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

Applicability Condition Extraction for Therapeutic Drug-Disease Relations

arXiv:2606.14031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying conditions that a certain drug takes therapeutic effect on a target disease is crucial for clinical decision-making support. However, most existing biomedical information extraction methods have focused on identifying only relations between drugs and diseases, while largely overlooking the context-specific conditions where such relations can apply. To address this problem, we introduce the task of applicability condition extraction for therapeutic drug–disease relations from biomedical research literature. We create the first dataset that has manually annotated triples of drugs, diseases, and applicability conditions on biomedical paper abstracts with 1,119 drug-disease pairs. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate the performance of a range of existing methods. In addition, we propose a new method that enhances LoRA to consider relations between drugs and diseases. Our method consistently outperforms strong baselines across different evaluation settings. The source code and dataset of this paper can be obtained from: https://github.com/guantingluo98/Drug-ACE

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

FashionChameleon: Towards Real-Time and Interactive Human-Garment Video Customization

Human-centric video customization, particularly at the garment level, has shown significant commercial value. However, existing approaches cannot support low-latency and interactive garment control, which is crucial for applications such as e-commerce and content creation. This paper studies how to achieve interactive multi-garment video customization while preserving motion coherence using only single-garment video data. We present FashionChameleon, a real-time and interactive framework for human-garment customization in autoregressive video generation, where users can interactively switch garment during generation. FashionChameleon consists of three key techniques: (i) Instead of training on multi-garment video data, we train a Teacher Model with In-Context Learning on a single reference-garment pair. By retaining the image-to-video training paradigm while enforcing a mismatch between the reference and garment image, the model is encouraged to implicitly preserve coherence during single-garment switching. (ii) To achieve consistency and efficiency during generation, we introduce Streaming Distillation with In-Context Learning, which fine-tunes the model with in-context teacher forcing and improves extrapolation consistency via gradient-reweighted distribution matching distillation. (iii) To extend the model for interactive multi-garment video customization, we propose Training-Free KV Cache Rescheduling, which includes garment KV refresh, historical KV withdraw, and reference KV disentangle to achieve garment switching while preserving motion coherence. Our FashionChameleon uniquely supports interactive customization and consistent long-video extrapolation, while achieving real-time generation at 23.8 FPS on a single GPU, 30-180$\times$ faster than existing baselines.

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

A Comprehensive Survey of Medical Image Segmentation: Challenges, Benchmarks, and Beyond

Medical image segmentation plays a critical role in clinical diagnostics, treatment planning, disease monitoring, and neurological disorder identification. This article presents a comprehensive review of its systematic development, covering widely used public datasets, representative methods built on the U-Net, Transformer, and SAM architectures, and key evaluation metrics with their differences, followed by an analysis of major challenges from multiple perspectives. Unlike surveys that focus on a single model family or a specific clinical application, this review organizes U-Net-, Transformer-, and SAM-based methods within a unified analytical framework, with a particular focus on their effectiveness in improving segmentation accuracy and efficiency. This work aims to guide future research and support clinical translation of medical image segmentation, with all related resources publicly available in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/andrew-pengyu/Awsome_MedSeg/tree/main.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

StickForStats: automated statistical assumption validation for reproducible computational biology

Reproducible computational biology depends on statistical decisions that routine workflows often skip: verifying that a differential-expression test's assumptions hold across all genes, that a strategy-comparison ANOVA is robust to non-normality, or that a meta-analysis is not distorted by publication bias. Surveys consistently find that fewer than 20% of published biomedical studies report checking these assumptions, and existing statistical software leaves validation to the analyst as an optional step. We present StickForStats, an open-source web platform that reframes assumption validation as a default precondition for every analysis. Its Guardian system–a middleware pipeline of eight validators (normality, variance homogeneity, independence, outliers, sample size, modality, linearity, homoscedasticity)–checks assumptions before execution and, on critical violations, reroutes to an appropriate nonparametric alternative with a documented decision trail. At genome scale, applying Guardian to a 91-sample synovial-sarcoma RNA-seq study (GSE271517) cascaded 90.6% of 27,221 genes to a rank-based test and flipped the differential-expression verdict for 553 genes–479 rescued from an under-powered t-test and 74 outlier-driven false positives rejected–materially changing the gene list a biologist would act on. The same automatic validation generalizes across domains: a CRISPR editing-strategy comparison (ANOVA F = 1122, with Guardian recommending Kruskal-Wallis H = 36.6), an ordinal correlation (Pearson r = 0.476 corrected to Spearman {rho} = 0.479), and a sixteen-trial clinical meta-analysis revealing severe publication bias (Egger's t = -5.78, p < 0.001); a complementary module extends the same validators to published manuscripts, checking claims against CONSORT, STROBE, ICH-E9, and JARS-Quant reporting standards. By making assumption validation automatic and transparent, StickForStats targets a tractable, under-served contributor to irreproducibility. The platform is MIT-licensed, validated against SciPy and R, and freely available at https://github.com/visvikbharti/stickforstats_new.

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

RecourseBench: A Modular Framework for Reproducible Algorithmic Recourse Evaluation

arXiv:2606.16113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Algorithmic recourse methods provide counterfactual explanations that inform individuals of the actions required to overturn an unfavorable model decision. Despite rapid methodological progress, principled comparison remains elusive; existing frameworks are often difficult to extend and lack both interoperability and systematic verification that integrated methods faithfully reproduce their originally reported results. We introduce RecourseBench, a unified evaluation framework built around three commitments namely, modularity, reproducibility, and interactivity. The framework decomposes the pipeline into five fully decoupled layers – Data, Preprocessing, Model, Recourse Method, and Evaluation – governed by abstract interfaces and a dynamic registry. To address the reproducibility gap in prior benchmarks, we introduce a four-tier classification system in which every integrated method is validated by an automated test suite against its originally reported results. We further provide an interactive web interface for flexible, configuration-driven comparison across methods, datasets, and model architectures. Our framework currently integrates 28 state-of-the-art recourse methods and, to our knowledge, constitutes the first recourse benchmark to explicitly enforce method-level reproducibility through automated, quantitative testing.

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

Complete entanglement detection using polynomial invariants

arXiv:2606.16712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing methods for deciding whether a bipartite quantum state is separable or entangled typically fall into one of two categories: they are either complete but require access to an explicit density matrix followed by numerical optimization, or they can be evaluated directly by measuring the quantum system but are incomplete, in the sense that they cannot detect all forms of entanglement. In this work, we overcome both limitations in a unified framework. First, we bypass numerical optimization by deriving separability criteria in the form of universal bounds on tensor powers of separable states. We prove that these bounds are complete: every entangled state violates them for sufficiently large tensor powers. Second, we explicitly construct a corresponding complete family of nonlinear entanglement witnesses, which can detect all forms of entanglement without requiring an explicit density matrix. The witnesses we construct are moreover basis-independent, in the sense that they are invariant under conjugation by local unitaries. Altogether, our results expand the toolbox for entanglement detection in arbitrary local dimensions in a manifestly invariant way.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

HD-Prot: A Protein Language Model for Joint Sequence-Structure Modeling with Continuous Structure Tokens

arXiv:2512.15133v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Proteins inherently possess a consistent sequence-structure duality. The abundance of protein sequence data, which can be readily represented as discrete tokens, has driven fruitful developments in protein language models (pLMs). A key remaining challenge, however, is how to effectively integrate continuous structural knowledge into pLMs. Current methods often discretize protein structures to accommodate the language modeling framework, which inevitably results in the loss of fine-grained information and limits the performance potential of multimodal pLMs. In this paper, we argue that such concerns can be circumvented: a sequence-based pLM can be extended to incorporate the structure modality through continuous tokens, i.e., high-fidelity protein structure latents that avoid vector quantization. Specifically, we propose a hybrid diffusion protein language model, HD-Prot, which embeds a continuous-valued diffusion head atop a discrete pLM, enabling seamless operation with both discrete and continuous tokens for joint sequence-structure modeling. It captures inter-token dependencies across modalities through a unified absorbing diffusion process, and estimates per-token distributions via categorical prediction for sequences and continuous diffusion for structures. Extensive results demonstrate that HD-Prot achieves competitive performance in unconditional sequence-structure co-generation, motif-scaffolding, protein structure prediction, and inverse folding tasks. Furthermore, our method can perform on par with state-of-the-art multimodal pLMs, despite being developed under limited computational resources (i.e., less than one-tenth the budget for modality extension fine-tuning). It highlights the viability of simultaneously estimating categorical and continuous distributions within a unified language model architecture, offering a promising alternative direction for multimodal pLMs.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sphere Packings in Higher Dimension (after Boaz Klartag)

arXiv:2606.13313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $\delta_n^L$ be the maximal density of a lattice sphere packing in the $n$-dimensional Euclidean space. We explain how Boaz Klartag proved the inequality $\delta_n^L \geq c n^2 2^{-n}$ where $c>0$ is a universal constant. In higher dimension, even for non-lattice sphere packings, this new lower bound is a substantial improvement. Klartag's proof uses the probabilistic method in two different ways. The first, very standard, relies on the statistical properties of a uniformly chosen random lattice. The second, completely new, studies the stochastic evolution of an ellipsoid constrained to contain non nonzero lattice points in the interior.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

VisChronos: Revolutionizing Image Captioning Through Real-Life Events

This paper aims to bridge the semantic gap between visual content and natural language understanding by leveraging historical events in the real world as a source of knowledge for caption generation. We propose VisChronos, a novel framework that utilizes large language models and dense captioning models to identify and describe real-life events from a single input image. Our framework can automatically generate detailed and context-aware event descriptions, enhancing the descriptive quality and contextual relevance of generated captions to address the limitations of traditional methods in capturing contextual narratives. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset, EventCap (https://zenodo.org/records/14004909), specifically constructed using the proposed framework, designed to enhance the model's ability to identify and understand complex events. The user study demonstrates the efficacy of our solution in generating accurate, coherent, and event-focused descriptions, paving the way for future research in event-centric image understanding.

10.
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.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

PosterForest: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Collaboration for Scientific Poster Generation

arXiv:2508.21720v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automating scientific poster generation requires hierarchical document understanding and coherent content-layout planning. Existing methods often rely on flat summarization or optimize content and layout separately. As a result, they often suffer from information loss, weak logical flow, and poor visual balance. We present PosterForest, a training-free framework for scientific poster generation. Our method introduces the Poster Tree, a structured intermediate representation that captures document hierarchy and visual-textual semantics across multiple levels. Building on this representation, content and layout agents perform hierarchical reasoning and recursive refinement, progressively optimizing the poster from global organization to local composition. This joint optimization improves semantic coherence, logical flow, and visual harmony. Experiments show that PosterForest outperforms prior methods in both automatic and human evaluations, without additional training or domain-specific supervision.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

High-Fidelity 3D Geometric Reconstruction of Pelvic Organs from MRI: A Hybrid Deep Learning and Iterative Optimization Approach

Patient-specific 3D reconstruction of pelvic organ geometry from MRI is important for pelvic floor modeling and downstream patient-specific analysis. However, while previous studies have focused primarily on either image segmentation or downstream use of 3D models, the reconstruction of high-fidelity, high-quality geometries remains labor-intensive and poorly standardized. The study introduced a hybrid deformable shape modeling framework that integrates deep learning prediction with iterative optimization for the reconstruction of the bladder, uterus, and rectum. The framework consists of three core components: a geometry-aware multi-level deep learning architecture that preserves topological consistency of pelvic organs; a two-stage amortized optimization training strategy that balances global shape capture and local surface refinement; and a holistic synergy mechanism–where iterative optimization provides supervision for deep learning during the training phase, and during inference, deep learning rapidly predicts the global organ morphology, followed by iterative optimization to refine local surfaces and mesh quality. This framework demonstrated marked superiority in geometric fidelity than current mainstream deep learning-based organ reconstruction models. For individual anatomical structures, the reconstructed 3D geometries for the bladder, rectum, and uterus achieved significantly lower Chamfer Distance values and higher Dice Similarity Coefficient scores. In addition, while maintaining high computational efficiency, the proposed architecture yielded superior overall volumetric mesh quality. At the patient level, the framework achieved higher mean values for the 10 worst elements for both minSICN and minSIGE compared to traditional geometric post-processing algorithms.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

FedSteer: Taming Extreme Gradient Staleness in Federated Learning with Corrective Projections and Caching

arXiv:2606.10124v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is often subject to aggregation variance if clients do not consistently participate in training rounds. While reusing stale model updates from inactive clients is a common technique to reduce this variance, we find that with skewed client participation, the resulting update staleness can become severe enough to destabilize training. To remedy this, we propose FedSteer, a novel method that constructs a gradient subspace from a cache of recent client gradients to serve as a low-dimensional representation of the current optimization landscape. FedSteer projects an active client's true gradient onto this subspace to find a set of optimal coordinates. For an inactive client, FedSteer reuses these coordinates with the now-evolved subspace drifted by other active clients. This process effectively "steers" outdated gradients toward the current global objective. This is complemented by a selective caching strategy that identifies a representative client subset to form the subspace, reducing server memory. Experiments demonstrate that FedSteer significantly outperforms baselines, preventing performance collapse in challenging scenarios while delivering accuracy gains of over 7% in others.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grad Detect: Gradient-Based Hallucination Detection in LLMs

arXiv:2606.24790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet they remain prone to generating hallucinations. Detecting these hallucinations is critical for deploying LLMs reliably in high-stakes applications. We present Grad Detect, a gradient-based approach for predicting hallucinations by analyzing layer-wise gradient patterns from a single forward-backward pass during inference. Our method shows that the internal gradient structure of a model carries rich information about the correctness of its output. This information is not accessible through output-level signals alone. We evaluate Grad Detect on several Q&A benchmarks across both hallucination detection and model abstention prediction, where it consistently outperforms confidence-based and sampling-based baselines. Through comprehensive layer ablation studies across all eleven models from four architectural families, we find that the final five layers concentrate over 97% of the discriminative gradient signal, enabling efficient deployment with minimal performance loss. Grad Detect provides a unified framework for predicting multiple dimensions of LLM reliability, offering strong predictive performance alongside interpretable insights into where and how model failures originate.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledge

LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone. We argue that this conflates two distinct roles: generating a skill from experience is a creative act that judgment handles well, while deciding whether that skill actually helps requires empirical evidence across many tasks. Measuring per-skill causal contributions via randomized masking, we find that skill libraries exhibit pervasive causal heterogeneity: individual skills routinely help on some task types while hurting on others, yet their opposing effects cancel in aggregate, making them invisible to global curation methods. We propose ASSAY, a framework that separates generation from curation: it computes a per-skill causal attribution on a small development set, restructures the library offline, and suppresses skills with negative predicted effect for each test task. Across seven base models spanning four providers and two benchmarks (AppWorld and tau-bench), ASSAY consistently improves over prior skill-curation approaches. On AppWorld's hardest split, DeepSeek-V3 achieves 69.3% task-goal completion (47.4% relative improvement), a new state of the art among all published methods including weight-tuned approaches. On tau-bench retail, GPT-4.1 improves by 8.7% relative, advancing past o4-mini, o1, and GPT-4.5 on the public leaderboard without any weight modification. Ablation traces the dominant gain to per-task masking, confirming that the bottleneck is matching skills to tasks at inference time, not removing bad skills globally. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/assay.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Extending Covariant Fluctuation Theorems into Quantum Regime through Quasiprobability Approach

arXiv:2606.14519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The covariant formulation of stochastic thermodynamics requires treating the stochastic work as a 4-vector, posing significant challenges for quantum systems due to the non-commutativity. We introduce a new quasiprobability distribution for the work 4-vector, which combines the Wigner and Margenau-Hill quasiprobabilities. This extends the covariant fluctuation theorems from classical to quantum regime. We illustrate our findings with a scalar field driven by classical particles with a generalized version of trace formula. Our work establishes a quasiprobability approach to studying relativistic quantum thermodynamics in a covariant way.

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

Decoherence-free algebras in quantum dynamics

arXiv:2403.12926v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this Article we analyze the algebraic properties of the asymptotic dynamics of finite-dimensional open quantum systems in the Heisenberg picture. In particular, a natural product (Choi-Effros product) can be defined in the asymptotic regime. Motivated by this structure, we introduce a new space called the Choi-Effros decoherence-free algebra. Interestingly, this space is both a C*-algebra with respect to the composition product, and a B*-algebra with respect to the Choi-Effros product. Moreover, such space admits a direct-sum decomposition revealing a clear relationship with the attractor subspace of the dynamics. In particular, the equality between the attractor subspace and the Choi-Effros decoherence-free algebra is a necessary and sufficient condition for a faithful dynamics. Finally, we show how all the findings do not rely on complete positivity but on the much weaker Schwarz property.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

FOCUS: DLLMs Know How to Tame Their Compute Bound

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) offer a compelling alternative to Auto-Regressive models, but their deployment is constrained by high decoding cost. In this work, we identify a key inefficiency in DLLM decoding: while computation is parallelized over token blocks, only a small subset of tokens is decodable at each diffusion step, causing most compute to be wasted on non-decodable tokens. We further observe a strong correlation between attention-derived token importance and token-wise decoding probability. Based on this insight, we propose FOCUS, an inference system designed for DLLMs. By dynamically focusing computation on decodable tokens and evicting non-decodable ones on-the-fly, FOCUS increases the effective batch size, alleviating compute limitations and enabling scalable throughput. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FOCUS achieves up to 3.52$\times$ throughput improvement over the production-grade engine LMDeploy in large-batch settings, while preserving or improving generation quality across multiple benchmarks.

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

Cascade Classification of Dermoscopic Images of Skin Neoplasms with Controllable Sensitivity and External Clinical Validation

Purpose. To compare deep learning architectures and classification schemes for dermoscopic images of skin neoplasms and assess their generalization on transfer from open international datasets to independent clinical datasets of Russian practice. Methods. Four architectures (ViT-B/16, Swin-S, ConvNeXt-S, EfficientNetV2-S) were compared in three schemes: binary (malignant/benign), single-stage four-class (benign, MEL, SCC, BCC), and a two-stage cascade (binary triage, then three-class differentiation MEL/SCC/BCC). All models used ImageNet-pretrained weights and a single augmentation protocol on aggregated open ISIC Archive data, and were evaluated on an internal held-out sample and two clinical datasets (Melanoscope AI mobile system; Sechenov University). Results. Internally the binary stage attains ROC-AUC 0.952-0.966; on Sechenov University it drops to 0.797-0.893, sensitivity to 0.53-0.67, and ECE rises from 0.02 to 0.27-0.39 with underestimation of malignancy, quantifying a generalization gap in ranking and calibration. Paired tests confirm one inter-architecture result on clinical data: the deficit of ViT-B/16 at the binary stage (p

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

The Data Manifold under the Microscope

arXiv:2606.15760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A significant gap exists between theory and practice in deep learning. Generalization and approximation error bounds are often derived for simplified models or are too loose to be informative. Many rely on the manifold hypothesis and on geometric regularity such as intrinsic dimension, curvature, and reach. Progress requires insight into data-manifold geometry and suitable benchmarks, yet existing options are polarized: analytic manifolds with known geometry but limited applicability, or real-world datasets where geometry is only coarsely estimable. We introduce a benchmarking framework for studying data geometry. We repurpose and extend dSprites and COIL-20 with additional transformation dimensions and dense, axis-aligned sampling, and pair them with finite-difference estimators that recover curvature, reach, and volume at near-ground-truth accuracy in a regime where general-purpose estimators are unreliable or difficult to deploy. The framework is intended as a controlled testbed, useful as a calibration environment for geometric estimators and a sandbox for probing theoretical assumptions. To illustrate its use, we present two application studies, namely assessing the scaling behavior of the bounds of Genovese et al. and Fefferman et al., and tracking the layer-wise geometry of a $\beta$-VAE, highlighting the behavior of current bounds and the value of controlled benchmarks for guiding and validating future theory. A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/koulakis/manifold-microscope.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Circuit Tracing in Autoregressive Protein Language Models

arXiv:2606.16044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (pLMs) can generate novel protein sequences with properties beyond those observed in nature, yet the mechanisms underlying protein generation remain poorly understood. Existing mechanistic interpretability methods based on sparse autoencoders and transcoders primarily focus on protein representation learning models and do not capture the computation required for autoregressive generation. Here, we introduce ProGenMech, a mechanistic interpretability framework for generative protein language models that extends cross-layer transcoders (CLTs) to ProGen3, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model trained for both causal generation and span infilling. Unlike per-layer approaches, CLTs reconstruct each layer using sparse latent variables from all preceding layers, enabling faithful recovery of inter-layer generative computation. We further develop a zero-shot circuit discovery framework to identify sparse latent circuits responsible for protein generation and fitness prediction. In causal generation and zero-shot fitness estimation tasks, ProGenMech outperforms local transcoder baselines in recovering ProGen3's probability distribution and functional scoring behavior, while matching the original model's generative distribution in span infilling tasks. Moreover, the recovered circuits reveal biologically meaningful motifs and functional regions associated with conserved sequence patterns and protein fitness landscapes, establishing a foundation for interpretable and steerable protein generation.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Clinical Characteristics and mortality outcomes of Atrial fibrillation complicating Heart failure with reduced ejection fraction: A prospective study from South Africa

Background: A growing burden of cardiovascular risk factors has raised cardiovascular disease-related mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), driving higher prevalence of heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) and its complication with atrial fibrillation (AF). No prospective study has examined AF's clinical impact on HFrEF in SSA. Aim: To determine AF prevalence in HFrEF, describe HFrEF-AF clinical characteristics, and determine AF's impact on mortality. Methods: In this prospective observational study at a tertiary hospital in Johannesburg, 136 HFrEF patients were enrolled and categorised as HFrEF- SR (sinus rhythm) or HFrEF-AF. Baseline clinical characteristics and biochemistry were recorded. Comprehensive echocardiography including left atrial strain by 2D speckle-tracking was performed. Median follow-up was 30.6 months. Results: AF was present in 28 patients (21%). The mean age was 58.7 {+/-} 14.9 years (52.9% male) and differed between groups (p < 0.001). Hypertensive heart disease was the leading cause of HFrEF (36%). Compared with SR, HFrEF-AF patients had poorer health status (KCCQ 27 [16-43] vs 45 [32-60], p < 0.001) and lower left atrial strain (26.2 {+/-} 11.3%, p < 0.001). Guideline-directed medical therapy was suboptimal in the AF group: anticoagulation use was higher than SR (60% vs 9.5%, p < 0.001) but overall inadequate; HFrEF-AF patients received lower median doses of carvedilol (15.6 mg vs 25 mg, p = 0.002) and enalapril (10 mg vs 20 mg, p = 0.004), and fewer received spironolactone (50% vs 75.3%, p = 0.013). Survival was significantly lower in HFrEF-AF (0.41 [0.22-0.61]) versus SR (0.73 [0.61-0.82], p < 0.001). Independent predictors of mortality included prior stroke, lower TAPSE and KCCQ, and higher E/e' and heart rate. Conclusion: AF is common among HFrEF patients in this SSA cohort (though lower than in high-income countries) and associates with worse clinical status, suboptimal therapy, and higher mortality.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Density Ridge Selective Prediction for LLM and VLM Hallucination Detection under Calibration Label Scarcity

Hallucination detection in large language and vision-language models is increasingly framed as selective prediction, where a detector assigns a confidence score and abstains when confidence is low. Unsupervised sampling detectors (Semantic Entropy) avoid labels but plateau in quality, while supervised probes attain stronger in-distribution scores yet degrade sharply when calibration labels are scarce. We recover the response manifold of an LLM as the density ridge of a kernel density estimate built on a six-dimensional kinematic feature map of hidden state generation trajectories. A test generation is scored by the negated Euclidean distance from its projected feature point to the nearest ridge vertex, yielding a low-dimensional geometric skeleton of the stochastic output distribution. We evaluate against Semantic Entropy, topological methods, and log-probability on six QA benchmarks (HaluEval-QA, TriviaQA, GSM8K, POPE, ScienceQA, A-OKVQA) using eight text and vision LLMs in a deliberately label-scarce protocol ($n_{cal}{=}200$ queries, $N{=}5$ generations). Our ridge-based score beats on AUROC with 5-20 points gain, while demonstrating tempered degradation under calibration-label scarcity.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Reward-SQL: Boosting Text-to-SQL via Stepwise Execution-Aware Reasoning and Process-Supervised Rewards

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have improved Text-to-SQL performance. However, RL-based approaches still struggle with complex queries due to two key limitations: insufficient stepwise execution-aware reasoning grounded in database feedback, and the lack of process-level rewards for guiding reasoning optimization. To address these issues, we propose CoCTE, a divide-and-conquer and execution-aware reasoning framework that progressively composes SQL queries through intermediate view validation and structured Common Table Expressions (CTEs), improving both accuracy and interpretability. To realize a CoCTE reasoning process, we develop Reward-SQL, a unified approach with three stages: (1) model initialization, which equips LLMs with structured CoCTE reasoning capabilities; (2) process reward design, which delivers fine-grained, execution-aware supervision; and (3) process-supervised RL and inference, which integrates process rewards into training and guides the inference stage by process rewards. This paper addresses the core challenges in Reward-SQL and makes the following contributions. We introduce a process reward model (PRM) that combines execution-aware trajectory scoring with entropy-based step weighting, providing dense and interpretable supervision across reasoning steps. We integrate PRM into both RL training and inference stages, stabilizing optimization and improving trajectory exploration with process-level signals. Experiments show that Reward-SQL significantly outperforms baselines with comparable model sizes, and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Bayesian 3D Steerable CNNs: Enabling Equivariance and Uncertainty Quantification Simultaneously

arXiv:2606.15479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Steerable convolutional neural networks (Steerable-CNNs) guarantee SE(3)-equivariance by parameterizing kernels as linear combinations of steerable basis functions, but their deterministic nature precludes uncertainty quantification - limiting their use in settings where confidence estimates are essential. We propose a Bayesian Steerable-CNN that places posterior distributions over the basis coefficients, yielding stochastic kernels while preserving equivariance exactly. The loss function of the model is obtained via variational inference and minimized by Bayes-by-Backpropagation. The framework admits a decomposition of predictive uncertainty into epistemic and aleatoric components. Empirically, the model attains competitive classification accuracy alongside an expected calibration error of 0.0263 and outperforms its deterministic counterpart by up to 6.17% under distributional shift induced by additive Gaussian noise. Furthermore, we leverage the model's uncertainty estimates to enhance its performance significantly, achieving a notable gain - approximately 4% higher accuracy across 84% of the test dataset. A statistically significant negative correlation between epistemic uncertainty and prediction error confirms that the learned posterior variance is semantically meaningful. The framework unifies Bayesian uncertainty quantification with the inductive bias of equivariant CNNs.