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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Multivariate Echocardiographic Phenotyping of Hypertensive Heart Failure Using Unsupervised Machine Learning: A Pilot Study

Background Heart failure in hypertensive patients is heterogeneous and poorly captured by traditional left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) based classification. Multivariate echocardiographic data combined with unsupervised machine learning may provide a more precise phenotypic characterization. This pilot study evaluated the feasibility of unsupervised clustering of routine transthoracic echocardiographic data to identify phenotypic subgroups of hypertensive heart failure. Methods This retrospective pilot study analyzed transthoracic echocardiography reports from hypertensive patients with clinical heart failure. After data cleaning and exclusion of incomplete records, 102 patients with 11 echocardiographic variables were included. Variables describing left ventricular geometry, systolic function, and diastolic performance were standardized and subjected to K-means clustering. Optimal cluster number was determined using the elbow method and silhouette analysis. Cluster characteristics were assessed using descriptive statistics and Kruskal Wallis testing. Concordance with LVEF based heart failure categories was evaluated. Results Three distinct echocardiographic phenotypes were identified. Cluster 0 (n = 50) demonstrated preserved LVEF with concentric remodeling, consistent with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) phenotype. Cluster 1 (n = 37) showed marked ventricular dilation and reduced systolic function, consistent with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF). Cluster 2 (n = 15) exhibited concentric hypertrophy with intermediate LVEF, consistent with heart failure with mildly reduced ejection fraction (HFmrEF) like phenotype. All echocardiographic variables differed significantly across clusters (p < 0.001). While Cluster 0 showed strong concordance with HFpEF (96%), Clusters 1 and 2 demonstrated substantial overlap across LVEF categories, indicating partial discordance between structural phenotypes and LVEF based classification. Conclusion Application of unsupervised machine learning to routine echocardiographic data identifies distinct heart failure phenotypes in hypertensive patients. These phenotypes demonstrate significant structural heterogeneity beyond LVEF based classification, supporting the utility of data-driven approaches for refined cardiac phenotyping. This pilot study provides a foundation for larger prospective studies.

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

DoubtProbe: Black-Box Jailbreak Defense via Structural Verification and Semantic Auditing

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing systems, black-box jailbreak defense has become an important practical problem. Existing defenses often rely on known-attack coverage, prompt-level semantic judgment, or local runtime control, yet these paths can become unstable under evolving prompt packaging, expression rewriting, and structure manipulation. We observe that many black-box jailbreaks do not remove the harmful goal, but reorganize the information needed to express and execute it, thereby evading safety alignment while remaining recoverable during generation. Motivated by this observation, we propose DoubtProbe, a dual-branch inference-time defense framework that combines structural verification with semantic auditing and formulates black-box jailbreak defense as consistency checking under controlled transformation. The structural branch extracts a structured representation from the original request, reconstructs the request under representation constraints, and detects information-preservation failures between the original and reconstructed requests; the semantic branch audits the original prompt directly. We evaluate DoubtProbe against representative black-box defenses on jailbreak and benign-request benchmarks, and further test backbone transfer from Qwen2.5-72B to Llama-3.1-70B. Results show that DoubtProbe achieves a stronger and more stable defense-utility trade-off: on Qwen2.5-72B, it reduces the JBB attack success rate from 0.293 to 0.100 and the CodeAttack attack success rate from 0.152 to 0.001, while maintaining false positive rates of 0.022 and 0.016 on AlpacaEval and OR-Bench; the same pattern remains stable on Llama-3.1-70B. These findings show that structural inconsistency signals provide a practical and generalizable basis for black-box jailbreak defense, especially when combined with semantic auditing.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimizing resource bounds in direct fidelity estimation

arXiv:2606.16336v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct fidelity estimation provides a way to estimate the fidelity between an experimentally prepared state and a desired pure target state without performing full tomography. Two influential formulations were introduced in 2011 by Flammia and Liu and by da Silva, Landon-Cardinal, and Poulin. In these protocols, the total estimation error is controlled through two distinct probabilistic steps: first, the fidelity is approximated using randomly sampled Pauli observables; second, each sampled expectation value is estimated from finitely many measurement outcomes. In this work we show that additional structural information about the noise can substantially sharpen the corresponding resource bounds. In particular, for some canonical channels the effective number of sampled Pauli settings can be reduced, leading to lower measurement cost both in the general pure-state setting and in the case of a stabilizer state. These results illustrate a broader point: worst-case confidence bounds in direct fidelity estimation can be significantly conservative when experimentally relevant structure is ignored. As a technical ingredient, we also revisit the allocation of the total accuracy and confidence budgets between the two probabilistic steps. Reformulating the analysis in terms of separate error parameters yields a constrained optimization problem whose solution lowers the average number of measurements in the general pure-state setting. Numerical simulations based on quantum circuits implemented in Qiskit illustrate both the improvement obtained under structured-noise assumptions and the conservativeness of the original worst-case bounds.

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

ReCal: Reward Calibration for RL-based LLM Routing

arXiv:2606.12479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) routing has emerged as an effective paradigm for leveraging the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs through dynamic model and reasoning-strategy selection. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based routing methods further improve routing quality by optimizing routing policies from interaction feedback. However, they still struggle to provide informative and comparable learning signals under heterogeneous tasks with varying difficulty. In practice, multiple objectives (e.g., correctness, format behavior) are aggregated into a single scalar reward, leading to ambiguous credit assignment and conflicting optimization signals. Moreover, reward signals exhibit significant variability across instances, where some instances produce higher or more variable rewards, introducing optimization bias that favors trivial samples over informative ones. To address these issues, we propose ReCal, a \underline{Re}ward \underline{Cal}ibration framework for RL-based LLM routing. We first introduce a hierarchical reward decomposition mechanism with component-wise advantage estimation. We further propose a distribution-aware optimization strategy that calibrates optimization variability through variance-aware reweighting and per-dataset normalization. Experiments on seven datasets demonstrate that ReCal consistently improves routing performance, and training stability over baselines. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ReCal.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Geometric Algebra Quantum Gate Decomposition

arXiv:2606.12480v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum gates are usually described through matrix and tensor-product formalisms that often obscure their geometric structure. In this work, we formulate the Pauli and Clifford groups within the complex Geometric Algebra (GA) framework. We show that the Pauli group is naturally identified with the group of blades up to a global phase, thereby providing a geometric interpretation of Pauli operators and their commutation relations in terms of oriented subspaces. We further prove that Clifford operators are generated by products of {\pi}/4-Pauli rotors and introduce a greedy Pauli rotor decomposition algorithm whose empirical behavior suggests unexpectedly compact decompositions for Clifford operators. Finally, we show that Clifford+T universality admits a natural geometric interpretation through {\pi}/8-rotors within this framework.

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

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

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

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

Vibrato Expression Control for Singing Voice Conversion with Improving Independent Control

arXiv:2606.17126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Singing style is a crucial aspect of a natural and expressive singing voice. Singers utilize singing styles to convey the feeling or emotion of the songs. Several works have been proposed to control singing style for making the more expressive singing voice. Recently, VibE-SVC successfully controls vibrato by predicting high-frequency F0 contour. In this paper, we introduce a singing voice conversion framework, called VibE-SVC2, to improve singing style conversion performance and controllability. The model offers control over two types of singing styles: a pitch style and a timbre style. For the pitch style, to resolve the pitch-energy entanglement issue that is unresolved in our previous work, we introduce a novel Energy Style Converter to address remaining style information in the energy contour. In addition, we propose a Zero-shot Pitch Style Converter, which mimics the pitch style of reference audio. To expand the controllability of the model, we propose vibrato rate scaling that is an independent control of vibrato extent, which is unavailable in VibE-SVC. For the timbre style, we extend the model to handle a variety of phonation styles. However, addressing specific styles such as vocal fry poses a challenge, as conventional F0 extraction often fails due to their inherent subharmonic characteristics, which degrades the conversion quality. To address this, we propose a novel Subharmonic Correction algorithm to refine the F0 contour for more natural timbre conversion. Through comprehensive objective and subjective evaluations, we demonstrate that VibE-SVC2 provides fine-grained, independent control over two types of singing styles, outperforming existing methods.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations

arXiv:2511.07332v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Building reliable computer-use agents requires grounding: accurately connecting natural language instructions to the correct on-screen elements. While large datasets exist for web and mobile interactions, high-quality resources for desktop environments are limited. To address this gap, we introduce GroundCUA, a large-scale desktop grounding dataset built from expert human demonstrations. It covers 87 applications across 12 categories and includes 56K screenshots, with every on-screen element carefully annotated for a total of over 3.56M human-verified annotations. From these demonstrations, we generate diverse instructions that capture a wide range of real-world tasks, providing high-quality data for model training. Using GroundCUA, we develop the GroundNext family of models that map instructions to their target UI elements. At both 3B and 7B scales, GroundNext achieves state-of-the-art results across five benchmarks using supervised fine-tuning, while requiring less than one-tenth the training data of prior work. Reinforcement learning post-training further improves performance, and when evaluated in an agentic setting on the OSWorld benchmark using o3 as planner, GroundNext attains comparable or superior results to models trained with substantially more data,. These results demonstrate the critical role of high-quality, expert-driven datasets in advancing general-purpose computer-use agents.

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

A General Framework for Decision Trees via Bregman Divergences

arXiv:2606.13984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Decision trees are one of the fundamental tools in statistical learning due to their interpretability, flexibility, and their ability to adapt to nonlinear structures. Among them, the Classification and Regression Trees, introduced by Breiman, Friedman, Olshen, and Stone in 1984, became one of the most influential algorithms and remains one of the most widely used methods for classification and regression problems. On the other hand, Bregman divergences, introduced by Lev Bregman in 1967 in the context of convex optimization, provide a broad family of loss functions that naturally generalize the squared Euclidean distance. This family includes, among others, the Kullback-Leibler divergence, the Poisson divergence, and the Itakura-Saito divergence, as well as several losses associated with distributions belonging to the exponential family. Moreover, Bregman divergences possess a rich geometric structure and deep connections with convex analysis and information geometry. In this work, we propose a generalization of the CART paradigm based on Bregman divergences, thereby obtaining a broader family of decision trees adapted to different statistical models and underlying geometries. Although algorithms such as CART or classical implementations such as rpart incorporate different impurity criteria, these are usually introduced in an ad hoc manner for each specific model. In contrast, the Bregman divergence approach provides a unified framework that allows these criteria to be derived and interpreted from common convex and geometric principles. Beyond the algorithmic construction, we also investigate theoretical properties of these trees. In particular, we study how properties of the generating convex function – such as strong convexity or smoothness – influence impurity gains between parent and child nodes, as well as stability and consistency properties of the estimator.

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

ERN-Net : Evolving Reason Node-Net for Document Binarization

This paper presents ERN-Net, an Evolving Reason Node-Net for efficient document image binarization. ERN-Net enhances degradation-sensitive regions, such as faint strokes, broken characters, and noisy backgrounds, through evolving reason nodes and multi-scale reasoning. We further compare ResNet-101, ConvNeXt-Tiny, and ConvNeXt-Base, and find that ConvNeXt-Tiny provides the best practical trade-off between accuracy and memory usage. In addition, DIBCO-based pretraining improves binarization performance without increasing model memory consumption, requiring only about 1.5 additional training hours. Experiments on DIBCO-style benchmarks show that ERN-Net is effective under low-data and low-memory settings.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

ConTex: Reformulating Counterfactual Generation For Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.18049v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision-making with deep learning-based time series forecasting requires not only accurate predictions but also actionable insights. However, current architectures do not inherently provide such information. Specifically, guidance is needed on how current conditions must be modified to shift from a predicted outcome to a desired future scenario. Counterfactual explanations provide a natural framework for this task, as they represent minimal input changes that alter the model's prediction, indicating when and how intervention is required. Existing approaches rely on instance-wise optimization, leading to inconsistency across instances, high computational costs, and limited applicability in real-time settings. To address these limitations, we reformulate counterfactual generation for time series forecasting as the problem of learning a globally consistent intervention strategy, allowing counterfactuals to be generated through a single shared function. We propose Counterfactual Time Series Explanations (ConTex), a model-agnostic, decomposed architecture comprising a temporal context encoder and a conditional encoder, followed by two heads that capture interventions in terms of temporal relevance and modification strength. This structure overcomes the instability and inconsistency of instance-based approaches by producing targeted, interpretable interventions across time and feature dimensions in a single forward pass, making it suitable for real-time applications. Across multiple forecasting architectures and benchmark datasets, ConTex achieves state-of-the-art validity while generating sparse counterfactuals that minimize the number of necessary interventions. Additionally, our approach reduces computational cost by at least 12-36x compared to instance-wise generation and supports real-time inference at approximately 0.007 seconds.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Towards Conversational AI for Disease Management

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue1, their capabilities for effective management reasoning—including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription—remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE)1−3 through a new LLM-based agentic system optimized for multi-visit clinical management and dialogue. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini’s long-context capabilities4, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialists and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. Though AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE’s strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Contour Field based Elliptical Shape Prior for the Segment Anything Model

The elliptical shape prior information plays a vital role in improving the accuracy of image segmentation for specific tasks in medical and natural images. Existing deep learning-based segmentation methods, including the Segment Anything Model (SAM), often struggle to produce segmentation results with elliptical shapes efficiently. This paper proposes a new approach to integrate the prior of elliptical shapes into the deep learning-based SAM image segmentation techniques using variational methods. The proposed method establishes a parameterized elliptical contour field, which constrains the segmentation results to align with predefined elliptical contours. Utilizing the dual algorithm, the model seamlessly integrates image features with elliptical priors and spatial regularization priors, thereby greatly enhancing segmentation accuracy. By decomposing SAM into four mathematical sub-problems, we integrate the variational ellipse prior to design a new SAM network structure, ensuring that the segmentation output of SAM consists of elliptical regions. Experimental results on some specific image datasets demonstrate an improvement over the original SAM.

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

BRICKS-WM: Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models

arXiv:2606.16489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has achieved remarkable success in continuous control by leveraging latent world models. However, prevailing approaches typically rely on monolithic latent dynamics, entangling environment dynamics into a coupled process. This coupling severely limits reusability: altering the agent necessitates retraining the entire world from scratch, even if the environment remains constant. To address this, we introduce BRICKS-WM (Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models), a framework for the modular assembly of structured world models. Driven by the insight that the physical world is composed of independent entities, we posit that global dynamics can be modeled as a composition of distinct dynamical modules interacting via latent interfaces. As a minimal instantiation, we factorize the latent state space into an actuated Agent module and an external Background module, bridged by a learned latent interface. Unlike prior object-centric methods that prioritize visual segmentation, BRICKS-WM enforces a functional separation in transition dynamics, ensuring that background dynamics remains agnostic to the agent's dynamics. Empirically, BRICKS-WM achieves control performance comparable to strong monolithic baselines when trained from scratch, and enables the reuse of frozen background dynamics across agents.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

TMO: ASYMMETRIC CROSS-MODAL ATTENTION FOR LEARNINGCELL-STATE-DEPENDENT REGULATORY LAGS FROM SINGLE-CELL MULTIOMIC DATA

Abstract Background: Single-cell multi-omics technologies simultaneously measure chromatin accessibility (ATAC) and gene expression (RNA), providing a unique window into the temporal ordering of regulatory events during differentiation. However, most computational models treat the two modalities symmetrically, ignoring the directional relationship between chromatin and transcription, and existing lag-aware methods estimate a single global lag per gene, failing to capture cell-state-dependent dynamics. Methods and Results: We introduce Temporal Multi-Omics (TMO), a deep learning framework that learns signed, cell-state-conditional regulatory lags ({Delta}{tau}) using asymmetric cross-modal attention. TMO projects RNA and ATAC into 50 latent components each, tokenises each cell as a sequence of 100 tokens, and uses a two-pass transformer in which a data-driven lag prior - derived from a sliding-window cross-correlation function - directly biases attention asymmetrically. On four independent 10x Multiome datasets (mouse brain, human brain, mouse kidney, human PBMC), the asymmetric model achieves Lag Concordance Scores (LCS) of 0.988-0.999, compared to 0.048-0.108 for an architecturally identical symmetric baseline. A stratified 80/20 held-out experiment confirms that the learned component-lag ordering generalises to unseen cells (held-out LCS 0.85-0.99). Clustered {Delta}{tau} heatmaps show positive {Delta}{tau} (ATAC-led priming) in early pseudotime and negative {Delta}{tau} (RNA-led, activity-dependent regulation) in late pseudotime; the ATAC-RNA correlation heatmap exhibits a U-shaped pattern indicative of developmental decoupling. Components with the most positive {Delta}{tau} are enriched for chromatin organization and stem cell differentiation (FDR < 0.05), while those with the most negative {Delta}{tau} are enriched for synaptic signalling and immune activation. Ablating the cell-state information from the lag predictor reduces the LCS and collapses per-component temporal dynamics (KS p [&le;] 0.039 in all four tissues), proving that TMOs dynamic lag patterns depend on cell-state conditioning. Independent ChIP-seq validation for four transcription factors (PAX5, Pax6, ASCL1, Hnf4) confirms highly significant separation between target genes and expression-matched background (p < 10-4 in all cases). Two Multiome Perturb-seq screens provide causal validation: SMARCB1 knockout shows a directional trend (1.5-fold target shift, p = 0.056, n = 147 perturbed cells), and SMARCE1 knockout reaches statistical significance (p = 0.0089, n = 3,394 perturbed cells). Gene-level cross-correlation independently validates that the regulatory lag signal is present in the raw data, and TMO further identifies rare, statistically significant biphasic gene programs where the regulatory direction reverses across pseudotime. Conclusions: TMO is the first method to make regulatory lag a learnable, cell-state-conditional, and architecturally encoded parameter. It is scalable, interpretable, and open-source, providing a powerful tool for studying regulatory timing in development, disease, and perturbation screens.

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

Decoupled Object-Centric Video Understanding for Generating Robotic Manipulation Commands

Translating video demonstrations into executable robot commands remains challenging because existing methods often fail to identify which objects are functionally involved in the demonstrated action. As a result, they may generate commands that are linguistically plausible but operationally ambiguous. We propose an object-centric video understanding framework that decouples action recognition from object identification to generate precise, grammar-free manipulation commands. Our approach integrates Temporal Shift Modules (TSM) for efficient spatio-temporal action classification with a novel Object Selection algorithm that identifies task-relevant objects through trajectory-based role classification, blur detection, and overlap minimization. The selected objects are then processed by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for robust category recognition and zero-shot generalization. Evaluated on a modified Something-Something V2 dataset, our method achieves 86.79\% action classification accuracy and BLEU-4 scores of 0.337 on standard objects and 0.261 on novel objects. These results improve over the strongest task-specific baseline by 80.2\% and 143.9\%, respectively. Larger gains are observed in METEOR and CIDEr, reaching 157.9\% and 171.7\% on novel objects. Across all semantic metrics, our approach consistently outperforms task-specific methods and remains competitive with, or surpasses, large general-purpose VLMs while retaining a modular, object-centric design.

18.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

Novel symptoms associated with eclampsia could improve detection and save lives

by Alice Beardmore-Gray, Andrew Shennan Eclampsia is a life-threatening complication of pre-eclampsia, yet remains difficult to predict. In this Perspective, Alice Beardmore-Gray and Andrew Shennan highlight a recent study that identifies 10 novel prodromal symptoms of eclampsia, with potential to better predict which women are at risk and therefore reduce delays in intervention.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Fast and Slow Variational Continual Learning

arXiv:2606.24007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning remains a major challenge for modern deep networks, partly because commonly used optimizers lack inherent mechanisms for continual adaptation. One such natural mechanism is fast and slow adaptation to balance stability and plasticity. This mechanism has deep roots in neuroscience and biology, but there is no consensus on how to best incorporate it in commonly used optimizers. Here, we show that this can be easily done via the VCL framework, where past posteriors are used as priors in the future. Our key idea is to incorporate slow adaptation via merging of past posteriors to slow down the drift in the knowledge as learning progresses. The merged posterior is then used as the prior in the VCL update to implement the fast-weight updates. These steps can be seamlessly implemented in the IVON optimizer, whose form and costs are nearly identical to that of Adam. We call this new optimizer the Continual IVON (CoVON) optimizer and show that it not only consistently improves over existing VCL optimizers, but also performs better than other weight-regularization strategies across domain-incremental learning, continual pre-training, and fine-tuning of large language models.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Large-scale proteomics and timing of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy

Background: Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) may first be diagnosed antepartum, during labor, or postpartum. We utilized untargeted large-scale proteomics to identify pathways associated with HDP based on timing of onset. Methods: We performed a nested case-control study comparing differential protein expression, from the SomaScan 7K platform, based on timing of onset of HDP versus controls (referent) using first-trimester samples from the NuMoM2b-Heart Health Study, a multi-site cohort that followed nulliparous individuals from the first trimester. Associations of proteins with timing of onset of HDP, adjusted for co-variates, were assessed using logistic regression q value-based false discovery rates and pathway enrichment and differential expression analysis were conducted. Results: Of 1628 individuals included, 678 had HDP, of which 67% manifested antepartum (AP), 29% intrapartum (IP), and 3% postpartum (PP). After adjusting for co-variates, compared to controls, 698 proteins, 39 proteins, and 144 proteins were differentially expressed in those with HDP according to AP, IP, PP onset, respectively. There was little overlap in individual protein expression based on timing of HDP. Pathway enrichment and graphical summary analyses suggested distinct processes. Specifically, there was downregulation of angiogenic proteins in AP HDP, downregulation of immune-related proteins in IP HDP, and upregulation of complement activation promoting fibrotic changes leading to cardiac dysfunction in PP HDP. Conclusion: There are differences in first-trimester protein expression based on whether HDP first manifests AP, IP or PP. This raises the possibility that there may be distinct mechanistic phenotypes that could uniquely inform diagnostic and therapeutic targets for HDP.

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

Hallucination Detection and Correction in Medical VLMs via Counter-Evidence Verification

Vision-Language models (VLMs) reliability in medical diagnosis is challenged by trust-undermining hallucinations. Existing hallucination detection approaches mainly focus on identifying factual inconsistencies between generated text and reference data. While some studies analyze where models attend in images, they seldom verify whether such attention truly reflects the visual evidence supporting the generated text. To address this gap, we propose Co}unter-Evidence Verification (CoEV), a training-free plug-and-play framework that detects and corrects hallucinations through evidence-based factual consistency verification. CoEV performs bidirectional verification between textual assertions and visual evidence, testing whether each statement is supported by its corresponding evidence region, and assigns each statement into a four-quadrant diagnostic map capturing combinations of text factuality and visual grounding. CoEV detects hallucinated content and serves as a post hoc refinement tool, correcting hallucinations without retraining. Extensive experiments on four medical datasets show that CoEV combats hallucinations in VLMs.For hallucination detection, CoEV consistently outperforms existing methods, improving average PR-AUC and ROC-AUC by 3.0% and 3.9% absolute points respectively, with notable gains of up to 18.5% in specific VQA scenarios. For hallucination correction, it improves Micro-F1 by up to 12.5%, reduces hallucination rates by over 11.9% on medical report generation, and also boosts medical VQA accuracy. These results show that CoEV enables reliable detection and correction of hallucinations, providing clinicians with dependable, evidence-based cues for diagnosis. Code will be released upon acceptance.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the structure of the sandpile identity element on Sierpinski gasket graphs

arXiv:2603.12006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the identity of the abelian sandpile group of finite approximation graphs of the Sierpinski gasket, and we show that the second-order term in the scaling limit converges to the path distance to the nearest corner on the Sierpinski gasket. The proof relies on a decomposition of the identity of the sandpile group into the sum of a constant function and the Laplacian of the graph distance on the approximating graphs.

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

DeMix: Debugging Training Data with Mixed Data Error Types by Investigating Influence Vectors

arXiv:2606.11616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality training data is essential for the success of machine learning models. However, real-world datasets often contain mixed types of errors arising from systematic flaws in data preparation pipelines, including label errors, feature errors, and spurious correlations. Effective debugging of training data requires both detecting erroneous samples and identifying their specific error types to enable targeted repair, yet existing data cleaning and attribution methods fail to adequately address this dual requirement. In this paper, we propose DeMix, a novel framework that simultaneously diagnoses erroneous samples and their error types. Our key insight is that different error types produce distinct patterns on model behavior. DeMix captures such error-specific patterns by influence vectors that characterize how each training sample affects model predictions across all validation samples. We formulate training data debugging as a multi-label classification problem where a classifier is developed to predict error types directly from influence vectors. We further introduce an intervention-based learning strategy that guides the classifier to capture invariant rationales specific to each error type, ensuring the learned classifier generalizes effectively. Empirical evaluations on 11 tasks across tabular data prediction, recommendation systems, and LLM alignment demonstrate that DeMix significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a 22.61% improvement in data debugging F1-score and a 9.32% gain in task model performance after data repair. Code is available at: https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/DeMix.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CogniFold: Always-On Proactive Memory via Cognitive Folding

Existing agent memory remains predominantly reactive and retrieval-based, lacking the capacity to autonomously organize experience into persistent cognitive structure. Toward genuinely autonomous agents, we introduce CogniFold, a brain-inspired "always-on" agent memory designed for the next generation of proactive assistants. CogniFold continuously folds fragmented event streams into self-emerging cognitive structures, bootstrapping progressively higher-level cognition from incoming events and accumulated knowledge. We ground this by extending Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory from two layers (hippocampus, neocortex) to three, adding a prefrontal intent layer. Emulating the prefrontal cortex as the locus of intentional control and decision-making, CogniFold achieves this through graph-topology self-organization: cognitive structures proactively assemble under the stream, merge when semantically similar, decay when stale, relink through associative recall, and surface intents when concept-cluster density crosses a threshold. We evaluate structural formation using CogEval-Bench, demonstrating that CogniFold uniquely produces memory structures that match cognitive expectations and concept emergence. Furthermore, across eight downstream benchmarks – two probing long-term conversational memory (LoCoMo, LongMemEval) and six spanning other cognitive domains – we validate that CogniFold simultaneously performs robustly on conventional memory tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/OpenNorve/CogniFold.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

TAPIOCA: Why Task- Aware Pruning Improves OOD model Capability

arXiv:2605.14738v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work has promoted task-aware layer pruning as a way to improve model performance on particular tasks, as shown by TALE. In this paper, we investigate when such improvements occur and why. We show first that, across controlled polynomial regression tasks and large language models, such pruning yields no benefit on in-distribution (ID) data but consistently improves out-of-distribution (OOD) accuracy. We further show empirically that OOD inputs induce layerwise norm and pairwise-distance profiles that deviate from the corresponding ID profiles. This leads to a geometric explanation of task-aware pruning: each task induces a task-adapted geometry, characterized empirically by the representation profiles observed on ID inputs. OOD inputs can introduce a distorted version of the task-adapted geometry. Task-aware pruning identifies layers that create or amplify this distortion; by removing them, it shifts OOD representational norms and pairwise distances toward those observed on the adapted distribution. This realigns OOD inputs with the model's task-adapted geometry and improves performance. We provide causal evidence through controlled distribution shifts and residual-scaling interventions, and demonstrate consistent behavior across model scales.