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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Identifying the risk profile of anemia subtypes and hemodynamic obstetric complications in relation to peripartum cardiomyopathy

Background: Peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM) is a leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide, with worse outcomes associated with African Ancestry and delayed presentation. However, the mechanisms underlying PPCM are incompletely understood. Objective: Use a large, nationwide cohort to explore associations between PPCM and underexplored perinatal risk factors and complications of childbirth. Methods: Public hospital discharge data were obtained from eleven U.S. states between 2003-2019. Delivery hospitalizations, patient characteristics and obstetric complications were identified using ICD-9 and -10 CM codes. Only cases with unique patient identifiers enabling readmission analysis were included. The primary outcome was incident PPCM coded between 30 days antepartum and 150 days postpartum. Results: Of 7,424,916 delivering patients, 5,488 patients were diagnosed with PPCM. Patients with PPCM had higher rates of anemia, anemia of chronic disease (ACD), iron deficiency anemia (IDA), sickle cell disease (SCD), sickle cell trait (SCT), red blood cell (RBC) transfusion, and postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) (p

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

Dual-branch Prompting for Multimodal Machine Translation

Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) typically enhances text-only translation by incorporating aligned visual features. Despite the remarkable progress, state-of-the-art MMT approaches often rely on paired image-text inputs at inference and are sensitive to irrelevant visual noise, which limits their robustness and practical applicability. To address these issues, we propose D2P-MMT, a diffusion-based dual-branch prompting framework for robust vision-guided translation. Specifically, D2P-MMT requires only the source text and a reconstructed image generated by a pre-trained diffusion model, which naturally filters out distracting visual details while preserving semantic cues. During training, the model jointly learns from both authentic and reconstructed images using a dual-branch prompting strategy, encouraging rich cross-modal interactions. To bridge the modality gap and mitigate training-inference discrepancies, we introduce a distributional alignment loss that enforces consistency between the output distributions of the two branches. Extensive experiments on the Multi30K dataset demonstrate that D2P-MMT achieves superior translation performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MentaY/DDP.

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

FreeBridge: Variational Schrödinger Bridges for Cellular Transition Dynamics

arXiv:2606.11286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-content imaging assays quantify cellular responses to chemical and genetic perturbations, yet continuous trajectories of individual cells are unobservable because cells are chemically fixed at acquisition. Perturbation modeling therefore reduces to inferring stochastic transport between control and treated populations observed only as separate marginals. While recent generative models achieve strong end-point alignment, boundary consistency does not determine intermediate evolution: multiple stochastic processes may connect identical marginals while traversing regions unsupported by observed single-cell morphologies. We introduce FreeBridge, a Schrödinger Bridge formulation for single-cell transition modeling under endpoint-only supervision. FreeBridge defines atomic states as instance-segmented single-cell representations, establishing a fixed cellular manifold, and learns stochastic transport constrained within this geometry via empirical latent support regularization. Across BBBC021, RxRx1, and JUMP, FreeBridge maintains competitive or improved endpoint fidelity and mechanism-of-action retention under a unified evaluation protocol; on BBBC021, it further reduces intermediate support violations. These findings highlight the importance of geometric grounding for biologically interpretable perturbation dynamics. Project page: https://y-research-sbu.github.io/FreeBridge/.

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

Mental Health AI Safety Claims Must Preserve Temporal Evidence

arXiv:2605.08827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The safety of mental health AI is often judged at the wrong temporal scale. Current evaluations typically score isolated responses, endpoint outcomes, or aggregate dialogue quality, while clinically consequential failures may arise from the order and accumulation of interactions themselves, including delayed escalation, repeated reinforcement, dependency formation, failed repair, and gradual deterioration across turns. This paper argues that this mismatch is not merely a limitation of evaluation coverage but a source of invalid safety conclusions. We introduce Temporal Safety Non-Identifiability, a formal account of why safety properties that depend on sequence, timing, accumulation, or recovery cannot be certified by protocols that discard those features. From this formalization, we develop SCOPE (Safety Claims Over Preserved Evidence) as a general principle for aligning safety claims with the evidence an evaluation actually retains, and instantiate it as SCOPE-MH, a mental-health instantiation of this reporting standard. We operationalize SCOPE-MH through a proof-of-concept on the AnnoMI dataset of expert-annotated motivational interviewing conversations, which reveals mechanisms of failure that per-turn behavior scoring does not represent. We propose SCOPE-MH as a diagnostic complement to existing evaluation infrastructure and argue that evaluation preserving temporal evidence is necessary, not optional, for safety-critical mental health AI deployment.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Causal Model of Theory of Mind in Conflict for Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.16944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to ascribe mental states to others and use those ascriptions for prediction and inference, is widely assumed to be essential for effective human-machine integration. Existing AI-ToM models address how to mentalize, but leave the question of when largely unaddressed. The central question is: under what situational and agent-level conditions is ToM engagement causally warranted in conflict? This paper presents a structural causal model formalized as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), treating ToM as a mechanism activated by situational and agent-level conditions rather than as an always-on capacity. The model specifies four exogenous variables capturing situational and agent-level conditions, five endogenous mediators, and a mechanistic ToM node producing engagement states through three distinct causal pathways: a tractability pathway, a reasoning-depth pathway, and an enabling-cause pathway. The primary outcome is epistemic accuracy, which decouples social reasoning from behavioral policy and generalizes across social phenomena beyond conflict. The framework gives AI systems a principled, resource-rational decision procedure for mentalizing, with implications for efficiency, trust, and the development of robust artificial social intelligence. Simulation validation, empirical human-machine teaming studies, and ethical considerations arising from conflict-optimized mentalizing are discussed.

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

Finite Resources False Discovery Rate Control in Structured Hypothesis Spaces

arXiv:2606.15393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific discovery relies on large-scale hypothesis testing. However, the capacity to identify true discoveries while controlling false discovery faces major challenges: obtaining relevant reference data (the null distribution) is resource-intensive, leaving finite-data uncertainty, and the procedure should account for the inherent structure in the hypothesis space, when such structure exists. Here, we present a framework for controlling the false discovery rate both when each hypothesis is evidenced only by a finite count of null draws, leaving its p-value uncertain, and when the hypothesis space carries arbitrary structure, requiring only that the structure be represented through a suitable reproducing kernel. We present two decision rules that are both robust to structural mis-specification, yet offer a distinct trade-off between exact FDR control and statistical power. The first rule guarantees exact FDR control; the second maximizes power by adapting mirror-statistic control into count space, utilizing an analytical framework to assess FDR control when exact mirror symmetry is relaxed. Furthermore, the tractability gained by the RKHS framework allows us to directly investigate finite-data uncertainties, which we leverage to suggest a policy for the efficient allocation of null distribution samples.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Mean-Field Games with Average Reward

arXiv:2606.16759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study inverse reinforcement learning for discrete-time, infinite-horizon mean-field games (MFGs) under an average-reward criterion. Expert demonstrations are assumed to arise from a stationary mean-field equilibrium under an unknown reward, and the goal is to recover a policy explaining the observed behaviour via the maximum causal entropy principle. We formulate the inverse problem by enforcing consistency with the expert mean-field term and long-run feature expectations, treating two reward classes within a unified occupation-measure framework. For finite-dimensional linear rewards, we give a convex dual reformulation with an explicit log-partition objective, and prove smoothness and curvature properties justifying constant-step-size gradient descent. For infinite-dimensional RKHS rewards, we develop a Lagrangian relaxation whose inner-maximising policy is characterised by a soft Bellman equation. The main obstacle is the absence of a discount-factor contraction. We resolve this by introducing a minorisation-based sub-stochastic kernel that yields a strict contraction of the soft Bellman operator. We establish Fréchet differentiability and Lipschitz smoothness of the log-likelihood score, leading to a gradient ascent algorithm with convergence guarantees. Two numerical examples, a malware-spread MFG and an RKHS-based consumer-choice model, show that the recovered policies closely match expert behaviour.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.11627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. Although this approach successfully improves the student's no-context performance, we identify an interesting and previously unstudied phenomenon: in many settings, reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student actually degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization demands not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the context is reintroduced, a property we call context removability. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight consistency regularizer that first anchors the student's no-context output via stop-gradient, then penalizes the context-conditioned output for deviating from it via forward KL divergence. This simple addition requires only one extra forward pass per training step, yet it effectively mitigates context-induced degradation and, in many cases, even improves no-context performance. Across 12 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, our method improves context-conditioned accuracy in the majority of settings, reduces context-induced harm in 11 out of 12 settings, and effectively eliminates response-length inflation. A mechanistic case study further confirms that context removability is achieved at the representation level, with hidden states remaining nearly identical regardless of whether the context is present.

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

Cluster Aggregated GAN (CAG): A Cluster-Based Hybrid Model for Appliance Pattern Generation

arXiv:2512.22287v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic appliance data are essential for developing non-intrusive load monitoring algorithms and enabling privacy preserving energy research, yet the scarcity of labeled datasets remains a significant barrier. Recent GAN-based methods have demonstrated the feasibility of synthesizing load patterns, but most existing approaches treat all devices uniformly within a single model, neglecting the behavioral differences between intermittent and continuous appliances and resulting in unstable training and limited output fidelity. To address these limitations, we propose the Cluster Aggregated GAN framework, a hybrid generative approach that routes each appliance to a specialized branch based on its behavioral characteristics. For intermittent appliances, a clustering module groups similar activation patterns and allocates dedicated generators for each cluster, ensuring that both common and rare operational modes receive adequate modeling capacity. Continuous appliances follow a separate branch that employs an LSTM-based generator to capture gradual temporal evolution while maintaining training stability through sequence compression. Extensive experiments on the UVIC smart plug dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms baseline methods across metrics measuring realism, diversity, and training stability, and that integrating clustering as an active generative component substantially improves both interpretability and scalability. These findings establish the proposed framework as an effective approach for synthetic load generation in non-intrusive load monitoring research.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Towards Steering without Sacrifice: Principled Training of Steering Vectors for Prompt-only Interventions

arXiv:2605.05983v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as an effective and lightweight approach to steer behaviors of large language models (LLMs), among which fine-tuned SVs are more effective than optimization-free ones. However, current approaches to fine-tuned SVs suffer from two limitations. First, they require careful selection of steering factors on a per-SV basis to balance steering effectiveness and generation quality at inference time. Second, they operate as full-sequence SVs (FSSVs), which can sacrifice generation quality regardless of factor selection due to excessive intervention on the model generation process. To address the first limitation, we propose joint training of steering factors and directions, such that post-hoc factor selection is no longer required. Using neural network scaling theory, we find that moderately large initialization sizes and learning rates for steering factors are essential for stability and efficiency of joint training. To tackle the second limitation, we draw inspiration from representation fine-tuning and introduce Prompt-only SV (PrOSV), an SV that intervenes only on a few prompt tokens. Our empirical results show that PrOSV outperforms traditional FSSVs on AxBench when using our joint training scheme. We also find that PrOSV achieves a better tradeoff between general model utility and adversarial robustness than FSSV.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Beyond Uniform Forgetting: A Study of Sequential Direct Preference Optimization Across Preference Settings

Aligning language models with human preferences often requires optimising multiple behavioural objectives. A practical approach is to apply these objectives sequentially using preference optimisation methods such as Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO), but it remains unclear whether later training uniformly degrades preferences learned earlier or whether the effect depends on the relationship between objectives. We study sequential DPO across four preference settings covering distributional conflict, multi-attribute interaction, strong safety signal, and compatible response-quality objectives. Using Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with LoRA adapters, we evaluate all objectives after every stage with a fixed base-model reference. We find that sequential DPO does not produce a single forgetting pattern; preference change ranges from partial degradation to stability, pair-level redistribution, or positive transfer depending on objective relationship, signal strength, and training order. Pair-level analysis using length-normalised policy margins shows that aggregate metrics can mask heterogeneous changes across preference pairs, whereas quartile decomposition reveals that high-confidence pairs can either degrade or improve depending on the setting. Mechanistic diagnostics show that Stage~2 gradients and adapter updates are near-orthogonal to the previous objective across all settings, providing little evidence that direct gradient opposition is the primary driver. These findings suggest that future sequential alignment pipelines should account for objective compatibility and signal strength, rather than assuming that later objectives affect earlier preferences uniformly.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Midwifery Practice in Conflict Contexts: Lived Experiences from Somalia and Nigeria

Background: Midwives are a central cadre in the health system, particularly in conflict-affected settings where they are sometimes the primary or even only skilled providers available. Yet, despite their critical role, there is limited qualitative evidence capturing their lived experiences and how these shape workforce entry, retention, and overall well-being. Methods: Drawing on a phenomenological research methodology, this qualitative study was embedded within a larger prospective longitudinal cohort of midwifery students and graduates in Somalia and Nigeria. We conducted focus group discussions with graduate midwives (n=48 in Nigeria; n=63 in Somalia) to explore their experiences transitioning into the workforce and their realities working in health systems impacted by conflict and violent insecurity. Data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Results: Five themes emerged from the data: (1) job search and workforce entry, which was described as fraught with challenges and shaped by a set of formal systems in Nigeria but informal networks and structural barriers in Somalia (2) working conditions that were marked by resource scarcity, infrastructural challenges, and heavy and unreasonable workloads, (3) safety, security and coping strategies that differed across the two contexts but reflected persistent exposure to violence and a reliance on ad hoc and personal coping in lieu of systematic protection, (4) community perceptions of midwives, shaped and constrained by social and gender norms and (5) mental health and emotional wellbeing, highlighting stress, burnout and moral injury experienced by this cadre. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the profound challenges faced by midwives working in conflict-affected settings, and they shine a light on the urgent need to support and invest in this critical and predominantly female health workforce.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Toward Preference-aligned Large Language Models via Residual-based Model Steering

Preference alignment is a critical step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) useful and aligned with (human) preferences. Existing approaches such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or Direct Preference Optimization typically require curated data and expensive optimization over billions of parameters, and eventually lead to persistent task-specific models. In this work, we introduce Preference alignment of Large Language Models via Residual Steering (PaLRS), a training-free method that exploits preference signals encoded in the residual streams of LLMs. From as few as one hundred preference pairs, PaLRS extracts lightweight, plug-and-play steering vectors that can be applied at inference time to push models toward preferred behaviors. We evaluate PaLRS on various small-to-medium-scale open-source LLMs, showing that PaLRS-aligned models achieve consistent gains on mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks while preserving baseline general-purpose performance. Moreover, when compared to models aligned with DPO and SimPO, they perform better with great time-savings. Our findings highlight that PaLRS offers an effective, much more efficient and flexible alternative to standard preference optimization pipelines, offering a training-free, plug-and-play mechanism for alignment with minimal data.

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

Deep Neural Networks: A Formulation Via Non-Archimedean Analysis

arXiv:2402.00094v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a new class of deep neural networks (DNNs) with multilayered tree-like architectures. The architectures are codified using numbers from the ring of integers of non-Archimdean local fields. These rings have a natural hierarchical organization as infinite rooted trees. Natural morphisms on these rings allow us to construct finite multilayered architectures. The new DNNs are robust universal approximators of real-valued functions defined on the mentioned rings. We also show that the DNNs are robust universal approximators of real-valued square-integrable functions defined in the unit interval.

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

Toward Trustworthy AI: Multi-Target Adversarial Attacks and Robust Defenses for Continuous Data Summarization

arXiv:2606.11804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trustworthy AI requires reliable data-processing pipelines, not only robust downstream predictive models. As an upstream component, data summarization determines which information is retained and passed to subsequent learning or decision modules. Therefore, adversarial perturbations to the summarization process can compromise trustworthy AI in an upstream manner: they may alter the selected summary, reduce its representativeness, and further degrade the utility of subsequent learning tasks. In this paper, we study adversarial attacks on continuous data summarization under similarity-level perturbations through DR-submodular optimization. We show that a class of multi-resolution image summarization objectives can be formulated as multilinear extensions of non-negative submodular set functions and satisfy DR-submodularity with $m$-weak monotonicity. We then formulate multi-target attack generation as a min-max problem, where one admissible perturbation of the similarity structure is optimized to degrade multiple target summarization models. To mitigate such perturbations, we formulate robust defense against mixed attack types as a regularized max-min problem. For both problems, we develop approximation algorithms with theoretical guarantees. Experiments on real-data and controlled clustered benchmarks show that the proposed attack is effective in representative low-to-moderate budget regimes and can induce downstream task-performance loss. The proposed defense improves the robustness–mitigation trade-off in structured settings, while also revealing the parameter sensitivity of robust protection on real data.

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

Visuals Lie, Consistency Speaks: Disentangling Spatial Attention from Reliability in Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Foundation Models are increasingly used as reasoning agents, making reliability, knowing when a model may hallucinate, critical. A common intuition, which we call the Attention-Confidence Assumption, holds that reliability follows from "structural" visual perception: tight attention on relevant regions should signal a trustworthy answer, while scattered attention signals confusion. We challenge this through the VLM Reliability Probe (VRP), a systematic cross-family study of reliability signals in contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce structural-attention metrics, cluster counts (C_k) and spatial entropy (H_s), to quantify the visual encoder's gaze, and track its evolution (Delta H_s) across layers. This reveals a "Symbolic Detachment": models often "Early Lock" visual features only to diffuse attention later, severing early perception from final generation. Contrary to the grounding hypothesis, we find a "Cluster Failure": spatial attention has near-zero correlation (R approx 0.001) with accuracy. Instead, reliability is a phenomenon of generation dynamics and internal-state distributions. Self-Consistency, the agreement rate across sampled reasoning paths, is the dominant predictor of truth (R = 0.429). Scaling causal interventions exposes a sharp architectural divergence: LLaVA locks its prediction in a fragile late-stage bottleneck, whereas PaliGemma and Qwen2-VL distribute reliability globally, staying resilient even when ~50% or more of their most predictive layer is destroyed. For current VLMs, reliability signals are detached from visual grounding maps and are best inferred from generation-time dynamics and hidden-state probes.

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

Sequential Kernel-based Conditional Independence Testing via Adaptive Betting

arXiv:2606.18993v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Testing conditional independence is fundamental yet intrinsically difficult: without additional assumptions, Type I error control is impossible in general. The "Model-X'' paradigm addresses this difficulty by assuming exact knowledge of a relevant conditional distribution. While small deviations from this assumption can sometimes be tolerated in classical one-shot testing, existing sequential conditional independence tests typically require the Model-X conditional to be known exactly, making them fragile when it must instead be estimated. We propose a new approach that is substantially more robust to such estimation error. Our method applies testing-by-betting to an adaptively optimized Kernel Conditional Independence statistic, together with a normalization scheme and a truncate-and-shift calibration strategy. These modifications greatly reduce Type I error inflation while preserving high power across high-dimensional synthetic benchmarks and real-world fairness tasks, outperforming existing sequential Model-X approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/he-zh/SKCI.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

ResEdit: Residual embeddings for precise generative image editing

Conditional diffusion image generators can be repurposed for editing through inversion, without the need for large-scale paired fine-tuning data. However, producing high-quality, targeted edits while maintaining image identity and global consistency remains challenging, as weakly conditioned inversion often embeds conflicting image features into the noise. We demonstrate that incorporating a residual image encoding as additional conditioning enables both improved identity preservation and better editability. We optimize this residual encoding to provide a strong conditioning signal for reconstruction, thereby reducing the reliance on inversion and susceptibility to its aforementioned pitfalls. To ensure this residual does not interfere with desired edits, we incorporate a gradient reversal-based optimization strategy that disentangles the residual from the edited condition. We illustrate our method's ability to produce high-fidelity results across precise intrinsic-based editing and relighting, and show proof-of-concept text-guided manipulation.

19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

TCRBinder: Unified pre-trained language model with paired-chain synergy for predicting T-cell receptor binding specificity

作者:

by Weihe Dong, Qiang Yang, Long Xu, Xiaokun Li, Kuanquan Wang, Suyu Dong, Gongning Luo, Xianyu Zhang, Tiansong Yang, Xin Gao, Guohua Wang Deciphering how human T cells recognise peptide-HLA (pHLA) complexes underpins next-generation vaccines and personalised immunotherapies, yet extreme sequence diversity and paired-chains interdependence still hamper reliable in silico prediction of T-cell receptor (TCR) specificity. To overcome these hurdles, we built TCRBinder, a paired-chain-aware deep model with a multi-branch encoder that routes each molecular component through dedicated transformer-based modules to capture contextual signals in both HLA pseudo-sequences and antigenic peptides while simultaneously processing the TCR α and β chains. This design captures the synergistic interaction between paired chains to emulate peptide-HLA-TCR (PHT) interactions and expose residue-level contact motifs. Across PHT and peptide-TCR (pTCR) benchmarks, the model delivered state-of-the-art performance (AUC-ROC = 0.911, AUPR = 0.791 for the PHT task) and remained superior on multiple independent datasets. We tracked the dynamics of clonal expansion and, in a large SARS-CoV-2 repertoire containing completely unseen peptides, improved the AUC-ROC by up to 16.3% over the leading alternatives. Moreover, TCRBinder provided mechanistic insights by pinpointing contact hotspots and quantifying residue contributions to binding probability. These capabilities position TCRBinder as a versatile tool for rational antigen discovery, immunotherapy stratification, and neoantigen vaccine design.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

SPARQ-MI leverages end-to-end spatial single-cell analysis of the tumor microenvironment

Detailed spatial analysis of the tumor micro-environment (TME) through multiplexed fluorescence imaging requires quantitative image-processing and data-analysis methods. While data-preprocessing down to segmentation of individual cells is captured by available methods, statistical analysis of single-cell features is compromised by the uneven noise distribution especially in complex tissues such as the TME, as well as by labor-intensive manual cell-type annotation and region segmentation. Here, we present SPARQ-MI (Spatial Phenotyping, Architecture Reconstruction and Quantification from Multiplexed Imaging) for streamlined spatial single-cell analysis, along with a tissue microarray PhenoCycler data-set with 37 fluorescent channels from melanoma patients under immunotherapy. We demonstrate that SPARQ-MI enables robust reconstruction of the cellular and spatial composition in this and other tissue types. Our analysis reveals associations of the cell-state and spatial location of CD8 T cells with response to immunotherapy. Overall, SPARQ-MI allows for quantitative analysis of complex fluorescence histology samples under minimal user input, and accounting for spatially uneven coverage of antibody signals, setting the stage for quantitative analysis of clinical samples.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tungsten Germanide Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors with Saturated Internal Detection Efficiency at Wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m

arXiv:2511.20868v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) are among the most sensitive single-photon detectors available and have the potential to transform fields ranging from infrared astrophysics to molecular spectroscopy. However, extending their performance into the mid-infrared spectral region - crucial for applications such as exoplanet transit spectroscopy and vibrational fingerprinting of molecules - has remained a major challenge, primarily due to material limitations and scalability constraints. Here, we report on the development of SNSPDs based on tungsten germanide, a novel material system that combines high mid-infrared sensitivity with compatibility for large-scale fabrication. Our detectors exhibit saturated internal detection efficiency at wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m, while using 2.7x thicker films (8 nm vs 3 nm) and up to 4.5x wider nanowires (360 nm vs 80 nm) compared to mid-infrared-optimized SNSPDs fabricated from tungsten silicide. This advance will enable scalable, high-performance single-photon detection in a spectral region that was previously inaccessible, opening new frontiers in remote sensing, thermal imaging, environmental monitoring, molecular physics, and astronomy.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

DailyReport: An Open-ended Benchmark for Evaluating Search Agents on Daily Search Tasks

arXiv:2606.12871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search Agents (SAs) typically leverage large language models (LLMs) to support complex information-seeking tasks by autonomously exploring web sources and synthesizing information into comprehensive responses. For SAs evaluation, prior benchmarks mainly focus on specialized tasks that are unlikely to arise in real-world user scenarios. Moreover, their reliance on coarse task-level rubrics often limits evaluation interpretability. To bridge this gap, we introduce DailyReport, an open-ended benchmark to evaluate SA capabilities on daily search tasks. It contains 150 open-ended tasks with 3,546 associated rubrics, capturing widely discussed and timely information demands of real-world users. Each task is decomposed into subtasks and evaluated with cascade rubrics across disentangled dimensions. Through cascade performance attribution and user-centric aggregation, we derive highly interpretable scores for each dimension, along with a user preference score. Our results on 17 agentic systems show that current systems still fall short of users' expectations. To facilitate future research, our dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/AGI-Eval-Official/DailyReport.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Majority-of-Three is Optimal

arXiv:2606.13614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a short proof that the majority vote of three independent consistent classifiers is an optimal learner in the realizable PAC setting. This proves optimality for the simplest voting scheme, while simplifying both the algorithmic structure and the probabilistic analysis of previous voting learners, including the algorithm of S. Hanneke and the analysis of bagging by K. Green Larsen.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Synthetic Data Generation for Domain Generalization in Fetal Brain MRI Segmentation

Fetal brain tissue segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for studying neurodevelopment, but remains challenging due to data heterogeneity and limited annotations. Domain randomization (DR) has recently emerged as a promising strategy for single-source domain generalization by synthesizing training images with randomized artifacts, contrast, and resolution. In this work, we investigate how to maximize the out-of-domain (OOD) generalization of DR-based methods. We evaluate several synthetic data generation strategies for DR, with a particular focus on our recently proposed framework, FetalSynthSeg. We show that simple Gaussian mixture-based intensity modeling outperforms more complex physics-based simulations, and that intensity clustering (subdividing tissue classes based on intensity) improves OOD robustness. Evaluated on 348 fetal subjects from four sites spanning 0.55-3T and both T1w and T2w contrasts, FetalSynthSeg reaches state-of-the-art performance on several FeTA 2024 testing datasets (80-85 Dice score) and, for the first time, offers robust segmentation on modalities other than T2w for fetal brain segmentation (80 Dice on dHCP-T1w dataset). Compared with state-of-the-art methods such as BOUNTI, nnU-Net ensemble, and the FeTA 2024 winner, FetalSynthSeg delivers comparable or superior accuracy while maintaining strong robustness across domain shifts. Our code, model weights, and Docker image ready for easy inference are available at https://hub.docker.com/r/vzalevskyi/fetalsynthseg.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Federated Bilevel Performative Prediction

arXiv:2606.19734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated bilevel optimization is widely used for nested learning problems across distributed clients, such as federated hyperparameter tuning and meta-learning under privacy and communication constraints. Most existing formulations assume fixed client data distributions, which can be violated by performativity, where deployed decisions reshape client behavior and data collection, inducing client-specific, decision-dependent distribution shift. We study federated bilevel performative prediction, where both upper-level (UL) and lower-level (LL) objectives are evaluated under client-dependent, decision-dependent distributions. We formalize the federated bilevel performatively stable (FBPS) point under a decoupled-risk perspective and provide sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. We then develop two federated methods to compute the FBPS solution: FBi-RRM, which converges linearly under a contraction condition, and FBi-SGD, a communication-efficient stochastic method based on federated hypergradient estimation with convergence guarantees under diminishing step sizes when sensitivities are sufficiently small. Experiments on strategic regression and meta strategic classification validate the predicted stability thresholds and demonstrate improved meta-generalization over non-performative baselines, and CNN-based classification further demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods in nonconvex neural network settings.