Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2604.26819

Sharp One-Dimensional Sub-Gaussian Comparison in Convex Order

Authors:

Yihan Zhang↗

arXiv:2604.26819v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that any random variable $X$ whose moment generating function is point-wise upper bounded by that of $ G \sim \mathcal{N}(0,1) $ must be dominated by $ G/\mathbb{E}[|G|] $ in convex order, meaning $ \mathbb{E}[f(X)] \le \mathbb{E}[f(G/\mathbb{E}[|G|])] $ for all convex $f$. This is sharp as witnessed by $ X \sim \mathrm{Unif}(\{-1,1\}) $ and $ f(x) = |x| $.

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02.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:6d0a276d54b4a0604806de987c2ecece

Efficacy of a Gamified Digital Platform for Substance Use Education and Overdose Prevention Among College Students: a Pilot and Feasibility Study

Authors:

Hilliard↗M. E↗Foreman↗Khan↗Zona↗Mishra↗Howse↗S. J↗

Background: For US young adults aged 18-25 in the 2018-2024 period, fentanyl was involved in 78.2% of the 44,020 unintentional or undetermined-intent overdose deaths, most often co-involving stimulants and other non-opioid substances. While fatal overdose rates in this age group have fallen to their lowest recorded level, emergency medical services-attended non-fatal overdose events have reached record highs, shifting the decisive variable toward bystander recognition and response. College students report near-universal alcohol education but minimal education on the substances actually driving overdose mortality. Methods: We conducted a single-group pre-post evaluation of the DopaGE Portal, a gamified, mastery-based digital platform covering cocaine, MDMA, benzodiazepines, and opioid overdose response, deployed at a public university (UNL) and a multi-campus volunteer network (TACO). Paired pre/post surveys (N=42) measured self-efficacy (7 items; primary), behavioral intentions, risk perception, and knowledge/attitudes on 5-point scales, plus four factual knowledge questions. Paired t-tests, exact McNemar tests, and Benjamini-Hochberg correction across eight primary tests were applied. Institutional naloxone distribution at UNL was tracked as an ecological behavioral outcome. A mandated high-school cohort (N=94) provided supplementary acceptability data. Results: Self-efficacy increased from 2.82 to 4.46 (d=2.00, 95% CI 1.46-2.55; adjusted p

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03.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:33a1b3277fc8ed95865f55f1bc3ef64f

Primary care practitioners preconception health literacy and information-seeking: A cross-sectional survey.

Authors:

Caut↗Schoenaker↗McIntyre↗Steel↗

Background Parental health before pregnancy influences maternal and child outcomes. Primary care professionals, including general practitioners [GPs], midwives, and naturopaths, can provide preconception care, yet many report limited knowledge and difficulty accessing relevant information. This study described Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths preconception health literacy, including knowledge and ability to access information. Methods Between July and September 2022, Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths completed a 32-item online cross-sectional survey. Participants were recruited through professional associations, and data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics Results Participants (N=373) included naturopaths (40.7%), GPs (32.4%), and midwives (26.8%). Reported barriers to clinician health literacy including lack of preconception care resources (25.5%), and limited clinician knowledge (23.6%). The proportion identifying limited clinician knowledge differed significantly between professions (GP: 31.4%; midwives: 23.0%; naturopaths: 17.8%; p=0.030). The highest level of accurate knowledge regarding preconception exposures was for pre-pregnancy obesity (82.7%), while low birth weight was the most accurately identified preconception outcomes (83.7%). Incorrect responses were most common for maternal multivitamin use as an exposure (28.3%) and childhood leukaemia as an outcome (26.3%). Differences between professions were strongest for infant outcomes, with moderate associations observed for shoulder dystocia (V=.2355), precipitous labour (V=.2173), macrosomia (V=.2060), labour dystocia (V=.2018) and cryptorchidism (V=.2018). Discussion Preconception health literacy varies across primary care professions. Clinicians require greater access to targeted resources and education tailored to their differing scopes of practice and experience. Improving clinician preconception health literacy may strengthen consistent evidence-based care and support better maternal, child, and long-term family health outcomes.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17296

Pareto LoRA: Mitigating Modality Imbalance in Unified Multimodal Models via Pareto-Optimal Gradient Integration

Authors:

Xiwen Wei↗Mark Nutter↗Madhusudhanan Srinivasan↗Radu Marculescu↗

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for integrating multimodal understanding and generation within a single autoregressive transformer. However, during multimodal instruction tuning, these models often exhibit pronounced modality imbalance: language gradients dominate optimization, thus leading to lower image generation quality, especially under parameter-efficient fine-tuning such as LoRA. In this work, we systematically analyze modality imbalance in LoRA-based fine-tuning of UMMs for interleaved text-image generation. We show that vision modality performance degrades substantially more than text modality performance when compared to unimodal counterparts, and that modality-specific gradients can differ by orders of magnitude across various tasks and layers. Motivated by this observation, we reformulate the multimodal instruction tuning as a bi-objective optimization problem and propose Pareto LoRA, a Pareto-optimal gradient integration strategy that balances the text and image objectives by modulating the gradient direction and strength. Experiments on the CoMM benchmark with Emu2 demonstrate that Pareto LoRA consistently improves multimodal generation balance, achieving up to 44.9% gains in perceptual image quality over vanilla LoRA while maintaining comparable text performance.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.06525

Agentic Large Language Models for Automated Structural Analysis of 3D Frame Systems

Authors:

Ziheng Geng↗Ian Franklin↗Santiago Martinez↗Jiachen Liu↗Yunhe Zhao↗Minghui Cheng↗

arXiv:2606.06525v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful foundation models with strong reasoning capabilities across domains. Beyond reactive text generation, agentic LLMs enable autonomous workflow execution through modular task decomposition and coordinated tool use. In structural engineering, recent efforts have developed agentic LLMs for automated analysis of plane frames. However, their extension to 3D frames remains underexplored due to challenges in irregular geometric representation, topological consistency, and long-horizon reasoning. This paper proposes an agentic LLM framework for automated structural analysis of 3D frames from natural language inputs. Irregular 3D frames are represented by projection onto a 2D plan, where orthogonal gridlines define spatial coordinates and a matrix of number of stories encodes vertical extrusion of each grid cell. Building on this representation, the framework establishes a multi-agent pipeline: a problem analysis agent parses input into structured JSON; a floor decomposition agent derives the spatial layout of each floor; the 3D geometry is assembled by node, girder, slab, and column agents; support and load agents assign boundary and loading conditions, and code translation agents generate executable SAP2000 script. Evaluated on ten representative 3D frames, the proposed framework achieves an average accuracy of 90% across repeated trials, demonstrating consistent and reliable performance.

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06.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18650

BLADE: Scalable Bi-level Adaptive Data Selection for LLM Training

Authors:

Jiaxing Wang↗Deping Xiang↗Jin Xu↗Zirui Liu↗Zicheng Zhang↗Guoqiang Gong↗Jun Fang↗Chao Liu↗Pengzhang Liu↗Tongxuan Liu↗Ke Zhang↗Qixia Jiang↗…

arXiv:2606.18650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Model (LLM) datasets scale to trillions of tokens, data selection has emerged as a critical frontier to filter out uninformative noise and construct adaptive learning trajectories. Beyond static heuristic filtering, advanced data selection methods for LLM training largely follow two paradigms, each with fundamental limitations. Influence-based methods provide principled bi-level objectives but require intractable inverse-Hessian computations, while excess-loss methods are computationally efficient but rely on a static reference model that becomes misaligned with the evolving proxy model during training. We propose BLADE (Bi-Level Adaptive Data sElection), a Hessian-free framework for data selection. BLADE reformulates the bi-level optimization problem underlying influence-based methods as a penalized single-level objective via Lagrange multipliers, avoiding inverse-Hessian computation while revealing a principled connection to excess-loss based data selection. The resulting objective recovers an excess-loss form but replaces the static reference model with a dynamic one that stays synchronized with training. Theoretically, we prove that this penalized formulation guarantees first-order convergence. For efficient online batch selection, we instantiate BLADE as a memoryless randomized block-coordinate Frank-Wolfe algorithm. Extensive experiments show that BLADE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art data selection baselines, providing a practical recipe for LLM training.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17561

RT-Counter: Real-Time Text-Guided Open-Vocabulary Object Counting

Authors:

Hao-Yuan Ma↗Li Zhang↗Zhiwei Zhu↗Jie Gao↗

Text-guided open-vocabulary object counting (TOOC) aims to count objects belonging to the categories specified by natural language descriptions. Although vision-language pre-trained models have been successful applied to TOOC tasks, they still struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding and real-time inference requirements in counting scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a real-time TOOC framework, called the Real-Time Counter (RT-Counter), that achieves not only good counting accuracy but also high computational efficiency. RT-Counter designs a novel Visual Prototype Textualization (VPT) module that can project learned visual features into a text feature space and then generate features containing the abstract information that is hard to capture with visual prototypes and the detailed prototype information that is difficult to describe in text, enhancing the object-level visual-language model's counting capabilities. Additionally, RT-Counter incorporates our Weaving Transformer (Weaformer) layers, maintaining high descriptive power at a fraction of the computational cost. The Weaformer layer adopts a novel hybrid attention mechanism that can efficiently weave together local and global visual features. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that RT-Counter successfully breaks the accuracy-speed trade-off in TOOC. While achieving a competitive MAE of 13.30 on FSC147, RT-Counter operates at 112.48 FPS, making it 7.4x faster and over 4$\times$ more parameter-efficient than the existing leading methods in TOOC. Our work aims at balancing high accuracy and real-time performance in TOOC. Code is available at: https://github.com/Jason-Mar1/RT-Counter.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12140

Time-Conditioned and Multi-Time Survival Prediction from 2D PET/CT Projections in Lung Cancer

Authors:

Ashish Chauhan↗Sambit Tarai↗Elin Lundstr\"om↗Johan \"Ofverstedt↗H{\aa}kan Ahlstr\"om↗Joel Kullberg↗

Accurate prediction of overall survival (OS) from positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) can support personalized treatment and follow-up strategies in oncology. However, the impact of temporal modeling on imaging-based survival prediction remains insufficiently explored. We investigate how different temporal formulations influence survival prediction by developing two complementary approaches: Attention-guided Time-Conditioned Survival (ATCS) and Multi-Time Survival (MTS). We retrospectively analyzed pre-treatment PET/CT images from 848 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), including 556 for model development and 292 for held-out testing. A previously proposed Time-Conditioned Survival (TCS) model was used as a baseline. Models were trained using 5-fold cross-validation and evaluated on the test set using time-dependent area under the curve (AUC) at 6-month intervals from 0.5 to 5 years. Both ATCS and MTS outperformed the baseline TCS model, achieving mean AUCs of 0.794 and 0.793, respectively, compared to 0.767. ATCS performed better at earlier time points (0.5-3 years), whereas MTS performed better at later intervals (3.5-5 years). Combining tumor-specific and tissue-wise PET/CT features improved performance over either input alone. Finer temporal discretization improved short-term prediction, while coarser intervals provided more stable long-term estimates. These findings demonstrate that temporal modeling and input design influence PET/CT-based survival prediction. The proposed approaches enable time-specific survival estimation from pre-treatment imaging and may support improved risk stratification and clinical decision-making.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12329

PROJECTMEM: A Local-First, Event-Sourced Memory and Judgment Layer for AI Coding Agents

Authors:

Ripon Chandra Malo↗Tong Qiu↗

arXiv:2606.12329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI coding assistants now support a growing share of software work, from quick scripts to production applications. Yet these agents remain largely stateless: each new session re-reads project files, re-derives prior decisions, and - most costly - may repeat debugging attempts that already failed. Reconstructing this context can consume an estimated 5,000-20,000 tokens per session; the bottleneck is often not model capability but missing project memory. We present projectmem, an open-source, local-first memory and judgment layer for AI coding agents. projectmem records development as an append-only, plain-text event log of typed events - issues, attempts, fixes, decisions, and notes - and deterministically projects that log into compact, AI-readable summaries served through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Beyond storage, projectmem adds a deterministic pre-action gate that warns an agent before it repeats a previously failed fix or edits a known-fragile file. We frame this as Memory-as-Governance: memory that does not merely answer the agent but acts on its next action. The system runs fully offline with no telemetry; its immutable log also serves as a provenance trail for reproducible, auditable AI-assisted development. projectmem ships as a three-dependency Python package (14 MCP tools, 19 CLI commands, 37 automated tests) and is evaluated through a two-month self-study across 10 projects comprising 207 logged events. Source code: https://github.com/riponcm/projectmem.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2510.09468

Geodesic Calculus on Implicitly Defined Latent Manifolds

Authors:

Florine Hartwig↗Josua Sassen↗Juliane Braunsmann↗Martin Rumpf↗Benedikt Wirth↗

arXiv:2510.09468v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latent manifolds of autoencoders provide low-dimensional representations of data, which can be studied from a geometric perspective. We propose to describe these latent manifolds as implicit submanifolds of some ambient latent space. Based on this, we develop tools for a discrete Riemannian calculus approximating classical geometric operators. These tools are robust against inaccuracies of the implicit representation often occurring in practical examples. To obtain a suitable implicit representation, we propose to learn an approximate projection onto the latent manifold by minimizing a denoising objective. This approach is independent of the underlying autoencoder and supports the use of different Riemannian geometries on the latent manifolds. The framework in particular enables the computation of geodesic paths connecting given end points and shooting geodesics via the Riemannian exponential maps on latent manifolds. We evaluate our approach on various autoencoders trained on synthetic and real data.

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11.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:3624d77a38f39add39490d21788abd0f

Recruitment, Retention Approaches and Community Engagement in the THRIVE pilot Trial: Lessons Learned from a Food is Medicine Trial

Authors:

Olusola-Bello↗Oborevwori↗Adeleye↗Irma Iribe↗Assani-Uva↗Kyeremeh↗Tomiwa↗Dugbartey↗J. A↗Saldarriaga Noel↗Washington↗I. E↗…

Background: Recruitment of underrepresented populations, including Black and Hispanic populations, for Food is Medicine (FIM) and cardiovascular trials, may pose significant challenges. Methods: We implemented a multi-component recruitment approach for the THRIVE (AdapTive personalized dietitian coacHing and messaging with pRoduce prescrIptions to improVE healthy dietary behaviors) pilot trial to engage primarily Black and Hispanic adults in a Food is Medicine for hypertension intervention. The recruitment approaches included community engagement at approximately 40 community events (cultural festivals and neighborhood gatherings); partnerships with 8 community and faith-based service hubs and food distribution sites; recruitment through safety net primary care clinics, digital outreach via the study website, and social media campaigns; and direct recruitment at places of worship. We report lessons learned from the community engagement process, recruitment efficiency, representativeness, and retention outcomes. Results: Within 6 months, the enrollment target was exceeded by 40%, with an accrual index of 1.04. Over 1,000 individuals were reached through the direct-to-community engagement process, while faith-based partnerships engaged about 900 adults. There were 2,673 visits to the study webpage, and social media achieved 12,259 impressions with 399 clicks. About 95% of participants resided within 10 miles of the faith-based recruitment sites. Face-to-face engagement at the food distribution sites within faith-based organizations or community service hubs outperformed digital methods. Faith leader endorsements and follow-up in-person meetings (following unsuccessful email outreach) dramatically increased recruitment. Regarding retention, pre-randomization attrition was 6%, and 82% of participants completed the study. Conclusion: Culturally tailored, community-engaged recruitment grounded in faith-based and local community partnerships, was highly effective in engaging Black and Hispanic populations in this FIM cardiovascular trial. This provides a replicable model for implementing equitable and sustainable cardiovascular health interventions.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19721

OnDeFog: Online Decision Transformer under Frame Dropping

Authors:

Daiki Yotsufuji↗Kenta Nishihara↗Shoma Shimizu↗Kento Uchida↗Shinichi Shirakawa↗

arXiv:2606.19721v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In challenging real-world reinforcement learning applications, communication delays or sensor failures often cause frame dropping, in which the agent cannot receive the dropped states and associated rewards. To address the performance degradation caused by frame dropping, the Decision Transformer under Random Frame Dropping (DeFog) was developed by incorporating additional mechanisms into the decision transformer to tackle frame dropping. Although DeFog can mitigate performance degradation in frame-dropping environments, since DeFog is an offline learning method, it struggles to effectively generalize to novel states not adequately represented in the training dataset. In this study, we propose OnDeFog, which integrates the mechanisms in DeFog with the online decision transformer (ODT), an online reinforcement learning method that learns policies through direct environmental interaction. Comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our proposed OnDeFog achieves superior performance compared to ODT in environments characterized by high dropping frame rate and outperforms DeFog on datasets containing a large amount of low-reward data.

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13.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:793f4958c1076c8dafece6c4595f529d

Reaching out-of-school girls with HPV vaccination: A qualitative evaluation in six low- and middle-income countries using the RE-AIM framework

Authors:

Zhang↗Rosser↗Wysong↗M. D↗Surkan↗P. J↗Rosen↗J. G↗Limaye↗R. J↗Park↗

Background Infection with human papillomavirus (HPV), the primary cause of cervical cancer, disproportionately affects women in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). While school-based vaccination of adolescent girls against HPV is highly effective, this strategy systematically excludes out-of-school (OOS) girls. Using the RE-AIM framework, we explored strategies to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination across six African and Asian LMICs. Methods We conducted semi-structured key informant interviews with 32 vaccination program stakeholders from Cambodia, Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Uganda between May and September 2024. Interviews explored countries implementation successes, challenges, and strategies to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination and sustainability considerations. Data were analyzed using a hybrid team-based thematic analysis approach guided by the RE-AIM framework. Results Community outreach-based strategies, typically integrated into routine immunization outreach, were identified as the most effective approach to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination. Targeted strategies, such as locating outreach clinics in community venues frequented by OOS girls (e.g., churches, markets) enhanced implementation. Perceived effectiveness of these strategies varied across participants, and formal assessment of effectiveness was constrained by the absence of disaggregated vaccination coverage data by school enrollment status. Some subpopulations of OOS girls (i.e., girls in nomadic or migrant communities, urban OOS girls) were not readily reached through standard outreach approaches, prompting implementation of adapted and tailored strategies for these subpopulations. Costs associated with conducting outreach in harder-to-reach areas were major barriers to reaching OOS girls, presenting challenges to the sustainability and cost-effectiveness of these approaches. Conclusions Routine community outreach platforms were widely perceived as most effective for reaching OOS girls. Strengthening disaggregated monitoring systems, adapting outreach for harder-to-reach subpopulations of OOS girls, and financing delivery models for tailored outreach strategies will be critical to improving equitable HPV vaccine coverage among OOS girls.

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14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18418

P$^2$CE: Model-Agnostic Plausible Pareto-Optimal Counterfactual Explanations

Authors:

Arthur Hendricks Mendes de Oliveira↗Giovani Valdrighi↗Marcos Medeiros Raimundo↗

arXiv:2606.18418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing use of machine learning algorithms in social applications has raised concerns about fairness and transparency, leading to the development of counterfactual explanations. These explanations supports individuals to understand and potentially alter unfavorable decisions in areas such as loan applications, job selections, and more, by providing actionable changes to input features that would lead to a desired outcome. Existing methods often struggle to balance feasibility, plausibility, and computational efficiency. To address this, we introduce P$^2$CE, an algorithm for generating plausible Pareto-optimal counterfactual explanations, offering users a diverse set of optimal trade-offs between different notions of feasibility. P$^2$CE employs an auxiliary isolation forest outlier detector to ensure that explanations are in accordance with the data distribution and leverages SHAP values to obtain optimal results with short computing times, regardless of the underlying model. Our algorithm was empirically evaluated on three datasets, demonstrating superior performance in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency compared to related techniques.

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15.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2510.06602

Hyperinvariant Spin Network States – An AdS/CFT Model from First Principles

Authors:

Fynn Otto↗Refik Mansuroglu↗Norbert Schuch↗Otfried G\"uhne↗Hanno Sahlmann↗

arXiv:2510.06602v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the existence and limitations of hyperinvariant tensor networks incorporating a local SU(2) symmetry. As discrete implementations of the anti de-Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence, such networks have created bridges between the fields of quantum information theory and quantum gravity. Adding SU(2) symmetry to the tensor network allows a direct connection to spin network states, a basis of the kinematic Hilbert space of loop quantum gravity (LQG). We consider a particular situation where the states can be interpreted as kinematic quantum states for three-dimensional quantum gravity. We show that important aspects of the AdS/CFT correspondence are realized in certain quantum states of the gravitational field in LQG, thus justifying, from first principles, a class of models introduced by [F. Pastawski et al., JHEP 06, 149 (2015)]. We provide examples of hyperinvariant tensor networks, but also prove constraints on their existence in the form of no-go theorems that exclude absolutely maximally entangled states as well as general holographic codes from local SU(2)-invariance. We calculate surface areas as expectation values of the LQG area operator and discuss further possible constraints as a consequence of a decay of correlations on the boundary.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17295

Phenotyping TPF via Self-Supervised Learning: A Label-Agnostic Framework with Expert Validation

Authors:

Miral Elnakib↗Muhammad Saad↗Ahmad Al-Kabbany↗

The full potential of artificial intelligence in tibial plateau fracture characterisation remains unrealised, constrained by a fundamental dependency on labelled datasets whose consistency cannot be guaranteed: conventional classification schemes such as Schatzker and AO/OTA suffer from inter-observer variability, causing supervised models to learn human disagreement rather than stable fracture morphology. We design, implement, and validate a label-agnostic framework that eliminates this constraint by learning fracture representations directly from imaging data without observer-assigned labels. A RadImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 encoder is fine-tuned on 154 cleaned knee radiographs using the SimCLR contrastive objective, preceded by a data cleaning protocol and followed by UMAP dimensionality reduction and k-means clustering to discover four imaging-derived phenotypes. Phenotype validity is assessed through a blinded expert review protocol administered to two independent clinicians. The four phenotypes demonstrate robust stability (bootstrap ARI = 0.319 +/- 0.041), strong internal cohesion (silhouette = 0.511), and coherence ratings of 3-5/5 from both reviewers under blinded conditions; one phenotype was unanimously identified as exhibiting comminution – a high-complexity feature isolated without any supervisory signal. Inter-partition comparison against Schatzker labels yields ARI = 0.013, confirming orthogonality to conventional classification boundaries. Notably, expert reviewers anchored to established classification vocabularies perceived imaging-derived groups as heterogeneous precisely where Schatzker alignment was lowest, suggesting that Schatzker-trained perception and label-agnostic embedding geometry measure orthogonal dimensions. These findings establish label-agnostic SSL phenotyping as a reproducible and clinically interpretable complement to conventional classification.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14730

Hierarchical GRU with Input-Conditioned Slot Queries for Ball Action Anticipation

Authors:

Parthsarthi Rawat↗

We present a hierarchical model for ball action anticipation in football broadcast video. Given a 30-second observation window, the system predicts actions occurring in the subsequent 5-second window across 10 classes. A shared local Transformer encodes clip-level features within each 5-second sub-window; a GRU then aggregates temporal context across all sub-windows; finally, a Transformer decoder with K input-conditioned event slots decodes the anticipation target via three decoupled heads (objectness, class, temporal offset). We introduce frequency-reweighted Hungarian matching that systematically favours rare action classes, and Gaussian soft targets for temporal bin supervision. On the SoccerNet Ball Action Anticipation benchmark, our method achieves 17.91% mAP on the test server.

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18.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19657

$K$-Theoretic Obstructions to Linearizing QCA Representations

Authors:

Mattie Ji↗Bowen Yang↗

arXiv:2606.19657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Projective representations arise naturally in physics and representation theory, and determining whether they can be linearized has been a fundamental problem. In this work, we study the analogous problem for quantum cellular automata (QCA) representations, which incorporate locality constraints imposed by a metric space $X$. Over an arbitrary field $\mathbb{F}$, we develop an obstruction theory for the linearization of QCA representations, using the algebraic $K$-theory spectrum of QCA constructed in previous work of the authors. The resulting obstructions are governed by the homotopy type of the QCA spaces, from which we extract universal obstruction classes to linearization. In the complex algebraic and unitary case, we also fully compute the homotopy types of the QCA spaces over a point, a line, and a plane.

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11650

Structure-Preserving Neural Surrogates with Tractable Uncertainty Quantification

Authors:

Handi Zhang↗Adrienne M. Propp↗Brooks Kinch↗Houman Owhadi↗Nathaniel Trask↗

arXiv:2606.11650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in scientific machine learning provide a means of near-real-time solution to partial differential equations (PDEs), but lack the theoretical underpinnings of conventional simulators that support contemporary verification and validation. In this work, we construct data-driven reduced-order models that serve as structure-preserving, real-time surrogates. Remarkably, the exterior calculus that imposes physical conservation structure also exposes topological structure that we use to build a Gaussian process (GP) representation of uncertainty in state-flux relationships, ultimately yielding a Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for quantities of interest with closed-form expressions for posterior uncertainty. We specifically propose structure-preserving $H(\mathrm{div})$–$L^2$ subspaces of conventional Raviart–Thomas and $dgP_0$ elements prescribed by a lightweight transformer. Reduced-order dynamics consistent with this subspace are learned by posing a conservation law in which a GP describes the fluxes between volumes. This work hinges on a novel interface between mixed FEM spaces and GP regression; when training is posed as the optimal recovery problem (ORP), the resulting GP regression can be written as an optimization problem with equality constraints that impose a conservation structure, amenable to a fast Schur-complement training strategy. The trained model can then be solved in real time with closed-form estimators for boundary fluxes driven by prescribed Dirichlet data. The paper includes RKHS posterior error bounds for linear functionals to support uncertainty quantification, as well as numerical experiments demonstrating the accuracy of the posterior distribution as a surrogate for error estimation.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18318

Budget-Aware Adaptive Adversarial Patches for Black-Box Object Detection

Authors:

Pedram MohajerAnsari↗Amir Salarpour↗David Fernandez↗Mert D. Pes\'e↗

Adversarial patches pose a practical threat to modern object detectors. Prior work shows vulnerability, but three gaps limit actionable insight: (i) few score-based black-box attacks jointly optimize patch location, texture, and size under tight query budgets; (ii) success is rarely tied to the patch's visual footprint; and (iii) evaluations often conflate EOT robustness with plain-view suppression. We present \method{}, a query-efficient, budget-adaptive black-box attack that couples a lightweight Contextual Thompson-Sampling placer with NES-style pixel updates, growing the patch only when progress stalls. Reporting is anchored by a strict plain-image suppression test; EOT is audited but never used as a substitute for success, and optional appearance/printability weights expose strength–visibility trade-offs. Across YOLOv5, Faster R-CNN, and YOLOS, \method{} achieves strong suppression on CNN-based detectors and substantial suppression on the transformer-based detector, using compact patches and exposing clear query–footprint trade-offs relative to fixed-size and heuristic baselines. A print–capture pilot further shows transfer across unseen physical objects and viewpoints.

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21.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:4407576acc93cb6be709127eaebd1591

Sperm quality improves in people taking potent obesity drugs

Authors:

Mariana Lenharo↗

Preliminary study finds that testosterone levels increase or stabilize in people taking GLP-1 medications. Preliminary study finds that testosterone levels increase or stabilize in people taking GLP-1 medications.

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22.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-10 DOI: HASH:5d13963040913546c97ba5365c2495db

Light-induced quantum friction of carbon nanotubes in water

Authors:

Tanuja Kistwal↗

Friction slows down moving objects at both macroscopic and microscopic scales1. At the electronic level, quantum friction describes direct transfer of momentum between a liquid and the electrons of a solid2. Owing to its microscopic nature, this phenomenon remains experimentally challenging to capture3. Here we show that near-infrared fluorescent single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) exhibit light-induced quantum friction in water. It is measured by observing an excitation-power-dependent linear decrease of around 50% in the diffusion constants of functionalized SWCNTs in aqueous solution. This effect disappears when excitons are localized, as in the case of SWCNTs with quantum defects. We further show that the chemical manipulation of exciton concentration by molecules that increase or decrease SWCNT fluorescence also modulates the diffusion constant by up to a factor of 2. Optical pump terahertz (THz) probe spectroscopy shows an instantaneous response (around 30 cm−1) that we assign to direct exciton–water coupling in the range of water Debye modes. It is followed by an increasing (>100 ps) response in the range of intermolecular translational modes of the hydrogen bond network of water (>100 cm−1), resembling heating. Classical molecular dynamics simulations further support a mechanism in which the fluctuating dipole moments of excitons create frictional forces. These findings establish light-induced quantum friction between excitons in SWCNTs and water and show that electronic excitations can be used to control nanoscale motion and fluid properties. Near-infrared fluorescent carbon nanotubes exhibit light-induced quantum friction in water, in which exciton interactions slow nanoscale motion and enable optical control of diffusion and fluid dynamics.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2305.06145

Causal Clothes-Invariant Feature Learning for Cloth-Changing Person Re-ID

Authors:

Xulin Li↗Yan Lu↗Bin Liu↗Jiaze Li↗Yating Liu↗Qi Chu↗Mang Ye↗Wanli Ouyang↗Nenghai Yu↗

In cloth-changing person re-identification (CCReID), it is critical to learn clothes-invariant feature, which can provide discriminative ID features that remain robust against clothing changes. However, a spurious correlation currently limits existing ReID methods from effectively extracting these clothing-invariant features. This spurious correlation arises from clothing ownership: clothing is rarely shared across different identities, so models tend to memorize clothing cues for identity recognition, and this strategy generalizes poorly to unseen clothing. In this paper, we propose Causal Clothes-Invariant Learning (CCIL), which explicitly shifts CC-ReID from likelihood learning P (Y|X) to causal intervention learning P (Y|do(X)) to block the clothing shortcut. CCIL realizes this intervention through three modules: a Confounder Dictionary, an Intervention Module, and Disentangle Regularization. The causality-based modeling makes the entire model naturally clothes-invariant, effectively preventing the capture of spurious correlations in feature learning. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of CCIL. On PRCC and DeepChange datasets, CCIL achieves Rank-1 accuracies of 66.4% and 59.2%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 1.4 and 4.1 percentage points, respectively.

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24.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20546

Predictability as a Fine-Grained Measure for Privacy

Authors:

Linda Lu↗Karthik Sridharan↗

arXiv:2606.20546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) ensures rigorous individual-level privacy guarantees against even the most knowledgeable attackers, but its worst-case nature can impose a costly privacy-accuracy tradeoff. We introduce privacy via predictability, a fine-grained framework that explicitly incorporates the attacker's core knowledge, a compromised portion of the dataset generated by a stochastic process, and a specified family of queries. Predictability measures privacy leakage as the incremental gain in an attacker's ability to predict sensitive information about unknown individuals after observing the algorithm's output, beyond what can already be inferred from the compromised data. We show that predictability and DP are generally incomparable: each can be small while the other is large. However, in the worst-case regime where all but one individual is compromised, and all binary queries are considered sensitive, predictability implies mutual-information DP. More generally, predictability provides a finer-grained privacy metric tailored to specific sensitive information and specific attacker models. We introduce a general framework, using the generalized method of moments (GMM), to analyze asymptotic predictability when the compromised data is generated by a stationary, ergodic, mixing process. Using this analysis, we derive a predictability-calibrated output perturbation scheme for ERM. Our approach is complementary to DP and can be used alongside DP to provide fine-grained privacy control.

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25.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:0872e4c95fb143afdd01b7f44fc776fb

Mapping abstraction and metacognition onto distinct transdiagnostic symptom profiles

Authors:

Oka↗Kunisato↗Koizumi↗Murakami↗Six↗Taylor↗J. E↗Cortese↗

Transdiagnostic psychiatric research on reward-guided learning has largely focused on simple associative processes, leaving it unclear whether or how higher-level processes are disrupted. Here, we studied how abstraction, the ability to extract relevant features from complex information, and metacognition, the ability to monitor and evaluate one's own mental processes, map onto specific transdiagnostic dimensions. Using an online sample (N = 249), we examined associations between these processes and three cross-culturally robust transdiagnostic dimensions derived from a large existing dataset (N = 19,505): Compulsive hypersensitivity, Social withdrawal, and Addictive behaviours. Computational modelling of an abstract representation learning task with confidence judgments revealed that Compulsive hypersensitivity was negatively associated with both abstraction ability (pboot = 0.003) and metacognitive sensitivity (pboot = 0.005), while Social withdrawal was positively associated with metacognitive sensitivity alone (pboot = 0.002). Moreover, transdiagnostic dimensions revealed more coherent associations with higher-order cognition than symptom-level analyses, highlighting the added value of examining psychopathology at the factor rather than the symptom level. These findings portray a hierarchical view of cognitive dysfunctions in psychopathology and point to representational and metacognitive processes as potential targets for transdiagnostic intervention.

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