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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Effects of Resveratrol as an Adjunct to a Low-Calorie Diet in Postmenopausal Women with Obesity and Knee Osteoarthritis

Background. Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for osteoarthritis and may contribute to pain, functional impairment, inflammation, and cartilage degradation. Resveratrol has potential anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective effects, but its efficacy as an adjunct to dietary intervention remains unclear. Objective. This study evaluated whether resveratrol supplementation provides additional benefits when combined with a low-calorie diet in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. Methods. A total of 97 postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis were included in this randomized controlled clinical study. Participants received either a 10-day low-calorie diet alone or the same diet combined with 150 mg/day trans-resveratrol. Anthropometric parameters, body composition, biochemical markers, pain intensity, functional status, and urinary CTX-II were assessed at baseline and follow-up. Results. Both interventions were associated with reductions in body weight, BMI, waist and hip circumferences, fat mass, glucose, HOMA-IR, lipid parameters, hsCRP, VAS, WOMAC, LAI, and urinary CTX-II. Compared with diet alone, resveratrol supplementation did not provide additional benefits for anthropometric parameters, glucose metabolism, lipid profile, or WOMAC score. However, the resveratrol group showed a greater reduction in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. The obesity class did not modify the treatment effect. Conclusion. A short-term low-calorie diet improved metabolic, inflammatory, and osteoarthritis-related parameters in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. The addition of resveratrol did not enhance weight loss or improve most metabolic outcomes but was associated with greater reductions in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. These findings suggest a potential anti-inflammatory and cartilage-related effect of resveratrol, which requires confirmation in longer randomized trials.

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

Test-Time Adaptation in Optical Coherence Tomography Using Trajectory-Aligned Time-Independent Flow

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is essential in ophthalmology, but inconsistent image quality especially in low-cost devices hinders automated analysis. To address this, we introduce a flow-matching-based test-time adaptation method that generates high-quality surrogate images from noisy inputs. Typically, domain gaps between test and training data cause pixel distribution mismatches during the denoising process. We overcome this by matching the test image's histogram to synthetic reference trajectories, successfully aligning the input with expected distributions. Additionally, we remove the network's time conditioning to account for slight deviations in real-world noise distributions. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in segmenting critical biomarkers for two stages of Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). Code is available: https://github.com/Veit21/tta-flow.

03.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-24

A new cancer progression model: From synthetic tumors to real data and back

by Daniela Volpatto, Sandro Gepiro Contaldo, Simone Pernice, Marco Beccuti, Francesca Cordero, Roberta Sirovich Intratumor heterogeneity (ITH) arises from the combined effects of genetic alterations, clonal interactions, and environmental constraints, and plays a central role in therapeutic resistance and disease progression. While ITH has been extensively documented in empirical tumor data, the scientific debate regarding the biological mechanisms underlying this heterogeneity remains complex, highlighting the need for cancer evolution models that are sufficiently flexible and sophisticated to reproduce the observed behaviors and to give insights on the unobserved ones. Here, we present a stochastic modelling framework for tumor evolution that integrates genotypic inheritance with phenotype driven functional traits and resource mediated competition. Mutational events are associated with functional capabilities such as altered proliferation, increased mutation rates, limit evasion potential or enhanced control over shared resources, allowing multiple genotypes to converge on similar phenotypes. The model explicitly tracks subclonal lineages while incorporating environmental constraints that modulate growth and competition. The framework is defined through a mathematically rigorous construction and is accompanied by an efficient simulation algorithm. To facilitate exploration and reproducibility, we provide an open-source graphical user interface that allows users to configure model parameters, run simulations, and inspect clonal genealogies and population dynamics without requiring direct interaction with the underlying code. Using this model, we illustrate how ecological feedbacks can shape clonal dynamics over time, supporting an interpretation in which early tumor growth is dominated by stochastic expansion, while later evolution increasingly reflects selection for traits that alleviate environmental constraints. Rather than constituting a new evolutionary paradigm, this behaviour demonstrates how well-documented biological patterns can emerge naturally from a unified stochastic and ecological description. Overall, our approach offers a flexible and extensible platform for investigating how chance, functional traits, and environmental interactions jointly govern tumor heterogeneity.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

AI4SE and SE4AI Exploration: A Decade Looking Back and Forward

arXiv:2606.19630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The March 2020 INCOSE INSIGHT special issue on AI and Systems Engineering (SE) became the most downloaded issue in the publication's history and launched a research community that now draws over 250 registrants to its annual workshop. In this article, we trace the progress in AI and SE across three phases (labeled here foundational, applied, and LLM inflection) based on the authors' reading of the field's core papers, and describe our opinions of where the community has converged and where critical gaps remain. Separately, a human-AI agreement literature review leveraging both human expertise and six AI models was performed to assess the relevance of 1,712 INCOSE INSIGHT articles and 889 SERC publications. The results identify five critical research gaps and offer guidance for practitioners navigating AI adoption, assurance, and workforce transformation in SE. We share the agreement data and the AI4SE/SE4AI Explorer web application so readers can compare their own relevance judgments with the human and AI raters.

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

Beyond the Unruh vacuum: multi-time correlations in black hole collapse and evaporation

arXiv:2606.13383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The black hole information paradox originates from the thermal character of Hawking radiation, which appears to erase information about the collapsing matter. However, thermality constrains only observables defined at a single time and leaves the structure of temporal quantum correlations largely unexplored. Here we show that multi-time quantum-field correlations provide a concrete mechanism for the survival of pre-collapse information in black hole evaporation. Using a two-dimensional model of gravitational collapse and evaporation, we demonstrate that late-time multi-time correlations are not fully reproduced by the Unruh vacuum. In particular, they contain a contribution that depends explicitly on parameters characterizing the pre-collapse state, despite the thermal character of the asymptotic radiation. Our results identify measurable multi-time correlations as carriers of information in Hawking radiation and suggest that formulations of the black hole information paradox based solely on single-time observables are incomplete.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

PhaseWY: A pipeline for haplotype phasing, sex chromosome identification and extraction of sex-limited sequences

Sex chromosomes are central to many ecological and evolutionary processes. Evidence has accumulated that sex chromosome systems vary extensively in age, turnover and transitions, motivating renewed efforts to study the diversity of sex chromosome systems across the tree of life. However, successful genomic detection of sex chromosomes depends on several factors, including the size and divergence time, background genetic diversity, and the number of sequenced females and males. In addition, technical challenges associated with sequencing and analysing the sex-limited Y/W chromosome remain. Here, we present PhaseWY, an automated Snakemake pipeline that uses whole-genome sequencing data from multiple female and male individuals to identify sex-chromosomal regions and extract the corresponding Y/W sequences. PhaseWY (i) detects sex differences in alignment depth, (ii) applies read-based and statistical haplotype phasing, (iii) identifies sex-linked regions using haplotype clustering, and (iv) subsets autosomal, X/Z- and Y/W-linked variants for downstream analyses. We applied PhaseWY to simulated data to benchmark factors influencing sex-linkage detection and successful extraction of Y/W-linked variants. To demonstrate its practical utility, we further applied PhaseWY to the neo-sex chromosome system in Alauda larks (Alaudidae) and performed a range of downstream analyses demonstrating the scope of applications of the PhaseWY output. We conclude that PhaseWY provides an easy-to-use and reproducible tool for population-genomic analyses in non-model organisms, with particular importance for advancing our understanding of sex-chromosome evolution.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

CAVEWOMAN: How Large Language Models Behave Under Linguistic Input and Output Compression

"Talk short. Drop grammar. Save token." This caveman style is widely promoted as a way to cut inference cost, but whether it actually saves anything depends on which channel (the user's prompt or the model's response) is being compressed. We present Cavewoman, a two-channel evaluation protocol that scores every generation on task accuracy, realized per-item cost, and reference-text agreement against the model's unconstrained reference. We evaluate eight models on five datasets at five reduction levels, with both channels measured on the same items. Output compression cuts realized cost on most API models (1.4-2.4x per model, up to 3x in the best case) and on all four open-weight models under public-tier pricing. Input compression has the opposite effect, a strict lose-lose: it raises net cost rather than lowering it (~1.15x on the five-benchmark mean, up to 1.8x on the worst dataset and 2.7x under stronger compression), because models compensate with longer responses even as accuracy collapses. Under the same setting, surface text diverges from the unconstrained reference: on the non-reasoning models, roughly half of all generations are correct yet their surface text no longer entails the model's own unconstrained baseline generation. The divergence survives length-controlled re-scoring, multiple-comparisons correction, and replication under complementary semantic measures. Code and data are available at https://github.com/danielle34/cavewoman.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Managing Task Execution for Unknown Workloads in Batteryless IoT: A Hardware-Agnostic Evaluation

arXiv:2606.24340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been shifting toward batteryless, energy-harvesting architectures. Sustaining reliable operation in these systems requires intelligent management of highly volatile stored energy. As edge applications grow in complexity, traditional energy-aware schedulers struggle with unpredictable workloads due to their reliance on static execution thresholds or pre-measured, hardware-specific task profiles. To overcome this, we propose two novel, hardware-agnostic dynamic scheduling strategies treating applications as a "black box," requiring no prior energy information: a model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent and an on-the-fly Approximated Prediction (AP) method. We evaluate these methods against an adaptive task rate approach (AsTAR) and optimized static thresholds using a custom-built, physically accurate simulation framework driven by real-world solar data and dynamic LoRa transmission profiles. Rather than claiming universal superiority, our analysis exposes the distinct operational trade-offs of each method: the AP approach delivers lightweight, near-oracle task throughput; the RL agent provides tunable survival-execution balancing; and AsTAR excels at execution pacing across long energy gaps. Finally, we demonstrate that while these advanced strategies provide critical resilience for severely constrained systems with small capacitors, devices with larger energy buffers can efficiently rely on simpler, less computationally expensive static policies.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

From Open Waters to Enclosed Cabins: ProteusVPR for Cross-Scene Visual Place Recognition in Maritime Perception and Cabin Inspection

Autonomous robotic inspection in maritime environments presents unique challenges for Visual Place Recognition (VPR) due to cross-scene perceptual shifts. Robots navigating ship-borne environments must transition between visually distinct domains: open decks with sparse textures and severe illumination changes, and enclosed cabins with repetitive structures and high visual ambiguity. Existing VPR methods, designed primarily for urban or indoor scenes, fail to generalize reliably across these starkly different scenarios. To address this, we propose ProteusVPR, a two-stage retrieval-refinement framework. The first stage employs any standard VPR model for initial image retrieval. The second stage introduces a geometric-visual estimation network that fuses the retrieved image with two temporally preceding frames, incorporating geometric descriptors, a local affine coordinate system, and camera azimuth encoding to achieve precise localization. To support this task, we introduce the XHZ dataset, an 8K-panoramic ship-borne dataset collected from an operational vessel, featuring multi-floor cabin structures, deck transition zones, and strict query-database separation for rigorous evaluation. Extensive experiments on the XHZ dataset demonstrate that ProteusVPR consistently improves the localization accuracy across multiple VPR backbones, reducing mean localization error by over 60\% on average and that ProteusVPR offers an effective and robust solution for precise visual localization in challenging, cross-scene maritime environments.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A Stabilized Path-Space Approach to Diffusion-Based Posterior Sampling

arXiv:2606.12710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models provide expressive data-driven priors for Bayesian inverse problems, but many diffusion posterior samplers rely on heuristic guidance approximations that can fail for nonlinear operators and multimodal posteriors. In this work, we develop a stabilized path-space framework for diffusion-based posterior sampling. Starting from a base diffusion process whose terminal marginal represents the prior, we define a likelihood-weighted target measure on trajectories and cast posterior sampling as learning a controlled stochastic process whose path measure matches this target. This formulation connects diffusion posterior sampling to stochastic optimal control while preserving the Bayesian structure needed for uncertainty quantification. We introduce a time reparameterization that makes the path-space control problem well posed by removing the bias induced by the unknown initial value function, without auxiliary training. We then learn the control via a trust-region path-space optimization method with log-variance objectives. The path-space perspective also unifies our learned control approach with existing guidance-based samplers, quantifies the sampling error induced by approximate controls, and yields importance sampling corrections for asymptotically exact posterior expectations. We evaluate the proposed framework on a suite of benchmark inverse problems with analytically characterized or high-quality reference posteriors, enabling principled assessment of sampling accuracy and uncertainty quantification. These experiments provide insight into the behavior of diffusion-based posterior samplers and demonstrate improved accuracy and robustness over leading approaches.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Optical cooling by interfacial charge transfer in 2D heterostructures

Authors:

Optical refrigeration, or laser cooling of solids1, offers a cryogen-free route to temperature control for quantum and electronic systems. Existing progress2–8 relies on a phonon-assisted up-conversion photoluminescence approach, which remains constrained by stringent material and excitation requirements. Here we demonstrate a distinct route, interfacial-charge-transfer-driven optical cooling, in two-dimensional semiconductor heterostructures. Photo-excited carriers in WSe2 cross a type-II junction into MoSe2 or WS2, extracting lattice energy nonradiatively—through a phonon-assisted interfacial charge transfer process. Raman and photoluminescence measurements show prominent low-temperature signatures in the WSe2 layer, with transient absorption spectroscopy identifying a phonon-assisted, barrier-activated interlayer charge transfer. Molecular dynamics simulations show a prominent interfacial thermal resistance sustaining the temperature gradient. This barrier-mediated phonon extraction bypasses the need for near-unity quantum efficiency or resonant excitation, offering a promising strategy for cryogen-free refrigeration and thermal management in quantum, optoelectronic and nanoscale systems. Optical cooling in two-dimensional semiconductor heterostructures is demonstrated through phonon-assisted interfacial charge transfer, enabling cryogen-free thermal management without stringent quantum-efficiency requirements.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Zero-shot generalization of transformer neural operators to larger domains

arXiv:2606.14597v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer-based neural operators have shown remarkable performance for approximating solution operators of partial differential equations on complex geometries. However, existing approaches implicitly assume a fixed domain size, which limits their ability to generalize at inference. In this work, we investigate domain extension, namely zero-shot inference on spatial domains that are significantly larger than those encountered during training. We argue that this setting fundamentally requires spatial locality and translation equivariance. We propose to implement this locality via a decomposable bias in the attention logits computation, enabling finely controllable locality while remaining fully decomposable into query-key inner products and directly compatible with optimized attention kernels. Combined with rotary positional embeddings, it enables expressive embeddings with controllable spatial support without altering the transformer architecture. We empirically show that our approach substantially improves zero-shot generalization to larger domains across two PDE benchmarks and a 3D industrial atmospheric flow application. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/cerea-daml/domain-extension.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

FLiP: Towards understanding and interpreting multimodal multilingual sentence embeddings

This paper presents factorized linear projection (FLiP) models for understanding pretrained sentence embedding spaces. We train FLiP models to recover the lexical content from multilingual (LaBSE), multimodal (SONAR) and API-based (Gemini) sentence embedding spaces in several high- and mid-resource languages. We show that FLiP can recall more than 75% of lexical content from the embeddings, significantly outperforming existing non-factorized baselines. Using this as a diagnostic tool, we uncover the modality and language biases across the selected sentence encoders and provide practitioners with intrinsic insights about the encoders without relying on conventional downstream evaluation tasks. Our implementation is public https://github.com/BUTSpeechFIT/FLiP.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Rare loss-of-function variants in POLD1, PMS1 and FAN1 modify age at onset of motor symptoms in Huntington's disease

Huntington's disease is a rare neurodegenerative disease whose primary risk factors are inherited expansions of a CAG repeat tract in the HTT gene. Somatic expansion of these tracts leads to neuronal toxicity, neuronal death and clinical disease progression. To identify genetic factors with a major impact on disease onset and progression, we genome sequenced 18,825 individuals for the ENROLL-HD study. Our results show rare inactivating mutations in three genes, all involved in DNA damage repair, are major determinants of age of onset for motor symptoms (n=10,610) and other clinical manifestations. Heterozygote carriers of predicted loss-of-function (pLoF) variants in POLD1 and PMS1 developed motor symptoms an average 20 years (n=3; P=1x10-5) and 7 years (n=6; P=2x10-3) later than non-carriers, respectively. Conversely, heterozygote carriers of pLoF variants in FAN1 (n=30) developed symptoms 10 years earlier (P=2x10-10). Our findings highlight therapeutic strategies and help predict age of onset for at-risk individuals.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Reference-Driven Multi-Speaker Audio Scene Generation from In-the-Wild Priors

Existing multi-speaker dialogue systems bind speakers to utterances through structured supervision: per-turn tags, multi-stream transcriptions, or learnable speaker embeddings. These systems operate within speech-only pipelines that produce clean vocal sequences without the ambient texture of real conversations. We take a different approach. Our method, ScenA, conditions a text-to-audio flow-matching foundation model, pretrained on large-scale in-the-wild data, directly on multiple reference voices and a free-form natural language prompt that describes an entire multi-speaker audio scene. Leveraging such a foundational model allows us to inherit its capacity for natural, non-studio audio: background noise, room acoustics, overlapping dialogue, and spontaneous paralinguistic events, while adding multi-speaker control without any per-turn structure. Concretely, reference latents are concatenated into the model's token sequence and distinguished by lightweight identity-aware positional encodings. However, we identify a critical obstacle to this approach: the Reference Shortcut. During training under standard noise schedules, the model can identify the matching reference by acoustic similarity to the noisy target, bypassing the text prompt entirely. We address this with a high-noise-biased timestep distribution that forces the model to rely on the text prompt for speaker assignment. We evaluate ScenA on the CoVoMix2-Dialogue benchmark, showing that it outperforms existing multi-speaker systems on speaker-binding metrics while generating rich conversational audio with overlapping speech, emotional vocalizations, and ambient sound. Our results demonstrate the advantage of using a general-purpose audio model conditioned on a free-form scene description, rather than passing structured dialog scripts through a speech-only pipeline.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Information-Theoretic Measures in AI: A Practical Decision Guide

arXiv:2604.23716v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Information-theoretic (IT) measures are ubiquitous in artificial intelligence: entropy drives decision-tree splits and uncertainty quantification, cross-entropy is the default classification loss, mutual information underpins representation learning and feature selection, and transfer entropy reveals directed influence in dynamical systems. A second, less consolidated family of measures, integrated information (Phi), effective information (EI), and autonomy, has emerged for characterizing agent complexity. Despite wide adoption, measure selection is often decoupled from estimator assumptions, failure modes, and safe inferential claims. This paper provides a practical decision framework for all seven measures, organized around three prescriptive questions for each: (i) what question does the measure answer and in which AI context; (ii) which estimator is appropriate for the data type and dimensionality; and (iii) what is the most dangerous misuse. The framework is operationalized in two complementary artifacts: a measure-selection flowchart and a master decision table. We cover both AI/ML and decision-making agent application domains per measure, with standardized Bridge Boxes linking IT quantities to cognitive constructs. Three worked examples illustrate the framework on concrete practitioner scenarios spanning representation learning, temporal influence analysis, and evolved agent complexity.

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

XAI-Grounded Explanation Generation for Speech Deepfake Detection with Training-Free Multimodal Large Language Models

Speech deepfake detection (SDD) systems require trustworthy explanations for reliable decision-making. Existing explanation ways mainly fall into two categories. Traditional explainable AI (XAI), such as gradient-based attribution, produces low-level attribution signals tightly coupled with model decisions, and harder to be understood by human than natural language explanations. Meanwhile, large language model (LLM)-based explanation generation often produces generic and ungrounded descriptions due to the lack of heuristic evidence and task-specific supervision, stemming from limited grounded explanation datasets for SDD. We therefore propose a training-free explanation framework that integrates XAI evidence with multimodal LLMs to generate grounded and specific explanations. Using the PartialSpoof dataset, we construct a grounded explanation dataset and show that methods with XAI increase inside accuracy by over 45\%, verified through human evaluation and faithfulness checks.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Information Leakage Detection through Approximate Bayes-optimal Prediction

arXiv:2401.14283v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In today's data-driven world, the proliferation of publicly available information raises security concerns due to the information leakage (IL) problem. IL involves unintentionally exposing sensitive information to unauthorized parties via observable system information. Conventional statistical approaches rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between observable and secret information for detecting ILs, face challenges of the curse of dimensionality, convergence, computational complexity, and MI misestimation. Though effective, emerging supervised machine learning based approaches to detect ILs are limited to binary system sensitive information and lack a comprehensive framework. To address these limitations, we establish a theoretical framework using statistical learning theory and information theory to quantify and detect IL accurately. Using automated machine learning, we demonstrate that MI can be accurately estimated by approximating the typically unknown Bayes predictor's log-loss and accuracy. Based on this, we show how MI can effectively be estimated to detect ILs. Our method performs superior to state-of-the-art baselines in an empirical study considering synthetic and real-world OpenSSL TLS server datasets.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Moment generating function of the tacnode process

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The tacnode process is a universal determinantal point process arising in non-intersecting particle systems and random tiling models. In this paper, we study the generating function for the counting functions of the tacnode process on a union of $m$ intervals, $m\in\mathbb{N}^{+}$. Our first result provides an integral representation for the $m$-point generating function in terms of the Hamiltonian governing a system of $8m+4$ coupled differential equations. Combined with several differential identities for this Hamiltonian, the representation yields the large gap asymptotics, up to and including the constant term. As further applications, we obtain asymptotic formulae for the expectations, variances, and covariances of the counting functions, and establish a central limit theorem for their joint fluctuations. These results extend the previously known $1$-point theory for the tacnode process to the multi-interval setting with multiple discontinuities.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Assessment of occupational aerosol exposure for laboratory technicians: A quantitative study using {Phi}X174 phage as a substitute virus

Authors:

This study aimed to clarify aerosol exposure risks throughout the workflow of a Biosafety Level 2 (BSL-2) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) laboratory, validate the suitability of the {Phi}X174 bacteriophage as an indicator virus, and provide evidence for biosafety control measures. The {Phi}X174 bacteriophage was used to simulate viral samples, and a concentration-bacteriophage plaque standard curve was constructed (R2=0.998). Five operational steps in a simulated PCR laboratory were quantitatively monitored for aerosol concentration using double-layer agar plates, with blank controls used to eliminate interference. Statistical analysis was employed to identify risk differences. Sample homogenization ((5.67 {+/-} 1.23) x 104 plaque-forming units (PFU)/m3) and nucleic acid extraction ((3.45 {+/-} 0.89) x 104 PFU/m3) were identified as high-/very high-risk steps. The viral load in the samples was strongly positively correlated with the aerosol concentration (r = 0.926, P

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Clinical Characteristics and Predictors of Delayed Cerebral Ischemia in High-Altitude Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage

Background and Purpose-Aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH) remains a devastating cerebrovascular event, with delayed cerebral ischemia (DCI) representing its most feared complication. High-altitude environments induce profound cerebrovascular adaptations, yet no study has systematically examined aSAH outcomes in chronically hypoxic populations. We characterized clinical features and identified DCI predictors among aSAH patients on the Tibetan Plateau. Methods-This single-center retrospective cohort included 256 consecutive aSAH patients admitted at a tertiary neurosurgical center in Tibet (altitude 2,330-4,920 m) between 2013 and 2015. The primary outcome was DCI per consensus criteria. Multivariable logistic regression identified independent predictors; receiver operating characteristic analysis evaluated model performance. Altitude and hemoglobin were specifically evaluated as altitude-related risk factors. Results-DCI occurred in 26 patients (10.2%). In-hospital mortality was 1.6%. Most patients presented with good-grade aSAH (Hunt-Hess I-II, 73.0%; Fisher I-II, 73.1%). On multivariable analysis, only Fisher grade independently predicted DCI (odds ratio, 3.63 [95% CI, 1.14-11.52]; P=0.029). Neither altitude (P=0.697) nor hemoglobin concentration (P=0.858) was associated with DCI risk. The predictive model achieved an area under the curve of 0.812. At 1-year follow-up, 77.8% achieved favorable functional outcomes (modified Rankin Scale 0-2). Conclusions-Fisher grade is the sole independent predictor of DCI in high-altitude aSAH patients, while chronic hypoxia and compensatory hemoglobin elevation do not significantly modify DCI risk. Established sea-level prognostic frameworks remain valid in high-altitude settings, supporting their continued use for clinical risk stratification. Keywords: aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage; high altitude; delayed cerebral ischemia; Fisher grade; Tibetan Plateau; prognosis

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

Question-Aware Evidence Ledgers for Video Relational Reasoning

The VRR-QA challenge evaluates visual relational reasoning in videos, where answers often depend on implicit spatial relations, event boundaries, target identity, and dialogue context rather than a single salient frame. We present a test-time reasoning pipeline built around a strong GPT-5.5 video QA solver and a set of question-aware evidence ledgers. The initial solver answers each question from a uniform video representation, while routed ledgers are prompted to make the required targets, count units, reference frames, and temporal or spatial scope explicit for counting, spatial, endpoint, viewpoint, and dialogue reasoning. External tools such as open-vocabulary detection, depth cues, pair crops, ASR, and scene-graph ledgers are used only as evidence sources. A conservative gate keeps the current answer unless independent evidence uniquely supports a different option. The final evidence-gated pipeline achieves 92.95% overall accuracy and 93.79% macro accuracy on the challenge test split.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Post Hoc Localization of Beam F3 Stimulation Targets: An MRI-Derived Geodesic Approach for Refined TMS E-Field Simulations

Background: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is an established treatment option in major depressive disorder. One of the most common approaches for targeting the dlPFC is the Beam F3 method, which determines the stimulation site (F3Beam) as a function of external cranial measurements. Precise knowledge of the individual stimulation site is essential for imaging-based analyses of TMS effects. However, due to the method's reliance on individual anatomy, retrospective identification of F3Beam targets across cohorts is challenging, limiting the analysis of existing datasets. We developed a scalable method to reconstruct subject-specific F3Beam target locations for e-field simulations based on structural imaging. Methods: High-resolution three-dimensional (3D) T1-weighted MRI was used to generate individual scalp meshes via the ''Simulation of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation'' (SimNIBS) software. Subject-specific anatomical distances and coordinates of interest were measured geodesically using a Python-based script to reconstruct the individual F3Beam targets. Validation included a retrospective comparison between digital geodesic measurements and manual cranial measurements in 20 patients and a prospective comparison with MR-visible scalp markers in 2 healthy controls. To assess the impact of our targeting algorithm on e-field simulations, volumetric e-field maps based on three potential targets (F3Beam, F3MNI, F3Geo) were generated in SimNIBS and compared using voxel-wise statistics in SPM12. Results: Retrospective analysis revealed a systematic bias towards higher in vivo measurements compared to digital geodesic measurements, though deviations in the final distances determining F3Beam (xBeam and yBeam) were minimal ({Delta}xBeam: 0.11 {+/-} 0.08 cm; {Delta}yBeam: 0.14 {+/-} 0.21 cm). Prospective validation demonstrated that F3Beam coordinates better matched in vivo coil positions than group-template-derived targets (F3MNI). Group-level analysis showed method-dependent clustering of coil positions with corresponding voxel-wise e-field differences. Conclusions: Individualized geodesic measurements may enable accurate, scalable and retrospective identification of Beam F3 targets and coil orientations. This approach may yield more accurate e-field simulations than group-template based targeting and provides a practical method for retrospective analysis of existing TMS treatment cohorts. This could be leveraged to identify response predictors or imaging-based biomarkers of treatment response.

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

Irresponsible AI: big tech's influence on AI research and associated impacts

arXiv:2512.03077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The accelerated development, deployment and adoption of artificial intelligence systems has been fuelled by the increasing presence of big tech in the AI field. This trend has been accompanied by growing ethical concerns and intensified societal and environmental impacts. This position paper argues that irresponsible AI development is strongly driven by big tech's influence and involvement in the field. First, we examine the growing and disproportionate influence of big tech in AI research and argue that its drive for scaling and general-purpose systems is fundamentally at odds with the responsible, ethical, and sustainable development of AI. Second, we review key current environmental and societal negative impacts of AI and trace their connections to big tech's influence. Third, we discuss the underlying economic forces driving big tech's actions. Finally, as a call to action, we invite AI researchers to counter big tech's influence in irresponsible AI development through strategies that build on the responsibility of implicated actors and collective action.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Beyond Safe Data: Pretraining-Stage Alignment with Regular Safety Reflection

arXiv:2606.19168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To achieve deeper safety alignment for large language models (LLMs), recent efforts have studied how to push safety interventions earlier into the pretraining stage, primarily by filtering unsafe data or rewriting it into safer forms. We argue that pretraining-stage alignment should go beyond making the data safe: LLMs may compose seemingly benign knowledge and capabilities into unsafe behaviors. To this end, we propose Safety Reflection Pretraining, a pretraining-stage alignment method which regularly inserts short safety reflections into pretraining corpora to integrate self-monitoring directly into language modeling, establishing a foundational capability that is subsequently reinforced by compatible post-training. Our experiments with 1.7B models pretrained on FineWeb-Edu show that Safety Reflection Pretraining improves safety classification accuracy and substantially reduces the success rates of inference-stage and finetuning attacks. Complementary to our real-world experiments, we also introduce a fully controlled synthetic environment, MedSafetyWorld, with a clear definition of safety and a reasoning structure under which models can easily generalize unsafe behaviors from safe data. Ablations in MedSafetyWorld further demonstrate a clear advantage of Safety Reflection Pretraining in preventing models from acting on unsafe behaviors generalized from safe data, compared with data filtering and rewriting. Taken together, our findings suggest that pretraining alignment should not only make the training data safe, but also shape the behaviors that models are likely to acquire from safe data.