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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MR-GVNO: A Geometry-Aware Variational Physics-Informed Neural Operator for Mindlin-Reissner Plates on Irregular Domains

arXiv:2606.16624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Plate and shell structures are widely used in engineering, making rapid response prediction under varying geometries, materials, and loads highly desirable. However, conventional finite element methods require repeated modeling and solution, resulting in high computational costs. This study proposes a geometry-aware variational neural operator for Mindlin-Reissner plate problems, termed MR-GVNO. The method uses boundary point clouds to represent irregular geometries and employs separate encoders for spatially varying material fields, pressure loads, and scalar physical parameters. A cross-attention mechanism integrates these inputs with query point information to predict transverse deflections and rotations at arbitrary locations. MR-GVNO is trained without labeled solution data using a variational physics-informed loss derived from the discretized total potential energy. It directly processes irregular point clouds and allows different physical fields to be discretized independently, avoiding interpolation onto a common grid. Numerical experiments on single-hole, double-hole, and L-shaped plates demonstrate accurate response prediction under homogeneous and heterogeneous materials and uniform and random loads. The model also achieves millisecond-level full-field inference and favorable cross-geometry generalization.

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

Efficient Financial Language Understanding via Distillation with Synthetic Data

Large instruction-following models are powerful but costly to deploy, particularly in finance, where labelled data are limited by confidentiality and expert annotation cost. We present an efficient framework for financial sentiment analysis through distillation with synthetic data, transferring knowledge from a large instruction-tuned teacher to compact student models. The framework is designed for low-resource conditions, where a small set of real examples are collected and labelled by hand. The framework then clusters the examples and uses the clusters to select seeds for generating synthetic examples via structured few-shot prompting. Experiments show that clustering-based seed selection yields more representative synthetic data than random sampling, enabling compact models to achieve strong performance with minimal supervision. Notably, on a more complex and noisy text domain, the compact model trained on the complete synthetic-seed corpus even outperforms the teacher model, while remaining competitive on formal text. The framework provides a practical route toward resource-efficient domain adaptation in financial NLP with minimal human labelling effort.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Domain-Shift Aware Neural Networks for Unbalance Characterization in Rotating Systems

arXiv:2606.18882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work investigates the application of a domain-shift aware neural network for regression tasks aimed at estimating unbalance masses in rotating shafts under varying operating conditions. Experimental data were collected from a test rig in which a primary shaft, equipped with a flange carrying unbalanced masses, was driven at different rotational speeds, while a secondary shaft could be optionally activated to introduce domain discrepancy. The unbalance masses were positioned at a fixed radial distance, and the dynamic response of the system was recorded using triaxial accelerometers. The inverse problem of mass estimation is formulated within a domain adaptation framework, where the network is trained with a maximum mean discrepancy strategy to align feature representations across source and target distributions. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of explicitly addressing domain shift in improving prediction accuracy, especially when the system's physical behavior and sources of domain discrepancy are not fully known and fall outside the training conditions. These findings highlight the potential of domain-shift aware models for regression tasks in Structural Health Monitoring.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models

Processing video in vision-language models is expensive: each frame occupies hundreds of tokens, and inference cost scales with every frame and every repeated query. We introduce Frames2LoRA, a method for parametric video internalization. A perceiver hypernetwork reads the intermediate representations produced layer-by-layer as a frozen VLM encodes a video, and generates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter in a single forward pass. Unlike standard LoRA fine-tuning, which requires iterative gradient updates, Frames2LoRA predicts these weights directly from the video. Trained for SmolVLM2 500M and 2.2B on video summarization and captioning, Frames2LoRA enables the same frozen VLM to answer queries from the adapter alone, with zero visual tokens in its context at query time. Frames2LoRA is statistically non-inferior and equivalent to direct video-in-context inference across all five captioning benchmarks at both model scales, and across seven of eight video question answering benchmark-scale pairings. Although trained only on 12 frames at 384px, it remains stable up to 1,024 frames and 1024px, where direct video-in-context inference often degenerates. Across this sweep, it reduces answer-time visual-token load by up to 1,500x and query TTFT by 6-80x, while preserving video-faithful outputs. We also find that independently generated adapters for non-overlapping video segments can compose in rank space, suggesting a path toward chunked long-video internalization.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Beyond the Golden Teacher: Enhancing Graph Learning through LLM-GNN Co-teaching

arXiv:2606.11583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) underlie real-world applications such as citation networks, social media, and e-commerce. Few-shot graph learning on TAGs is hard: with only a handful of labels per class and the rest of the graph unannotated, neither GNNs nor LLMs can learn well on their own. GNNs read topology and fail on cold nodes; LLMs read text and fail on text-ambiguous nodes. Existing LLM-GNN methods all follow the same recipe: designate one model as the golden teacher and use its outputs (e.g., features or pseudo-labels) to supervise the other. We argue this golden-teacher assumption breaks under sparse supervision: neither model is golden, and treating either as such transfers its blind spots into the student. We therefore ask: can we avoid designating either model as the golden teacher, and still perform effective graph learning? We answer with LLM-GNN Co-Teaching, a bidirectional co-teaching framework in which neither model is fixed as teacher. The GNN and LLM exchange their most confident pseudo-labels under an architecture-specific small-loss criterion, and both update every round. Supervision is then mined from the trajectory: whenever a node moves from cross-model contradiction at round t to cross-model agreement at round t+1, the LLM's two answers on the same input form a preference pair (old contradicting self < new peer-endorsed self) for DPO training. We call this Round-based Pseudo-Label Preference Optimization (RPL-PO). On six benchmarks, LLM-GNN Co-Teaching consistently outperforms GNN-as-Judge and all prior methods, with absolute 3-shot gains of 7.86% on Cora and 7.73% on ogbn-arxiv; improvements carry over to 5-shot and to zero-shot cross-dataset transfer. Error-structure analysis further shows that abandoning the golden-teacher assumption substantially improves the LLM's graph learning capability on challenging samples.

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

Gradual Fine-Tuning for Flow Matching Models

arXiv:2601.22495v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning flow matching models is a central challenge in settings with limited data, evolving distributions, or computational constraints. While recent work has produced significant advances, particularly in the area of reward-based fine-tuning, current methods fail to demonstrate both theoretical correctness as well as strong empirical results in terms of stability, efficiency, and diversity preservation. In this work, we propose Gradual Fine-Tuning (GFT), a simple yet principled annealing-based framework for fine-tuning flow generative models when only samples from the target distribution are available. For stochastic flows, GFT defines a temperature-controlled sequence of intermediate objectives that smoothly interpolate between the pretrained and target drifts, provably approaching the true target as the temperature approaches zero. We analytically demonstrate that sample generation after GFT can be made substantially more efficient with the use of arbitrary (e.g., optimal transport) couplings, as well as by utilizing few-step inference methods. Empirically, GFT significantly improves convergence stability, while maintaining or improving generation quality, training speed, and generation diversity compared to other fine-tuning methods. Our results position GFT as a simple yet theoretically grounded and practically effective alternative for scalable adaptation of flow matching models under distribution shift.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Discovery and inference beyond linearity for epidemiological data by integrating Bayesian regression, tree ensembles and Shapley values

arXiv:2505.00571v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) is gaining popularity in epidemiology and healthcare studies for hypothesis-free discovery of risk and protective factors. ML is strong at discovering nonlinearities and interactions, but this power is compromised by a lack of reliable inference. Although Shapley values provide local measures of features' effects, valid uncertainty quantification for these effects is typically lacking, thus precluding statistical inference. We propose RuleSHAP, a framework that addresses this limitation by combining a dedicated Bayesian sparse regression model with an improved tree-based rule generator and Shapley value attribution. RuleSHAP provides detection of nonlinear and interaction effects, with uncertainty quantification at the individual level as a key contribution. We derive an efficient formula for computing marginal Shapley values within this framework. We apply RuleSHAP to data from an epidemiological cohort to detect and infer several effects for high cholesterol and blood pressure, such as nonlinear interaction effects between features like age, sex, ethnicity, BMI and glucose level. To conclude, we demonstrate the validity of our framework on simulated data.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Programmatic access to ICTV virus taxonomy through a public ontology API

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) is responsible for developing and maintaining a universal virus taxonomy. As the reference framework for organising the viral world, it is essential for virology and related fields. Despite its widespread use in research and public health, programmatic access to ICTV taxonomy has remained limited, posing challenges for integration, versioning, and interoperability across databases and bioinformatics resources requiring up-to-date virus taxonomy. To address this, we developed a public and sustainable solution leveraging ontology-based APIs. Successive ICTV Master Species List (MSL) releases were transformed into a structured ontology and deployed as a unified representation through the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS). The framework also provides ICTV-NCBI mappings and helper libraries for integration into downstream systems. This enables, for the first time, public programmatic retrieval of current and historical virological taxon names, taxonomic relationships, metadata, and persistent identifiers through stable endpoints. More broadly, this work illustrates a general strategy for transforming structured biological datasets into semantically enriched graph resources exposed through scalable public APIs. These developments enhance interoperability, reduce manual curation, and support FAIR-aligned taxonomic data management in virology and pandemic preparedness.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Learn-to-learn on Arbitrary Textual Conditioning: A Hypernetwork-Driven Meta-Gated LLM

Conventional LLMs may suffer from corpus heterogeneity and subtle condition changes. While finetuning can create the catastrophe forgetting issue, application of meta-learning on LLMs is also limited due to its complexity and scalability. In this paper, we activate the meta-signal of $\beta$ within the SwiGLU blocks, resulting in a meta-gating mechanism that adaptively adjusts the nonlinearity of FFN. A hypernetwork is employed which dynamically produces $\beta$ on textual conditions, providing meta-controllability on LLMs. By testing on different condition types such as task, domain, persona, and style, our method outperforms finetuning and meta-learning baselines, and can generalize reasonably on unseen tasks, condition types, or instructions. Our code can be found in https://github.com/AaronJi/MeGan.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Minimum Zero-Forcing Sets

arXiv:2606.18106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper explores the problem of finding the minimum zero-forcing set on undirected graphs and proposes an adapted machine-learning framework to solve the problem. The minimum zero-forcing set problem is a graph coloring problem where the color of an initial set of nodes propagates throughout a network. The set of nodes is zero-forcing if it forces all uncolored nodes to change color under the constraint of the color-change rule. There are several applications to this problem across different domains such as network science, network control, and designing logical circuits. Finding the minimum zero-forcing set is shown to be NP-hard. We propose a reinforcement learning framework, SD-ZFS, that adapts the S2V-DQN architecture to the ZFS problem. We train several models on this adapted framework and analyze the performance across graph datasets that have varying structures. We evaluate how the models trained on the framework generalize, scale, and transfer to different network types. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework when compared against the optimal solution and greedy heuristic. We provide further insight into how the ZFS problem can be solved through machine-learning and the influence of network structure on the problem.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Synthesizing Arbitrary Non-Hermitian Hamiltonian with Stochastic Floquet Engineering

arXiv:2606.15664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The conventional Floquet engineering scheme synthesizes a given target Hamiltonian with a deterministic temporal periodic driving field. In this work, we introduce the stochastic Floquet engineering scheme that can synthesize an arbitrary non-Hermitian target Hamiltonian using a time-periodic driving field with noisy amplitude. Our method is rooted in the Hermitian dynamics taking noise as a valuable quantum resource with no need for loss or gain in prior. We apply our method to engineer a cavity Hamiltonian with dissipative coupling between Fock states, and to prepare a given quantum state from a generally arbitrary quantum state. The stochastic Floqut engineering also provides a way to generate non-unitary quantum gates, which take advantage in certain tasks compared to unitary quantum computing, without the need for ancillae or state-dependent updating.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Utilising Artificial Intelligence to Identify Ventricular Tachycardia Ablation Targets in Sinus Rhythm

Background and Aims: Machine learning has shown potential in predicting ablation targets for ventricular tachycardia (VT) in an animal model. This study progresses to externally validating deep learning approaches for human data. Methods: The development and external validation dataset included 21 and 13 patients, respectively, with structural VT undergoing catheter ablation. In the development datasets, electrophysiological studies were conducted using the AdvisorTM HD grid (EnsiteTM X), while both CARTO and Ensite Precision were used in the validation dataset. In each patient, VT ablation targets were defined as mapping points within 8 mm of VT isthmuses. Three advanced machine learning models were trained using cardiac mapping data acquired in both omnipolar and unipolar configurations during sinus rhythm and ventricular pacing. Discrimination was evaluated using nested leave-one-out cross-validation at patient level. Results: Overall, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which integrate intracardiac signal waveforms with three-dimensional electroanatomical geometries, achieved the highest performance, with optimal results obtained from unipolar electrograms acquired in sinus rhythm (median AUC 0.793, sensitivity 83.6%, specificity 69.0%). This may be partly explained by the inclusion of repolarization dynamics in unipolar electrograms and the higher point density of sinus rhythm maps. Comparable performance was observed in the external dataset. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that graph convolutional networks applied to sinus rhythm EGM waveforms collected during substrate mapping can localise critical components of VT re-entry circuits. This approach has potential to provide fast and accurate ablation guidance without the need to induce and map VT, improving safety and efficacy of VT catheter ablation.

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

Exploding and vanishing gradients in deep neural networks: the effect of residual connections

arXiv:2606.17013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The well known phenomenon of exploding and vanishing gradients in deep neural networks is analyzed using multiplicative ergodic theory. The effect of adding a residual connection is explained in this context. Specifically, a characterization of Liapunov exponents due to Furstenberg and Kifer is exploited in order to make a precise statement about the Liapunov spectrum and the effect of residual connections on it.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

In silico characterization of lysis and host-recognition modules in Staphylococcus aureus bacteriophage genomes

Background/aim: Antimicrobial resistance in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) requires precision non-antibiotic therapeutics, yet phage lytic efficacy is poorly predicted by phenotypic assays, as shown by paradoxical biofilm responses. This study characterized the genomic architecture of lytic S. aureus bacteriophages, focusing on the conservation of the lysis module and the variability of host-recognition modules, to provide a rational basis for phage candidate selection. Materials and methods: Twenty-two complete S. aureus phage genomes were retrieved from NCBI GenBank. Genomic features were extracted with custom Biopython scripts. Lysis (endolysin, holin) and host-recognition (tail fiber/receptor-binding protein) modules were annotated and validated by InterPro domain analysis, with disrupted endolysins resolved by tBLASTn. Phylogeny was reconstructed from large terminase subunit (TerL) sequences using maximum likelihood. Results: Genome size spanned three classes, from 17.5 to 148.6 kb. The LysK-type endolysin (CHAP, Amidase, SH3b) was highly conserved, whereas tail fiber/RBP genes were detected in only 14 of 22 phages. Domain analysis reclassified two proteins annotated as endolysins as virion-associated peptidoglycan hydrolases, and identified two independent mechanisms, HNH endonuclease insertion and intron splitting, that interrupt lysis-module genes and confound automated annotation. Maximum likelihood analysis recovered a strongly supported, highly conserved core clade with EW and SA13 as divergent lineages. Conclusion: Lysis modules are conserved whereas host-recognition modules are variable, indicating that host recognition rather than the lytic enzyme is the principal determinant of host range and the more rational target for phage selection and engineering.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2602.22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods are designed for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), relying on fixed teacher traces or teacher-student Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization. When combined with RL, these approaches often suffer from distribution mismatch and objective interference: teacher supervision may not align with the student's evolving rollout distribution, and the KL regularizer can compete with reward maximization and require careful loss balancing. To address these issues, we propose RL-aware distillation (RLAD), which performs selective imitation during RL – guiding the student toward the teacher only when it improves the current policy update. Our core component, Trust Region Ratio Distillation (TRRD), replaces the teacher-student KL regularizer with a PPO/GRPO-style likelihood-ratio objective anchored to a teacher–old-policy mixture, yielding advantage-aware, trust-region-bounded distillation on student rollouts and naturally balancing exploration, exploitation, and imitation. Across diverse logic reasoning and math benchmarks, RLAD consistently outperforms offline distillation, standard GRPO, and KL-based on-policy teacher-student knowledge distillation.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Measurement Geometry for Quantum Random Access Codes: Beyond Nayak Bound and Toward Optimality

arXiv:2606.12700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum random access codes (QRACs) ask how well N classical bits can be encoded into M qubits while allowing any single bit to be recovered. Although the Nayak bound remains the standard general upper bound on the decoding probability, numerical evidence suggests a stronger upper bound in the small-qubit regime. In this work, we formulate the optimal decoding probability in terms of decoding measurements, reformulating QRAC design as a spectral problem for noncommuting measurements. Using this formulation, we give an elementary proof of the Nayak bound by simplifying the Chernoff-bound argument. Moreover, we refine the argument to obtain upper bounds that improve over Nayak's bound in the entire finite-size regime. The equality conditions of our bounds justify defining mutually unbiased projector-valued measurements (MUPVMs), a generalization of mutually unbiased bases. We show that decoding measurement of any two-qubit QRAC attaining the conjectured bound must form MUPVMs. We also show that any MUPVM, assisted by one ancillary qubit, yields a QRAC with optimal N-scaling decoding probability. Finally, we propose a new MUPVM-based construction for the (M+2,M)-QRAC family attaining the conjectured bound.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

InfantFace: Detecting infant faces in neonatal clinical environments

Reliable localisation of the neonatal face is the first step for several video-camera based non-contact assessments such as pain and distress related facial expression analysis, pain scoring, cardiorespiratory signal extraction and cessation of breathing alerts. However, major challenges persist in neonatal clinical environments. Cluttered backgrounds, illumination changes and poor lighting conditions can reduce the accuracy of face detection models. Clinical interventions, monitoring equipment and, in some cases, medical devices can obstruct the face, making visual assessment difficult. We propose a one-stage YOLOv11m-based model tailored for face detection of infants in neonatal clinical environments. We combined multiple publicly available datasets (VGGFace2, CelebA, FDDB, WIDER FACE) to train and evaluate our proposed model. We then fine-tuned our model on a neonatal research dataset involving 228 videos from 114 recording sessions of 113 independent infants. Before fine-tuning, our model achieved an AP50 of 0.87, surpassing the performance of three state-of-the-art general face detectors. Performance improved further to an AP50 of 0.96 after clinical-domain adaptation. Evaluating face detection performance across different datasets remains a challenge due to the lack of publicly available neonatal datasets. Prioritising the creation of such datasets, while upholding appropriate privacy safeguards and ethical standards in their creation and use, would greatly support further progress in this field.

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

Structuring The Future: Diffusion LLM Speculative Decoding via Calibrated Draft Graphs

Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive LLMs (AR-LLMs) with the potential to operate at significantly higher token-generation rates. To unlock this potential, we present Spiffy, a speculative decoding algorithm to accelerate dLLM inference while provably preserving the model's output distribution. This work addresses the unique challenges involved in applying ideas from speculative decoding of AR-LLMs to dLLMs. Spiffy performs auto-speculation to eliminate the overheads of an independent draft model, structuring draft states in the form of a novel directed draft graph to take advantage of the bidirectional, blockwise nature of dLLM generation. These draft graphs are calibrated offline to maximize acceptance rates and are dynamically pruned during inference for improved computational efficiency. We present a detailed formulation of Spiffy and demonstrate its ability to accelerate LLaDA, Dream, and SDAR models in combination with KV caching and threshold-based dynamic unmasking leading to up to $8.6\times$ reduction in model inferences and $6.3\times$ acceleration in token rate.

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

GILT: An LLM-Free, Tuning-Free Graph Foundational Model for In-Context Learning

arXiv:2510.04567v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for processing relational data but often struggle to generalize to unseen graphs, giving rise to the development of Graph Foundational Models (GFMs). However, current GFMs are challenged by the extreme heterogeneity of graph data, where each graph can possess a unique feature space, label set, and topology. To address this, two main paradigms have emerged. The first leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), but is fundamentally text-dependent, thus struggles to handle the numerical features in vast graphs. The second pre-trains a structure-based model, but the adaptation to new tasks typically requires a costly, per-graph tuning stage, creating a critical efficiency bottleneck. In this work, we move beyond these limitations and introduce Graph In-context Learning Transformer (GILT), a framework built on an LLM-free and tuning-free architecture. GILT introduces a novel token-based framework for in-context learning (ICL) on graphs, reframing classification tasks spanning node, edge and graph levels in a unified framework. This mechanism is the key to handling heterogeneity, as it is designed to operate on generic numerical features. Further, its ability to understand class semantics dynamically from the context enables tuning-free adaptation. Comprehensive experiments show that GILT achieves stronger few-shot performance with significantly less time than LLM-based or tuning-based baselines, validating the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yiming421/inductnode/.

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

CellNet – Localizing Cells using Sparse and Noisy Point Annotations

Counting living cells is an important step in many biological research workflows. Our collaborators at the Wellcome Sanger Institute study vital genes in humans via large scale saturation genome editing screening, which requires repeatedly counting cells a great number of times. Computer Vision based automation is crucial for high throughput and resource efficiency. In this work, we develop a regression-based deep learning computer vision algorithm to detect and count cells in phase-contrast microscopy images. To reduce annotation effort, which in practice often becomes a bottleneck, we focus on counting cells only using sparse point annotations, which are fast and easy to acquire. By comparison to state-of-the-art 0-shot methods, we show that regression-based counting is a promising alternative in low data regimes. Through developing methods to automatically count living cells in microscopy images, we contribute to valuable research on the human genome. The code is available at https://github.com/beijn/cellnet.

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

Heteroskedastic Signals in Budgeted LLM Verification: Structural Heterogeneity Limits Optimization Gains

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems increasingly use uncertainty signals to allocate limited computation across verification, test-time scaling, tool execution, and other selective-compute decisions. Such policies rely on a global signal comparability assumption: equal scores should carry comparable decision value across inputs. Using budgeted verification as a controlled diagnostic setting, we identify a failure mode of this assumption: uncertainty quality is heteroskedastic across cost strata, with some regions exhibiting near-random discriminability despite concentrating many errors. Under an explicit local model, we characterize the resulting distortion of global allocation and show that its upper bound scales with cross-stratum signal-quality dispersion. We separate weak signals, optimization instability, and structural heterogeneity through a controlled intervention hierarchy: Threshold, MP-Adapt, MP-Strat, and a deliberately simple cost-stratified thresholding intervention (CST). Across MBPP and MATH using Qwen3-8B, LLaMA3-8B, and GPT-4o-mini, global online adaptation yields inconsistent gains over static thresholding; MP-Strat partially recovers performance, while CST improves hit rate by up to 17 percentage points in strongly heterogeneous settings without gradient updates. These results identify structural heterogeneity, rather than optimizer weakness alone, as the primary bottleneck in the observed settings. More broadly, misaligned feedback structure cannot always be repaired by stronger optimization.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Ferritin across long-term conditions in England: cross-sectional primary care study

Background Iron deficiency (ID) is a readily treatable condition once identified. Ferritin is the primary diagnostic marker, but cut-offs vary and inflammation complicates interpretation in patients with long-term conditions (LTCs). Aim To describe ferritin distribution and the prevalence of threshold-defined low ferritin in adults with and without LTCs in primary care. Design and setting Cross-sectional observational study using routinely collected electronic health records from a national primary care database in England (1st January 2015 to 31st December 2021). Method Adults with >1 ferritin test in Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum were included. LTCs were identified using validated primary-care code lists. Outcomes included ferritin distribution and threshold-defined ID prevalence using World Health Organization (WHO) (

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning over Digital Twin Representations for Reasoning-Intensive Surgical VideoQA

Surgical video question answering requires multi-step reasoning across semantic, spatial, and temporal dimensions. Existing methods architecturally compress videos into discrete token representations and couple visual perception with reasoning. This approach fragments continuous spatial-temporal relationships and has been shown to restrict multi-step reasoning capabilities. We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that trains large language models (LLMs) to decouple perception from reasoning by operating over digital twin representations constructed from surgical foundation models. Additionally, we introduce hierarchical representations across frame, temporal window, and procedure levels with probabilistic uncertainty estimates. Finally, we propose a novel reward that combines format validation with accuracy assessment through clinical plausibility evaluation and uncertainty-aware calibration for training. To demonstrate the capabilities of this approach, we introduce REAL-Colon-Reason, a colonoscopic benchmark with 2000 question-answer pairs across three complexity levels. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on REAL-Colon-Reason and two existing surgical VideoQA benchmarks REAL-Colon-VQA and EndoVis18-VQA.

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

CRIS: Cross-Plane Self-Supervised Isotropic Restoration for Anisotropic Volumetric Imaging Across Modalities

Anisotropic volumetric acquisitions are common in clinical MRI and volume electron microscopy (vEM), where sparse through-plane sampling creates thick slices or sections that degrade orthogonal reformats and downstream analysis. We present CRIS, a cross-plane self-supervised framework for isotropic restoration without paired isotropic ground truth. CRIS casts 3D restoration as 2D stripe completion on orthogonal reformats of an isotropic grid: high-resolution in-plane slices are synthetically degraded and periodically masked for training, while at inference blank slices define the isotropic grid, two orthogonal reformats are restored, and predictions are fused by multi-view averaging. We evaluate CRIS on two MRI cohorts and two microscopy benchmarks up to 8x anisotropy. On brain MRI, CRIS achieves 32.921 +/- 0.436 dB PSNR and 0.9631 +/- 0.0027 SSIM, outperforming interpolation, SMORE4, SIMPLE, SA-INR, and ATME, and gives the best segmentation consistency (Dice 0.940 +/- 0.004, ASSD 0.245 +/- 0.014 mm, HD99 1.275 +/- 0.061 mm). On reference-free abdominal MRI, CRIS reduces FID/KID to 48.714/0.023. On vEM, CRIS outperforms interpolation, NIIV, and vEMINR, reaching 29.133 dB/0.834 3D PSNR/SSIM at 4x, 27.123 dB/0.734 on EPFL at 8x, and 21.915 dB/0.699 on noisy hemibrain data. In a robustness experiment, one variable-gap CRIS model evaluated across gap factors 3–7 and coronal, axial, and sagittal degradations maintained higher PSNR/SSIM than interpolation (36.36–31.14 dB and 0.977–0.932 vs. 33.07–27.85 dB and 0.951–0.853). These results support CRIS as a modality-flexible route to isotropic restoration without paired isotropic targets or configuration-specific retraining. Code is available at https://github.com/adi-hatav/CRIS.

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

Efficient Temporal Modeling for Mobile Sleep Staging via Lightweight Random Attention

arXiv:2606.13694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mobile sleep staging serves as a foundational infrastructure for in-home sleep monitoring and closed-loop modulation. But existing sequential models such as RNNs and Transformers are computationally expensive for mobile deployment. In this paper, we propose Random Attention (RA), a lightweight temporal modeling module based on fixed random projections, which replaces learnable sequence modeling with similarity-based aggregation. RA introduces little additional parameters beyond the epoch encoder while enabling effective temporal smoothing. We further provide a theoretical interpretation via the Random Attention Prior Kernel (RAPK), which decomposes RA into a global smoothing term and a feature similarity term, offering an interpretable view of temporal sleep structure. Experiments on Sleep-EDF-20 and Sleep-EDF-78 show that RA consistently improves epoch-wise baselines by 1-3\% in accuracy and F1 score, while achieving competitive performance compared with LSTM, GRU, and Transformer models. RA also demonstrates strong generalization across different backbone encoders and improved robustness over conventional temporal smoothing methods. These results indicate that efficient sleep staging can be achieved through lightweight similarity-based temporal aggregation, making RA suitable for real-time wearable applications.