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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Constraining the outputs of ReLU neural networks

arXiv:2508.03867v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a class of algebraic varieties naturally associated with ReLU neural networks, arising from the piecewise linear structure of their outputs across activation regions in input space, and the piecewise multilinear structure in parameter space. By analyzing the rank constraints on the network outputs within each activation region, we derive polynomial equations that characterize the functions representable by the network. We further investigate conditions under which these varieties attain their expected dimension, providing insight into the expressive and structural properties of ReLU networks.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Vacuum photon emission and mean electromagnetic field in pair-creating external backgrounds

arXiv:2606.12547v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a perturbative description of vacuum radiative processes in quantum electrodynamics with a prescribed external electromagnetic background capable of producing electron-positron pairs. Since the initial vacuum is then unstable and the in- and out-vacua are inequivalent, radiative observables require a real-time formulation beyond the ordinary in-out approach of vacuum-stable QED. Using the Keldysh-Schwinger-Fradkin nonequilibrium technique, we derive the mean number density of emitted photons through the second nonvanishing order in the fine-structure constant. The leading term, of order $\alpha$, reproduces the known vertex and tadpole mechanisms, while the complete order-$\alpha^2$ correction contains interference, loop, and induced-current contributions. We also give an independent derivation based on the spectral decomposition of the identity operator in the in-Fock space, where the photon number density is represented as a sum of squared transition amplitudes and vacuum-disconnected terms are canceled by the optical theorem generalized to an unstable vacuum. In addition, we compute the mean electromagnetic field through order $e^3$, including the electromagnetic dressing of the induced vacuum current, and verify it using the corresponding Schwinger-Dyson equations. The final formulas are expressed in terms of exact solutions and propagators of the Dirac equation in the external background and apply to general spacetime-dependent field configurations.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Detecting Hallucinations for Large Language Model-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Knowledge graph (KG) reasoning infers new knowledge from existing facts and is widely applied in question answering, recommendation, and decision support. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based KG reasoning frameworks have become increasingly popular by leveraging retrieved KG information. However, hallucinations in LLMs remain a critical issue. Even when relevant KG knowledge is incorporated, models may still generate incorrect outputs, leading to misinformation and unreliable decisions. Existing hallucination detection methods either focus on LLM internal states or verify consistency with retrieved contexts, but both overlook the structural information in KGs, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this gap, we propose LUCID, the first halLUcination deteCtIon method for LLM-based knowleDge graph reasoning frameworks. LUCID jointly leverages LLM attention scores, KG semantics, and structural information. Specifically, it extracts node and edge features from attention scores and semantic similarities, and integrates them with KG structure using a graph neural network. We also construct manually annotated benchmark datasets for evaluation. Experiments on nine datasets show that LUCID achieves state of the art performance compared to 15 baselines.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

ReportQA: QA-Based Radiology Report Evaluation

Radiology report evaluation is essential for advancing automated report generation. Natural language generation metrics have limited clinical relevance. Clinical efficacy (CE) metrics evaluate important medical findings, but focus mainly on presence and cover only a limited set of entities. Due to heavy reliance on manual annotations, it is difficult for CE metrics to extend clinical entities or attributes. In clinical practice, radiology reports serve as a medium for information transfer. Clinicians use them to perform downstream diagnostic tasks without directly inspecting images. Based on this insight, we propose ReportQA, a clinical-related and flexible radiology report evaluation framework, supporting detailed quantitative analysis of radiology report generation systems. We first collect datasets covering multiple imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We then construct knowledge trees of clinical entities and attributes with radiologist guidance, and use large language models (LLMs) to extract structured information from raw reports. Next, we generate QA pairs from predefined templates and apply quality control through self-filtering and report-based filtering. During evaluation, the report is treated as context, and an LLM acts as a judge model to answer the QA pairs. Based on the resulting QA accuracy, we introduce QAScore metric. Compared with existing metrics, QAScore shows better alignment with radiologist judgments. Experiments on multiple state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal that current report-based inference paradigms struggle to learn fine-grained clinical representations and exhibit strong negative prior biases. In contrast, question-driven inference provides a more effective alternative. For reproducibility and extensibility, we release the knowledge trees, structured reports, and QA pairs, along with the pipeline code for QA construction and evaluation.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SEAGym: An Evaluation Environment for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.17546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving LLM-based agents improve mainly by changing their agent harness: the structured execution layer around a base model, including prompts, memory, tools, middleware, runtime state, and the model-tool interaction loop. Existing evaluations often reduce this process to isolated task scores or a single sequential curve, obscuring whether an update produces reusable improvement, overfits recent tasks, increases cost, or harms older behavior. We introduce SEAGym, an evaluation environment for measuring agent harness updates across training, validation, test, replay, and cost records. SEAGym turns Harbor-compatible benchmarks into dynamic self-evolution task sources with train batches, frozen update-validation, held-out ID and OOD transfer views, replay diagnostics, and saved snapshot and metric records. Instantiating SEAGym on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and HLE, we compare ACE, TF-GRPO, and AHE under a shared epoch/batch protocol. The results show that these evaluation views provide complementary signals about the evolution process: frequent updates may fail to improve held-out performance, useful intermediate snapshots may collapse later, and source diversity and model backend can affect harness reliability.

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

Vision-Reasoning-Guided Occlusion Removal from Light Fields

Occlusion-robust scene recovery remains a major challenge in computational imaging, particularly in natural environments where dense foreground vegetation severely limits visibility. We propose a vision-reasoning-guided light field occlusion removal framework that combines the visibility recovery capability of light field integration (LFI) with the semantic reasoning capacity of vision-language models (VLMs). Multi-view observations are first integrated via LFI to suppress foreground occlusions and produce an initial visibility-enhanced representation. A VLM is then incorporated as a conditional semantic prior to restore degraded structures and recover fine details, guided by the observed measurements. To improve recovery consistency and reduce hallucination artifacts, we introduce a multi-sample fusion strategy that aggregates multiple generated hypotheses into a unified estimate. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving the highest average SSIM across four synthetic light field benchmark scenes (4-Syn) and strong generalization across structured and unstructured acquisition settings. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining physical imaging constraints with vision-language reasoning for robust perception under severe occlusion, with applicability to search-and-rescue and exploratory robotic navigation.

07.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-01

The NIH 2025 Public Access Policy: Immediate access, unequal costs

by Caitlin R. Ryus, Caroline Raymond King, Edward R. Melnick The NIH 2025 Public Access Policy eliminates embargo periods for federally funded research, expanding who can read science. Yet without addressing article processing charges and market concentration, the policy risks creating new barriers to who can afford to perform and publish their science. In this Perspective, Caitlin Ryus and colleagues discuss the NIH 2025 Public Access Policy, highlighting that while expanding who can read science, the policy risks creating new barriers to who can afford to perform and publish their science.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Multi-component Causal Tracing in Large Language Models

Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model's (LLM's) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM's behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model's components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZiruiYan/multi-component-causal-tracing.

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

On Subquadratic Architectures: From Applications to Principles

arXiv:2606.12364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers dominate modern sequence modeling, but their quadratic attention incurs substantial computational cost. Subquadratic architectures offer a scalable alternative. However, it remains unclear which designs yield the most effective sequence models. We compare three leading approaches: xLSTM, Mamba-2, and Gated DeltaNet. We evaluate these models on tasks with complex dependencies: (1) code-model pre-training, (2) distillation of code models from large language models, and (3) pre-training of time-series foundation models. Across these settings, xLSTM delivers the strongest overall performance. To explain xLSTM's advantage, we present a unified formulation and analyze the underlying architectural mechanisms, focusing on state tracking and memory dynamics. Our results show that xLSTM enables more flexible and stable memory correction via its gating scheme. We corroborate these findings on controlled synthetic length-generalization tasks. Overall, our findings indicate that xLSTM's gains on complex tasks stem from robust state tracking and accumulation.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Epileptogenicity alters intrahippocampal ripple propagation

Objective: Tracing the propagation of high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) aids in localizing epileptogenic regions and improving surgical outcomes. We examined how hippocampal epileptogenicity influences the propagation properties of the HFOs it generates. Methods: We analyzed non-REM sleep stereo-EEG from 49 patients (68 hemispheres) with verified hippocampal contacts. Hippocampi were stratified by excitability: 28 seizure onset zone (SOZ), 22 more-irritative non-SOZ (>6 interictal epileptiform discharges [IED]/min), and 18 less-irritative non-SOZ (

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Data-driven subsampling rates for diffusion parameter estimation of SDEs

arXiv:2606.13615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of diffusion parameter estimation for stochastic differential equation (SDE) models in scenarios where data and model are compatible only on specific scales that have yet to be determined. We introduce a simple and efficient method for selecting suitable rates at which given time series data should be subsampled in order to ensure that the statistical structure of the subsampled data is consistent with the behavior of the SDE model on an infinitesimal scale. Our approach is based on analyzing the statistics of the lengths of monotonically increasing or decreasing segments in the subsampled data sequence, which we refer to as monotone runs. As an analytical foundation, we prove for a large class of SDEs with additive noise that the lengths of monotone runs at an infinitesimal scale are approximately geometrically distributed with success probability $1/2$. This universal characterization is employed to derive an automated method for selecting appropriate subsampling rates for given time series data that is directly applicable in real-world scenarios and does not rely on an asymptotic framework of multiscale diffusions. The approach is demonstrated using an application from industrial mathematics concerning surrogate models for fiber lay-down curves in production processes of nonwoven textiles.

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

When to Trust, How to Distill: Multi-Foundation Model Guidance for Lightweight, Robust Scientific Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) in physical sciences is hindered by a critical trade-off: while these models encode rich, universal temporal dynamics, they suffer from severe distributional misalignment when applied zero-shot to specific scientific domains, and their computational cost prohibits deployment in edge-computing sensor networks. We address a fundamental challenge: How can we extract latent structural knowledge from misaligned foundation models (FM) to train lightweight, specialized forecasters? We propose Gated Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Distillation (Guard), a novel framework that reframes multiteacher distillation as an instance-wise decision process with two adaptive mechanisms: (1) a Contextual Router that dynamically selects the most relevant teacher based on local input statistics, exploiting complementarity across diverse foundation models; and (2) an Uncertainty-Gated Temperature mechanism that acts as a "circuit-breaker," automatically attenuating distillation strength when teacher confidence diverges from domain reality. We evaluate our proposed lightweight framework on four climate-critical domains: meteorology, ecosystem carbon flux, soil moisture, and energy grids. Our method significantly reduces RMSE relative to a fixed-weight multi-teacher distillation baseline, successfully distilling knowledge from pretrained FMs (teachers) even when they exhibit suboptimal zero-shot accuracy due to distribution shift between the original and target data domains. We demonstrate that these domain-misaligned teachers can still serve as critical correctives, outperforming the globally superior FMs on 28.5% of the hardest instances. Ultimately, this enables high-precision scientific forecasting suitable for resource-constrained edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/RupasreeDey/GUARD-KDD2026.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Automated Mediator for Human Negotiation: Pre-Mediation via a Structured LLM Pipeline

arXiv:2606.11379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-mediation, the preparatory phase preceding direct human negotiation, plays a critical role in achieving mutually beneficial agreements, yet is often omitted due to cost, time, and limited access to trained mediators. We introduce an automated mediator for human negotiation, implemented as a structured pipeline of LLM modules, that supports pre-mediation in integrative negotiation settings. The pipeline decomposes preparation into specialized modules for dialogue, preference prediction, response-level critique, and structured summarization, separating inference, generation, and evaluation to address limitations of monolithic single-prompt approaches. We use the term "agent" for each module following common LLM-systems terminology, but the components are not autonomous and do not interact peer-to-peer; outputs are passed forward in a fixed sequence. We evaluate the system in two controlled human-subject experiments comparing AI-based pre-mediation with professional human mediators in a multi-issue negotiation scenario. On short-term self-reported measures, the automated mediator achieves preparation outcomes broadly comparable to human mediators, including trust in the mediator and confidence in reaching mutually beneficial agreements, while achieving substantially lower error on the preference-inference task under our scenario and prompts (36% lower RMSE). A second study shows that targeted prompt refinements reduce excessive affirmation patterns from 36.6% to 16.8%, matching human mediator baselines. Our findings suggest that structured LLM pipelines can provide scalable, low-effort pre-mediation support broadly comparable to human mediators on short-term self-reported preparation outcomes. The pipeline's single-party design mirrors how human mediators run pre-mediation today and enables parallel deployment across all parties to a dispute, supporting scalability.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Effects of Resveratrol as an Adjunct to a Low-Calorie Diet in Postmenopausal Women with Obesity and Knee Osteoarthritis

Background. Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for osteoarthritis and may contribute to pain, functional impairment, inflammation, and cartilage degradation. Resveratrol has potential anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective effects, but its efficacy as an adjunct to dietary intervention remains unclear. Objective. This study evaluated whether resveratrol supplementation provides additional benefits when combined with a low-calorie diet in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. Methods. A total of 97 postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis were included in this randomized controlled clinical study. Participants received either a 10-day low-calorie diet alone or the same diet combined with 150 mg/day trans-resveratrol. Anthropometric parameters, body composition, biochemical markers, pain intensity, functional status, and urinary CTX-II were assessed at baseline and follow-up. Results. Both interventions were associated with reductions in body weight, BMI, waist and hip circumferences, fat mass, glucose, HOMA-IR, lipid parameters, hsCRP, VAS, WOMAC, LAI, and urinary CTX-II. Compared with diet alone, resveratrol supplementation did not provide additional benefits for anthropometric parameters, glucose metabolism, lipid profile, or WOMAC score. However, the resveratrol group showed a greater reduction in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. The obesity class did not modify the treatment effect. Conclusion. A short-term low-calorie diet improved metabolic, inflammatory, and osteoarthritis-related parameters in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. The addition of resveratrol did not enhance weight loss or improve most metabolic outcomes but was associated with greater reductions in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. These findings suggest a potential anti-inflammatory and cartilage-related effect of resveratrol, which requires confirmation in longer randomized trials.

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

ORCA: A Platform for Open-Source Dexterity Research

arXiv:2606.14561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotics manipulation research increasingly focuses on two-finger parallel grippers for their effectiveness, affordability, and ease of teleoperation. Grippers are nonetheless limited by their form factor, often requiring bimanual setups even for simple reorientation tasks. Anthropomorphic hands are a more natural platform for dexterous robot learning – closer to the human hand, and capable of learning from human video – yet they remain hard to use in learning research: even where open and accessible hand hardware exists, the software for control, simulation, teleoperation, and retargeting is scattered in one-off code bases, and largely disconnected from the robot-learning ecosystem. In this work, we introduce the \orca~learning stack, an open-source research stack for dexterity as a first-class robot learning domain. Our \orca~stack unifies low-level control, simulation, teleoperation from a range of consumer platforms, and hand retargeting, behind a single interface, and integrates natively with popular robot-learning frameworks such as \lerobot, so dexterous hand researchers can leverage the same data, training, and evaluation pipelines used for non-dexterous robot learning. We demonstrate a complete end-to-end workflow, collecting expert demonstrations of an in-hand reorientation task by teleoperation with a consumer-grade VR headset, training an autonomous policy with \lerobot, and evaluating the learned policy in a fully reproducible and observable setup. We open-source the entire stack as a shared, reproducible foundation for dexterous-manipulation research.

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

Gen-VCoT: Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Diffusion-Based RGB Intermediate Representations

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual reasoning but rely on text-based chain-of-thought (CoT), lacking interpretable visual intermediates. Existing methods use opaque tokens or external tools, missing key properties. We propose Gen-VCoT, a framework using expert vision models to generate RGB images as reasoning intermediates. It has three stages: visual grounding (SAM segmentation), geometric reasoning (Marigold depth maps), and semantic reasoning (Qwen2-VL integration). An adaptive router selects reasoning depth. Evaluations show Gen-VCoT improves spatial (25% better) and depth (50% better) questions, but may hurt simple factual queries. Text CoT outperforms visual intermediates on CLEVR (91.2% vs 62.5%), showing task-dependent optimal representations. Gen-VCoT establishes a new paradigm for interpretable multimodal reasoning.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Steady-State Noise Signatures of Lindbladian Exceptional Points

arXiv:2606.13377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exceptional points (EPs) are non-Hermitian degeneracies at which two or more eigenvalues and their corresponding eigenvectors coalesce. In open quantum systems, exceptional points can arise in the Lindbladian governing the dissipative dynamics. Their signatures have so far been mainly identified in finite-time observables, such as transient currents, while steady-state average currents generally provide no direct evidence of the underlying exceptional-point structure. In this work, we demonstrate that signatures of Lindbladian EPs can nevertheless be accessed in the steady-state regime through current noise. We derive general expressions for current correlation functions within a Lindblad master-equation framework and show, in particular, how exceptional points affect their behaviour as a function of the time delay. We illustrate these results with the paradigmatic example of two interacting qubits coupled to two reservoirs, where the steady-state noise clearly distinguishes overdamped, underdamped, and critical regimes. Our results establish current correlation functions as a steady-state probe of Lindbladian EPs in open quantum systems.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Examining the Limits of Word2Vec with Toki Pona

Word2Vec's effectiveness at generating semantic embeddings has been widely validated, yet it has been tested almost exclusively on languages with large vocabulary inventories. This study examines whether Word2Vec can successfully capture semantic relationships within an extremely reduced vocabulary using data from Toki Pona, a constructed language with approximately 130 words. We sourced 1.4 million sentences (7.95 million tokens) from the Toki Pona community for training. Approximately 23% of sentences in the corpus contain non-Toki Pona tokens such as named entities, loanwords, and neologisms. To investigate whether this linguistic noise enhances or hinders performance – a topic rarely addressed in word embedding literature – we trained two distinct models: one retaining these incidental tokens and another filtering them out completely. Evaluation was conducted using quantitative methods measuring word proximity to semantic category centroids, automated silhouette scores via agglomerative clustering, and qualitative analysis utilizing representational similarity matrices compared against English. The results indicate that while sparse, non-core tokens do not affect the relative structure of the learned embeddings, they actually draw similar words closer together in the vector space. Importantly, Word2Vec's effectiveness depends more on distributional patterns than lexicon size even at this extreme lower bound.

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

ProductConsistency: Improving Product Identity Preservation in Instruction-Based Image Editing via SFT and RL

Recent advances in instruction-based image editing have enabled models to perform complex visual edits from natural language instructions. However, in product-centric scenarios where preserving product features, branding, and textual elements are critical, current open and closed source models often struggle to maintain this fine-grained object identity. This issue is further compounded by the lack of datasets for instruction-based product image editing with text fidelity constraints, leaving it largely treated as an implicit capability of instruction-based image editing models. In this work, we introduce the ProductConsistency dataset which is designed to improve product-centric image editing. Our approach includes a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset of 87k samples for product editing, a reinforcement learning (RL) dataset with 869 unique product images, and a new benchmark dataset, the ProductConsistency Benchmark, to allow rigorous and standardized evaluation of editing models. To guide RL training, we propose a Cyclic Consistency reward that enforces semantic preservation of product identity by using caption similarity between the original product description and captions generated from the edited image. We fine-tune both Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and Flux.1-Kontext-dev using our dataset and demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline models in OCR and Perceptual metrics, and MLLM-based evaluations as well, indicating stronger product consistency, text rendering, and overall visual quality; with the Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 model achieving a 5x reduction in the character error rate. The code and pipeline is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProductConsistency-6FCC/README.md

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

When Do We Need LLMs? A Diagnostic for Language-Driven Bandits

arXiv:2604.05859v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic decision-making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer selection; all frequent problems in finance). While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to these settings, utilizing LLMs for reasoning at every decision step is computationally expensive, and uncertainty estimates are difficult to obtain. To address this, we introduce LLMP-UCB, a bandit algorithm that derives uncertainty estimates from LLMs via repeated inference. However, our experiments demonstrate that lightweight numerical bandits operating on text embeddings (dense or Matryoshka) match or exceed the accuracy of LLM-based solutions at a fraction of their cost. We further show that embedding dimensionality is a practical lever on the exploration-exploitation balance, enabling cost-performance tradeoffs without prompt complexity. Finally, to guide practitioners, we propose a geometric diagnostic based on the arms' embeddings to decide when to use LLM-driven reasoning versus a lightweight numerical bandit. Our results provide a principled deployment framework for cost-effective, uncertainty-aware decision systems with broad applicability across AI use cases.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Structure-Based Immunoinformatics Design of a CTB-Adjuvanted Multi-Epitope Mucosal Vaccine Against Helicobacter pylori

Background: Helicobacter pylori coloniz the gastric mucosa of nearly half of the global population and is classified as a Group I carcinogen by the World Health Organization due to its strong association with gastric cancer. The growing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant H. pylori strains significantly compromises current therapeutic strategies, emphasizing the urgent need for effective prophylactic approaches. Research design and methods; In this study, a novel multi-epitope vaccine was designed targeting H. pylori, incorporating epitopes from four key virulence proteins: BabB, SabB, SabA, and VacA. Using an immunoinformatics-guided structural vaccinology approach, B- and T-cell epitopes were predicted, prioritized based on immunogenicity, conservation, population coverage, and non-homology to human proteins, and assembled into the final vaccine construct. To enhance immunogenicity and specifically stimulate mucosal immune responses, the cholera toxin B subunit (CTB) was fused at the N-terminal via an EAAAK linker, a novel application in H. pylori multi-epitope vaccines. The PADRE universal epitope and additional linkers were incorporated to optimize epitope presentation and helper T-cell activation. Results: Comprehensive evaluations of physicochemical, antigenic, allergenic, and toxic properties were conducted, followed by secondary and tertiary structure modeling, refinement, and validation. Conformational B-cell epitopes were mapped, and molecular docking, binding affinity analysis, energy minimization, and molecular dynamics simulations confirmed structural stability and receptor interactions. Codon optimization and in silico cloning predicted efficient expression in Escherichia coli, while immune simulations suggested robust humoral and cellular responses. Conclusions: This study presents a promising multi-epitope vaccine candidate against H. pylori, offering a rational framework for future experimental validation and potential clinical application.

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

Model soups need only one ingredient

arXiv:2602.09689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large pre-trained models on a target distribution often improves in-distribution (ID) accuracy, but at the cost of out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness as representations specialize to the fine-tuning data. Weight-space ensembling methods, such as Model Soups, mitigate this effect by averaging multiple checkpoints, but they are computationally prohibitive, requiring the training and storage of dozens of fine-tuned models. In this paper, we introduce MonoSoup, a simple, data-free, hyperparameter-free, post-hoc method that achieves a strong ID-OOD balance using only a single checkpoint. Our method applies Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to each layer's update and decomposes it into high-energy directions that capture task-specific adaptation and low-energy directions that introduce noise but may still encode residual signals useful for robustness. MonoSoup then uses entropy-based effective rank to automatically re-weigh these components with layer-wise coefficients that account for the spectral and geometric structure of the model. Experiments on CLIP models fine-tuned on ImageNet and evaluated under natural distribution shifts, as well as on Qwen language models tested on mathematical reasoning and multiple-choice benchmarks, show that this plug-and-play approach is a practical and effective alternative to multi-checkpoint methods, retaining much of their benefits without their computational overhead.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Advancing Clinical Implementation of Cardiovascular Polygenic Risk Scores Through Patient-Level Robustness Assessment

Background and Aims: Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) can perform equivalently at the population level yet disagree for individual patients. We examined whether such intra-individual variability reflects genuinely complementary risk information or mainly statistical and methodological uncertainty, and whether it affects clinical classification once PRSs are integrated into SCORE2-OP. Methods: In 4,137 ASCVD-free participants of the CoLaus|PsyCoLaus cohort (478 incident events over a median 14.4 years), we identified 16 ASCVD-PRSs with practically equivalent population-level performance using Bayesian equivalence testing. We quantified intra-individual variability (standard deviation, coefficient of variation, intraclass correlation, Cohen's kappa, extreme discordance), tested whether discordance exceeded chance, decomposed scores into shared and unique genetic components, and assessed variability after integration into SCORE2-OP, benchmarked against perturbation of systolic blood pressure. Results: For a typical individual, risk estimates varied by 18 percentile points across PRSs. Discordance matched chance expectations under a shared-signal model, with no distinct phenotypic profile among discordant individuals, and predictive power resided overwhelmingly in the shared genetic component. Variability tracked PRS size and weighting rather than distinct variants. After integration into SCORE2-OP, 75.6% of participants were placed in different categories by at least one model and 54.6% as both low and high risk; instability was concentrated near guideline thresholds and far exceeded that from blood-pressure measurement error. Conclusions: Equivalent population-level performance is not sufficient to treat PRSs as interchangeable at the individual level, and methodological standardisation and pragmatic clinical trials remain necessary to determine whether PRS integration improves long-term cardiovascular outcomes.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Computer Vision for Real-Time Anatomical Navigation in Neurosurgery: First-in-Human Clinical Evaluation and Iterative Development (IDEAL Stage 1)

Introduction: Precise anatomical navigation is fundamental to safe endoscopic pituitary surgery, a high-stakes procedure characterised by a challenging learning curve. While traditional navigation systems often rely on workflow-disrupting probes or static preoperative imaging, advancements in computer vision AI (CVAI) now enable dynamic, real-time anatomical segmentation directly from live surgical video1-3. Our group has previously conducted a series of preclinical human-computer interaction studies to refine the system's design, alongside digital and high-fidelity physical simulations demonstrating the benefit of AI assistance in improving overall performance, training, and safety4-8. Building on this foundation, the current study represents a first-in-human application of real-time CVAI assistance in the neurosurgical operating room, serving to assess feasibility and safety, and to iteratively improve the system. Method: Guided by DECIDE-AI and IDEAL frameworks, this single-centre evaluation comprises an initial proof-of-concept phase (n=6) for endoscopic transsphenoidal pituitary surgeries. The AI model utilised a DINOv3-derived vision transformer architecture, deployed via a high-performance edge computing unit to achieve low-latency, real-time inference without reliance on cloud infrastructure2. Given the high-risk nature of the procedure and the early stage of clinical AI integration, the system was initially deployed as an educational adjunct on a secondary monitor, ensuring the primary surgical feed remains uncompromised. Functionality and safety were assessed via structured questionnaire, prospective observation, and blinded retrospective review of the recordings of the endoscopic surgical video feed and wider operating room environment. Continuous multi-stakeholder feedback through validated human factors surveys drove iterative technical refinements between cases. Results: Six patients with pituitary adenomas were enrolled. The CVAI system was successfully deployed in four cases, demonstrating acceptable real-time sella segmentation accuracy. Deployment failed pre-operatively in two cases owing to a single recurring system reboot bug. Iterative refinement between cases were driven by our experience and surgical team feedback. This resulted in the integration of additional anatomical structure segmentations (e.g., carotid arteries), enhanced model accuracy via training dataset expansion, and hardware firmware upgrades. Multi-stakeholder surveys demonstrated satisfactory system feasibility, usability, and acceptability among the surgical team. Both prospective observation and retrospective video review confirmed the absence of adverse events, including no significant distraction to the primary surgeon, and there were no AI-related clinical complications. Conclusion: This first-in-human early clinical evaluation demonstrates the feasibility, safety and iterative development of real-time, CVAI-based anatomical navigation during high-stakes neurosurgery. Future work will include a larger single-centre case series (IDEAL Stage 2a) with more surgical teams to further iterate the system and explore its impact on training and workflow. As the underpinning technology improves, deployment will transition to direct intra-operative decision support and integration with other intra-operative navigational technologies.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Machine-learned, finite temperature Fermi-operator expansions suitable for GPUs and AI-hardware

arXiv:2605.08523v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present several finite-temperature recursive Fermi-operator expansion schemes based on the second-order spectral projection (SP2) method. Our approach builds on a previous observation that the electronic structure problem, as formulated through a recursive SP2 expansion, can be mapped onto the architecture of a deep neural network. Using this perspective, we generalize SP2 to finite electronic temperatures by constructing machine learning models that determine optimized recursive expansion coefficients. The same approach is also applied to the prediction of the electronic entropy for fractional occupation numbers. The coefficients are trained for a specified chemical potential and electronic temperature and are not available in closed analytical form. However, by employing an appropriate affine rescaling strategy to the Hamiltonian matrix, we eliminate the need to retrain the model for different temperatures and chemical potentials. Our approach avoids explicit diagonalization and relies solely on highly optimized matrix-matrix multiplication kernels. Compared to state-of-the-art diagonalization, we achieve an order-of-magnitude speedup in the single-particle finite-temperature density matrix calculation for small and moderately sized matrices on modern GPUs and dense matrix multiply units.