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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Body composition subphenotypes, cardiometabolic risk and incident outcomes: validation in the population-based NAKO and UK Biobank imaging cohorts

Authors:
Grune↗Haueise↗von Itter↗M.-N↗Jung↗Bamberg↗Bibi↗Friedrich↗C. M↗Fromherz↗Kauczor↗H.-U↗…

Background Anthropometric measures do not adequately capture heterogeneity in body fat distribution and corresponding cardiometabolic risk, whereas magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enables precise differentiation and quantification of adipose tissue compartments and ectopic fat. We aimed to validate previously derived MRI-based body composition subphenotypes and their cardiometabolic risk profiles in two independent European cohorts. Methods Using deep learning-based image analysis, we quantified bone marrow, visceral, subcutaneous, cardiac, renal sinus, hepatic, skeletal muscle, and pancreatic fat in the imaging substudies of two population-based cohorts: the German National Cohort (NAKO, N=29,314, age range 19-74 years) and the UK Biobank (N=36,109, age range 40-69 years). Body composition subphenotypes, previously identified by k-means clustering, were evaluated using a rigorous statistical cluster validation framework with method-based and results-based approaches. In NAKO, cross-sectional associations between subphenotypes and estimated cardiovascular disease risk scores were examined using linear regression. In UK Biobank, longitudinal associations between subphenotypes and incident cardiometabolic outcomes, ascertained through hospital record linkage, were analysed using Cox regression. Findings All five body composition subphenotypes were robustly validated across both cohorts, and showed distinct fat distribution patterns and cardiometabolic risk profiles: I "lean", II "average adiposity", III "bone and muscle adiposity", IV "hepato-abdominal adiposity", and V "general and pancreatic adiposity". Subphenotypes I-III showed progressive adipose tissue remodelling patterns likely reflecting ageing trajectories. The "hepato-abdominal adiposity" subphenotype showed highest risk of incident diabetes, whereas the "general and pancreatic adiposity" subphenotype showed highest overall cardiovascular disease burden and metabolic impairment. Interpretation MRI-derived body composition subphenotypes represent distinct fat distribution patterns that reflect ageing- and disease-related processes, which supports the potential of body composition phenotyping for improved cardiometabolic risk stratification and targeted prevention.

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02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Continuous stochastic flows driven by white noise and their duals

Authors:
Yaolin Yu↗

arXiv:2606.12143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a class of continuous stochastic flows driven by a space-time white noise and characterize their dual flows by explicit stochastic differential equations. A key ingredient of the proof is the convergence of solutions under coefficient approximations. As an application, we derive the dual flows in two illustrative examples, the squared Bessel flow and the Jacobi flow. We also introduce a new model of polynomially self-repelling (PSR) flow and show that it enjoys a self-duality property.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum-Classical Hierarchical Equations of Motion

Authors:
Amartya Bose↗

arXiv:2606.14363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a quantum-classical hierarchical equations of motion (QC-HEOM) approach for simulating non-Markovian open quantum systems. The method combines the ensemble-averaged classical path reference of the quantum-classical path integral formalism with a hierarchy of auxiliary quantum influence functionals. By incorporating thermal fluctuations through an ensemble average over reference trajectories, the hierarchy is required to represent only the residual quantum memory associated with the imaginary part of the bath response function. Consequently, unlike conventional hierarchical equations of motion, QC-HEOM does not require Matsubara or Padé expansions of the thermal kernel and exhibits only weak temperature dependence of the hierarchy size. Furthermore, because thermal fluctuations are supplied through reference classical trajectories, the framework naturally extends beyond harmonic baths and enables the incorporation of anharmonic and molecular environments through externally generated trajectories. We derive the formalism and demonstrate its exactness for a harmonic bath. Applications to an asymmetric spin-boson model and the seven-site Fenna–Matthews–Olson complex illustrate the accuracy of QC-HEOM. It reproduces benchmark quasi-adiabatic path integral and hierarchical equations of motion results while requiring substantially fewer auxiliary objects, particularly at low temperatures. These results establish QC-HEOM as an efficient framework for treating residual quantum memory in quantum-classical descriptions of open-system dynamics. The separation of thermal fluctuations from residual quantum memory through the use of Wigner trajectories provides an approximate route toward hierarchical treatments of complex anharmonic environments that are inaccessible to conventional HEOM approaches.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

DreamReasoner-8B: Block-Size Curriculum Learning for Diffusion Reasoning Models

Authors:
Zirui Wu↗Lin Zheng↗Jiacheng Ye↗Shansan Gong↗Xueliang Zhao↗Yansong Feng↗Wei Bi↗Lingpeng Kong↗

Block diffusion language models accelerate decoding through parallel block-wise denoising, yet whether they can be reliably scaled for long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning remains unresolved. To this end, we develop DreamReasoner-8B, an open-source block diffusion reasoning model, and conduct a systematic study of how training and inference block sizes affect long-CoT reasoning. Our analysis reveals a stark performance disparity: training with large block sizes yields remarkably poor reasoning, whereas small block sizes preserve effective reasoning. To bridge this granularity gap, we propose block-size curriculum learning, which gradually transitions training from fine-grained to coarse-grained block sizes, thereby overcoming this limitation and enabling strong reasoning performance that generalizes across diverse inference block sizes. On mathematical and code reasoning benchmarks, DreamReasoner-8B achieves results competitive with leading open autoregressive models such as Qwen3-8B. This work establishes a practical foundation for efficient, reasoning-capable diffusion language models. We release our model at https://github.com/DreamLM/DreamReasoner.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Improving Medical Communication using Rubric-Guided Counterfactual Recommendations

Authors:
Adrian Cosma↗Nicoleta-Nina Basoc↗Andrei Niculae↗Cosmin Dumitrache↗Emilian Radoi↗

Text-based telemedicine increasingly relies on lightweight patient feedback, however, such feedback primarily reflects perceived communication quality rather than medical accuracy. We introduce an LM-guided counterfactual recommendation pipeline that discovers and refines interpretable communication features such as tone, personalization, actionability and completeness in addressing patient concerns, without interfering with the medical content. These features are used together with patient-doctor interaction metadata to estimate positive feedback. At inference time, the system searches over low-cost ordinal feature changes and recommends minimal communication changes predicted to increase the probability of positive feedback, while independent auditor models test whether these gains generalize beyond the selection model. Across interactions, recommendations yield a mean +6.41% gain in predicted positive feedback probability under independent auditors, and are non-negative for 93.31% of recommendations. These results suggest that small, interpretable communication changes can capture most predicted gains while preserving the doctor's control over medical reasoning and final wording.

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

As Easy as Rocket Science: Assessing the Ability of Large Language Models to Interpret Negation in Figurative Language

Authors:
Jasmine Owers↗Edwin Simpson↗Martha Lewis↗

Figurative language and negation are two areas that challenge current language models, however, both are widely used throughout written and spoken language. Large language models (LLMs) are also widely used in everyday contexts where they cannot necessarily be tuned for a specific dataset. It is therefore essential to understand the ability of LLMs to correctly interpret text that includes both negation and figurative language. To investigate this, we develop a set of new annotations to an existing dataset of figurative language, and test a range of language models on the dataset. We find that the combination of negation and figurativeness can present a particular challenge, and that performance overall and across different negation types is particularly dependent on the prompt style used.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Design Methodology and Performance Trade-offs Management for Distributed and Compound AI Systems

Authors:
Milos Gravara↗Andrija Stanisic↗Stefan Nastic↗

arXiv:2606.14350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems must typically satisfy service-level objectives including accuracy, latency, and cost. The prevailing model-centric approaches select a monolithic model at design time and apply identical computation regardless of input difficulty, cannot decompose tasks across specialized components, and have knowledge that is fixed at training time. During runtime, this can lead to performance degradation and increasing costs. Because the model is the main design variable, it determines the majority of system behavior, coupling operational objectives to a single design-time choice. Addressing these limitations requires shifting from model-centric to system-centric design. Compound AI systems realize this shift by orchestrating multiple models, algorithms, and tools as distributed AI systems through explicit control logic. The performance of such systems depends on their workflow topology, the models assigned to each task, and the parameters governing runtime behavior. We present a design methodology that organizes this space along two dimensions, workflow topology and configuration selection, and identifies eight design patterns, each consolidating techniques to address a specific limitation of monolithic deployment. We validate our methodology through three case studies. Across our case studies, Compound AI configurations approach accuracy of monolithic models within 2.5 to 4 percentage points while reducing latency by up to 60% and cost by up to 71%. We show that model selection and parameter configuration jointly determine system performance, but the resulting design space grows combinatorially, as workflows compose more patterns and components. Thus, we identify five open challenges that define a roadmap from manually configured prototypes towards systems that automatically discover and maintain SLO-compliance in Compound and Distributed AI systems.

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

EKF-Based Depth Camera and Deep Learning Fusion for UAV-Person Distance Estimation and Following in SAR Operations

Authors:
Luka \v{S}iktar↗Branimir \'Caran↗Bojan \v{S}ekoranja↗Marko \v{S}vaco↗

arXiv:2602.20958v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) frameworks aid human search tasks by detecting and recognizing specific individuals, then tracking and following them while maintaining a safe distance. A key safety requirement for UAV following is the accurate estimation of the distance between camera and target object under real-world conditions, achieved by fusing multiple image modalities. As part of the system for automatic people detection and face recognition using deep learning, in this paper we present the fusion of depth camera measurements and monocular camera-to-body distance estimation for robust tracking and following. Deep learning based filtering of depth camera data and estimation of camera-to-body distance from a monocular camera are achieved with YOLO-pose, enabling real-time fusion of depth information using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm. The proposed subsystem, designed for use in drones, estimates and measures the distance between the depth camera and the human body keypoints, to maintain the safe distance between the drone and the human target. Our system provides an accurate estimated distance, which has been validated against motion capture ground truth data. The system has been tested in real time indoors, where it reduces the average errors, RMSE and standard deviations of distance estimation up to 15,3% in three tested scenarios. Based on the test results, the EKF fusion-based approach increases the depth detection range by reducing the errors outside the optimal depth camera working range. It also shows improved robustness and precision in challenging conditions, such as reflections and poor visibility, making it suitable for SAR.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

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

Authors:
Duc-Manh Phan↗Quoc-Duy Tran↗Duy-Khang Do↗Anh-Tuan Vo↗Hai-Dang Nguyen↗Trong Le Do↗Mai-Khiem Tran↗Vinh-Tiep Nguyen↗Tam V. Nguyen↗Isao Echizen↗Minh-Triet Tran↗Trung-Nghia Le↗…

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

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

Direct Advantage Estimation for Scalable and Sample-efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Hsiao-Ru Pan↗Bernhard Sch\"olkopf↗

arXiv:2606.20411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE) has been shown to improve the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, its reliance on full environment observability limits its applicability in realistic settings, and its requirement to model transition probabilities incurs substantial computational overhead for high-dimensional observations. In the present work, we address both limitations. First, we extend the theoretical framework of DAE to partially observable domains with minimal modifications. Second, we reduce its computational complexity by introducing discrete latent dynamics models that efficiently approximate transition probabilities. We evaluate our approach on the Arcade Learning Environment and find that DAE scales effectively with function approximator capacity while retaining high sample efficiency.

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

Exposing the Illusion of Fairness: Auditing Vulnerabilities to Distributional Manipulation Attacks

Authors:
Valentin Lafargue↗Adriana Laurindo Monteiro↗Emmanuelle Claeys↗Laurent Risser↗Jean-Michel Loubes↗

arXiv:2507.20708v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid deployment of AI systems in high-stakes domains, including those classified as high-risk under the The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), has intensified the need for reliable compliance auditing. For binary classifiers, regulatory risk assessment often relies on global fairness metrics such as the Disparate Impact ratio, widely used to evaluate potential discrimination. In typical auditing settings, the auditee provides a subset of its dataset to an auditor, while a supervisory authority may verify whether this subset is representative of the full underlying distribution. In this work, we investigate to what extent a malicious auditee can construct a fairness-compliant yet representative-looking sample from a non-compliant original distribution, thereby creating an illusion of fairness. We formalize this problem as a constrained distributional projection task and introduce mathematically grounded manipulation strategies based on entropic and optimal transport projections. These constructions characterize the minimal distributional shift required to satisfy fairness constraints. To counter such attacks, we formalize representativeness through distributional distance based statistical tests and systematically evaluate their ability to detect manipulated samples. Our analysis highlights the conditions under which fairness manipulation can remain statistically undetected and provides practical guidelines for strengthening supervisory verification. We validate our theoretical findings through experiments on standard tabular datasets for bias detection. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ValentinLafargue/Inspection.

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12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Modeling light-matter coupled systems with neural quantum states

Authors:
Noe Salmeron↗Marin Bukov↗Markus Schmitt↗

arXiv:2606.14352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in cold atom manipulation enable the study of many-body systems where short-range interactions between neighboring atoms coexist with long-range interactions mediated by photons. Such a combination of interactions makes a theoretical approach challenging beyond mean-field methods. In this work, we develop a neural quantum state based approach to study these systems numerically. We introduce a neural-network architecture capable of handling hybrid Hilbert spaces with large local bosonic dimensions in strongly interacting spin-photon systems. We benchmark this approach on a model of a two-dimensional lattice of Rydberg atoms coupled to a photon mode. The superradiant ground states found in the large spin-photon coupling regime allow us to demonstrate the efficiency of the method in the presence of high photon occupation. Furthermore, the ability to capture spin-spin and spin-photon correlations leads us to observe quantitative deviations in the ground state phase boundaries with respect to mean-field theory. The method extends to other systems with a similar hybrid Hilbert space structure, such as spin-phonon systems, and provides a scalable framework for investigating their ground state properties.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

SMART: Scalable Mesh-free Aerodynamic Simulations from Raw Geometries using a Transformer-based Surrogate Model

Authors:
Jan Hagnberger↗Mathias Niepert↗

Machine learning-based surrogate models have emerged as more efficient alternatives to numerical solvers for physical simulations over complex geometries, such as car bodies. Many existing models incorporate the simulation mesh as an additional input, thereby reducing prediction errors. However, generating a simulation mesh for new geometries is computationally costly. In contrast, mesh-free methods, which do not rely on the simulation mesh, typically incur higher errors. Motivated by these considerations, we introduce SMART, a neural surrogate model that predicts physical quantities at arbitrary query locations using only a point-cloud representation of the geometry, without requiring access to the simulation mesh. The geometry and simulation parameters are encoded into a shared latent space that captures both structural and parametric characteristics of the physical field. A physics decoder then attends to the encoder's intermediate latent representations to map spatial queries to physical quantities. Through this cross-layer interaction, the model jointly updates latent geometric features and the evolving physical field. Extensive experiments show that SMART is competitive with and often outperforms existing methods that rely on the simulation mesh as input, demonstrating its capabilities for industry-level simulations.

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

Different Layers, Different Manifolds: Module-Wise Weight-Space Geometry in Transformer Optimization

Authors:
Kirato Yoshihara↗

arXiv:2606.13276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Weight-space geometry plays a central role in neural network optimization, yet manifold constraints are often applied uniformly across all weight matrices. In this work, we ask whether different transformer modules prefer different manifold geometries. We study Manifold Muon for GPT-2 pretraining and compare layer-wise assignments of Stiefel and DGram constraints across attention and MLP blocks. Our results show a clear asymmetry: constraining attention layers with Stiefel geometry while assigning DGram geometry to MLP layers gives the best performance among the tested configurations, whereas the inverted assignment and all-DGram configuration become unstable under the shared hyperparameter setting. We trace this failure to singular value growth in DGram-constrained attention weights, which can amplify attention logits and induce softmax saturation. These findings suggest that symmetry-aware and geometry-aware optimization for transformers should be module-specific rather than uniform.

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

PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

Authors:
Yantao Li↗Qiang Hui↗Chenyang Yan↗Kanzhi Cheng↗Fang Zhao↗Chao Tan↗Huanling Gao↗Jianbing Zhang↗Kai Wang↗Xinyu Dai↗Shiguo Lian↗

Reinforcement learning has recently improved the reasoning ability of Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs, yet prevailing reward designs emphasise final-answer correctness and consequently tolerate process hallucinations–cases where models reach the right answer while misperceiving visual evidence. We address this process-level misalignment with PaLMR, a framework that aligns not only outcomes but also the reasoning process itself. PaLMR comprises two complementary components: a perception-aligned data layer that constructs process-aware reasoning data with structured pseudo-ground-truths and verifiable visual facts, and a process-aligned optimisation layer that constructs a hierarchical reward fusion scheme with a process-aware scoring function to encourage visually faithful chains-of-thought and improve training stability. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that our approach substantially reduces reasoning hallucinations and improves visual reasoning fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art results on HallusionBench while maintaining strong performance on MMMU, MathVista, and MathVerse. These findings indicate that PaLMR offers a principled and practical route to process-aligned multimodal reasoning, advancing the reliability and interpretability of MLLMs.

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

VISUALSKILL: Multimodal Skills for Computer-Use Agents

Authors:
Ziyan Jiang↗Li An↗Yujian Liu↗Jiabao Ji↗Qiucheng Wu↗Jacob Andreas↗Yang Zhang↗Shiyu Chang↗

Computer-use agents (CUAs) approach human-level performance on standardised benchmarks but still struggle on long-horizon tasks and unseen software. Existing skill libraries address this with reusable skills, but represent the skill artifact as text only, despite the visual nature of GUI interaction. We propose VISUALSKILL: a hierarchical multimodal skill, tailored to each target application and organised as a central index over per-topic files, which the agent consumes through a load_topic MCP tool that fetches the relevant topic's text and figures on demand. We construct each skill with a two-stage pipeline that combines authored documentation with live-application UI exploration. On two CUA benchmarks, CUA-World and OSExpert-Eval, a Claude Code CLI agent backed by Claude Opus 4.6 reaches an average score of 0.456 with VISUALSKILL, a +15.3 point absolute lift over the no-skill baseline (0.303). Against a matched text-only skill that is generated from the same source content and differs from VISUALSKILL only in modality, VISUALSKILL yields a further +8.3 point absolute gain over the matched text-only skill (0.373 vs. 0.456), providing direct evidence that retaining visual figures in the skill artifact, rather than verbalizing them away, helps the agent both identify UI elements and verify workflow state after each action. Our code is available at https://github.com/XMHZZ2018/VisualSkills.

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

A Scalable PyTorch Abstraction for Multi-GPU Gaussian Splatting

Authors:
Matthew Cong↗Francis Williams↗Jonathan Swartz↗Mark Harris↗Sanja Fidler↗Ken Museth↗

Gaussian splatting methods have become increasingly popular for neural reconstruction of the real world. However, they are often limited in scale and resolution due to compute and memory constraints. We present a multi-GPU Gaussian splatting approach that scales reconstruction to higher resolutions and larger scenes while abstracting away the code complexity typically associated with distributing a model. To accomplish this, we propose a PyTorch backend that distributes the Gaussian parameters and splatting operators across GPUs via CUDA unified memory and NVLink. Because distribution occurs at the operator level, the model code requires no explicit cross-device communication. More broadly, the backend exposes multiple GPUs as an aggregate PyTorch device and supports other PyTorch operators. We demonstrate city-scale reconstructions with street-level detail consisting of over 1 billion Gaussian splats, more than 25 times as many as the current state of the art.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NEST: Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding

Authors:
Ali Asgarov↗Kaushik Narasimhan↗Najibul Haque Sarker↗Hani Alomari↗Chia-Wei Tang↗Anushka Sivakumar↗Zaber Ibn Abdul Hakim↗Shaurya Mallampati↗Chris Thomas↗

Recent progress in vision-language models has enabled the processing of increasingly long video sequences, but the ability to handle extended token streams does not translate to understanding of narrative structure in long videos. Existing long video benchmarks focus on needle-in-a-haystack retrieval rather than evaluating how low-level actions form events, how events interact across time, and how narratives progress, for example, whether a model can connect an early setback, such as a job loss to a later relationship breakup, despite long gaps, intervening scenes, or flashbacks that reframe what occurred. We introduce NEST (Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding), a dataset of 1005 full-length movies (avg. 98 minutes), each annotated with 102 multimodal narrative events grounded in visual content, dialogue, and audio. NEST captures multimodal narrative events with structured annotations grounded in visual content, dialogue, and audio, and links them through relations that reflect narrative structure, including temporal ordering, hierarchical composition, and long-range dependencies. We introduce baselines for event trigger detection (ETD), event localization (EL), event argument extraction (EAE), and event relation extraction (ERE). The benchmark is highly challenging for grounded event discovery, with ETD below 8%, EL under 6%, and EAE below 11%. In contrast, ERE is more tractable once events are given, reaching 35.45% F1 zero-shot and 44.42% F1 after fine-tuning.

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

Equivariant Flow Matching for Symmetry-Breaking Bifurcation Problems

Authors:
Fleur Hendriks↗Ond\v{r}ej Roko\v{s}↗Martin Do\v{s}k\'a\v{r}↗Marc G. D. Geers↗Vlado Menkovski↗

arXiv:2509.03340v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bifurcation phenomena in nonlinear dynamical systems often lead to multiple coexisting stable solutions, particularly in the presence of symmetry breaking. Deterministic machine learning models are unable to capture this multiplicity, averaging over solutions and failing to represent lower-symmetry outcomes. In this work, we formalize the use of generative AI, specifically flow matching, as a principled way to model the full probability distribution over bifurcation outcomes. Our approach builds on existing techniques by combining flow matching with equivariant architectures and an optimal-transport-based coupling mechanism. We generalize equivariant flow matching to a symmetric coupling strategy that aligns predicted and target outputs under group actions, allowing accurate learning in equivariant settings. We validate our approach on a range of systems, from simple conceptual systems to physical problems such as buckling beams and the Allen–Cahn equation. The results demonstrate that the approach accurately captures multimodal distributions and symmetry-breaking bifurcations. Moreover, our results demonstrate that flow matching significantly outperforms non-probabilistic and variational methods. This offers a principled and scalable solution for modeling multistability in high-dimensional systems.

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20.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Associations between hematologic dynamics during pregnancy and obstetric complications: A retrospective observational study

Authors:
Veronica Tozzo↗

by Veronica Tozzo, Rachel Petherbridge, Kaitlyn James, Sarah Hsu, Deepti Pant, Chloe Michalopoulos, Brody H. Foy, Tanayott Thaweethai, Christopher Mow, Jacqueline Maya, Carolina Batlle Camero, Lydia Shook, Kathryn J. Gray, Logan Mauney, John M. Higgins, Camille E. Powe Background Pregnancy alters hematologic state as measured by complete blood count (CBC), but the longitudinal changes in CBC indices that define healthy pregnancies are not well established. In a large cohort based at an academic health system in the United States, we aimed to define reference intervals and typical longitudinal changes in CBC indices during pregnancy. We then tested for associations between extreme CBC values for gestational age or extreme longitudinal changes in CBC indices and obstetric complications. Methods and findings We studied nine CBC indices in individuals with singleton pregnancies who delivered after 30 weeks’ gestation and presented for prenatal care prior to 20 weeks. The electronic health record (EHR)-based Maternal Health Cohort (Massachusetts General Hospital; 1998–2016) formed our discovery cohort of 45,992 pregnancies, 18% of which had relevant complications. We developed a validation cohort of 48,868, 27% with complications from EHR data in the Mass General Brigham healthcare system from 2016 to 2024. In pregnancies without complications in the discovery cohort, we derived gestational-age-specific reference intervals (2.5th–97.5th percentile) and established typical intra-pregnancy longitudinal changes. In the validation cohort, we then tested CBC values outside of the 26–29 weeks’ gestation reference interval and CBC rare changes (uncommon changes in magnitude and direction) between 7–14 and 26–29 weeks’ gestation for association with a composite outcome (hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, small for gestational age birthweight, preterm birth) and its individual components using generalized estimating equations. Derived reference intervals differed from those in the literature for mean red cell volume, mean red cell hemoglobin, red cell count, and mean red cell hemoglobin concentration; reference intervals for other indices were similar to those previously published. In validation, hematocrit, hemoglobin, and red cell count values above their gestational-age specific reference intervals were associated with increased risk of the composite obstetric outcome: odds ratios (ORs) of 1.4 (95% CI [1.2, 1.5] p 

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Development of a Novel Risk Prediction Model for Rheumatoid Arthritis-Associated Interstitial Lung Disease (RA-ILD): A Longitudinal Study

Authors:
Lv↗Y.-p↗Wang↗S.-y↗Piao↗H.-n↗Gong↗Zeng↗K.-q↗Zhong↗Lei↗S.-f↗…

Background: Interstitial lung disease (ILD) is one of the most common and potentially most devastating extra-articular complication of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and is associated with substantial morbidity and mortality. However, reliable tools for the early identification of ILD in patients with RA remain limited. This study aimed to identify plasma protein biomarkers of RA-ILD and develop an interpretable machine learning model for risk prediction using data from the UK Biobank. Methods: We first evaluated the association between baseline RA and the risk of incident ILD in the UK Biobank using Cox proportional hazards models. Mendelian randomization analysis was then performed to investigate the potential causal relationship between RA and ILD. Finally, we analyzed 2,920 plasma proteins measured using the Olink platform in 781 eligible RA patients. Proteins associated with ILD risk were identified using Cox proportional hazards models and subsequently used to construct eight machine learning models. Model performance was assessed using the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) and decision curve analysis. The best-performing model was further interpreted using Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) to evaluate feature importance. Results: Compared with participants without RA, Patients with baseline RA had a significantly higher risk of developing ILD (Hazard ratio: 4.425, 95% CI: 3.549,5.518). The MR supported a potential causal association between RA and ILD (Odds ratio: 1.227, 95% CI: 1.121,1.343). Among the eight machine learning models, the CatBoost model showed the best performance, achieving an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.884 (95% CI: 0.773,0.996). The SHAP analysis identified LAG3, NPC2, and LAMP3 are the three most important plasma protein predictors of ILD development in patients with RA. Conclusion: Plasma proteomics combined with machine learning may provide a promising approach for identifying biomarkers and predicting ILD risk in patients with RA. LAG3, NPC2, and LAMP3 may serve as candidate biomarkers for RA-ILD and warrant further validation. Keywords: Rheumatoid arthritis, Interstitial lung disease, Mendelian randomization, Machine learning, Plasma proteins.

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22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

‘Student Geng’ ignites research-integrity scandal in China after calling out senior academics<b> </b>

Authors:
Xiaoying You↗

Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations. Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Hidden Power of Scaling Factor in LoRA Optimization

Authors:
Zicheng Zhang↗Haoran Li↗Jiaxing Wang↗Guoqiang Gong↗Anqi Li↗Yudong Hu↗Ting Xiong↗Yurong Gao↗Junxing Hu↗Zhida Jiang↗Yifeng Zhang↗Pengzhang Liu↗…

arXiv:2606.12883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the scaling factor $\alpha$ is often treated as a mere complement to the learning rate, yet its role in optimization remains poorly understood. In this paper, we reveal that the scaling factor $\alpha$ and the learning rate function differently, with $\alpha$ emerging as the dominant driver of effective optimization, delivering gains that cannot be replicated by learning rate scaling alone. Through the synergy of extensive empirical analysis and a theoretical Signal-Drift framework, we uncover three findings into LoRA's scaling mechanism: First, LoRA's spectral suppression smooths the optimization landscape, rendering standard hyperparameters overly conservative and creating an optimization gap. Second, when leveraging this smoothness to accelerate convergence, $\alpha$ outperforms the learning rate by amplifying the task signal without increasing the drift ratio. Third, the optimal scaling factor follows a sublinear relationship with the rank, well characterized by a square-root law with an unexpectedly large coefficient, revealing the insufficient scaling of existing rank-tied heuristics. Based on these insights, we propose LoRA-$\alpha$, a minimalist framework that restores $\alpha$ to its principled regime, making LoRA compatible with standard small learning rates. Extensive evaluations across diverse tasks demonstrate that LoRA-$\alpha$ consistently improves performance while streamlining hyperparameter search, unleashing the learning potential of LoRA.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Fi-Gaussian: Frequency-Aware Implicit Gaussian Splatting for Single Image Dehazing

Authors:
Yuhan Chen↗Ying Fang↗Guofa Li↗Wenxuan Yu↗Yicui Shi↗Kunyang Huang↗Wenbo Chu↗Keqiang Li↗

Single image dehazing continues to be hindered by the loss of high-frequency details and the difficulty of accurate physical scattering modeling. To address these issues, we propose Fi-Gaussian, a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting network for single image dehazing. Unlike explicit rendering methods that rely on 3D point clouds, our method employs implicit Gaussian splatting to adaptively model the underlying distribution of clear images as a continuous representation in 2D feature space. The core of the network is a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting module, which decouples low-frequency structural information and high-frequency texture information in the frequency domain and then performs adaptive Gaussian aggregation with complex-valued weights to recover fine details. In addition, a physics-driven scattering renormalization mechanism is introduced to estimate the transmission map and atmospheric light under the guidance of implicit Gaussian priors. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fi-Gaussian achieves state-of-the-art quantitative performance and produces visually superior dehazed results, validating the effectiveness of implicit Gaussian splatting for low-level vision tasks.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Dissociating Decodability and Causal Use in Bracket-Sequence Transformers

Authors:
Aryan Sharma↗Cutter Dawes↗Shivam Raval↗

When trained on tasks requiring an understanding of hierarchical structure, transformers have been found to represent this hierarchy in distinct ways: in the geometry of the residual stream, and in stack-like attention patterns maintaining a last-in, first-out ordering. However, it remains unclear whether these representations are causally used or merely decodable. We examine this gap in transformers trained on the Dyck language (a formal language of balanced bracket sequences), where the hierarchical ground truth is explicit. By probing and intervening on the residual stream and attention patterns, we find that depth, distance, and top-of-stack signals are all decodable, yet their causal roles diverge. Specifically, masking attention to the true top-of-stack position causes a sharp drop in long-distance accuracy, while ablating low-dimensional residual stream subspaces has comparatively little effect. These results, which extend to a templated natural language setting, suggest that even in a controlled setting where the relevant hierarchical variables are known, decodability alone does not imply causal use.

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