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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpretable Sperm Morphology Classification via Attention-Guided Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.20438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Male infertility is a major cause of couple infertility, often linked to abnormal sperm morphology. While deep learning models offer automated analysis, most lack interpretability, limiting their clinical adoption. This study proposes an attention-guided deep learning framework for sperm morphology classification. We combine a pretrained EfficientNet-B0 with a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to focus on key areas of the sperm head, improving both accuracy and interpretability. Evaluated on the SMIDS and HuSHem public datasets, our model achieves accuracies of 90.2% and 93.9% (macro F1 scores of 0.913 and 0.948), outperforming SimpleCNN and standard EfficientNet-B0. Furthermore, we use Grad-CAM++ visualizations to highlight features influencing the model's decisions. The results demonstrate that this accurate and transparent framework is a practical tool for automated sperm analysis in fertility clinics.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

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

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.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards an Inferentialist Account of Information Through Proof-theoretic Semantics

arXiv:2605.05368v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Information is one of the most widely-discussed concepts of the current era. However, a great deal of insightful work notwithstanding, it is yet to be given wholly convincing logical or mathematical foundations. Without them, we lack adequate reasoning tools for understanding the complex ecosystems of systems upon which the society depends. We seek to rectify this by taking a first step towards developing an inferentialist semantic theory of information. There are three key interacting components. First, conceptual analysis: the metaphysics of information. Dretske expressed the key concepts of information in terms of intentionality, truth, and transmissibility. We replace truth with inferability, and trace the consequences of this replacement. Second, logic: proof-theoretic semantics (P-tS) provides a mathematical-logical realization of inferentialist reasoning. Using P-tS, we develop the first steps towards a mathematical-logical theory of an inferentialist primitive unit of information, the 'inferon'. This proof-theoretic approach counterpoints the model-theoretic view of information articulated in situation theory. Furthermore, we argue that it facilitates addressing all three components of van Benthem and Martinez's categorization of the understandings of information, as range, as correlation, and as code. Our focus is on information-as-correlation. Third, systems: the P-tS tools we develop provide the basis for a mathematical account of distributed systems modelling – a key tool from informatics for understanding the organization of information processing systems. This yields a reasoning-based theory of information flow in models of distributed systems. Overall, we seek to give a conceptually rigorous mathematical-logical account of information and its role within informatics, grounded in inference and reasoning.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Conditions for Unitarity in Timeless Quantum Theory

arXiv:2504.01579v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum timeless approaches solve the problem of time by recovering the usual unitary evolution of quantum theory relative to a clock in a stationary quantum Universe. For some Hamiltonians of the Universe, such as those including an interaction term with the clock, the dynamics is substantially altered and can be non-unitary. This work derives necessary and sufficient conditions for the relative dynamics to be unitary and finds the general form of the unitary evolution operator. A physical interpretation of these conditions is given in terms of the clock's rate. Unitary dynamics is associated with rates that are constant in time and independent of the clock's internal structure.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Cancer care disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada: A sequential mixed-methods study

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted healthcare delivery worldwide, with cancer care among the most affected services. Prior studies documented delays in referrals, reduced specialist access, and increased provider burden. However, the extent to which these experiences were reflected at the system level remains unclear. Objective To document cancer care experiences and examine whether these experiences were reflected in population-level health system indicators across Ontario, Canada. Methods We used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 32 participants, including patients with cancer (n=8), caregivers (n=5), healthcare providers (n=14), and decision-makers (n=5) across two hospital settings in Ontario, Canada. Emergent themes informed the development of quantitative indicators. We then conducted a retrospective population-based analysis of linked administrative health databases for cancer patients in Ontario (n=87,786) to assess the prevalence of identified themes. Results Four themes emerged: (I) delays in diagnosis and screening; (II) disrupted access to primary care; (III) barriers to specialist and mental health services; and (IV) fragmented care for patients with multimorbidity. Quantitative findings corroborated major themes. Screening rates declined for cervical (64.8% to 57.5%) and breast cancer (64.5% to 57.2%). While in-person primary care shifted almost entirely to virtual modalities (8.5% to 95.4%), overall visit volumes remained stable. Specialist care showed uneven patterns, with increased oncology visits but declines in cardiology and mental health services. Patients with multiple comorbidities experienced the largest reductions in non-oncology specialist care. Conclusion The pandemic disrupted key components of cancer care, particularly screening, access to certain specialist services, and care for patients with complex needs. Integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence highlights areas of system vulnerability and underscores the need for coordinated, resilient cancer care capable of maintaining essential services during future crises.

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

Segmentation-based Detection for Efficient Multi-Task Spacecraft Perception

Vision-based perception is fundamental to Space Situational Awareness and autonomous on-orbit operations such as rendezvous, docking, servicing, and navigation. However, progress in this area is limited by the scarcity of annotated space imagery and by challenging visual-domain characteristics including severe illumination changes, low signal-to-noise ratio, and high contrast. We address Stream 1 of the SPARK 2026 Challenge, which requires a single model for spacecraft classification, detection, and fine-grained component segmentation across multiple target types. We propose a compact architecture that integrates a MobileNetV3 encoder with a U-Net-style decoder, combining computational efficiency with accurate dense prediction. Detection is derived analytically from the union of predicted component masks, avoiding a separate bounding-box regression head in the single-spacecraft setting. Our method achieved an overall leaderboard score of 0.9482, with task-specific scores of 1.0000 in classification, 0.9788 in detection, and 0.8917 in segmentation. The proposed approach ranked second overall in the SPARK 2026 Challenge, demonstrating that lightweight encoder-decoder architectures can deliver strong multi-task performance for practical onboard space vision systems.

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

PromptMN: Pseudo Prompting Language

Prompting has become the primary interface between humans and generative AI, yet many natural language prompts remain fragile: roles, goals, constraints, and expected outputs are often buried in prose or left implicit. In agentic and software development workflows, a misread at the first handoff can propagate through every step, since a significant portion of agent failures stem from context ambiguities rather than model limitations. This paper introduces PromptMN, a pseudo-prompting domain-specific language that annotates natural language with compact, %-prefixed typed directives covering roles, goals, requirements, priorities, constraints, plans, inputs, and outputs. Semantic resolution lets authors write in any order while the model interprets directives by function. PromptMN sits between informal prompting and programming-style pseudocode: structured enough to be inspectable and reusable, yet lightweight enough for analysts, managers, developers, and stakeholders across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). PromptMN also pairs with reverse prompt engineering. Asking a model to restate a desired outcome as PromptMN lets users inspect the inferred roles, goals, constraints, and missing assumptions before acting, reducing repair cycles and yielding a reusable artifact for aligning people and AI tools. PromptMN's feasibility is evaluated across several frontier models, including Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.5. The models correctly resolved PromptMN instructions, including complex structures such as repetition, conditionals, methods, and a prime-checking task, without fine-tuning. The same vocabulary applies across new codebases, maintenance, and redesign in the SDLC scenarios presented. While large-scale validation remains future work, these early results suggest PromptMN is a practical step toward clearer, more reviewable human-to-AI interaction.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

Beyond phylogeny: Genome-wide DNA sequence patterns suggest DNA physical properties associated with thermal adaptation in extremophile microbes

Temperature is a fundamental constraint on biological systems, yet how it is reflected in genome sequence organization remains unclear. Here, we show that genome-wide distributions of short DNA sequences contain a robust signal of thermal adaptation that is largely independent of phylogeny. Using Structural Topic Modelling (STM), a machine-learning approach for identifying groups of co-occurring sequence motifs, we analyze canonical 6-mer and 9-mer frequency profiles of bacterial and archaeal genome proxies (randomly sampled genomic regions) and identify motif families systematically associated with thermophiles and psychrophiles. In bacterial thermophiles, the identified motif families are dominated by highly specific, overrepresented and co-occurring C- and G-stacked hexamers, and a distinct family of CG-periodic hexamers recurring across multiple temperature comparisons. In contrast, bacterial psychrophile-associated motifs are dominated by low-complexity A-, T-, and AT-run hexamers. Thermophilic archaea generally exhibit a distinct CTAG-centred hexamer family, suggesting that different domains may adapt to similar environmental constraints through different sequence-level solutions. However, this domain-level contrast is not absolute: in a targeted analysis of two thermophilic bacterium–archaeon pairs, we find unusually similar frequencies of all the STM-identified thermophile-associated hexamer families, suggesting that shared high-temperature environments can, in specific cases, partially override phylogenetic divergence. Notably, the identified motif families constitute only a small and highly selective subset of the vast space of possible G+C-rich or A+T-rich sequences. This indicates that thermal adaptation is associated with specific sequence architectures rather than broad shifts in nucleotide composition. Accordingly, the observed signal cannot be explained by overall base composition alone, but instead arises from structured combinations and positional arrangements of nucleotides within short sequence contexts. Related motif families are recovered at both k=6 and k=9, indicating that the signal reflects systematic shifts in genome-wide sequence organization rather than isolated sequence motifs. These patterns are consistent with known sequence-dependent DNA physical properties documented in biochemical and biophysical studies, including differences in base-stacking interactions and conformational flexibility. Together, our results suggest that genome-wide sequence organization reflects sequence-dependent DNA physical properties associated with thermal adaptation, revealing a previously underappreciated physical layer of genomic information beyond phylogenetic history.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VideoMDM: Towards 3D Human Motion Generation From 2D Supervision

We introduce VideoMDM, a diffusion-based framework that trains 3D human motion priors directly from accurate 2D poses extracted from monocular videos, without any 3D ground truth. A pretrained 2D-to-3D lifter provides approximate 3D pose sequences that serve as a noisy teacher: these are diffused, denoised by the model in 3D, and supervised in 2D by reprojecting the prediction and comparing against accurate keypoints. We show that, under mild assumptions, a depth-weighted 2D reprojection loss is equivalent in expectation to direct 3D supervision, and we adapt standard 3D motion regularizers - velocity consistency and over-parameterized representation alignment - to this 2D setting. Unlike methods that lift 2D to 3D only at inference, VideoMDM learns a coherent 3D motion manifold during training. On HumanML3D it nearly closes the gap to fully 3D-supervised MDM (FID 0.88 vs 0.54); On real video datasets Fit3D and NBA the method learns to generate motions consistently preferred by humans, with strong quantitative results.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Unsupervised Learning for Missing Modalities in Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606.15743v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper addresses the missing-modality challenge in multi-modal learning by introducing Unsupervised Learning for Missing Modalities in Multi-Modal Learning (UL4M4), a flexible framework that imputes missing feature embeddings in a task-independent manner before supervised prediction. We propose modality-specific normalization and a novel partial-modality distance metric to enable fair clustering of incomplete observations, capturing cross-modal structures while preserving scale-invariance across varying dimensionalities and modality counts. Cluster centers from this unsupervised stage guide an iterative greedy imputation process for any missing modalities during training or inference, supporting arbitrary numbers of modalities and arbitrary missing patterns per sample. The imputation module is lightweight, uses frozen encoders, and decouples from the downstream task, allowing easy integration with any fusion/prediction architecture. Extensive experiments under diverse and highly incomplete regimes demonstrate UL4M4's robustness, achieving, to the best of our knowledge, the first consistent F1-Micro scores above 0.7 on challenging missing configurations even when more than 50\% of modality slots are missing. Results are also stable across cluster sizes and significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines. Code is available here: https://github.com/h-ismkhan/Multimodal-Learning-with-Missing-Modalities-via-Unsupervised-Learning.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

GLLaucoMed: A Secure LLM-Powered Agentic Workflow for Automated Medication Extraction from Free-Text Glaucoma Clinical Notes

Purpose: To evaluate the efficacy of large language models (LLMs) in extracting medication-related information from glaucoma clinical notes in the electronic health record (EHR). Design: Cross-sectional. Subjects: 1,250 subjects in the Bascom Palmer Ophthalmic Repository. Methods: Extracted clinical notes from glaucoma-related encounters between 2014 and 2024 were labeled by two glaucoma specialists with a third serving as an adjudicator. Graders were asked to label current topical medications (CTM), proposed changes to topical medications ({Delta}TM), current oral medications (COM), and proposed changes to oral medications ({Delta}OM) in a structured fashion. The dataset was split into development (10%), validation (10%), and test (80%) sets stratified by clinician. Development and validation sets were used to engineer and refine prompts, and the held-out test set was used for model assessment. Five LLMs (Claude Opus 4.6, DeepSeek-V3.2, GPT 5.2, Grok 4.1, and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B) were accessed via Microsoft Azure AI Foundry within a HIPAA-compliant environment. Inter-grader agreement was assessed with Gwet AC1. LLM performance was initially assessed in a binary fashion with F1 scores, and the degree of text match among positive cases was evaluated using exact match accuracy and Jaccard Index (JI). Main Outcome Measures: F1 score, exact match accuracy, JI. Results: Gwet AC1 for intergrader agreement was 0.799, 0.888, 0.985, and 0.988 for CTM, {Delta}TM, COM, and {Delta}OM, respectively. F1 scores for CTM were 0.985, 0.971, 0.978, 0.968, and 0.970 for Claude, Deepseek, GPT, Grok, and Qwen, respectively; for {Delta}TM: 0.905, 0.826, 0.897, 0.842, 0.855, respectively; for COM: 0.923, 0.887, 0.899, 0.906, 0.894, respectively; for {Delta}OM: 0.958, 0.815, 0.937, 0.835, 0.940, respectively. Among positive cases, range of exact match accuracies for CTM (N=1354) was 0.730- 0.882 and range of JIs was 0.809-0.918. For {Delta}TM (N=404), exact match accuracy range was 0.619-0.780 and JI range was 0.668-0.827. For COM (N=47), exact match accuracy range was 0.766-0.872 and JI range was 0.765-0.870. For {Delta}OM (N=25), exact match accuracy range was 0.583-0.920 and JI range was 0.583-0.922. Conclusions: The GLLaucoMed pipeline demonstrated high performance in extracting and standardizing medication data from unstructured clinical notes, including both current medications and proposed changes. Claude and GPT exhibited the strongest performance.

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

SoftSkill: Behavioral Compression for Contextual Adaptation

arXiv:2606.20333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly deployed as natural-language Markdown files that encode answer policies, evidence-use habits, and task procedures. These files are readable and portable, but they are consumed indirectly: for each task instance, a frozen language model must translate a long textual artifact into generation-time behavior. This paper asks whether a natural-language skill can instead initialize a compact continuous context object, refined by a trainable soft delta while the base model remains frozen. We propose SoftSkill, a frozen-backbone method that tunes such soft skills with next-token prediction and deploys them as latent behavioral priors at inference time. In our main single-round setting, a length-32 SoftSkill prefix on Qwen3.5-4B improves over no-skill prompting by 8.3 points on SearchQA, 42.1 points on LiveMath, and 1.3 points on DocVQA. Relative to SkillOpt, SoftSkill improves accuracy by 5.2 points on SearchQA and 12.5 points on LiveMath, while replacing hundreds to thousands of Markdown skill tokens with a few virtual tokens. We further study agentic execution as a harder boundary case, where sparse trajectory imitation provides useful signal but does not yet robustly compress long-horizon procedural behavior. More broadly, the results suggest that some task skills are better treated not as additional Markdown to be reinterpreted at inference time, but as compact latent controls over how a frozen model enters the task.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Focus When Necessary: Adaptive Routing and Collaborative Grounding for Training-Free Visual Grounding

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in cross-modal reasoning, they often struggle to perceive fine-grained details in complex high-resolution images. Recent training-free methods address this through image scaling and localized cropping. However, applying these manipulations indiscriminately introduces computational redundancy for simple queries and can degrade accuracy by truncating essential global context or introducing irrelevant background noise. To this end, we propose LazyMCoT, a dynamic and training-free framework that adaptively allocates visual grounding efforts based on sample difficulty. The framework features an Adaptive Routing mechanism that evaluates predictive uncertainty using first-token statistics from a single forward pass. This efficiently bypasses confident cases while ensuring the recall of difficult samples via conformal calibration. For these challenging cases, a Collaborative Grounding module integrates the inherent cross-modal attention of the model with an external visual expert through a two-stage refinement process. This refinement process generates a precise localized display to recover small or occluded targets. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that LazyMCoT rivals training-based approaches by simultaneously improving reasoning accuracy and reducing average inference latency. Our code is availble at https://github.com/TencentBAC/LazyMCoT.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Mixing times of one-sided $k$-transposition shuffles

arXiv:2112.05085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study mixing times of the one-sided $k$-transposition shuffle. We prove that this shuffle mixes relatively slowly, even for $k$ big. Using the recent ``lifting eigenvectors'' technique of Dieker and Saliola and applying the $\ell^2$ bound, we prove different mixing behaviors and explore the occurrence of cutoff depending on $k$.

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

Order Is Not Control

AI alignment, interpretability, steering, and neural perturbation studies identify order-inducing objects. We argue that order is not control. Control requires a receiver-gated response law: a denominator-indexed operator mapping material state, action/drive, bath, and receiver state to response displacement, sinks, effort, and basin projection. We identify it across biological, LLM, adapter, and stochastic-operator panels. The laws are local: an intervention can be admitted, saturated, sign-changing, leaky, or overdriven depending on medium, bath, receiver state, action port, and comparator. Control is assigned when finite effort moves a target or outcome-readout class under the same denominator while damage, null/evasive, invalid format, overdrive, and unnecessary effort stay bounded. Mouse ALM, C. elegans, and zebrafish panels provide physical response-operator evidence while excluding coordinate identity and controller conclusions. LLM panels show generated-output response laws: across four material conditions, response vectors are predictable at 72.8-73.7% component-sign accuracy, rising to 84.3-84.8% on nonzero components; held-out observers predict system-effect and target/oracle families at 93.6% and 91.7% accuracy. Constitution-conditioned adapters reshape susceptibility as prepared media, and stochastic-operator panels separate measured opportunity from deployable action policies. This gives a driven-dissipative response-system account at the mesoscopic control level: drives act through prepared media, baths, and receivers, producing admitted movement, impedance, sinks, or overdrive. The evidence supports local admitted control and measurable stochastic response operators, while leaving deployable pre-generation control, hidden/logit causal sufficiency, biological-to-LLM coordinate identity, and literal thermodynamic quantities outside scope.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Diabetes is associated with increased nocturnal respiratory rate

Background and Objective: Diabetes mellitus (DM) causes autonomic neuropathy, which may alter nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR). To test the association between DM and NRR, we analyzed elective polysomnograms of four large observational cohorts. Research Design and Methods: We performed cross-sectional analysis of over 25,000 individuals with polysomnograms (PSGs) from the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS), Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL), Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), and Wisconsin Sleep Cohort (WSC). Patient-level NRRs were derived from inductance plethysmography waveforms. DM status was determined by self-report, physician diagnosis, medication use, or laboratory values, depending on the cohort. We related DM and NRR (continuous and dichotomized) using logistic regression models and adjusted for potential confounders. Cohort-specific results were combined using random-effects meta-analysis. Results: Meta-analysis of unadjusted models showed a pooled odds ratio (OR) of 1.10 (95% CI:1.04-1.17) for each breath-per-minute (brpm) increase in NRR. This association remained significant after multivariable adjustment (OR:1.06, 95% CI:1.02-1.11). Dichotomized analyses similarly showed higher odds of DM across dichotomization thresholds ranging from 15 to 21 brpm. At a threshold of 18 brpm, the unadjusted pooled OR was 1.77 (95% CI:1.23-2.55, P=0.0022), and the adjusted OR was 1.49 (95% CI:1.10-2.02, P=0.0098). Conclusions: Clinically stable outpatients with elevated NRR have an increased prevalence of DM. Additional studies are needed to investigate whether the mechanism is autonomic neuropathy and whether monitoring NRR can detect early complications of DM.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

AI-Automation Tooling in Computer Engineering Education: Mixed-Methods TAM/UTAUT Evidence for a General Acceptance Attitude

作者:

arXiv:2606.12424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative AI and low-code workflow platforms become routine in software practice, a key educational question is whether the next generation of computer engineers will accept these tools as useful, usable, and worthy of sustained engagement. This paper reports a mixed-methods, cross-sectional study of undergraduate computer engineering students' acceptance of AI automation tooling, instantiated through the open-source platform n8n across three identically scripted workshops in Thailand (n = 103). A 12-item, five-point Likert instrument mapped to six TAM/UTAUT constructs - Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Behavioral Intention (BI), Self-Efficacy (SE), Hedonic Motivation (HM), and Output Quality (OQ) - was complemented by inductive thematic analysis of open-ended feedback. Analyses combined ordinal reliability estimation, bootstrap confidence intervals, non-parametric tests, multiple-comparison-controlled correlations, polychoric dimensionality diagnostics, a common-method-bias check, and between-session comparisons. Acceptance was favorable across all six constructs with large effect sizes, with PE emerging as the strongest construct and HM as the weakest. Dimensionality diagnostics further revealed that canonical TAM/UTAUT sub-facets collapsed into a single general acceptance factor in this short-form post-workshop context, a finding with important methodological and theoretical implications. Qualitative themes converged with the quantitative profile regarding usefulness and enthusiasm but diverged on output quality, revealing a small yet articulate reliability-skeptical minority. The findings support the curricular adoption of AI automation tooling in undergraduate computing education and identify three theory-grounded instructional levers: instruction-sequencing scaffolds, self-efficacy supports, and trust-calibration interventions.

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

X+Slides: Benchmarking Audience-Conditioned Slide Generation

arXiv:2606.19256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatically generating slide decks from source documents is an important application of large language models (LLMs). Existing benchmarks primarily assess slide completeness and technical depth, while overlooking the target audience as a critical real-world factor. For instance, specialists demand rigorous proofs, whereas decision-makers prioritize actionable conclusions. To bridge this gap, we introduce X+Slides, a benchmark specifically designed for audience-conditioned slide generation. Built on a diverse corpus spanning 113 topics and seven presentation scenes, X+Slides employs a dynamic evaluation framework constructed from 8,133 deduplicated, source-grounded probes. By assigning audience-specific utility weights to the same source-grounded probes, X+Slides reports four complementary metrics: Audience Coverage measures how much audience-essential information is conveyed, Domain-wise Coverage shows which information types are covered, Efficiency measures delivered utility per unit of attention cost, and Correctness verifies whether slide claims are supported by the source. Experiments on DeepPresenter, SlideTailor, and NotebookLM show that current systems can recover a substantial but still incomplete part of audience-essential information: at $\tau_A=0.7$, DeepPresenter reaches a best Audience Coverage of 0.714, SlideTailor reaches 0.594, and the NotebookLM ablation reaches 0.853 while showing clear grounding differences. These results indicate that visual quality and broad topic coverage should not be treated as evidence support without source-grounded evaluation.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

DiffusionBlocks: Block-wise Neural Network Training via Diffusion Interpretation

arXiv:2506.14202v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end backpropagation requires storing activations throughout all layers, creating memory bottlenecks that limit model scalability. Existing block-wise training methods offer means to alleviate this problem, but they rely on ad-hoc local objectives and remain largely unexplored beyond classification tasks. We propose $DiffusionBlocks$, a principled framework for transforming transformer-based networks into genuinely independent trainable blocks that maintain competitive performance with end-to-end training. Our key insight leverages the fact that residual connections naturally correspond to updates in a dynamical system. With minimal modifications to this system, we can convert the updates to those of a denoising process, where each block can be learned independently by leveraging the score matching objective. This independence enables training with gradients for only one block at a time, thereby reducing memory requirements in proportion to the number of blocks. Our experiments on a range of transformer architectures (vision, diffusion, autoregressive, recurrent-depth, and masked diffusion) demonstrate that DiffusionBlocks training matches the performance of end-to-end training while enabling scalable block-wise training on practical tasks beyond small-scale classification. DiffusionBlocks provides a theoretically grounded approach that successfully scales to modern generative tasks across diverse architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/SakanaAI/DiffusionBlocks .

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

A continental-scale scenario modelling framework for evaluating infant RSV immunisation strategies across Europe

Background. The recent approval of long-acting monoclonal antibodies (la-mAbs) and a maternal vaccine (MV) in the EU enables universal RSV prevention in infants. Modelling studies are widely used to quantify the population-level impact of alternative immunisation strategies. However, existing assessments of new RSV immunisation products focus on national or sub-national settings. Methods. We developed an age-stratified, stochastic compartmental model of RSV transmission for 28 EU/EEA countries. It combines literature-based parameters on RSV natural history and product efficacy with country-specific demographic and contact patterns. After model calibration against age- and country-specific RSV hospitalisation rates, we designed scenarios for both la-mAbs and MV at four coverage levels, with and without catch-up immunisation for infants under six months at season onset. We then evaluated each scenario against a no-immunisation baseline. Results. At 95% coverage, the cross-country median reduction in RSV hospitalisations over one season in infants under 12 months is 29.9% for la-mAbs (country median range: 27.7-33.9%) and 22.4% for MV (20.0-25.6%), scaling linearly with coverage. Out of all averted hospitalisations, 78.3% (90% CI: [67.3, 92.7]%) are concentrated in infants aged 0-2 months for la-mAbs and 72.7% (90% CI: [61.4, 88.6]%) for MV. A catch-up campaign nearly doubles the overall reduction in RSV hospitalisations. Conclusions. Despite country-specific heterogeneities, impact of la-mAbs and MV is comparable across settings and herd-immunity effects are largely negligible. This supports harmonised European guidelines on coverage targets. Seasonal catch-up campaigns emerge as an effective lever to maximise the impact of immunisation programmes.

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

TWLA: Achieving Ternary Weights and Low-Bit Activations for LLMs via Post-Training Quantization

arXiv:2606.13054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment. Ternarization has emerged as a promising compression technique, offering significant reductions in model size and inference complexity. However, existing methods struggle with heavy-tailed activation distributions and therefore keep activations in high precision, fundamentally limiting end-to-end inference acceleration. To overcome this limitation, we propose TWLA, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that achieves 1.58-bit weight compression and 4-bit activation quantization while maintaining high accuracy. TWLA comprises three components: (1) Euclidean-to-Manifold Asymmetric Ternary Quantizer (E2M-ATQ) minimizes layer-output error under weight ternarization via a two-stage optimization from Euclidean initialization to manifold relocation; (2) Kronecker Orthogonal Tri-Modal Shaping (KOTMS) applies a Kronecker-structured orthogonal rotation to reshape weights into ternary-friendly tri-modal distributions, while the shared rotation statistically suppresses activation outliers; and (3) Inter-Layer Aware Activation Mixed Precision (ILA-AMP) explicitly introduces adjacent-layer second-order interaction costs in bit allocation and jointly optimizes for the layer-wise disparity of activation quantization gains induced by the shared orthogonal transform, preventing cascades triggered by a few weak layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TWLA maintains high accuracy under W1.58A4, while delivering significant inference acceleration. The code is available at .

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Better Adherence, Richer Context: A Field Evaluation of LLM-Powered Conversational Voice Diaries for Sleep

arXiv:2606.18596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sleep diaries are central to behavioral sleep medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, yet daily completion is difficult to sustain, and static forms often provide limited context for interpreting night-to-night sleep variation. We designed an LLM-powered conversational voice diary that delivers clinically grounded morning and evening sleep diary questions through proactive smart-speaker prompts, structured conversational intake, and adaptive follow-up dialogue. We evaluated the system in a four-week between-subjects field study with 30 university students, comparing it with a text-based mobile diary using matched diary items, reporting windows, and reminder intervals. Compared with the text-based diary, the conversational voice diary showed higher adherence and elicited more detailed contextual self-report about routines, stressors, environmental conditions, and other sleep-related factors. Participants also described the voice diary as easier to integrate into daily routines, despite longer perceived completion time. However, voice-based conversational intake produced lower completeness for some structured diary fields, revealing a trade-off between expressive richness and structured precision. These findings show both the promise and the challenge of using LLM-powered conversational voice assistants for longitudinal health self-report.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Do Vision-Language Models Understand 3D Scenes or Just Catalogue Objects?

arXiv:2605.20448v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models reliably name objects in a scene, but do they represent the 3D layout those objects inhabit? We introduce a 3,034-sample human-curated benchmark targeting three components of spatial understanding: depth-ordered occlusion (probed via three independent counterfactual operationalisations), optical-geometry inference over visible reflections, and volumetric rearrangement planning. Six frontier and open-weight VLMs, scored by trained annotators on 18,204 responses with no LLM-as-judge, reveal a sharp dissociation: models that plan rearrangements over visible layouts at 53–97% accuracy and rarely violate collision constraints fall to 6–45% on occlusion and below 7% on reflections. An embodied-reasoning model reproduces the same profile. White-box analysis on Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking localises the failure to the visual-token merger: spatial information recoverable throughout the vision encoder becomes inaccessible after token compression and only stabilises again when clean post-merger activations are patched into the language decoder.

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

Test-Time Compute Scaling for ASR with Depth-Conditioned Looped Transformers

arXiv:2606.04678v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: End-to-end ASR systems typically use fixed-depth acoustic encoders at inference, making it difficult to trade additional test-time computation for improved recognition without training a larger model. A natural approach is to reuse a shared Transformer block recurrently, but we find that naive looping does not fully exploit additional recurrent compute. We introduce LARM, a depth-conditioned looped Transformer that turns recurrent encoder depth into a controllable test-time compute axis. LARM combines sparse CTC checkpoints, supervision-clock embeddings, FiLM depth conditioning, and delayed soft-posterior feedback. These components structure the loop into recognition checkpoints separated by latent refinement phases and allow shared weights to specialize across recurrent steps. On LibriSpeech, LARM improves WER as the number of inference loops increases and achieves performance competitive with deeper unshared-parameter baselines. Our results show that test-time compute scaling can extend beyond autoregressive language-model reasoning to continuous non-autoregressive speech recognition.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Prevalence and Correlates of Ideal Cardiovascular Health among Ugandan Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors often emerge during adolescence and track into adulthood, yet data on cardiovascular health (CVH) in sub-Saharan Africa remain limited. We assessed the prevalence and correlates of ideal CVH among Ugandan adolescents. Methods: We analysed baseline data of adolescents enrolled in a cluster-randomised controlled trial being conducted in urban (Kampala) and rural (Jinja) districts of Uganda. In this study, Ideal CVH was defined as meeting "ideal" status of 5-7 of the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 metrics. Random-effects logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with ideal CVH, accounting for village-level clustering. Results: We recruited 1316 participants with a mean age of 13.2 years, of whom 58.1% were female. Overall, the prevalence of ideal CVH was 66.8% (95% CI: 64.2% - 69.3%). The prevalence was higher in Jinja (74.4%, 95%CI: 70.9% - 77.7%) than Kampala (59.6%, 95%CI: 55.8%-63.2%) and the difference was evident (p