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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Enhancing Underwater Light Field Images via Global Geometry-aware Diffusion Process

This work studies the challenging problem of acquiring high-quality underwater images via 4-D light field (LF) imaging. To this end, we propose GeoDiff-LF, a novel diffusion-based framework built upon SD-Turbo to enhance underwater 4-D LF imaging by leveraging its spatial-angular structure. GeoDiff-LF consists of three key adaptations: (1) a modified U-Net architecture with convolutional and attention adapters to model geometric cues, (2) a geometry-guided loss function using tensor decomposition and progressive weighting to regularize global structure, and (3) an optimized sampling strategy with noise prediction to improve efficiency. By integrating diffusion priors and LF geometry, GeoDiff-LF effectively mitigates color distortion in underwater scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods across both visual fidelity and quantitative performance, advancing the state-of-the-art in enhancing underwater imaging. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/linlos1234/GeoDiff-LF.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Real-Time Neural Hair Denoising

We propose a lightweight real-time method for reconstructing strand-based hair G-Buffers from severely undersampled rasterized inputs. Our pipeline first applies neural spatial reconstruction and temporal accumulation to recover hair coverage, i.e., fractional hair visibility within a pixel, and tangent. It then uses a tangent-guided reconstruction step to complete the position, which is subsequently used for physically based deferred hair shading. We evaluate our method across a diverse set of hairstyles, including straight, wavy, afro, and ponytail styles, under both static and dynamic scenarios. Our method achieves higher hair reconstruction quality than existing hair-specific denoising techniques and general industrial neural reconstruction solutions such as DLSS and FSR.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Dual-Domain Equivariant Generative Adversarial Network for Multimodal CT-PET Synthesis

We present a Dual-Domain Equivariant Generative Adversarial Network (DDE-GAN) for multimodal CT-PET image synthesis. Traditional GAN-based approaches often operate solely in the spatial domain and ignore geometric consistency, resulting in limited structural fidelity. DDE-GAN addresses these challenges by jointly learning from both spatial and frequency (Fourier) domains, capturing complementary anatomical and spectral information. Furthermore, rotational equivariance embedded in the physics of the CT and PET measurements are integrated into the loss of both the generator and discriminator to ensure consistent responses under rotations, improving anatomical accuracy. A hierarchical dual-domain training strategy enforces intra- and inter-domain consistency through multi-stage loss functions. Evaluated on the HECKTOR 2022 CT-PET dataset, DDE-GAN achieves superior synthesis quality over baseline models for CT-PET image synthesis. The results demonstrate that combining dual-domain learning with geometric equivariance substantially enhances multimodal image synthesis accuracy and robustness, enabling practical applications in PET completion and data augmentation.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Arbitrarily Configurable Wavefunctions via Imaginary Gauge Phase Imprint in Non-Hermitian Lattices

arXiv:2603.28153v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a general framework, termed the imaginary gauge phase imprint (IGPI), which enables engineering arbitrarily configurable wavefunctions with exact solutions and self-organization dynamics in any-dimensional non-Hermitian lattices under imaginary gauge fields. Using this method, we uncover a novel phase with exact critical wavefunctions, dubbed the skin critical phase (SCP), which is marked by unconventional localization, topological-skin, and dynamical characteristics. Furthermore, we validate the IGPI by imprinting and visualizing complex fractal states with Sierpinski-carpet and Koch-snowflake profiles, as well as exotic super-moire and 3D-moire states in regular lattices. Our work not only offers fresh insights into non-Hermitian critical and fractal physics, but also provides a rigorous paradigm for controlling and visualizing wavefunction patterns using the IGPI in engineered non-Hermitian systems.

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

P3B3: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Measuring European and Brazilian Portuguese Variety Bias in LLMs

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become embedded in everyday communication, capturing regional linguistic variation is essential for reliable and equitable language use. In Portuguese, European (pt-PT) and Brazilian (pt-BR) varieties remain unevenly represented, with pt-BR dominating in data quantity, while LLM preference for Portuguese variants remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce P3B3, an expert-curated language variety agnostic benchmark of conversational prompts, along with an evaluation framework for measuring variety bias and controllability. Experiments on several models show that most LLMs exhibit a strong bias toward pt-BR, with variation in controllability across models. These results highlight the need for more balanced multilingual representation across language varieties.

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

Flux magnetism in a strongly interacting dipolar lattice supersolid under tunable gauge fields

arXiv:2509.05058v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supersolidity and magnetism are fundamental phenomena characterizing strongly correlated matter. Here we unveil a mechanism that directly connects these two regimes and can be experimentally accessed in ultracold atomic systems. Specifically, we exploit the distinctive properties of magnetic lanthanide atoms trapped in a one-dimensional anti-magic wavelength optical lattice. This platform enables a realistic implementation of a triangular Bose-Hubbard ladder featuring two key ingredients: strong long-range interactions and tunable gauge fields. Owing to these properties, our numerical analysis reveals a robust lattice supersolid regime with finite fluxes in each triangular plaquette. Remarkably, we show that the density modulation of the supersolid phase and a finite gauge field induce magnetic ordering of the fluxes, forming ferromagnetic and ferrimagnetic patterns. Our results thus reveal a fascinating quantum effect that bridges supersolidity and magnetism.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

How Well Do Large Language Models Capture Human Personality?

arXiv:2606.18263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human populations via persona prompting, often under the assumptions that richer persona descriptions improve behavioral fidelity, similarly sized attribute combinations are equally simulatable, and persona definitions generalize across tasks. In this work, we formalize these assumptions and systematically evaluate them across multiple architectures, scales, and simulation settings. We identify a fundamental limitation we term persona manifold collapse, where increasingly expressive persona specifications lead to systematic contraction of representational and behavioral diversity. Across models, increasing persona complexity consistently reduces inter-persona separation in latent space and weakens behavioral differentiation in downstream simulation tasks. These effects persist across multiple analyses as richer personas fail to preserve human subgroup disagreement, performance varies across attribute combinations of similar size, and adding descriptive detail often degrades rather than improves simulation fidelity. Surprisingly, simple Age-Gender personas consistently outperform richly specified Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) across industries, achieving substantially higher downstream prediction accuracy. We find that collapse is not uniform across attributes. Certain combinations remain behaviorally stable and preserve stronger alignment with human responses, forming localized regions we term alignment bridges. Together, our results provide empirical and conceptual foundations for understanding the limits of persona-conditioned simulation, highlighting the need for representation-aware persona construction rather than increasing persona expressivity alone.

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

Making Foresight Actionable: Repurposing Representation Alignment in World Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising route for robot manipulation by using video generation models to model future scene evolution before producing control actions. However, our empirical observations reveal a phenomenon: generating plausible visual futures does not always guarantee the extraction of accurate actions. To diagnose this failure, we conduct action-head attention analysis and causal interventions. We find that the action decoder fails to focus on task-relevant interaction regions and remains sensitive to perturbations in task-irrelevant areas. This reveals a representation mismatch: hidden states optimized for visual reconstruction are not inherently organized in a form useful for low-level action control. In this paper, we propose AGRA, an Action-Grounded Representation Alignment objective that regularizes the world-action interface by aligning intermediate video diffusion features with spatially coherent semantic representations from a foundation visual encoder. We evaluate AGRA on real-world manipulation tasks. Experiments show that AGRA makes world model representations more action-grounded: by focusing the action decoder on the correct interaction regions, it improves object localization accuracy and affordance understanding, and makes the policy more robust to perturbations in task-irrelevant regions. As a result, AGRA consistently improves both in-distribution performance and out-of-distribution generalization over the baseline world action model.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Persistence diagrams of random triangular matrices over finite fields

arXiv:2606.17895v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let us consider a random infinite lower triangular matrix, where the entries on and below the diagonal are i.i.d. uniform random elements of a fixed finite field. We investigate the evolution of the span of the first $n$ rows of this matrix as $n$ grows. Many properties of this evolving subspace can be captured with the help of the verbose persistence diagram, which is a standard tool in stochastic topology and topological data analysis. We give an explicit formula for the distribution of the persistence diagram. We prove a law of large numbers for the distribution of lifetimes. We also describe the fluctuations of the persistent Betti numbers.

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

PrologMCP: A Standardized Prolog Tool Interface for LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.14935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier reasoning-tuned language models still fail on deductive tasks at depth, and the cost of improved performance through extended internal reasoning scales poorly. Symbolic delegation offers a complementary route: a language model translates the problem, while a solver performs the inference. However, current autoformalization pipelines for logic programming are typically bespoke integrations tied to particular tasks or agents. We introduce PrologMCP, a task-agnostic, open-source server that exposes Prolog as a stateful tool through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Its compact tool interface, structured error reporting, and per-session isolation make the translate-run-inspect-repair loop a reusable primitive for MCP-capable agents. We evaluate a formalizer agent enhanced with PrologMCP against standard and reasoning LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4.1, and o4-mini) on two subsets of PARARULE-Plus: a general-purpose sample and a more challenging one targeting a specific failure mode of natural-language reasoning. On the general sample, the formalizer matches or exceeds reasoning LLMs (accuracy 1.00 vs.\ 1.00 / 0.998), with the largest gains over standard models (0.762 for GPT-4.1). On the challenging subset, the formalizer remains near-perfect (1.00 / 0.99) while reasoning LLMs drop to 0.95 / 0.94. These results suggest that delegating inference to Prolog via MCP is a robust and inspectable alternative to extended natural-language reasoning.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Stochastic dominations for FK percolation and sharp thinning thresholds for the Ising energy field

arXiv:2606.13648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: At first glance, one would imagine that the energy field of the Ising model, the set of edges whose endpoints share the same spin, is stochastically monotone as a function of the coupling constants. However, this is not generally the case. In this paper, we introduce two weaker notions of stochastic domination that make this result true: $p$–weak and $p$–weak$^\dagger$ domination. Both of these notions depend on a parameter $p$ and we find the optimal values $p$ and $p^\dagger$ so that these dominations hold. One of the key ingredient to obtain some of the results is a new stochastic domination relating FK percolations with different parameters $q,\tilde{q}\geq 1$ that is of independent interest.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Device assessed 24-hour movement behaviour and cardiovascular disease mortality amongst cancer survivors.

Background: Cancer survivors face elevated risks of mortality from cardiovascular disease (CVD). The potential importance of physical activity (PA) and other behaviours across the 24-hour day (e.g. sedentary behaviour (SB) and sleep) for CVD-mortality risk is not well understood in this at-risk population. Objectives: To assess the importance of 24-hour movement behaviour, using a compositional approach, for mitigating CVD-mortality amongst cancer survivors. Methods: Participants with a prior cancer diagnosis were drawn from the UK Biobank accelerometry sub-study (n=6,158). Accelerometer-derived movement (moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA), vigorous PA (VPA), moderate PA (MPA), light PA (LPA), SB, sleep) was examined in relation to CVD-mortality, identified from health record linkage data (using Fine-Gray Cox proportional-hazards models adjusted for demographic, health, lifestyle covariates). Results: Median follow-up was 8.0 years (Q1-Q3: 7.4-8.5), with n=500 (8.2%) deaths (CVD-deaths: n=118). Greater MVPA, in place of any other behaviour, was inversely associated with CVD-mortality with e.g. 10% lower hazard if MVPA theoretically replaced 7 minutes (mins)/day SB (Hazard ratio (HR): 0.91, (95% Confidence Interval: 0.86-0.95)), 9 mins/day LPA (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97), or 11 mins/day sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97). The VPA component of MVPA proved critical, requiring only ~1-2 additional mins/day for equivalent hazard reduction. Sleep duration, was also inversely associated with CVD-mortality. A 10% lower hazard required replacing 29 mins/day of SB with sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.84-0.96); no other behavioural replacement amongst SB, sleep or LPA could provide an equivalent risk reduction. Conclusions: Among cancer survivors, the most potent reduction in CVD-mortality followed theoretically reallocating time to higher intensity movement.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A Unified Latent Space Disentanglement VAE Framework with Robust Disentanglement Effectiveness Evaluation

arXiv:2603.11242v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating and interpreting latent representations, such as variational autoencoders (VAEs), remains a significant challenge for diverse data types, especially when ground-truth generative factors are unknown. To address this, we unify several state-of-the-art disentangled VAE approaches for latent space disentanglement into one framework – bfVAE. To assess the effectiveness of a disentangled VAE model and enhance latent space interpretability, we propose Feature Variance Heterogeneity via Latent Traversal (FVH-LT) and Dirty Block Sparse Regression in Latent Space (DBSR-LS). To ensure robust interpretability of learned latent space, we develop a greedy alignment strategy (GAS) that mitigates label switching and aligns latent dimensions across runs to set the foundation of result aggregation. We also introduce a convenient scalar latent space separation index (LSSI) based on the GAS-aligned outputs of FVH-LT and DBSR-LS to summarize the overall latent structural separation without knowledge of the ground-truth generative factors. We compare bfVAE to five VAE models and validate the effectiveness FVH-LT, DBSR-LS, and LSSI in on seven tabular and image datasets. Under our examined experimental settings, bfVAE provides a more flexible disentanglement framework achieves more favorable overall trade-off between disentanglement and reconstruction than the benchmark VAE models; FVH-LT and DBSR-LS reliably uncover semantically meaningful and domain-relevant latent structures and generally yield consistent results; and LSSI makes an effective quantitative summary of latent structural separation.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ASTEROID: A Spatiotemporal Information Transformer for Forecasting Multi-Step Time Series of Molecular Dynamics

arXiv:2606.17668v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation is computationally demanding, particularly for large-scale systems requiring long-term analysis. Accurate forecast of the outcomes of a MD simulation is not only an attractive scientific challenge but also has substantial practical value. In this work, we developed a data-driven framework, termed ASTEROID (Advanced Spatiotemporal TransformER fOr Inferring Dynamics), that can directly predict multi-step atomic coordinates, avoiding conventional iterative integration. For this purpose, our ASTEROID reformulates MD trajectories as high-dimensional spatiotemporal sequences and integrates the Spatiotemporal Information (STI) Transformation equation into a Transformer architecture. The core innovation of ASTEROID lies in its ability to model multiscale spatiotemporal dependencies. In particular, for spatial dependencies, a local-global self-attention mechanism captures both short- and long-range interactions. For temporal dependencies, an encoder-decoder structure integrates global context with autoregressive forecasting. ASTEROID was evaluated on several quantum-mechanics derived molecular datasets. Our results indicate that ASTEROID achieved not only a higher level of accuracy in multi-step prediction than existing methods on various benchmarks, but also significantly reduced computational cost of conventional MD simulation. Moreover, the model supports iterative multi-step forecasting over an extended time scale. This work establishes a robust and generalizable data-driven paradigm for accelerating MD simulations.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DDI_single: Single-Sequence-Based Protein Domain Assembly

作者:

Domains are the basic units of protein structure and function. Appropriate inter-domain organization is critical to enable cooperative execution of multiple related functions. It is thus a crucial step to determine the full-length structure of multi-domain proteins for the purpose of elucidating their functions and designing new drugs to regulate these functions. Existing structure prediction algorithms are generally better at solving the internal conformation of domains, rather than modeling the relative positions between domains. To address the challenge of accurately determining multi-domain protein conformations, we develop a single-sequence-based domain assembly algorithm called DDI_single. DDI_single directly extracts features from the amino acid sequence using the protein language model ESM-1b, and accurately predicts the interactions between residue pairs of structural domains through a novel gated cross-attention module, thus achieving the correct assembly of structural domains. With the knowledge of domain definition, DDI_single achieves more than 20% higher accuracy in the task of predicting the relative distances of residue pairs between domains than that of the single-sequence-based structure prediction algorithm trRosettaX_single. When assembling domains with known spatial conformations, DDI_single correctly assembles 74.4% of the samples in the test set (TM-score>0.5). When assembling domains with unknown spatial conformations, in cases where the internal spatial conformations of domains are correctly modeled, DDI_single correctly assembles 73.9% of the samples.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

DynamicDemiLog: A Single Sketch for Ultrafast Similarity, Frequency, and Cardinality Estimation

Probabilistic cardinality estimators (HyperLogLog), similarity sketches (MinHash), and frequency estimators (Count-Min Sketch) are fundamental approximate data structures that each target one primary problem. We present DynamicDemiLog (DDL), a sketch that unifies cardinality estimation, set similarity, containment, element frequency and composition in one tiny data structure built from a single pass over the input stream. Using an inverted index over 200,687 RefSeq sketches (159,567 organisms), DDL performs all-to-all sketch similarity comparison of the full database in 30 seconds (128 threads, indexed) - over 375x faster per query than Mash's brute-force all-to-all comparison of 91,282 sketches, or 31x faster without the index, at double the sketch resolution. DDL extends the LogLog register with a mantissa: each register stores a floating-point-encoded hash value consisting of an integer exponent (the leading-zero count) and a fractional mantissa (the sub-leading-zero bits), rather than the integer leading-zero count alone. This preserves enough hash information for meaningful register-by-register comparison - a property that standard 6-bit registers lack - while improving on LogLog's cardinality estimation machinery, including DynamicLogLog's early exit mask for high-throughput streaming. With a default 10 mantissa bits (16-bit registers, 2,048 buckets, 4 KB), DDL achieves a per-register false-match rate of 0.018% on unrelated random same-size sets (compared to 17.0% for LL6, a basic HyperLogLog implementation), enabling Weighted Kmer Identity (WKID), Average Nucleotide Identity (ANI), containment, and completeness estimation from register comparison alone. A 16-bit per-register observation counter provides element frequency information at trivial additional computation cost, and an additional byte tracks element composition (GC content, for biological data). Furthermore, DDL's high-specificity registers enable an inverted index structure (DDLIndex) that answers similarity queries against a database of N sketches in O(B + M) time, where M is the number of matching index entries, compared to O(NxB) for pairwise comparison.

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

Overcoming Rank Collapse in Feedback Alignment

arXiv:2606.11123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Backpropagation (BP) is widely viewed as biologically implausible, in part because it requires feedback weights to be the transpose of forward weights for error propagation. Interestingly, when training a network with fixed random feedback weights to circumvent this issue, learning aligns the forward weights with the feedback weights, leading the backpropagated error signal to become an approximation of the standard gradient used by BP. This process, called Feedback Alignment (FA), occurs in MLPs and very shallow CNNs but does not scale well to deeper architectures. In this work, we first investigated differences between BP and FA models, trained on CIFAR10, specifically focusing on the effective rank of the signal. We found that the FA error has a considerably lower rank and hence is constrained to a lower-dimensional subspace compared to BP, limiting exploration of the parameter space. Motivated by this observation, we evaluated two mechanisms for increasing the effective dimensionality of FA: Muon, an optimiser that orthogonalises weight updates; and hidden activity normalisation, which promotes activation orthogonality. Across larger architectures and benchmarks, we find that these methods consistently improve over FA baselines, for example, on CIFAR100 with a Resnet-18, accuracy increases by 9 percentage points. Our results identify low-dimensional gradient dynamics as a key obstacle to scaling FA and suggest that inducing higher-dimensional update geometry is a promising route toward scaling alternatives to backpropagation.

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

Rethinking the Pointer Loss in Table Structure Recognition: Geometry-Aware Pointer Loss for Spatial Locality

Table Structure Recognition (TSR) using a pointer network achieves impressive results by predicting HTML sequences while aligning tags to detected text (or cell) regions. However, our analysis reveals that when pointer networks fail, 79.6% of errors occur between spatially adjacent cells (Manhattan distance

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

ADMETron: An AI-driven SaaS platform for comprehensive ADMET prediction and compound prioritisation

ONTOSIGHT(R) ADMETron is an AI-driven platform designed for rapid prediction and visualization of Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity (ADMET) properties to support modern drug discovery. The platform integrates an interactive web interface with a scalable predictive engine, enabling high-throughput virtual screening and batch analysis of chemical compounds. Its core architecture combines recurrent neural network (RNN)-derived molecular embeddings from SMILES representations with physicochemical descriptors, which are subsequently modeled using gradient boosting machines (GBMs). This framework provides predictions across 34 ADMET endpoints, including physicochemical properties, absorption, CYP450 interactions, hERG liability, and mutagenicity. The predictive performance of ADMETron was evaluated using benchmark datasets from the Therapeutics Data Commons (TDC), demonstrating strong performance and generalizability across both classification and regression tasks. Beyond predictive modeling, the platform introduces an interactive radar graph-based structure-activity relationship (SAR) visualization framework that enables real-time comparison of multiple compounds and reference drugs across selected ADMET parameters. This feature facilitates intuitive interpretation of multidimensional molecular profiles and supports lead optimization and compound prioritization. Comparative assessment against widely used online ADMET tools further demonstrated broad endpoint coverage spanning pharmacokinetic, physicochemical, toxicity, and medicinal chemistry properties within a unified environment. Together, these capabilities establish ADMETron as a comprehensive platform for ADMET assessment and data-driven decision-making in drug discovery. (https://admetron.partex.ai/).

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Quantum Transition State

arXiv:2606.10266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The transition state – the critical configuration separating reactants from products – is the central organizing concept of chemical reaction rate theory, yet for nearly a century it has been thought to have no exact quantum counterpart: the recrossing-free, one-way flux through a transition state appears to demand simultaneous knowledge of position and momentum, in conflict with the uncertainty principle. We show this obstruction is illusory and construct the quantum transition state directly from the exact quantum flow. Its stable and unstable invariant manifolds intersect in a unique bounded trajectory – the quantum transition-state trajectory – anchoring a moving dividing surface that each reactive characteristic crosses exactly once, yielding a one-way flux of the standard quantum probability current. The geometric framework underlying classical transition-state theory thus survives intact in exact quantum mechanics, in a fundamentally quantum form.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Multi-Class Brain Tumor Classification Using Advanced Deep Learning Models: A Comparative Study

Despite recent advancements in deep learning, accurately classifying brain tumors from MRI images continues to pose challenges. In this research, we present a comprehensive evaluation of five different convolutional neural networks (CNN) architectures, including a customized baseline model and four pre-trained models - for use in classifying multi-class brain tumors using a clinically-sourced dataset of approximately 10,000 MRI images. We have utilized five different architectures; VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, and EfficientNetB0, which were all tested and trained within an identical experimental framework. Performance was measured by both overall accuracy and tumor-wise recall as a means to measure the clinically-relevant performance of each architecture. We found that EfficientNetB0 had the best overall classification accuracy at 95%, when compared to the other architectures tested; specifically VGG16 (94.37%), VGG19 (92.29%), DenseNet121 (90.91%) and the customized CNN (78.00%). An especially important finding of our research was the considerable improvement in detecting meningiomas; specifically, while simple CNNs could detect meningiomas with a recall rate of approximately 20%, EfficientNetB0 was able to detect meningiomas with a recall rate of 89%. Meningiomas are often difficult to detect because they can appear very subtly on MRI images. Additionally, an interesting finding was that the deeper VGG19 performed worse than the shallower VGG16. This indicates that in many cases the architectural efficiency of a CNN model may be more important than its depth when working with medical images. Overall, EfficientNetB0 appears to provide the optimal trade-off between classification accuracy, number of parameters used in the model and clinically meaningful performance.

22.
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.

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

DEEPRUBRIC: Evidence-Tree Rubric Supervision for Efficient Reinforcement Learning of Deep Research Agents

Deep research agents synthesize long-form reports by searching and reasoning over retrieved evidence. Reinforcement learning with rubric-based rewards improves these agents by optimizing them against checkable criteria that translate report quality into reward signals, but its efficiency depends on whether those criteria reliably capture the task scope and evidence needs. Most existing studies ask an LLM to generate rubrics for a given query, but when the model fails to infer the underlying information needs, the generated rubrics may be incomplete and reduce RL efficiency. To obtain more reliable query–rubric supervision, we introduce DeepRubric, a data construction framework that reverses this process: instead of inferring evaluation criteria for a given query, it first determines what an evidence-backed report should be evaluated on and then synthesizes aligned query–rubric pairs from those evaluation targets. Starting from a sampled seed topic, DeepRubric builds an evidence tree by recursively expanding evidence-backed sub-questions, whose leaves serve as atomic and verifiable evaluation targets. It then uses the evidence tree to synthesize the training query and rubrics, ensuring that the reward evaluates exactly the information requested by the query. Using DeepRubric, we construct 9K query–rubric supervision examples and train DeepRubric-8B with rubric-based GRPO, achieving comparable performance to prior open state-of-the-art deep research models across three benchmarks with roughly 13x fewer RL GPU-hours.

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

ROSE: Benchmarking the Perception-to-Action Gap in Multimodal Models

arXiv:2606.19965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to act on visual information, yet the same scene may require different actions under different task contexts. How reliably can a model turn the same visual evidence into the action required by the current context? To answer this question, we introduce \textsc{ROSE} (Reference-conditioned Oddity and Symbolic Execution), a controlled benchmark that holds the visual scene fixed while varying region constraints and required symbolic outputs. Through coupled counting and coordinate-action tasks, \textsc{ROSE} tests whether models can infer an implicit majority reference and act on the resulting fine-grained visual evidence under changing contexts. Across nine recent MLLMs, performance drops by as much as 44.5 percentage points from counting-oriented tasks to region-conditioned action, despite 98.8\% human performance. The gap persists on paired scenes and regions for which the same model returns the correct count, while global-click and matched local controls show that coordinate grounding explains only part of the loss, revealing a distinct, model-dependent bottleneck in turning shared visual evidence into context-specific actions.