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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Association between depressive symptoms and physical function among participants with heart disease in the Reasons for Geographic And Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study.

Background: Depression and heart disease frequently co-occur in the aging population and are associated with functional decline and poor health outcomes. Understanding how depressive symptoms relate to different aspects of physical function among adults with heart disease may help identify high-risk subgroups. Objective: To examine the association of depressive symptoms with self-reported and observed physical function measures among participants with heart disease in the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study and assess whether associations differ by sex and race?sex groups. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis using data from REGARDS study second in-home visit (2013?2016). Depressive symptoms were measured with the 10-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (CES D 10), considering scores ?10 as clinically significant. Physical function measures were instrumental activities of daily living (IADL), activities of daily living (ADL), chair stand time (5 repetitions), and gait speed. Linear regression models estimated associations of depressive symptoms with function, adjusting for sociodemographic, health behavior, antidepressant medications, body mass index, and social support. Effect modification by sex and race?sex group was evaluated. Results: Among 3,055 participants, 11.7% had CES D 10 ?10. Compared to CES-D-10 scores

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

A BART-based approach with hierarchical strategy for Vietnamese abstractive multi-document summarization

In this technical report, we focus on solving the challenge of Vietnamese multi-document abstractive summarization, introduced in the International Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP) 2022. We choose to follow the popular hierarchical approach, i.e. condensing each document followed by aggregation and summarization. We propose a novel yet simple strategy to shorten documents that is driven by the golden summary, thus ensuring high correlation between stages of the hierarchical approach. Our method achieves a ROUGE2-F1 score of 0.2468 on the VLSP's public test set, and can produce fluent and concise summaries. Additionally, we utilize external sources for extra data, which greatly enhances the quantity of data for Vietnamese multi-document summarization. The additional data is made available for the community.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Stochastic Inflation

arXiv:2606.12636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We formulate stochastic inflation in an open quantum system framework. The field coarse-grained in a patch of fixed physical size, and the total momentum of that patch, form a canonical pair and act on a one-mode Fock space which we identify as the "bulk". At each time step, new comoving modes join the coarse-grained patch and the bulk has to be redefined. This redefinition produces an entangled mode that is traced over, yielding a non-unitary evolution equation for the bulk's density matrix. For a free test field in de Sitter, one obtains GKLS dynamics, generated by an effective Hamiltonian and a single non-Hermitian Lindblad operator, hence diffusion and Hubble friction originate from the same quantum channel. The Wigner-Weyl transform of the GKLS equation leads to a Fokker-Planck equation for the Wigner function, which matches the one that applies to the classical phase-space distribution of stochastic inflation. We also provide several schemes under which one can unravel the GKLS dynamics into stochastic Schrodinger equations when continuous measurements of the decoupled mode are performed, making contact with Langevin formulations of stochastic inflation. In the light-field regime, an additional overdamped reduction can be performed by integrating out the momentum variable in the Wigner distribution, leading to Starobinsky's slow-roll Fokker-Planck equation. In that regime, the purity of the patch is strongly suppressed. In contrast, for heavy fields, field diffusion is suppressed and the coarse-grained patch remains close to a pure underdamped oscillator, which prevents a classical stochastic treatment.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RepFusion: Leveraging Multimodal Priors for Denoising in Representation Space

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in text-to-image (T2I) systems, but they are typically limited to text encoding, while denoising is handled by newly trained generative backbones. The emergence of representation autoencoders (RAEs) shifts the generation target toward semantically structured visual representations, creating a latent space that is more compatible with pretrained LLM priors. Inspired by multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), where an MLP projector is sufficient to align clean visual representations with a pretrained LLM, we repurpose the MLLM itself as a noisy representation encoder, extending this mechanism from clean to noisy inputs. We present RepFusion, which uses the resulting MLLM outputs as the conditioning signal for a diffusion transformer. In controlled comparisons at similar inference budgets, RepFusion outperforms baselines that devote comparable capacity to newly initialized denoisers. These results demonstrate that MLLMs provide strong priors for denoising visual representations and that, by conditioning on evolving noisy representations, test-time compute can be productively spent on repeated MLLM conditioning in modern T2I systems.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Stability of a Generalized Debiased Lasso with Applications to Resampling-Based Variable Selection

作者:

arXiv:2405.03063v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a generalized debiased Lasso estimator based on a stability principle. When a single column of the design matrix is perturbed, the estimator admits a simple update formula that can be computed from the original solution. Under sub-Gaussian designs with well-conditioned covariance, this approximation is asymptotically accurate for all but a vanishing fraction of coordinates in the proportional growth regime. The proof relies on concentration and anti-concentration arguments to control error terms and sign changes. In contrast, establishing comparable distributional limits (e.g., Gaussianity) under similar assumptions remains open. As an application, we show that the approximation significantly reduces the computational cost of resampling-based variable selection procedures, including the conditional randomization test and a local knockoff filter.

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

ReRAM-aware Model Finetuning addressing I-V Non-linearity and Retention Errors

arXiv:2606.17471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional CPU, GPU, and NPU architectures are increasingly limited by the von Neumann bottleneck. While In-Memory Computing (IMC) using ReRAM crossbar arrays offers a high-density, energy-efficient alternative, its practical deployment is constrained through their non-idealities. Existing hardware-aware training frameworks often require training from scratch, which is computationally prohibitive for modern large-scale models. In this work, we propose a finetuning-based hardware-aware training algorithm that enables robust DNN deployment on ReRAM with minimal training overhead. Our approach mitigates I-V non-linearity by applying a range-shrunk sinh transformation and incorporates retention errors directly into a regularization loss during the finetuning process. We evaluate our framework across models and tasks such as image classification and question-answering (QA). Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves similar accuracy on large-scale models like ResNet18 and DeiT-Tiny as the base model. In-case of ImageNet for MobileNetV3 families the technique has only less than 2% accuracy degradation. Further, applying the technique on the SQuAD v2 dataset results in only 1 point degradation of F-1 score.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human Universal Grasping

arXiv:2606.17054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans can grasp objects effortlessly, whereas multi-fingered robots are far from this level of generality. We argue that the most natural source of robot grasping data is from humans, who pick up thousands of objects every day. We present HUG, a flow-matching model that generates diverse human grasps for any user-specified object in a single RGB-D image captured from a stereo camera. Using smart glasses, we first collect 1M-HUGs, an egocentric dataset of human grasps spanning 1M frames (27.8 hrs) and 6,707 object instances across 41 buildings. Next, to model the distribution of natural human grasps, our novel flow-matching model fuses RGB and depth observations to output a grasp parameterized by wrist translation, wrist rotation, and MANO hand pose. Predicted grasps can be retargeted to various robot hands, enabling zero-shot grasping in everyday scenes. To standardize evaluation, we build a new simulated benchmark, HUG-Bench, of 90 unseen objects from five geometric categories and various sizes, with metric-scale 3D meshes. We evaluate HUG in the real world on the 30-object test set of HUG-Bench across multiple stereo cameras, robot embodiments, and household environments. HUG outperforms the state-of-the-art grasping baselines by +23% and +34% on our challenging object set. Code, data, benchmark, checkpoints, and an interactive demo are released on our website: https://grasping.io/

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Order statistics for edge eigenvectors of Wigner matrices

arXiv:2606.17425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we establish a general comparison theorem for the order statistics of the edge eigenvectors for generalized Wigner matrices. Consequently, we derive the Gumbel law for the maximal edge eigenvector component and prove the universality of the Gaussian fluctuations of the order statistics in an intermediate regime close to the maximum. In addition, our comparison result also implies a quantitative first order estimate for moderately small order statistics.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

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

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

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SegDINO: Introducing Multi-Scale Structure into DINO for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation

Self-supervised DINO models provide strong transferable visual representations, yet applying them directly to image segmentation remains challenging. Existing approaches commonly rely on heavy decoders with complex upsampling, introducing substantial parameter and computational overhead. We observe that introducing scale into DINO features is far more critical than increasing decoder capacity. In this work, we present SegDINO, an efficient segmentation framework that integrates a DINOv3 backbone with lightweight scale modeling. SegDINO introduces Token Pyramid Adaptation (TPA) to reorganize intermediate DINO features into a pseudo multi-scale hierarchy, and Scale-Aware Decoding (SAD) for efficient intra-scale refinement and top-down multi-scale propagation. We further curate PanCT, a new CT dataset containing 284 patients with expert-annotated pancreatic tumors, to assess SegDINO's ability to handle difficult small-lesion cases. Extensive experiments on PanCT and three public benchmarks demonstrate that SegDINO achieves state-of-the-art results with high efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/script-Yang/segdino_v2.

11.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

Novel symptoms associated with eclampsia could improve detection and save lives

by Alice Beardmore-Gray, Andrew Shennan Eclampsia is a life-threatening complication of pre-eclampsia, yet remains difficult to predict. In this Perspective, Alice Beardmore-Gray and Andrew Shennan highlight a recent study that identifies 10 novel prodromal symptoms of eclampsia, with potential to better predict which women are at risk and therefore reduce delays in intervention.

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

Towards Data-Efficient Cross-Device Generalization of Grad-Shafranov Equilibria via Transfer Learning Neural Operator

arXiv:2606.15512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time reconstruction of magnetohydrodynamic equilibria is essential for plasma shaping, stability assessment and feedback control in magnetic confinement fusion. However, Grad-Shafranov equilibrium calculations remain largely device-specific and iterative, limiting their use in latency-constrained control settings. Existing neural approaches can accelerate individual equilibrium predictions, but they do not generally provide reusable models across changing plasma boundaries or tokamak geometries. Here we show that equilibrium reconstruction can be recast as a cross-device operator learning problem. We develop a domain-specific neural operator framework that maps geometry and profile parameters directly to the poloidal flux field, replacing repeated solve-on-demand computation with amortized operator inference. Using the analytically tractable Solov'ev family as a controlled Grad-Shafranov testbed, we generate equilibria across eight geometrically distinct tokamak-like configurations and benchmark five neural operator architectures under four transfer-learning strategies. Single-geometry pretraining gives poor transfer to unseen devices, whereas multi-geometry pretraining enables data-efficient adaptation. The Wavelet Neural Operator gives the strongest cross-geometry performance, reaching mean relative L2 errors below 4% with 100 labelled target equilibria and below 2% with full fine-tuning. The predicted magnetic fields satisfy the divergence-free constraint to numerical precision, and four architectures achieve millisecond or sub-millisecond inference. These results identify neural operator pretraining as a route towards reusable, real-time equilibrium inference across fusion device configurations.

13.
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.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

AGORA: Can Deliberation and Governance Gates Absorb Participation Bias in Transit Planning?

arXiv:2606.13696v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transit network design depends not only on the optimization algorithm but also on who shows up to the public hearing. Current practice often collects one-directional comments from self-selected attendees, leaving participant mix as an uncontrolled source of outcome variation. We present AGORA, a framework that holds the network, demand, and solver fixed while systematically varying meeting composition through stakeholder agents, structured deliberation, and governance gates. Across two standard benchmark networks at different scales, we find that (i) aggregate outcomes vary little across compositions, but on tail risk and fairness disparity, representative sampling still tends to outperform skewed compositions; (ii) without deliberation, composition produces no variation at all, showing that deliberation is the mechanism through which who attends affects outcomes; and (iii) governance gates compress cross-profile variance without shifting the average outcome on Mandl, but low acceptance on Mumford0 shows thresholds require instance-specific calibration. These findings reframe participation bias from an uncontrollable input to a process-design problem: even without guaranteed representative attendance, well-structured deliberation and governance criteria can substantially reduce how much outcomes depend on who is in the room.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Approximate Next Policy Sampling: Replacing Conservative Target Policy Updates in Deep RL

arXiv:2605.05481v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit a classic "chicken-and-egg" problem in reinforcement learning: to safely improve a policy, the value function must be accurate on the state-visitation distribution of the updated policy. That distribution over states is unknown and cannot be sampled for the purposes of training the value function. Conservative updates solve this problem, but at the cost of shrinking the policy update. This paper explores an alternative solution, Approximate Next Policy Sampling (ANPS), which addresses the problem by modifying the training distribution rather than constraining the policy update. ANPS is satisfied if the distribution of the training data approximates that of the next policy. To demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of ANPS, we introduce Stable Value Approximate Policy Iteration (SV-API). SV-API modifies the standard approximate policy iteration loop to hold the target policy fixed while an iteratively updated behavioral policy gathers relevant experience. It only commits to a new policy once a convergence criterion has been met. If certain stability criteria are met, the update is guaranteed to be safe; otherwise, it remains no less safe than standard approximate policy iteration. Applying SV-API to PPO yields Stable Value PPO (SV-PPO), which matches or improves performance on high-dimensional discrete (Atari) and continuous control benchmarks while executing substantially larger target policy updates. These results demonstrate the viability of ANPS as a new solution to this classic challenge in RL.

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

A Comparative Study of Pretrained Transformer Models for Quranic ASR: Speech Representations, Label Formats, and Dataset Composition

arXiv:2606.19747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quran Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert Quranic recitation into text, enabling applications such as aided memorisation tools and Quranic search engines. However, existing ASR models often exhibit high Word Error Rates (WER) on user-recited verses and lack full coverage of the Quranic corpus. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of domain-specific fine-tuning of pretrained Transformer-based models for Quranic ASR, using advanced speech feature extraction methods: Wav2Vec2.0, HuBERT, and XLS-R. These models apply self-supervised learning by masking portions of input audio and using Transformer architectures to learn context-aware speech features. The pretrained models are fine-tuned on a filtered Quranic dataset exceeding 870 hours of professional and user recitations. Through comprehensive ablation studies across feature extractors, output label formats, training strategies, and clip durations, we identify the key factors that affect transcription accuracy in this domain. Our best-performing configuration achieves a WER of 0.08 on the EveryAyah subset and 0.11 on the combined EveryAyah+Tarteel setting, representing roughly a five-percentage-point gain over the Citrinet baseline (WER = 0.163) while reducing combined-model training time from 140 hours to 40 hours. Arabic text without diacritics yields the best fine-tuning results, and Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 provides the strongest overall representation. Future work includes improving dataset quality and developing phoneme-aware models to extract deeper speech feature representations for Tajweed-sensitive applications.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

inquiSTR: a toolkit for accurate and efficient population-scale tandem repeat genotyping and analysis

Tandem repeats are highly mutable genomic elements linked to human traits and diseases. Profiling large catalogs of tandem repeats from population-scale long-read sequencing data requires accurate and efficient tools. We introduce inquiSTR, a command-line toolkit for fast genome-wide tandem repeat length genotyping. inquiSTR, with efficient parallel processing and low-memory streaming algorithms, genotypes a genome-wide repeat catalog of 1.78 million loci in less than two minutes. Benchmarking shows high accuracy and significantly faster performance compared to existing tools and truth sets. inquiSTR also provides methods for downstream analyses such as population structure inference, association testing, and outlier detection.

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

One Token to Fool LLM-as-a-Judge

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trusted as automated judges, assisting evaluation and providing reward signals for training other models, particularly in reference-based settings like Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, we uncover a critical vulnerability even in this reference-based paradigm: generative reward models are systematically susceptible to reward hacking. We find that superficial inputs, which we term ''master keys'' such as non-word symbols (e.g., '':'' or ''.'') or generic reasoning openers (e.g., ''Thought process:'' or ''Let's solve this problem step by step.''), can consistently elicit false positive rewards without any substantive reasoning. Our systematic evaluation demonstrates this is a widespread failure affecting a diverse range of models, including leading proprietary systems such as GPT-o1 and Claude-4. These results challenge the assumed robustness of LLM judges and pose a significant threat to their reliability. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective data augmentation strategy using truncated model outputs as adversarial negative examples. The resulting Master Reward Models (Master-RMs) demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness against these ''master key'' attacks while maintaining high performance in standard evaluation settings. We supplement these findings with a comprehensive analysis of the vulnerability across model scales, prompt variations, and common inference-time strategies, offering insights to guide future research on robust LLM evaluation. We release our robust, general-domain reward models and the synthetic training data at https://huggingface.co/sarosavo/Master-RM and https://huggingface.co/datasets/sarosavo/Master-RM.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Toward Controllable Catalyst Inverse Design via Large-Scale Autoregressive Pretraining

arXiv:2606.17445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inverse design of heterogeneous catalysts remains challenging because catalyst surfaces exhibit substantial structural complexity with coupled surface-adsorbate interactions across a vast chemical space that is difficult to explore efficiently through conventional screening alone. Although machine learning-based high-throughput screening has accelerated catalyst discovery, its efficiency inevitably declines as the search space grows, motivating the development of generative models that can directly construct catalysts with target properties. Here, we present a conditional catalyst generative model based on the Generative Pretrained Transformer architecture with a numerical embedding layer that enables the generation of catalyst structures conditioned on both categorical and continuous properties within a single autoregressive framework. The model was pretrained on 133 million catalyst structures and subsequently fine-tuned on approximately 460,000 optimized structures with associated categorical properties and binding energies for conditional generation. The resulting model achieved 98% structural validity, 95% optimization validity, and high categorical condition fidelity, with a 93 % joint match rate for adsorbate type and composition. For binding energy conditioning, the match rate of approximately 20% represents a four-fold improvement over the baseline training distribution, and the generated distributions shift systematically toward the target values, enabling a 1.5 to 4-fold improvement in screening efficiency for reaction-targeted catalyst discovery without additional fine-tuning. These results show that large-scale autoregressive pre-training, combined with explicit property conditioning, provides a practical route toward controllable catalyst generation and accelerated catalysts discovery.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Learn-to-learn on Arbitrary Textual Conditioning: A Hypernetwork-Driven Meta-Gated LLM

Conventional LLMs may suffer from corpus heterogeneity and subtle condition changes. While finetuning can create the catastrophe forgetting issue, application of meta-learning on LLMs is also limited due to its complexity and scalability. In this paper, we activate the meta-signal of $\beta$ within the SwiGLU blocks, resulting in a meta-gating mechanism that adaptively adjusts the nonlinearity of FFN. A hypernetwork is employed which dynamically produces $\beta$ on textual conditions, providing meta-controllability on LLMs. By testing on different condition types such as task, domain, persona, and style, our method outperforms finetuning and meta-learning baselines, and can generalize reasonably on unseen tasks, condition types, or instructions. Our code can be found in https://github.com/AaronJi/MeGan.

21.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-16

The data transparency crisis in research: Lessons from systematic reviews and meta-analyses

by Saul Martin-Rodriguez, Rodrigo Fernandez-Gonzalo, David Moher Summary points Systematic reviews and meta-analyses underpin clinical guidelines and health policy, yet their validity may be compromised by limited access to underlying datasets and associated analytical code. Reliance on incomplete or inconsistently reported summary statistics forces researchers to use imputation and unverifiable assumptions, which can distort effect estimates and mislead clinical decision-making. The consequences extend beyond methodology: flawed evidence synthesis can influence treatment recommendations, healthcare spending, and patient safety, as illustrated by historical cases such as hormone replacement therapy. Despite widespread data-sharing policies, compliance remains low, enforcement weak, and monitoring almost non-existent, with many datasets remaining unavailable or inaccessible. This Policy Forum argues for strengthening enforceable data-sharing mechanisms, including clearer enforcement and pragmatic verification approaches within editorial workflows.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Sociodemographic and health correlates of reimbursement authorizations for cannabis for medical purposes in Canadian veterans: A cross-sectional study linking the Life After Services Studies 2019 and Health Administrative Databases

Background Evidence on factors associated with cannabis for medical purposes (CMP) authorizations among Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) clients remains limited and inconsistent, particularly concerning mental health and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a leading indication for use. We investigated demographic, clinical and service characteristics associated with VAC authorizations for CMP reimbursement. Method We linked VAC administrative CMP program data with responses from the 2019 Life After Services Studies cross-sectional survey of Regular Force veterans released between 1998 and 2018. Multivariable logistic regressions examined associations between CMP reimbursement (yes/no) and demographic, clinical and well-being factors, with analyses stratified by PTSD status. Results Among 1,289 respondents (weighted n=33,131), 18.4% were authorized for CMP reimbursement. Younger age (

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

Hierarchical Successor Representation for Robust Transfer

arXiv:2602.12753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The successor representation (SR) provides a powerful framework for decoupling predictive dynamics from rewards, enabling rapid generalisation across reward configurations. However, the classical SR is limited by its inherent policy dependence: policies change due to ongoing learning, environmental non-stationarities, and changes in task demands, making established predictive representations obsolete. Furthermore, in topologically complex environments, SRs suffer from spectral diffusion, leading to dense and overlapping features that scale poorly. Here we propose the Hierarchical Successor Representation (HSR) for overcoming these limitations. By incorporating temporal abstractions into the construction of predictive representations, HSR learns stable state features which are robust to task-induced policy changes. Applying non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) to the HSR yields a sparse, low-rank state representation that facilitates highly sample-efficient transfer to novel tasks in multi-compartmental environments. Further analysis reveals that HSR-NMF discovers interpretable topological structures, providing a policy-agnostic hierarchical map that effectively bridges model-free optimality and model-based flexibility. Beyond providing a useful basis for task-transfer, we show that HSR's temporally extended predictive structure can also be leveraged to drive efficient exploration, effectively scaling to large, procedurally generated environments.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Factor Analysing Predictive Processing: No Evidence for a General Factor Across Tasks

Background & Hypothesis: Dysfunctional predictive processing (PP), specifically the aberrant weighting of priors, is a frequently-proposed mechanism for psychosis and psychosis-like phenomena (schizotypy). Evidence for this theory mostly originates from single-task studies, which assume that all tasks load onto a single latent construct of PP performance, but the underlying factor structure of PP tasks is unknown. PP deficits in psychosis may be better described by a two-factor, hierarchical model: weakened lower-level (perceptual) priors compensated by higher-level (cognitive) priors. Study Design: This study implements a multi-paradigm approach in healthy participants to investigate latent constructs underlying PP and their relationship to schizotypy. Participants (N = 73) completed 6 tasks measuring reliance on priors across language, memory, visual, and auditory domains. A factor analysis investigated whether performance across tasks is captured by a single or two-factor model. Study Results: Although a two-factor model best described performance, factors reflected within-task correlations rather than a PP hierarchy. Cross-task PP measures were poorly correlated, suggesting that individuals' weighting of priors was task-specific. A full model including all task outcomes (not factors) significantly predicted the severity of schizotypal aberrant beliefs but no other schizotypal measures. Conclusions: These results do not evidence a single factor underpinning PP performance. It is therefore inappropriate to use results from single tasks to propose a generalised PP deficit in psychosis. Variation was also not captured by a two-factor hierarchical model of priors. Further multi-paradigm research is required to evaluate alternative models or additional variables that describe aberrant PP in psychosis.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

EvoBrowseComp: Benchmarking Search Agents on Evolving Knowledge

Search Agents – large language models augmented with search tools – have intensified the need for future-proof evaluation benchmarks. Existing benchmarks such as BrowseComp rely on static knowledge, making them vulnerable to test-set contamination and parametric memorization. Consequently, models can achieve high scores through fact recall rather than genuine retrieval, obscuring true browsing competence via reasoning shortcuts. In this paper, we introduce EvoBrowseComp, an evolving benchmark of 400 English and 400 Chinese contamination-free complex questions synthesized via live-web traversal. To collect these questions, we design a three-agent collaborative framework: (1) a QA synthesis agent that retrieves fresh knowledge from the live web to synthesize QA pairs; (2) an information filtering agent that filters retrieved knowledge in terms of credibility and popularity to block parametric shortcuts; and (3) a high-level guidance agent that formalizes questions into reasoning graphs to reduce logical redundancy and shortcuts in synthesized QA pairs. Because the framework supports fully automated synthesis, EvoBrowseComp can be regularly updated to prevent data contamination and maintain temporal freshness. Extensive experiments confirm its great difficulty, requiring broad horizontal search. It establishes a scalable paradigm for auto-updatable, high-difficulty benchmarking that keeps pace with both evolving world knowledge and advancing agent capabilities.