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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

GMN4AD: Graph Matching Network for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis with Test-Time Domain Adaptation using Multi-centered Structure Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects millions of older adults, with prevalence expected to rise significantly in the coming years. Early diagnosis, particularly during the mild cognitive impairment (MCI) stage, is critical for timely intervention. Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI) has emerged as a key modality for detecting AD-related brain changes, but traditional graph-based approaches often struggle with modality and inter-site heterogeneity, limiting diagnostic performance. In this paper, we propose Graph Matching Network for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis (GMN4AD), designed to model interactions between heterogeneous brain graphs derived from neuroimaging data. Unlike conventional methods that treat each brain graph independently, GMN4AD leverages graph matching to capture cross-graph relationships, enhancing diagnostic precision. Furthermore, we introduce a test-time domain adaptation strategy that combines contrastive learning to mitigate domain shifts during inference. Extensive experiments on three public AD datasets demonstrate that GMN4AD achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, offering a robust and generalizable solution for AD diagnosis.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Beyond Global Replanning: Hierarchical Recovery for Cross-Device Agent Systems

Real-world computer-use tasks often span multiple applications and devices, requiring agents to coordinate heterogeneous environments under dynamic runtime failures. Existing multi-device agent systems support task decomposition and cross-device assignment, but recovery remains largely coarse-grained: when execution fails, they typically retry the same strategy, reassign the subtask, or revise the global plan, without systematically modeling the device-local strategy space. This limits their ability to distinguish failures that can be repaired within the current device from those that require cross-device replanning. We propose H-RePlan, a hierarchical replanning framework for multi-device agents with unified API–CLI–GUI execution. H-RePlan equips each device with interchangeable execution strategies and separates device-local strategy recovery from orchestrator-level global replanning through a compact cross-layer failure abstraction. To evaluate this capability, we introduce HeraBench, a fault-injected benchmark that constructs cross-device workflows over Linux and Android devices and injects strategy- and device-level failures. Experiments show that H-RePlan substantially outperforms single-strategy and coarse-grained multi-device baselines, achieving higher completion, instruction adherence, and perfect-pass rates while reducing the token cost required for reliable end-to-end success. These results demonstrate that scope-aware hierarchical recovery is essential for robust multi-device agent execution.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Kinematic properties of the Pauli equation

arXiv:2606.17548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Based on the Wigner-Vlasov formalism, this paper investigates the kinematic properties of the Pauli equation. It is shown that the probability current associated with the Pauli equation can be represented as a superposition of two currents with certain expansion coefficients. Each of these currents corresponds to a particular component of the spinor. The expansion coefficients effectively serve as weighting functions that determine the probability contribution of the corresponding spinor component. Therefore, each spin projection corresponds to its own probability flux. A new system of the Hamilton-Jacobi equations and also a system of motion equations in electromagnetic fields are obtained, taking into account the interaction between the spin and the magnetic field. To illustrate how these equations can be applied we have investigated the quantum system kinematics in detail using an exact solution of the Pauli equation in the presence of a uniform magnetic field and an asymmetric quadratic potential.

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

Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver for Accelerating Generative Modeling

arXiv:2601.21542v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) models have emerged as a leading paradigm for high-fidelity synthesis. However, their reliance on iterative Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solving creates a significant latency bottleneck. Existing solutions face a dichotomy: training-free solvers suffer from significant performance degradation at low Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs), while training-based one- or few-steps generation methods incur prohibitive training costs and lack plug-and-play versatility. To bridge this gap, we propose the Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver (BA-solver). BA-solver retains the versatility of standard training-free solvers while achieving significant acceleration by introducing a lightweight SideNet (1-2% backbone size) alongside the frozen backbone. Specifically, our method is founded on two synergistic components: 1) Bidirectional Temporal Perception, where the SideNet learns to approximate both future and historical velocities without retraining the heavy backbone; and 2) Bi-Anchor Velocity Integration, which utilizes the SideNet with two anchor velocities to efficiently approximate intermediate velocities for batched high-order integration. By utilizing the backbone to establish high-precision ``anchors'' and the SideNet to densify the trajectory, BA-solver enables large interval sizes with minimized error. Empirical results on ImageNet-256^2 demonstrate that BA-solver achieves generation quality comparable to 100+ NFEs Euler solver in just 10 NFEs and maintains high fidelity in as few as 5 NFEs, incurring negligible training costs. Furthermore, BA-solver ensures seamless integration with existing generative pipelines, facilitating downstream tasks such as image editing.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Vascular Phenotyping in Parkinson's Disease: Diabetes Mellitus Operationalizes a Microvascular Metabolic Syndrome Cluster Across PPMI Diagnostic Cohorts

Background: Diabetes mellitus elevates Parkinson's disease (PD) risk, via hypothesized cerebrovascular mediation. Whether the diabetes/prediabetes vascular-risk phenotype concentrates in cardiometabolic risk or macrovascular events across prodromal and clinically diagnosed PD remains unresolved. Objectives: To quantify the vascular-risk burden associated with diabetes/prediabetes across the PPMI diagnostic cohorts to test whether this association differs by cohort. Methods: Cross-sectional analysis of 413 PPMI participants (76 healthy controls, 145 prodromal PD, 192 clinically diagnosed PD) examined diabetes/prediabetes (n = 73) and seven vascular risk factors. The Vascular Burden Score (0 to 7) was a priori partitioned into microvascular and macrovascular sub-scores. Modified Poisson regression estimated adjusted prevalence ratios (aPR), adjusted for age, sex, and body mass index. A cohort-by-diabetes interaction tested cross-cohort consistency. Sensitivity analyses incorporated nigral diffusion tensor imaging (PD-risk biomarker) and FreeSurfer white matter hypointensity volume (cerebrovascular marker). Results: Diabetes/prediabetes elevated Vascular Burden Score ({beta} = 0.53, 95% CI 0.29 to 0.77, p < 0.001) versus non-diabetic participants, with a non-significant cohort-by-diabetes interaction (F = 0.29, p = 0.747). Three microvascular factors survived false discovery rate correction: obesity (aPR 2.28), hypertension (aPR 1.60), and hyperlipidemia (aPR 1.45). Macrovascular events showed no diabetic amplification ({beta} = -0.06, p = 0.25). In the imaging-phenotyped subset, Vascular Burden Score components contributed classifier variance distinct from nigral microstructure. Conclusions: Diabetes/prediabetes operationalize a microvascular cluster stable across prodromal and idiopathic PD. Cardiometabolic phenotyping may complement established PD-risk biomarkers (dopamine transporter SPECT, nigral diffusion), pending longitudinal validation linking vascular phenotype to dopaminergic markers.

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

Artemis: Anatomy-Resolved inTervention for Eliminating Multimodal NeuroImage confounderS

arXiv:2606.18287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal neuroimaging, integrating functional connectivity from fMRI and structural connectivity from DTI, enables non-invasive analysis of brain networks using graph neural networks. However, demographic factors such as age and sex systematically confound the relationship between brain connectivity and clinical outcomes, causing GNNs to exploit spurious shortcuts rather than learning causally invariant representations. While recent causal GNN methods introduce causality at the graph-modeling level, their causal mechanisms remain domain-agnostic without accounting for the real-world confounders inherent in clinical neuroimaging data. Moreover, brain networks are constructed from atlas-based parcellations where each region exhibits distinct sensitivity to demographic factors, necessitating region-aware adjustment. We propose Artemis, a region-level causal framework that bridges this gap with causal intervention at each brain region independently by learning region-specific confounder representations with lightweight parameters. Our adjustment comprehensively utilized the multimodal functional and structural features for graph reasoning as a plug-in module compatible with arbitrary GNN backbones. Experiments on three benchmarks, ADNI for disease diagnosis, OASIS for dementia staging, and HCP for sex classification, demonstrate consistent improvements over representative GNN-based baselines. Multiple supporting experiments further demonstrate statistical significance and neuroscientific interpretability.

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

Scalable Pairwise Kernel Learning with Stochastic Vec Trick

arXiv:2606.16979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pairwise learning is a specialized form of supervised learning that focuses on predicting outcomes for pairs of objects. In this work, we introduce SPaiK, a new scalable kernel learning method tailored for pairwise settings. Our approach preserves the expressive power of kernel methods while substantially reducing computational and memory requirements. The key innovation is the stochastic generalized vec trick (sGVT), a stochastic extension of the sparse Kronecker product multiplication algorithm, which enables efficient large-scale training with pairwise kernels. By incorporating sGVT, SPaiK makes it possible to apply kernel-based pairwise learning to datasets of a size previously out of reach. We evaluate the performance of SPaiK on seven real-world drug-target affinity datasets and compare the results with state-of-the-art methods in pairwise learning.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Designing AI-Supported Focus Groups: A Role x Modality Playbook

arXiv:2606.11835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collecting participants' lived experiences is central to design research. Focus groups are uniquely valuable because participants not only share individual accounts but also respond to one another, surfacing comparison, disagreement, and collective sensemaking. However, focus groups are resource-intensive and highly sensitive to facilitation: moderators must probe for specificity, balance participation, manage topic flow, and sustain psychological safety, and subtle facilitation choices can shape what becomes salient. Recent HCI work and commercial meeting tools show that generative AI can scaffold live conversation through prompting, turn regulation, thematic mapping, and real-time summarization. Yet UXR teams lack a clear map of what these capabilities mean in focus groups and what methodological risks they introduce. We synthesize AI supports for live conversation and translate them into a focus-group-specific playbook organized by AI role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied).We synthesize prior work on AI-supported live conversation and propose a focus-group-specific playbook of AI supports organized by role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied). We characterize interactional trade-offs and identify open questions for evaluating AI-supported focus groups as methodological configurations.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Beyond Algorithms: Conceptual Innovation in Medical Imaging AI

arXiv:2606.19270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence has driven rapid progress in medical imaging research, producing increasingly sophisticated algorithms and steady improvements on benchmark tasks. However, this algorithm-centric trajectory has also revealed a growing imbalance: while computational methods advance rapidly, the conceptual foundations that define imaging tasks, evaluation metrics, and clinical meaning sometimes remain underexamined. In this Perspective, we distinguish algorithmic innovation, which focuses on improving computational implementations and performance within a fixed problem definition, from conceptual innovation, which reframes what problems are posed, how success is measured, and why an approach is clinically relevant. We argue that prevailing incentive structures, training pathways, and publication norms disproportionately reward algorithmic novelty, particularly for early-career researchers, while at times undervaluing conceptual contributions that are essential for scientific maturation and clinical translation. Through representative examples from medical imaging AI, we show how insufficient conceptual grounding can lead to misaligned objectives, fragile generalization, and limited real-world impact. We conclude with actionable recommendations for researchers, mentors, reviewers, and journals to better recognize, support, and integrate conceptual innovation alongside algorithmic advances.

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

CellNet – Localizing Cells using Sparse and Noisy Point Annotations

Counting living cells is an important step in many biological research workflows. Our collaborators at the Wellcome Sanger Institute study vital genes in humans via large scale saturation genome editing screening, which requires repeatedly counting cells a great number of times. Computer Vision based automation is crucial for high throughput and resource efficiency. In this work, we develop a regression-based deep learning computer vision algorithm to detect and count cells in phase-contrast microscopy images. To reduce annotation effort, which in practice often becomes a bottleneck, we focus on counting cells only using sparse point annotations, which are fast and easy to acquire. By comparison to state-of-the-art 0-shot methods, we show that regression-based counting is a promising alternative in low data regimes. Through developing methods to automatically count living cells in microscopy images, we contribute to valuable research on the human genome. The code is available at https://github.com/beijn/cellnet.

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

Temporal Self-Imitation Learning

arXiv:2606.19752v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon robot manipulation policies trained with reward shaping can still exploit dense rewards through inefficient interaction, while rare efficient behaviors may be forgotten during training. We argue that temporal efficiency itself provides a powerful and underutilized source of self-supervision for reinforcement learning. We introduce Temporal Self-Imitation Learning (TSIL), a reinforcement learning framework that mines temporally efficient successful trajectories generated during learning and converts them into reusable supervision for future policy improvement. TSIL progressively refines learning using configuration-conditioned adaptive temporal targets derived from fast successful trajectories, while preserving and replaying efficient behaviors through efficiency-weighted self-imitation learning. Across 15 distinct long-horizon manipulation tasks, TSIL consistently improves learning efficiency, task-completion efficiency, revisitation of fast successful behaviors, and robustness to unstable training conditions. More broadly, our results suggest that the temporal structure of successful behavior itself provides a scalable self-supervisory signal for reinforcement learning beyond manually engineered reward shaping alone.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Robust Pretty Good Measurement via Hybrid Classical-Quantum Pseudoinverse Approximation and Circuit-Level Realization

arXiv:2606.13150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretty Good Measurement (PGM) is a near-optimal strategy for quantum state discrimination, but its practical realization becomes unstable when the ensemble operator is singular or ill-conditioned. We introduce a numerically robust PGM formulation based on the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse, replacing the standard inverse square root with a threshold-regularized variant that remains well-defined across different spectral regimes. We develop a hybrid classical-quantum framework that combines pseudoinverse-based spectral preprocessing with quantum circuit realizations using block-encoding and spectral-transformation techniques. The framework incorporates support awareness, yielding physically meaningful measurement operators even in rank-deficient cases, and employs oblivious amplitude amplification to improve circuit-level success probabilities. Extensive numerical and circuit-level simulations show close agreement between theoretical predictions and quantum circuit outputs. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets, including ill-conditioned and degenerate scenarios, demonstrate stable discrimination performance where standard PGM becomes numerically unstable. The results establish a practical hybrid classical-quantum framework for robust quantum state discrimination and extend previous circuit-based implementations of the PGM testing stage toward pseudoinverse-aware measurement design.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Block algebra for morphing circuits

作者:

arXiv:2606.12724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Morphing circuits are a new paradigm for quantum error correction that relaxes hardware requirements. We present four constructions for CNOT-based CSS morphing circuits with explicit qubit connectivity degrees. All four constructions are specified in block algebra notation, with entries in algebras generated by permutation matrices. The first three are obtained by rewriting existing surface- and color-code morphing circuits; the fourth is a new three-round construction modeled on the 6.6.6 color code. The surface-code construction recovers the morphing circuit of Ref. [ST25] for two-block group algebra codes. Numerical search then instantiates these permutation matrices using regular representations of finite groups. [ST25] M. H. Shaw and B. M. Terhal, Phys. Rev. Lett. 134(9), 090602 (2025).

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

ROVE: Unlocking Human Interventions for Humanoid Manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.17011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human interventions provide crucial corrective signals for post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, enabling seamless humanoid interventions is a formidable systems challenge due to complex whole-body kinematics and dexterous-hand control. Consequently, the collected intervention trajectories are often suboptimal, and methods that rely on human interventions as expert supervision can absorb hesitant, inefficient, or even erroneous behaviors. To address both the system and algorithmic challenges, we propose ROVE, a reinforcement learning framework for humanoid VLA post-training with imperfect human interventions. First, ROVE introduces a human-in-the-loop pipeline capable of collecting deployment and intervention data for humanoid manipulation. Second, it utilizes Optimistic Value Estimation (OVE) to prioritize high-value behaviors from mixed-quality trajectories. To further robustify value estimation, we incorporate cross-embodiment human experience videos to provide rich supervision for long-tailed failure and recovery modes. The resulting critic yields informative advantage signals, steering the VLA actor to focus on high-value behaviors rather than indiscriminately imitating all actions. On challenging real-world contact-rich and fine-grained humanoid manipulation tasks, ROVE outperforms experience-learning baselines and consistently improves across multiple rollout-intervention iterations.

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

AC-ODM: Actor–Critic Online Data Mixing for Sample-Efficient LLM Pretraining

arXiv:2505.23878v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optimizing pretraining data composition is pivotal for LLM generalization. While dynamic mixing outperforms static strategies by capturing evolving training dynamics, current methods fail to reconcile computational efficiency with sample efficiency and structural flexibility for diverse pipelines.We introduce Actor–Critic Online Data Mixing (AC-ODM), which approaches data mixing from a reinforcement learning perspective with a parameterized policy that we theoretically prove to act as a dynamic linear surrogate maximizing the constructive interference of gradients. To enhance practical flexibility, AC-ODM supports two operational modes: (i) a proxy mode for fixed, pre-prepared corpora, where a policy learned on a small model is transferred to a larger target; and (ii) a non-proxy mode for direct end-to-end training from scratch without priors. Empirically, AC-ODM significantly outperforms prior methods in convergence speed and downstream accuracy across various architectures. On Pythia-1B, it reaches optimal validation perplexity using up to 66% fewer training steps than competitive baselines, delivering a 27.5% relative improvement in MMLU accuracy and a 2.23 x higher pass@1 on HumanEval, all while incurring a virtually negligible (0.4%) per-step wall-clock increase and only 2% additional memory overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/DANG-ai/AC-ODM.

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

Fine-Tuning a 7B Advisor on Free-Tier GPUs: An Adapter-Handoff Recipe and a Synthetic-Data Reliability Caution

arXiv:2504.15610v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning a 7B language model for specialized advising is attractive in resource-constrained settings, but multi-epoch runs routinely exceed the wall-clock limits of the free-tier GPUs (Kaggle, Colab) such users rely on. We report two things. First, a practical recipe: a three-epoch QLoRA fine-tune of Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 (4-bit NF4, LoRA rank 16, via Unsloth) completed across two free-tier 16 GB GPUs (Tesla P100 then T4) by checkpointing only the small LoRA adapter (41.9M parameters) and resuming on the second machine. Adapter-only handoff is sufficient – optimizer and scheduler state need not be transferred – so the binding constraint is per-step VRAM and per-session wall-clock, not aggregate compute. Second, and more importantly, an honest evaluation that returns a cautionary result. On a blind held-out comparison against the un-fine-tuned base model, the fine-tuned model scored higher on similarity to the synthetic training distribution (BERTScore F1 +0.063, a fidelity not quality signal) but lower on advising quality: a blind LLM-as-judge preferred the base model on 46% of prompts versus 18%, and a source-verified factuality audit found four confident errors from the fine-tuned model on policy-sensitive topics against zero for the base. Auditing the training data with the same method, we find this is not a fine-tuning artifact: each audited error is already present in the Gemini-generated training answers, and a random-sample audit finds verifiable errors in a sizable fraction of responses (28-40%; single-judge, n=40). The data is therefore sufficient to account for the errors, which we attribute to the synthetic-data pipeline rather than the adapter-handoff method. We release the dataset, adapter, cross-GPU notebooks, and full evaluation harness so every result reproduces on a single 16 GB GPU.

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

A Link between Shock-wave Theory and Symmetry-reduced Stochastic Gradient Descent for Artificial Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.18303v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a mathematically explicit link between shock-wave theory and the symmetry-quotiented learning dynamics of stochastic gradient descent, drawing on differential geometry, Lie group theory, and fluid mechanics. Specifically, after quotienting parameter symmetries and applying local-entropy coarse-graining, the effective dynamics satisfy a viscous Hamilton–Jacobi equation on the quotient manifold. Moreover, under the assumption that the raw parameter dynamics can be summarized by a gradient field on the quotiented space, the gradient of the coarse-grained loss function obeys a Burgers-type equation, and shock formation can be established rigorously. We apply our theory to multilayer perceptrons, convolutional neural networks, Transformers, and mean-field networks, and show that they obey the Hamilton–Jacobi or Burgers-type equations. We conjecture that this framework also yields practical diagnostics for deep learning. In architectures such as Transformers, raw parameter norms are often distorted by symmetry redundancy and may therefore be misleading, whereas symmetry-corrected quotient observables provide a principled basis for monitoring, forecasting, and controlling training-phase transitions.

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

MedRLM: Recursive Multimodal Health Intelligence for Long-Context Clinical Reasoning, Sensor-Guided Screening, Evidence-Grounded Decision Support, and Community-to-Tertiary Referral Optimization

Real-world clinical decision support requires reasoning over heterogeneous and longitudinal patient information rather than answering isolated medical questions. However, current medical large language models and retrieval-augmented generation systems often rely on single-step prompting or retrieval, which can be fragile when clinical evidence is distributed across long electronic health records, medical images, sensor streams, guidelines, and referral constraints. This paper proposes MedRLM, a Recursive Multimodal Health Intelligence framework for long-context clinical reasoning, sensor-guided screening, and community-to-tertiary referral support. Instead of compressing all patient information into one prompt, MedRLM treats the patient case as an external clinical environment that can be recursively inspected, decomposed, retrieved, verified, and synthesized. The framework coordinates specialized agents for clinical text, longitudinal EHR, medical imaging, physiological sensor signals, guideline retrieval, uncertainty auditing, and referral planning. It further introduces a Clinical Evidence Graph Memory to connect patient-specific observations with retrieved evidence, standardized definitions, sensor-derived biomarkers, and referral criteria. A sensor-guided recursive triggering mechanism activates deeper reasoning when abnormal physiological or behavioral patterns are detected, while uncertainty-gated refinement supports clinician review for high-risk or low-confidence cases. We also outline a real-data evaluation design using public and credentialed clinical datasets spanning EHR, radiology, ECG, ICU time series, and referral-proxy outcomes. MedRLM aims to move medical AI from static question answering toward auditable, multimodal, and workflow-aware clinical decision support.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Impact of Early Treatment on Symptom Improvement and Procedural Events among Men with BPH and Bothersome Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms: A Contemporary Analysis of the American Urological Association Quality (AQUA) Registry

PURPOSE: As the armamentarium of BPH therapies continues to expand, it remains imperative to maximize patient satisfaction and minimize decisional regret. We sought to determine the impact of time from BPH diagnosis to index treatment on symptom improvement and subsequent procedural events. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We queried the American Urological Association Quality Registry for men [&ge;] 40 years old with BPH, available IPSS data, and no receipt of prior BPH treatment. Index treatment included medication, surgery, or minimally invasive surgical therapy (MIST). Outcomes included IPSS over 3 years of follow-up, change in percentage of mild lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) by 3 months, and time to procedural event. Patients were stratified by time from index diagnosis to treatment by 3 years. Outcomes were compared across time-to-treatment cohorts with appropriate statistical tests with p < 0.05 as significant. RESULTS: 43,919 patients met criteria with 19,642 pursuing treatments. Patients pursued treatment at comparably lower baseline IPSS compared to prior prospective series. Patients undergoing surgery and MIST had significantly higher baseline IPSS, while medical comorbidities were significantly more common among men initiating pharmacotherapy. Early surgery and MIST were associated with significant improvement in IPSS within 6-12 months and an increase in mild LUTS by 3 months. All forms of early treatment were associated with delayed time to procedural events, including catheterization and fulguration. CONCLUSIONS: Early procedural intervention for BPH is associated with early symptom improvement and delayed time to procedural events among real-world, contemporary practice.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

CreativeBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Machine Creativity via Self-Evolving Challenges

The saturation of high-quality pre-training data has shifted research focus toward evolutionary systems capable of continuously generating novel artifacts, leading to the success of AlphaEvolve. However, the progress of such systems is hindered by the lack of rigorous, quantitative evaluation. To tackle this challenge, we introduce CreativeBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine creativity in code generation, grounded in a classical cognitive framework. Comprising two subsets – CreativeBench-Combo and CreativeBench-Explore – the benchmark targets combinatorial and exploratory creativity through an automated pipeline utilizing reverse engineering and self-play. By leveraging executable code, CreativeBench objectively distinguishes creativity from hallucination via a unified metric defined as the product of quality and novelty. Our analysis of state-of-the-art models reveals distinct behaviors: (1) scaling significantly improves combinatorial creativity but yields diminishing returns for exploration; (2) larger models exhibit ``convergence-by-scaling,'' becoming more correct but less divergent; and (3) reasoning capabilities primarily benefit constrained exploration rather than combination. Finally, we propose EvoRePE, a plug-and-play inference-time steering strategy that internalizes evolutionary search patterns to consistently enhance machine creativity.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

High coverage, persistent gaps: quality of Antenatal Care and its determinants in Zambia based on the 2024 Demographic and Health Survey.

Abstract Background Evaluating antenatal care (ANC) quality is critical to reducing maternal and neonatal mortality. In Zambia, despite high basic ANC attendance, comprehensive national evidence on the clinical content and quality of services remains limited. This study assessed the coverage of WHO-recommended ANC interventions and identified factors associated with care quality using the latest national data. Methods A cross-sectional analysis was conducted using data from the 2024 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey. The final analytic sample comprised 4,829 women aged 15-49 with a live birth in the preceding 5 years. A composite index of 15 selected, equally weighted WHO-recommended components evaluated clinical assessment, counseling/screening, preventive interventions, and utilization. Survey-weighted Poisson regression estimated adjusted incidence rate ratios (aIRRs) for the count of ANC components received. Results The mean ANC quality score was 12.5 out of 15 (95% CI: 12.4-12.6), and 78.5% (95% CI: 77.0-80.0) of women achieved adequate ANC ([&ge;] 12/15 components). While individual clinical and counseling coverage generally exceeded 90%, only 47.2% (95% CI: 45.3-49.0) of women initiated care during the first trimester, and just 4.8% (95% CI: 4.1-5.6) achieved [&ge;] 8 ANC contacts. Maternal education was the strongest and most stable predictor of quality across all models. Compared to no education, higher education was associated with an 8.0% higher expected quality score (aIRR = 1.080, 95% CI: 1.051-1.110). Lower ANC quality was significantly associated with unwanted pregnancies (aIRR = 0.970, 95% CI: 0.956-0.993) and with residence in Western (aIRR = 0.923, 95% CI: 0.897-0.951) and North Western (aIRR = 0.966, 95% CI: 0.937-0.996) provinces. Absence of distance barriers and residence in Eastern, Luapula, and Copperbelt provinces were associated with higher quality scores. Conclusion While average ANC component coverage in Zambia is high, critical gaps persist in early initiation and total contact frequency. Care adequacy is strongly influenced by maternal education, relationship status, pregnancy intention, and regional inequities. These findings underscore the need for interventions targeted at uneducated women, preventing unintended pregnancies, and underserved regions such as Western and North Western Provinces. Keywords: Antenatal care quality, ANC content, Zambia, maternal education.

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

Multimodal Concept Bottleneck Models

arXiv:2606.19882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance the interpretability of deep learning networks by aligning the features extracted from images with natural concepts. However, existing CBMs are constrained in their ability to generalize beyond a fixed set of predefined classes and the risk of non-concept information leakage, where predictive signals outside the intended concepts are inadvertently exploited. In this paper, we propose Multimodal Concept Bottleneck Model (MM-CBM) to address these issues and extend CBMs into CLIP. MM-CBM utilizes dual Concept Bottleneck Layers (CBLs) to align both the image and text embeddings into interpretable features. This allows us to perform new vision tasks like zero-shot classification or image retrieval in an interpretable way. Compared to existing methods, MM-CBM achieves up to 51.26% accuracy improvement on average across four standard benchmarks. Our method maintains high accuracy, staying within ~5% of black-box performance while offering greater interpretability.

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

Efficient Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridge for CT Field of View Extension

Computed tomography (CT) is a cornerstone imaging modality for non-invasive, high-resolution visualization of internal anatomical structures. However, when the scanned object exceeds the scanner's field of view (FOV), projection data are truncated, resulting in incomplete reconstructions and pronounced artifacts near FOV boundaries. Conventional reconstruction algorithms struggle to recover accurate anatomy from such data, limiting clinical reliability. Deep learning approaches have been explored for FOV extension, with diffusion generative models representing the latest advances in image synthesis. Yet, conventional diffusion models are computationally demanding and slow at inference due to their iterative sampling process. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient CT FOV extension framework based on the image-to-image Schrödinger Bridge (I$^2$SB) diffusion model. Unlike traditional diffusion models that synthesize images from pure Gaussian noise, I$^2$SB learns a direct stochastic mapping between paired limited-FOV and extended-FOV images. This direct correspondence yields a more interpretable and traceable generative process, enhancing anatomical consistency and structural fidelity in reconstructions. I$^2$SB achieves superior quantitative performance, with root-mean-square error (RMSE) values of 49.8 HU on simulated noisy data and 152.0 HU on real data, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion models such as conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic models (cDDPM) and patch-based diffusion methods. Moreover, its one-step inference enables reconstruction in just 0.19 s per 2D slice, representing over a 700-fold speedup compared to cDDPM (135 s) and surpassing DiffusionGAN (0.58 s), the second fastest. This combination of accuracy and efficiency indicates that I$^2$SB has potential for real-time or clinical deployment.