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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Ontology Memory-Augmented ASR Correction for Long Text-Speech Interleaved Conversations

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) correction has traditionally focused on isolated utterances or short local contexts. However, as text and speech become increasingly interleaved in long interactions, ASR correction requires conversation-level contextual evidence. Existing ASR correction methods often rely on the current hypothesis or concatenate raw dialogue history. In such contexts, sparse correction evidence can be difficult to locate amid redundancy and noise. Addressing these challenges, we propose an ontology memory-augmented ASR correction framework for long text-speech interleaved conversations. The framework organizes preceding interaction history into a dynamically updatable ontology memory, where entities, terminology, surface variants, potential ASR confusions, and semantic relations are stored as retrievable nodes for context-grounded correction. To evaluate this setting, we construct RAMC-Corr, a dataset derived from MAGIC-RAMC for long-range ASR correction with grounded context. Experiments on RAMC-Corr show that our method improves over direct correction in 9 out of 10 paired backbone-setting combinations and encourages more selective and evidence-grounded corrections for context-dependent ASR errors.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Structure preserving properties of higher order moment closures for TASEP

arXiv:2604.15925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) is a stochastic model for the unidirectional flow of interacting particles on a 1D-lattice that is much used in systems biology and statistical physics. Its master equation describes the evolution of the probability distribution on the configuration space. The size of the master equation grows exponentially with the length of the lattice. It is known that the complexity of the system may be reduced using mean-field approximations. We provide a rigorous definition of a family of such models using moments of any order and an extension to the pair approximation for obtaining closures for the system. The dimension of these models grows linearly with the lattice size and exponentially in the order of the approximation. Moreover, we show that the states of these models still have a probabilistic interpretation and that basic structural properties of the master equation are preserved. This extends known results on the Ribosome Flow Model which can be viewed as the first order approximation for TASEP.

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

Confidence Calibration for Multimodal LLMs: An Empirical Study through Medical VQA

arXiv:2606.19950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great potential in medical tasks, but their elicited confidence often misaligns with actual accuracy, potentially leading to misdiagnosis or overlooking correct advice. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between accuracy and confidence in medical MLLMs. It proposes a novel method that combines Multi-Strategy Fusion-Based Interrogation (MS-FBI) with auxiliary expert LLM assessment, aiming to improve confidence calibration in Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA). Experiments demonstrate that our method reduces the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by an average of 40\% across three Medical VQA datasets, significantly enhancing MLLMs' reliability. The findings highlight the importance of domain-specific calibration for MLLMs in healthcare, offering a more trustworthy solution for AI-assisted diagnosis.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

An Information Theoretic Framework for Graph Novelty Generation via Latent Mixture Modeling

arXiv:2606.19770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose an information-theoretic framework for graph novelty generation, which aims to generate data that are distinct from existing patterns while preserving global structural consistency. Our approach embeds data into a latent space, models the latent distribution using finite mixture models, and generates novel samples by imposing explicit novelty and reliability conditions formulated in terms of description length. Specifically, novelty is enforced by requiring generated samples to be poorly explained by all existing mixture components, while reliability constrains their impact on the overall mixture structure under the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that, with appropriate threshold choices, the probabilities of misclassifying non-novel or unreliable samples converge to zero with explicit rates. Experiments on synthetic and benchmark graph datasets demonstrate that the proposed method enables principled novelty generation with quantifiable risk.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Neuromorphic Speech Enhancement with Dual-Branch Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.23761v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking neural network (SNN)-based neuromorphic speech enhancement has emerged as a promising paradigm due to its energy efficiency, yet it still underperforms classical artificial neural network (ANN)-based approaches owing to binary activations and the lack of well-designed network architectures. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel dual-branch spiking neural network architecture equipped with a gated spiking unit (GSU), termed GSU-DBNet. Specifically, GSU-DBNet simultaneously models the speech magnitude spectrum and complex spectrum, predicting the corresponding magnitude and complex spectral masks. Meanwhile, a dual-path GSU module is adopted to exploit temporal and frequency information for enhanced spatiotemporal feature representation. Experiments on a popular benchmark dataset show that GSU-DBNet achieves a PESQ score of 3.04 with only 394K parameters, outperforming existing SNN-based methods while using only 4.5%–10.6% of the parameters of representative ANN-based models.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Co-development of anxiety and depression in UK and Brazil youth; a cross-country comparison

Importance Anxiety and depression frequently co occur and show developmentally patterned co-development from childhood to adolescence. Adult psychiatric outcomes vary according to the timing, sequencing, and persistence of early symptoms, yet it remains unclear whether patterns of co development are comparable across high income and low and middle income country contexts. Objective Examine joint developmental trajectories of anxiety and depression from childhood to adolescence and their associations with anxiety and depression diagnoses in young adulthood. Design, Setting and Participants Population based prospective cohort studies in the UK (Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children [ALSPAC], N=9,586) and Brazil (Pelotas 2004 Birth Cohort, N=3,815). Main Outcomes and Measures Trajectories were derived using parallel process latent growth models and latent class growth analyses of anxiety and depression using the Development and Well Being Assessment at early childhood (6-7 years), middle childhood (10-11 years), and adolescence (13-15 years). Diagnoses of anxiety and depression at 18 years were assessed via the Clinical Interview Schedule (ALSPAC) and the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (Pelotas). Results Prevalence of anxiety and depression from early childhood to adolescence was similar across cohorts. Co-development was stronger in ALSPAC, with modest increases in both conditions, whereas in Pelotas, anxiety increased rapidly while depression showed little average change. In both cohorts, four trajectory classes were identified: stable-low (ALSPAC, 41%; Pelotas, 54%), increasing (31%; 28%), decreasing (23%; 15%), and persistent-high anxiety/increasing depression (5%; 3%). Compared with the stable-low class, youth in the increasing and persistent-high classes had elevated odds of depression (ALSPAC: OR=2.0 [95% CI, 1.4-2.8] and 4.2 [2.6-6.7]; Pelotas: 2.2 [1.5-3.3] and 2.9 [1.4-6.0]) and anxiety in young adulthood (ALSPAC: 1.6 [1.2-2.2] and 4.8 [3.2-7.0]; Pelotas: 1.7 [1.2-2.6] and 2.9 [1.5-5.8]). No increased risk was observed in the decreasing class. Conclusions and Relevance Patterns of anxiety and depression co development were comparable across the UK and Brazil, suggesting shared developmental pathways. However, more rapid increases in anxiety among Brazilian youth may reflect context specific risk factors. Persistence or emergence beyond early childhood was critical for identifying later diagnostic risk in both settings, highlighting the importance of early monitoring and intervention.

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

Notation Matters: A Benchmark Study of Token-Optimized Formats in Agentic AI Systems

Large language models in Agentic AI systems consume tool schemas and execution results and emit tool invocations as structured data. The default language for that exchange, JSON, was designed for application-to-application interchange rather than token efficiency, so its structural elements impose substantial token overhead. Recent work proposes token-optimized alternatives such as TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) and TRON (Token Reduced Object Notation) as more compact replacements, but these formats have been evaluated only on isolated comprehension or generation tasks. Whether their token reductions hold inside end-to-end agentic loops therefore remains an open question. We evaluate TOON and TRON on four agentic benchmarks (BFCL, MCPToolBenchPP, MCP-Universe, StableToolBench) and five open-weight LLMs, decoupling input compression from output compression to measure comprehension and generation independently. TRON reduces tokens by up to 27% with accuracy within 14pp of the JSON baseline. TOON achieves up to 18% reduction at a similar 9pp accuracy cost, but additionally cascades on multi-turn parsing failures and collapses parallel tool-call output for most models. The code is available at: https://github.com/lkutschka/notation-matters

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Level of Physical Activity and ApoE Status - Effects on Alzheimer's Disease and on Mortality

Background: Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) affect over 7.2 million Americans aged 65 and older, with the APOE-4 allele representing the strongest known genetic risk factor. Physical activity (PA) has been associated with reduced dementia risk, but its interaction with APOE genotype remains poorly characterized in large, genomically informed cohorts. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort analysis using linked genomic, survey, and longitudinal electronic health record data from the VA Million Veteran Program (MVP). Veterans aged

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

SP-Mind: An Autonomous Reasoning Agent for Spatial Proteomics Analysis

arXiv:2606.24235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial proteomics enables single-cell-resolution characterization of protein expression within tissue architecture, playing a critical role in understanding tumor microenvironments and guiding precision medicine. However, current analysis workflows remain fragmented, requiring expert manual orchestration of heterogeneous tools and limiting research scalability and reproducibility. We present SP-Mind, the first autonomous AI agent designed to unify the spatial proteomics analysis pipeline, from raw multiplexed tissue imaging to downstream phenotype discovery. Equipped with expert-curated biological analysis skills and specialized computational tools, SP-Mind converts natural-language queries into end-to-end analytical workflows without task-specific fine-tuning. To rigorously evaluate its capabilities, we introduce SP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning diverse tissue types, comprising 102 tasks across 18 distinct categories. Through extensive evaluation on SP-Bench and established downstream tasks, SP-Mind achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing open-source biomedical agent baselines.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Real-Time Interactive Music Generation via Data-Free Streaming Consistency Distillation

arXiv:2606.24307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interactive music and live performance relies on real-time human expression, but modern generative music AI remains largely absent from this domain due to its prohibitive inference latency and offline rendering paradigm. To provide pioneer musicians with a novel medium for interactive composition, we should fundamentally change these static models into dynamic, playable instruments. In this paper, we propose a framework that bridges this gap. To achieve the low latency required for live interaction without sacrificing structural coherence, we formulate distillation within a streaming autoregressive latent space. Our approach gets rid of the need for expensive paired audio-latent datasets by utilizing prompt-only inputs to synthesize teacher-guided, chunk-wise trajectories on the fly. Because live instruments require high acoustic fidelity, we introduce music-aware consistency objectives, which combine latent, spectral, and temporal-difference losses, to preserve crucial qualities like timbre, transients, and rhythmic stability during accelerated single-step streaming generation. Implemented via parameter-efficient adaptation, our distillation reduces generation steps to achieve a low real-time factor. Crucially, by operating as a continuous autoregressive stream, the system can seamlessly assimilate dynamic human inputs on the fly, allowing users to instantly steer the musical trajectory without interrupting the audio flow. Ultimately, this work recontextualizes generative text-to-music models not as passive prompt-and-wait systems, but as responsive instruments, opening new frontiers for live human-AI musical co-creation.

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

MoCo-AIS: A Contrastive Learning Framework for Similarity Computation of Vessel Trajectories

arXiv:2606.17978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trajectory similarity is a fundamental task in analyzing mobility patterns, essential for applications such as route pattern extraction, mobility prediction, and anomaly detection. Traditional distance-based measures for computing similarity incur high computational cost, driving the adoption of lightweight learning-based approaches. Supervised methods rely on extensive labels derived from traditional distance measures and often reproduce these metrics, which limits generalization. While self-supervised learning addresses this issue through contrastive learning, it lacks a unified framework, making it difficult to compare deep learning (DL) models for consistent trajectory representation. Accordingly, this paper presents MoCo-AIS, a unified framework for learning vessel trajectory embeddings based on the Momentum Contrast (MoCo) paradigm, which formulates similarity learning through positive and negative trajectory pairs. Within this framework, we evaluate a diverse set of leading DL models on large-scale, real-world vessel-tracking AIS datasets that capture diverse navigation behaviors and operating conditions. Results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves similarity learning over existing baselines, while providing a benchmarking platform for evaluating trajectory representation models.

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

Measurement noise limits the advantage of nonlinear models over linear models in biomedical prediction

arXiv:2606.18420v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On biomedical tabular data, flexible models such as deep networks, gradient-boosted trees, and kernel methods are repeatedly matched or beaten by linear and logistic regression given the same features. The usual reaction is to treat this as a model-side shortfall, to be fixed with more data, a better architecture, or tuning, on the assumption that the nonlinear structure is there and the model has failed to capture it. We argue that these fixes cannot help when the binding limit is the measurement rather than the model, as it frequently is in biomedicine. Additive noise blurs the population-optimal predictor, and because blurring removes a function's fine, rapidly varying detail before its broad shape, it erases nonlinear structure faster than linear structure. A degree-$k$ interaction is attenuated by the $k$-th power of feature reliability, while the linear part is attenuated only once. At the reliabilities typical of biomedical measurement, the nonlinear advantage can vanish even when the underlying biology is strongly nonlinear, and what the noise removes cannot be recovered by a larger cohort or a more flexible model, only by better measurement. The nonlinearity is hidden, not absent, and a tie between linear and flexible models is not by itself a verdict on the biology. These pieces are classical, drawn from measurement-error statistics, psychometrics, and Gaussian analysis, and we assemble them into an exact excess-risk identity. Measurement reliability is one of three conditions, alongside sample size and feature representation, that must align for a flexible model to help, and together they leave only a narrow window that most biomedical tasks fall outside. Across 140 UK Biobank tasks, the gap between flexible and linear models, where it exists, carries the predicted noise signature, and the three conditions can be separated by intervention but not by a benchmark alone.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

From Sparse Features to Trustworthy Proxies: Certifying SAE-Based Interpretability

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable features from language models (LMs), yet a central question remains: when can an SAE-based explanation be treated as a faithful view of an underlying frozen LM We study this through a post-hoc generalization framework that certifies the LM via a sparse proxy, obtained by replacing a native hidden activation with its pretrained SAE reconstruction. Our framework derives an upper bound on the base model's expected risk using four measurable quantities: proxy risk, SAE reconstruction gap, concept-pool mismatch, and sparse complexity. We interpret this certificate as an operational criterion for explanatory faithfulness. In particular, a non-vacuous bound indicates that the extracted sparse features retain meaningful predictive information, while small reconstruction and mismatch errors indicate that the proxy remains behaviorally close to the original model. Empirically, we show that the bound becomes non-vacuous on GPT-2 Small, Gemma-2B, and Llama-3-8B at practical sample sizes. A detailed layerwise analysis of Llama-3-8B reveals a strong depth dependence, with later layers becoming much easier to certify, associated with both stronger local fidelity and weaker downstream error amplification. Finally, through feature-shuffling ablations, we show that the decomposition distinguishes genuine semantic alignment from mere statistical sparsity, providing a useful diagnostic for when SAE-based explanations become less reliable.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Maternal deaths associated factors in the Conflict-Affected North West Region of Cameroon. Lessons from a cross-sectional survey

Background Maternal mortality is a significant global public health crisis, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and conflict-affected regions. Cameroon's maternal mortality ratio is high at 406 deaths per 100,000 live births, while the ongoing Anglophone conflict has further exacerbated maternal healthcare delivery in the North West Region (NWR){middle dot} Despite the evidence-based interventions like partographs, obstetric kits, birth preparedness plans, and active management of the third stage of labour, implementation gaps persist across health facilities. Objective The study aimed to assess factors related to preventable maternal deaths in the NWR of Cameroon by exploring maternal health service usage, implementation of obstetric measures, demand-side challenges, accessibility barriers, and health system weaknesses. Methodology The study employed a quantitative descriptive cross-sectional survey design{middle dot} Data was collected with structured questionnaires from postpartum women and healthcare workers in selected health facilities and catchment communities in the NWR{middle dot} Also, a multistage sampling technique was adopted, and Cochran's formula generated a sample size of 109 respondents{middle dot} In addition, data were analysed using SPSS version 27 and Stata version 18, employing descriptive and inferential statistics. Results In this study, while 70{middle dot}64 percent of females attended at least 4 ANC visits, only 38{middle dot}53 percent met WHO ANC adequacy requirements. Facility delivery was 96{middle dot}33 percent, yet only 38{middle dot}46 percent received completed delivery plans. Conflict-related challenges affected access, with 44{middle dot}95 percent reporting insecurity-associated movement difficulties, while 44{middle dot}95 percent reported increased transportation expenses due to the conflict. Near-miss complications were reported among 27.52 percent of participants. Delivery record reviews indicated that obstetric kits were utilised in 81{middle dot}76 percent of deliveries, partographs were accessible in 86{middle dot}49 percent of records but correctly filled in just 60{middle dot}81 percent , while oxytocin administration was 95{middle dot}95 percent. Integrated Health Centres showed poorer adherence with intrapartum interventions compared with District and Regional Hospitals (p

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

Accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models with Prior-Corrected Token Reduction

Visual token reduction has emerged as an effective strategy for accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Many existing methods prune tokens by ranking text-visual attention scores. However, we show that attention is often dominated by a model-induced prior: even without textual instruction, MLLMs tend to focus on certain task-agnostic regions. Consequently, the attention scores of instruction-conditioned tokens are suppressed, increasing the risk that these tokens are discarded during pruning. To address this issue, we propose Prior-Corrected Token Reduction (PriorTR), a training-free token reduction method that explicitly separates task-conditioned attention from the model-induced prior. PriorTR estimates the attention map of the prior, and contrasts it with the task-conditioned attention distribution to measure the additional usable information contributed by each visual token. Importantly, PriorTR computes both the model-induced prior and the task-conditioned posterior within a single forward pass by introducing a null token that serves as an instruction-agnostic probe in the attention block. This design avoids duplicated propagation. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal benchmarks and MLLMs demonstrate that PriorTR consistently improves the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency over strong training-free baselines, particularly under aggressive token budgets.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Fast Human Attention Prediction for Fixation-guided Active Perception in Autonomous Navigation

Human visual attention relies on structured scanpaths to efficiently process scenes, yet instilling this behavior into robot autonomy is in its infancy and hindered by the high,computational costs of existing predictive models. To address this, we introduce GazeLNN, a computationally lightweight,scanpath prediction model that leverages Liquid Neural Networks as its recurrent engine and employs MobileNetV3 for feature extraction. Operating auto-regressively, the architecture predicts sequential fixation heatmaps conditioned on the current visual stimulus and fixation history. Despite requiring only 0.61 GFLOPs, GazeLNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Low Resolution dataset achieving 0.47 ScanMatch score. It outperforms existing recurrent baselines across diverse evaluation metrics, while reducing computational costs by 99.40% and accelerating inference by up to six times. To investigate the role of human attention modeling in robot autonomy and demonstrate the practical utility of this highly efficient architecture, we integrate GazeLNN into an active camera-robot control policy trained via Reinforcement Learning. This integration enables human-fixation-guided perception during autonomous navigation, validated through successful real-world deployments on an aerial robot.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Effectiveness of Stress Management to Reduce Stress Eating for Women: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Intervention Studies

Objective: This systematic review and meta-analysis examined 1) the effects of stress management interventions on changes in stress eating for women, and 2) the longevity of these effects, by summarizing and assessing evidence from controlled and non-equivalent pretest-posttest intervention studies. Method: Five databases (PsycINFO, PubMed, Medline, Web of Science, CINAHL), existing sources, and grey literature were searched (February - June 2025). Studies that assessed stress eating or emotional eating, included a stress management intervention, and comprised at least 70% women were included. The primary outcome was reduction in stress eating. Data were pooled in meta-analyses using multi-level random-effects models and subset by follow-up period. Risk of bias was assessed via funnel plots and sensitivity analyses. Results: Sixty studies with 119 effect size estimates were included in the primary analysis. Pooled estimates indicated that stress management interventions significantly reduced stress eating (Hedges g = -0.4174, p < 0.001), with pre-post designs having larger effects than controlled trials. Subgroup analyses of follow-up periods found small effects in the short-term (before 3 months; Hedges g = -0.4202, p < 0.0001) and moderate effects for mid-term (3-6 months; Hedges g = -0.5886, p < 0.0001). Effects beyond 6 months were small and nonsignificant (Hedges g = -0.4370, p = 0.0660). Conclusion and Relevance: Stress management interventions appear to be effective for reducing stress eating for women, suggesting the potential to incorporate stress management in interventions targeting obesity. Effects may be only sustained 6 months post-intervention, suggesting the need for strategies to bolster long-term effectiveness.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ISE: An Execution-Grounded Recipe for Multi-Turn OS-Agent Trajectories

Training capable OS agents requires data that simultaneously captures structured user intents, multi-turn task delegation, and grounded tool execution–properties absent from existing datasets. We propose ISE (Intent -> Simulate -> Execute), a three-stage synthesis paradigm that addresses these gaps jointly. Stage 1 constructs roughly 50000 structured intents via a 4D framework (Persona x Domain x Task x Complexity); after deduplication the pool contains 43956 unique intents and attains a Vendi Score of 61.57 over the entire pool on mpnet-base-v2 embeddings (cosine kernel, q=1). Stage 2 drives multi-turn user-agent interaction through a role-locked user simulator that grounds each user turn in actual execution outcomes, producing 23132 complete trajectories averaging 8.12 user turns and 68.24 total dialogue turns. Stage 3 runs every tool call inside a live, isolated OS workspace, generating authentic failure-recovery dynamics instead of simulated responses. Fine-tuning on ISETrace improves ClawEval pass@1 from 19.3 to 37.7 using Qwen3-8B on agent tool-use tasks with a standard protocol. This result outperforms zero-shot GPT-4o and the larger Qwen3-32B base model which is four times bigger. An ablation on Stage 2 proves multi-turn simulation brings a large portion of the performance gain. We release all source code and dataset at https://github.com/Valiere01/ISE-Trace.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Low-rank Updates in Slowly Time-varying Graphs for Spatial-Temporal Signal Interpolation

arXiv:2606.24011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A crucial assumption in graph signal processing (GSP) is the existence of an underlying graph that captures the pairwise similarities between nodes, allowing filters to be designed based on this graph for tasks such as denoising. For spatial-temporal data in which node-to-node similarities evolve over time, a static spatial graph is insufficient. In this paper, to represent slowly time-varying pairwise relationships, we model the graph changes in two consecutive adjacency matrices $P = W^{(2)} - W^{(1)}$ across time as a low-rank matrix. % Specifically, given an initial adjacency matrix $W^{(1)}$ at time $t=1$, we jointly interpolate a signal $x_2$ and estimate $W^{(2)}$ at $t=2$ using both a graph signal smoothness prior for $x_2$ and a low-rank prior on $\P$. We alternate optimization steps. With $W^{(2)}$ fixed, $x_2$ is interpolated by solving a linear system. Alternatively, holding $x_2$ fixed, $W^{(2)}$ is updated via proximal gradient descent (PGD). The proximal mapping of the rank term $Gamma(W^{(2)} - W^{(1)})$ is approximated in linear time using a fast orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm that selects a sparse combination of atoms from a dictionary $cR$ formed by the outer products of $W^{(1)}$'s eigenvectors. We unroll iterations of our algorithm into layers to build a lightweight neural network for limited data-driven parameter tuning. Experiments show that our joint optimization achieves better signal interpolation compared to existing time-varying graph models.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Rescaling Confidence: What Scale Design Reveals About LLM Metacognition

arXiv:2603.09309v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Verbalized confidence, in which LLMs report a numerical certainty score, is widely used to estimate uncertainty in black-box settings, yet the confidence scale itself (typically 0–100) is rarely examined. We show that this design choice is not neutral. Across six LLMs and three datasets, verbalized confidence is heavily discretized, with more than 78\% of responses concentrating on just three round-number values. To investigate this phenomenon, we systematically manipulate confidence scales along three dimensions: granularity, boundary placement, and range regularity, and evaluate metacognitive sensitivity using $meta-d'$. We find that a 0–20 scale consistently improves metacognitive efficiency over the standard 0–100 format, while boundary compression degrades performance and round-number preferences persist even under irregular ranges. These results demonstrate that confidence scale design directly affects the quality of verbalized uncertainty and should be treated as a first-class experimental variable in LLM evaluation.

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

Which Speech Representation Better Matches Text-Native Reasoning? A Study of Speech-Text Alignment on Frame Rate and Representation

Spoken dialogue models typically start from text LLM backbones, yet reasoning often degrades when conditioning on speech instead of text. We attribute part of this modality gap to a temporal-granularity mismatch: speech tokens are temporally redundant and far longer than text under matched semantics, diluting per-token semantic density and weakening text-native reasoning dynamics. We study speech token design as a representation selection problem and sweep frame rates under a frozen LLM backbone with a fixed information rate. To make low frame rates feasible, we introduce factorized FSQ and a lightweight non-autoregressive audio LM head, scaling capacity to nearly 300\,bits/frame without sacrificing efficient prediction. With the bottleneck removed, we sweep frame rates (50$\rightarrow$2.08\,Hz) and alignment depth, and observe a consistent best regime for speech QA at 4.17\,Hz with intermediate-layer representation alignment.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ASRU: Activation Steering Meets Reinforcement Unlearning for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) may memorize sensitive cross-modal information during pretraining, making machine unlearning (MU) crucial. Existing methods typically evaluate unlearning effectiveness based on output deviations, while overlooking the generation quality after unlearning. This can easily lead to hallucinated or rigid responses, thereby affecting the usability and safety of the unlearned model. To address this issue, we propose ASRU, a controllable multimodal unlearning framework that incorporates generation quality as a core evaluation objective. ASRU first induces initial refusal behavior through activation redirection, and then optimizes fine-grained refusal boundaries using a customized reward function, thereby achieving a better trade-off between target knowledge unlearning and model utility. Experiments on Qwen3-VL show that ASRU significantly improves unlearning effectiveness (+24.6%) on average and generation quality (5.8X) on average while effectively preserving model utility, using only a small amount of retained supervision data.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A multi-agent system for spine MRI report generation from multi-sequence imaging

Spinal pathology is a leading cause of pain and disability worldwide. Spine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is central to clinical evaluation, yet its interpretation remains complex and time-consuming, requiring integration of information across multiple imaging sequences and anatomical regions. Despite recent advances in automated MRI analysis, effectively combining multi-sequence data while preserving sequence-specific diagnostic information remains an open challenge. Here we present SpineAgent, a multi-agent framework for spine MRI report generation built upon a multi-sequence foundation model trained on routine clinical data from 32,047 patients and 453,683 MRI series, comprising a total of 13,441,191 MRI slices. To accommodate diverse modalities of sequences, we first pre-train two DINOv3-based encoders separately on T1- and T2-weighted sequences. We then introduce a continual training strategy that learns a synthesizer to embed images of other sequences using the T1 and T2 encoders, producing patient-level embedding that integrates various signals across MRI sequences. Using these embeddings, SpineAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance, with mean 10.8% AUROC improvement across 17 spinal condition-prediction tasks compared to the best competing method, and demonstrates strong generalizability under cross-manufacturer and cross-cohort evaluation. Beyond classification, SpineAgent enables pathology localization by identifying findings-relevant slices and segmenting pathological regions. It also supports multimodal image-report retrieval, providing a solid foundation for scalable and explainable MRI report generation. We further integrate these validated capabilities of SpineAgent into 37 specialized agents for condition diagnosis, pathological-region localization, and clinically-similar-cases retrieval. Finally, we incorporate their outputs as structured tokens within a Medical Report Agent trained end-to-end for report generation. Through both automated metrics and expert evaluation by five radiologists, SpineAgent achieves leading performance in spine MRI report generation. Together, SpineAgent introduces a continual training approach for multi-sequence spine MRI understanding. By decomposing report generation into clinically grounded subtasks addressed by specialized agents, the SpineAgent framework enables accurate, interpretable and generalizable spine MRI reporting across diverse imaging sequences and anatomical regions.