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Breast Cancer Screening Knowledge and Sentiments in Singaporean Women: Mixed Methods Study Using Topic Modeling, Sentiment Analysis, and Structured Questionnaire Data

Background: Mammography screening uptake in Singapore remains below 40% despite campaigns and subsidies. Natural language processing (NLP) can extract nuanced attitudes from free text that fixed response options miss, revealing latent factors influencing breast cancer (BC) screening behavior. Objective: This study characterized women’s attitudes toward mammography using mixed methods data, examined associations between BC awareness and screening willingness, and identified barriers and facilitators through NLP of free-text responses. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study within the multicenter cohort in Singapore (October 2021-December 2023). In total, 4169 women aged 35‐59 years (median 48, IQR 43‐54) were recruited via convenience sampling (3 hospitals and 2 polyclinics). Participants completed online structured questionnaires on demographics and screening history, then a BC education quiz with feedback. Participants answering >80% correctly were classified as “BC-aware.” Posteducation, participants reported screening willingness (motivated or neutral) with optional free-text explanations. Logistic regression models (adjusted for study site, age, ethnicity, marital status, housing, and education) examined the associations with willingness. For 3819 English-language respondents, biterm topic modeling identified themes and sentiment analysis quantified emotional tone. Statistical significance: =.05. Results: Overall, 79% (3287/4169) were BC-aware, and 94% (3908/4169) reported increased motivation posteducation. BC-aware women had higher screening motivation than BC-unaware women (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 2.88, 95% CI 2.19‐3.80;

Towards a more efficient bias detection in financial language models

arXiv:2603.08267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bias in financial language models constitutes a major obstacle to their adoption in real-world applications. Detecting such bias is challenging, as it requires identifying inputs whose predictions change when varying properties unrelated to the decision, such as demographic attributes. Existing approaches typically rely on exhaustive mutation and pairwise prediction analysis over large corpora, which is effective but computationally expensive-particularly for large language models and can become impractical in continuous retraining and releasing processes. Aiming at reducing this cost, we conduct a large-scale study of bias in five financial language models, examining similarities in their bias tendencies across protected attributes and exploring cross-model-guided bias detection to identify bias-revealing inputs earlier. Our study uses approximately 17k real financial news sentences, mutated to construct over 125k original-mutant pairs. Results show that all models exhibit bias under both atomic (0.58\%-6.05\%) and intersectional (0.75\%-5.97\%) settings. Moreover, we observe consistent patterns in bias-revealing inputs across models, enabling substantial reuse and cost reduction in bias detection. For example, up to 73\% of FinMA's biased behaviours can be uncovered using only 20\% of the input pairs when guided by properties derived from DistilRoBERTa outputs.

A prospective clinical feasibility study of a conversational diagnostic AI in an ambulatory primary care clinic

arXiv:2603.08448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based AI systems have shown promise for patient-facing diagnostic and management conversations in simulated settings. Translating these systems into clinical practice requires assessment in real-world workflows with rigorous safety oversight. We report a prospective, single-arm feasibility study of an LLM-based conversational AI, the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE), conducting clinical history taking and presentation of potential diagnoses for patients to discuss with their provider at urgent care appointments at a leading academic medical center. 100 adult patients completed an AMIE text-chat interaction up to 5 days before their appointment. We sought to assess the conversational safety and quality, patient and clinician experience, and clinical reasoning capabilities compared to primary care providers (PCPs). Human safety supervisors monitored all patient-AMIE interactions in real time and did not need to intervene to stop any consultations based on pre-defined criteria. Patients reported high satisfaction and their attitudes towards AI improved after interacting with AMIE (p
  • ✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
  • Scale Space Diffusion Soumik Mukhopadhyay · Prateksha Udhayanan · Abhinav Shrivastava
    arXiv:2603.08709v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion models degrade images through noise, and reversing this process reveals an information hierarchy across timesteps. Scale-space theory exhibits a similar hierarchy via low-pass filtering. We formalize this connection and show that highly noisy diffusion states contain no more information than small, downsampled images - raising the question of why they must be processed at full resolution. To address this, we fuse scale spaces into the
     

Scale Space Diffusion

arXiv:2603.08709v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion models degrade images through noise, and reversing this process reveals an information hierarchy across timesteps. Scale-space theory exhibits a similar hierarchy via low-pass filtering. We formalize this connection and show that highly noisy diffusion states contain no more information than small, downsampled images - raising the question of why they must be processed at full resolution. To address this, we fuse scale spaces into the diffusion process by formulating a family of diffusion models with generalized linear degradations and practical implementations. Using downsampling as the degradation yields our proposed Scale Space Diffusion. To support Scale Space Diffusion, we introduce Flexi-UNet, a UNet variant that performs resolution-preserving and resolution-increasing denoising using only the necessary parts of the network. We evaluate our framework on CelebA and ImageNet and analyze its scaling behavior across resolutions and network depths. Our project website ( https://prateksha.github.io/projects/scale-space-diffusion/ ) is available publicly.

Online Neural Networks for Change-Point Detection

arXiv:2010.01388v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Moments when a time series changes its behavior are called change points. Occurrence of change point implies that the state of the system is altered and its timely detection might help to prevent unwanted consequences. In this paper, we present two change-point detection approaches based on neural networks and online learning. These algorithms demonstrate linear computational complexity and are suitable for change-point detection in large time series. We compare them with the best known algorithms on various synthetic and real world data sets. Experiments show that the proposed methods outperform known approaches. We also prove the convergence of the algorithms to the optimal solutions and describe conditions rendering current approach more powerful than offline one.

Wasserstein Gradient Flows for Scalable and Regularized Barycenter Computation

arXiv:2510.04602v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Wasserstein barycenters provide a principled approach for aggregating probability measures, while preserving the geometry of their ambient space. Existing discrete methods are not scalable as they assume access to the complete set of samples from the input measures. Meanwhile, neural network approaches do scale well, but rely on complex optimization problems and cannot easily incorporate label information. We address these limitations through gradient flows in the space of probability measures. Through time discretization, we achieve a scalable algorithm that i) relies on mini-batch optimal transport, ii) accepts modular regularization through task-aware functions, and iii) seamlessly integrates supervised information into the ground-cost. We empirically validate our approach on domain adaptation benchmarks that span computer vision, neuroscience, and chemical engineering. Our method establishes a new state-of-the-art barycenter solver, with labeled barycenters consistently outperforming unlabeled ones.

Impact of LLMs news Sentiment Analysis on Stock Price Movement Prediction

arXiv:2602.00086v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper addresses stock price movement prediction by leveraging LLM-based news sentiment analysis. Earlier works have largely focused on proposing and assessing sentiment analysis models and stock movement prediction methods, however, separately. Although promising results have been achieved, a clear and in-depth understanding of the benefit of the news sentiment to this task, as well as a comprehensive assessment of different architecture types in this context, is still lacking. Herein, we conduct an evaluation study that compares 3 different LLMs, namely, DeBERTa, RoBERTa and FinBERT, for sentiment-driven stock prediction. Our results suggest that DeBERTa outperforms the other two models with an accuracy of 75% and that an ensemble model that combines the three models can increase the accuracy to about 80%. Also, we see that sentiment news features can benefit (slightly) some stock market prediction models, i.e., LSTM-, PatchTST- and tPatchGNN-based classifiers and PatchTST- and TimesNet-based regression tasks models.
  • ✇Nature Medicine
  • Mosquito-borne viruses, vaccine-borne hope Mike May
    Nature Medicine, Published online: 09 March 2026; doi:10.1038/d41591-026-00014-6From chikungunya and dengue to yellow fever and Zika, mosquito‑transmitted diseases are spreading with urbanization, travel and climate change. A new generation of vaccines, trials and public‑health tools aim to keep ahead of the threat.
     
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