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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Unveiling the Awareness of Private Health Insurance Coverage among Healthcare Professionals in Freetown, Sierra Leone: Insights Extracted from Their Perspectives.

Our study is an assessment of the knowledge, personal coverage, and related determinants of private health insurance as revealed by healthcare professionals in Freetown, the urban capital of Sierra Leone. This study stands as a precursor for Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), like Sierra Leone, seeking to establish Universal Health Coverage (UHC) to provide healthcare access and coverage through publicly arranged risk pooling, designed to help protect against unmanageable medical costs. In parallel, such countries face significant challenges with achieving sustainable universal coverage due to limited public resources, inefficient allocation systems, uneasy reliance on out-of-pocket payments, and large struggling populations. Our research sheds particular light on how healthcare professionals view their own participation with private healthcare options. A cross-sectional, analytical study was conducted, openly recruiting individuals from various facilities in Freetown. Using the Yamane Formula, a sample size of 109 participants was calculated. STATA 14.0 was used for data analysis. Our findings revealed that 96 (88.9%) participants did not have private health insurance, while 12 (11.1%) did have private coverage. However, 105 (97.2%) reported other modes of health insurance, with only 3 (2.8%) uninsured. Notably, 97.2% expressed willingness to join a private health insurance scheme. Our study found no statistically significant associations between selected indicators (demographic or socioeconomic fac tors) and current insurance coverage among study participants. These results highlight a low prevalence and understanding of private health insurance among healthcare professionals in a representative urban center in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), while acknowledging high willingness to enroll. The lack of any significant determinants suggests other unexamined factors, such as cost, accessibility, or awareness, capable of influencing the adoption and implementation of a universal health program.

02.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Cell-type resolved transcriptional network analysis of <i>in vivo</i> cellular senescence following injury

作者:

by Alda Sabalic, Victoria Moiseeva, Andres Cisneros, Oleg Deryagin, Eusebio Perdiguero, Pura Muñoz-Cánoves, Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo Identifying the genetic correlates of complex phenotypes is a challenging task. Methods coming from the field of complex networks can help finding such molecular patterns, by revealing statistical associations among groups of genes that correlate with the phenotype. Here we study cellular senescence, a complex cell state whose molecular underpinnings are still under active investigation. We analyze cell type–resolved RNA sequencing data obtained from injured muscle tissue in mice, with a network-based approach that merges eigenvector centrality feature selection and community detection. Our analysis identifies genetic markers that had not been associated with senescence so far, which are validated with existing single-cell RNA sequencing data in a different type of tissue. The identified key genes belong to transcriptional pathways associated with established hallmarks of senescence, and thus can be interpreted as molecular correlates of such hallmarks. The method proposed here could be applied to any complex cellular phenotype even when only bulk RNA sequencing is available, provided the data is resolved by cell type.

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

A Systematic Evaluation of Black-Box Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.19868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, their outputs often remain unreliable and may contain hallucinations, making uncertainty estimation (UE) essential for building trustworthy LLMs. In practice, many mainstream LLMs are only accessible through restricted APIs, where internal signals such as logits and hidden states are unavailable, making black-box UE especially important. However, existing work on black-box UE for LLMs remains fragmented in methodology and lacks a unified empirical comparison. To address this gap, we present a systematic review of black-box UE methods and organize them into five categories: verbalization-based, sampling-based, explanation-based, multi-agent, and hybrid methods. We further build a unified evaluation framework and benchmark 24 representative methods across 4 models and 4 dataset settings. Our results show that no single method consistently dominates across all settings. Nevertheless, methods that reason over and compare candidates in the answer space are generally effective, and hybrid methods that combine multiple uncertainty signals perform well under most conditions. By releasing the benchmark data and a unified evaluation framework, we aim to facilitate reproducible comparisons and support future research, while our empirical findings provide practical guidance for developing future black-box UE methods for LLMs.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Pulling The REINS: Training-Free Safety Alignment of Video Diffusion Models via Representation Steering

Open-weight video diffusion models can generate photorealistic unsafe content, from violence to misinformation, yet existing defenses either require expensive safety fine-tuning that degrades general capability, or apply external filters that are trivially bypassed by adversarial prompts. We present REINS (REpresentation-space INference-time Safety steering), a training-free method that aligns video diffusion models at inference time by steering their internal representations toward safe generation. Our key finding is that safety-relevant structure is linearly encoded in the hidden-state activations of video diffusion transformers, and a single direction, discovered via Supervised PCA on binary safety labels, suffices to separate safe from unsafe generation trajectories. At inference, adding this direction to hidden states at an intermediate transformer layer redirects generation from harmful content to semantically related safe alternatives, with no weight updates, no concept enumeration, and negligible computational overhead. Through mechanistic analysis, we reveal that while safety information accumulates monotonically with transformer depth, steering effectiveness peaks at intermediate layers (~50% depth), exposing a fundamental tradeoff between information availability and downstream propagation capacity. We evaluate REINS across 9 video diffusion models, multiple parameter scales (1.3B-5B), and both text-to-video and image-to-video generation, to our knowledge, the broadest safety evaluation suite in the video generation literature.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Optimizing Incomplete, Large-Scale and Sparse Multi-Graph Matching in Bioimaging

Multi-graph matching is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Our work is motivated by a challenging application in bioimaging, where dozens or even hundreds of 3D microscopy images of worms must be brought into correspondence. Existing datasets do not cover this large-scale regime, and virtually all existing methods are inapplicable because they assume a complete or dense problem setting. To support further research, our first contribution is a new large-scale dataset based on problem instances from bioimaging. Our second contribution is a comprehensive analysis of the two main multi-graph matching paradigms: direct and permutation synchronization-based formulations. We argue, in part by proof, that practical large-scale methods must explicitly address problem sparsity and incompleteness. Since standard permutation synchronization approaches fail in this setting, we further introduce a sparse permutation synchronization paradigm. Our final contribution is GREEDA, a general method for sparse and incomplete problems that can be instantiated across cost orders and paradigms. While our paper focuses on objective functions up to quadratic order, GREEDA is inherently generalizable to arbitrary orders. On larger, sparse instances, GREEDA outperforms competing methods in both objective value and runtime. For example, for moderately-sized problems based on 30 worm images GREEDA produces a high-quality solution within 2 minutes, whereas competitors require at least half an hour and yield far worse results. On smaller dense problems, GREEDA remains on par with leading methods while being an order of magnitude faster.

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

HadBalance: A Plug-and-Play Unified Global Geometric Prior Framework for Generalizable Biomedical Segmentation

Precise biomedical image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis. Geometric cues (e.g., boundary, shape, and topology) can improve structural consistency, yet most are task-specific and lack a unified geometric foundation that generalizes across organs and modalities. We are motivated by the observation that several medical segmentation targets can be approximated as globally near-convex shapes. A convex region is one in which any two interior points can be connected by a line segment entirely contained within the region. In practice, medical targets may exhibit small local concavities or boundary irregularities; we refer to such globally convex-like shapes as near-convex. Motivated by this, we derive Hadwiger Shape Priors from Hadwiger's theorem as an interpretable global regularizer using three 2D measures: area A, perimeter P, and Euler characteristic chi, enabling transfer across organs and modalities. However, because medical datasets are shape-heterogeneous, enforcing near-convex priors uniformly can over-regularize non-convex anatomy with significant concavities, washing out concavities and fine details and degrading segmentation accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict-Aware Objective Balancing (CAOB), which integrates shape priors with segmentation in a gradient-aware manner. For each prior, CAOB removes only the gradient component that conflicts with segmentation while preserving the remaining aligned component, and adaptively regulates objective influences to prevent prior dominance. This enables stable use of shape priors on shape-heterogeneous data without erasing genuine concavities or fine structural details. We call this plug-and-play framework HadBalance.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Model Forensics: Investigating Whether Concerning Behavior Reflects Misalignment

arXiv:2606.26071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal of safety research is determining whether a model is misaligned. Prior work has largely focused on detecting concerning behavior. But behavior alone does not establish misalignment: a concerning action can arise from benign causes such as confusion. This motivates model forensics: investigating whether the action was driven by malign intent. In this paper, we propose a baseline protocol for model forensics consisting of two steps, iterated as needed. First, we read the chain of thought (CoT) to generate hypotheses about what drives model behavior. Second, we make edits to the prompt or environment to test these hypotheses. While the CoT is not always faithful, it is a rich source of unsupervised insight that can guide the collection of more rigorous evidence. To evaluate our protocol, we create a suite of six agentic environments where models exhibit concerning behavior, and apply it to each. We establish that Kimi K2 Thinking takes shortcuts due to a genuine disposition towards low-effort actions, by showing this hypothesis successfully predicts its behavior. Through counterfactual experiments, we show DeepSeek R1 deceives out of a desire to be consistent with a previous instance of itself. Our methods nonetheless leave significant room for refinement. For example, when we test whether Kimi K2 Thinking believes it is violating user intent, we find no evidence of such a belief, but without positive controls we cannot confirm our tests would detect it. Overall, we find our simple protocol provides a strong baseline that we hope future work will improve upon. More broadly, our work is a concrete step in developing the growing field of model forensics.

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

IB-HFN: Information Bottleneck-Driven SAR-Optical Fusion Network for High-Fidelity Cloud Removal

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-assisted optical cloud removal aims to recover surface information obscured by clouds in optical remote sensing images by exploiting complementary SAR observations. Existing multimodal fusion methods typically rely on direct spatial concatenation and pixel-wise supervision, which can propagate SAR speckle noise into optical reconstruction and lead to over-smoothed results. To address these limitations, we propose an Information Bottleneck-driven High-Fidelity Network (IB-HFN) for SAR-assisted optical cloud removal. IB-HFN employs a dual-stream backbone to preserve modality-specific representations before deep semantic fusion, thereby mitigating premature cross-modal contamination. At the fusion stage, we introduce a Spatial Information Bottleneck Fusion module that compresses SAR features through a channel-wise variational information bottleneck to suppress unstructured speckle noise. In parallel, a local-global gating mechanism predicts clear-sky regions and routes reliable optical details through a Dirac-initialized skip connection, decoupling noise suppression from texture preservation. We further develop a joint optimization strategy that integrates feature-level bottleneck regularization with image-level constraints on reconstruction accuracy, structural consistency, spectral fidelity, and contrastive sharpness. A dynamic weighting schedule balances these objectives to stabilize training and reduce hazy artifacts. Experiments on the SEN12MS-CR dataset under challenging spatio-temporal splits demonstrate that IB-HFN achieves superior structural preservation and spectral fidelity over existing methods.

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

Robin-Neumann Coupling of PINN and FEM Solvers: A Steklov-Poincaré View, with Application to Fluid-Structure Interaction with Contact

arXiv:2606.14181v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are meshless and carry moving geometry and topology change through resampling of collocation points; the finite-element method (FEM) is the workhorse for boundary-fitted discretisations. Coupling the two across a shared interface promises the best of both, yet existing PINN-FEM schemes are validated only empirically. We put the coupling on a domain-decomposition footing: viewing each solver as a Steklov-Poincaré (trace-to-flux) operator, we transfer the classical Dirichlet-Neumann (DN) divergence diagnosis and its Robin-Neumann (RN) cure, including a closed-form, sweep-free interface impedance, and prove a PINN-specific contraction theorem: a trained network realises only a perturbed Steklov operator with a per-step training residual, and RN still contracts, with no shared-eigenbasis hypothesis, to a floor set by the achieved training loss. Because a PINN has no stiffness matrix, we introduce a Fourier-mode interface probe that recovers the network's resolvable Steklov eigenvalues to within 0.5% and doubles as a diagnostic of the network's spectral cap. The theory predicts measured PINN-FEM contraction rates to within 7% on 1D and 2D Poisson couplings, and a two-slab analogue of the large-added-mass regime shows RN's per-mode impedance matching winning decisively where tuned scalar relaxation saturates. We demonstrate the framework on a Stokes/rigid-disc problem with Alart-Curnier contact: the meshless PINN fluid absorbs the topology change at contact by collocation exclusion alone, no remeshing and no cut cells, and the static-equilibrium contact reaction matches the submerged weight to 0.4% under mesh refinement. We quantify remaining limitations: the warm-started PINN drifts off the Stokes manifold over long horizons, and matched FEM-FEM benchmarks attribute pre-impact squeeze-film signatures to PINN under-resolution.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Pillbox: A Leakage-Aware Foundation-Model Predictor and Lineage-Ceiling Diagnostic for Cancer Drug Response

We present Pillbox, a predictor whose pipeline is audited against the six Asiaee leakage modes with the one residual pathway shown by per-fold ablation to be non-load-bearing on hard splits. Our model combines CpGPT methylation embeddings, CLAMP drug embeddings, and per-fold-fit gene-expression principal components which are fused by Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM)-conditioned graph attention on the STRING v12 protein-protein interaction graph. Then we alpha-ensemble the model against a histogram-based gradient boosting regressor baseline. On GDSC GSE68379 (987 cell lines, 375 drugs) across seeds 42, 7, and 123, the ensemble reaches test R-Squared of 0.78, 0.77, and 0.76 on random, histology-blind, and site-blind splits respectively, with cell-aware lifts above the drug-mean floor of +0.054, +0.060, and +0.037. As a quantitative diagnostic for feature-stack saturation we propose the cross-architecture residual correlation, calibrated against a same-architecture-different-initialization control. On histology-blind splits the cross-architecture value of 0.939 falls short of the same-architecture ceiling of 0.974 by approximately 0.03 in residual correlation, a gap we interpret as the headroom available to architecture choice on top of the current foundation-model representation and consistent with the long-established observation that tissue lineage dominates cell-line drug response. We integrated curated mutation, methylation, and drug-target-expression channels, but these do not improve prediction once foundation-model embeddings are in place. Cross-screen validation against PRISM matches the GDSC-to-PRISM measurement reproducibility ceiling within 0.01 Spearman.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

X-Tokenizer: A Multimodal Action Tokenizer for Vision-Language-Action Pretraining

Modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models must bridge pretrained vision-language reasoning and precise continuous robot control. Existing action tokenizers discretize actions primarily for reconstruction, producing codes that preserve motion geometry but provide only weak semantic supervision to the backbone. We therefore formulate action tokenization not as mere compression, but as semantic interface learning between multimodal reasoning and executable control. To this end, we introduce X-Tokenizer, a lightweight encoder-Semantic Residual Quantization (SRQ)-decoder architecture that provides a shared action interface across diverse robotic arm embodiments. Its key component, SRQ, imposes an asymmetric structure on residual vector quantization: the first level is trained with Masked Action Modeling (MAM) to form a discrete action language that captures coarse motion intent, while deeper levels remain reconstruction-oriented residuals that preserve fine-grained details. To further align action tokens with multimodal semantics, X-Tokenizer is pretrained with contrastive alignment to the representation space of a pretrained foundation model and with next-frame vision-language feature prediction. Pretrained on 2.4M trajectories (2.0B action frames), a single frozen X-Tokenizer plugs into a mixed discrete-continuous VLA as a representation-shaping supervision signal. X-Tokenizer achieves top real-world aggregate and strong RoboTwin 2.0 simulation results. Outperforming FAST in multimodal grounding (+13.5%) and long-horizon tasks (+8.25), it shows that action tokenizers serve as semantic interfaces for VLA pretraining beyond mere action compression.

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

DIMOS: Disentangling Instance-level Moving Object Segmentation

Moving instance segmentation (MIS) attracts increasing attention due to its broad applications in traffic surveillance, autonomous driving, and animal tracking. Event cameras record asynchronous brightness changes, providing high temporal resolution and dynamic range, which makes them highly sensitive to motion information. By fusing event and image features, motion cues from events can complement spatial details from images, enhancing the performance of MIS. However, current multimodal MIS methods still struggle to segment small moving instances, as event cameras often yield sparse features under limited resolution. Moreover, event features entangle appearance attributes with motion cues, which further restricts effective cross-modal fusion. To address these challenges, we first propose a dual-disentangling feature extraction framework that separates and extracts appearance and motion information within both image and event modalities, thereby improving feature density. Subsequently, a multi-granularity cross-modal alignment is introduced to align distributionally and semantically consistent features across modalities, enabling more effective fusion with rich spatial and temporal details. The experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal MIS, especially for small instances under challenging conditions such as fast motion and low-light settings.

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

Koshur Diacritizer: A Byte-Level Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Kashmiri Diacritic Restoration

Kashmiri, an Indo-Aryan language written in a modified Perso-Arabic script, frequently omits diacritic marks in digital text, creating ambiguity and challenging downstream NLP applications. We present Koshur Diacritizer, a ByT5-small byte-level sequence-to-sequence model for restoring diacritics in Kashmiri text. To support this task, we release a publicly available dataset of 23.7k aligned undiacritized diacritized Kashmiri sentence pairs. The proposed framework combines script-aware normalization, alignment validation, and skeleton-preserving inference to ensure reliable restoration while maintaining the original base-letter sequence. Experimental results on a held-out test set achieve a DERm of 0.2012 and a WER of 0.2159. Additionally, evaluation by a native Kashmiri linguistic expert yields a mean accuracy of 77.5%. The dataset, model, and source code are publicly released to provide a reproducible baseline for Kashmiri diacritic restoration and future low-resource language research.

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

Prototyping an AI-powered Tool for Energy Efficiency in New Zealand Homes

arXiv:2509.05364v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Residential buildings contribute significantly to energy use, health outcomes, and carbon emissions. In New Zealand, housing quality has historically been poor, with inadequate insulation and inefficient heating contributing to widespread energy hardship. Recent reforms, including the Warmer Kiwi Homes program, Healthy Homes Standards, and H1 Building Code upgrades, have delivered health and comfort improvements, yet challenges persist. Many retrofits remain partial, data on household performance are limited, and decision-making support for homeowners is fragmented. This study presents the design and evaluation of an AI-powered decision-support tool for residential energy efficiency in New Zealand. The prototype, developed using Python and Streamlit, integrates data ingestion, anomaly detection, baseline modeling, and scenario simulation (e.g., LED retrofits, insulation upgrades) into a modular dashboard. Fifteen domain experts, including building scientists, consultants, and policy practitioners, tested the tool through semi-structured interviews. Results show strong usability (M = 4.3), high value of scenario outputs (M = 4.5), and positive perceptions of its potential to complement subsidy programs and regulatory frameworks. The tool demonstrates how AI can translate national policies into personalized, household-level guidance, bridging the gap between funding, standards, and practical decision-making. Its significance lies in offering a replicable framework for reducing energy hardship, improving health outcomes, and supporting climate goals. Future development should focus on carbon metrics, tariff modeling, integration with national datasets, and longitudinal trials to assess real-world adoption.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Fibonacci Steady-States and Persistent Oscillations in an Ordered Multimode Dicke Model

arXiv:2606.13072v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultracold atoms in multimode optical cavities provide a rich testbed for many-body phenomena enabled by light-mediated interactions. Recent experiments include realizations of spin glasses and associative memories, as described by multimode Dicke models with disordered couplings. However, the properties of multimode Dicke models with ordered coupling geometries remain largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate the stable steady-states of the multimode Dicke model with an ordered nearest-neighbor coupling geometry, where $n_c$ atomic clusters are coupled via $n_c-1$ cavity modes. We show that the number of mean-field stable steady-states in the superradiant phase exhibits Fibonacci scaling with the number of atomic clusters, and that a subset of these steady-states exhibit persistent oscillations. Using both the truncated Wigner approximation and the numerically-exact hierarchy of pure states, we further demonstrate that these features of the stable steady-state solutions persist for finite cluster sizes. Ordered multimode Dicke models, such as the nearest-neighbor coupling geometry considered here, are accessible with current experimental technologies and point toward a broader class of strongly interacting dissipative systems with similarly rich behavior.

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

Eyring-Kramers asymptotics for infinite-dimensional stochastic gradient systems

arXiv:2606.16083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study small-noise asymptotics for a class of reversible stochastic evolution equations in infinite dimensions. The dynamics are of the form \[ dX_t=-A\nabla F(X_t)\,dt+\sqrt{2\beta^{-1}A}\,dW_t, \] where $F$ is a regular multi-well potential, $A$ is a selfadjoint mobility operator, $W$ is a cylindrical Brownian motion and $\beta\gg 1$ is the inverse noise strength. The invariant measure is a Gibbs perturbation of a Gaussian reference measure, and the resulting framework covers, in particular, the stochastic Allen-Cahn and stochastic Cahn-Hilliard equations on bounded intervals. In the double-well case, we derive a sharp asymptotic formula for the first nonzero eigenvalue of the generator. This gives an infinite-dimensional Eyring-Kramers law for the spectral gap, with exponential rate determined by the communication height and leading prefactor determined by the local quadratic behavior at the relevant minima and saddle points. Our approach provides a general strategy for lifting finite-dimensional Eyring-Kramers analysis to infinite-dimensional stochastic gradient systems.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

CABLE: Cloud-Assisted Bandwidth-efficient LMM-based Encoding for V2X Systems

Cloud-hosted large multimodal models (LMMs) can provide strong open-vocabulary perception for Vehicle-to-Everything systems, but naively transmitting full-resolution frames from edge to cloud causes severe communication overhead and high cloud-side prefill latency. We present CABLE, a cloud-assisted bandwidth-efficient LMM-based encoding framework for edge-cloud perception. CABLE propagates the previous cloud segmentation mask on the edge using ego-motion compensation, refines it with residual-motion cues, and consolidates disconnected regions via a corridor envelope to form a robust region of interest (ROI). Only ROI-masked images are uploaded, while the cloud segmentation output is fed back as the prior for the next frame, forming a mask-to-ROI-to-LMM feedback loop. Experiments on five datasets (nuScenes, WOD-ZB, Waymo, KITTI, and CADC) show consistent communication savings while largely preserving perception, achieving $73$–$87\%$ ROI pixel-coverage reduction with $5$–$8\times$ estimated LMM prefill speedup at a modest detection-quality trade-off relative to full-frame inference.

18.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Integrative modelling of innate immune response dynamics during virus infection

by Ramya Boddepalli, Harsh Chhajera, Rahul Roya Positive-sense RNA viruses that constitute a large class of human pathogens employ various strategies to suppress and evade host immune defenses. Understanding the dynamic interaction between the viral life cycle and immune signaling is crucial to designing effective antiviral strategies. Although significant progress has been made, quantitative models that can accurately capture the intricate interactions and the intertwined dynamics during viral infection of cells remain missing. In this study, we develop a comprehensive mathematical model that integrates the intracellular viral life cycle with key cellular innate immune pathways, including RIG-I-mediated detection and JAK-STAT signaling. The model provides mechanistic insights into long-standing observations, capturing both virus-specific dynamics and innate immune response, and the key components driving their coupled dynamics. For example, a comparison of viruses shows how the Japanese Encephalitis virus undergoes a dramatic reduction in viral load in cells, due to its rapid replication that robustly activates the RIG-I pathway, in contrast to the poor immune control of Hepatitis C virus. More importantly, our model demonstrates how virus-host interactions exhibit a sharp transition boundary behavior, where minor differences in immune strength or viral suppression capacity can determine whether infections resolve or persist. We propose that ISG mRNA translation and viral replication predominantly dictate these bimodal infection outcomes. Additionally, the model not only recapitulates IFN desensitization but also identifies the molecular players involved. We demonstrate how our model’s ability to capture IFN dynamics allows us to predict optimal timing and dosing strategies for interferon-based prophylactic therapies. Together, our approach reveals fundamental features that govern the delicate balance between the establishment of infection and immune control in RNA virus infections.

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

Written by AI, Managed by AI: Semantic Space Control and Index Sickness Elimination Across 391 Consecutive Sessions

The prevailing engineering intuition for addressing conceptual drift in long-horizon LLM collaboration is to trade more formal constraints for more reliable outputs – designing symbolic identifier systems, accumulating defensive rules in System Prompts, expanding context windows. Our engineering record shows that in long-horizon settings, this direction may produce effects contrary to design intent. Using action research methods in a real software project (Bang-v3) spanning approximately one month and 391 collaborative sessions, we document and analyze the failure process of these strategies. When the symbolic system exceeds a complexity threshold, LLMs do not become more accurate – instead, they abandon genuine understanding of business semantics, retreat to self-referential reasoning within the symbolic layer, and generate outputs that appear internally consistent but are physically disconnected from reality. We name this failure pattern "Index Sickness," and its canonical manifestation "Phantom Legislation." We name the underlying principle the "Pang Principle (Semantic Vitality Law)": natural language carrying explicit purpose conveys far greater information quality than symbolic expression. From this, we design and validate its physical engineering mechanism: "Baseline-Log Physical Separation." In the same project, this mechanism reduced AI Instructions volume by ~75%, and across the subsequent ~150 sessions, no recurrence of Index Sickness was observed. A bilingual companion version (Chinese) is included as supplementary material.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Root-Selecting Fixed-Point Inversion for Rectified Flows via Trajectory Straightness

Finding the initial noise that generates a given data sample, known as inversion, is a key component for downstream applications such as training-free image editing. Existing fixed-point inversion methods improve inversion accuracy by formulating each inversion step as a fixed-point problem, but they lack a principled mechanism for selecting among multiple fixed-point solutions that can arise in practice. We observe that different selections induce different inversion trajectories, leading to substantial variation in reconstruction and editing quality. For rectified flows, we further find that this variation is closely associated with trajectory straightness, motivating straightness as a principled selection criterion. We propose SelFix, a fixed-point inversion method that selects fixed-point solutions inducing straighter inverse trajectories while retaining convergence to an exact inverse root under standard local assumptions. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and PIE-Bench show that SelFix improves fixed-point inversion, achieving stronger real-image reconstruction and better source-preserving prompt-based editing than prior inversion baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/seminkim/selfix.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

SurgAtlas: A Large-Scale Surgical Video-Language Dataset with 2,391 Hours of Open and Minimally Invasive Surgery

We introduce SurgAtlas, the largest surgical video-language dataset to date, comprising 15,291 videos (2,391 hours) spanning 18 surgical specialties and over 5,000 procedure types, sourced entirely from publicly available YouTube content. SurgAtlas is also the first surgical video-language dataset to include open surgery at scale, with 6,182 open procedure videos alongside over 9,000 minimally invasive recordings, and the first to establish standardized benchmarks for open-surgery video understanding. We additionally provide an expert-validated subset with verified visual question-answer pairs across diverse open and minimally invasive procedures, serving as a clinically grounded benchmark for surgical reasoning. Compared with existing surgical video-language datasets, SurgAtlas provides one of the most diverse annotation schemas, combining segment-level captions, step- and phase-level descriptions, video-level surgical descriptions, and reasoning-oriented question-answer pairs organized within a hierarchical taxonomy. These annotations are constructed through an automated multi-tier pipeline with LLM-based enrichment and a staged VQA generation framework with explicit groundedness verification. The scale and diversity of SurgAtlas enable training surgical foundation models with broad procedural coverage: we finetune Qwen3-VL-8B through a two-stage captioning-then-instruction pipeline and achieve competitive or state-of-the-art results on multiple established surgical benchmarks, including phase recognition, triplet detection, and reasoning question answering. More broadly, SurgAtlas provides a large native public video corpus that can support future large-scale pretraining of multimodal surgical AI systems and contribute to the development of next-generation foundation models for surgery.

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

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ForecastBench-Sim: A Simulated-World Forecasting Benchmark

Forecasting benchmarks for general-purpose AI systems usually inherit the constraints of the real world: outcomes resolve slowly, tail events are rare, and counterfactual questions are difficult to score. We introduce ForecastBench-Sim, a simulated-world forecasting benchmark built on game rollouts from Freeciv, a turn-based strategy game modelled on the Civilization series. Forecasters receive a fixed world report (a structured snapshot of the current game state) and answer questions about hidden future states; the benchmark then continues the simulation and scores forecasts. Because the world is simulated, the same setup can generate continuous or binary forecasting questions at arbitrary time horizons, paired intervention worlds for conditional or causal questions, and resolved examples of rare or disruptive outcomes. We describe the benchmark pipeline, question families, scoring protocol, and release artifacts, and report validation slices from model evaluations and an anonymized human pilot. ForecastBench-Sim is intended to complement real-world forecasting benchmarks by providing controlled, immediately resolvable tasks for studying probabilistic reasoning under dynamic world states.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Biomedical Capacity, Governance, and Health Security: A Dominican Republic Research Analysis of Stakeholder Perspectives

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed critical vulnerabilities in globally concentrated biomedical supply chains and accelerated interest in nearshoring and hemispheric health-security strategies. The Dominican Republic, already the third-largest medical device exporter in Latin America, occupies a strategically significant but institutionally constrained position within this realignment. This study evaluates stakeholder perceptions of the principal opportunities and barriers affecting biomedical ecosystem development in the Dominican Republic, with particular attention to governance, workforce capacity, and value-chain upgrading pathways. Methods. A concurrent mixed-methods design was employed, integrating a cross-sectional electronic survey of 142 purposively sampled domain experts (administered September-December 2025) with a qualitative executive consultation with senior government and industry leaders. Survey analyses combined descriptive statistics, one-sample t-tests against the scale neutral midpoint, chi-square goodness-of-fit tests, Friedman non-parametric ranking, Spearman rank correlations, and exploratory linear and logistic multivariable regression. Qualitative responses were analyzed using a framework approach grounded in the Triple Helix model of innovation systems. Results. Perceived government support was significantly below neutral (mean = 2.67, SD = 1.12; p = 0.034). Workforce shortages (83.3%) and weak academia-industry collaboration (71.4%) were the most frequently endorsed barriers ({chi}2(5) = 18.7, p = 0.002). Regulatory modernization (88.1%) and workforce development (85.7%) ranked as the highest-priority policy levers (Friedman p = 0.005). Clinical trials and contract research organization services were the dominant sub-sector priority (76.2%, binomial p < 0.001). In multivariable analysis, perceived government support, talent availability, and confidence in IP protection jointly explained 46% of the variance in sector competitiveness (R2 = 0.46, p < 0.001). Strong majority support existed for a formal public-private biomedical coordination authority (73.8%, p < 0.001).Conclusion. Institutional credibility and advanced human capital–rather than geography or market access–are the perceived binding constraints on the Dominican Republics biomedical trajectory. Regulatory modernization, targeted workforce investment, and the establishment of a national biomedical coordination authority represent the highest-leverage interventions for positioning the country as a hemispheric hub for biomedical manufacturing, clinical research, and health security.

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arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Task-Error Residual Learning for Real-Robot Five-Ball Juggling

arXiv:2606.16978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For residual learning that refines existing behavior, sample efficiency depends on two things: how much information each rollout returns, and how efficiently the learner uses that information. Reinforcement learning's standard scalar reward carries far less information than the directional task error that defines the task. Random exploration further discards whatever information each rollout returns. Through residual learning with directional task-error supervision and a task error model that drives sample selection, we achieve stable three-, four-, and five-ball juggling on anthropomorphic Barrett WAM arms. Despite planning and controlling through a simple, idealized stack, the system converges from the second attempt. The first attempt drops, after which task error decreases monotonically without further failures. In comparison, five-ball juggling typically takes humans years of practice. We compare residual learners across two ternary axes, the directional information in the learning feedback and the commitment of the analytic prior, spanning Newton-style Jacobian updates, Composite Bayesian Optimization, and stochastic search methods. Both axes prove necessary: neither directional feedback nor an informative prior suffices alone, and the simplest method that combines them, a fixed-Jacobian Newton update, is the most reliable. The learned residual tolerates substantial prior misalignment and degraded joint tracking, affecting mainly convergence speed. The bottleneck for residual learning on real robots is therefore the information content of the supervision signal and how the learner uses it, not the accuracy of the surrounding stack. Video documentation of all experiments is available at https://kai-ploeger.com/residual-juggling.