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01.
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.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Multi-agent imitation learning with function approximation: Linear Markov games and beyond

arXiv:2602.22810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we present the first theoretical analysis of multi-agent imitation learning (MAIL) in linear Markov games where both the transition dynamics and each agent's reward function are linear in some given features. We demonstrate that by leveraging this structure, it is possible to replace the state-action level "all policy deviation concentrability coefficient" (Freihaut et al., arXiv:2510.09325) with a concentrability coefficient defined at the feature level which can be much smaller than the state-action analog when the features are informative about states' similarity. Furthermore, to circumvent the need for any concentrability coefficient, we turn to the interactive setting. We provide the first, computationally efficient, interactive MAIL algorithm for linear Markov games and show that its sample complexity depends only on the dimension of the feature map $d$. Building on these theoretical findings, we propose a deep MAIL interactive algorithm which clearly outperforms BC on games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect4.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RGFVR: Reference-Guided Face Video Restoration with Flow Matching

Face video restoration from degraded observations is challenging, as it requires simultaneously recovering visual fidelity, temporal consistency, and subject identity. Existing approaches are often either reference-free, which can lead to identity loss when person-specific facial details are lost, or subject-specific, which limits generalization to unseen identities. We propose a subject-agnostic, reference-guided framework for identity-preserving face video restoration. Our method introduces bimodal perceptual-descriptive identity conditioning into a pretrained flow-based text-to-video generator and employs a two-stage training strategy to strengthen identity guidance during restoration. Experiments show that our approach improves restoration fidelity, temporal consistency, and identity preservation, achieving superior performance under challenging video degradations, including downsampling, blur, noise, and compression artifacts. The code is available under: https://github.com/batuhanntosun/RG-FVR.

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

Adaptive $k$NN graph model

arXiv:2601.16509v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The $k$-nearest neighbors ($k$NN) algorithm is a cornerstone of non-parametric classification in artificial intelligence, yet its deployment in large-scale applications is persistently constrained by the computational trade-off between inference speed and accuracy. Existing approximate nearest neighbor solutions accelerate retrieval but often degrade classification precision and lack adaptability in selecting the optimal neighborhood size ($k$). Here, we present an adaptive graph model that decouples inference latency from computational complexity. By integrating a Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graph with a pre-computed voting mechanism, our framework completely transfers the computational burden of neighbor selection and weighting to the training phase. Within this topological structure, higher graph layers enable rapid navigation, while lower layers encode precise, node-specific decision boundaries with adaptive neighbor counts. Benchmarking against eight state-of-the-art baselines across six diverse datasets, we demonstrate that this architecture significantly accelerates inference speeds, achieving real-time performance, without compromising classification accuracy. These findings offer a scalable, robust solution to the inherent inference bottleneck of $k$NN, laying an adaptive structural foundation for graph-based nonparametric learning.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

AVOC: Enhancing Hour-Level Audio-Video Understanding in Omni-Modal LLMs via Retrieval-Inspired Token Compression

Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved remarkable progress in short-form audio-video understanding, yet long-form audio-video comprehension remains challenged by limited context windows and severe information redundancy. To address these bottlenecks, we propose AVOC, a framework for long-form audio-video understanding in Omni-modal Large Language Models. AVOC introduces a learnable token compression module between the modality encoders and the LLM backbone. We reframe multimodal token compression as a top-$K$ retrieval problem: given a fixed context budget, the module must retrieve a compact subset of tokens that best supports answering the user query. We draw inspiration from three classical Information Retrieval criteria for selecting informative units from a large candidate pool: relevance, importance, and diversity. AVOC instantiates each criterion as a tailored mechanism for audio-video understanding, and integrates them into a unified retrieval-style compression pipeline. Experiments show that AVOC achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-form audio-video benchmarks, surpassing the second-best model by 4.9 and 5.5 points in average accuracy on OmniVideoBench and LVOmniBench, respectively. Moreover, AVOC maintains robust performance on Audio-Video Needle-in-a-Haystack task at durations up to one hour.

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

Towards an Agent-First Web: Redesigning the Web for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.19116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The World Wide Web was built on an assumption held for three decades: the primary consumer of web content is a human being. This permeates every layer; its access model presumes human visitors, its economics rest on human attention, and its content targets human perception. The rapid emergence of AI agents as intermediaries between humans and web content invalidates this assumption. Yet the web resists agents through blanket blocking, CAPTCHA-based exclusion, and economic models that treat agent access as extraction rather than legitimate interaction. This paper proposes a principled redesign across three layers. At the access layer, agents acting for humans should inherit equivalent access rights, governed by rate limiting and agent identification metadata in HTTP requests, analogous to browser headers, alongside a dual-layer architecture serving human-readable and agent-optimized content from the same domain. At the economic layer, we propose an intent-based tier framework grounded in the agent-as-human-proxy principle: an agent's economic obligation mirrors that of the human it represents. A token-based subscription model meters content in tokens rather than pageviews, alongside a commissioned content economy anchoring AI content production in human intentionality. At the content layer, we identify epistemic recursion, the self-referential loop in which AI-generated content is consumed by agents to produce further content, progressively detaching web knowledge from human ground truth. We propose the Agent Text Markup Language (ATML), a four-level human supervision tier model, and a cryptographic provenance chain to counter this threat. Together these constitute ten design principles for an agent-first internet, one in which agents are first-class citizens whose integration requires renegotiating the web's foundational social contract across access, economics, and content.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

DREAM: Dense Retrieval Embeddings via Autoregressive Modeling

Dense retrieval embedding models are a fundamental component of modern retrieval-based AI systems. Most dense retrievers are trained with contrastive objectives, which require labeled positive and negative document pairs that are often costly and difficult to obtain. In this work, we investigate whether the autoregressive next-token prediction objective of a large language model (LLM) can provide supervision for dense retrieval. The intuition is simple: if a document contains information relevant to a query, conditioning on that document should make the target output easier for the LLM to predict. A key challenge is that the next-token prediction loss is computed inside the LLM, while the retriever is a separate embedding model. To address this challenge, we propose DREAM (Dense Retrieval Embeddings via Autoregressive Modeling), which injects retriever-generated query-document similarity scores into selected attention heads of a frozen LLM. During training, these scores determine how much attention each candidate document receives while the LLM predicts the target output. The resulting prediction loss provides gradients for retriever training through the attention mechanism. We evaluate DREAM on retrieval benchmarks BEIR and RTEB using embedding backbones ranging from 0.5B to 3B parameters. DREAM consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model scales. These results demonstrate that DREAM provides a promising approach for training dense retrievers through autoregressive modeling.

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

An Attention Mechanism for Robust Multimodal Integration in a Global Workspace Architecture

arXiv:2602.08597v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robust multimodal systems must remain effective when some modalities are noisy, degraded, or unreliable. Existing multimodal fusion methods often learn modality selection jointly with representation learning, making it difficult to determine whether robustness comes from the selector itself or from full end-to-end co-adaptation. Motivated by Global Workspace Theory (GWT), we study this question using a lightweight top-down modality selector operating on top of a frozen multimodal global workspace. We evaluate our method on two multimodal datasets of increasing complexity: Simple Shapes and MM-IMDb 1.0, under structured modality corruptions. The selector improves robustness while using far fewer trainable parameters than end-to-end attention baselines, and the learned selection strategy transfers better across downstream tasks, corruption regimes, and even to a previously unseen modality. Beyond explicit corruption settings, on the MM-IMDb 1.0 benchmark, we show that the same mechanism improves the global workspace over its no-attention counterpart and yields decent benchmark performance.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scalar-Stepsize Nonuniform Monte Carlo Optimistic Policy Iteration: A Certified Counterexample

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tsitsiklis proved convergence of Monte Carlo optimistic policy iteration under a uniform update structure and identified nonuniform update frequencies as a delicate obstruction. We give a certified negative answer for the natural scalar-stepsize, unnormalized asynchronous state-value recursion with fixed nonuniform state-selection probabilities. In a three-state, two-action discounted MDP, the nonuniform update frequencies induce a diagonally scaled greedy-policy mean field with a certified nonconstant attracting hybrid periodic orbit. With a bounded unbiased geometric-horizon estimator and Robbins–Monro stepsizes, the original stochastic recursion remains trapped near the cycle with positive probability and therefore fails to converge. The example pinpoints a geometric obstruction: uniform sampling gives radial residual contraction, whereas scalar nonuniform sampling anisotropically distorts the residual dynamics and can generate switched attracting cycles.

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

Multi-HMR 2: Multi-Person Camera-Centric Human Detection, Mesh Recovery and Tracking

Most advances in human mesh recovery (HMR) have focused on pelvis-centered recovery, overlooking metric 3D localization and detection accuracy in the camera coordinate system - two key factors for real-world applications such as human-robot interaction and social scene understanding. Current evaluation protocols often ignore these aspects, emphasizing per-person, root-centered recovery rather than camera-space perception. As a result, existing approaches rely on fixed camera assumptions or handcrafted post-processing, limiting their robustness and practical deployment. We introduce Multi-HMR 2, a simple yet robust DETR-based framework for Multi-person Camera-centric Human detection, mesh Recovery, and tracking. Multi-HMR 2 predicts a scene-consistent camera together with human meshes, enabling metric 3D localization without ground-truth intrinsics. Moreover, by distilling image-based memory features from SAM2, Multi-HMR 2 extends to tracking, achieving consistent identity association without video supervision. Despite its conceptual simplicity - no handcrafted components, no video input, and no ground-truth cameras - Multi-HMR 2 achieves state-of-the-art pelvis-centered performance while substantially improving detection accuracy and metric 3D localization.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Towards a Robust cell-free DNA Isolation Protocol for NGS Applications in a Clinical Molecular Diagnostics Setting

Cell-free DNA (cfDNA), released from apoptotic and necrotic cells into body fluids, represents a non-invasive source of genetic information for disease prediction, diagnosis, and monitoring. However, its low physiological abundance makes cfDNA highly susceptible to pre-analytical influences. In particular, genomic DNA (gDNA) released from lysed white blood cells (WBCs) can contaminate plasma and compromise downstream cfDNA analyses. This study evaluated the impact of different blood collection tubes and isolation methods on cfDNA stability and yield. Blood samples from 13 healthy donors were collected using cfDNA-stabilizing tubes (Cell-Free DNA BCT, Streck; S-Monovette cfDNA Exact, Sarstedt) and stored at room temperature for 1, 5, or 10 days before plasma isolation. CfDNA was extracted using either a magnetic bead-based method or a silica column-based approach. DNA quantity and quality were assessed by fluorometric quantification, automated fragment analysis, and gene-specific quantitative PCR. Streck-based workflows maintained stable cfDNA yields and characteristic mononucleosomal fragmentation profiles across all storage times. In contrast, Sarstedt tubes showed reduced cfDNA concentrations after 5 days and a pronounced increase at 10 Days, accompanied by high-molecular weight DNA patterns consistent with WBC lysis. These trends were largely independent of the extraction method. Overall, the results demonstrate that blood collection tube chemistry critically influences cfDNA integrity during delayed processing. Streck tubes, particularly when combined with QIAamp, provided the most robust and reproducible workflow for routine molecular diagnostics, whereas Sarstedt tubes produced physiologically implausible results after extended storage.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Trade-offs in Medical LLM Adaptation: An Empirical Study in French QA

The development of large language models (LLMs) has led to an increased focus on their adaptation to specialized domains and languages, yet the effectiveness of domain adaptation strategies remains unclear. We present a study of medical domain adaptation using French medical question-answering (QA) as a case study. We compare continual pretraining (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and their combination across three model families, multiple sizes, and three initialization types, explicitly disentangling adaptation effects from base model choice. We evaluate both multiple-choice (MCQA) and open-ended QA (OEQA) under greedy and constrained decoding using automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. For MCQA, CPT+SFT most often achieves the best scores, but gains over SFT are small and frequently not statistically significant, making SFT a strong and cost-effective default. For OEQA, CPT consistently improves overlap-based metrics, while SFT often degrades generation quality; instruction tuning and CPT+SFT are preferred by LLM-based evaluation. Cross-lingual experiments further show effective transfer from French adaptation to English benchmarks. Overall, we provide practical guidelines for selecting adaptation strategies under computational constraints.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On multidimensional infinite dihedral group extensions of Gibbs Markov maps

arXiv:2601.08961v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We obtain a local central limit theorem for cocycles associated with a class of non abelian and non compact group extensions of Gibbs Markov maps. This class consists of multidimensional infinite dihedral groups. Unlike in the set up of the random walks on groups, we cannot use the convolution of measures on the group and instead we resort to an approach based on irreducible representations. Depending on the dimension of the group, we obtain either mixing, and thus ergodicity, or dissipativity. Also, we obtain the asymptotics of the first return time of the group extension to the origin.

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

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

arXiv:2606.12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone. As a result, both human instructions and zero-shot language models can fail to reliably steer VLAs toward successful task execution. In this work, we propose a framework that interactively searches for language sequences that improve closed-loop VLA task performance, distills these sequences into a test-time language feedback policy (LFP), and learns an improvement head that predicts when language steering will improve performance. We conformalize this improvement head to prevent harmful steering interventions, where the LFP decreases task performance relative to the original instruction on out-of-distribution scenarios. Crucially, our approach operates on arbitrary frozen pre-trained VLAs, requiring neither access to the original training distribution nor fine-tuning of the underlying model. On seen environments, our conformalized LFP improves base VLA performance by 24.7% in simulation and 65.0% in hardware. On visual and semantic perturbations, our conformalized LFP has strong harmlessness guarantees, and produces recovery behaviors not observed with open-loop prompting.

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

Robust Local Polynomial Regression with Similarity Kernels

Authors:

arXiv:2501.10729v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Local Polynomial Regression (LPR) is a widely used nonparametric method for modeling complex relationships due to its flexibility and simplicity. It estimates a regression function by fitting low-degree polynomials to localized subsets of the data, weighted by proximity. However, traditional LPR is sensitive to outliers and high-leverage points, which can significantly affect estimation accuracy. This paper revisits the kernel function used to compute regression weights and proposes a novel framework that incorporates both predictor and response variables in the weighting mechanism. The focus of this work is a conditional density kernel that robustly estimates weights by mitigating the influence of outliers through localized density estimation. The proposed method is implemented in Python and is publicly available at https://github.com/yaniv-shulman/rsklpr. The population analysis quantifies the bias induced by density-based robust weighting, and the reported experiments show lower empirical bias than iterative robust LOWESS while remaining competitive with standard LOWESS. This advancement provides a promising extension to traditional LPR, opening new possibilities for robust regression applications.

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

TransitNet: A Compact Attention-Augmented Deep Learning Framework for Low-SNR Transit Blind Searches

arXiv:2606.18932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by the observational incompleteness of intermediate-to-long-period Earth-size planets, we present TransitNet, a compact attention-augmented deep-learning framework for low-SNR transit blind searches. To enable realistic method development and objective threshold calibration under blind-search conditions, we develop a unified dataset construction, benchmarking, and threshold-selection framework. On recovery benchmarks constructed from unseen Kepler targets, TransitNet attains 95.2 percent accuracy in the challenging SNR range of 6 to 8 and outperforms both TLS and BLS, achieving ROC-AUC and PR-AP values of 0.974 and 0.982, respectively. In an injected Earth-size and sub-Earth-size transit recovery experiment, TransitNet achieves a recovery rate of 93.0 percent, substantially exceeding those of TLS (63.1 percent) and BLS (60.0 percent). In addition to detection, TransitNet provides attention-based estimates of transit windows and midpoints. On an independent evaluation set, 97.4 percent of injected transits are fully covered by the estimated transit window. Applied to real Kepler observations, the model successfully recovers all 34 selected confirmed Kepler planets, with a mean absolute transit midpoint error of 1.24 hours. The model combines a compact footprint of about 1.5 MB with high inference efficiency, yielding speed-ups of about 12 to 25 times relative to CPU-TLS and about 4 to 5 times relative to CPU-BLS. These results demonstrate that TransitNet provides an accurate, scalable, and computationally efficient framework for low-SNR transit blind searches in the tested regime and motivate its extension to longer-period Earth-size planet searches.

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

When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.05172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Behavior Cloning (BC) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for robot learning. However, BC lacks a self-guided mechanism for online improvement after demonstrations have been collected. Existing offline-to-online learning methods often cause policies to replace previously learned good actions due to a distribution mismatch between offline data and online learning. In this work, we propose Q2RL, Q-Estimation and Q-Gating from BC for Reinforcement Learning, an algorithm for efficient offline-to-online learning. Our method consists of two parts: (1) Q-Estimation extracts a Q-function from a BC policy using a few interaction steps with the environment, followed by online RL with (2) Q-Gating, which switches between BC and RL policy actions based on their respective Q-values to collect samples for RL policy training. Across manipulation tasks from D4RL and robomimic benchmarks, Q2RL outperforms SOTA offline-to-online learning baselines on success rate and time to convergence. Q2RL is efficient enough to be applied in an on-robot RL setting, learning robust policies for contact-rich and high precision manipulation tasks such as pipe assembly and kitting, in 1-2 hours of online interaction, achieving success rates of up to 100% and up to 3.75x improvement against the original BC policy. Code and video are available at https://pages.rai-inst.com/q2rl_website/

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Atlas of glomerular disease-specific genetic effects on blood transcriptome

IgA nephropathy (IgAN), IgA vasculitis (IgAV), focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), membranous nephropathy (MN), and minimal change disease (MCD) account for the majority of idiopathic glomerulo-nephropathies (GN). These disorders involve immune system dysregulation and have a complex genetic architecture. Currently, there are no adequately powered blood transcriptomic datasets coupled to genetic data from patients with GN that can delineate disease-context specific genetic effects on blood immune cell transcriptome. We performed whole genome sequencing coupled with bulk blood transcriptome sequencing on 1,822 participants from the CureGN study, a prospective cohort of participants with a kidney biopsy diagnosis of primary GN. We generated disease-context specific transcriptome-wide maps of gene expression QTL (eQTL), splicing QTL (sQTL), and double strand RNA-editing QTL (edQTL) for FSGS (N=447), IgAN (N=403), IgAV (N=123), MCD (N=408), and MN (N=441), as well as cross-disease maps for all 1,822 participants. Our QTL mapping identified 16,068 eGenes, 4,644 sGenes and 4,611 edQTLs with an FDR

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

PeptiDIA: A Machine Learning Framework for Enhanced Peptide Identification in Fast-Gradient Data-Independent Acquisition Proteomics

Data-independent acquisition (DIA) mass spectrometry has become increasingly prevalent in proteomics as advances in instrumentation, chromatography, and computational analysis have enabled robust proteome identification across complex biological samples. However, analytical depth achieved with fast chromatographic gradients remains lower than that obtained using long-gradients, reflecting a throughput-depth trade-off. Here, we present PeptiDIA, a machine learning framework that enhances peptide identification in fast-gradient DIA data by leveraging paired fast and long-gradient acquisitions from identical samples. PeptiDIA processes DIA-NN outputs generated at relaxed false discovery rate thresholds to obtain expanded candidate peptide pools and trains gradient-boosted decision tree models using long-gradient identifications as reference labels. The model integrates DIA-NN features with engineered peptide descriptors and applies isotonic regression to calibrate probabilities, enabling controlled peptide recovery relative to the long-gradient reference. Applied to human and murine datasets spanning six tissues acquired on an Orbitrap Exploris 480, PeptiDIA increased peptide identifications by 25-34% at 1% target reference-discordance rate (RDR) and increased the number of protein groups containing at least one rescued peptide by 15-17%. Overall, PeptiDIA improves the identification depth of fast-gradient DIA-NN workflows without altering acquisition strategies. The framework is available as a web application and command-line tool at https://github.com/Jordano700/PeptiDIA.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

oxo-flow: compiled, memory-safe bioinformatics workflow orchestration

Authors:

Bioinformatics analyses depend on workflow engines to coordinate dozens of computational tools across complex dependency chains. The most widely adopted engines-Snakemake, Nextflow, the Common Workflow Language (CWL), and the Workflow Description Language (WDL)-run on interpreted or just-in-time (JIT) compiled language runtimes, incurring hundreds of milliseconds of startup latency and providing no compile-time safety guarantees from the host language. We developed oxo-flow, a workflow engine written in Rust that compiles to a single native binary. On an Apple M5 processor, oxo-flow parses, validates, and dry-runs a production-scale workflow in roughly 22 milliseconds-before Snakemake or Nextflow have finished loading their runtime environments. Peak memory usage is 16 megabytes, representing six- to seven-fold reductions relative to Snakemake and Nextflow. Dry-run latency is essentially independent of workflow size: a hundred-fold increase in rule count adds approximately 0.4 milliseconds. oxo-flow integrates 31 command-line tools, a REST interface with 60 endpoints, an embedded web application, and native cluster submission into a single 10-megabyte binary. It provides per-rule environment isolation across seven backends, checkpoint-based fault tolerance with cryptographic output verification, and a formal installation and operational qualification protocol for regulated laboratory environments. Ten curated workflows and three demonstration pipeline repositories are available. oxo-flow is freely available under Apache License 2.0 at https://github.com/Traitome/oxo-flow.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Generalised Medical Phrase Grounding

Medical phrase grounding (MPG) maps textual descriptions of radiological findings to corresponding image regions. These grounded reports are easier to interpret, especially for non-experts. Existing MPG systems mostly follow the referring expression comprehension (REC) paradigm and return exactly one bounding box per phrase. Real reports often violate this assumption. They contain multi-region findings, non-diagnostic text, and non-groundable phrases, such as negations or descriptions of normal anatomy. Motivated by this, we reformulate the task as generalised medical phrase grounding (GMPG), where each sentence is mapped to zero, one, or multiple scored regions. To realise this formulation, we introduce the first GMPG model: MedGrounder. We adopted a two-stage training regime: pre-training on report sentence–anatomy box alignment datasets and fine-tuning on report sentence–human annotated box datasets. Experiments on PadChest-GR and MS-CXR show that MedGrounder achieves strong zero-shot transfer and outperforms REC-style and grounded report generation baselines on multi-region and non-groundable phrases, while using far fewer human box annotations. Finally, we show that MedGrounder can be composed with existing report generators to produce grounded reports without retraining the generator.

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

RNN(p) for Power Consumption Forecasting

arXiv:2209.01378v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An elementary Recurrent Neural Network that operates on p time lags, called an RNN(p), is the natural generalisation of a linear autoregressive model ARX(p). It is a powerful forecasting tool for variables displaying inherent seasonal patterns across multiple time scales, as is often observed in energy, economic, and financial time series. The architecture of RNN(p) models, characterised by structured feedbacks across time lags, enables the design of efficient training strategies. We conduct a comparative study of learning algorithms for these models, providing a rigorous analysis of their computational complexity and training performance. We present two applications of RNN(p) models in power consumption forecasting, a key domain within the energy sector where accurate forecasts inform both operational and financial decisions. Experimental results show that RNN(p) models achieve excellent forecasting accuracy while maintaining a high degree of interpretability. These features make them well-suited for decision-making in energy markets and other fintech applications where reliable predictions play a significant economic role.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Certifiable Safe RLHF: Semantic Grounding and Fixed Penalty Constraint Optimization for Safer LLM Alignment

arXiv:2510.03520v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ensuring safety is a foundational requirement for large language models (LLMs). Achieving an appropriate balance between enhancing the utility of model outputs and mitigating their potential for harm is a complex and persistent challenge. Contemporary approaches frequently formalize this problem within the framework of Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) and employ established CMDP optimization techniques. However, these methods exhibit two notable limitations. First, their reliance on reward and cost functions renders performance highly sensitive to the underlying scoring mechanism, which must capture semantic meaning rather than being triggered by superficial keywords. Second, CMDP-based training entails tuning dual-variable, a process that is both computationally expensive and does not provide any provable safety guarantee for a fixed dual variable that can be exploitable through adversarial jailbreaks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Certifiable Safe-RLHF (CS-RLHF) that introduces a cost model trained on a large-scale corpus to assign semantically grounded safety scores. In contrast to the lagrangian-based approach, CS-RLHF adopts a rectified penalty-based formulation. This design draws on the theory of exact penalty functions in constrained optimization, wherein constraint satisfaction is enforced directly through a suitably chosen penalty term. With an appropriately scaled penalty, feasibility of the safety constraints can be guaranteed at the optimizer, eliminating the need for dual-variable updates. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that CS-RLHF outperforms state-of-the-art LLM model responses rendering at-least 5 times efficient against nominal and jail-breaking prompts

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

A Global Health Quality Improvement Project: Enhancing Cervical Cancer Awareness and screening in Nigeria

Background Cervical cancer remains a significant global public health challenge, ranking as the fourth most common cancer among women worldwide. According to The World Health Organization (WHO) 604,000 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer globally in 2020, with over 342,000 deaths amongst this group [1]. Despite its high mortality, cervical cancer is largely preventable through early detection and vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes nearly all cases of cervical cancer [1,2] In Nigeria, it is the second most common cancer among women in Nigeria and a leading cause of cancer-related deaths, with low screening rates exacerbating late diagnoses and poor outcomes [1]. Despite global commitments to elimination with Pap smear screening and HPV vaccination, less than 10% of women in Nigeria have undergone screening due to misconceptions, stigma, and limited awareness. Educational interventions may improve awareness and promote screening behaviors. This global health quality improvement (QI) project aimed to enhance cervical cancer awareness and increase Pap smear uptake at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Clinic in Abuja, Nigeria. Methods In November 2024, we conducted a health education intervention at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) through a structured educational session for male and female CBN staff members. The session focused on cervical cancer prevention, risk factors, and screening guidelines. Additionally, cervical cancer awareness was raised via email, social media, and electronic bulletin board. Participants completed pre and post-interventions surveys assessing cervical cancer knowledge across 10 key items and demographic characteristics. Pap smear uptake was assessed using the CBN clinic records for three months before and after the intervention. Institutional approval was obtained from CBN and external institutional review board approval was not required. Results 188 participants attended the health education session with 124 survey responses (70 pre-event, 54 post-event). Participants were mostly women aged 30-39. Post-intervention, eight of ten survey questions showed improved knowledge, with five demonstrating statistically significant gains: understanding Pap smear frequency (p