalized Sinkhorn Algorithm for Mean-Field Schrödinger Bridge

arXiv:2604.06531v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The mean-field Schrödinger bridge (MFSB) problem concerns designing a minimum-effort controller that guides a diffusion process with nonlocal interaction to reach a given distribution from another by a fixed deadline. Unlike the standard Schrödinger bridge, the dynamical constraint for MFSB is the mean-field limit of a population of interacting agents with controls. It serves as a natural model for large-scale multi-agent systems. The MFSB is computationally challenging because the nonlocal interaction makes the problem nonconvex. We propose a generalization of the Hopf-Cole transform for MFSB and, building on it, design a Sinkhorn-type recursive algorithm to solve the associated system of integro-PDEs. Under mild assumptions on the interaction potential, we discuss convergence guarantees for the proposed algorithm. We present numerical examples with repulsive and attractive interactions to illustrate the theoretical contributions.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The brain builds a sentence neuron by neuron

作者:

Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals. Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals.