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

Do we have the knowledge we need? Rethinking human-AI decision-making in corporations

arXiv:2606.15575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Organizational knowledge is fragmented across a variety of software systems, tacit expertise, and manual documents that have traditionally been designed for human consumption. As AI systems are increasingly deployed and granted decision-making roles, they require access to this knowledge. This raises two questions: how should organizations store and maintain knowledge so that it remains accessible to both humans and future AI systems, and how should agency be allocated between humans and AI across tasks with different risks and levels of uncertainty? In this position paper, we describe how organizational knowledge evolves and contribute a framework that maps task attributes and knowledge availability to recommended agency allocations and control mechanisms. We illustrate the applicability of the framework on two different manufacturing tasks: a routine operation (visual quality inspection) and a one-off strategic decision (factory location), and conclude with opportunities for future research.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Evaluative Judgement in Teaching AI-based Translation: A Class-room Case Study of AI-Mediated Translation and Post-Editing

作者:

Drawing on 23 anonymized student pro-jects from a fourth-year Machine Transla-tion and Post-editing course in a BA-level translation programme, this paper exam-ines how structured comparison of gen-eral-purpose LLMs and online MT sys-tems can elicit evaluative judgement in AI-mediated translation. Students translat-ed short specialised English Wikipedia texts into Catalan or Spanish, generated four system outputs, evaluated them using automatic metrics and human adequa-cy/fluency assessment, selected one output for post-editing, and justified their deci-sion in written reports. Descriptive counts are reported for all 23 projects, while qualitative interpretation is based on the 22 cases accompanied by written reports. Results show that students did not treat automatic metrics as final authority: final post-editing selections often diverged from metric rankings and were justified through adequacy, fluency, terminology, naturalness, and expected post-editing ef-fort. The study therefore does not bench-mark systems under controlled conditions; it analyses how students justified system choice within an authentic classroom as-signment.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Smoothness-Based Derandomization of PAC-Bayes Bounds

arXiv:2606.19105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study PAC-Bayes derandomization for smooth loss functions. Our goal is to obtain generalization bounds that hold with high probability for deterministic predictors by exploiting smoothness properties of both the loss and the predictor class. We show that passing from the Gibbs predictor to the deterministic predictor at the posterior mean has a precise cost, given by the generalization gap of the Jensen gap class. We control this class through its Rademacher complexity, leading to bounds for deterministic predictors that involve flatness quantities expressed in terms of parameter Jacobians and Hessians of the score map. The framework applies to both bounded and unbounded smooth loss functions, and we specialize the results to linear predictors and smooth neural networks. Finally, the Jacobian and Hessian quantities appearing in the theory motivate a practical regularizer. For BatchNorm networks, we compute this regularizer with respect to effective BatchNorm weights obtained by folding the BatchNorm transformation into the adjacent affine weights. Experiments on CIFAR-10 illustrate the behavior of this regularizer under different batch sizes.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

PoQ-Judge: A Multi-Architecture Evaluation Framework for Cost-Aware Proof-of-Quality in Decentralized LLM Inference

Decentralized LLM inference networks need lightweight, reference-free quality evaluation for Proof of Quality (PoQ). We present PoQ-Judge, a framework that trains dedicated judge models to score query-output pairs without ground-truth references. We study three architectures across the quality-cost tradeoff: a TextCNN judge, a MiniLM cross-encoder, and a DeBERTa judge. Using two-stage training on UltraFeedback plus GPT-labeled in-domain data, the best model reaches 0.747 Pearson correlation with the ground-truth proxy on a held-out test set, outperforming reference-based evaluators from prior work. As a reference-free component in composite scoring, it achieves 0.645 Pearson correlation, matching the best single reference-based evaluator while removing the need for reference answers. We also show that online calibration identifies semantic quality as the dominant dimension and that cascade evaluation reduces cost by 72.7 percent with only modest quality loss. Results are much stronger on QA than summarization, pointing to proxy quality as the main remaining limitation.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

uva-irlab-conv at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Multi-Turn RAG with Learned Sparse Retrieval and Listwise Reranking

This report describes our participation in SemEval-2026 Task 8 on multi-turn retrieval and question answering. The task evaluates conversational systems across four domains (finance, cloud documentation, government, Wikipedia), and includes unanswerable queries where the available collection does not contain sufficient evidence to produce a complete response. We propose a multi-turn retrieval-augmented generation pipeline that combines learned sparse retrieval with LLM-based reranking and generation. Using sparse retrieval as the primary retrieval method, we leverage its strong generalization across domains. In addition, we make use of the long-context capabilities of LLMs for conversational query rewriting, pointwise and listwise reranking, and generating the final response, each conditioned on the full conversational history. This multi-step design enables effective integration of conversational context throughout retrieval and generation, improving robustness across domains.

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

AI Contagion in Social Networks

arXiv:2606.15206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study how artificial intelligence (AI) interacts with social communication networks to shape the stability of collective knowledge. Agents exchange information through a network while receiving AI-generated content, and AI systems retrain on the aggregate social information they influence. This interaction generates two feedback forces: an AI contagion channel, through which distortions diffuse across the network, and an AI social distortion multiplier, through which retraining amplifies past errors. Despite the high dimensionality of the environment, we show that the long-run behavior of the system admits a two-dimensional representation whose spectral radius determines whether AI-mediated information systems are dynamically stable or unstable. We characterize a sharp regulatory frontier identifying the minimum filtering required for stability and show how network topology shapes systemic informational risk.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

SuperThoughts: Reasoning Tokens in Superposition

Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves LLM problem-solving but is computationally expensive due to sequential token generation. While recent works explore reasoning in continuous latent spaces to bypass discrete token generation, they often struggle with training stability and fail to scale to complex, long-horizon tasks due to lack of supervision signal. We propose SuperThoughts, which compresses pairs of consecutive CoT tokens into single latent representations and decodes two tokens per step via a lightweight Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) module. This preserves discrete token supervision at training time while doubling throughput at inference time. We finetune Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-14B-Instruct, and evaluate on MATH500, AMC, OlympiadBench, and GPQA-Diamond. With a confidence-based adaptive mechanism that falls back to standard decoding when uncertain, SuperThoughts achieves $\sim$20–30\% CoT length reduction while maintaining accuracy with minimal degradation (1-2 points accuracy drop on most tasks).

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for Antibody Sequence-Structure Design

Antibodies specifically recognize antigens and play a central role in therapeutic discovery. Designing antibodies for a given antigen remains challenging because antigen-antibody complex data are limited, whereas the sequence and conformational spaces of complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) are large. Retrieved CDR templates from databases or candidate libraries can narrow the design space and improve controllability, but retrieval for novel antigens is often sparse and imperfect; treating retrieved templates as hard conditions can bias the denoising process and cause negative transfer. To address this problem, we propose Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for antibody sequence-structure design (NT-ABDiff), a joint diffusion framework that treats candidate CDR-only templates as optional and potentially unreliable conditions. NT-ABDiff uses reliability-aware template modulation to estimate the context-conditioned usefulness of each candidate and to adaptively reweight and fuse multiple templates during conditioning. We further train the model with mixed-quality and corrupted templates as conditional perturbation regularization, encouraging the denoiser to exploit informative templates while remaining stable when templates are uninformative. Experiments under controlled template shifts and a train-set retrieval evaluation show that NT-ABDiff improves CDR-H3 sequence recovery and structural accuracy over strong baselines, while retaining robustness to missing, mismatched, and corrupted templates. Under a stringent random-template CDR-H3 evaluation, NT-ABDiff improves amino-acid recovery (AAR) from 30.03% to 39.47% and reduces RMSD from 3.160 to 2.915A; with train-set retrieval candidates, it achieves 39.50% AAR and 2.76 {ring} A RMSD. Code, processed splits, {ring} configuration files, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/ShiDeng7rz/NT-ABDiff.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

KFTD: Koopman-Fourier Time-Differentiable Network for Continuous Ocean Spatiotemporal Forecasting

arXiv:2606.17070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate oceanic forecasting is critical for climate monitoring and disaster early warning. However, ocean spatiotemporal forecasting encounters the double challenges of modeling complex dynamical systems and ensuring computational efficiency. We present Koopman Fourier Time-Differentiable (KFTD) Network, a time continuous twostage paradigm that decouples interpolation from prediction to achieve efficient and scalable spatiotemporal modeling. We map complex nonlinear dynamics into the Koopman linear space and exploit Fourier analysis to enable continuous time interpolation at arbitrary sub-steps. A lightweight residual network consumes the high fidelity intermediate states to yield the final forecast. Unlike diffusion models, KFTD eliminates multi step noise sampling and directly evolves the system in continuous time, yielding a 4 computational speedup. We further introduce a DPP Loss that supports arbitrary PDE constraints in an endtoend manner, breaking the physical consistency bottleneck of pure data-driven approaches. Empirical results on four ocean datasets confirm that our continuous time framework reduces MSE by an average of 5.6% (up to 12.7% for SST) and improves efficiency over MCVD by 76.25%.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Faking entanglement with imperceptible measurement deviations

arXiv:2606.20396v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum entanglement is a central resource underpinning emerging quantum technologies, enabling capabilities beyond those of classical systems. Accurate verification of entanglement is therefore crucial. However, experimental schemes usually rely on the assumption that quantum measurements can be realized exactly. As the complexity of a quantum system grows, this assumption typically becomes increasingly unrealistic, therefore leading to a widening mismatch between theoretical models and experimental implementations. Here we demonstrate that arbitrarily small measurement errors, when adversarially encoded in the measurement apparatus, can lead to the false certification of high-dimensional entanglement in systems that are, in fact, separable. This is achieved by introducing explicit hacking attacks to measurement devices in well-established entanglement verification tests. We further experimentally demonstrate this effect using classical photonic states encoded in the spatial degree of freedom, spanning up to 61 dimensions with measurement fidelity errors as low as 0.23%. Our results uncover a fundamental vulnerability in current methods for high-dimensional entanglement detection, highlighting the susceptibility of complex quantum devices to small adversarial perturbations. The findings underscore the need for developing secure verification of quantum information that is robust to bounded discrepancies between theory and experiment.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

RedactionBench

Large Language Models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains that require redaction of personally identifiable information (PII). While redacting PII is a data cleaning prerequisite, existing benchmarks conflate extraction mechanics with privacy semantics. A public phone number is not equivalent to a phone number in a medical record. Whether information constitutes a violation depends heavily on who holds it, why, and in what context, fundamentally differentiating redaction from simple entity recognition. Grounded in contextual integrity, we introduce RedactionBench, a manually annotated benchmark comprising 200 diverse documents across 11 domains, mostly seeded from real-world sources. We also introduce R-Score, a novel character-level metric that treats semantically similar redactions equally and nullifies shallow formatting choices, such as varying masking styles for phone numbers. Evaluations across Named Entity Recognition models, entity extraction Small Language Models, and frontier models equipped with agentic tools demonstrate that contextual redaction remains an unsolved problem. A human evaluation with over 80 users on RedactionBench reveals a stark dichotomy in privacy perceptions. Annotators show consensus with target labels for mandatory redactions (89.4 percent) and safe text preservations (94.1 percent), but fail to agree on contextual redactions (47.7 percent). This variance demonstrates the subjective nature of contextual privacy and motivates R-Score, which decouples contextual ambiguity from strict precision. We compare 35 models across families and report their performance in redacting PII. Finally, we release RedactionBench to establish a baseline for future privacy-preserving systems, hoping to inspire efficient model design and standardized evaluations.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

CREST: Deployment-Realistic Hardware-in-the-Loop NAS for Embedded Sensing Systems

arXiv:2606.15004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying neural networks on low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) requires selecting model architectures under tight memory, latency, and energy constraints. Existing workflows often simplify this process along one or more axes: static proxy costs such as FLOPs or parameters, treating one MCU as representative, and continuous-inference tests instead of deployed sensing schedules. These assumptions can mis-rank Pareto-front candidates, miss infeasible deployments, and obscure schedule-dependent energy. We present CREST (Cross-platform Runtime Evaluation and Search Tool), a deployment-realistic hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) neural architecture search (NAS) framework for MCU sensing systems. CREST keeps the optimizer, HIL measurement boundary, logging, and replay workflow fixed while exposing workload, model family, target backend, schedule, quantization, and scoring policy as configurable axes. This makes deployment effects experimentally separable within one reusable workflow. We evaluate CREST on inertial odometry and audio classification across three Arm Cortex-M targets. For inertial odometry, measured-energy HIL search reduces median per-inference energy by 41.7% versus FLOPs-based selection and 40.8% versus memory-traffic-based selection at similar error. FLOPs-based selection also chooses infeasible deployments on memory-constrained targets. On the STM32 N657 target, continuous-inference and duty-cycled searches produce different Pareto frontiers. For audio classification, the same application-level policy selects different DS-CNN architectures on different boards, and cross-board replay changes deployment cost substantially. Overall, CREST shows that deployment-realistic MCU NAS must jointly optimize model architecture, target platform, runtime schedule, and deployment policy rather than relying only on static proxy costs or continuous-inference measurements.

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

From Detection to Recovery: Operational Analysis on LLM Pre-training with 504 GPUs

arXiv:2605.09370v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale AI training is fundamentally a distributed systems problem, where hardware failures are routine operating conditions rather than rare exceptions, yet public operational evidence from production training clusters remains limited. This report presents an empirical analysis of a 63-node NVIDIA B200 production cluster (504 GPUs), using 55 days of Prometheus time-series data and 73 days of operational logs covering 224 multi-node training sessions. The environment is cross-organizational: five parties (SKT, Upstage, Lablup, NVIDIA Korea, VAST Data) share a unified monitoring pipeline. This enabled joint diagnosis of a 60-node-scale storage I/O bottleneck absent in 2-4-node tests, a production-scale phenomenon no single team could isolate alone. We perform three quantitative analyses yielding four findings. First, over 751 Prometheus metrics and 10 XID-identified GPU failures, no single metric is consistently dominant across failure types, motivating multi-signal detection. Second, 523 checkpoint events trace the save/load path from GPU VRAM to the NFS server: restart loading reaches 21.5% of maximum read bandwidth (700 GB/s) and save bursts 16.0% of maximum write bandwidth (250 GB/s), with NFS/RPC queueing and transport-layer backlog rising together. Third, across 224 sessions over 73 days, node exclusions concentrate so the top 3 of 63 nodes account for over 50%. Fourth, auto-retry chain analysis shows a 33.3% success rate over 12 chains (73 attempts), 2.7x the 12.5% manual rate, with a median retry interval of 11 minutes (IQR 10-11). All analyses are grounded in production infrastructure providing session-level workload management, GPU-centric scheduling, and unified observability.

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

AthDGC: An Open Diachronic Greek Treebank with Indo-European Parallels

AthDGC ("Athens-PROIEL") is an open, end-to-end workflow and dataset. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first openly licensed dependency-parsed treebank of Greek that spans eight diachronic periods, namely Archaic, Classical, Koine, Late Antique, Byzantine, Late Byzantine, Early Modern, and Modern Greek, under a single PROIEL XML 2.0 schema, with verse-level cross-alignment of the New Testament to Latin (Vulgate), Gothic (Wulfila), Old Church Slavonic (Marianus), and Classical Armenian. AthDGC builds on the PROIEL Treebank Family (Haug and Johndal 2008; Eckhoff et al. 2018), which established the schema and the Koine-Greek reference set for the project. Annotation uses the Stanford Stanza PROIEL-trained workflow; sentence-level alignment uses LaBSE, a multilingual sentence-embedding model; word-level alignment uses multilingual-BERT attention through the AwesomeAlign procedure. The v0.4 release provides curated samples and the open-source toolkit; the full annotated corpus partitions remain under v0.5 audit on the Greek national HPC. Quantitative scale, per-witness verse counts, and per-period annotated-row counts are reported in the v0.5 release notes, after the audit pass completes. Concept DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20439182.

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

Redesign Mixture-of-Experts Routers with Manifold Power Iteration

Router is the cornerstone component to the Mixture-of-Experts models. Serving as expert proxies, the rows of the router matrix compute their similarity to the MoE inputs to determine which subset of experts is activated. Ideally, each router row is designed to encode the expert matrix into this representative vector, such that its dot-product with token can better reflect token-expert affinity. However, there exists no design principles to enforce this condensation. In this paper, we propose to align each router row with the principal singular direction of the associated expert, as this direction provides the most expressive mathematical description of a matrix. Based on this principle, we propose a router redesign with Manifold Power Iteration (MPI). Specifically, it introduces a "Power-then-Retract" paradigm, where a power iteration step is performed on the router weights, followed by a retraction to impose a norm constraint to ensure both efficiency and stability. Theoretically, we show that MPI drives router rows to converge toward the principal singular directions of associated experts. Empirically, we pretrain MoE model across scales from 1B to 11B parameters to confirm that this alignment facilitates more effective MoE models.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Beyond Uniform Tokens: Adaptive Compression for Time Series Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled time series (TS) analysis by jointly modeling numerical observations and textual context through a shared token interface. However, TS tokens and prompt tokens exhibit fundamentally different information structures, making uniform token processing inefficient. In this paper, we study token efficiency in TS language modeling from an asymmetric-token perspective. We show that TS tokens have highly uneven spectral contributions, where many tokens share redundant frequency patterns while a small subset preserves critical temporal evidence. We also observe that prompt-token influence attenuates with model depth, suggesting that full prompt retention across all layers is unnecessary. Based on these findings, we develop an adaptive token budgeting framework that compresses TS tokens via frequency-domain structure and progressively reduces prompt tokens across layers. Experiments across forecasting, classification, imputation, and anomaly detection demonstrate up to 7.68$\times$ inference acceleration and performance gains in 78\% of evaluated settings, showing the effectiveness of asymmetric token compression for scalable TS foundation models.

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

GradPower: Powering Gradients for Faster Language Model Pre-Training

arXiv:2505.24275v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose GradPower, a lightweight gradient-transformation technique for accelerating language model pre-training. Given a gradient vector $g=(g_i)_i$, GradPower first applies the elementwise sign-power transformation: $\varphi_p(g)=(sign(g_i)|g_i|^p)_{i}$ for a fixed $p>0$, and then feeds the transformed gradient into a base optimizer. Notably, GradPower requires only a single-line code change and no modifications to the base optimizer's internal logic, including the hyperparameters. When applied to Adam (termed AdamPower), GradPower consistently achieves lower terminal loss across diverse architectures (LLaMA, Qwen2MoE), parameter scales (66M to 2B), datasets (C4, OpenWebText), and learning-rate schedules (cosine, warmup-stable-decay). The most pronounced gains are observed when training modern mixture-of-experts models with warmup-stable-decay schedules. GradPower also integrates seamlessly with other state-of-the-art optimizers, such as Muon, yielding further improvements. Finally, we provide theoretical analyses that reveal the underlying mechanism of GradPower and highlight the influence of gradient noise.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Incremental costs of transitioning from four to eight WHO-recommended antenatal care visits in Uganda: A costing analysis from a societal perspective

Background In 2016, the World Health Organization revised its antenatal care (ANC) recommendation from four to eight visits. For low- and middle-income countries like Uganda, where achieving even four visits remains a challenge, this transition has significant cost implications for both the health system and households. This study estimated the incremental costs of adopting the eight-visit model from a societal perspective. Methods The study was conducted in six government health facilities in southwestern Uganda. A micro-costing approach estimated health facility costs (personnel, equipment, consumables, and overhead). Costs incurred at patients end (transport, ultrasound, medical expenses, and time) were collected from 785 women using a questionnaire, with all costs in 2025 USD. Results For an average of 4.3 visits, total cost per woman was $100.1: facility costs $43.7 (43.7%), and patient costs $56.4 (56.3%). Transitioning to eight visits would increase total cost by $57.8 (57.8%), of which $36.4 (63.0%) would fall on households, equivalent to 68.8% of average monthly household income. Total costs would rise by 55.4% ($115.5 to $179.5) at Health Center IVs and 64.3% ($102.3 to $168.1) at Health Center IIIs, with facility costs up 43.4% and 62.9% and patient costs up 61.2% and 65.7%, respectively. Conclusion Transitioning to eight ANC visits would impose a large financial burden on households, with the incremental patient cost equivalent to more than two-thirds of average monthly household income. Equitable implementation requires improving availability of medicines and diagnostics, subsidizing transport, exploring telemedicine or community-based models, and improving efficiency at lower-tier health centers.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Temporal Validation Changes the Apparent Public-Health Utility of Under-Five Mortality Prediction in Bangladesh: A Four-Round DHS Machine-Learning Study

arXiv:2602.03957v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Background: Under-five mortality in Bangladesh remains uneven despite national progress. DHS-based prediction models may guide targeted follow-up, but only if validation reflects future use. We examined how validation design changes apparent prediction performance. Methods: Four BDHS rounds (2011-2022; 33,962 children; 1,290 deaths) were analysed with a 26-feature pipeline and three model classes under four validation regimes, including cross-survey temporal validation (train 2011+2014, calibrate 2017, test 2022). A 32-unit ELU multilayer perceptron was selected via genetic-algorithm neural architecture search. AUROC used 2,000 bootstrap resamples; screening utility used sensitivity, PPV, and number needed to screen (NNS) at fixed capacity. Results: Validation regime altered public-health interpretation more than model class. NAS MLP AUROC ranged from 0.669 (2022-only random) to 0.775 (pooled random), with temporal AUROC 0.730. At the top-10% temporal threshold, NAS identified 152/355 deaths in 2022 (sensitivity 42.8%, PPV 13.2%, NNS 7.6). NNS across designs ranged from 5.6 to 11.0. Conclusions: Validation-regime choice changed screening workload and apparent policy value more than architecture. Temporal validation supports defensible estimates of follow-up and referral demand; DHS child-mortality studies should report sensitivity, PPV, and NNS before programmatic use.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

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

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

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

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

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

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Bias-mitigated microbiome inference refines coronary artery disease signature

作者:

Roughly half the cells in the human body are microbial, and changes in these communities are increasingly implicated in cardiovascular, metabolic, and oncological diseases. Yet identifying which taxa truly differ in abundance, differential abundance (DA), is distorted by four major sources of bias: loss of total microbial load, taxa measurement efficiencies, arbitrary pseudocounts required to handle pervasive zeros, and contamination which has recently driven retractions. No existing DA method accounts for all four. Here we introduce BootDA, a non-parametric bootstrap-based method that explicitly models each bias source without data transformations, pseudocounts, parametric assumptions, or assuming that most taxa are non-DA. In semi-parametric simulations preserving the sparsity (>70% zeros) and correlation structure of real 16S amplicon data, BootDA achieved the highest sensitivity among tested methods, including ANCOM-BC2, LinDA, MaAsLin 3, and Wilcoxon tests, while controlling the false discovery rate. Performance was retained in low biomass settings when contamination contributed ~50% of counts, and without negative controls, indicating de novo decontamination capability. Applied to a coronary artery disease cohort, BootDA refined the original signature to two co-enriched genera, Klebsiella and Gemmiger, and excluded likely contaminants. BootDA is available as an R package and could generalise to other sparse, high dimensional biological data.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

From Bounding Boxes to Visual Reasoning: An On-Policy Data Annotation Tool for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are rapidly advancing toward sophisticated grounded structured visual reasoning. Training models for such advanced capabilities demands a new genre of data that seamlessly unifies spatial coordinates, open-vocabulary descriptions, structured attributes, and topological relationships into a singular representation. However, existing data annotation tools fundamentally fail to meet these intricate demands, suffering from three systematic bottlenecks: limited expressiveness, severe annotation-training decoupling, and poor data reusability. To bridge this infrastructure gap, we introduce an open-source annotation tool, ScreenAnnotator. First, we define a unified annotation atom schema that binds spatial, semantic, and structural primitives into a single unit. Second, we implement an on-policy annotation loop embedded with a Bayesian Annotation Verifier (BAV). Finally, we design a template-driven multi-task data synthesis process dynamically transforms static atoms into diverse multi-dimensional reasoning tasks, eliminating redundant re-annotation. The on-policy loop drives the annotation accept rate to nearly 100% on flowcharts and 77% on GUI screenshots, while steadily reducing per-image annotation time as labeled data accumulate. In the flowchart scenario, fine-tuning a VLM yields 76.1% average accuracy, which is a 35.1% point absolute gain. Our code is available at: https://github.com/WnQinm/Annotator.

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

HY-WU (Part I): An Extensible Functional Neural Memory Framework and An Instantiation in Text-Guided Image Editing

Foundation models are transitioning from offline predictors to deployed systems expected to operate over long time horizons. In real deployments, objectives are not fixed: domains drift, user preferences evolve, and new tasks appear after the model has shipped. This elevates continual learning and instant personalization from optional features to core architectural requirements. Yet most adaptation pipelines still follow a static weight paradigm: after training (or after any adaptation step), inference executes a single parameter vector regardless of user intent, domain, or instance-specific constraints. This treats the trained or adapted model as a single point in parameter space. In heterogeneous and continually evolving regimes, distinct objectives can induce separated feasible regions over parameters, forcing any single shared update into compromise, interference, or overspecialization. As a result, continual learning and personalization are often implemented as repeated overwriting of shared weights, risking degradation of previously learned behaviors. We propose HY-WU (Weight Unleashing), a memory-first adaptation framework that shifts adaptation pressure away from overwriting a single shared parameter point. HY-WU implements functional (operator-level) memory as a neural module: a generator that synthesizes weight updates on-the-fly from the instance condition, yielding instance-specific operators without test-time optimization.

25.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-29

Availability, appeal, and addictiveness by design: Tobacco and nicotine industry deliberate targeting of youth

by Raglan Maddox, Becky Freeman, Charlotta Pisinger, Emily Banks Contemporary tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed, marketed, and distributed to maximize youth appeal, uptake, dependence, and use. Youth uptake is a predictable outcome of systems designed to maximize product availability, appeal, and addictiveness. In recognition of the World No Tobacco Day 2026 theme, "unmasking the appeal", this Perspective by Raglan Maddox and colleagues discusses how tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed and marketed to maximize youth appeal, and highlight the need for policies to ensure greater industry accountability and to tackle concerning uptake trends.