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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS

Authors:
Martin Cordiner↗

Interstellar objects provide the only directly observable samples of icy planetesimals formed around other stars, and can therefore provide insight into the diversity of physical and chemical conditions occurring during exoplanet formation1−3. Here we report isotopic measurements of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which reveal an elemental composition unlike any Solar System body. The water in 3I/ATLAS is enriched in deuterium, at a level of D/H = (0.98 ± 0.06)%, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than in known comets, while its range of 12C/13C ratios (141–191 for CO2 and 123–172 for CO) exceeds typical values found in the Solar System, as well as nearby interstellar clouds and protoplanetary disks. Such extreme isotopic signatures indicate formation at temperatures  ≲ 30 K in a relatively metal-poor environment. When interpreted with respect to models for Galactic chemical evolution, the carbon isotopic composition implies that 3I/ATLAS may have accreted as long ago as 12 billion years, following a period of intense, early star formation. 3I/ATLAS thus represents a preserved fragment of an ancient planetary system.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Learning Task-Aware Sampling with Shared Saliency through Density-Equalizing Mappings

Authors:
Tsz Lok Ip↗Han Zhang↗Lok Ming Lui↗

In image and surface-based learning tasks, convolutional features are typically extracted using receptive fields that are sampled uniformly across the entire domain. However, informative structures are rarely distributed uniformly in practice and are often concentrated in localized regions. Such phenomena are particularly common in medical imaging, where pathological changes are spatially confined. Consequently, uniform convolution allocates equal computational effort to both informative and uninformative regions, resulting in inefficient feature extraction and suboptimal utilization of model capacity. To address this issue, we propose a framework for task-adaptive sampling that dynamically redistributes computational attention according to the spatial importance of the data. Specifically, we introduce the Density-Equalizing Convolutional Neural Network (DECNN), which employs density-equalizing mappings to guide convolution through a learned density function. The density function encodes the relative importance of different regions and induces a transformation that enlarges informative areas while compressing less relevant ones. As a result, convolutional receptive fields are redistributed non-uniformly over the domain, enabling denser sampling in task-relevant regions. By coupling this importance-driven transformation with convolution, DECNN performs adaptive feature extraction that focuses computational resources on informative structures. This leads to more efficient use of model capacity, yielding a lightweight yet expressive architecture while simultaneously producing an interpretable saliency map. Experiments on image classification and craniofacial surface analysis demonstrate that DECNN achieves competitive or superior performance with fewer parameters, accurately identifies task-relevant regions, and remains robust under complex geometric variations.

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

TA-RAG: Tone-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Peer-Support Health Communication

Authors:
Yong-Bin Kang↗Anthony McCosker↗

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) successfully grounds large language model (LLM) outputs in trusted documents, but factual grounding alone is insufficient for sensitive peer-support health communication. In domains such as HIV peer support, responses must also be accessible, stigma-free, empathetic, and tailored to the recipient. This paper presents TA-RAG, a lightweight, prompt-based tone-aware RAG framework that embeds explicit tone control into a RAG pipeline without requiring model fine-tuning. We operationalise tone across four core components: stigma-free rewriting, readability adjustment, recipient adaptation, and empathy rephrasing. We evaluate TA-RAG through component-level tests using questions derived from HIV Online Learning Australia (HOLA), UNAIDS terminology guidance, readability metrics, peer-support standards from National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA), and a public empathy dataset. Results show that the TA-RAG's components improve their targeted communication quality while preserving key content. These findings emphasise that prompt-based tone control is a potential direction for making RAG outputs suitable for sensitive peer-support health communication.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SARLO-80: Worldwide Slant SAR Language Optic Dataset 80cm

Authors:
Sol\`ene Debuys\`ere↗Nicolas Trouv\'e↗Nathan Letheule↗Elise Colin↗Georgia Channing↗

arXiv:2606.20523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal foundation models have advanced rapidly thanks to large optical benchmarks, but comparable resources for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remain limited. Existing SAR–optical datasets largely rely on low-resolution, intensity-only Ground Range Detected~(GRD) products and do not preserve complex-valued SAR measurements or native acquisition geometry, which restricts physically grounded multimodal learning. In particular, large-scale public datasets combining very-high-resolution (VHR) SAR SLC, aligned optical imagery, and natural-language descriptions are still lacking. We present a VHR SAR–optical–text dataset built from open-access Umbra spotlight acquisitions distributed as Sensor Independent Complex Data (SICD). From around 2,500 worldwide scenes (VV/HH, 20cm–2m native resolution), we standardize all SAR data to an 80cm slant-range grid via band-limited FFT resampling and tile the imagery into 1024 by 1024 patches. For each SAR patch, we retrieve a high-resolution optical tile and warp it into the SAR grid using local coordinate correspondences for local pixel-level alignment. We further generate three caption variants (SHORT/MID/LONG) per sample to support vision–language training and evaluation. Our dataset contains 119,566 triplets (complex and amplitude slant-range SAR patch, aligned optical patch, natural-language description) covering 257 locations across 72 countries and a broad range of land types and infrastructures. We release fixed train/validation/test splits and the full preprocessing and baseline code to enable reproducible benchmarks for multimodal alignment on cross-modal retrieval and conditional generation in native SAR geometry. The dataset is publicly available on the Hugging Face Hub at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ONERA/SARLO-80.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Lattice surgery for near-term experimental logical qubit entanglement creation in planar architectures

Authors:
Lukas B\"odeker↗\'Aron M\'arton↗Luis Colmenarez↗Ilya Besedin↗Andreas Wallraff↗Markus M\"uller↗

arXiv:2606.15190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the era of early fault-tolerant quantum computing, basic demonstrations of entanglement operations between a few logical qubits are at the frontier of recent developments in quantum computing. In this work, we describe in detail, at both the logical and physical qubit levels, a logical teleportation protocol between two surface code logical qubits based on lattice surgery. We address several aspects of the teleportation protocol pertinent to superconducting qubit architectures. We explore the modularity constraints in the number and location of stabilizer readouts and compare variants of the teleportation protocol in this regard. Additionally, we investigate potential performance improvements related to in-sequence decision logic and the optimal size of the interface region between two surface code patches on a superconducting chip. Based on our simulations, we show possible near-term improvements in lattice surgery protocols that facilitate fault-tolerant quantum computing in superconducting circuit architectures.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Incremental costs of transitioning from four to eight WHO-recommended antenatal care visits in Uganda: A costing analysis from a societal perspective

Authors:
Atuhumuza↗E. B↗Atukunda↗E. C↗Musiimenta↗Mugyenyi↗G. R↗Haberer↗Obua↗Siedner↗M. J↗Matthews↗…

Background In 2016, the World Health Organization revised its antenatal care (ANC) recommendation from four to eight visits. For low- and middle-income countries like Uganda, where achieving even four visits remains a challenge, this transition has significant cost implications for both the health system and households. This study estimated the incremental costs of adopting the eight-visit model from a societal perspective. Methods The study was conducted in six government health facilities in southwestern Uganda. A micro-costing approach estimated health facility costs (personnel, equipment, consumables, and overhead). Costs incurred at patients end (transport, ultrasound, medical expenses, and time) were collected from 785 women using a questionnaire, with all costs in 2025 USD. Results For an average of 4.3 visits, total cost per woman was $100.1: facility costs $43.7 (43.7%), and patient costs $56.4 (56.3%). Transitioning to eight visits would increase total cost by $57.8 (57.8%), of which $36.4 (63.0%) would fall on households, equivalent to 68.8% of average monthly household income. Total costs would rise by 55.4% ($115.5 to $179.5) at Health Center IVs and 64.3% ($102.3 to $168.1) at Health Center IIIs, with facility costs up 43.4% and 62.9% and patient costs up 61.2% and 65.7%, respectively. Conclusion Transitioning to eight ANC visits would impose a large financial burden on households, with the incremental patient cost equivalent to more than two-thirds of average monthly household income. Equitable implementation requires improving availability of medicines and diagnostics, subsidizing transport, exploring telemedicine or community-based models, and improving efficiency at lower-tier health centers.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Echo2ECG: Enhancing ECG Representations with Cardiac Morphology from Multi-View Echos

Authors:
Michelle Espranita Liman↗\"Ozg\"un Turgut↗Alexander M\"uller↗Eimo Martens↗Daniel Rueckert↗Philip M\"uller↗

arXiv:2603.08505v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is a low-cost, widely used modality for diagnosing electrical abnormalities like atrial fibrillation by capturing the heart's electrical activity. However, it cannot directly measure cardiac morphological phenotypes, such as left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), which typically require echocardiography (Echo). Predicting these phenotypes from ECG would enable early, accessible health screening. Existing self-supervised methods suffer from a representational mismatch by aligning ECGs to single-view Echos, which only capture local, spatially restricted anatomical snapshots. To address this, we propose Echo2ECG, a multimodal self-supervised learning framework that enriches ECG representations with the heart's morphological structure captured in multi-view Echos. We evaluate Echo2ECG as an ECG feature extractor on two clinically relevant tasks that fundamentally require morphological information: (1) classification of structural cardiac phenotypes across three datasets, and (2) retrieval of Echo studies with similar morphological characteristics using ECG queries. Our extracted ECG representations consistently outperform those of state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal baselines across both tasks, despite being 18x smaller than the largest baseline. These results demonstrate that Echo2ECG is a robust, powerful ECG feature extractor. Our code is accessible at https://github.com/michelleespranita/Echo2ECG.

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

EndoCoT: Scaling Endogenous Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Models

Authors:
Xuanlang Dai↗Yujie Zhou↗Long Xing↗Jiazi Bu↗Xilin Wei↗Yuhong Liu↗Beichen Zhang↗Kai Chen↗Yuhang Zang↗

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been widely integrated into diffusion frameworks primarily as text encoders to tackle complex tasks such as spatial reasoning. However, this paradigm suffers from two critical limitations: (i) MLLMs text encoder exhibits insufficient reasoning depth. Single-step encoding fails to activate the Chain-of-Thought process, which is essential for MLLMs to provide accurate guidance for complex tasks. (ii) The guidance remains invariant during the decoding process. Invariant guidance during decoding prevents DiT from progressively decomposing complex instructions into actionable denoising steps, even with correct MLLM encodings. To this end, we propose Endogenous Chain-of-Thought (EndoCoT), a novel framework that first activates MLLMs' reasoning potential by iteratively refining latent thought states through an iterative thought guidance module, and then bridges these states to the DiT's denoising process. Second, a terminal thought grounding module is applied to ensure the reasoning trajectory remains grounded in textual supervision by aligning the final state with ground-truth answers. With these two components, the MLLM text encoder delivers meticulously reasoned guidance, enabling the DiT to execute it progressively and ultimately solve complex tasks in a step-by-step manner. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks (e.g., Maze, TSP, VSP, and Sudoku) achieve an average accuracy of 92.1%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 8.3 percentage points. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://internlm.github.io/EndoCoT/.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Implicit Reasoning for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation

Authors:
Yinhan He↗Liam Collins↗Bhuvesh Kumar↗Jundong Li↗Neil Shah↗Donald Loveland↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge. Yet reliably invoking this knowledge for GR remains poorly understood. A key obstacle is that LLM-based GR typically represents items with Semantic IDs (SIDs), disrupting LLMs' natural-language reasoning interface because these tokens are unseen by the LLM during pretraining. Existing approaches address this with expensive multi-stage pipelines that ground SIDs and elicit explicit rationales, but offer limited insight into when and why each stage is necessary. In this work, we systematically decompose explicit reasoning training pipelines for LLM-based GR, revealing three key limitations: weakened world-knowledge verbalization, misalignment between SID and natural-language token embedding spaces, and sensitivity to rationale quality, all of which hurt explicit reasoning performance. To circumvent these issues, we propose PauseRec, a lightweight implicit reasoning paradigm tailored for GR. PauseRec is exceptionally practical, avoiding costly reasoning trace acquisition and reasoning alignment training, leading to a multitude of benefits: (1) it outperforms standard explicit CoT methods by up to 6.22%, (2) it reduces training cost by up to 65% GPU hours, and (3) it speeds up inference by up to 71.3%. These results position PauseRec as a lightweight alternative to explicit rationale generation, enabling more effective and efficient LLM-based GR.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Enhancing Graph Neural Networks Using Proximity Graphs for Dust Source Emission Forecasting

Authors:
Maryam Sanisales↗Zahed Rahmati↗Ali Darvishi Boloorani↗Ali Vefghi↗

arXiv:2606.19825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of dust source emissions is critical for mitigating the significant environmental and health hazards posed by dust storms. Traditional forecasting methods often struggle to capture the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of these phenomena. In this paper, we demonstrate that proximity graphs enable Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to effectively model the intricate spatial and temporal relationships between data points. Specifically, we use proximity graphs–such as Delaunay triangulation, Gabriel graph, k-Nearest Neighbor graph, and Yao graph–as the input for GNNs (including GraphSAGE, Graph Convolutional Networks, and Graph Attention Networks) to perform message passing. Our approach highlights the effectiveness of integrating proximity graphs with GNNs for robust and accurate dust source forecasting. To emphasize the importance of proximity graph representations, we compare our method against GNNs using random graphs for message passing. The results show that GNNs with proximity graphs significantly outperform those with random graphs and are also far superior to Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model in dust source emission forecasting.

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

QALM: Escaping Local Minima via Interleaved Exploration and Exploitation in Quantum Circuit Optimization

Authors:
Aidan Wagner↗Mingkuan Xu↗Pengyu Liu↗Zhihao Jia↗Umut A. Acar↗

arXiv:2606.16221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum circuit optimizers face a fundamental limitation in how they tolerate temporary cost increases. At one extreme, greedy rule-based optimizers immediately apply any cost-reducing transformation, achieving high efficiency but quickly becoming trapped in local minima. At the other extreme, search-based optimizers accept cost-increasing moves to explore the circuit space and escape such minima. However, because search-based optimizers cannot determine within a reasonable time budget whether a given point is promising, that is, whether its neighborhood contains a deeper local minimum, they must blindly explore higher-cost regions. As a result, escaping the current basin to reach a promising point takes exponentially many steps. In this work, we show that this limitation can be overcome with a hybrid framework that interleaves the exhaustive exploration capabilities of search algorithms with the efficiency of rule-based optimization. We implement this framework as QALM, a novel optimizer designed to escape local minima without incurring the runtime penalties of pure search. Crucially, our results demonstrate that QALM does not merely strike a balance; it outperforms existing rule-based and search-based optimizers in circuit reduction rates while operating with the computational efficiency of rule-based systems. In a comprehensive evaluation across 248 circuits, QALM matches or exceeds the fidelity of the strongest baseline on 83.9% of these circuits, given the same time budget.

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12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Multi-platform reassessment of human mitochondrial DNA methylation reveals signals consistent with technical artifacts

Authors:
Basrai↗Bahcheli↗A. T↗Tan↗Zuzarte↗P. C↗Bevan↗Chan↗Ng↗Lam↗Arruda↗Das↗…

The existence and functional relevance of mitochondrial DNA methylation remain controversial. Here, we systematically profiled cytosine methylation and hydroxymethylation across human brain and blood tissues spanning healthy and malignant states using orthogonal sequencing approaches that avoid chemical conversion during library preparation. While nuclear DNA exhibited canonical methylation patterns, mitochondrial DNA consistently showed negligible signal, indistinguishable from background technical noise. By mapping cytosine-guanine sites between mitochondrial DNA and nuclear-embedded mitochondrial sequences, we demonstrate the potential of these nuclear counterparts to confound not only cytosine methylation but also hydroxymethylation measurements, corroborating and extending prior findings implicating nuclear contamination as a potential source of apparent mitochondrial epigenetic signals. Additional technical factors that inflate apparent mtDNA methylation signals were identified, including sequence context biases, flow cell chemistries, and coverage-dependent discrepancies between the heavy and light strands. Collectively, these results provide convergent evidence against the presence of biologically meaningful cytosine methylation or hydroxymethylation in mitochondrial DNA. These findings caution against interpreting apparent mtDNA methylation signals in human adult tissues as meaningful without rigorous orthogonal validation and comprehensive consideration of technical and analytical confounding factors.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Improving Alignment Between Human and Machine Codes: An Empirical Assessment of Prompt Engineering for Construct Identification in Psychology

Authors:
Kylie L. Anglin↗Stephanie Milan↗Brittney Hernandez↗Claudia Ventura↗

Due to their architecture and vast pre-training data, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text classification performance. However, LLM output - here, the category assigned to a text - depends heavily on the wording of the prompt. While literature on prompt engineering is expanding, few studies focus on classification tasks, and even fewer address domains like psychology, where constructs have precise, theory-driven definitions that may not be well represented in pre-training data. We present an empirical framework for optimizing LLM performance for identifying constructs in texts via prompt engineering. We experimentally evaluate five prompting strategies – codebook-guided empirical prompt selection, automatic prompt engineering, persona prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, and explanatory prompting - with zero-shot and few-shot classification. We find that persona, chain-of-thought, and explanations do not fully address performance loss accompanying a badly worded prompt. Instead, the most influential features of a prompt are the construct definition, task framing, and, to a lesser extent, the examples provided. Across three constructs and two models, the classifications most aligned with expert judgments resulted from a few-shot prompt combining codebook-guided empirical prompt selection with automatic prompt engineering. Based on our findings, we recommend that researchers generate and evaluate as many prompt variants as feasible, whether human-crafted, automatically generated, or ideally both, and select prompts and examples based on empirical performance in a training dataset, validating the final approach in a holdout set. This procedure offers a practical, systematic, and theory-driven method for optimizing LLM prompts in settings where alignment with expert judgment is critical.

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14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Secondary terms for first moments of Selmer groups of twists of elliptic curves over global function fields

Authors:
Sun Woo Park↗

arXiv:2606.14274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $E$ be a non-isotrivial elliptic curve over a global function field $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$ of characteristic coprime to $2$ and $3$. Under some explicit conditions, we determine the secondary terms for the first moments of prime Selmer groups of cyclic prime twist families of $E$ over $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Simulation-Augmented Multi-Step Split Conformal Prediction for Aggregated Forecasts

Authors:
Andro Sabashvili↗

arXiv:2606.16356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study uncertainty quantification for aggregated forecasting tasks such as annual totals and year-over-year growth rates. We propose SA-MSCP, a simulation-augmented multi-step split conformal method that generates future paths from cross-validated residuals using a block bootstrap and constructs prediction intervals from empirical quantiles. Experiments show that SA-MSCP improves empirical coverage over a simulated-path baseline for aggregated and growth-rate targets. Our results demonstrate that simulation-enhanced conformal calibration is an effective and general framework for uncertainty quantification in aggregated time-series forecasting.

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16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Effective discrete-modulated continuous variable QKD under general attacks

Authors:
Mariana Navarro↗Antonio Ac\'in↗Carlos Pascual-Garc\'ia↗

arXiv:2606.20346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous variable quantum key distribution via discrete modulations ensures information-theoretic security using standard telecom technologies, providing affordable and scalable quantum communications with simplified classical postprocessing. However, existing security proofs against general attacks often rely on restrictive assumptions, such as a bounded dimension for coherent states, or require impractically large block sizes. In this work, we develop a finite-size security analysis that removes these limitations while incorporating realistic experimental features. Our approach combines the dimension reduction technique, a security proof based on the marginal-constrained entropy accumulation, and a trusted detector model accounting for the receiver imperfections. We report positive key rates in the finite-size regime for relevant block sizes of the order of $10^8$. These results contribute to narrowing the gap between theoretical security proofs and practical implementations of discrete-modulated continuous variable quantum key distribution protocols.

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

From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AI

Authors:
Yongheng Zhang↗Ziang Liu↗Jiaxuan Zhu↗Shuai Wang↗Xiangqi Chen↗Haojing Huang↗Jiayi Kuang↗Siyu Chen↗Ao Shen↗Hao Wu↗Qiufeng Wang↗Qian-Wen Zhang↗…

arXiv:2606.14502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are undergoing a fundamental transformation from conversational generators into integrated AI systems capable of reasoning, action, memory, and self-improvement. We conceptualize this transition as a shift from Chatbot to Digital Colleague: from conversational answers to persistent work. We organize this transition along two tightly coupled dimensions. First, at the cognitive core level, LLMs are advancing from Chatbot-era "fast thinking" systems driven by next-token prediction toward Thinking LLMs that leverage inference-time computation, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, reflection, process supervision, and reinforcement learning to support more deliberate and reliable cognition. Second, at the tool-augmented task execution level, LLMs are progressing from tool-calling Agents that invoke external resources in an ad hoc manner toward OpenClaw-style workstation systems (OpenClaw) equipped with persistent Workspaces, skills, verification loops, and governance. The "Workspace + Skill" paradigm makes episodic tool use colleague-like via state persistence, reusable procedures, task closure, and experience reuse. We examine data construction shifts from instruction-response pairs to State-Action-Observation trajectories and evaluation from static benchmarks to sandboxed, auditable, self-evolving AI ecosystems.

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18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A multi-agent system for spine MRI report generation from multi-sequence imaging

Authors:
Xiao↗Yang↗Sun↗Zhang↗Xu↗Yao↗Miller↗Z. D↗King↗W. E↗Kanani↗M. M↗…

Spinal pathology is a leading cause of pain and disability worldwide. Spine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is central to clinical evaluation, yet its interpretation remains complex and time-consuming, requiring integration of information across multiple imaging sequences and anatomical regions. Despite recent advances in automated MRI analysis, effectively combining multi-sequence data while preserving sequence-specific diagnostic information remains an open challenge. Here we present SpineAgent, a multi-agent framework for spine MRI report generation built upon a multi-sequence foundation model trained on routine clinical data from 32,047 patients and 453,683 MRI series, comprising a total of 13,441,191 MRI slices. To accommodate diverse modalities of sequences, we first pre-train two DINOv3-based encoders separately on T1- and T2-weighted sequences. We then introduce a continual training strategy that learns a synthesizer to embed images of other sequences using the T1 and T2 encoders, producing patient-level embedding that integrates various signals across MRI sequences. Using these embeddings, SpineAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance, with mean 10.8% AUROC improvement across 17 spinal condition-prediction tasks compared to the best competing method, and demonstrates strong generalizability under cross-manufacturer and cross-cohort evaluation. Beyond classification, SpineAgent enables pathology localization by identifying findings-relevant slices and segmenting pathological regions. It also supports multimodal image-report retrieval, providing a solid foundation for scalable and explainable MRI report generation. We further integrate these validated capabilities of SpineAgent into 37 specialized agents for condition diagnosis, pathological-region localization, and clinically-similar-cases retrieval. Finally, we incorporate their outputs as structured tokens within a Medical Report Agent trained end-to-end for report generation. Through both automated metrics and expert evaluation by five radiologists, SpineAgent achieves leading performance in spine MRI report generation. Together, SpineAgent introduces a continual training approach for multi-sequence spine MRI understanding. By decomposing report generation into clinically grounded subtasks addressed by specialized agents, the SpineAgent framework enables accurate, interpretable and generalizable spine MRI reporting across diverse imaging sequences and anatomical regions.

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19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

On the Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation for the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model and its mean-field limit

Authors:
Alexander Czernik↗Ruoyuan Liu↗Shao Liu↗

arXiv:2606.15214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model, i.e. a system of $N$ interacting stochastic damped nonlinear wave equations (SdNLW) with coupled cubic nonlinearities, posed on the two-dimensional torus and indexed by a parameter $\varepsilon > 0$. We show that as $\varepsilon$ goes to zero (Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation) and $N$ goes to infinity (mean-field limit), each component of the solution to the SdNLW system converges to the solution to the stochastic nonlinear heat equation (SNLH) with a mean-field nonlinearity. We prove such convergence via two regimes: first with $\varepsilon$ going to zero to obtain the parabolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model, i.e. a system of $N$ coupled SNLH, and then with $N$ going to infinity; or first with $N$ going to infinity for each component to obtain the mean-field SdNLW and then with $\eps$ going to zero. As a result, we obtain a commutative diagram regarding the convergence from the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model to the mean-field SNLH.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Decoupling Semantics from Distortions: Multi-Scale Two-Stream Vision-Language Alignment for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment

Authors:
Zijie Meng↗

Existing vision-language model (VLM)-based AI-generated image quality assessment (AIGIQA) methods suffer from a fundamental semantic-distortion dimensional conflict: monolithic representations optimized for semantic discrimination inherently entangle compositional understanding with low-level perceptual sensitivity, rendering them blind to fine-grained quality degradations. We introduce MST-CLIPIQA, a multi-scale two-stream framework that achieves hierarchical vision-language alignment through explicit representational decoupling. Our architecture leverages dual CLIP encoders with complementary patch granularities: coarse-grained streams capture global semantic coherence while fine-grained streams preserve textural signatures and artifact patterns. An information bottleneck-inspired gated fusion mechanism performs adaptive cross-scale distillation, with optional cross-attention enabling prompt-anchored correspondence evaluation when generation prompts are available. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks establish new state-of-the-art results, achieving average improvements of 1.11 percent SRCC on quality and 2.35 percent SRCC on text-image correspondence prediction, while maintaining efficiency with only 0.8M trainable parameters. Our project is available at https://github.com/YMlinfeng/MST-CLIPIQA.

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21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Europe must seize the moment to lead on free and open science

Authors: Unknown Author

An under-appreciated research powerhouse, Europe has a responsibility to champion democratic science that is accessible to all the world’s research talent. An under-appreciated research powerhouse, Europe has a responsibility to champion democratic science that is accessible to all the world’s research talent.

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

Prior-Informed Flow Matching for Graph Reconstruction

Authors:
Harvey Chen↗Nicolas Zilberstein↗Santiago Segarra↗

arXiv:2601.22107v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Prior-Informed Flow Matching (PIFM), a conditional flow model for graph reconstruction. Reconstructing graphs from partial observations remains a key challenge; classical embedding methods often lack global consistency, while modern generative models struggle to incorporate structural priors. PIFM bridges this gap by integrating embedding-based priors with continuous-time flow matching. Grounded in a permutation equivariant version of the distortion-perception theory, our method first uses a prior, such as GraphSAGE or node2vec, to form an informed initial estimate of the adjacency matrix based on local information. It then applies rectified flow matching to refine this estimate, transporting it toward the true distribution of clean graphs and learning a global coupling. Experiments on different datasets demonstrate that PIFM consistently enhances classical embeddings, outperforming them and state-of-the-art generative baselines in reconstruction accuracy.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

SpAArSIST: Sparsified AASIST for Efficient and Reliable Anti-Spoofing

Authors:
Anton Firc↗Vojt\v{e}ch Stan\v{e}k↗Zbyn\v{e}k Li\v{c}ka↗Kamil Malinka↗Martin Pere\v{s}\'ini↗

arXiv:2606.11674v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present SpAArSIST, a deployment-oriented refinement of the widely used AASIST graph pooling backend for self-supervised learning (SSL) based anti-spoofing. Motivated by redundant operations in public implementations, we replace learned pooling and stack-node attention with explicit, lightweight choices: separate train and inference graph pooling ratios $(k_{\mathrm{tr}},k_{\mathrm{inf}})$, magnitude-based node scoring, and mean aggregation of graph nodes. The best overall configuration (rank 1) cuts backend compute by 20.7% (195.045M $\rightarrow$ 154.706M MACs) and model size by 4.1% (611.8k $\rightarrow$ 586.4k params), while improving out-of-domain robustness on In-the-Wild to 2.82% EER and 0.078 minDCF (from 4.64% and 0.133) and remaining competitive on ASVspoof5. We further provide a composite selection score that summarizes accuracy, calibration, and compute to support balanced deployment-oriented model choice.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

From Correspondence to Actions: Human-Like Multi-Image Spatial Reasoning in Multi-modal Large Language Models

Authors:
Masanari Oi↗Koki Maeda↗Ryuto Koike↗Daisuke Oba↗Nakamasa Inoue↗Naoaki Okazaki↗

While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made substantial progress in single-image spatial reasoning, multi-image spatial reasoning, which requires integration of information from multiple viewpoints, remains challenging. Cognitive studies suggest that humans address such tasks through two mechanisms: cross-view correspondence, which identifies regions across different views that correspond to the same physical locations, and stepwise viewpoint transformation, which composes relative viewpoint changes sequentially. However, existing studies incorporate these mechanisms only partially and often implicitly, without explicit supervision for both. We propose Human-Aware Training for Cross-view correspondence and viewpoint cHange (HATCH), a training framework with two complementary objectives: (1) Patch-Level Spatial Alignment, which encourages patch representations to align across views for spatially corresponding regions, and (2) Action-then-Answer Reasoning, which requires the model to generate explicit viewpoint transition actions before predicting the final answer. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that HATCH consistently outperforms baselines of comparable size by a clear margin and achieves competitive results against much larger models, while preserving single-image reasoning capabilities.

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

Compositional Reasoning Depth Predicts Clinical AI Failure: Empirical Evidence Consistent with Transformer Compositionality Limits in Electronic Health Record Question Answering

Authors:
Sanjay Basu↗

Aggregate accuracy benchmarks conceal a systematic structure in how large language models fail at electronic health record (EHR) question answering: questions requiring more inferential steps produce disproportionately more errors. Motivated by theoretical results on transformer compositionality limits, we introduce a pre-specified hop-count taxonomy – the number of distinct reasoning steps required to answer a clinical question from an EHR – as a principled predictor of model failure. We annotate 313 clinician-generated MedAlign EHR question-answer pairs across four hop levels and evaluate 301 questions in a within-model ablation (claude-sonnet-4-6, zero-shot vs. extended thinking) and cross-architecture replications (gpt-4o and gpt-5.4-2026-03-05, zero-shot). All three models, spanning two providers and two OpenAI generations (GPT-4 and GPT-5), show monotone accuracy decline with hop count: Claude Sonnet zero-shot falls from 30.6% (hop=1) to 17.6% (hop=4) (Cochran-Armitage z=-2.30, p=0.011; OR per hop 0.72, 95% CI [0.56,0.92], p=0.008); GPT-4o replicates this (37.8% to 14.7%; OR 0.58 [0.45,0.75], p

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