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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Phonikud: Overcoming Phonetic Underspecification for Hebrew Text-To-Speech

Text-to-speech (TTS) for Modern Hebrew is challenged by the language's orthographic complexity, with existing solutions ignoring underspecified phonetic features such as stress. We present a framework for more phonetically accurate Hebrew TTS with four contributions: (1) Phonikud, an open-source Hebrew grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) system that outputs fully-specified International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, designed by augmenting a base diacritizer. (2) The ILSpeech corpus of paired Hebrew audio, text, and expert IPA annotations. (3) A benchmark for the previously unmeasured task of Hebrew G2P conversion. (4) Hebrew audio-to-IPA models capturing previously disregarded phonetic details for automatic TTS evaluation. Our results show that Phonikud more accurately predicts Hebrew phonemes than prior methods, and that small, local TTS models with phonetic input from Phonikud approach large proprietary systems. We release our code, data, and models at https://phonikud.github.io.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Spatially Stratified Distillation for Heterogeneous Radar Place Recognition

Scalable, all-weather place recognition increasingly relies on heterogeneous radar place recognition to bridge diverse hardware platforms. A notable application is matching queries from cost-effective 4D automotive radars against high-fidelity reference maps built by dense spinning radars. This process is fundamentally limited by the extreme sparsity (and narrow field-of-view) of the 4D sensor, which captures only a fraction of the structural density present in the spinning radar database. Prior efforts address this issue by unifying different radar signals. That is, projecting both signals into a common representational space. Yet, they suffer performance degradation in multi-session environments. In this paper, we propose spatially-stratified distillation (SSD); a strategy that replaces standard uniform distillation with an asymmetric spatial alignment derived directly from physical radar returns. In regions where both radars exhibit overlapping returns, SSD enforces strong feature alignment. Crucially, in sparse regions where the 4D student lacks returns but the teacher contains valid structure within the shared field of view, SSD applies heavily discounted distillation weights. Extensive evaluations of the recent HeRCULES dataset demonstrate that SSD significantly outperforms prior place recognition methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on its challenging dynamic sequences.

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

Does the Judge Prefer English? Evaluating Language-Switching Invariance in LLM-as-a-Judge

作者:

Large language models (LLMs) are now widely used as automatic judges for open-ended instruction-following evaluation. This practice is convenient, scalable, and often more semantically aware than reference-based metrics, but it also introduces a new reliability question: does a judge evaluate the quality of an answer, or does it also react to the language in which the comparison is presented? We propose Judge-LS, a lightweight meta-evaluation protocol that transforms LLMBar response-pair items into English, Chinese, and Chinese-English language-switched variants. A reliable judge should preserve its preference under label-preserving language transformations and should not prefer a language when two answers are translation-equivalent. We evaluate four API-accessible judges on the full 419-item LLMBar benchmark, producing 13,408 successful pairwise judgments. Across models, Chinese and language-switched presentations induce 10.7–14.4% preference flips relative to English, and all judges achieve their highest accuracy in English. However, translation-equivalent tie probes do not reveal a systematic English preference: most probes are judged as ties, and non-tie decisions more often favor Chinese. We add confidence intervals, paired significance tests, and an automatic transformation audit with a sensitivity analysis that excludes mechanically flagged high-risk variants. The experiment requires no model training, uses only API calls, and is feasible on modest local hardware.

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

CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment

Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHILLGuard: a dedicated Chinese LLM content safety guardrail. To address the critical scarcity of high-quality annotated Chinese safety data, we propose a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline: we expand multi-source corpus via retrieval-augmented generation, generate implicit harmful samples through prompt engineering rewriting, and refine high-quality data via multi-model voting-based label calibration. Based on this, we build CHILLGuardTrain, a large-scale training set with 405,007 samples, and CHILLGuardTest, a rigorously curated annotated test set with 51,745 samples. We then train CHILLGuard on CHILLGuardTrain under a generator-classifier collaborative framework via Model-aware Direct Preference Optimization. Extensive experiments under multiple settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CHILLGuard, e.g., a 15.92% improvement of F1 score over Qwen3Guard-8B-Strict on our benchmark. We will release our resources at https://github.com/cswbyu/CHILLGuard.

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

LLM-as-Judge in Education: A Curriculum-Grounded Marking Pipeline

arXiv:2606.17507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to question generation and automated assessment. However, deploying LLMs in preparation for high-stakes exams requires more than prompt engineering; it demands software pipelines that systematically ground model outputs in authorised curriculum artefacts and marking guidelines issued by education authorities. This paper presents a curriculum-grounded, configurable LLM-as-Judge pipeline for question-level marking, co-developed with an industrial partner, to support exam preparation for university admission. The pipeline identifies the relevant topics, subtopics, and cognitive demand of a question, and assembles verifiable and authorised context to support LLM judgement. Curriculum intent is operationalised through concrete syllabus artefacts, including prescribed verbs and outcomes, performance band descriptors, glossary definitions, and marking-guideline principles. A staged LLM workflow is employed to first generate question-specific rubrics, capturing structured expectations of performance, and then derive and evaluate marking criteria used to allocate marks to student responses. This design improves consistency, transparency, and alignment with official marking practices. Preliminary evaluation shows that the proposed LLM-as-Judge pipeline delivers marking outcomes comparable to human tutors, while yielding justifications that are more traceable to authorised curriculum artefacts and marking standards. The pipeline has also been integrated into an online study platform, where early deployment data provide initial insights into operational usage and manual overrides.

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

Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves $\mathsf{NP}$-Complete Problems

arXiv:2606.14806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Assuming the gravitational field is classical and that it couples to quantum fields via the semiclassical Einstein field equations, we show that the weak-field dynamics of a massive and non-relativistic qubit can in principle be used to solve an $\mathsf{NP}$-complete problem in polynomial time. We attribute this vast computational power to the non-linear dynamics afforded by the semiclassical Einstein field equations. Consequently, the above two assumptions entail a violation of the Physical Extended Church–Turing Thesis, which we regard as evidence for the quantization of gravity.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum Correlation Hierarchy and Teleportation in Dephased Hydrogen Hyperfine System

arXiv:2606.11731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of quantum correlations in the hydrogen hyperfine spin system subject to Markovian phase noise. Treating the electron and proton spin degrees of freedom as an open two-qubit system governed by an isotropic hyperfine Hamiltonian and local dephasing, we obtain the exact time-dependent density matrix and derive analytical expressions for the full X-state family. We compute concurrence($C$), trace-distance measurement-induced nonlocality (Trace MIN–$\mathcal{N}_1$), and average steering coherence (ASC) in closed form and establish their strict ordering $ C(t)\leq \mathcal{N}_1(t)\leq \mathrm{ASC}(t) $ at all times. Entanglement is identified as the most fragile resource, undergoing sudden death at a finite time. Trace MIN exhibits dephasing-immune freezing for states with nonzero population imbalance, while ASC is the most robust quantity, persisting longest in every scenario studied.We additionally demonstrate that the dephased thermal hyperfine state serves as a resource for quantum teleportation, deriving a closed-form expression for the average fidelity and establishing that the teleportation advantage window coincides exactly with the entanglement survival interval, $\mathcal{F}_A > 2/3 \Longleftrightarrow \mathcal{C} > 0$, for the full X-state family with maximally mixed marginals. We identify four distinct dynamical regimes and map all three correlation measures onto directly measurable Pauli spin correlators, enabling experimental reconstruction of the full hierarchy without full state tomography.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Lect\=uraAgents: A Multi-Agent Framework for Adaptive Personalized AI-Assisted Learning and Embodied Teaching

Effective personalized AI-assisted learning demands systems that can not only generate accurate learner-specific educational materials, but also dynamically adapt their instruction to diverse learners. However, existing educational agents have primarily focused on lecture content automation and simulations, which often fall short of modelling multimodal and embodied instructional methods tailored for the individual learner. To this end, we propose Lect\=uraAgents - a multi-agent framework that enables personalized learning through end-to-end adaptive embodied teaching. At its core, Lect\=uraAgents mirrors a professor-student relationship, in which a ProfessorAgent leads a collaborative team of specialized subordinate agents through research, planning, review, and embodied delivery of lecture contents that adapt to a learner's needs. The framework offers three main contributions: (1) a hierarchical multi-agent architecture for end-to-end personalized learning; (2) an adaptive embodied teaching mechanism, wherein the ProfessorAgent executes visible and pedagogically motivated teaching actions (e.g., handwrite, highlight, underline, etc.) over contents in a teaching environment; and (3) a Teaching Action-Speech Alignment (TASA) algorithm that employs salience-based heuristics and temporal semantic segmentation to generate coherent teaching action sequences aligned with learner profiles. We evaluate Lect\=uraAgents on diverse courses at high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels using sample-specific rubric-based analysis; with generated lecture materials and teaching actions assessed and validated by expert educators. Experimental results show consistent gains in lecture content quality, embodied teaching quality, assessment, and personalization over existing approaches, positioning Lect\=uraAgents as a pedagogically well-grounded framework for personalized learning at scale.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DeePEn - A Depth sensitive benchmark for Protein Engineering

Recent progress in modeling techniques and high-throughput screening has significantly enhanced the accessibility of protein engineering. Nevertheless, further progress gets hindered by the lack of robust benchmarks that capture the practical challenges for real-world protein engineering. Here, we introduced DeePEn, a Depth-sensitive benchmark for Protein Engineering that quantifies a models generalization capabilities when predicting protein fitness at increasing mutational distance from the wildtype or training data. We defined distance as the number of simultaneous point mutations, i.e., single amino acid variants (SAVs), moving from wild-type to mutant (edit distance in computer science jargon). Specifically selecting four deep mutational scanning (DMS) datasets with sufficient multi-mutation data points from ProteinGym, we assessed recent predictive models, including general and biophysics-informed protein Language Models (pLMs), and a non-transformer neural network. Our results highlight how the performance of all models deteriorates with increasing mutational distance and that no single metric sufficiently captures the diverse requirements of protein engineering. To overcome these shortcomings, DeePEn provides a readily available resource for multi-metric benchmarking that focuses on the prediction of distant variants.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

On the Limits of LLM-as-Judge for Scientific Novelty Assessment

arXiv:2606.12071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used to generate and judge scientific ideas. This makes novelty evaluation a central problem. Full idea evaluation is difficult because it often requires judging a method, its feasibility, and its empirical promise. We therefore study a cleaner upstream object: the research question (RQ). RQ generation is a prerequisite for scientific ideation, and RQs can be compared against questions pursued in real papers. We introduce RQ-Bench, a benchmark built from recent arXiv papers. For each paper, we reconstruct author-anchored RQs from its cited background, gaps, and contributions. These RQs are not the only valid questions for the same background. They are author-anchored reference points for testing novelty judgments. We evaluate model-generated RQs with standalone LLM judging, comparative LLM judging, and human expert evaluation. LLM judges consistently rate model-generated RQs as highly novel, producing a novelty mirage; in comparative evaluations, this preference becomes even stronger. Domain experts, however, reach the opposite conclusion and prefer the author-anchored reference questions. We further find that many generated RQs are narrow or source-bound, a dimension that LLM judges often miss unless explicitly tested. Overall, the contradictory novelty evaluations between LLM judges and human experts raise a serious concern about the reliability of using LLMs to assess the scientific novelty of research questions.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Confidence Calibration for Multimodal LLMs: An Empirical Study through Medical VQA

arXiv:2606.19950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great potential in medical tasks, but their elicited confidence often misaligns with actual accuracy, potentially leading to misdiagnosis or overlooking correct advice. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between accuracy and confidence in medical MLLMs. It proposes a novel method that combines Multi-Strategy Fusion-Based Interrogation (MS-FBI) with auxiliary expert LLM assessment, aiming to improve confidence calibration in Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA). Experiments demonstrate that our method reduces the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by an average of 40\% across three Medical VQA datasets, significantly enhancing MLLMs' reliability. The findings highlight the importance of domain-specific calibration for MLLMs in healthcare, offering a more trustworthy solution for AI-assisted diagnosis.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Position: Align AI to Our Aspirations, Not Our Flaws

arXiv:2606.13755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We argue that aligning AI to aggregated human preferences is the wrong target. With current technology, one can train AIs to share the values of a Silicon Valley techno-optimist, a degrowth environmentalist, a national-conservative culture warrior, a single-party state cadre, or a devout religious traditionalist. We should not. Human values produce societies that thrive or fail on the merits of those values - from failed states and extreme inequality to declining happiness, political polarization, and government dysfunction in the world's wealthiest democracies. The pluralistic-alignment program correctly diagnoses that there is no single "humanity" to align with, but is dangerous if taken as the main directive. We argue that AI should be trained to a non-negotiable floor of objective alignment goals - competence, bounded by the constraints of factual accuracy, honesty, and lawfulness and that pluralism belongs at the surface (language, register, conventions, missing-context defaults) and across the wide band of legitimate value tradeoffs that respect the floor, but not at the level of values that violate it. We highlight the empirical reality of unfiltered pluralistic values, propose four commitments as a constructive alternative, and engage six credible objections: commercial pressure and practical feasibility, democratic legitimacy, regulatory compliance, over-reliance on institutionalist explanations, the charge that the floor itself is culturally laden, and the limits of Coherent Extrapolated Volition.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Proto-LeakNet: Towards Signal-Leak Aware Attribution in Synthetic Human Face Imagery

The growing sophistication of synthetic image and deepfake generation models has turned source attribution and authenticity verification into a critical challenge for modern computer vision systems. Recent studies suggest that diffusion pipelines unintentionally imprint persistent statistical traces, known as signal-leaks, within their outputs, particularly in latent representations. Building on this observation, we propose Proto-LeakNet, a signal-leak-aware and interpretable attribution framework that integrates Closed-set classification with a density-based Open-set evaluation on the learned embeddings, enabling analysis of unseen generators without retraining. Acting in the latent domain of diffusion models, our method re-simulates partial forward diffusion to expose residual generator-specific cues. A temporal attention encoder aggregates multi-step latent features, while a feature-weighted prototype head structures the embedding space and enables transparent attribution. Trained solely on closed data and achieving a Macro AUC of 98.13\%, Proto-LeakNet learns a latent geometry that remains robust under post-processing, surpassing state-of-the-art methods, and achieves strong separability both between real images and known generators, and between known and unseen ones. The codebase is available at the following link: https://github.com/claudiunderthehood/Proto-LeakNet .

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SA-VIS: Sparse frame Annotations for training Video Instance Segmentation

Recent online video instance segmentation (VIS) methods have achieved impressive results, thus becoming the preferred approach to segment instances in videos. Despite the resurgence of impressive single image models, the online (or semi-online) VIS approaches outperform single-image models (e.g., based on SAM) by using long sequences of densely annotated frames during training. However,such a training setup of VIS is expensive in the sense of compute as well as dense annotations required. In order to solve these major flaws, we argue that the effective modeling of the instances and their evolution in videos do not require densely annotated frames. To that end, we propose a simple and effective module, called Past-frames Feature Propagation (PFP) which aggregates low-dimensional features from the image encoder of multiple frames. This simple low-compute module provides tremendous learning capability in using sparse video frame labels for end-to-end training. Combined with a light-weight frame-specific Instance Queries, our Sparse frame Annotation VIS (SA-VIS) significantly improves performance over its baseline. Most interestingly, our simple design that avoids complexities effectively bridges the gap in accuracy between training on sparsely and densely annotated video sequences. This translates to a mere 0.4% drop in performance of SA-VIS when using annotations for only 1/5 of the images in the dataset. Empirically, SA-VIS shows strong improvements over the baseline on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021/2022 and Occluded VIS (OVIS) and an over 1% improvement in AP on the state-of-the-art in a limited annotations scenario.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DRFLOW: A Deep Research Benchmark for Personalized Workflow Prediction

arXiv:2606.18191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research (DR) systems are increasingly used for complex information-seeking tasks, but existing works mainly focus on generating reports and summaries. In contrast, many enterprise tasks instead require an agent to identify concrete workflows which is a sequence of action-steps. For example, rather than summarizing budgeting policies, an agent should be able to determine the steps needed to answer a question such as: "How do I request new headcount given a fixed budget?". Therefore, we introduce DRFLOW, a benchmark for evaluating personalized workflows predicted by agents from heterogeneous sources. Each task requires the agent to identify relevant evidence from scattered sources, then use that evidence to predict the correct action-step sequence for the user's task. DRFLOW contains 100 tasks across five domains, with 1,246 reference workflow steps grounded in more than 3,900 sources. We define seven diagnostic metrics covering factual grounding, step recovery, structural ordering, condition resolution, and personalization. We further present DRFLOW-Agent (DRFA), a workflow-oriented reference agent to predict personalized workflow. We show that although DRFA improves over strong baseline agents (upto 10.02% average F1 score), there is substantial room for improvement remains across these workflow metrics, indicating that predicting complete and correct personalized workflows remains a challenging frontier for deep research.

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

Adversarial Attacks Leverage Interference Between Features in Superposition

Why do adversarial examples exist, and why do they transfer between models? Existing explanations appeal to high-dimensional geometry, non-robust patterns in the input, and decision boundary structure, but none provides a representation-level mechanism that explains why specific perturbations succeed and why attacks transfer between models. In this paper, we show that adversarial vulnerability can stem from efficient information encoding in neural networks. Specifically, vulnerability can arise from superposition - the phenomenon where networks represent more concepts than they have dimensions, forcing non-orthogonal representation and thus interference. This interference causes perturbations targeting one representation to affect others, creating vulnerabilities determined by interference patterns. In synthetic settings with precisely controlled superposition, we establish that superposition suffices to create adversarial vulnerability. The resulting attacks are predictable: PGD-discovered perturbations align with theoretically optimal perturbations derived from the interference geometry. Models trained on similar data develop similar interference patterns, explaining attack transferability. We then show that successful attacks on image classifiers exhibit the structure predicted by our proposed mechanism. These findings reveal that adversarial vulnerability can be a byproduct of networks' representational compression, complementing existing explanations based on data properties or architectural factors.

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

Learning from the Self-future: On-policy Self-distillation for dLLMs

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has proven effective for post-training large language models (LLMs), yet its application to diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) remains unexplored. Existing OPSD methods are inherently autoregressive-centric. They inject privileged information via left-to-right prefix conditioning with token-level divergence supervision, a design that fundamentally conflicts with the arbitraryorder generation of dLLMs. We introduce d-OPSD, the first OPSD framework tailored for dLLMs. Our approach makes two core contributions. First, we reframe self-teacher construction by using self-generated answers as suffix conditioning, enabling the student model to learn from "self future-experience" rather than privileged prefixes. Second, we shift supervision from token-level to step-level, aligning training with the iterative denoising process of dLLMs. Experiments across four reasoning benchmarks show that d-OPSD consistently outperforms RLVR and SFT baselines with superior sample efficiency, requiring only around 10% of the optimization steps by RLVR and opening a promising pathway for dLLM posttraining. The code is available at https://github.com/xingzhejun/d-OPSD.

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

ERQA-Plus: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Reasoning in Embodied AI

Generalist embodied agents require more than object recognition: they must reason about spatial relations, actions, procedures, human intentions, environmental constraints, and commonsense consequences from situated visual observations. Yet existing visual and embodied question answering benchmarks often provide limited control over the reasoning dependencies being tested, making it difficult to distinguish grounded embodied reasoning from shortcut-driven visual or linguistic pattern matching. We present ERQA-Plus, a diagnostic benchmark for reasoning in embodied AI. ERQA-Plus contains 1,766 question-answer instances grounded in 711 robot-centric images and organized according to a structured taxonomy spanning perceptual, action-centric, social-interaction, navigation-environmental, and contextual commonsense reasoning. The dataset is constructed using a multi-stage generation and validation pipeline that combines taxonomy-guided question generation, automatic quality judging, iterative revision, and human assessment to improve visual grounding, answer validity, and reasoning quality. We benchmark representative general-purpose vision-language models and embodied models, including LLaVA-NeXT-8B, Prismatic-7B, MiniCPM-V-4.5-8B, Qwen3-VL, RoboRefer-8B, and RoboBrain2.5-8B. Although the strongest model, Qwen3-VL-32B, achieves 83.4% overall accuracy and 61.4 SBERT score, category-level results reveal persistent weaknesses in spatial reasoning, procedural reasoning, event prediction, and intention inference. ERQA-Plus therefore provides a fine-grained evaluation framework for measuring not only whether embodied agents answer correctly, but also which forms of embodied reasoning they can and cannot perform reliably. The dataset is available https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingdas/erqa-plus and the project page at https://github.com/LUNAProject22/erqa-plus.

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

Enhancing Precision Agriculture with a Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Multi-Class Plant Disease Classification and Interpretability

This study proposes an overall deep learning architecture for multi-class classification of plant diseases from high-resolution leaf imagery, with a particular interest in investigating the behavior of ResNet-50 and a hybrid ResNet + Vision Transformer (ViT) design. A specially gathered image database with 15,200 training images and 3,800 validation images spanning 38 classes across multiple crops, including tomato, apple, grape etc. were subjected to preprocessing steps such as resizing, normalization, and data augmentation to enhance model robustness. Multiple architectures, including ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNet-B0, were trained and compared with the hybrid ResNet + ViT model. All models were fine-tuned using the AdamW optimizer and cross-entropy loss, with early stopping applied to prevent overfitting and ensure generalization. Furthermore, interpretability techniques such as Grad-CAM and saliency maps were implemented to indicate disease-relevant regions, while segmentation-based analysis was performed to identify the affected parts of a leaf. For every one of the considered architectures, ResNet-50 led to the highest accuracy of 98.74%, whereas the hybrid ResNet + ViT model achieved a competitive accuracy of 98.58%, showing that the hybrid architectures were effective in capturing both local and overall information. The experimental results showcase the promise of transformer-based models to achieve highly accurate, interpretable, and computationally efficient computer-based multi-class multi-disease classification systems, providing helpful assistance for cultivation management practices as well as for precision farming.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Perceptions of aging well among older adults with heart failure: insights from a qualitative study

Background: Heart failure (HF) is a prevalent and often debilitating cardiovascular condition among older adults, frequently accompanied by multimorbidity, functional limitations, and the need to age in place. Traditional models of successful aging emphasize disease absence and preserved function, yet most individuals with HF live with ongoing symptoms and chronic health challenges. How older adults with HF define aging well, particularly across different socioeconomic contexts, remains underexplored. Objectives: To explore how older adults with HF conceptualize aging well and to identify perceived facilitators and barriers across more and less resourced New York City neighborhoods. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 adults diagnosed with HF residing in Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods classified by 2019 United States Census data. Interviews were guided by Rowe and Kahn's model. Transcripts were analyzed using an inductive-deductive thematic approach and interpreted in alignment with the Healthy People 2030 framework. Results: Participants had a mean age of 69 years; 50% identified as Black and 50% were women. Despite functional limitations, 65% reported aging well. Five themes emerged: maintaining physical function, maintaining cognitive function, sustaining social relationships, avoiding pain, and promoting overall well-being. Avoiding pain and promoting well-being extended beyond traditional models. Neighborhood context shaped priorities, with financial stability emphasized in more affluent areas and social cohesion prioritized in less affluent communities. Conclusions: Older adults with HF frequently perceive themselves as aging well despite chronic illness, reframing successful aging beyond disease avoidance. These findings support a patient-centered, place-informed model of aging well with implications for healthcare delivery and policy.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Cancer care disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada: A sequential mixed-methods study

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted healthcare delivery worldwide, with cancer care among the most affected services. Prior studies documented delays in referrals, reduced specialist access, and increased provider burden. However, the extent to which these experiences were reflected at the system level remains unclear. Objective To document cancer care experiences and examine whether these experiences were reflected in population-level health system indicators across Ontario, Canada. Methods We used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 32 participants, including patients with cancer (n=8), caregivers (n=5), healthcare providers (n=14), and decision-makers (n=5) across two hospital settings in Ontario, Canada. Emergent themes informed the development of quantitative indicators. We then conducted a retrospective population-based analysis of linked administrative health databases for cancer patients in Ontario (n=87,786) to assess the prevalence of identified themes. Results Four themes emerged: (I) delays in diagnosis and screening; (II) disrupted access to primary care; (III) barriers to specialist and mental health services; and (IV) fragmented care for patients with multimorbidity. Quantitative findings corroborated major themes. Screening rates declined for cervical (64.8% to 57.5%) and breast cancer (64.5% to 57.2%). While in-person primary care shifted almost entirely to virtual modalities (8.5% to 95.4%), overall visit volumes remained stable. Specialist care showed uneven patterns, with increased oncology visits but declines in cardiology and mental health services. Patients with multiple comorbidities experienced the largest reductions in non-oncology specialist care. Conclusion The pandemic disrupted key components of cancer care, particularly screening, access to certain specialist services, and care for patients with complex needs. Integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence highlights areas of system vulnerability and underscores the need for coordinated, resilient cancer care capable of maintaining essential services during future crises.

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

SurroundNEXO: Ego-Centric Metric Bridging for Spatially Consistent Geometry in Autonomous Driving

Modern autonomous driving depends on accurate metric 3D understanding for perception, reconstruction, and planning, which in turn requires reliable multi-camera depth prediction. However, the outward-facing nature of vehicle-mounted surround-view camera rigs inherently limits visual overlap across views, challenging the correspondence-based assumptions that underpin conventional multi-view geometry. To bridge this gap, we present SurroundNEXO, named after the Spanish word nexo for a geometric link, a low-overlap multi-camera metric depth framework that grounds cross-view reasoning in ego-centric geometry rather than dense visual correspondences. Instead of directly enforcing early global fusion, SurroundNEXO first assigns image tokens globally comparable ego-frame viewing directions through Ego-Ray Positional Encoding, then uses sparse LiDAR measurements as metric anchors to propagate absolute scale cues, and finally expands feature interaction progressively from view-local modeling to decomposed spatio-temporal reasoning and global integration. This design enables metric-scale depth prediction with improved spatial consistency across weakly overlapping cameras. Across low-overlap autonomous driving benchmarks, including NuScenes, Waymo and DDAD, SurroundNEXO reduces single-view error by 33.2%, improves cross-view consistency by 10.5%, and enhances metric reconstruction quality by 25.6% compared with SOTA methods. It further remains robust under extremely sparse depth prompts and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to unseen camera layouts.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

What Does the Weight Norm Control in Grokking? Logit-Scale Mediation under Cross-Entropy

arXiv:2606.18465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Grokking, the delayed jump from memorization to generalization, is usually tied to the weight norm: a smaller norm generalizes sooner. We ask what the norm actually controls. Holding the weight norm fixed by clamping and varying only an output temperature, we slide the grokking delay across its entire norm-induced range under cross-entropy; matching the effective logit scale back to baseline recovers about 85% of the delay at two moduli. Across a grid of norms and temperatures the delay collapses onto the logit scale alone (R2 = 0.97), with the norm adding 1-2% beyond it. The effect is loss-dependent: under mean-squared error the logit scale is pinned and the norm acts through a different route. A memorization control, a float64 softmax-collapse audit, and a no-LayerNorm transformer point to the same channel. Forking arms from one identical state, the delay follows the held norm value and not the clamp operation, which closes a rescaling-artifact concern. The proximal variable is the logit scale and the softmax saturation it drives; the weight norm is only an upstream handle. All numbers, tables, and figures reproduce from released code and data.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

When the Tool Decides: LLM Agents Defer Blindly to Graph Neural Network Tools, and Stronger Backbones Defer More

arXiv:2606.14476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A growing line of work equips large language model (LLM) agents with graph neural networks (GNNs) as callable tools, assuming the agent exercises judgment over when and how much to rely on such a tool. We test this directly. We expose a frozen GNN to a ReAct-style LLM agent as an explicit tool and measure, on node classification over a text-attributed graph (ogbn-arxiv, replicated on WikiCS), whether the agent uses the tool or merely obeys it. We find the agent does not exercise judgment: its predictions agree with the raw GNN's 97.6-99.2% of the time (5 seeds), collapsing into a GNN parrot that adopts the tool's output wholesale and bypasses its own reasoning. Sweeping backbone capability (Qwen2.5 0.5B-7B), the deference is not a weak-model artifact: among models able to invoke the tool, agreement rises with capability (0.60 to 0.98 from 1.5B to 7B). Crucially, the cost of deference does not shrink as capability grows and grows where alternatives emerge: a per-node oracle over the available actions beats the parrot by 0.09-0.18 at 3B and 0.12-0.22 at 7B, roughly doubling at high homophily, because the parrot is pinned to the frozen GNN while the agent's alternatives improve; at 7B a simple neighbour-label tool overtakes the GNN at high homophily (0.81 vs 0.71) yet the agent still defers. A simple selective-invocation gate recovers about half of that high-homophily gap (0.71 to 0.83) but yields no net global gain, and held-out estimates bound the best achievable gate over standard test-time features to at most a third of the oracle headroom: reliable selective invocation looks limited by available information, not merely router design. Our results are a cautionary measurement: evaluations of agent+tool systems cannot assume the agent adds judgment on top of the tool, and selective invocation must be designed in rather than expected to emerge from scale.

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arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Revisiting LLM Adaptation for 3D CT Report Generation: A Study of Scaling and Diagnostic Priors

Recent advances in multimodal learning, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), have demonstrated strong adaptability to natural images. However, extending their use to the medical domain, particularly for volumetric (3D) images, is challenging due to high computational complexity, volumetric dependencies and the semantic gap between visual features and clinical terminology. Naively fine-tuning LLMs on limited medical data often leads to overfitting and clinical hallucination, where linguistic fluency is prioritized over clinical factuality. In this study, we investigate parameter-efficient adaptation strategies for volumetric CT report generation and introduce RAD3D-Prefix, a lightweight diagnostic-prior conditioning framework that minimizes the need for extensive parameter training. This module integrates image embeddings with multi-label diagnostic classification logits, preserving critical clinical details while bridging the semantic gap. By keeping the LLM frozen, our method requires minimal trainable parameters and mitigates the risk of overfitting on small, domain-specific datasets. Through a systematic study spanning LLMs from 96.1M to 1.6B parameters, we find that fine-tuning is most beneficial for smaller LLMs, whereas freezing larger (~1B+ LLMs and training only lightweight projection layers provides a superior trade-off between performance, generalization, and computational efficiency. Across multiple automatic metrics and a clinical reader study, RAD3D-Prefix outperforms comparable parameter-efficient baselines and demonstrates strong out-of-domain generalization while using substantially fewer trainable parameters than fully fine-tuned alternatives.