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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Using wastewater surveillance to explore community-level dietary intake in sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa

Wastewater can be used to measure biomarkers that reflect population-level dietary intake and diversity; however, how this approach may apply in a low-income country remains a knowledge gap. This study aims to evaluate whether select dietary-related metabolites can be detected in wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) samples from both sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa. Fourteen WES samples were collected and analyzed from two university campuses in Mzuzu and Thyolo, Malawi. Four targets were analyzed: N-methyl-2-pyridone-5-carboxamide (2PY; a biomarker of vitamin B3), 4-pyridoxic acid (4-PA; a biomarker of vitamin B6), as well as enterodiol and enterolactone (biomarkers of dietary fiber and polyphenol consumption). An 18-question survey, paired spatiotemporally with the WES measurements, assessed self-reported daily dietary intake, food insecurity, and nutrient deficiency symptoms among 500 respondents. Among the 14 WES samples, 2PY, 4-PA, and enterolactone were detected, while enterodiol was not detected above the method limit (

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

RECTOR: Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling for Affective and Cognitive Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.15278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Affective and cognitive disorders manifest as distributed, time-varying brain network dynamics across regions, channels, and time, challenging robust representation learning from EEG/sEEG for clinical diagnosis. We propose RECTOR (Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling), an end-to-end self-supervised framework that unifies joint region-channel-temporal representation learning beyond fixed anatomical priors. At its core, RECTOR-SA is a hierarchical, block-sparse self-attention induced by Adaptive Functional Partitioning that evolves region structures from static anatomical definitions to adaptive functional regions. The self-supervision is driven by Masked Topology and Representation Learning, which jointly optimizes three complementary objectives: Masked Predictive Modeling, Topological Structure Modeling, and Cross-View Consistency. Across diverse benchmarks, RECTOR sets a new state-of-the-art in EEG emotion recognition and sEEG task-engagement classification. Crucially, its strong robustness to missing channels and cross-montage generalization underscores its potential for large-scale pre-training on heterogeneous EEG/sEEG, providing interpretable insights at both region and channel levels.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Structure Bioinformatics of Eight Human ATP Synthase Fo Subunits and Their AlphaFold3-Predicted Water-Soluble QTY Analogs

Human mitochondrial ATP synthase is an essential rotary motor enzyme that produces most of the cellular ATP through oxidative phosphorylation. Its membrane-embedded Fo sector contains highly hydrophobic transmembrane subunits that are challenging to study in aqueous environments without detergents. This study explores whether applying the QTY code can reduce the hydrophobicity of selected ATP synthase Fo subunits while preserving their overall molecular structures. We applied the QTY code to eight human ATP synthase Fo subunits: ATP6, ATP8, ATPK, ATP68, ATPMK, AT5G1, AT5G2, and AT5G3. Hydrophobic amino acids leucine (L), isoleucine (I), valine (V), and phenylalanine (F) in transmembrane regions were systematically replaced with hydrophilic glutamine (Q), threonine (T), and tyrosine (Y). Four native subunits with available CryoEM structures from human ATP synthase (PDB: 8H9S) were superposed with their AlphaFold3-predicted QTY analogs. The native ATP synthase Fo subunits superposed well with their respective QTY analogs. For the CryoEM-native comparisons, RMSD values ranged from 0.565[A] to 2.546[A]. For the AlphaFold3-native comparisons of subunits without CryoEM structures, RMSD values ranged from 0.204[A] to 0.297[A]. Despite substantial QTY substitutions in the transmembrane regions, ranging from 38.89% to 50.79%, the QTY analogs retained similar overall folds, molecular weights, and isoelectric points. Hydrophobic surface analysis showed that the QTY analogs had reduced hydrophobic patches compared with their native counterparts, with average hydrophobicity decreasing from 0.2959 in native proteins to -1.1023 in QTY analogs. These structural bioinformatics studies suggest that the QTY code can be applied to ATP synthase Fo subunits to generate more hydrophilic, potentially water-soluble analogs while preserving overall structural similarity. These results extend the application of the QTY code to the membrane-embedded Fo sector of ATP synthase and provide a foundation for future experimental studies testing whether these QTY analogs can be expressed, purified, and evaluated for assembly or proton-transfer-related functions.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CORA: Analyzing and bridging thinking-answer gap in Multimodal RLVR via Consistency-Oriented Reasoning Alignment

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has successfully elicited the reasoning capabilities of large language models, motivating its extension to multimodal scenarios. Existing methods primarily focus on improving the visual coverage of reasoning traces and mitigating visual hallucinations, but underestimate the semantic inconsistency between the reasoning process and the final answer. In this paper, we delve into thinking-answer inconsistency in RLVR for large vision-language models (LVLMs), showing thorough analyses of rollouts collected throughout Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) training process and post-RLVR evaluation outputs that this issue persists during training and remains present during inference. Motivated by the analysis, we propose Consistency-Oriented Reasoning Alignment (CORA), which introduces thinking-answer semantic consistency into RLVR through a lightweight plug-and-play consistency reward model, and further incorporates Hybrid Reward Advantage Splitting (HRAS) to stably coordinate task and consistency optimization. Extensive experiments across representative multimodal reasoning benchmarks and mainstream LVLMs show that CORA improves task performance while effectively mitigating thinking-answer inconsistency, leading to more faithful reasoning traces.

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

Learning to Emulate Chaos: Adversarial Optimal Transport Regularization

arXiv:2604.21097v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chaos arises in many complex dynamical systems, from weather to power grids, but is difficult to accurately model with data-driven methods such as machine learning emulators. While emulators are promising tools for accelerating simulations and solving inverse problems, they still struggle to learn chaotic dynamics, where sensitivity to initial conditions renders exact long-term forecasts infeasible, especially given noisy data. Recent work instead trains emulators to match the statistical properties of chaotic attractors, but these approaches often rely on handcrafted summary statistics or large, diverse multi-environment datasets. In this work, we propose a family of adversarial optimal transport objectives that can jointly learn high-quality summary statistics and a physically consistent emulator from a single noisy trajectory. We theoretically analyze and experimentally validate a Sinkhorn divergence formulation (2-Wasserstein) and a WGAN-style dual formulation (1-Wasserstein) of our approach. Numerical experiments across a variety of chaotic systems, including ones with high-dimensional spatiotemporal chaos, show that emulators trained using our proposed objectives have significantly improved long-term statistical fidelity.

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

Broadband High-Level Squeezed Light using Waveguide Optical Parametric Amplifiers with External Dispersion Compensation

arXiv:2606.17422v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate broadband phase-sensitive amplification (PSA) measurement of squeezed light generated by a waveguide optical parametric amplifier (OPA) with external dispersion compensation. In broadband systems, group velocity dispersion (GVD) induces a frequency-dependent rotation of the squeezing axis, which limits the observable bandwidth in PSA measurements. To overcome this limitation, we introduce external dispersion compensation between two OPAs and suppress the quadrature rotation over a wide frequency range. As a result, we observe a maximum squeezing of 5.9 dB near the carrier frequency and more than 5 dB of squeezing up to a frequency offset of 4.5 THz from the carrier. Furthermore, squeezing below the shot-noise level is confirmed up to a frequency offset of 6 THz from the carrier, corresponding to the accessible phase-matching bandwidth of the waveguide OPA. Our results establish a practical method for broadband characterization of squeezed light and provide a key step toward ultrafast continuous-variable quantum information processing.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MagicSim: A Unified Infrastructure for Executable Embodied Interaction

Robot learning and embodied agents now require simulation to serve as a shared execution substrate linking control, skills, and planning, not only as a renderer, controller testbed, or fixed task environment. Existing pipelines split these layers with "magic" actions, disconnected training environments, or forward-only renders that cannot reproduce, evaluate, and annotate the same episode. We present MagicSim, an embodied interaction infrastructure built around one deterministic batched runtime and a shared Markov decision process (MDP). From YAML-first specifications that decouple contents, placement, behavior, and agent exposure, MagicSim constructs diverse executable worlds spanning task families, interaction regimes, physics, layouts, sensors, avatars, and robot embodiments in one reset-and-step loop. A common execution interface grounds high-level commands through controllers, atomicskills, planner primitives, and asynchronous planning, realizing them as robot actions rather than simulator-side state edits. One task definition supports three capabilities: benchmark and RL evaluation, an autocollect interface that automatically turns commands into grounded trajectories, and agent/VLM-facing interaction. For automatic execution, commands flow through a Command->Skill->Planner->Robot->Record pipeline, while per-environment command, skill, planning, retry, annotation, and episode states advance independently above the shared physics tick. Successful rollouts are saved as structured multimodal trajectories aligning language supervision, action representations, visual/geometric representations, and task-level status with the executed episode. MagicSim thus unifies diverse world construction, embodied execution, task evaluation, automatic rollout generation, and interactive agent interfaces in one planner-in-the-loop runtime.

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

Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification via Prototype Adaptation and Pseudo Class-variable Training

arXiv:2606.08898v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the task of few-shot class-incremental audio classification, the number of classes is assumed to always increase without considering the possibility of decrease. However, the number of classes generally increases or decreases in practice. In this paper, we investigate a problem of Few-shot Class-variable Incremental Audio Classification (FCIAC), in which the number of classes increases or decreases. We propose a FCIAC method using prototype adaptation and pseudo class-variable training. The model in our method consists of an encoder and a classifier. The classifier is initialized by a class-variable prototype adaptation network, whose structure dynamically changes with the change of classes. In addition, we design a pseudo class-variable training strategy to enhance the model's adaptability to changing classes. Experiments on three public datasets show that our method exceeds previous methods in average accuracy. The code is at: https://github.com/cgq2971-afk/FCIAC.

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

Persona-Pruner: Sculpting Lightweight Models for Role-Playing

Language Models (LMs) have shown remarkable potential as role-playing chatbots, delivering consistent, stylized interactions when given a specification of a character or user persona. However, applying these capabilities to real-world applications (e.g., ecosystems with numerous NPCs interacting simultaneously) exposes a critical inefficiency due to the excessive computational cost. In this paper, we question the necessity of dedicating a full, generalist model to a single persona, hypothesizing that a specific character identity relies on only a fraction of the model's total capacity. We observe that naively pruning LMs often severely degrades the role-playing performance for a specific persona; it does not distinguish between redundant knowledge and essential character traits. We propose Persona-Pruner, a framework that sculpts a lightweight role-playing model by isolating persona-specific sub-networks from a single description. Our experiments consistently show that Persona-Pruner preserves role-playing performance substantially more effectively than existing state-of-the-art LLM pruning techniques, reducing the performance drop from the dense model by up to 93.8% over the strongest baseline on RoleBench in LLM-as-a-judge score, while still maintaining general LLM capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/jsu-kim/Persona-Pruner.

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

SirenFNO: Efficient and Full Frequency Learning of Fourier Neural Operators

arXiv:2606.11518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fourier neural operators (FNOs) are effective and efficient surrogates for approximating solutions of PDEs and generalize across discretizations. However, owing to the reliance on frequency truncation to maintain learning efficiency of FNOs, empirical studies suggest that FNOs exhibit spectral bias toward low-frequency information, which may hinder the learning capability especially for certain PDEs with strong high-frequency oscillations. To address this limitation, we propose SirenFNO, a novel framework that leverages sinusoidal representation networks (SIRENs) to learn implicit neural representations and performs mode-wise kernel parameterization. Our SIREN parameterization learns a full-grid spectrum with a constant and discretization-independent parameter count, thereby eliminating the need for frequency truncation. We further extend SirenFNO with functional tensor decompositions to enhance parameter and learning efficiency. Empirical results show that our SirenFNO consistently outperforms FNO with approximately $4$ to $15$ times parameter reductions with preserved discretization invariance, and our functional decomposition variants obtain performance improvements with a maximum of $73$ times fewer parameters across multiple PDE benchmarks.

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

Global Convergence of Gradient Descent for Score Matching in Gaussian Mixtures via Reverse Fisher Divergence

arXiv:2606.19876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The score matching problem is a central training objective in modern generative modeling, diffusion models, fitting unnormalized statistical models, and inverse problems. A standard approach is to minimize the forward Fisher divergence, where the expectation is taken with respect to the teacher distribution. However, recent results show that even in simple Gaussian mixture model settings, this objective can lead to undesirable and initialization-dependent convergence behavior. In this paper, we study an alternative objective: the reverse Fisher divergence, where the expectation is taken with respect to the student distribution. We analyze gradient descent (GD) for fitting Gaussian mixture models and show that this change in the objective leads to significantly better optimization properties. First, when the teacher distribution is a single Gaussian and the student is a Gaussian mixture model with fixed weights and identity covariances, we prove the global convergence of GD from arbitrary initializations. Second, we extend the analysis to the case where the teacher is also a Gaussian mixture model and prove global convergence guarantees under a global random initialization scheme and a $\widetilde{\Omega}(1)$-separation assumption on the target means. In particular, with high probability, each student component converges near its closest teacher component, and we provide conditions under which the student distribution converges in total variation distance. Our proofs rely on a new Lyapunov-based analysis of the gradient descent dynamics, showing that the reverse Fisher divergence has a much more favorable optimization landscape than the forward Fisher divergence.

12.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

U = U for all: Advancing equity in HIV prevention

by Thiago S. Torres, Paula M. Luz Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U = U). However, U = U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. Equitable and accurate awareness of U = U requires culturally tailored interventions, improved provider education, and supportive policy environments beyond biomedical evidence alone. Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U). However, U=U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. In this Perspective, Thiago Torres and Paula Luz outline what is needed to improve equity and accuracy in global awareness and education of U=U.

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

Variational Graph Neural Networks for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems

arXiv:2603.29515v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasingly wide use of deep machine learning techniques in computational mechanics has significantly accelerated simulations of problems that were considered unapproachable just a few years ago. However, in critical applications such as Digital Twins for engineering or medicine, fast responses are not enough; reliable results must also be provided. In certain cases, traditional deterministic methods may not be optimal as they do not provide a measure of confidence in their predictions or results, especially in inverse problems where the solution may not be unique or the initial data may not be entirely reliable due to the presence of noise, for instance. Classic deep neural networks also lack a clear measure to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions. In this work, we present a variational graph neural network (VGNN) architecture that integrates variational layers into its architecture to model the probability distribution of weights. Unlike computationally expensive full Bayesian networks, our approach strategically introduces variational layers exclusively in the decoder, allowing us to estimate cognitive uncertainty and statistical uncertainty at a relatively lower cost. In this work, we validate the proposed methodology in two cases of solid mechanics: the identification of the value of the elastic modulus with nonlinear distribution in a 2D elastic problem and the location and quantification of the loads applied to a 3D hyperelastic beam, in both cases using only the displacement field of each test as input data. The results show that the model not only recovers the physical parameters with high precision, but also provides confidence intervals consistent with the physics of the problem, as well as being able to locate the position of the applied load and estimate its value, giving a confidence interval for that experiment.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Authority, Truth, and Citation Bias: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Benchmark for Studying Epistemic Susceptibility in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.13104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in citation-augmented settings, yet the effect of citation presence on model behavior independent of factual content remains poorly understood. We introduce AuthorityBench, a 220,564-prompt multi-domain benchmark that isolates how citation-based authority signals influence epistemic behavior in LLMs. The benchmark uses a fully balanced 2x2 factorial design crossing claim veracity with citation veracity, the first to do so, across four domains (general knowledge, science, law, and medicine), with controlled variation over 40 prompt templates, four venue prestige tiers, and a country-coded author name dataset. Evaluating seven models on 12 structured research questions, we find that citation presence, whether real or fabricated, consistently increases hallucination rates relative to a no-citation baseline. The effect is strongest when fabricated citations accompany true claims, raising hallucination rates by 3 to 22 percentage points and reaching 35 to 77% in the general knowledge domain, while legal claims are comparatively robust and venue prestige and author demographics show negligible impact. All datasets and evaluation code are available at: https://github.com/floating-reeds/AuthorityBench

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

Unstable Features, Reproducible Subspaces: Understanding Seed Dependence in Sparse Autoencoders

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to interpret neural network representations, but their utility depends on whether the learned features are reproducible across training runs. We study this question through feature stability: for each SAE feature, we estimate the probability that a similar feature reappears in an independently trained SAE. This yields a scalable per-feature signal that separates stable from unstable features. In a large-scale study across seeds, models, layers, dictionary sizes, and SAE variants, we find a pronounced functional asymmetry: stable features carry most of the reconstruction- and prediction-relevant signal, while unstable features have weak marginal impact and are dominated by low-frequency surface-form triggers in both activation statistics and automatic explanations. Geometrically, unstable features are individually non-reproducible but concentrate in reproducible lower-rank subspaces, suggesting that seed dependence often reflects basis ambiguity within a shared region of activation space rather than pure noise. A controlled synthetic model makes this mechanism explicit, showing that low-rank ground-truth features can be recovered at the subspace level while remaining non-identifiable as individual SAE latents across seeds. Finally, by pooling unique cross-seed features, we construct more stable SAEs while preserving explained variance in this setting. Together, these results show that unstable features are not merely failed or noisy latents: they have weak individual functional impact, but reflect reproducible low-dimensional structure that standard SAEs resolve differently across seeds.

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

Exact Linear Attention

作者:

arXiv:2605.18848v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper introduces Exact Linear Attention (ELA), a mechanism that achieves linear computational complexity for Transformer attention by exploiting the exact decomposition property of kernel functions, thereby eliminating approximation error. We identify and address two key limitations of prior linear attention – gradient explosion and token attention dilution – by imposing kernel constraints that ensure non-negativity, discriminability, and geometric interpretability. Several kernel functions are proposed, including the Hadamard Exp Kernel, Summation Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, and Subtraction Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, each tailored for specific attention behaviors. Beyond the core attention formulation, the paper presents three engineering innovations: (1) a Hyper-Link structure that replaces traditional residual connections to mitigate gradient degradation; (2) a Memory Lobe module based on bidirectional linear attention, which captures "transformation flow" across layers to implement qualitative memory and an implicit reinforcement learning paradigm; and (3) a routing-score-based bias mechanism for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to improve interpretability and semantic alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that ELA achieves up to 6x faster decoding speed and 75% reduction in KV cache memory usage compared to full attention, while maintaining comparable or superior training performance. The proposed memory module accelerates convergence and enhances generalization. Furthermore, we extend the linear attention principle to vision models, yielding YOLO-LAT, which attains up to 4.3x GPU inference speedup and 7.9x parameter reduction with competitive detection accuracy. These results underline the broad applicability of exact linear attention for scaling Transformer models to ultra-long sequences and efficient visual tasks.

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

LongWebBench: Evaluating Structural and Functional Webpage Generation in Long-Horizon Settings

arXiv:2606.17727v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promising progress in generating webpages from visual inputs, yet existing evaluations mainly focus on short, single-screen, and largely static webpages. We introduce LongWebBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-horizon webpage generation from both structural and functional perspectives. LongWebBench contains 490 real-world long webpages for structural fidelity evaluation and 507 goal-oriented interaction tasks over 129 webpages for functional evaluation. It employs two complementary protocols: a multi-dimensional VLM-based metric for assessing long-range structural coherence, and a DOM-augmented agent-based pipeline for end-to-end functional verification. We further examine the automatic evaluation protocols through human agreement analysis. Experiments with state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary VLMs under single-image and multi-image settings reveal that structural fidelity degrades as webpage length increases, while visually plausible generations often fail to support executable multi-step interactions. These results highlight the need to evaluate long webpage generation beyond visual similarity, with executable interaction as a core criterion. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zheny2751-dotcom/LongWebBench.

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

APT: Atomic Physical Transitions for Causal Video-Language Understanding

Physical events are not understood by their names alone, but by the causal state changes that compose them. A clip-level label such as "bounce" can be correct while hiding the process that makes the event physically valid, from support loss and contact onset to rebound and settling. To make this hidden process explicit, we introduce Atomic Physical Transitions (APTs): minimal, temporally localized state changes that bind a visible cue to an active physical mechanism and before/after dynamical regimes. An APT chain represents a video as an ordered causal transition sequence rather than a single aggregate event label: event labels tell what happened; APT chains explain why it happened. To make APTs learnable by VLMs, we construct mixed-source APT data from human annotations and simulator ground truth, covering 14 transition types across contact, gravity, friction, and rotation/stability, with 27,303 timed instances over 1,246 trials. Using this data, we find that current VLMs miss transition-level physics, with zero-shot recall at most 14% and errors dominated by missed transitions. Direct fine-tuning on APT chains improves transition detection but causes event-level forgetting, indicating that the model learns a specialized answer format rather than a reusable physical representation. We therefore propose APT-Tune, a parameter-efficient recipe that teaches VLMs to use causal transitions without forgetting how to answer video questions. It combines image-pad-aware supervision, format-conditional co-training, and mechanism-conditioned domain-to-type decoding to make APT learning format-robust and physically grounded. With only 11 M LoRA parameters on Qwen3-VL-2B, APT-Tune substantially improves APT recall while also improving event-level video transfer. These results show that APTs are not a new answer format, but a human-aligned causal supervision signal for physical video understanding.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Reference-guided immune recovery matching prioritizes traditional Chinese medicine ingredients

Therapeutic prioritization from single-cell transcriptomes requires a target that is closer to treatment response than disease-signature reversal. In immune diseases, post-treatment recovery may follow patient- and cell-type-specific trajectories rather than a simple return along the pretreatment disease axis. We developed ImmuneNavi, a healthy-reference-anchored recovery-matching workflow for ranking traditional Chinese medicine ingredients from paired PBMC data. The workflow maps heterogeneous PBMC cohorts to a common healthy immune coordinate system, constructs patient-cell-type disease and recovery states, and processes ITCM treated-control profiles into a fixed ingredient perturbation bank. Patient and ingredient states are represented in matched gene, pathway and transcription-factor views, allowing the model to combine local transcriptional direction with more stable program-level features. A matcher trained on one paired treatment cohort preserved recovery-aligned ingredient rankings in independent PBMC cohorts without redefining the feature space, candidate set or preprocessing procedure. This provides a reusable transcriptomic pipeline for moving from paired immune-state measurements to prioritized natural-product candidates for experimental follow-up.

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

From Physics to Representation: Audio Learning with Synthetic Pre-training via Procedural Generation

arXiv:2606.14791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised learning advances audio representation for multimedia analysis. However, prevailing data-centric approaches rely on massive real-world corpora, increasing training costs, curation burdens, and privacy barriers. To address this, we present AudioPG, a procedural synthesis framework eliminating real audio recordings during pre-training. AudioPG trains a Transformer-based masked autoencoder on waveforms generated on-the-fly from basic acoustic primitives and composition rules. The encoder transfers effectively to real audio benchmarks, achieving 90.60% accuracy on ESC-50, 0.546 mAP on FSD50K, 88.17% on UrbanSound8K, and 97.03% on Speech Commands V2. Notably, pre-training completes in under 20 minutes on a single GPU. Latent space analysis reveals physical factors, including fundamental frequency and relative intensity, emerge in orthogonal subspaces, making representations linearly decodable. These results establish procedural synthesis as an efficient, interpretable pre-training signal when large-scale corpora are unavailable. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Freyliu0516/audioPG.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Toward Simultaneously Optimal Regret in U-Calibration

arXiv:2606.18527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: U-calibration studies online forecasting algorithms whose predictions can be consumed by any unknown downstream agent, guaranteeing sublinear regret simultaneously for all proper loss functions. Existing U-calibration algorithms achieve worst-case optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss, but they fail to adapt to easier losses: as we show, even for smooth losses such as squared loss, they incur $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ regret instead of the optimal $O(\log T)$ regret. In this work, we show that this limitation is not inherent. Specifically, we design a single forecast algorithm that simultaneously achieves $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss and $O(\log T)$ regret for every bounded smooth proper loss. More generally, our algorithm also attains logarithmic regret for losses that are smooth relative to the log-barrier, which include several non-Lipschitz examples. Our approach is based on a novel variant of Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) in which perturbations are applied directly in the prediction space using self-concordant noise. The resulting analysis also departs substantially from prior FTPL analyses due to the complex nature of this noise and may be of independent interest.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Multi-Domain Feature Fusion Framework for Generalizable Deepfake Detection Across Different Generators

Deepfakes are artificially generated images, audio, or videos that threaten privacy, security, and information integrity. Detecting such content is crucial for countering disinformation, as the latest models generate highly realistic content. While spatial- or frequency-based approaches achieve good detection rates on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)-based generated deepfakes, they often struggle with recent diffusion model-generated images. In particular, existing approaches rarely exploit complementary multi-domain representations or systematically evaluate cross-generator robustness. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-domain deepfake detection framework called SGFF-Net (Spatial-Gradient-Frequency Fusion Network) that integrates spatial, gradient, and DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform)-based frequency representations within a dual residual learning architecture. Experimental results show that the SGFF-Net achieves 98.95\% accuracy in intra-dataset evaluation and improves performance in both cross-model (70.46\%) and cross-paradigm (69.94\%) settings. Incorporating multi-source training and data augmentation further enhances robustness, increasing accuracy from 70.46\% to 79.80\% in cross-model evaluation, from 69\% to 78\% in cross-paradigm evaluation, and from 61.50\% to 75.80\% on real-world data. Unlike single-domain detectors, the SGFF-Net learns complementary forensic cues across spatial, gradient, and wavelet-frequency domains, resulting in greater robustness under cross-generator and cross-paradigm evaluation. The results further show that combining multi-domain representations with data diversity and augmentation substantially improves generalization, providing practical insights for developing more reliable deepfake detection systems.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Polygenic risk scores associate with asthma phenotypes and proteomic analyses implicate IL1R1 in two family-based studies

Despite its high prevalence and the discovery of hundreds of genetic associations, the genetic determinants and heterogeneous manifestations of asthma remain incompletely understood. Incorporating polygenic risk scores (PRS) into asthma research offers a powerful approach to quantify inherited susceptibility, refine risk profiles, and advance mechanistic understanding of disease development. For this study, we leveraged whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data from two family-based cohorts of childhood asthma - the Genetics of Asthma in Costa Rica Study (GACRS) and the Childhood Asthma Management Program (CAMP) - to examine the transmission profiles of externally derived asthma PRS and their associations with clinical phenotypes in children with asthma. To further elucidate molecular mechanisms, we integrated large-scale external genome-wide association study (GWAS) summary statistics and genetic prediction models of protein abundance in a two-step proteome-wide association study (PWAS) of asthma. Our findings provide robust evidence supporting the validity of externally derived asthma PRS (asthma PRS association p-value p={10}^{-24} [GACRS and CAMP trios combined] for the Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative [GBMI]) and reveal consistent associations with spirometry measures and atopy markers across both studies, as 13 of 21 traits (62%) were significantly associated with the GBMI-PRS in the meta-analysis after multiple-testing correction. Moreover, the results of the integrative proteomic analysis implicate IL-1 signaling in the etiology of asthma, reinforcing the candidacy of IL1R1 antagonists for drug repurposing.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Neighborhood socioeconomic status associated with post-stroke cognitive impairment: a retrospective cohort study

Background: Late complications after stroke (LCAS), including cognitive symptoms, impact quality of life and recovery. It is not known if neighborhood-level measures of socioeconomic status (SES) influence LCAS. This study assessed associations between SES measures, including neighborhood income inequality (Gini) and area deprivation index (ADI), and cognitive symptoms after acute ischemic stroke (AIS) in a hospital leveraging active surveillance of LCAS. Methods: This retrospective cohort study included 512 patients hospitalized with AIS at Tufts Medical Center with subsequent follow-up (between zero and three months or between three and twelve months) in the Stroke Clinic from 1/1/2018 - 12/31/2022. Using ZIP code data, patients were characterized as low Gini (low inequality) and high ADI (high deprivation) (Gini = 5) by state medians. These variables were combined, indicating patients who were living in both a low Gini and high ADI neighborhood to evaluate the effects of living in a homogeneously deprived area. There were 206 and 281 patients in the low Gini and high ADI groups respectively. 140 patients lived in a low Gini and high ADI neighborhood. The multivariable logistic analysis assessed the likelihood of cognitive symptoms, adjusting for age, race, ethnicity, sex, NIH Stroke Scale (NIHSS), thrombolysis, active LCAS surveillance, poverty, and ADI-Gini combination. Results: There were no associations between high ADI (OR: 1.03, 95% CI: 0.67 ? 1.57) or low Gini (OR: 1.74, 95% CI: 0.98 ? 3.07) alone and cognitive symptoms after AIS. However, the combined variable demonstrated increased likelihood of cognitive symptoms in the high ADI-low Gini group (OR: 1.82, 95% CI: 1.08 ? 3.06). Conclusions: This study suggests that individuals living in homogeneously deprived neighborhoods report higher likelihood of cognitive symptoms after AIS. Further studies with increased power are needed to investigate the underlying causes of these disparities and to develop interventions to reduce these complications.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

The New Social Image: How AI Competency and AI Proactivity Influence Self- and Peer-Perceptions in the Workplace

arXiv:2606.00182v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human-AI collaboration is considered the most promising way to incorporate AI in the workplace. What remains unexplored are the experiential consequences of this teaming. More specifically, in a team with AI, how humans perceive themselves (self-perception) and how they are perceived by their coworkers (peer perception) in terms of work ownership and job meaningfulness. In a 2x2x2 vignette study (n=50), participants rated perceptions of ownership, affect, job meaningfulness and satisfaction, and role dynamics across two levels (low/high) of AI proactivity and AI competency as within-subject factors, with point-of-view (self perception/peer perception) as between-subjects. Our results showed that AI with low competency or low proactivity generally improved feelings related to ownership, meaningfulness, satisfaction, and role dynamics, and also increased positive affect while reducing negative affect. However, these effects were often influenced by point-of-view. For instance, low AI proactivity resulted in higher job satisfaction from self-perception rather than peer perception. Based on our findings, we argue that designing AI for the future of work solely around performance metrics may not be adequate. Highly competent and proactive AI-driven systems can have undesirable impacts on perceptions of ownership, job identity, social image and team dynamics, and consequently, job meaningfulness.