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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Otto engine powered by an anisotropic Heisenberg XYZ model under independent local magnetic fields

arXiv:2606.12877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a quantum Otto heat engine whose working substance is an anisotropic two-qubit Heisenberg XYZ model. Independent local magnetic fields are used to control each spin individually. The influence of the longitudinal coupling, anisotropy, transverse coupling, and local fields on the net work output and efficiency is systematically examined. Reducing the longitudinal coupling is found to markedly improve both the maximum work and the peak efficiency. The engine performance reaches an optimum at a particular value of the anisotropy parameter. A local work analysis clarifies how work is produced during the cycle. Because of the asymmetric local fields and the intrinsic spin-spin interaction, the two qubits play markedly different thermodynamic roles; the interaction term itself contributes crucially to the total work. We further analyze the variation of quantum entanglement, quantified by concurrence, along the cycle. The results indicate that a pronounced change in entanglement between the hot and cold isomagnetic strokes is closely correlated with the efficiency enhancement. This work offers new insight into the operating principles and control of quantum Otto heat engines.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

How the zebrafish brain weaves recent experiences into future decisions

作者: 未知作者

Animals often use recent experience to guide future choices. Whole-brain imaging in larval zebrafish (Danio rerio) reveals a dedicated neural circuit that governs history-biased decisions: the thalamus maintains the most recent event as a stable pattern of neuronal activity, and the brainstem integrates recent experiences into a continuous signal that biases future action. Whole-brain calcium imaging in the zebrafish reveals how information about events in the recent past drives future behaviour.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpreting Neural Combinatorial Optimization via Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) achieves strong performance, yet its black-box nature remains a key roadblock to deployment and scientific diagnosis. Standard interpretability tools, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are ill-equipped for NCO, whose decisions are dynamic, state-dependent, and lack proper concept vocabulary definition. To close this gap, we introduce Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks (EPB), to our knowledge, the first framework for interpreting NCO policies by distilling black-box NCO models into human-readable program portfolios. EPB employs an LLM to autonomously evolve a bank of programs, where each program's per-step action distribution serves as the bottleneck. EPB works through an iterative framework: Block I fixes program bank capacity and introduces a hybrid textual-numerical gradient descent scheme that couples numerical gradients for student router updates and textual gradients for LLM-based program revision; Block II dynamically adapts bank capacity via fault-targeted expansion and redundancy pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate EPB's effectiveness and broad applicability, where the distilled program portfolios largely match original performance. EPB also reveals that NCO behavior shifts across optimization stages and can be approximated as a composition of classic heuristic variants. Our work advances interpretable NCO and establishes EPB as a promising tool for interpreting sequential decision-making models.

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

Know Your Limits : On the Faithfulness of LLMs as Solvers and Autoformalizers in Legal Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on reasoning tasks, but whether this reflects faithful logical inference or heuristic approximation remains unclear. We study this question in legal entailment by comparing three paradigms, including pure LLM classification, LLM-based Formal Reasoning, and solver-based Formal Reasoning using the Z3 SMT solver, on a re-annotated subset of ContractNLI across five LLMs. Our re-annotation reveals a systematic and measurable gap between pragmatic legal interpretation and strict formal entailment, where a substantial proportion of legally sound inferences are not formally grounded without additional unstated assumptions. While introducing formal structure improves accuracy, with LLM-based Formal Reasoning achieving the highest benchmark performance, we show that this gain does not imply faithful reasoning. We identify three recurring failure modes: scope laundering, where LLMs report solver-inconsistent classifications without executing the underlying formal reasoning, producing conclusions that appear logically grounded but are not; implicit constraint blindness, where LLMs overlook logical constraints present in formal representations; and program synthesis failures, where LLMs generate incorrect Z3 code despite structured prompting. Critically, scope laundering persists across all models, raising serious concerns about the faithfulness of LLM-based formal reasoning as a proxy for symbolic execution. These results reveal a fundamental gap between benchmark accuracy and logical faithfulness.

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

From Awareness to Adherence: Bridging the Context Gap in Spoken Dialogue Systems via Context-Aware Decoding

Despite the success of end-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems, maintaining strict context adherence in multi-round conversations remains a challenge. While prior works attribute these failures to models forgetting dialogue history, we highlight an equally critical but overlooked bottleneck: a gap between latent context awareness and active adherence. Although models internally recognize relevant past utterances, strong parametric priors often overshadow these signals during decoding. To bridge this gap, we propose an audio-adapted Context-Aware Decoding (CAD) approach. By leveraging internal attention mechanisms to isolate key historical rounds, our approach contrasts output distributions with and without this key context during inference, directly amplifying multimodal contextual signals. Evaluations on the Audio MultiChallenge benchmark demonstrate significant improvements in Semantic Memory and Self Coherence subtasks, successfully enforcing strict, context-faithful adherence.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Deciphering shared and divergent tissue architectures from cross-species spatial transcriptomics

作者:

The integration of spatial transcriptomics (ST) data across species is essential for cross-species and translational studies, but remains challenging due to molecular divergence and anatomical differences between organisms. We present STACAME, a graph attention autoencoder-based framework to decipher shared and divergent tissue architectures from cross-species ST data by explicitly modeling both orthologous and species-specific genes. STACAME aligns ST slices in a spatially aware manner, identifies homologous and species-specific domains, and enables a suite of downstream comparative analyses. We demonstrate its utility by integrating ST datasets from diverse tissues, including hippocampus, isocortex, embryo, breast, liver, and cerebellum, across multiple species such as human, macaque, marmoset, mouse, and zebrafish. STACAME supports cross-species spatial domain alignment, the detection of shared and divergent spatially variable genes, development alignment and comparison, and the 3D integration of tissue architecture. This flexible approach facilitates the translation of findings from model organisms to humans, providing a unified computational platform for cross-species spatial transcriptomics.

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

FAPO: Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization of Multi-Step LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.19605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain. We present FAPO (Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization), a framework that lets Claude Code optimize an LLM pipeline inside a standardized codebase. FAPO evaluates a pipeline, inspects intermediate steps, diagnoses failures, proposes scoped changes, and validates variants repeatedly to optimize against a score function. It first tries prompt edits and, only when prompt optimization appears insufficient, changes chain structure within the permitted scope when attribution identifies a structural bottleneck. Across six benchmarks and three task models, FAPO beats the baseline GEPA in 15 of 18 model-benchmark comparisons. In 11 model-benchmark comparisons, FAPO wins with non-overlapping mean $\pm$ trial-standard-deviation ranges, and the mean FAPO-GEPA gain is +14.1 pp. In the six HoVer and IFBench comparisons where prompt-first search escalated to structural changes, FAPO wins all six with a mean gain of +33.8 pp. FAPO also improves performance on security tasks: on CTIBench-RCM, a security CVE-to-CWE task, prompt-only FAPO lifts test accuracy by +4.0 pp on GPT-5, +7.1 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct, and +2.0 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning. These results position FAPO as a state-of-the-art pipeline optimization technique for both general-purpose and security-focused tasks.

08.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Adaptive deep brain stimulation for dynamic gait control in Parkinson’s disease: a randomized feasibility trial

A randomized crossover study of five patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) demonstrates that gait-synchronized adaptive deep brain stimulation is feasible and safe, and reduces falls compared with continuous stimulation. Gait dysfunction in PD is a major source of disability and is often insufficiently treated by continuous deep brain stimulation (cDBS). Although adaptive DBS (aDBS) has shown efficacy for other motor symptoms using β-based, state-driven neural signals, gait is a dynamic, cyclical behavior that may require temporally precise modulation. Here we evaluated a behavior-contingent aDBS approach that synchronizes stimulation to gait phase. We reported a single-center, blinded, randomized, crossover study evaluating the feasibility of identifying patient-specific biomarkers to drive aDBS. The primary outcome was feasibility of successful identification of gait-phase biomarkers to implement aDBS. Five participants with PD undergoing pallidal DBS and subdural electrode paddle implantation were enrolled. We successfully identified personalized gait-phase biomarkers from cortical or pallidal field potentials in all five patients and embedded them into a bidirectional neurostimulator. During acute in-clinic testing, aDBS improved step variability and step symmetry versus cDBS. Three participants subsequently completed a double-blinded, multi-day crossover phase. In this setting, aDBS maintained general motor symptom control, reduced falls and yielded patient-specific gait improvements. No adverse events occurred and aDBS was well tolerated. These findings establish the feasibility of biomarker-driven, movement-synchronized neuromodulation and support the development of a larger randomized trial to determine clinical efficacy. ClinicalTrial.gov registration: NCT04675398 . A randomized crossover study shows that gait-phase-synchronized adaptive deep brain stimulation is feasible and safe, and reduces falls compared to continuous stimulation in Parkinson’s disease.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning Coordinated Preference for Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cooperative multi-objective multi-agent reinforcement learning (MOMARL) models team decision making under multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. In this setting, conflicts arise not only across objectives but also across agents with different observations, roles, and contributions. We propose Preference Coordinated Multi-agent Policy Optimization (PCMA), which learns coordinated agent-specific preferences to enable complementary trade-offs among agents. Theoretically, we formulate cooperative MOMARL as a team-optimal game and show that, under suitable conditions, preference diversity can induce team improvement through a first-order improvement decomposition. Experiments on multiple cooperative MOMA environments and a practical traffic-control scenario show that PCMA improves both performance and trade-off coordination.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Low-Burden Data Augmentation for Dysarthric ASR via Zero-Shot Voice Cloning

arXiv:2606.19823v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic speech recognition remains unreliable for dysarthric speech due to data scarcity and high inter-speaker variability. While synthetic data can address these gaps, traditional methods often require extensive speaker-specific data, reintroducing the collection bottleneck. We investigate zero-shot voice cloning as a low-burden augmentation strategy, using Higgs Audio V2 to clone speakers in the TORGO dataset. We fine-tune (FT) Whisper-medium on cloned, real, and hybrid data and evaluate on held-out real speech. Compared to the zero-shot (31.62%), Clone FT achieved a competitive 26.00% WER, nearly matching the 24.44% and 25.12% seen with Real and Hybrid FT, respectively. Notably, Clone and Hybrid FT outperform Real FT for moderate-severe speakers. Clone FT achieves the best results (11.45% relative) in cross-corpus evaluation on the SAP-1102. These results suggest that zero-shot cloning provides scalable training data that circumvents the costly data collection bottleneck.

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

The ACUTE Protocol: Operationalizing Language Model Activations for Better Calibration, Utility, and Trust

As language models improve and become increasingly deployed to solve a variety of tasks, trustworthiness becomes essential. Calibration is a good proxy for trust: well-calibrated confidence estimates help inform the risk versus reward tradeoff when trusting a specific model output. Unfortunately, even as models improve, they remain poorly calibrated, often biasing towards overconfidence. Additionally, calibration can be gamed: a policy that always predicts the base rate is perfectly calibrated, but completely uninformative. To resolve this, we develop a new metric, expected utility renormalized by the oracle (EURO), that balances calibration and informativeness. We also propose a general-purpose activation-based confidence, utility, and trust estimation protocol (ACUTE) to appropriately adjudicate uncertainty. The ACUTE protocol provides flexible, sample-efficient, and compute-efficient confidence estimators for 3 tasks including multiple choice question answering, tool-calling, and scientific document summarization across 6 models from 4 model families. ACUTE outperforms strong baselines on EURO, while maintaining low calibration error. Taken together, our work shows that equipping LLMs with the ACUTE protocol can improve calibration, utility, and trustworthiness in numerous settings.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Calibration Without Comprehension: Diagnosing the Limits of Fine-Tuning LLMs for Vulnerability Detection in Systems Software

arXiv:2606.20502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whether LLMs scoring well on vulnerability benchmarks genuinely reason about security or merely pattern-match on contaminated data remains unresolved. We present CWE-Trace, a framework for LLM vulnerability detection built from 834 manually curated Linux kernel samples spanning 74 CWEs. The framework enforces a strict temporal split (pre-2025 historical set / post-cutoff leakage-free set), preserves context-aware vulnerable–patched pairs, and introduces two diagnostic metrics: the Directional Failure Index (DFI) and Hierarchical Distance and Direction (HDD). We evaluate eight vanilla LLMs and 15 LoRA fine-tuned variants across non-targeted detection, targeted detection, and CWE classification. Our analysis yields two key results. First, data contamination provides no measurable advantage. Function-level analysis shows that 84% of nominally contaminated samples carry no usable memorization signal: vulnerable functions are absent or cross-mapped across datasets, and ~31% of contaminated samples carry CWE misclassification. Second, backbone directional priors dominate fine-tuning. Models exhibit stable, systematic failure modes (DFI ranging from -85.5 to +94.8 pp) that persist from historical to post-cutoff data and resist correction. Fine-tuning shifts the output threshold without changing the decision policy. This is calibration without comprehension: output distributions adapt to training data while the underlying security reasoning remains absent. The weakest backbone at binary detection (DeepSeek-R1) gains the most in coarse CWE classification, revealing that detection and understanding are decoupled capabilities. The best detection score reaches only 52.1% (+2.1 pp above chance); exact CWE ranking remains below 1.3% Top-1 accuracy, confirming that current LLMs lack reliable security reasoning for systems software, regardless of fine-tuning strategy.

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

What Should a Streaming Video Model Remember?

Streaming video understanding models must answer queries at any moment during an ongoing stream, using only what they have observed so far and under fixed memory and computation budgets. Existing methods address this by adding memory banks, retrieval modules, or visual token compression to preserve long-range history. However, strong recent-window baselines show that indiscriminate history injection can dilute current-scene perception, suggesting that the key challenge is not whether to use memory, but how to allocate it selectively. We formulate this as budgeted online latent evidence allocation and propose SelectStream, a selective latent-memory framework that keeps the current observation directly visible to a frozen VLM while exposing historical information only through a compact, query-conditioned evidence budget. Three coordinated mechanisms govern when to write, what to preserve, and how to retrieve: surprise-driven adaptive windowing, priority-preserving consolidation, and query-conditioned graph reasoning over a fixed-capacity latent memory graph. Retrieved evidence is calibrated and injected as latent tokens for answer generation, without replaying frames or growing the context with stream length. Experimental results show that SelectStream achieves strong online streaming performance and preserves general video understanding, reaching 82.67\% on StreamingBench, 67.03\% on OVO-Bench, and 74.4\% average accuracy on offline video benchmarks, while outperforming strong recent-window baselines and prior streaming memory methods.

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

IGLU: The Integrated Gaussian Linear Unit Activation Function

Activation functions are fundamental to deep neural networks, governing gradient flow, optimization stability, and representational capacity. Within historic deep architectures, while ReLU has been the dominant choice for the activation function, modern transformer-based models increasingly are adopting smoother alternatives such as GELU and other self-gated alternatives. Despite their empirical success, the mathematical relationships among these functions and the principles underlying their effectiveness remains only partially understood. We introduce IGLU, a parametric activation function derived as a scale mixture of GELU gates under a half-normal mixing distribution. This derivation yields a closed-form expression whose gating component is exactly the Cauchy CDF, providing a principled one-parameter family that continuously interpolates between identity-like and ReLU-like behavior via a single sharpness parameter $\sigma$. Unlike GELU's Gaussian gate, IGLU's heavy-tailed Cauchy gate decays polynomially in the negative tail, guaranteeing non-zero gradients for all finite inputs and offering greater robustness to vanishing gradients. We further introduce IGLU-Approx, a computationally efficient rational approximation of IGLU expressed entirely in terms of ReLU operations that eliminates transcendental function evaluation. Through evaluations on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and WikiText-103 across ResNet-20, ViT-Tiny, and GPT-2 Small, IGLU achieves competitive or superior performance on both vision and language datasets against ReLU and GELU baselines, with IGLU-Approx recovering this performance at substantially reduced computational cost. In particular, we show that employing a heavy-tailed gate leads to considerable performance gains in heavily imbalanced classification datasets.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mathematical Basis for Analyzing Superconducting Phase Transitions Using Catastrophe Theory

arXiv:2606.11810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We establish a rigorous mathematical bridge from quantum many-body path integrals to the cusp catastrophe model by Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction, which provides a theoretical foundation for analyzing superconducting phase transition using the catastrophe theory. First, it is proved that, near the critical point the infinite-dimensional effective action is diffeomorphic to a finite-dimensional catastrophe. Secondly, starting from Ginzburg-Landau free energy functional, the Euler-Lagrange partial differential equation can be reduced to the cusp catastrophe model. Thirdly, the fermionic imaginary-time path integral to the cusp catastrophe is derived through the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation, Matsubara frequency expansion, and Grassmann algebra. Furthermore, we connect this framework with the adsorption potential theory we proposed, elucidating the catastrophic topological nature of the electron pairing mechanism in high-temperature superconductivity. The precise microscopic derivation of the adsorption potential from first-principles electronic structure calculations would strengthen the predictive power of the theory.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Coherent Control of an Embedded Bound State Without a Spectral Gap

作者:

arXiv:2606.17685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bound states in the continuum (BICs) can confine photonic excitations in open systems without conventional cavities or band gaps, making them natural candidates for long-lived quantum storage and single-photon control. Their use is limited, however, by two obstacles: they are dark to incident photons, and they lack spectral-gap protection from the surrounding continuum. We overcome both limitations in a giant atom coupled to a one-dimensional waveguide using two temporal control knobs. Atomic-frequency modulation breaks and restores the destructive-interference condition, enabling deterministic capture and release of mode-matched single photons. Coupling modulation instead preserves the BIC condition while tuning the atomic and photonic weights of the stored state. A key result is that this embedded state can nevertheless be controlled adiabatically despite the absence of a spectral gap, with an intrinsic leakage probability linear in the ramp rate. By separating radiative access from BIC-preserving deformation, the protocol turns a dark BIC into a single-photon memory whose fidelity is set by the intrinsic continuum-induced leakage law, providing a route to embedded-state control in open photonic platforms.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Cross-Domain Multi-Person Human Activity Recognition via Near-Field Wi-Fi Sensing

Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition (HAR) provides substantial convenience and has emerged as a thriving research field, yet the coarse spatial resolution inherent to Wi-Fi significantly hinders its ability to distinguish multiple subjects. By exploiting the near-field domination effect, establishing a dedicated sensing link for each subject through their personal Wi-Fi device offers a promising solution for multi-person HAR under native traffic. However, due to the subject-specific characteristics and irregular patterns of near-field signals, HAR neural network models require fine-tuning (FT) for cross-domain adaptation, which becomes particularly challenging with certain categories unavailable. In this paper, we propose WiAnchor, a novel training framework for efficient cross-domain adaptation in the presence of incomplete activity categories. This framework processes Wi-Fi signals embedded with irregular time information in three steps: during pre-training, we enlarge inter-class feature margins to enhance the separability of activities; in the FT stage, we innovate an anchor matching mechanism for cross-domain adaptation, filtering subject-specific interference informed by incomplete activity categories, rather than attempting to extract complete features from them; finally, the recognition of input samples is further improved based on their feature-level similarity with anchors. We construct a comprehensive dataset to thoroughly evaluate WiAnchor, achieving over 90% cross-domain accuracy with absent activity categories.

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

DecNefSimulator: A Modular, Interpretable Framework for Decoded Neurofeedback Simulation Using Generative Models

arXiv:2511.14555v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Decoded Neurofeedback (DecNef) is a promising non-invasive approach to brain modulation with wide-ranging applications in neuromedicine and cognitive neuroscience. However, progress in DecNef research remains constrained by subject-dependent learning variability, reliance on indirect measures to quantify progress, and the high cost and time demands of experimentation. We present DecNefSimulator, a modular and interpretable simulation framework that formalizes DecNef as a machine learning problem. Beyond providing a virtual laboratory, DecNefSimulator enables researchers to model, analyze and understand neurofeedback dynamics. Using latent variable generative models as simulated participants, DecNefSimulator allows direct observation of internal cognitive states and systematic evaluation of how different protocol designs and subject characteristics influence learning. We demonstrate how this approach can (i) reproduce empirical phenomena of DecNef learning, (ii) identify conditions under which DecNef feedback fails to induce learning, and (iii) guide the design of more robust and reliable DecNef protocols in silico before human implementation. In summary, DecNefSimulator bridges computational modeling and cognitive neuroscience, offering a principled foundation for methodological innovation, robust protocol design, and ultimately, a deeper understanding of DecNef-based brain modulation.

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

Learning Fine-Grained Correspondence with Cross-Perspective Perception for Open-Vocabulary 6D Object Pose Estimation

Open-vocabulary 6D object pose estimation empowers robots to manipulate arbitrary unseen objects guided solely by natural language. However, a critical limitation of existing approaches is their reliance on unconstrained global matching strategies. In open-world scenarios, trying to match anchor features against the entire query image space introduces excessive ambiguity, as target features are easily confused with background distractors. To resolve this, we propose Fine-grained Correspondence Pose Estimation (FiCoP), a framework that transitions from noise-prone global matching to spatially-constrained patch-level correspondence. To systematically eliminate background interference, FiCoP first employs an object-centric disentanglement step to isolate the target from macro-level environmental noise. Building upon this localized region, our core methodological innovations are twofold. Firstly, a Cross-Perspective Global Perception (CPGP) module is proposed to fuse dual-view features, establishing structural consensus through explicit context reasoning and text-guided semantic injection. Secondly, we design a Patch Correlation Predictor (PCP) that leverages a patch-to-patch correlation matrix as a structural prior. This generates a precise block-wise association map, acting as a spatial filter to enforce fine-grained, noise-resilient matching. Experiments on the REAL275 and Toyota-Light datasets demonstrate that FiCoP improves Average Recall by 8.0% and 6.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art method, highlighting its capability to deliver robust and generalized perception for robotic agents operating in complex, unconstrained open-world environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zjjqinyu/FiCoP.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Wildfire pollution exposure during childhood adversely affects cognitive and neural development

Air pollution has well-documented negative cardiovascular and respiratory consequences. However, the impact of particulate matter pollution (PM2.5) on brain development is unclear. Animal studies suggest that exposure to early-life PM2.5 can cause adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, but in vivo human work has been hampered by cross-sectional designs and heavily confounded PM2.5 exposure measures. Here we use an innovative natural experimental design to isolate the effects of wildfire pollution on neurocognitive development in a large cohort of children (N>9000, 4 waves, age 9-16). Doing so, we find that greater wildfire PM2.5 exposure is robustly associated with slower brain development and shallower cognitive improvement across early adolescence. Our study underscores the urgent public health concern that wildfire PM2.5 poses for childhood development.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Fast Speech Foundation Model Distillation Using Interleaved Stacking

Distilling a large speech foundation model (SFM) into an efficient student model has been successfully applied to low-resource environments. Although distillation reduces inference latency, it requires an additional student model training. However, the training efficiency of SFM distillation remains underexplored. In this work, we explore training acceleration of SFM distillation to speed up model deployment. We examine the potential of stacking, in which the model depth is progressively increased through training until the target model depth is reached. While existing stacking methods improve training speed, they suffer from performance degradation. To handle this limitation, we propose interleaved stacking, a novel stacking method that consistently preserves layer position throughout the stacking process. This property is particularly critical in SFMs, in which each layer encodes distinct layer-specific knowledge. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on SUPERB.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Reduced nighttime smartphone use among cohabiting partners: a longitudinal study under the lens of social control of health behaviors theory

Objective: We examined the link between cohabitation with a partner and nighttime smartphone use through the social control of health behavior theory. Background: Nighttime smartphone use is a behavioral risk factor for sleep problems. While previous research has predominantly focused on individual-level risks of sleep disturbances, the role of social context remains underexplored. Theoretical frameworks, specifically the Social Control of Health Behavior, suggest that social relationships regulate health-related behaviors; however, it is unclear how far this regulation extends to modern digital behaviors among couples. Method: We analyzed survey data from three waves of the SmartSleep Study (2018, 2020, and 2023; total N = 25,028), including a longitudinal follow-up subset (N = 1,003). We tested multivariate associations between living with a partner, changes in cohabitation status and frequent nighttime smartphone use by fitting generalized linear mixed-effects models. Additionally, we mapped the complex interplay between indicators of social integration, social support, smartphone use, and sleep quality using hierarchical clustering of non-linear correlations. Results: Cohabiting participants had lower odds of frequent nighttime smartphone use compared to those living alone (OR = 0.66; 95% CI: 0.61, 0.72). This lower risk was driven primarily by cohabitation with a partner (OR = 0.49; 95% CI: 0.36, 0.66). Longitudinal analysis supported these findings, showing that sustained cohabitation was associated with less frequent nighttime use (OR = 0.56; 95% CI: 0.38, 0.82). Clustering analysis revealed that indicators of social integration and support clustered with favorable sleep quality. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the health-protective effects of cohabitation with a partner extend to digital behaviors. Consistent with social control of health behavior theory, the presence of a partner appears to reduce frequent nighttime smartphone use, highlighting the critical importance of considering social context when addressing digital health hygiene and promoting sleep.

23.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-27

Sequential chemo-immunotherapy followed by standard versus reduced thoracic radiotherapy for older and/or frail stage III non-small-cell lung cancer: A randomized open-label cohort trial

作者:

by Wei-Xiang Qi, Shuyan Li, Mengdi Wang, Huan Li, Feifei Xu, Lei Yao, Biao Yu, Linlin Chen, Gang Cai, Cheng Xu, Xianwen Sun, Zhiyao Bao, Jiayi Chen, Yi Xiang, Shengguang Zhao Background The appropriateness of concurrent chemoradiotherapy (cCRT) for older or clinically vulnerable stage III unresectable non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients remains contentious. Furthermore, the survival implications of de-escalating thoracic radiotherapy (RT) intensity in this population have not been conclusively elucidated. Methods and findings We conducted a phase II randomized, open-label, two-cohort (non-comparative) trial at a tertiary hospital in China (NCT05557552). Between September 30, 2022 and April 30, 2024, we enrolled 56 older and/or frail patients with stage III NSCLC who were ineligible for cCRT. The primary endpoint was the 1-year progression-free survival (PFS) rate estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method. Secondary endpoints included objective response rate (ORR), overall survival (OS), and safety. In the intention-to-treat (ITT) set, which included all 56 randomized patients who received at least one dose of study treatment, the 1-year PFS was 84.3% (95% confidence interval [CI] [70.3%, 98.3%]) in the standard RT group and 70.7% (95% CI [54.3%, 87.1%]) in the reduced RT group. In the per-protocol set (53 patients), the 1-year PFS was 82.9% (95% CI [68.9%, 98.8%]) in the standard RT group and 73.4% (95% CI [58.3%, 92.4%]), with a median follow-up of 24 months. Among 56 patients in the safety analysis set, 71.4% of patients experienced grade 3/4 adverse events (AEs) in the standard RT group and 53.6% in the reduced RT group. One patient (3.6%) in the reduced RT and three patients (10.7%) in the standardized RT experienced grade 5 AEs. The main limitations are the non-comparative design, small sample size, and lack of power to establish non-inferiority or superiority. Conclusion The current study suggested that reduced RT combined with sequential chemo-immunotherapy might be feasible for older/frail patients intolerant to cCRT, showing numerically similar survival outcomes. These exploratory findings warrant confirmation in larger, adequately powered randomized trials. Trial registration The trial had been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov on Sep 30, 2022.ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05557552

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

EEG-FM-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for the Systematic Evaluation and Diagnostic Analyses of EEG Foundation Models

arXiv:2508.17742v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electroencephalography foundation models (EEG-FMs) have advanced brain signal analysis, but the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks impedes model comparison and scientific progress. Current evaluations rely on inconsistent protocols that render cross-model comparisons unreliable, while a lack of diagnostic analyses obscures the internal mechanisms driving transfer efficiency and scaling behaviors. To address this, we introduce EEG-FM-Bench, a unified system for the standardized evaluation of EEG-FMs. The benchmark integrates 14 datasets across 10 paradigms and incorporates diverse experimental settings, including multiple fine-tuning strategies, task organizations, and classifier configurations, supported by tools for gradient and representation analysis. Our experiments and analysis reveal several critical insights: (1) multi-task learning often acts as a useful regularizer that mitigates overfitting in data-scarce EEG contexts, although negative transfer can arise under specific task paradigms; (2) pre-training efficiency is currently limited by gradient conflicts between reconstruction objectives and downstream tasks; (3) under released checkpoints and a matched downstream protocol, model or data scale alone does not fully explain transfer performance, while objective alignment, adaptation compatibility, and EEG-specific design appear to be important factors. This benchmark enables fair comparison and reproducible analysis, providing a step toward fairer comparison and more interpretable analysis of EEG-FMs. Code is available at https://github.com/xw1216/EEG-FM-Bench.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

LoSoNA: A Benchmark for Local Social Norm Adaptation in Group Conversations

Online group chats are social spaces with local conversational norms that are rarely stated explicitly. The ability and willingness of LLM-based agents to recognize and adapt to these norms remains mostly unexplored. We introduce LoSoNA, a benchmark for local social norm adaptation in multi-party chat. Each scenario gives a subject model a curated group-chat transcript in which non-subject participants demonstrate a hidden local norm, followed by a final elicitor turn that forces a response revealing whether the subject has inferred that norm. We evaluate eight frontier and open-weight models under four prompting conditions that vary how explicitly the model is told to treat the prior conversation as evidence for how it should answer. Naive prompting remains limited for most models; explicit norm-aware prompting helps unevenly, with Gemini 3.1 Pro reaching $84.2\%$ and Claude Fable 5 reaching $81.6\%$, while several other models show small gains or regressions. LoSoNA contributes to recent calls for evaluating LLM social capabilities by testing whether models can infer local conversational norms from precedent and use them in a one-turn group-chat response.