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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Multi-Head Attention-Based Feature Extractor Integration with Soft Actor-Critic for Porosity Prediction and Process Parameter Optimization in Additive Manufacturing

arXiv:2606.20087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Additive manufacturing process optimization requires precise parameter control to minimize defects such as porosity. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) approaches using discrete action spaces suffer from slow convergence and susceptibility to local optima, limiting their effectiveness for high-precision manufacturing tasks. This study addresses these limitations by employing a continuous action space combined with a novel architecture that integrates a multi-head attention mechanism with the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm. The attention-based feature extractor enhances the agent's ability to capture subtle variations in low-dimensional input features, enabling more effective exploration-exploitation balance for navigating value spaces with local minima. We validate our approach on porosity prediction and process parameter optimization in laser powder bed fusion, demonstrating faster convergence and higher final reward values compared to standard RL methods including DQN, PPO, TD3, and vanilla SAC. The proposed methodology achieves a convergence value of 322.79 within 14 episodes, outperforming existing approaches while maintaining stability throughout training.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

When English Isn't the Best Teacher: Source Language Effects in Cross-Lingual In-Context Learning

Cross-lingual transfer in multilingual NLP has been widely explored in supervised fine-tuning contexts, where factors like data availability and linguistic similarity largely determine transfer quality. As the field shifts toward few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL), it is often presumed that insights from fine-tuning carry over unchanged. Yet this assumption has not been rigorously evaluated, leaving open the question of how to choose source languages for cross-lingual ICL. We conduct a broad empirical study of cross-lingual transfer in ICL spanning seven tasks, six models, and a typologically diverse set of languages. We further analyze language confusion, a key obstacle for generative tasks in cross-lingual ICL. Our results show that conventional fine-tuning-based expectations do not consistently apply in the ICL regime and point to alternative heuristics for selecting source languages effectively.

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

From Simulation to Real-World: An In-Field 6D Pose Dataset and Baseline for Robotic Strawberry Harvesting

Robotic strawberry harvesting requires precise 6D pose estimation; however, collecting 6D pose ground truth in real agricultural fields is inherently challenging. Existing 6D pose estimation methods have therefore relied solely on synthetic data that lacks scene-level realism, leaving their performance under real agricultural field conditions unquantified. In this work, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first real-world 6D pose ground truth dataset of strawberries collected in actual agricultural fields (12,040 images). We also introduce a synthetic dataset rendered in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, featuring scene-level realism and domain randomization. Nevertheless, our experiments reveal that a significant sim-to-real gap persists, underscoring the necessity of real agricultural field data for reliable evaluation. We further quantify the sim-to-real gap through baseline 6D pose estimation results across backbone encoders, serving as a reference for future work. The real-world dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Approximability limits for bounded-degree max-LINSAT and implications for decoded quantum interferometry

arXiv:2606.13570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For general max-k-XORSAT with $k \geq 3$, no polynomial-time algorithm can do substantially better than random guessing on worst-case instances unless $\mathsf{P} = \mathsf{NP}$: approximating beyond the random-assignment value of $1/2$ is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard. The picture changes when each variable appears in at most $D$ constraints. In that bounded-degree setting, polynomial-time algorithms can provably beat the random baseline by an additive amount of order $1/\sqrt{D}$. For Boolean instances, this scaling is known to be optimal: the matching hardness result is due to Trevisan, while the corresponding algorithmic guarantee was established by Barak et al. Whether the same holds over general finite fields, and what it implies for quantum algorithms, has not been established. We make this connection explicit and extend the hardness to max-E$k$-LINSAT$(q,r)$ with bounded degree $D$ and over arbitrary finite fields $\mathbb{F}_q$, proving that it is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard to exceed $r/q + \mathcal{O}_{q,r}(1/\sqrt{D})$. These results provide the complexity-theoretic benchmark for the bounded-degree instances targeted by decoded quantum interferometry (DQI), QAOA, and classical heuristics. Any quantum advantage on bounded-degree instances is therefore confined to the constant prefactor. We further show that in the context of DQI and on $(k,D)$-regular instances, this prefactor is sensitive to the nature of the decoder: DQI with classical decoders faces an information-theoretic $1/\sqrt{D \log D}$ barrier that prevents it from matching the hardness scaling, while DQI with quantum decoders is compatible with the $1/\sqrt{D}$ scaling – identifying quantum decoding as the key ingredient for matching the complexity-theoretic scaling with DQI.

06.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-22

Affordable centimeter-scale 3D microscopy with submicrometer resolution

作者: 未知作者

Submicrometer-resolution three-dimensional (3D) imaging of large samples has been constrained by the short working distance, high cost and inflexible design of immersion objectives. We developed hybrid solid–liquid optics (HySIL) — a refractive framework with index-matched components — for submicrometer-resolution 3D imaging of centimeter-scale samples in various immersion media using inexpensive air objectives.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma: Foundations and Applications

作者:

arXiv:2603.07245v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma (LLL) is a central tool in probabilistic combinatorics, providing a sufficient condition under which a finite collection of undesirable events with limited dependencies can be simultaneously avoided with positive probability. This paper offers a self-contained expository treatment of the lemma and its strengthened versions, emphasizing mathematical foundations, conceptual clarity, and applications. We begin with a pedagogically motivated proof of the LLL based entirely on unconditional probability inequalities. Particular attention is given to the symmetric form of the lemma and several subsequent strengthenings. The paper also discusses a variety of classical applications of both the symmetric and asymmetric forms of the LLL in combinatorics and graph theory, including bounds for the edge-disjoint paths problem, satisfiability of Boolean formulas in conjunctive normal form, lower bounds on diagonal and off-diagonal Ramsey numbers, hypergraph coloring results, structural properties of directed graphs, and acyclic graph colorings. Additional observations and refinements are provided throughout. We also introduce the algorithmic framework of Moser and Tardos, highlighting its constructive counterpart to the LLL, together with an introduction to the entropy-compression principle. The lopsided LLL, a refinement of the LLL, is presented along with an application to the Latin transversal problem. We further discuss the cluster-expansion lemma and its relation to the LLL, and present an alternative treatment of the Latin transversal problem from the cluster-expansion perspective that yields an improved result. The paper concludes with a high-level overview of the iterated LLL, also known as the semi-random method.

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

TopoHR: Hierarchical Centerline Representation for Cyclic Topology Reasoning in Driving Scenes with Point-to-Instance Relations

Topology reasoning is crucial for autonomous driving. Current methods primarily focus on instance-level learning for centerline detection, followed by a sequential module for topology reasoning that relies on simplified MLP layers. Moreover, they often neglect the importance of point-to-instance (P2I) relationships in topology reasoning. To address these limitations, we present TopoHR (Topological Hierarchical Representation), a novel end-to-end framework that establishes cyclic interaction between centerline detection and topology reasoning, allowing them to iteratively enhance each other. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical centerline representation including point queries, instance queries, and semantic representations. These multi-level features are seamlessly integrated and fused within a hierarchical centerline decoder. Furthermore, we design a hierarchical topology reasoning module that captures both fine-grained P2I relationships and global instance-to-instance (I2I) connections within a unified architecture. With these novel components, TopoHR ensures accurate and robust topology reasoning. On the OpenLane-V2 benchmark, TopoHR refreshes state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements. Notably, compared with previous best results, TopoHR achieves +3.8 in $\mathrm{DET}_{l}$, +5.4 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{ll}$ on $subset_A$ and +11.0 in $\mathrm{DET}_{l}$, +7.9 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{ll}$ on $subset_B$, validating the effectiveness of the proposed components. The code will be shared publicly at https://github.com/Yifeng-Bai/TopoHR.git.

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

Retrievable Gradients: Continual Post-Training Without Cumulative Weight Drift

Continual post-training enables models to absorb emerging knowledge after deployment, but repeatedly updating shared parameters can accumulate weight drift, potentially causing catastrophic forgetting and degrading general capabilities. Retrieval-augmented generation avoids such parameter drift, yet often lacks the depth of parametric knowledge integration. In this paper, we propose ReGrad (Retrievable Gradients), a new paradigm that treats gradients as retrievable units of knowledge. ReGrad pre-computes document-specific gradients offline, stores them in an indexed Gradient Bank, and retrieves only query-relevant gradients at inference time for temporary weight adaptation. However, raw language-modeling gradients are optimized for token-level document reconstruction rather than for query-driven knowledge use. We therefore introduce a bi-level meta-learning objective that reshapes document-derived gradients into generalizable adaptation signals for downstream tasks. Experiments across general and domain-specific settings show that \textsc{ReGrad} outperforms CPT and RAG baselines, enabling scalable and reversible parametric knowledge injection without accumulating weight drift.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Short Chains, Deep Thoughts: Balancing Reasoning Efficiency and Intra-Segment Capability via Split-Merge Optimization

While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in solving complex tasks through the generation of long reasoning chains, this reliance on verbose generation results in significant latency and computational overhead. To address these challenges, we propose CoSMo (Consistency-Guided Split-Merge Optimization), a framework designed to eliminate structural redundancy rather than indiscriminately restricting token volume. Specifically, CoSMo utilizes a split-merge algorithm that dynamically refines reasoning chains by merging redundant segments and splitting logical gaps to ensure coherence. We then employ structure-aligned reinforcement learning with a novel segment-level budget to supervise the model in maintaining efficient reasoning structures throughout training. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and backbones demonstrate that CoSMo achieves superior performance, improving accuracy by 3.3 points while reducing segment usage by 28.7\% on average compared to reasoning efficiency baselines.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Where a Quantum Reservoir Works: A Transferable Operating Band

arXiv:2606.13284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In quantum reservoir computing, a fixed quantum system transforms an input signal, while learning reduces to training a simple linear readout on its measured outputs. Since the quantum dynamics themselves are never optimized, the method is well suited to today's hardware. Yet these dynamics must still be chosen carefully, because their settings remain fixed throughout training and inference. It therefore remains an open question where, in its control space, a fixed quantum system learns well. We address this question for a dissipative reservoir by mapping performance over three central physical controls: the strength of the input drive, the coupling between neighboring qubits, and the rate of dissipation. Good performance concentrates in a single, well-defined operating region of this control space. This region transfers across tasks and reservoir initializations, and the same memory-defined regime persists under architectural changes. It is also mechanistically grounded, since it disappears whenever any of the mechanisms that create it is removed. Finally, the region can be located cheaply before any task is run, using a simple memory diagnostic.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Metric Match: A Subset Selection Approach to Evaluating LLM Judge Reliability

arXiv:2606.15029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM judges are used to reduce the need for costly human labor in evaluating open-ended text generation. However, the reliability of these judges depends critically on their alignment with human raters – a property that itself depends on costly human annotations. In this work, we develop a method (Metric Match) for estimating correlation-based reliability metrics of LLM judges from limited annotations. Metric Match selects a subset of samples for human annotation such that the subset matches the population reliability metric with respect to acquired synthetic labels. We empirically show that Metric Match achieves a win-rate of 0.838 against random subset selection across four different correlation metrics and 15 datasets, with an 18.7% decrease in average estimation error and reduces annotation needs by 32.5%. We provide a cost model and highlight a medical case study where our method saves $1,041.67 compared to random selection for expert annotation. Further, we shift our task from reliability estimation to reliability classification of whether a given judge is above a deployment threshold, outperforming random selection with Metric Match. All project code is publicly available, and we additionally provide an installable package for ease of use.

13.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

Linking reduced prefrontal microcircuit inhibition in schizophrenia to EEG biomarkers in silico

by Sana Rosanally, Frank Mazza, Heng Kang Yao, Faraz Moghbel, Hannah Seo, Etay Hay Reduced cortical inhibition by parvalbumin-expressing (PV) interneurons in schizophrenia is thought to be associated with impaired processing in the prefrontal cortex and altered EEG signals such as oddball mismatch negativity (MMN). Recent studies also suggest loss of somatostatin (SST) interneuron inhibition. However, establishing the link between reduced interneuron inhibition and reduced MMN experimentally in humans is currently not possible. To overcome these challenges, we simulated spiking activity and EEG during baseline and oddball response in detailed models of human prefrontal microcircuits in health and schizophrenia, with reduced PV and SST interneuron inhibition as constrained by postmortem patient data. We showed that reduced PV interneuron inhibition can account for the decreased MMN amplitude seen in schizophrenia, with a threshold below which the amplitude effect was low as seen in at-risk patients. In contrast, reduced SST interneuron inhibition did not affect the MMN amplitude. We further showed that both types of inhibition loss were necessary to account for changes in resting EEG in schizophrenia, with reduced SST interneuron inhibition increasing broadband power, and reduced PV and SST interneuron inhibition both leading to a right shift from alpha to beta frequencies. Our study thus links reduced PV and SST interneuron inhibition in schizophrenia to distinct EEG biomarkers that can serve to improve stratification and early detection using non-invasive brain signals.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Geometrical fairness in graph neural networks

arXiv:2606.17684v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based learning methods have become increasingly prominent due to their strong performance across diverse applications. Among these, recent frameworks grounded in diffusion processes provide a unifying perspective that extends traditional graph neural network formulations while addressing limitations of standard message-passing mechanisms. Despite these advances, concerns remain regarding the fairness of such models, as they may propagate or amplify biases present in the data. In this work, we introduce a fairness-aware adaptation of graph-based diffusion by modifying the underlying Laplacian operator. Our approach incorporates multiple complementary transformations, including subspace projections, spectral adjustments, and frequency-based filtering, to mitigate bias-related components. Leveraging the intrinsic smoothing properties of graph diffusion, we provide a principled analysis of the resulting behavior and establish theoretical insights into fairness properties. We evaluate the proposed framework on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that it achieves competitive performance while improving fairness metrics with limited additional computational cost.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimality Condition for the Petz Map

arXiv:2410.23622v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum error correction, the Petz map serves as a perfect recovery map when the Knill-Laflamme conditions are satisfied. Notably, while perfect recovery is generally infeasible for most quantum channels of finite dimension, the Petz map remains a versatile tool with near-optimal performance in recovering quantum states. This work introduces and proves, for the first time, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of the Petz map in terms of entanglement fidelity. In some special cases, the violation of this condition can be easily characterized by a simple commutator that can be efficiently computed. We provide multiple examples that substantiate our new findings.

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

Characterizing Software Aging in GPU-Based LLM Serving Systems

arXiv:2606.11916v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper proposes an empirical methodology to study software aging in GPU-based LLM serving systems. Traditional aging studies focus on CPU-centric software with relatively regular workloads; LLM serving is different, spanning a Python host and a CUDA device, handling requests whose cost varies by orders of magnitude, and relying on rapidly evolving software stacks. We run a 216-hour campaign across six co-located deployments under identical stress conditions, monitor host, device, and client metrics in parallel, and apply a statistical pipeline that accounts for autocorrelation and multiple testing. Our results reveal statistically significant memory aging in all deployments, with leak rates strongly dependent on the serving runtime and deployment configuration. Beyond these findings, we provide a reproducible framework that opens a research direction at the intersection of the software aging and rejuvenation and LLM serving communities.

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

Flex4DHuman: Flexible Multi-view Video Diffusion for 4D Human Reconstruction

We present Flex4DHuman, a multi-view video diffusion model that transforms a monocular or sparse multi-view video of a dynamic subject into synchronized dense multi-view videos using only relative camera-pose conditioning. Unlike prior human-centric methods that rely on skeletons, depth maps, normals, or rendered target-view geometry, Flex4DHuman requires no explicit geometry priors and instead conditions generation through relative camera-pose positional encoding. The generated videos can be directly ingested by downstream reconstruction pipelines to create dynamic 4D Gaussian splats. Built on the Wan 2.1 1.3B text-to-video model, Flex4DHuman preserves the backbone architecture and encodes camera and view information through a five-axis positional encoding that extends spatio-temporal RoPE with view indices and continuous SE(3) relative camera geometry. A three-stage curriculum progressively trains the model for pose following, flexible reference-to-target view generation, and temporal rollout. To support temporal rollout, we train with clean historical target-view tokens. We also add multi-view captions to enable test-time text control. Combined with an off-the-shelf 4D Gaussian Splatting stage, our framework lifts monocular static-camera videos into dynamic 4D Gaussian splats. Experiments on DNA-Rendering and ActorsHQ show that Flex4DHuman surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods, while the same formulation generalizes to animal categories after mixed human-animal training. These capabilities make Flex4DHuman a practical step toward scalable 4D content creation from casual monocular videos for simulation, gaming, AR/VR, and video re-shooting.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The brain builds a sentence neuron by neuron

作者:

Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals. Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals.

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

SpikF-GO: Spiking Fourier Graph Operators for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.13901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as an energy-efficient alternative to conventional neural networks, demonstrating strong performance in computer vision and robotics. More recently, SNNs have been applied to time series forecasting (TSF), with methods exploring spiking temporal backbones, spike-compatible positional encodings, Fourier-domain processing, and redesigned neuron dynamics. However, existing SNN forecasting approaches process variables independently, lacking explicit mechanisms for modeling inter-variable dependencies. This is a critical limitation in multivariate settings, where cross-variable correlations carry substantial predictive information. We propose Spiking Fourier Graph Operators (SpikF-GO), which addresses this gap by combining a hypervariate graph formulation in which every scalar observation becomes a graph node with spike-driven spectral processing. SpikF-GO introduces a Hard Concrete frequency gate for learnable sparse frequency selection and a Complex LIF gate that applies independent spiking neurons to real and imaginary Fourier components, preserving binary, event-driven computation throughout the spectral domain. We further present a variant incorporating Central Pattern Generator-based positional encodings for stronger long-range temporal modeling. Evaluated on eight benchmarks under a unified experimental protocol, SpikF-GO achieves the best average rank among all SNN methods and outperforms its ANN counterpart, FourierGNN, at reduced energy cost. SpikF-GO maintains competitive accuracy even at substantially smaller embedding dimensions, thereby achieving significant energy reductions. To our knowledge, this is among the first works to bring graph-based multivariate modeling into the spiking domain for TSF and the first to provide a unified comparison across SNN forecasting architectures under a common experimental protocol.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Spiking Pyramid Wavelet Transformation for High-efficient and Low-energy Image Restoration

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered significant interest in computer vision due to their potential for efficiency and biological inspiration. While spiking CNN-based methods have shown promise for image restoration (IR) tasks, their performance is constrained by the inherent receptive field limitations of CNN operations. In the paper, we explore the benefits of discrete wavelet transformation and propose a spiking pyramid wavelet-based model (SPWM) for high-efficient and low-energy target. Specifically, we develop a spiking dual pyramid wavelet (SDPW) block to model long-range dependency and exploit the properties of the degradation in the wavelet domain. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate that SPWM significantly lowers computational costs and energy consumption while maintaining image quality. Our method showcases the potential of SNNs in the field of IR, offering new insights for future applications of resource-limited devices.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

HKVM-RAG: Key-Value-Separated Hypergraph Evidence Organization for Multi-Hop RAG

Multi-hop RAG poses a data-engineering problem beyond passage matching: under fixed retrieval budgets, a system must organize retrieved text into evidence units that expose answer chains. Dense retrievers score passages independently, while graph-based memories make associations explicit but often rely on pairwise or entity-centered keys that fragment multi-hop evidence. We present HKVM-RAG, a key-value-separated evidence-organization layer. It assembles answer-path hyperedges from cached passage-level LLM evidence tuples and uses them as retrieval keys, while retaining passage text as answer values. To isolate key-space design, our fixed-substrate protocol holds the tuple cache, candidate passages, reader, and evaluation budget constant across pairwise graph and hypergraph variants. Weighted hypergraph key-value retrieval improves over KG-PPR by +3.426 F1 on 2WikiMultiHopQA and +3.592 F1 on MuSiQue; HotpotQA shows that higher structured support coverage need not yield standalone answer-F1 gains. We therefore study WHG-KV as an evidence-control signal rather than a dense-retrieval replacement. Oracle and train-to-dev analyses identify support selection as repairable, and a dense-aware controller combines frozen ColBERTv2 and HKVM rank/score features using out-of-fold HKVM predictions. It reaches 88.846, 65.073, and 85.810 F1 on the three benchmarks, improving over ColBERTv2 by +11.084, +6.763, and +5.966 F1. Source-level ablations show that matched non-WHG structured signals do not match the WHG-KV gains. These results provide bounded evidence that key-value-separated hypergraph organization can serve as a reusable evidence-control mechanism for multi-hop RAG.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Virtual Responsive Neurostimulation Implantation: From Intracranial Connectivity to Optimized Lead Placement

Responsive neurostimulation (RNS) is an implanted device that delivers direct brain stimulation for drug-resistant focal epilepsy. Individual responses are highly variable, and no validated framework exists to predict outcome or guide lead placement before implantation. We hypothesized that this variability is partly explained by lead placement in relation to patterns of functional connectivity in brain networks. Fourty-nine patients with drug-resistant focal epilepsy who underwent pre-implantation intracranial EEG (iEEG) and RNS implantation across three independent epilepsy centers were retrospectively studied. We developed a composite functional connectivity score, based on simple Spearman correlation, combining the standard deviation and kurtosis of interictal iEEG connectivity distributions to predict the response outcome in a training cohort (HUP, n=18) and validated in two independent cohorts (NYU, n=17; UCSF, n=14). We accounted for a spatial mismatch between iEEG and RNS electrodes with a distance-based correction. The score was extended to generate patient-specific 3D maps of predicted RNS efficacy across 200 simulated, or virtual RNS, lead configurations. Accuracy of the score in predicting clinical outcome was 72% at the group level, 61% at the individual patient level, and, after distance-based optimization, 100% in patients with RNS electrodes placed close to location of iEEG electrodes. Applied to the validation cohort, the same score reached 68% accuracy (71% balanced accuracy, 55% sensitivity, 88% specificity). The spatial combination of the scores at different SEEG contacts localization gives a spatial score for each patient. Responders showed significantly higher spatial scores than non-responders, supporting that actual RNS lead placement in responders was located in map-identified favorable regions. Interictal iEEG functional connectivity predicts individual RNS response across independent epilepsy centers, and patient-specific 3D maps derived from this biomarker could prospectively guide lead implantation toward favorable network regions, opening a promising avenue toward network-informed RNS surgical planning.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

How knowledge shapes community stigma and social support for women seeking abortion in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A cross-sectional study.

Background The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) bears one of the highest maternal mortality ratios globally (746 per 100,000 live births), with nearly 11% of deaths attributable to complications of unsafe abortion. Despite ratification of the Maputo Protocol and related national policies, access to safe abortion remains limited, largely due to entrenched stigma. Social support, encompassing emotional, informational, and instrumental assistance, is critical in shaping womens abortion-seeking behaviors and health outcomes. This study examines the influence of community-level knowledge on stigma and social support for women seeking abortion care. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted from May 2024 to June 2024 among 1,715 adults in Kinshasa and North Kivu provinces. Analyses focused on a sub-sample of 574 respondents reporting familiarity with women who had undergone abortion. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was applied to estimate direct and indirect pathways linking community knowledge, stigma, and social support. Results Two core knowledge indicators, recognition of abortion as a safe medical procedure and awareness of legal conditions for access, were significantly associated with outcomes. A one-unit increase in knowledge corresponded to a 0.39-point increase in social support and a 0.19-point reduction in stigma. Enhanced knowledge promoted empathetic attitudes, reinforced practical support, and mitigated moralizing judgments toward women seeking abortion. Conclusions Strengthening community knowledge emerges as a strategic lever to reduce abortion-related stigma and enhance social support in the DRC. These findings underscore the importance of integrating stigma-reduction and knowledge-enhancement interventions into reproductive health programs to improve womens access to safe and dignified abortion care.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Daily Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2020) scoring reveals diet quality patterns masked by aggregation

The Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2020) is conventionally computed by aggregating intake across days before scoring. Digital food logging enables an alternative: scoring each day and averaging daily scores. These methods are not equivalent. The HEI's density-based structure and component caps cause aggregation to inflate adequacy scores when intake is irregular. Using Food & You data, we show daily HEI correlates more strongly with microbiome diversity, and recommend co-reporting both metrics.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Don’t compete, collaborate: why collective funding applications are the future

Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them. Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them.