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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Home-based binocular serious games in virtual reality to treat visual acuity and stereovision in residual amblyopia: AMBER study

Objectives: Amblyopia is a pediatric visual disorder traditionally treated by patching the fellow eye, though many patients retain residual amblyopia post-treatment. Increasing evidence suggests that visual plasticity allows treat-ment beyond the classical therapeutic window. AMBER evaluated the efficacy of binocular serious games in virtual reality (VR) in residual amblyopia. Methods and Analysis: The monocentric, prospective, randomized, crossover trial (reported as case series) includ-ed 14 anisometropic, strabismic, or mixed residual amblyopia patients (6-35 years; 5 children, 9 adults). Participants underwent two 2-month intervention phases: optical correction (standard care) and standard care plus VR games (2.5 h/week), each with a 2-month follow-up. Best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), stereoacuity, and reading speed were assessed (5 timepoints) using the Sloan and Landolt charts, the Titmus, TNO, Lang II, Asteroid, and Mnread tests. Compliance and adverse events (AE) were recorded. Results: VR training improved BCVA in 10 amblyopic eyes (Landolt and Sloan), with more pronounced effects in anisometropic patients. Six patients showed improved stereoacuity (Titmus; 4x mixed, 1x anisometropic, 1x stra-bismic amblyopia), persistent only in children (1x strabismic, 1x mixed amblyopia). Four improvements were ob-served with TNO (1x), Lang II (1x), Asteroid (0x), and MNread (1x). Despite positive trends, when comparing re-sults of individual patients, between both eyes, and with standard treatment, consistency of improvements cannot be conclusively demonstrated. One non-severe AE (dizziness) was reported. Conclusions: Following individual cases, VR training improved BCVA and stereoacuity, particularly in children and patients with high compliance. However, considering the cohort as a whole, consistency of effects has to be confirmed in larger groups. Thus, the methodologically sophisticated AMBER study revealed differences in VR treatment efficacy between amblyopia types, children/adults, endpoints and tests, offering precious data for the design of meaningful future studies. It shows that neurovisual plasticity gauged by VR-games offers safe, engaging treatment options for residual amblyopia.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Mechanical Field Networks: Structured Neural Dynamics for Multivariate Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.11251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many multivariate dynamical systems are observed only through trajectories, leaving the mechanisms governing their joint dynamics hidden. Existing approaches can impose interpretable dynamics or learn flexible state transitions, yet the resulting interaction structure is typically either specified in advance or left implicit within the learned dynamics. We introduce MF-Net, a recurrent dynamical model that represents all variables in a shared field state and updates this state through a learned relation law. Each variable carries a field component, and these components evolve jointly through a learnable mechanical transition. Here, mechanical refers to the relation-to-motion organization of the transition, where learned relations shape state-dependent flows, field responses, and motion tendencies that move the field state forward. The resulting structure is part of the rollout itself: learned relations influence how the field moves, and the same internal quantities support both forecasting and structural readout. Across known-law interaction systems, chaotic benchmarks, real neural recordings, and ecological time series, MF-Net achieves competitive short- and medium-horizon forecasting while retaining inspectable structural readout. On the 40-dimensional Lorenz–96 testbed, MF-Net achieves an eight-step $R^2$ of $0.798\pm0.018$; across five seeds, its learned relation matrix recovers the local coupling support with a local/nonlocal strength ratio of $19.80\pm1.00$ and Precision@$K$ of $1.000\pm0.000$. MF-Net provides a structure-readable dynamical modeling framework in which learned relations are trained through forward evolution and, on real data, interpreted as functional predictive couplings under appropriate observational limits.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

CAPED: Context-Aware Privacy Exposure Defense for Mobile GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.12666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Screenshot-based mobile GUI agents can operate ordinary smartphone apps through the same visual interface as a human user, but this capability also turns every screen observation into a privacy boundary. During normal task execution, screenshots may expose contacts, messages, photos, files, recommendations, health cues, and other sensitive context that is unrelated to the user's request. We call this problem incidental visual privacy exposure. It is difficult to address with existing defenses: text anonymization misses many visual and inferential cues, while generic privacy masking can remove the evidence and controls that a GUI agent needs to complete the task. This paper presents CAPED, a context-aware pre-upload exposure control layer for mobile GUI agents. CAPED is designed as a phone-side protection layer: before screenshots are released to a remote multimodal agent, it extracts task requirements, uses screen context as a privacy prior, parses visible UI elements, and selectively exposes only content needed for the current task while masking incidental private content. We evaluate CAPED on AndroidWorld for broad task utility and with a controlled 28-task seeded privacy evaluation used as a measurement instrument for trajectory-level incidental leakage. In this seeded evaluation, Full CAPED reduces success-conditioned weighted seeded leakage from 0.766 under raw screenshots to 0.268 while preserving high task utility. A broader AndroidWorld run shows a remaining prototype-level utility cost, but the results support the central claim that screenshot upload should be treated as an explicit device–cloud boundary decision, governed by task-driven selective exposure rather than all-or-nothing screen sharing.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Validation of a Smartphone-Image-Based Computer-Vision Model for Lean Mass and Body Fat Estimation Against Dual-Energy X-ray Absorptiometry

Introduction Body composition, rather than body weight alone, is an increasingly important health metric, and preservation of lean mass has become a central concern in obesity treatment, aging, and chronic disease management. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) provides accurate assessment of fat and lean tissue, but its cost and logistical requirements limit repeated measurement. Computer-vision approaches show promise for estimating adiposity from smartphone images, but lean-mass estimation remains less established. Methods We evaluated a computer-vision body composition model, applied to consumer-grade smartphone photographs, against DXA in a held-out validation sample of 195 adults from an ongoing cross-sectional study. Body fat percentage and total lean mass percentage were co-primary outcomes; for total lean mass percentage, an image-only configuration (no added covariates) was pre-specified as primary. Agreement was quantified using Lin's concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) as the lead statistic, with Pearson correlation, mean absolute error, root mean square error, mean bias, and Bland-Altman limits of agreement. In secondary analyses, appendicular lean mass and total lean mass percentage were each estimated with and without routine anthropometric and demographic inputs (body weight, height, age, and sex). Results Total lean mass percentage agreed with DXA from image features alone (CCC 0.916). Body fat percentage, estimated with routine inputs added, agreed at least as closely (CCC 0.930). Adding routine inputs barely changed agreement for total lean mass percentage but markedly improved it for appendicular lean mass, an absolute quantity that scales with body size. Conclusions A smartphone-image-based model estimated both body fat and lean mass with strong agreement to DXA, with lean mass percentage from image features alone. The approach needs no fixed equipment or ionizing radiation. Whether it can track change over time, including in incretin-based weight loss where lean mass preservation is a concern, was not assessed in this cross-sectional study.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Estimating Individualized Treatment Effects in Acute Ischemic Stroke with Causal Transformation Models (TRAM-DAG): A Multi-Centre Observational Study with External RCT Validation

arXiv:2606.12623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personalized medicine in acute ischemic stroke requires moving beyond average treatment effects (ATE) to individualized treatment effect (ITE) estimates to support treatment decisions. In acute ischemic stroke, mechanical thrombectomy has been shown to be more effective on average than lysis in randomized controlled trials (RCTs), such as the MR CLEAN study. We aim to identify which individual patients benefit most from mechanical thrombectomy compared to lysis. The outcome of interest is the modified Rankin Scale (mRS) at three months, an ordinal measure of functional disability (0: no symptoms, 6: death). We demonstrate that causal transformation models on directed acyclic graphs (TRAM-DAG) can be used for ITE estimation after being fitted on observational MAGIC multi-center stroke patient data. To ensure comparability with the MR CLEAN population, which we use for validation, we train the TRAM-DAG on a MAGIC sub-population with NIHSS at admission >= 6, corresponding to one inclusion criterion of MR CLEAN. The fitted model is then used to estimate ITEs for stroke patients in the MR CLEAN population. While these ITE estimates cannot be confirmed experimentally, we show that their average is consistent with the trial's reported ATE. Furthermore, the ITE estimates correctly rank trial patients by their observed frequency of a good outcome (mRS at three months

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

Discriminative Span as a Predictor of Synthetic Data Utility via Classifier Reconstruction

In many real-world computer vision applications, including medical imaging and industrial inspection, binary classification tasks are characterized by a severe scarcity of positive samples. A widely adopted solution is to generate synthetic positive data using image-to-image transformations applied to negative samples. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how can we reliably assess whether such synthetic data will improve downstream model performance? In this work, we propose a geometry-driven metric that predicts the utility of synthetic data without requiring model training. Our approach operates in the embedding space of a pre-trained foundation model and represents the dataset through difference vectors between samples. We evaluate whether the weight vector of a linear classifier can be expressed within the subspace spanned by these variations by measuring the relative projection error. Intuitively, if the variations induced by synthetic data capture task-relevant directions, their span can approximate the classifier, resulting in low projection error. Conversely, poor synthetic data fails to span these directions, leading to higher error. Across multiple datasets and architectures, we show that this metric exhibits strong correlation with downstream classification performance of CNNs trained on mixtures of real negative and synthetic positive data. These findings suggest that the proposed metric serves as a practical and informative tool for evaluating synthetic data quality in data-scarce settings.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Prior over Evidence: Stereotype-Driven Diagnosis in LLM-Based L2 Pronunciation Feedback

Large language models are increasingly deployed for written pronunciation feedback in second-language (L2) English learning, under the assumption that their diagnoses are grounded in the supplied speech evidence rather than in priors from pretraining. This assumption is tested on 1,800 L2-Arctic utterances spanning six L1 backgrounds, three audio-capable LLMs, four pronunciation dimensions, and five evidence conditions ranging from a text-only baseline to numeric acoustic features and raw audio. Each (utterance x model x condition x dimension) cell is scored on three metrics: Rating Accuracy (RA) against gold labels, Evidence Coherence (EC) assessing internal consistency without ground truth, and Grounded Correctness (GC) evaluated against gold evidence. Results show three findings across models. First, rating accuracy and grounded reasoning decouple: 39.6% of judged cells contain internally coherent reasoning that supports a wrong rating, against only 15.8% where the reasoning supports a correct rating. Second, phoneme-level feedback converges to a fixed inventory of L2-English difficulty phones that recurs across all six L1 backgrounds and all evidence conditions. Third, acoustic evidence improves the rating only when the supplied feature directly probes the target dimension: textualised F0 range raises pitch-variation grounding from (0.18-0.19) to (0.45-0.62) across all three models, while stress and phoneme correctness, which require target-to-realisation alignment, remain ungrounded. The same audio waveform without textualised F0 values does not reproduce this improvement. These findings indicate that current general-purpose LLMs are more reliable as verbalisers of externally computed pronunciation evidence than as standalone diagnostic engines.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Shift-Invariant Attribute Scoring for Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks via Shapley Value

arXiv:2510.01663v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: For many real-world applications, understanding feature-outcome relationships is as crucial as achieving high predictive accuracy. While traditional neural networks excel at prediction, their black-box nature obscures underlying functional relationships. Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks (KANs) address this by employing learnable spline-based activation functions on edges, enabling recovery of symbolic representations while maintaining competitive performance. However, KAN's architecture presents unique challenges for network pruning. Conventional magnitude-based methods become unreliable due to sensitivity to input coordinate shifts. We propose ShapKAN, a pruning framework using Shapley value attribution to assess node importance in a shift-invariant manner. Unlike magnitude-based approaches, ShapKAN quantifies each node's actual contribution, ensuring consistent importance rankings regardless of input parameterization. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ShapKAN preserves true node importance while enabling effective network compression. Our approach improves KAN's interpretability advantages, facilitating deployment in resource-constrained environments.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

MixSD: Mixed Contextual Self-Distillation for Knowledge Injection

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used to inject new knowledge into language models, but it often degrades pretrained capabilities such as reasoning and general-domain performance. We argue this forgetting arises because fine-tuning targets from humans or external systems diverge from the model's autoregressive distribution, forcing the optimizer to imitate low-probability token sequences. To address this problem, we propose MixSD, a simple external-teacher-free method for distribution-aligned knowledge injection. Instead of training on fixed targets, MixSD constructs supervision dynamically by mixing tokens from two conditionals of the base model itself: an expert conditional that observes the injected fact in context, and a naive conditional that reflects the model's original prior. The resulting supervision sequences preserve the factual learning signal while remaining substantially closer to the base model's distribution. We evaluate MixSD on two synthetic corpora that we construct to study factual recall and arithmetic function acquisition in a controlled setting, together with established benchmarks for open-domain factual question answering and knowledge editing. Across multiple model scales and settings, MixSD consistently achieves a better memorization-retention trade-off compared to SFT and on-policy self distillation baselines, retaining up to 100% of the base model's held-out capability while maintaining near-perfect training accuracy, whereas standard SFT retains as little as 1%. We further show that MixSD produces substantially lower-NLL supervision targets under the base model and reduces harmful movement along Fisher-sensitive parameter directions. These results suggest that aligning supervision with the model's native generation distribution is a simple and effective principle for knowledge injection that mitigates catastrophic forgetting.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Space-time duality approach to (inhomogeneous) integrable quenches

arXiv:2606.20445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Characterising the universal aspects of non-equilibrium quantum many-body dynamics is one of the key goals of this century's physics research. Progress, however, is hindered by the lack of general theoretical frameworks for studying interacting quantum matter far from equilibrium. A recent breakthrough has been the realization that several key non-equilibrium quantities, such as the rate of growth of entanglement or the fluctuations of conserved charges within finite subsystems, can be related to equilibrium properties through a space-time duality that effectively exchanges the roles of space and time. This observation effectively enables the study of non-equilibrium phenomena using tools and concepts borrowed from equilibrium statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. A first proof of principle of this framework, dubbed space-time duality approach (SDA), was provided by interacting integrable systems, where thermodynamic properties can often be characterized exactly, while dynamical quantities typically remain beyond analytical reach. Subsequent developments, however, revealed that the SDA suffered from an intrinsic ambiguity, restricting its applicability to homogeneous quenches and to charge fluctuations arising from symmetric initial states. Here we resolve this ambiguity from first principles and derive closed-form predictions for entanglement growth and charge fluctuations after general quantum quenches. We benchmark our results against the exact analytical solution of the Rule 54 quantum cellular automaton and extensive TEBD simulations of the XXZ chain. Moreover we show that, when specialised to the entanglement entropy, our framework naturally reproduces the predictions of the quasiparticle picture.

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

Measuring language complexity from hierarchical reuse of recurring patterns

We introduce the ladderpath index as a measure of language complexity grounded in algorithmic information theory. It counts the minimum steps needed to reconstruct a sequence through hierarchical reuse of repeated substructures, capturing an exactly computable but constrained form of algorithmic compressibility related to, but distinct from, Kolmogorov complexity. We apply the ladderpath approach to 21 parallel corpora from the Parallel Universal Dependencies dataset. The ladderpath index is approximately invariant across the languages, and varies much less than the corpus length. This is more pronounced when all corpora are mapped to a unified binary representation, providing evidence for the equi-complexity hypothesis from a representation-independent perspective. We also observe trade-offs between character inventory size and corpus length, and between vocabulary-level and corpus-level reconstruction complexity, supporting the trade-off hypothesis that total complexity is conserved and redistributed across linguistic levels. The reusable substructures identified by the ladderpath approach, without any linguistic input, overlap with words and morphological components attested in the natural vocabulary. The hierarchical reuse captured by the ladderpath approach parallels the chunking mechanisms proposed in cognitive science, where the human cognitive system compresses linguistic input into nested, reusable units under shared memory and processing constraints. This connection between cognitive chunking and the ladderpath approach provides a new interpretation for the equi-complexity and trade-off hypotheses, grounding both in the shared cognitive architecture that underlies language processing across human languages.

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

Influcoder: Distilling Decoders' Gradient Influence Rankings into an Encoder for Data Attribution

With the growth of LLMs' (Large Language Models) capabilities, there has been an increasing push to curate high quality datasets by filtering samples in the training data. In general, Data Attribution (DA) methods aim to estimate how individual samples in a training dataset can precondition a model to generate certain outputs. As an example, one might be interested in which samples in the data could be the source of toxic behavior after training the LLM. Many methods quantify this conditioning through the paradigm of influence functions. While methods of this family are effective in its function, they lack the necessary processing speed and storage compactness to be practically implemented on large datasets. We propose a method, Influcoder, as a quick and cost-effective approach to influence-based Data Attribution at scale.

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

Global Geometry Is Not Enough for Vision Representations

A common assumption in representation learning is that globally well-distributed embeddings support robust and generalizable representations. This focus has shaped both training objectives and evaluation protocols, implicitly treating global geometry as a proxy for representational competence. While global geometry effectively encodes which elements are present, it is often insensitive to how they are composed. We investigate this limitation by testing the ability of geometric metrics to predict compositional binding across a diverse suite of vision encoders. We find that standard geometry-based statistics exhibit near-zero correlation with compositional binding. In contrast, functional sensitivity, as measured by the input–output Jacobian, reliably tracks this capability. We further provide an analytic account showing that this disparity arises from objective design, as existing losses explicitly constrain embedding geometry but leave the local input–output mapping unconstrained. These results suggest that global embedding geometry captures only a partial view of representational competence and establish functional sensitivity as a critical complementary axis for modeling composite structure.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

A Dual Edge Spatial Jacobian Image Graph for Interpretable Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Automated diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading from colour fundus photographs can achieve strong predictive performance, but clinical interpretation requires more than an image-level label. It requires understanding how lesion evidence is distributed around retinal vessels and how this evidence relates to quantitative vascular biomarkers. We present a dual-edge spatial-Jacobian image graph for interpretable DR grading. Each fundus image is represented as a graph node with four aligned evidence streams: AutoMorph vessel information ($X_1$), DR-XAI-style lesion evidence maps ($X_2$), a 128-dimensional lesion-based contrastive image embedding ($X_3$), and AutoMorph morphometric biomarkers ($X_4$). The spatial edge branch ($X_{12}$) encodes vessel-lesion geometry, while the Jacobian branch ($X_{34}$) models embedding-biomarker sensitivity. Lightweight two-token attention fuses both edge families into a final image graph. On 2,910 matched non-augmented APTOS images, the full graph achieves 0.8076 accuracy, 0.8312 quadratic weighted kappa, 0.5915 macro-F1, and 0.9330 adjacent-grade accuracy; referable DR reaches 0.9055 accuracy and 0.9711 AUROC. The framework is positioned as an explainable representation-learning tool for lesion-biomarker hypothesis generation, rather than as a deployment-ready clinical classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/Inamullah-Colab/dual-edge-dr-graph-xai.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Gate-Controlled Spin Qubits in Confined Altermagnets

作者:

arXiv:2606.24150v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose gate-defined spin qubits in electrostatically confined altermagnetic quantum dots. Elliptical confinement of the $d$-wave altermagnetic structure produces a low-energy doublet with opposite spin polarization. For the range of parameters used here, the qubit states energy gap lies in the microwave range while the leakage gap remains in the meV range. Even without spin-orbit coupling, time-dependent simulations show that a phase-controlled quadrupolar gate drive about a fixed bias point implements $X_{\pi/2}$ and $X_\pi$ rotations by resonantly modulating the confinement anisotropy. We extend the study to two-qubits using a double quantum dot. We show that the double quantum dot spectrum can be cleanly projected onto isolated quantum dot product states with a nonzero nonlocal Pauli block in the effective logical two-qubit Hamiltonian. Resonant central-barrier modulation then drives the logical two-qubit component close to a maximally entangled state. These calculations show anisotropic altermagnetic quantum dots as a route to locally gate-controlled spin qubits without requiring spin-orbit coupling.

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

Lung-SRAD: Spectral-Aware Regularized Audio DASS with Dual-Axis Patch-Mix Contrastive Learning for Respiratory Sound Classification

arXiv:2606.11922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent respiratory sound classification (RSC) studies largely rely on CLS-token driven self-attention architectures such as the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST). While effective at modeling global context, recent analyses suggest a low-pass filtering behavior that may reduce sensitivity to localized abnormal patterns. In this work, we investigate State Space Models (SSMs) as an alternative backbone for RSC. Using the Distilled Audio State Space model, we analyze intermediate representations through spectral response curves and observe stronger preservation of mid-to-high spatial-frequency components. Based on these observations, we introduce spectral-aware layer regularization using Gaussian convolution applied to selected layers. We further propose Dual-Axis Patch-Mix contrastive learning tailored to SSM-based audio models for robust representation learning. Experiments on the ICBHI benchmark show that our approach achieves 64.48% score, outperforming the AST baseline by 5%. Code is available at https://github.com/RSC-Toolkit/Lung-SRAD.

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

NatureBench: Can Coding Agents Match the Published SOTA of Nature-Family Papers?

We introduce NatureBench, a cross-discipline benchmark of 90 tasks distilled from peer-reviewed Nature-family publications, designed to evaluate whether AI coding agents can move beyond reproduction toward discovery on real scientific problems. NatureBench is built on NatureGym, an automated pipeline that constructs a standardized, per-task containerized environment from a source paper, addressing the environment-fragmentation problem that has limited the credibility of prior agent-on-research benchmarks. Evaluating ten frontier agent configurations under a strict web-search-disabled protocol, we find that the strongest model surpasses SOTA on only 17.8% of tasks under the g>0.1 criterion. Analysis of method pathways reveals that agents succeed primarily through methodological translation, converting scientific tasks into familiar supervised prediction problems, rather than through genuine scientific invention. Failures are dominated by wrong method choice and insufficient compute budget, not by task misunderstanding. We release the benchmark, the NatureGym pipeline, and a public leaderboard with maintainer-side reproduction. Code: https://github.com/FrontisAI/NatureBench

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

BLUEmed: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Agent Debate for Clinical Error Detection

Terminology substitution errors in clinical notes, where one medical term is replaced by a linguistically valid but clinically different term, pose a persistent challenge for automated error detection in healthcare. We introduce BLUEmed, a multi-agent debate framework augmented with hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that combines evidence-grounded reasoning with multi-perspective verification for clinical error detection. BLUEmed decomposes each clinical note into focused sub-queries, retrieves source-partitioned evidence through dense, sparse, and online retrieval, and assigns two domain expert agents distinct knowledge bases to produce independent analyses; when the experts disagree, a structured counter-argumentation round and cross-source adjudication resolve the conflict, followed by a cascading safety layer that filters common false-positive patterns. We evaluate BLUEmed on a clinical terminology substitution detection benchmark under both zero-shot and few-shot prompting with multiple backbone models spanning proprietary and open-source families. Experimental results show that BLUEmed achieves the best accuracy (69.13%), ROC-AUC (74.45%), and PR-AUC (72.44%) under few-shot prompting, outperforming both single-agent RAG and debate-only baselines. Further analyses across six backbone models and two prompting strategies confirm that retrieval augmentation and structured debate are complementary, and that the framework benefits most from models with sufficient instruction-following and clinical language understanding.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DipSkmer: Reference-free population genomics with diploid genome skims

Ecologists and conservation biologists rely on genetic diversity as a key essential biodiversity variable (EBV) used to track population health and dynamics, and utilize the population parameter {theta} (estimated by the average pairwise genomic distance) as a key metric of diversity. While whole-genome-sequencing (wgs) is increasingly affordable, it will be considerable time before the full diversity of life is represented by high-quality assembled genomes; even then, constant monitoring will still require repeated sampling of populations. In contrast, genome skimming (low-coverage, short-read wgs) is highly cost-effective but challenging to analyze because the coverage is too low for assembly and reliable error correction. Mature methods, such as Mash, exist for estimating pairwise genomic distances based on the Jaccard similarity of k-mer sets computed using sketching techniques. Some, such as Skmer, additionally model the impacts of low coverage. These methods have been successfully applied to assembly-free species identification and phylogenetics; however, their use in population genetics has been limited. This is because these methods implicitly treat genomes as haploid and heterozygosity confounds true estimates of genomic distance for diploid organisms. In this paper, we address this problem through a number of technical advances. First, we use coalescent theory to mathematically derive how the Jaccard index between two diploid samples changes with the scaled population size parameter ({theta}). Next, we derive an estimator that computes {theta} from the Jaccard index, in addition to several auxiliary variables, which we also estimate from the genome skims. The resulting method, DipSkmer, enables more accurate estimates of coverage, sequencing error, and pairwise nucleotide distance for diploid samples. Analyses of both simulated and empirical datasets show that for diploids and low distances (e.g.,

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

A soluble bi-specific fusion protein for the improved expansion of human CD8+ CAR-T cells

The success of Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cell therapy is heavily dependent on the quality of the final cellular product. Current expansion protocols often rely on reagents that require removal from cell culture media, posing logistical challenges in manufacturing, and can also lead to terminal differentiation. Here, we evaluate the use of a soluble, bead-free T cell activator, T cell expansion protein (T-CEP), as a streamlined alternative for generating potent CAR-T cells. Human T cells were activated with T-CEP or known T cell activators (Dynabeads and TransAct) and transduced with either CD19 or interleukin-13 (IL-13) mutein (tetravariant-13; TV-13)-based CAR lentiviral vectors. Our results demonstrate that T-CEP supports robust CAR-T cell expansion and achieves transduction efficiencies comparable to commercial reagents for both types of CAR-T cells. Notably, T-CEP significantly favored the expansion of CD8+ T cells, yielding an enhanced CD27+ phenotype and a lower CD4:CD8 ratio compared to TransAct. Cytotoxicity assays confirmed that T-CEP-expanded CAR-T cells possess cytolytic function equivalent to commercial reagents for both CARs, while exhibiting lower levels of inflammatory cytokine secretion. In summary, T-CEP represents a competitive alternative to existing expansion agents, as it does not require its removal during CAR-T manufacturing and generates a CD8+ dominant, less-differentiated phenotype without compromising efficacy.

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

Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agents

Turn-taking in multi-party spoken conversations remains a fundamental challenge for voice-based agents, particularly under dynamic floor competition and varying user expectations. We propose ModeratorLM, a role-playing voice agent that conditions turn-taking behavior on an explicitly assigned role in multi-party settings. The system is built on a speech large language model operating in chunk-wise streaming manner. We further introduce a reasoning-augmented variant that incorporates chain-of-thought reasoning over conversational context and the assigned role. We construct RolePlayConv, a large-scale synthetic dataset of spoken multi-party conversations with diverse assistant roles. Experiments on real-world meeting data and RolePlayConv show improved turn-taking precision by over 40% and recall by more than 70%, while substantially reducing false-positive interruptions compared to non-role-conditioned baselines.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

TA-RAG: Tone-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Peer-Support Health Communication

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) successfully grounds large language model (LLM) outputs in trusted documents, but factual grounding alone is insufficient for sensitive peer-support health communication. In domains such as HIV peer support, responses must also be accessible, stigma-free, empathetic, and tailored to the recipient. This paper presents TA-RAG, a lightweight, prompt-based tone-aware RAG framework that embeds explicit tone control into a RAG pipeline without requiring model fine-tuning. We operationalise tone across four core components: stigma-free rewriting, readability adjustment, recipient adaptation, and empathy rephrasing. We evaluate TA-RAG through component-level tests using questions derived from HIV Online Learning Australia (HOLA), UNAIDS terminology guidance, readability metrics, peer-support standards from National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA), and a public empathy dataset. Results show that the TA-RAG's components improve their targeted communication quality while preserving key content. These findings emphasise that prompt-based tone control is a potential direction for making RAG outputs suitable for sensitive peer-support health communication.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DeepMine-Mamba: Mitigating Information Dilution in Mamba-Based State Space Models for Document Image Binarization

Document image binarization aims to separate foreground text from degraded backgrounds while preserving thin, broken, and low-contrast strokes. Although deep learning methods have improved binarization performance, most existing approaches rely on convolutional, transformer-based, or generative architectures, while Mamba-based state space models remain largely unexplored for this task. In this work, we investigate Mamba-based feature propagation and observe that direct state-space propagation may dilute weak foreground cues during long-range modeling, especially faint ink traces, fragmented characters, and boundary-sensitive stroke details. To address this problem, we propose DeepMine-Mamba, a Mamba-based binarization framework equipped with a novel Anti-Dilution Gate that estimates propagation-induced feature changes and selectively restores stroke-sensitive local responses while suppressing unnecessary background enhancement. Experiments on DIBCO/H-DIBCO benchmarks under a strict leave-one-year-out protocol show that DeepMine-Mamba achieves competitive overall performance, with strong average FM and Fps across benchmark years. Ablation results further show that the Anti-Dilution Gate is the key component for mitigating propagation-induced foreground dilution and improving stroke preservation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Low-Cost Neuromorphic Fall Detection Using Synthetic Event Data and Hybrid SNNs

This work presents the development of hybrid models that integrate spiking neural networks (SNNs) with components of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn from simulated event-based camera data (Dynamic Vision Sensor, DVS) generated from conventional smartphone videos. Aimed primarily at human fall detection, the approach leverages the energy efficiency and spatio-temporal processing capabilities of SNNs by converting video frames into event-based data. The proposed models are evaluated through simulations on multiple datasets, comparing their performance to that of traditional machine learning models. Results demonstrate significant gains in efficiency without sacrificing accuracy, underscoring the potential of combining SNNs and DVS technology for complex tasks in real-world environments.

25.
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.