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

HGCN(O): A Self-Tuning GCN HyperModel Toolkit for Outcome Prediction in Event-Sequence Data

arXiv:2507.22524v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose HGCN(O), a self-tuning toolkit using Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) models for event sequence prediction. Featuring four GCN architectures (O-GCN, T-GCN, TP-GCN, TE-GCN) across the GCNConv and GraphConv layers, our toolkit integrates multiple graph representations of event sequences with different choices of node- and graph-level attributes and in temporal dependencies via edge weights, optimising prediction accuracy and stability for balanced and unbalanced datasets. Extensive experiments show that GCNConv models excel on unbalanced data, while all models perform consistently on balanced data. Experiments also confirm the superior performance of HGCN(O) over traditional approaches. Applications include Predictive Business Process Monitoring (PBPM), which predicts future events or states of a business process based on event logs.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Grey- and white-matter resilience to tau, cognition and sex in Alzheimer's disease

INTRODUCTION: Brain resilience to tau has been mainly studied in relation to grey matter, while its role in white matter remains unclear in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Sex may moderate associations between brain resilience and cognition. METHODS: We analyzed medial temporal lobe tau PET SUVR, entorhinal cortical thickness, cingulum-hippocampal mean diffusivity, and cognition in 205 amyloid-positive individuals from ADNI. Associations between grey- and white-matter resilience to tau and cognitive performance or decline were examined using linear and mixed-effects models, including sex interactions and stratified analyses. RESULTS: Higher grey-matter resilience to tau related to better cross-sectional memory and language performance (p

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Boosting Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization

作者:

arXiv:2606.12505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline preference optimization has become a practical substitute for reinforcement learning from human feedback, but pairwise objectives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants use only the chosen and rejected responses stored in a static dataset. This leaves a useful signal unused: the response that the reference model itself would generate for the same prompt. We propose Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization (DPOP), a simple extension of DPO that augments the base preference loss with a gated penalty on reference-greedy responses. DPOP activates this penalty only when the current policy still assigns a lower likelihood to the preferred response than to the rejected response. On AlpacaEval 2.0, DPOP improves length-controlled win rate over DPO, SimPO, and AlphaDPO on both Llama-3-8b-it and Gemma-2-9b-it, achieving relative gains of 5.3\% and 4.4\% over baselines on the two models, respectively. Ablations further show that a SimNPO-style length-normalized penalty is stronger than NPO and token-level unlikelihood in this setting.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Do We Really Need Diffusion? A Fast U-Net for Paired Medical Image Translation

Magnetic resonance imaging-signal fat fraction (MRI-SFF) quantifies tissue fat and serves as an established biomarker for metabolic and musculoskeletal disorders. The acquisition requires, however, specialized MRI sequences, which are not available routinely. We investigate whether SFF can be estimated from widely available T2-weighted (T2w) MRI via image-to-image translation (I2I). We further compare a lightweight 4-level U-Net to a state-of-the-art Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) using a dataset of 230 048 paired 2D images (183 517 train, 23 621 val, 22 910 test) from the German National Cohort (NAKO). Both models clearly outperform the identity baseline (Pearson correlation r = 0.769, mean absolute error MAE = 0.070 +/- 0.054), which confirms that the models learn a non-trivial cross-modal mapping. Interestingly, the lightweight U-Net outperforms the DDPM in both correlation (r = 0.975 vs. 0.962) and error (MAE = 0.014 +/- 0.015 vs. 0.019 +/- 0.019), while reducing inference time by a factor of 208 (25.2 ms vs. 5 227.2 ms per image using 50 Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) steps). The strong clinical performance at substantially reduced computational cost enables real-time clinical use.

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

Towards Understanding and Measuring COGNITIVE ATROPHY in LLM Behaviour

arXiv:2606.18129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent incidents involving LLMs used for mental-health support reveal a critical evaluation gap: surface-level safety scores do not capture how models behave across realistic, emotionally sensitive interactions over time. Existing benchmarks measure knowledge, safety, or static response quality, but miss whether LLM interactions help users keep reflecting, coping, and making decisions themselves. We formalize this missing dimension as COGNITIVE ATROPHY, a process-level behavioural measure in AI-mediated mental-health support distinct from safety and helpfulness. To measure it, we introduce COGNITIVE ATROPHY BENCH, a clinically grounded benchmark built from 1,576 fully human-generated counseling conversations, 15,680 turns, and 42,230 responses from five LLMs. Three clinical and neuropsychology experts developed a 20-attribute schema spanning user context, response behaviour, and global risk flags; six trained clinical reviewers applied it with span-grounded evidence, producing 5,324 reviewer judgments. We further introduce the User-Input Risk Index (UIRI), the Cognitive Atrophy Risk Index (ARI), and trajectory summaries. Across five LLMs, models show a consistent moderate-to-high level of atrophy-aligned behaviour across single and multi-turn settings. While models generally respond to overt safety cues, they adapt less reliably when users seek solutions or decisions. The dominant recurring patterns are directive advice, problem-solving, recommendation responses, topic shifts, and forms of validation that may reinforce dependence rather than reflection. Our work makes COGNITIVE ATROPHY measurable and provides a foundation for auditing model behaviour in sensitive LLM conversations.

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

Online Learning for Supervisory Switching Control

arXiv:2603.14762v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study supervisory switching control for partially-observed linear dynamical systems. The objective is to identify and deploy a suitable controller for the unknown system by periodically selecting among a collection of $N$ candidate controllers, some of which may destabilize the underlying system. While classical estimator-based supervisory control guarantees asymptotic stability, it lacks quantitative finite-time performance bounds. Conversely, current non-asymptotic methods in both online learning and system identification require restrictive assumptions that are incompatible in a control setting, such as system stability, which preclude testing potentially unstable controllers. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel, non-asymptotic analysis of supervisory control that adapts multi-armed bandit algorithms to a control-theoretic setting. The proposed data-driven algorithm evaluates candidate controllers via scoring criteria that leverage system observability to isolate the effects of state history, enabling both detection of destabilizing controllers and accurate system identification. We present two algorithmic variants with dimension-free, finite-time guarantees, where each identifies the matching controller in $O(N \log^2 N)$ steps, while simultaneously achieving finite $L_2$-gain with respect to system disturbances.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Topological Codes Based on Space Groups

arXiv:2606.20548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Topological codes form one of the most important classes of stabilizer codes. Most existing algebraic constructions and analyses of topological codes assume translation invariance. Here we show that topological codes can arise in more general settings by incorporating point group operations. The central construction is a class of Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes called space-group codes, whose check operators are built from group-algebra templates over space groups that combine translations with point-group operations. We develop methods for analyzing topological properties of space-group codes using ring-modules and their invariant theory. At first glance, space-group codes might appear to complicate practical implementation; however, we find that they can exhibit greater locality than previous codes based purely on translations. Our framework thus extends the landscape of topological codes and opens up a broader design space for the co-design of topological codes with quantum computing platforms.

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

Bayesian Inference and Decision Audits for Public Archives of Frontier AI Evaluations

作者:

arXiv:2606.17005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public AI evaluations are often read as terminal leaderboards, yet the underlying evidence is a selective time series shaped by reporting rules, benchmark revisions, and missingness. Repeated public archives for LiveBench and Open LLM Leaderboard v2 serve as the primary longitudinal record; LMArena provides a preference stress test; and GAIA and tau-bench contribute limited agentic pilots. Together, these archives instantiate a Bayesian inference problem: under a fixed reporting convention, one constructed terminal-only example over $1{,}000$ systems is compatible with two pre-terminal histories, yielding times of $23.03$ or $75.13$ to reach within $0.05$ of the ceiling under the same terminal-tail model. In synthetic posterior comparisons, action-facing diagnostics differ across observation regimes. The candidate selection-aware frontier model fails synthetic recovery, objective-archive prediction, preference transfer, and uncertainty calibration; correspondingly, fixed audit gates reject its stronger claims. An archive-and-adjudication protocol reconstructs public evaluation histories, isolates a verified timing boundary, and falsifies unsupported frontier claims.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

An Integrated Framework for Transcriptomic Characterization and Lorentzian Hyperbolic Visualization of a High-Risk Topological Branch in Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a highly heterogeneous brain disorder in which molecular alterations vary across brain regions, disease stages, and patient subgroups. This study introduces an integrated analytical framework for characterizing transcriptomic variation associated with a high-risk topological branch, which was identified based on Lorentz distance in postmortem Brodmann area 36 samples from the Mount Sinai Brain Bank cohort, where over 70% of samples were in Braak stages V-VI. The framework integrates weighted gene co-expression network analysis, repeated stability-based differential expression analysis, network-level gene filtering, Gene Ontology enrichment, and nested stratified cross-validation to evaluate whether topological branch-associated genes capture biologically meaningful signals and carry predictive information for high-Braak group status. The identified gene sets were functionally enriched for neuronal development, neuron projection organization, synaptic signaling, vesicle fusion, and regulated synaptic release, suggesting that the high-risk topological branch reflects biologically relevant transcriptomic programs linked to neurodegenerative progression. Nested cross-validation further showed that the selected genes achieved measurable internal predictive performance for distinguishing high-Braak samples. As a second methodological contribution, we introduced a Lorentzian hyperbolic variant of t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (Lorentz t-SNE) to explore latent non-Euclidean structure in transcriptomic data. This method embeds samples in hyperbolic space, providing an alternative to Euclidean embeddings for representing hierarchical or nonlinear structures. Compared with conventional Euclidean embeddings, the proposed Lorentz t-SNE revealed a more localized organization of high-Braak samples. Together, these results demonstrate the utility of the proposed analytical framework and Lorentz t-SNE for investigating heterogeneous, potentially non-Euclidean organization in AD transcriptomes.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Emergent de Sitter Space and Non-Unitary Tensor Networks from Non-Hermitian Quantum Criticality

arXiv:2606.17983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extending the holographic principle to de Sitter (dS) spacetimes remains one of the most vital open frontiers in quantum gravity, where a microscopic, bottom-up tensor-network framework that relates boundary quantum data to emergent de Sitter spacetime is still lacking. In this work, we first show the emergence of de Sitter spacetime from boundary entanglement by formulating a non-unitary continuous multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (cMERA) for a concrete non-Hermitian critical fermion chain. Within this emergent spacetime, we analyze the associated geodesics and show that they act as extremal Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) surfaces undergoing a smooth timelike-to-null transition. Remarkably, we demonstrate that this continuum trajectory dictates a distinct tensor-network architecture in which the bond-counting contribution naturally truncates at the discrete timelike-to-null transition toward the deep infrared. In the resulting architecture, the null ray along the horizon is represented by zero-cost links, since the associated cut severs no tensor legs. This network structure successfully reproduces the logarithmic scaling of non-unitary critical entanglement entropy, offering a bond-counting picture for the de Sitter RT formula. Our results provide the long-sought dS/(c)MERA correspondence at the level of both emergent spacetime and discrete holographic entanglement.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

From Parameters to Feature Space: Task Arithmetic for Backdoor Mitigation in Model Merging

arXiv:2606.12498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging (MM) has gained significant attention as a cost-effective approach to integrate multiple task-specific models into a unified model. However, recent work reveals that MM is highly susceptible to backdoor attacks. Existing defenses based on task arithmetic often fail to eliminate backdoors without substantially degrading clean-task performance, owing to their reliance on direct parameter-space editing. To address this gap, we propose Linear Feature Path Minimization (LFPM), a backdoor mitigation framework for model merging, which introduces an anti-backdoor task vector into the backdoored merged model. Unlike prior approaches, LFPM formulates the backdoor robustness of the merged model from a unified feature-space perspective under the Cross-Task Linearity (CTL) framework, which leverages the approximate linearity of features across tasks. This perspective guides the optimization of the anti-backdoor task to suppress backdoors while preserving clean-task performance. Furthermore, we introduce an effective optimization mechanism based on gradient accumulation and loss path-integral, ensuring robust backdoor suppression along the interpolation path. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LFPM consistently exhibits strong robustness against backdoor attacks in both full fine-tuning and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) settings.

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

Patterned matrices with random walk entries

arXiv:2512.04612v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is well known that the weak limit of a suitably scaled continuous-time random walk (CTRW) is the Brownian motion. We investigate the convergence of certain patterned random matrices whose entries are independent CTRWs and their time-changed versions, in a non-commutative probability framework. For the Wigner link function, the limits are free Brownian motion and its time-changed version driven by an inverse stable subordinator. For the symmetric circulant and the circulant with CTRW entries, we use their explicit eigenvalue expressions to define some empirical processes that converge weakly to a Brownian motion and a complex Brownian motion, respectively. For matrices with iid entries, and for elliptic matrices, the algebraic limits are equal in $*$-distribution to processes whose marginals are circular and elliptic variables, respectively. A random time-changed variant of these results is also established.

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

Bridging the Usability Gap: Lessons from Interpreting Studies for Machine Interpreting Design

Machine interpreting (MI), the live, real-time branch of speech translation, has achieved remarkable progress on standard benchmarks, with some systems approaching human parity on textual fidelity. Yet the user experience remains far inferior to interpreter-mediated communication, revealing what we term the accuracy illusion: systems that appear accurate on paper but fail in practice to support smooth, goal-oriented interaction. This paper defines MI as a distinct subfield of speech translation, with its own characteristics and the need for evaluation methods grounded in communicative effectiveness rather than isolated fidelity metrics. Drawing on insights from interpreting studies, we identify critical dimensions of professional interpreting practice that are overlooked by current systems, and consolidate them into three interdependent design priorities for future MI: agency (context-sensitive initiative and repair), grounding (multimodal and discourse-level situational awareness), and experience (adaptive improvement through real interaction). Together, these priorities chart a path toward closing the usability gap and enabling systems that can sustain authentic multilingual communication in real time.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

An Integrated System for Real-Time Student Assessment and Career Guidance Using Neural Networks in Computing Disciplines

arXiv:2606.15831v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many undergraduate students in Computer Science (CS) and Software Engineering (SWE) struggle to identify suitable career paths, particularly when their academic performance, abilities, and interests do not fully align. To address this issue, this study proposes an AI-driven Student Assessment and Career Prediction System that integrates a Career Guidance Expert (CGE) system with a Web-Based Student Assessment (WBSA) platform. Within the integrated framework, CGE enhances personalized career recommendations using AI while also assisting students after graduation in identifying suitable jobs, research domains, and higher study opportunities aligned with their skills and interests. The WBSA platform further strengthens interaction between students and faculty through assessments, personalized tasks, mentorship activities, and a secure real-time chat application. The CGE system employs a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) model trained on real-world academic and extracurricular data collected using the snowball sampling method from the students of universities, achieving a validation accuracy of 94.71% in predicting personalized career paths. A pre-survey was conducted across universities to evaluate the proposed model before deployment. The WBSA system was developed as a modern web application using technologies such as Node.js, Next.js, and PostgreSQL to ensure scalability, responsiveness, and secure data management. The overall system is supported by a secure cloud-based infrastructure, the platform provides reliable performance while assisting graduates to select suitable career path in IT sector. In addition, a post-survey involving both students and faculty was conducted to gather feedback and further improve the overall effectiveness and usability of the system.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ProcessThinker: Enhancing Multi-modal Large Language Models Reasoning via Rollout-based Process Reward

Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning. Recent post-training with reinforcement learning under verifiable rewards (RLVR) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) can improve multimodal reasoning, but most approaches rely on sparse outcome-only rewards. As a result, they struggle to tell whether an incorrect answer comes from a small mistake late in the reasoning or from an unhelpful trajectory from the start. A common solution is to train a process reward model (PRM) for step-level supervision, but this typically requires large-scale high-quality chain-of-thought annotations and additional training cost. We propose ProcessThinker, a practical post-training pipeline that provides step-level process rewards without training an explicit PRM. ProcessThinker first rewrites reasoning traces into a step-tagged format for cold-start supervised fine-tuning, then applies GRPO with a standard format reward and our rollout-based process reward. Concretely, for each intermediate step, we sample multiple continuations from that step and use the empirical success rate (final-answer verification) as the step reward. This gives dense credit assignment and encourages reasoning steps that more reliably support a correct conclusion, helping reduce inconsistent or self-contradictory progress across steps – a key issue in logical reasoning. Across four challenging video benchmarks (Video-MMMU, MMVU, VideoMathQA, and LongVideoBench), ProcessThinker consistently improves over the baseline model Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Lowest order Carleman linearization for low Reynolds long-term behaviour of fluid flow simulations

arXiv:2605.23380v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is shown that the lowest (second) order truncation of the Carleman linearization of the fluid equations (C2) recovers the late stage of the evolution, namely the steady-state solution, although to a decreasing degree of accuracy at increasing Reynolds number. This asymptotic property is first proved analytically for the decaying logistic with external forcing and then shown to hold to a significant degree of accuracy also for the more complex case of two-dimensional Kolmogorov-like fluid flow at low Reynolds numbers, below $Re \sim 10$. This time-asymptotic property may open interesting prospects for the quantum simulation of low-Reynolds steady-state fluid flows.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HULFSynth : An INR based Super-Resolution and Ultra Low-Field MRI Synthesis via Contrast factor estimation

We present an unsupervised single image bidirectional Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) synthesizer that synthesizes an Ultra-Low Field (ULF) like image from a High-Field (HF) magnitude image and vice-versa. Unlike existing MRI synthesis models, our approach is inspired by the physics that drives contrast changes between HF and ULF MRIs. Our forward model simulates a HF to ULF transformation by estimating the tissue-type Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) values based on target contrast values. For the Super-Resolution task, we used an Implicit Neural Representation (INR) network to synthesize HF image by simultaneously predicting tissue-type segmentations and image intensity without observed HF data. The proposed method is evaluated using synthetic ULF-like data from generated from standard 3T T$_1$-weighted images for qualitative assessments and paired 3T-64mT T$_1$-weighted images for validation experiments. WM-GM contrast improved by 52% in synthetic ULF-like images and 37% in 64mT images. Sensitivity experiments demonstrated the robustness of our forward model to variations in target contrast, noise and initial seeding.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Stability of Khintchine-type inequalities via log-monotonicity

arXiv:2606.19313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate Khintchine-type inequalities for the weighted sums $S=\sum_ka_kX_k$ of independent copies of a symmetric random variable $X$. We show how log-monotonicity of the sequence $r_k(X)=k! \mathbb{E}[X^{2k}]/(2k)!$ implies sharp comparisons between the $L_p$ and $L_2$ norms of $S$ for every even integer $p\geq 2$, extending classic Khintchine-type inequalities and yielding new results in the log-convex setting. We also investigate the stability of our inequalities. Our first stability inequality sharpens the classic inequality by a deviation of the coefficient vector from the coordinate extremizers, while the second quantifies deviation from the Gaussian limit. Our results recover recent stability inequalities for random signs and apply to a broad class of distributions, including type-$\mathscr{L}$ random variables, ultra sub-Gaussian random variables and Gaussian mixtures.

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

Possible or Definite? A Benchmark for Evaluating Diagnostic Uncertainty Preservation in Clinical Text

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for clinical text tasks such as summarization and revision. While most studies evaluate the fluency and coherence of LLM-generated text, whether LLMs correctly preserve diagnostic uncertainty remains underexplored. In clinical practice, phrases such as ``possible pneumonia'' communicate the strength of available evidence and directly guide decisions about follow-up testing and treatment. Altering these uncertainty expressions can change the clinical meaning entirely. In this paper, we systematically evaluated this problem in two steps. First, we constructed a benchmark of 1,200 clinical documents with 9,184 uncertainty annotations across five levels. Second, we evaluated three LLMs on this benchmark. Our results show that (1) LLMs preserve the original uncertainty cues poorly, often less than half the time; (2) LLMs struggle with nuanced distinctions between adjacent levels. This work reveals a failure mode not captured by standard evaluation metrics and provides implications for the safe deployment of LLMs in clinical workflows.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Teach-and-Repeat: Accurately Extracting Operational Knowledge from Mobile Screen Demonstrations to Empower GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.12817v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the digital world on mobile devices is shifting from static UI perception to dynamic action comprehension. This capability enables models to convert visual state transitions into operational knowledge, defined as short natural-language sentences that describe action types, target UI elements, textual arguments, and execution orders. However, due to the highly diverse and heterogeneous UI designs across applications, existing vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to accurately infer these underlying operations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Teach VLM, a core model designed to translate mobile screen trajectories into step-wise operational knowledge by extracting and analyzing operation-related keyframes from demonstration videos. To address the scarcity of aligned training data, we develop a systematic data flywheel for scalable data acquisition. We further introduce a novel Chinese Mobile Screen Teach Benchmark for fine-grained evaluation. Building upon Teach VLM, we propose the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm, where the generated operational knowledge serves as an interpretable procedural reference to guide downstream screen-based execution agents. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Teach VLM significantly outperforms strong VLM baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance in operation semantics prediction. Furthermore, experiments in Android World show that our paradigm yields consistent Task Success Rate improvements for downstream agents. Together, Teach VLM and the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm offer a practical pathway from raw demonstrations to reusable task automation.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

StagePilot: Stage-Level Planning for Long-Horizon Dialogue Simulation in Cybergrooming

Cybergrooming is an evolving threat to youth, requiring proactive educational interventions. We address this by modeling dialogue progression as a structured planning problem over stage-wise interactions. We propose StagePilot, a dialogue framework that separates stage-level planning from response generation, in which the model selects the next stage under constrained transitions and generates responses conditioned on it, enabling coherent and realistic progression. Reinforcement learning is used to learn stage-level policies from offline data, optimizing for both emotional alignment and goal-consistent progression. Our empirical experiments show that StagePilot generates more structured, coherent dialogue trajectories and reduces conversational stagnation compared to baselines; notably, the IQL+AWAC variant reaches the final stage more often while maintaining over 70% positive or neutral responses, yielding a 43% relative improvement.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Gendered pathways to adolescent mental health: An empirical assessment of a new conceptual framework

Introduction Gender norms and roles are important determinants of physical and mental health in the key period of adolescence. Yet, the gendered pathways to mental health in adolescents are not fully understood. Using a conceptual framework for global adolescent mental health that we developed based on a Delphi process, we empirically investigated the associations between six gender-related constructs and adolescent mental health. Methods We used cross-sectional Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) data from Ethiopia (2020) to explore the associations between sex, gender norms, psychological competencies, gender attitudes, gender roles, with the latter two also serving as mediators, and psychological distress (GHQ-12), using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Results The SEM model contained measurements from 1,584 adolescents, including 843 girls and 741 boys, with a median age of 13 years. Out of 14 pathways tested, we found statistically significant associations between psychological competencies and psychological distress; sex and gender attitudes; and between gender norms and psychological competencies, gender attitudes, and gender roles. Hence, the gender-related constructs were mostly associated with each other, rather than with psychological distress. Conclusion The gender-related constructs are strongly interrelated, thereby attenuating their individual effects on psychological distress. The interplay of gender-related constructs should be considered when developing interventions to promote mental health in adolescents.

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

Neuro-Relational Programs: Unifying Queries and Neural Computation over Structured Data

arXiv:2606.11946v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The conventional approach to deep learning over relational databases applies neural models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), to a graph representation of the database. Recent approaches instead operate on databases directly, associating tuples with embeddings and extending query mechanisms to jointly process embeddings and relational content. Inspired by these developments, we introduce Neuro-Relational Programs (NRPs), a declarative query language for relational databases whose facts carry numeric vector embeddings. NRPs extend Datalog-style rules with operations that combine, aggregate, and transform embeddings, thereby interleaving relational reasoning and learnable neural components within a single formalism. This yields a general approach to neural computation over relational data: an NRP can be read both as a query plan with trainable components and as a neural architecture with relational structure built in. Natural syntactic fragments of NRPs recover existing architectures and query formalisms. Zero-ary NRPs correspond to non-adaptive query algorithms; monadic NRPs generalize GNN-style message passing and precisely capture Deep Homomorphism Networks, a connection that we extend to frontier-guarded NRPs over databases with row-ids. We characterize the expressive power of unrestricted NRPs with ReLU-FFN transformations by FOCQ, an extension of first-order logic with counting interpreted over real-weighted structures, yielding a precise connection with uniform TC$^0$ over ordered databases. Together, these results establish NRPs as a broad declarative framework for querying and neural computation over relational data.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

scMagnifier: Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes via GRN-informed perturbations and consensus clustering

作者:

by Zhenhui He, Dong Kangning Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data remains challenging, as their subtle transcriptional differences are often obscured by technical noise and data sparsity. Here, we present scMagnifier, a consensus clustering framework that leverages gene regulatory network (GRN)-informed in silico perturbations to amplify subtle transcriptional differences and uncover latent cell subpopulations. scMagnifier perturbs candidate transcription factors (TFs), propagates perturbation effects through cluster-specific GRNs to simulate post-perturbation expression profiles, and integrates clustering results across multiple perturbations into stable subtype assignments. Additionally, scMagnifier introduces regulatory perturbation consensus UMAP (rpcUMAP), a perturbation-aware visualization that provides clearer separation between cell subtypes and guides the selection of the optimal number of clusters. In both single-batch and multi-batch benchmarks, scMagnifier consistently improves the resolution and accuracy of fine-grained cell type identification. Notably, when integrated with spatial clustering methods such as STAGATE, scMagnifier is compatible with spatial transcriptomics workflows and effectively reveals tumor cell subtypes and their spatial organization in ovarian cancer.

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

TopBench: A Benchmark for Implicit Predictive Reasoning in Tabular Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced Table Question Answering, where most queries can be answered by extracting information or simple aggregation. However, a common class of real-world queries is implicitly predictive, requiring the inference of unobserved answers from historical patterns rather than mere retrieval. These queries introduce two challenges: recognizing latent intent and reliable predictive reasoning over massive tables. To assess LLMs in such Tabular questiOn answering with implicit Prediction tasks, we introduce TopBench, a benchmark consisting of 779 samples across four sub-tasks, ranging from single-point prediction to decision making, treatment effect analysis, and complex filtering, requiring models to generate outputs spanning reasoning text and structured tables. We evaluate diverse models under both text-based and agentic workflows. Experiments reveal that current models often struggle with intent recognition, defaulting to just lookups. Deeper analysis identifies that accurate intent disambiguation serves as the prerequisite for leading these predictive behaviors. Furthermore, elevating the upper bound of prediction precision requires the integration of more sophisticated modeling or reasoning capabilities.