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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

What level of expertise is necessary to generate ACLS training test questions: pre-med students vs. artificial intelligence?

Abstract Introduction In-hospital cardiac arrest carries high mortality despite standardized ACLS training. Educators face increasing time constraints in developing assessment tools for ACLS training. Two possible solutions to this problem are using pre-medical students or using artificial intelligence to generate test questions. This study compared the quality of pre-medical student-generated ACLS test questions vs. AI-generated ACLS test questions, testing the hypothesis that AI-generated questions are non-inferior to student-generated questions. Methods Ten pre-medical students created ACLS questions following predefined criteria, while an AI model (Northwell's Artificial Intelligence Hub) generated comparable questions. A blinded ACLS-certified physician evaluated questions on the qualities of Alignment, Clarity, Cognitive Level, and Question Design using a standardized rubric (Likert scale: 1 = poor quality, 5 = excellent). Student's T-test and Chi-square analysis were used to compare the quality of questions on different rubric domains within each arm (student vs. AI) and within one domain (eg, question Clarity) between arms. The Student's T test was used when 2 comparator groups were compared (eg, Clarity of student-generated vs. AI-generated questions) within one arm. The ANOVA test was used when comparing more than 2 comparator groups (eg, Alignment vs. Clarity vs. Cognitive Level) within one arm. Statistical significance was set as a priority at p

02.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Comparative impacts and cost-effectiveness of tuberculosis systematic screening strategies in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru: A mathematical modeling study

作者:

by Yiran E. Liu, José Victor Bortolotto Bampi, Ronan F. Arthur, Argita D. Salindri, Caroline Busatto, Pedro Avedillo Jiménez, Daniele Maria Pelissari, Fernanda Dockhorn Costa Johansen, Robert Arana-Narvaez, Alvaro Fernando Moreno Roca, Wilfredo Santos Solís Tupes, Esther Mori Jiu, Christian Alfredo Moreno Roca, Erika Albertina Abregú Contreras, Valentina Antonieta Alarcón Guizado, Julián Trujillo Trujillo, Belkys Marcelino, Mónica Alonso Gonzalez, Mayra Cecilia Córdova Ayllon, Ted Cohen, Moises A. Huaman, Jeremy D. Goldhaber-Fiebert, Julio Croda, Jason R. Andrews Background Incarceration is a leading driver of tuberculosis in Latin America. Systematic screening in prisons may reduce tuberculosis burden, but optimal strategies and cost-effectiveness remain uncertain. We examined the population-wide health impacts and cost-effectiveness of systematic screening in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, comparing different timepoints, frequencies, and screening algorithms. Methods and findings Using dynamic transmission models calibrated to Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, we simulated annual or biannual (twice-yearly) prison-wide screening, alone or combined with entry and exit screening from 2026 to 2035. We evaluated four algorithms: (1) symptom screening, (2) chest X-ray with computer-aided detection (CXR-CAD), (3) symptoms and CXR-CAD (follow-up testing if either is positive), and (4) GeneXpert Ultra (Xpert) with pooled sputum. Individuals screening positive then received individual Xpert. We projected impacts on within-prison and population-level tuberculosis incidence in 2035, along with discounted costs (2023 US dollars) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Model projections showed that combined entry, exit, and biannual screening with CXR-CAD was highly impactful and cost-effective across countries, reducing tuberculosis incidence by 61%–87% in prisons and 18%–28% population-wide. Compared to only biannual CXR-CAD (the next best strategy), the incremental cost per DALY averted of adding entry and exit screening was $2,984 (Brazil), $2,925 (Colombia), and $645 (Peru). Adding symptom screening to CXR-CAD marginally increased benefit and was only cost-effective in Peru’s higher-incidence prisons. Biannual screening alone remained cost-effective at prison incidence levels well below national averages, as well as at far lower willingness-to-pay thresholds. In settings without CXR-CAD, pooled Xpert was an impactful, cost-effective alternative. Key limitations include the model’s simplified representation of tuberculosis disease states and lack of stratification by age, gender/sex, HIV, or drug resistance. Conclusions These modeling results support immediate national-level adoption of prison-wide tuberculosis screening twice-yearly and at entry and exit, using CXR-CAD or pooled Xpert.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Spectral DPPs via NEPv: A Scalable Continuous Relaxation of Determinantal MAP for Diversity-Aware Data Selection

arXiv:2606.19411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting a small, diverse, high-quality subset from a massive pool of candidates is a recurring primitive in modern machine learning – data curation and coreset selection for training and fine-tuning large models, active-learning batch acquisition, prompt and exemplar selection for in-context learning, retrieval diversification, and experimental design. Determinantal Point Processes (\operatorname{DPP} s) give a principled, well-calibrated notion of diversity for this task, but their MAP objective – pick a size-$k$ subset $S$ maximizing $\logdet(L_S)$ – is NP-hard, and the standard greedy and sampling algorithms scale superlinearly in the ground-set size $n$. This cost is prohibitive precisely in the data-centric regime where diversity matters most, where $n$ ranges over millions to billions of candidate examples, features, or embeddings. We recast \operatorname{DPP}-MAP as a continuous optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold, and show that its first-order optimality conditions form a Nonlinear Eigenvalue Problem with eigenvector dependency (\operatorname{NEP}v) of a previously unstudied form. This \operatorname{NEP}v\ admits a self-consistent field (\operatorname{SCF}) iteration with a spectral-gap-based local contraction guarantee, giving a principled iterative solver where the diversity objective drives an eigenvector-dependent operator. The resulting algorithm, \OurMethod, requires only matrix-vector products with the kernel and runs in time $O\!\big((ndk+nk^2)\,t\big)$ for a small number of iterations $t$, scaling near-linearly in $n$ and integrating directly with low-rank and feature-map kernels common in ML. This paper focuses on the relaxation, solver, and scaling analysis; full real-data benchmarking is left to a planned empirical study.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SeamEdit: A Black-Box VLM-Agnostic Pipeline for Large-Image Semantic Editing

Semantic region editing for large images must satisfy two requirements at the same time: high generative quality and natural integration with surrounding content. Some related methods rely on white-box models and leave the strong generation capability of closed-source models underexplored. Directly applying closed-source models to tiled editing, however, introduces several failure modes: semantic deformation, canvas-level alignment drift, and visible seam artifacts. This paper presents SeamEdit, a training-free and model-agnostic pipeline that treats any VLM with inpainting capability as a black-box oracle. SeamEdit mitigates these issues through a five-stage post-hoc pipeline: overlay-based tile decomposition, black-box VLM inpainting, geometric and color-consistency correction, seam-risk-based multi-candidate ranking, and dynamic-programming curved seam fusion. The pipeline reduces seam visibility and supports semantic modification of arbitrary tile regions.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Finetuning Vision-Language-Action Models Requires Fewer Layers Than You Think

arXiv:2606.20246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference. In this work, we reveal a highly non-trivial architectural characteristic of these continuous control foundation policies (e.g., pi_0, GR00T-N1.5): despite being trained on diverse physical trajectories, they exhibit severe layer-wise representational redundancy. To exploit this, we introduce a structural compression pipeline that is entirely training-free, bypassing the need of existing methods to load full-scale models to learn optimized token reductions or dynamic layer selectors. Instead, using only a single forward pass via Centered Kernel Alignment to identify redundant layer features, we remove twin layers to permanently compress the model depth by up to 50% across both the VLM backbone and the continuous control policy head. Downstream fine-tuning of this streamlined architecture yields a dual acceleration benefit: a 40-50% reduction in training time and up to 30% faster real-time inference, while matching or exceeding full-scale base model performance. We comprehensively validate our method across three simulation benchmarks (LIBERO, RoboCasa, SimplerEnv) and 10 diverse real-world manipulation tasks across 4 unique robotic embodiments. These results prove that advanced VLAs require significantly fewer layers than previously assumed, offering a highly compute-efficient paradigm for scalable robot learning.

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

The Measurement Gap in the Automation of EU Law: Benchmarking Doctrinal Legal Reasoning under the EU AI Act

Large language models now produce legal text of at least median quality, yet no existing benchmark can evaluate whether they perform doctrinal legal reasoning, which forms the interpretive core of legal work, rather than the ancillary, paralegal tasks that most current legal-AI evaluations measure. This measurement gap is not only methodological but legal: the EU AI Act makes "appropriate accuracy" a binding requirement for high-risk AI used in the judicial domain, yet that requirement cannot acquire operational content without the very doctrinal-reasoning benchmark the field lacks.

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

Rotational Symmetry based Object Pose Estimation from Point Clouds in the Absence of Known 3D Models

Object pose estimation is crucial to many industrial applications, with one example being automated spray painting using a robot. However, confidentiality concerns often limit access to high-quality 3D models, posing a significant challenge for point-cloud-based pose estimation. In such scenarios, rotational symmetry, a readily accessible characteristic of many industrial objects, can provide valuable prior information to facilitate pose estimation.In this paper, we propose a method that leverages the rotational symmetry commonly found in industrial objects to address the challenge caused by the absence of 3D models. The object pose is jointly estimated with point cloud refinement through an iterative optimization process. This optimization relies on a rotational symmetry constraint loss. To construct this loss, each 3D point is rotated according to the currently estimated pose, and multiple correspondences are identified using nearest-neighbor search by exploiting the rotational symmetry property. These correspondences are then used to compute the rotational symmetry constraint loss, which iteratively refines both the pose and the point cloud.By explicitly incorporating rotational symmetry into the optimization process, the proposed method achieves robust pose estimation and generalizes well across diverse object types. The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset specifically created for point clouds without known 3D models, consisting of four categories of synthetic objects and one real wheel hub collected from a production line. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to methods that rely on known 3D models.

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

Conditional Diffusion Guidance under Hard Constraint: A Stochastic Analysis Approach

arXiv:2602.05533v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study conditional generation in diffusion models under hard constraints, where generated samples must satisfy prescribed events with probability one. Such constraints arise naturally in safety-critical applications and in rare-event simulation, where soft or reward-based guidance methods offer no guarantee of constraint satisfaction. Building on a probabilistic interpretation of diffusion models, we develop a principled conditional diffusion guidance framework based on Doob's h-transform, martingale representation and quadratic variation process. Specifically, the resulting guided dynamics augment a pretrained diffusion with an explicit drift correction involving the logarithmic gradient of a conditioning function, without modifying the pretrained score network. Leveraging martingale and quadratic-variation identities, we propose two novel off-policy learning algorithms based on a martingale loss and a martingale-covariation loss to estimate h and its gradient using only trajectories from the pretrained model. We provide non-asymptotic guarantees for the resulting conditional sampler in both total variation and Wasserstein distances, explicitly characterizing the impact of score approximation and guidance estimation errors. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in enforcing hard constraints and generating rare-event samples. The code of the numerical experiments can be found at https://github.com/ZhengyiGuo2002/CDG_Finance.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Gendered pathways to adolescent mental health: An empirical assessment of a new conceptual framework

Introduction Gender norms and roles are important determinants of physical and mental health in the key period of adolescence. Yet, the gendered pathways to mental health in adolescents are not fully understood. Using a conceptual framework for global adolescent mental health that we developed based on a Delphi process, we empirically investigated the associations between six gender-related constructs and adolescent mental health. Methods We used cross-sectional Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) data from Ethiopia (2020) to explore the associations between sex, gender norms, psychological competencies, gender attitudes, gender roles, with the latter two also serving as mediators, and psychological distress (GHQ-12), using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Results The SEM model contained measurements from 1,584 adolescents, including 843 girls and 741 boys, with a median age of 13 years. Out of 14 pathways tested, we found statistically significant associations between psychological competencies and psychological distress; sex and gender attitudes; and between gender norms and psychological competencies, gender attitudes, and gender roles. Hence, the gender-related constructs were mostly associated with each other, rather than with psychological distress. Conclusion The gender-related constructs are strongly interrelated, thereby attenuating their individual effects on psychological distress. The interplay of gender-related constructs should be considered when developing interventions to promote mental health in adolescents.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

StereoFactory: A Unified Merging Framework for Robust Stereo Matching

Stereo matching has advanced through foundation models trained on large-scale datasets, yet this paradigm suffers from a scalability bottleneck: incorporating new data requires costly joint retraining. Model merging offers a scalable post-hoc alternative by integrating knowledge from specialized models after source checkpoints are available. However, existing merging methods typically retain all available models or rely on greedy inclusion, which can preserve harmful task-vector interference. We propose StereoFactory, a coarse-to-fine evolutionary framework for adaptive model merging. Stage~1 employs a genetic algorithm to search the combinatorial space of model subsets, determining which models should participate. Stage~2 addresses module-level knowledge specialization (different functional modules exhibit distinct preferences for knowledge sources) through CMA-ES optimization of architecture-adaptive routing over the selected task vectors, with optional module-level scaling. Experiments across two architectures and four benchmarks demonstrate that StereoFactory consistently achieves the best four-benchmark average under the same checkpoint pool, reducing the average error from 3.80 to 3.30 on NMRF and from 2.88 to 2.19 on FoundationStereo relative to the strongest controlled baseline. The post-hoc search requires only 2.7–3.7\% of the corresponding joint-retraining wall-clock time. Analysis reveals that knowledge contributions are inherently module-specific, and selected subsets can transfer across architectures with minimal degradation. Code will be publicly released upon acceptance at: https://github.com/XiandaGuo/StereoFactory.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

FutureOmni: Evaluating Future Forecasting from Omni-Modal Context for Multimodal LLMs

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong omni-modal perception, their ability to forecast future events from audio-visual cues remains largely unexplored, as existing benchmarks focus mainly on retrospective understanding. To bridge this gap, we introduce FutureOmni, the first benchmark designed to evaluate omni-modal future forecasting from audio-visual environments. The evaluated models are required to perform cross-modal causal and temporal reasoning, as well as effectively leverage internal knowledge to predict future events. FutureOmni is constructed via a scalable LLM-assisted, human-in-the-loop pipeline and contains 919 videos and 1,034 multiple-choice QA pairs across 8 primary domains. Evaluations on 13 omni-modal and 7 video-only models show that current systems struggle with audio-visual future prediction, particularly in speech-heavy scenarios, with the best accuracy of 64.8% achieved by Gemini 3 Flash. To mitigate this limitation, we curate a 7K-sample instruction-tuning dataset and propose an Omni-Modal Future Forecasting (OFF) training strategy. Evaluations on FutureOmni and popular audio-visual and video-only benchmarks demonstrate that OFF enhances future forecasting and generalization. We publicly release all code (https://github.com/OpenMOSS/FutureOmni) and datasets (https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenMOSS-Team/FutureOmni).

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Children's DNA Methylation and Family Dynamics in a Congo Basin Subsistence Community: Links with Parental Conflict and Fathers' Caregiving

Family environments may contribute to children's long-term health through biological processes, including epigenetic regulation such as DNA methylation (DNAm). However, most studies in this area focus on Euro-American populations while also rarely including fathering data. The current study investigated children's blood DNAm associations with positive (father caregiving) and negative (parental conflict) family dynamics in a smaller-scale subsistence society living in the Congo Basin rainforest. We measured DNAm from dried blood spots of 54 children (mean age=8.48 years) and conducted three epigenome-wide association studies aimed at discovering differential co-methylated regions (CMRs) associated with family dynamics. Via path models, we investigated the health implications and shared contribution of family factors of the identified CMRs. Differential DNAm associated with family dynamics was localized to genes related to stress, immunology, development, and aging, thus possibly linking to children's physical health and were simultaneously connected to other family factors such as number of siblings. Our findings suggested similarities in biological embedding of family factors across socio-ecologically diverse contexts.

13.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-08

Single-cell spatial pharmacobiology for imaging antibody-based therapies in solid tumors

作者: 未知作者

We have developed single-cell spatial pharmacobiology (SSP), which combines in situ imaging of a systemically infused fluorescent therapeutic antibody with high-plex spatial proteomics. Applied to head and neck and pancreatic tumors from patients treated in phase 1 trials, SSP revealed marked spatial heterogeneity in antibody delivery and target engagement, which was shaped by conserved stromal barriers.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CisTransCell: Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction via Gene Function, Regulatory Control, and Cellular Context

arXiv:2606.13713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting cellular transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in single-cell biology, especially in the zero-shot setting where the perturbed gene or gene combination is unseen during training. A major difficulty is that perturbation effects are not determined by expression state alone: they depend on how the perturbed gene product influences other genes and proteins, how those downstream factors act on cis-regulatory elements, and which regulatory programs are active in the current cell state. To better capture this biological complexity, we propose CisTransCell, a cell-conditioned multi-modal framework for single-cell perturbation prediction that augments each gene with two complementary priors: a regulatory-sequence prior that captures how the gene is controlled, and a coding-sequence prior that captures what the gene product does. By integrating these priors with cellular expression state, CisTransCell models perturbation response as a cascade from gene function to regulatory control to downstream transcriptional change. Experiments on benchmark single-cell perturbation datasets show that CisTransCell achieves strong performance in zero-shot perturbation prediction.

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

Hybrid Acousto-Optical Double Dressing of a Two-Level System

arXiv:2509.25847v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We experimentally investigate resonance fluorescence from a two-level system in a novel configuration where a strong laser drives an optical Rabi oscillation while an acoustic field parametrically modulates the frequency of the two-level system. We observe emission spectra that deviate markedly from the standard Mollow triplet, including dynamical cancellation of the central peak. A doubly dressed state model incorporating hybridization among the emitter, optical field, and acoustic field captures these features. Guided by this model, we experimentally validate the condition for optimal cooling of acoustic phonons in an emitter-optomechanical system. These results reveal new regimes of strongly driven quantum nonlinear interactions.

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

MolmoMotion: Forecasting Point Trajectories in 3D with Language Instruction

Motion forecasting is central to visual intelligence: agents must anticipate how objects will move in order to plan actions, reason about physical interactions, and synthesize realistic futures. We argue that 3D points in world coordinates provide a general representation that is class-agnostic, view-stable, compact, and directly useful for downstream tasks. We formalize the task of goal-conditioned 3D point motion forecasting: given a short visual history, a set of 3D query points on an object of interest, and a language description of the intended goal, the model predicts the future 3D trajectory of each point. We introduce a full stack to study this task at scale: (1) MolmoMotion-1M is a large corpus of action-described, object-grounded 3D point trajectories annotated from 1.16M unconstrained videos; (2) PointMotionBench is a human-verified benchmark spanning 111 object categories and 61 motion types; and (3) MolmoMotion is a general motion forecasting model that supports both autoregressive coordinate prediction and flow-matching-based trajectory generation. MolmoMotion accurately predicts diverse motion patterns with different language instructions, and significantly outperforms existing motion prediction baselines on PointMotionBench. Finally, we show that the learned 3D motion prior transfers well to downstream applications: it improves training efficiency and generalization for robot manipulation, and its predicted trajectories provide effective motion guidance for generative models to synthesize videos with more realistic object motion.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

In situ nanocrystal confinement for efficient blue perovskite LEDs

Metal halide perovskites have emerged as promising semiconductors for light-emitting diodes (LEDs) owing to their excellent luminescence properties1. However, their performance remains limited, primarily owing to the inherent contradiction between ‘high crystallinity’ and ‘small size’ in the in situ synthesis of perovskite nanocrystals on substrates. Here we report efficient blue perovskite LEDs (PeLEDs) achieved via in situ polymerization-driven nanocrystal confinement to synthesize perovskite films composed of high-quality nanocrystals. The in situ-formed polymer network imposes nanoscale spatial constraints during perovskite nanocrystal growth, enabling nanocrystals with small sizes and a high photoluminescence quantum yield of 83%. Furthermore, polymerizable monomers with sufficient coordination sites allow a prolonged lattice rearrangement of perovskite clusters, promoting the crystallinity of the nanocrystals. The synthesized perovskite nanocrystals are utilized in the fabrication of PeLEDs, resulting in an external quantum efficiency of 21.8% at 491 nm, which is among the highest performances in blue PeLEDs. This work simultaneously controls the thermal dynamics of perovskite crystallization and organic ligand reactions, which helps to advance understanding of the effect of ligand engineering on nanocrystal synthesis, benefiting the development of efficient PeLEDs and other optoelectronic technologies. Efficient blue perovskite light-emitting diodes with an external quantum efficiency of 21.8% are achieved through in situ polymerization-driven nanocrystal confinement.

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

NeRD: Neuro-Symbolic Rule Distillation for Efficient Ontology-Grounded Chain-of-Thought in Medical Image Diagnosis

Interpretability is essential for trustworthy medical image diagnosis. However, existing concept-driven interpretable methods have key limitations: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) require scoring all predefined concepts at inference time and for manual intervention, imposing a substantial burden on clinicians, while rationale-based generative approaches often select concepts by class discriminability, which can drift from diagnostic ontologies. To address these issues, we propose Neuro-Symbolic Rule Distillation (NeRD), a framework that produces efficient, ontology-grounded reasoning chains that are sufficient yet non-redundant, without manually crafting diagnostic rules. Experiments on two skin datasets demonstrate strong diagnostic performance and interpretability, and blinded expert evaluation confirms the clinical plausibility of NeRD rationales. Our method further enables a first expert-in-the-loop study for Multimodal Chain-of-Thought-based diagnosis, achieving efficient and effective concept-level intervention.

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

The Urysohn Machine: A Metric-Topological Model of Computation

作者:

arXiv:2508.14143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the Urysohn Machine, an effective model of classification-oriented computation in which metric separation, frontier structure, and contraction are explicit parts of the computational state. Its basic object is a Urysohn Triple: a support region, a target partition, and a separating classifier stored in a reusable Metric Library. The topological foundation is a constructive Urysohn Realization theorem for finite simplicial settings. It builds separators from dyadic ladders of nested polyhedral regions and equips their frontiers with a chain-level calculus: frontiers are cycles, and shells between levels have boundaries given by differences of frontiers. This construction yields two related complexity measures: decision-boundary width, the geometric measure of a single classifier's boundary, and Urysohn width, the total frontier mass represented by a library or realization. We prove an Amortized Separation Theorem showing that approximating a boundary of width to accuracy requires a number of simple basis triples proportional to boundary width and inversely proportional to resolution, under explicit boundary-footprint assumptions. We also introduce a contrastive separation operator whose graph-cut functional consistently estimates decision-boundary width from sampled metric data, while its Laplacian spectrum certifies class-component structure and conductance. Finally, we analyze the dynamic Urysohn ladder and prove four guarantees: separability under quotient collapse, stability of committed frontiers, bounded capacity under contraction, and scalability with quotient distance. Together, these results give a metric-topological account of classification complexity, amortized inference, and compositional reuse that preserves classical computability while exposing geometric structure hidden by purely symbolic descriptions.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

ProGRank: Probe-Gradient Reranking to Defend Dense-Retriever RAG from Corpus Poisoning

arXiv:2603.22934v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves large language model applications by grounding generation in retrieved evidence, but also introduces corpus poisoning as a new attack surface. In this setting, an adversary injects or edits passages so that they enter the Top-$K$ results for target queries and influence downstream generation. Existing defences often rely on content filtering, auxiliary models, or generator-side reasoning, which complicates deployment. We propose ProGRank, a post hoc, training-free retriever-side defence for dense-retriever RAG. ProGRank stress-tests each query–passage pair under mild randomized perturbations, extracts probe gradients from a small fixed parameter subset, and derives two instability signals: representational consistency and dispersion risk. It then combines these signals with a score gate for reranking. ProGRank preserves the original passage content, requires no retraining, and supports a surrogate-based variant when the deployed retriever is unavailable. Experiments across datasets, retrievers, attacks, and retrieval-stage and end-to-end settings show that ProGRank improves robustness and maintains a favorable robustness–utility trade-off, including under adaptive evasive attacks.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Acoustic Prompting via Stage-wise Modulation for Few-Shot Learning in Audio Language Models

arXiv:2606.15751v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio-Language Models (ALMs) have shown remarkable success in zero-shot audio classification by aligning audio waveforms with text. Recent efforts to improve downstream performance focus on learning optimal text prompts. However, previous approaches focus on the text encoder, leaving the potential of learnable prompts within the audio encoder unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that introduces trainable prompts into the audio encoder to capture task-specific acoustic features. We demonstrate that integrating audio-side prompt learning with existing text-side approaches enhances few-shot adaptation. Through extensive experiments across 11 datasets show that integrating our method as a plug-and-play module alongside existing text prompt tuning generally leads to performance improvements. These findings suggest that explicitly modulating the audio representation space effectively complements text-only prompting approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/hyebin-c/aspl.

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

One-Step Generalization Ratio Guided Optimization for Domain Generalization

arXiv:2606.16301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Domain Generalization (DG) aims to train models that generalize to unseen target domains but often overfit to domain-specific features, known as undesired correlations. Gradient-based DG methods typically guide gradients in a dominant direction but often inadvertently reinforce spurious correlations. Recent work has employed dropout to regularize overconfident parameters, but has not explicitly adjusted gradient alignment or ensured balanced parameter updates. We propose GENIE (Generalization-ENhancing Iterative Equalizer), a novel optimizer that leverages the One-Step Generalization Ratio (OSGR) to quantify each parameter's contribution to loss reduction and assess gradient alignment. By dynamically equalizing OSGR via a preconditioning factor, GENIE prevents a small subset of parameters from dominating optimization, thereby promoting domain-invariant feature learning. Theoretically, GENIE balances convergence contribution and gradient alignment among parameters, achieving higher OSGR while retaining SGD's convergence rate. Empirically, it outperforms existing optimizers and enhances performance when integrated with various DG and single-DG methods.

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

Forged Calamity: Benchmark for Cross-Domain Synthetic Disaster Detection in the Age of Diffusion

The rapid advancement of text-to-image diffusion models has enabled the creation of highly photorealistic synthetic images that closely resemble real photographs, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish authentic content from AI-generated fabrications. This poses challenges for cybersecurity, digital forensics, and disaster response, where fake imagery of floods, fires, or earthquakes can spread misinformation or disrupt emergency operations. To address this, we introduce Forged Calamity, a benchmark dataset for synthetic disaster detection containing 30,000 images, including 6,000 real and 24,000 synthetic samples generated by four diffusion models. Comprehensive experiments across fine-tuned and zero-shot settings reveal consistent weaknesses in current forensic approaches. Fine-tuned detectors perform well in-distribution but lose up to 50\% accuracy on unseen generators or disaster types, showing overfitting to model-specific artifacts. Zero-shot generalized detectors also struggle to maintain stable accuracy, with only limited resilience in a few representation-robust models. These findings highlight persistent generalization gaps and the urgent need for domain- and model-agnostic detection methods to ensure visual authenticity in the diffusion era.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Starter-Iterator Neural Operator: A Unified Architecture for High-Fidelity Forward and Inverse PDE Problems

arXiv:2606.18305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Operator learning is an emerging interdisciplinary field that integrates machine learning with scientific computing. By mapping infinite-dimensional function spaces, this approach provides an efficient surrogate modeling framework for high-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs). Compared to traditional numerical solvers, it achieves a superior trade-off between computational complexity and approximation accuracy, demonstrating significant advantages in many-query tasks such as real-time prediction and parameter sweeps. Given the stringent accuracy requirements of both forward simulation and inverse inference, as well as the precision bottlenecks of existing operator learning methods in handling complex boundaries or long-term evolution, we propose the Starter-Iterator Neural Operator (SINO). Our framework reinterprets the initialization strategies and iterative formats of traditional iterative methods through neural networks, establishing an efficient approach for spectral-spatiotemporal collaborative modeling. Specifically, the frequency-domain initialization module captures globally stable low-frequency features, while the time-domain learning module focuses on optimizing local solution residuals, thereby effectively overcoming the inherent limitations of conventional single-domain modeling approaches. Extensive experiments on typical dynamical systems such as the Navier-Stokes equations and acoustic wave equations, as well as practical applications including super-resolution imaging and weather forecasting, demonstrate that SINO achieves outstanding performance in numerical accuracy, generalization capability, and robustness.

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

Enhancing LLM Safety Through a Theoretical Minimax Game Lens

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) necessitates effective mechanisms to ensure their responsible deployment by accurately distinguishing unsafe content from benign content. While substantial safety datasets are available in English, multilingual safety modeling remains underexplored due to limited open-source safety datasets in other languages. Even within English datasets, safe yet sensitive corner-case content is scarce, leading to shortcut learning by models and non-trivial false-positive rates. To mitigate these issues, we introduce a novel minimax reinforcement learning (RL) framework wherein a data generator and a classifier model co-evolve, facilitating the production of high-quality synthetic multilingual safety data. We theoretically formalize this interaction as a minimax game and rigorously demonstrate convergence to a Nash equilibrium. Empirical evaluations confirm that our synthetic data generation method significantly enhances the classifier model performance, enabling a substantially smaller model to surpass the state-of-the-art by nearly 10% on English benchmarks while achieving 4.5x faster inference speed. These results establish a scalable and efficient methodology for synthetic data generation, advancing the development of safer and more robust multilingual LLM deployments.