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

An Explainable AI Assistant for Introductory Programming Education: Improving Feedback Reliability with Instructor-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2606.12425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Active learning is widely recognized as an effective approach for improving learning outcomes in introductory programming courses. However, insufficient instructional support often limits students' access to timely, personalized feedback, which is crucial for mastering foundational programming concepts. Although recent advances in AI, particularly large language models, offer scalable opportunities for feedback, concerns about explainability and reliability remain. In this paper, we present an AI-driven classroom assistant that leverages an explainable AI model to analyze student code, map logical errors to instructor-identified misconceptions, and deliver instructor-authored feedback, thereby grounding reliability in instructor-defined pedagogical knowledge. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we conducted an expert evaluation to examine its alignment with instructor-verified feedback and deployed the system in a classroom setting to assess students' perceptions of its usability. Results indicate that the assistant can provide accurate, instructor-verified feedback to students while fostering a positive experience.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

The most discriminable quantum states in the multicopy regime

arXiv:2604.26927v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work investigates which sets of quantum states give rise to the highest achievable success probability in minimum-error state discrimination if multiple copies of the unknown state are given. Specifically, we consider uniformly distributed ensembles of the form $\left\{\frac{1}{N},\rho_i^{\otimes k}\right\}_{i=1}^N$, where $N$ states in dimension $d$ are provided in $k$ identical copies, and derive universal limits in this scenario. For pure state ensembles, we prove that whenever $N$ is large enough to support a state $k$-design, these designs will exactly give rise to the maximally discriminable sets. We further show that when $N$ exceeds the size required for a $k$-design, mixed states can outperform all pure state ensembles. We then recognise that the problem of most discriminable classical states in the multi-copy regime is in one-to-one correspondence to the concept of the multiplicative Bayes capacity of independent uses of classical channels, a concept that emerges naturally in the context of classical information leakage. This connection allows us to completely solve the classical analogue of our problem when $N\geq \binom{d + k - 1}{k}$, and to prove that quantum systems offer a quadratic advantage (in number of copies $k$) over classical ones. Then, we prove that this classical over quantum advantage is strongly reduced when one is restricted to real quantum states, more precisely, when $N \geq k + 1$, pure real qubits only offer a constant advantage over classical bits. Finally, we introduce computational techniques to find sets of most discriminable ensembles and to obtain rigorous universal upper bounds on the maximal success probability for multi-copy state discrimination in cases that are analytically intractable.

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

GD$^2$PO: Mitigating Multi-Reward Conflicts via Group-Dynamic reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.16771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLMs advance, post-training reinforcement learning (RL) increasingly relies on multi-dimensional rewards to cultivate comprehensive capabilities. This shift demands new algorithms capable of optimizing diverse and potentially competing objectives simultaneously. To address this, existing methods such as Group reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization (GDPO) decompose the overall score into independent reward groups, then compute the RL loss separately within each group. However, this strategy still encounters multi-reward conflicts: a single rollout can yield positive advantages on certain reward dimensions but negative ones on others, causing opposing signals to cancel each other out during aggregation, further hindering RL training efficiency. Inspired by Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO), which improves RL training efficiency by filtering out ineffective rollouts with near-zero advantages, we propose Group-Dynamic reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization (GD$^2$PO). Specifically, GD$^2$PO employs a conflict-aware filtering mechanism to mask out rollouts suffering from severe reward-wise disagreement. By preventing conflicting signals from canceling each other out, this masking strategy preserves and enhances the magnitude of effective RL advantages, thereby significantly accelerating learning efficiency. Furthermore, we introduce query-level reweighting to dynamically adjust the update intensity of each query based on its overall reward consensus. Experiments on various multi-reward scenarios, including tool calling and human preference alignment, demonstrate that GD$^2$PO consistently and significantly outperforms existing baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/GD2PO.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Socioeconomic Determinants of Guideline-Concordant Therapy for Early-Stage Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer: A Population-Based Analysis from Appalachian and Non-Appalachian Ohio, 2004-2015

Purpose: To examine the relative contributions of insurance, county-level poverty, and other socioeconomic factors, as compared with Appalachian geography, to receipt of guideline-concordant therapy for early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in Appalachian and non-Appalachian Ohio. Methods: Retrospective population-based cohort study using the Ohio Cancer Incidence Surveillance System. We identified adults diagnosed with early-stage NSCLC between 2004 and 2015 (N=26,756). The primary outcome was receipt of guideline-concordant local therapy (surgery or definitive radiation). Rural-urban classification used USDA Rural-Urban Continuum Codes. Multivariable logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards models assessed predictors of treatment and survival, with E-values, race-stratified models, and propensity score weighting as sensitivity analyses. Findings: Median age was 71 years; 50.3% were male, 83.8% non-Hispanic White, and 20.4% Appalachian. Overall, 83.6% received guideline-concordant local therapy (59.6% surgery, 24.0% radiation). In adjusted analysis, Medicaid (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 0.53, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.44-0.63; adjusted risk ratio [RR] 0.94, 0.91-0.96), county-level poverty >20% (OR 0.77, 95% CI 0.68-0.87; RR 0.96, 0.95-0.98), and unmarried status were independently associated with lower therapy receipt, whereas Appalachian residence was associated with modestly higher receipt (OR 1.17, 95% CI 1.06-1.29; RR 1.02, 1.01-1.04). Therapy rates converged across regions over the study period (year x Appalachian interaction p20% (HR 1.13, 95% CI 1.07-1.20). Conclusions: Socioeconomic factors, particularly Medicaid insurance and county-level poverty, were the patient characteristics most strongly associated with lower receipt of guideline-concordant therapy, whereas Appalachian residence was not a barrier. Findings support targeted interventions addressing insurance-related and poverty-related barriers to lung cancer care in high-poverty communities regardless of geographic designation.

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

CREST: Deployment-Realistic Hardware-in-the-Loop NAS for Embedded Sensing Systems

arXiv:2606.15004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying neural networks on low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) requires selecting model architectures under tight memory, latency, and energy constraints. Existing workflows often simplify this process along one or more axes: static proxy costs such as FLOPs or parameters, treating one MCU as representative, and continuous-inference tests instead of deployed sensing schedules. These assumptions can mis-rank Pareto-front candidates, miss infeasible deployments, and obscure schedule-dependent energy. We present CREST (Cross-platform Runtime Evaluation and Search Tool), a deployment-realistic hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) neural architecture search (NAS) framework for MCU sensing systems. CREST keeps the optimizer, HIL measurement boundary, logging, and replay workflow fixed while exposing workload, model family, target backend, schedule, quantization, and scoring policy as configurable axes. This makes deployment effects experimentally separable within one reusable workflow. We evaluate CREST on inertial odometry and audio classification across three Arm Cortex-M targets. For inertial odometry, measured-energy HIL search reduces median per-inference energy by 41.7% versus FLOPs-based selection and 40.8% versus memory-traffic-based selection at similar error. FLOPs-based selection also chooses infeasible deployments on memory-constrained targets. On the STM32 N657 target, continuous-inference and duty-cycled searches produce different Pareto frontiers. For audio classification, the same application-level policy selects different DS-CNN architectures on different boards, and cross-board replay changes deployment cost substantially. Overall, CREST shows that deployment-realistic MCU NAS must jointly optimize model architecture, target platform, runtime schedule, and deployment policy rather than relying only on static proxy costs or continuous-inference measurements.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Entanglement improves coordination in distributed systems

arXiv:2602.04588v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Coordination in distributed systems is often hampered by communication latency, which degrades performance. Quantum entanglement offers fundamentally stronger correlations than classically achievable without communication. Crucially, these correlations manifest instantaneously upon measurement, irrespective of the physical distance separating the systems. We investigate the application of shared entanglement to a dual-work optimization problem in a distributed system comprising two servers. The system must process both a continuously available, preemptible baseline task and incoming customer requests arriving in pairs. System performance is characterized by the trade-off between baseline task throughput and customer waiting time. We present a rigorous analytical model demonstrating that when the baseline task throughput function is strictly convex, rewarding longer uninterrupted processing periods, entanglement-assisted routing strategies achieve Pareto-superior performance compared to optimal communication-free classical strategies. We prove this advantage through queueing-theoretic analysis, non-local game formulation, and computational certification of classical bounds. Our results identify distributed scheduling and coordination as a novel application domain for near-term entanglement-based quantum networks.

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

Multimodal Brain Tumour Classification Using Feature Fusion

Clinicians diagnose brain tumors by synthesizing patient symptoms, medical history, and quantitative imaging data from modalities such as MRI and CT scans into a unified clinical judgement. However, most deep learning models rely on MRI/CT images alone, failing to replicate the clinicians multimodal reasoning. We explore a two-branch multimodal network combining raw MRI scans with 91 extracted radiomic features (intensity, texture, shape, and boundary descriptors) to classify brain tumors into glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no-tumor. A pre-trained CNN backbone encodes the image stream, whereas a dedicated MLP encodes the radiomic stream. Both streams are fused via concatenation, gated, or bidirectional cross-modal attention strategies. Across nine experimental runs on a balanced 7,200 image dataset, all multimodal configurations outperform unimodal baselines with gated fusion achieving the best accuracy of 96.13%.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Learning to Prompt: Improving Student Engagement with Adaptive LLM-based High-School Tutoring

LLMs can personalize education, although current static-prompt tutoring systems struggle to adapt to diverse academic disciplines. We develop and test a system with subject-aware prompting, based on 14 pedagogical features (e.g., tutor scaffolding, student understanding) extracted from raw transcripts. We first train a prompt routing model in a simulation environment, and then deploy it for online adaptation with actual high-school students. The simulation benchmark shows the router outperforming two static baselines ($0.694$ vs. $0.647$ and $0.64$, $p

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Agents' Last Exam

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long horizon, economically valuable, real world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 sub fields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is below 1%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP relevant impact.

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

Cycle-Consistent Neural Explanation of Formal Verification Certificates

arXiv:2606.24414v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal verification produces machine-checkable certificates that attest to the satisfaction or violation of temporal properties, yet these certificates remain opaque to non-specialist stakeholders. We propose a cycle-consistent neural architecture that generates faithful natural language explanations of verification certificates. A forward network NN1 maps certificates to explanations, and an inverse network NN2 reconstructs certificates from explanations; a symbolic verifier closes the loop, providing a differentiable faithfulness proxy. A pointer-generator mechanism ensures lexical grounding by copying state names directly from the certificate. We evaluate on 420 test certificates spanning six verification methods (bounded proof, k-induction, inductive invariant, lasso, reachability, witness pair) in both YES and NO verdict variants, drawn from a financial compliance domain with 207 named states. Our trained architecture, combined with a hybrid inference-time routing strategy, achieves 90.0% cycle-verified soundness, surpassing a multi- LLM few-shot baseline (76.1% for the best of 16 LLM combinations across four frontier models) by 13.9 percentage points. The neural model wins on 10 of 12 verdict/kind categories, with three categories reaching 100% soundness. The architecture offers 860x faster inference (185 ms vs. 160 s per certificate for the full multi-LLM baseline), offline operation, deterministic outputs, and zero per-inference cost. These results demonstrate that trained specialization outperforms general-purpose LLM prompting for structured certificate explanation, while eliminating the deployment constraints of cloud-based inference.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

On Injectivity of Phase Retrieval

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this short note, we prove that if $A \in \mathbb C^{N \times M}$ with $N=4M-5$ has i.i.d.\ standard complex Gaussian entries, then the probability that the phase retrieval map generated by $A$ is not injective is positive. This proves Part (1) of a conjecture of Cynthia Vinzant, which was later restated by Afonso S. Bandeira in [BDL+26]. The main result of this paper was obtained using generative AI, in particular the Rethlas system.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MLT-Dedup: Efficient Large-Scale Online Video Deduplication via Multi-Level Representations and Spatial-Temporal Matching

The explosive growth of user-generated video content on online platforms is accompanied by the emergence of numerous near-duplicate videos–videos that are identical or highly similar but differ by partial edits. These duplicates degrade user experience and increase storage and bandwidth costs, making large-scale video deduplication a critical task. Existing video deduplication frameworks face a fundamental challenge in retrieving sufficient high-quality candidates under a limited index budget, as well as trade-offs between efficiency and precision. To address these issues, we propose MLT-Dedup, an efficient large-scale online video deduplication framework with Multi-Level representations and spatial-Temporal matching. Our approach employs a Multi-Level Video Encoder (ML-VE) to extract both fine-grained frame-level and sparse clip-level embeddings: sparse embeddings support efficient candidate retrieval, while fine-grained embeddings are loaded for precise pairwise matching. During matching, we introduce DiF-SiM, a Differential Feature-enhanced Similarity Module capable of locating duplicated temporal segments and providing reliable similarity evidence to support policy-driven deduplication decisions. Extensive experiments on a real-world large-scale platform demonstrate that MLT-Dedup reduces online repetition rates by 91% at 90% precision. Furthermore, our sparse retrieval design achieves a 5x increase in indexing capacity, enabling broader candidate coverage in real-world deployment.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Ex-Omni: Enabling 3D Facial Animation Generation for Omni-modal Large Language Models

Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) aim to unify multimodal understanding and generation, yet extending them to jointly produce speech and 3D facial animation remains largely unexplored despite its importance for natural human-computer interaction. A key challenge is the mismatch between the discrete semantic reasoning of LLMs and the dense temporal dynamics required for 3D facial motion. We propose Expressive Omni (Ex-Omni), an open-source model that augments OLLMs with native speech-accompanied 3D facial animation. Ex-Omni decouples semantic reasoning from temporal generation through a blendshape-aware speech unit generator and a blendshape decoder, where speech units provide temporal scaffolding and hidden speech representations carry facially relevant cues. We further introduce a unified token-as-query gated fusion (TQGF) mechanism for controlled semantic injection, as well as InstructS2SF-1200K, a dataset consisting of 1200K samples for pre-training. Extensive experiments show that Ex-Omni maintains competitive speech understanding and generation ability while achieving better audio-visual synchronization and lower face-generation latency than cascaded pipelines.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Voronoi Percolation: Topological Stability and Giant Cycles

arXiv:2601.00793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the topological stability of Voronoi percolation in higher dimensions. We show that slightly increasing p allows a discretization that preserves increasing topological properties with high probability. This strengthens a theorem of Bollobás and Riordan and generalizes it to higher dimensions. As a consequence, we prove a sharp phase transition for the emergence of i-dimensional giant cycles in Voronoi percolation on the 2i-dimensional torus.

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

How Controlling the Variance can Improve Training Stability of Sparsely Activated DNNs and CNNs

arXiv:2602.05779v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Edge-of-Chaos (EoC) theory developed for the random initialization of deep networks allows more efficient training by both preserving information in the initial outputs of the network and minimising exploding or vanishing gradients through characterisation of the intermediate layers as Gaussian processes. This EoC theory provides formulae for the choice of the initialisation distribution variances of the weights and biases. For activations which are approximately linear around the origin, the EoC theory typically encourages the Gaussian process variance to converge towards zero with increasing depth. Here we consider the less studied setting of highly sparsity inducing activations where a large region of values near the origin are set to zero. In this setting we prove a new phenomenon whereby initialisations leading to larger fixed Gaussian processes are beneficial to training stability. This theory informs a new, yet simple, initialisation strategy that allows training DNNs and CNNs with as large as 90\% sparsity in the hidden layers.

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

Toward Vibe Medicine: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Framework for Clinical Decision Support

arXiv:2606.15504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, the advances of large language models and autonomous agents have revolutionized the healthcare field, facilitating diagnosis and improving treatment results. However, most existing AI systems rely on pre-trained knowledge and predefined pipelines, which struggle to learn dynamically from the interactive chat session history that contains patient outcomes and past failures. To address this limitation, we propose VIBEMed, a multi-agent framework with a built-in self-evolution mechanism and architecture-level safety sandbox for robust clinical decision support. The system integrates three specialized agents, including a Clinical Diagnostic Agent (CDA) for hypothesis generation, a Therapeutic Execution Agent (TEA) for treatment planning, and a Clinical Evolution Manager Agent (CEMA) that distills longitudinal clinical feedback into reusable knowledge, transforming multimodal patient information into personalized medical decisions. Through self-evolution mechanism, the framework enables iterative updates across memory, model behavior, and decision strategies, allowing the system to improve over time. Experimental results show that VIBEMed demonstrates superior performance through its evolving mechanism in complex clinical cases, particularly in tasks that require integrated decision-making and longitudinal planning. The framework also supports reliable end-to-end decisions in challenging scenarios such as oncology treatment planning, highlighting its feasibility in real-world clinical contexts. Overall, VIBEMed provides a practical path beyond static AI systems toward adaptive, experience-driven clinical decision support, demonstrating the value of combining multi-agent collaboration with continuous evolution for advancing precision medicine.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

MAPS: A Novel Multi-Axial Projective Sphere for Geometrically Visualizing Higher d-Valued Quantum State-Space of Qudits

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visualizing the d-valued quantum state-space of quantum systems serves as a foundational pillar for the scientific research and practical applications in quantum computing and information science, where d >= 2. The 2-valued quantum states of a qubit are elegantly visualized on the three-dimensional Bloch sphere. In contrast, expanding this geometrical paradigm to visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit (d >= 3), e.g., a qutrit (d=3), ququadit (d=4), and quintit (d=5), leads to severe structural and topological complexities. This paper introduces a new generalized three-dimensional framework to effectively visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit, in the aspects of ease of illustration, structural simplicity, and natural representation for researchers and engineers. We called this new framework the "multi-axial projective sphere (MAPS)", which consists of n projectional intersecting spatial axes, where d-1

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

Scaling Laws of Global Weather Models

arXiv:2602.22962v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data-driven models are revolutionizing weather forecasting. To optimize training efficiency and model performance, this paper analyzes empirical scaling laws within this domain. We investigate the relationship between model performance (validation loss) and three key factors: model size ($N$), dataset size ($D$), and compute budget ($C$). Across a range of models, we find that Aurora exhibits the strongest data-scaling behavior: increasing the training dataset by 10x reduces validation loss by up to 3.2x. GraphCast demonstrates the highest parameter efficiency, yet suffers from limited hardware utilization. Our compute-optimal analysis indicates that, under fixed compute budgets, allocating resources to more total training data yields greater performance gains than increasing model size. Furthermore, we analyze model shape and uncover scaling behaviors that differ fundamentally from those observed in language models: weather forecasting models consistently favor increased width over depth. These findings suggest that future weather models should prioritize wider architectures and larger effective training datasets to maximize predictive performance.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Approach for Melt Pool Prediction in Laser Powder Bed Fusion

arXiv:2606.23719v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a promising additive manufacturing technique that suffers from quality assurance concerns. Predicting melt pools from process parameters is crucial for assessing quality prior to manufacturing but remains a difficult problem because of the complex physical processes underlying LPBF. Quantum computers present a new computing paradigm, providing a new approach to information processing using quantum entanglement and superposition. This paper presents a practical demonstration of a hybrid quantum-classical model that leverages quantum computing to improve process parameter feature extraction with a quantum feature encoder. To make the quantum approach computationally feasible for large datasets, we first employ a clustering algorithm to reduce the number of expensive quantum computations. These quantum features are then processed by a classical neural network to predict the melt pool morphology, allowing for more accurate predictions of melt pools. We demonstrate the method using a quantum simulator, analyze the effect of measurement shot noise on the predictive performance of the network, and verify the results using quantum hardware. Finally, by examining which quantum features are most important, we provide insights that can inform the future design of more effective quantum encoding circuits. Ultimately, the performance improvement over purely classical networks validates the hybrid approach, demonstrating an engineering application of quantum computing using noisy and intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices.

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

Assessing Reliability of Symbol Detection in Concept Bottleneck Models

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) are a relevant tool for explainable Artificial Intelligence because they make their predictions through human-interpretable symbols. However, high task accuracy does not guarantee that these symbols are detected faithfully: jointly trained CBMs may encode task-specific shortcuts in the bottleneck, making their explanations unreliable. In this paper, we study concept-detection reliability by swapping independently trained concept detectors and classification heads that share the same symbolic vocabulary. We use the resulting performance degradation, concept-level metrics, and symbol-wise uncertainty estimates to identify concepts that are especially prone to spurious firing. Finally, we propose a reliability-aware training strategy in which a shared concept detector is optimized with multiple classification heads and penalized for relying on globally or instance-wise unreliable symbols. On CUB-200-2011 with full concept supervision, detectors and heads are almost freely interchangeable (swap drop below one accuracy point, relative retention above $99\%$, and no concept detected below chance), whereas on a controlled synthetic task we show that, as the concept-supervision weight is reduced, models keep near-perfect task accuracy while swapped accuracy and agreement with the ground-truth concepts collapse to chance. Our reliability-aware training substantially mitigates this leakage, roughly doubling swap accuracy in the leaky regime.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Adaptive Machine Learning Framework for UAV Trajectory Optimization in O-RAN

arXiv:2606.24483v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) as open radio units (O-RUs) in 6G cellular systems presents a promising opportunity to achieve scalable and adaptive network coverage. However, optimizing UAV trajectories in dynamic and unfamiliar environments remains a critical challenge, particularly due to the need for extensive retraining in each new scenario. In this paper, we introduce a novel UAV trajectory optimization framework that integrates enhanced continual transfer learning within the O-RAN architecture. The proposed system maintains a library of pre-trained models and employs a model selection mechanism to identify and transfer knowledge from the most relevant environments, minimizing adaptation time and improving efficiency. When no sufficiently similar model is available, a fallback model empowered by continuous refinements ensures baseline performance. The framework leverages real-world city maps and ray tracing techniques to enhance learning reliability and improve trajectory planning. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model selection-based transfer learning approach reduces convergence time by 44% to 56% compared to retraining from scratch, and up to 40% compared to traditional transfer learning without model selection.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of an automated, imaging-based preoperative screening model for early identification of malnutrition in an abdominal surgery cohort

Background: Clinical malnutrition affects one in five abdominal surgery patients and increases postoperative complications and mortality. Current screening occurs after admission, closing the window for preoperative nutritional intervention. No objective, scalable preoperative screening tool exists. Objective: To determine whether automated volumetric CT-based body composition analysis improves preoperative identification of surgical patients at risk for clinical malnutrition compared to clinical variables or single slice imaging alone. Methods: Retrospective cohort study of adults undergoing elective abdominal surgery at a quaternary academic medical center (2018 to 2021) with a preoperative CT scan within 90 days and complete nutrition assessment. Clinical malnutrition was diagnosed by a registered dietitian using ASPEN/AND criteria. Three sex stratified Elastic Net models were compared: (1) base clinical variables; (2) base plus L3 single slice skeletal muscle index and attenuation; and (3) base plus comprehensive 3D volumetric quantification of five muscle groups and two fat depots. Discrimination (AUROC), calibration (Brier score), and clinical utility (decision curve analysis) were assessed via 10-fold cross-validation. Results: Among 1,143 patients (52.4% female; mean age 60.5 years), 231 (20.2%) were diagnosed with malnutrition. Malnourished patients had significantly higher complication rates (36.4% vs. 15.4%, p

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

The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Image Denoising, specifically focusing on the high-noise regime ($\sigma = 50$). The competition investigates advanced neural architectures designed to restore high-fidelity details from images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Unlike constrained benchmarks, this track emphasizes peak quantitative performance, measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without limitations on parameter count or computational overhead. By synthesizing contributions from 20 finalist teams out of 116 registrants, this report benchmarks the latest technical innovations and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in unconstrained image restoration.

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

Enabling Real-Time Point-of-Care Ultrasound Segmentation: A GPU-Free Deployment in Resource-Limited Settings

Authors:

Ultrasound imaging is the most widely adopted medical modality globally due to its low cost and portability, yet artificial intelligence (AI) deployment remains constrained by reliance on GPU-accelerated models, creating a structural paradox where the cost of "intelligence" exceeds that of the imaging device itself. Here, we present the systematic adaptation and extensive evaluation of UltraSeg, an ultra-lightweight architecture originally developed for colonoscopic polyp segmentation, now engineered for point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) across ten public datasets spanning six anatomical sites (breast, thyroid, kidney, carotid, fetal, and small-animal tumor). We systematically validate both variants in ultrasound domains: UltraSeg-130K (0.13M parameters) achieves 89.7 FPS on single-core CPUs and 34.8 FPS on a refurbished mobile device, while UltraSeg-500K (0.5M parameters) delivers 44.6 FPS on CPU and 16.1 FPS on mobile device. UltraSeg-500K matches or exceeds the Dice performance of the 31M-parameter UNet and approaches 105M-parameter TransUNet in average performance, with superior zero-shot cross-dataset generalization on external validation sets (UDIAT, DDTI). By enabling clinical-grade segmentation without GPU dependency, this work brings AI costs in line with ultrasound accessibility, making advanced diagnostics available in resource-limited settings.