中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Unsupervised Causal Abstractions Discovery

Authors:
Th\'eo Saulus↗Simon Lacoste-Julien↗Dhanya Sridhar↗

arXiv:2606.19594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal abstractions formalize when a high-level structural causal model (SCM) captures the interventional behavior of a lower-level SCM. Existing applications of this notion largely follow a hypothesis-testing paradigm: an expert proposes a candidate high-level model and then evaluates if the low-level system implements it. We study the complementary problem of learning a high-level model directly from low-level measurements. Our contributions leverage hypotheses from low-rank causal discovery, and can be summarized as follows: (1) we show that observations generated by a low-rank graph induce latents that form a causal abstraction, (2) we provide identifiability results about these latents, and (3) we propose a practical objective to learn this high-level SCM.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Debate2Create: Robot Co-design via Multi-Agent LLM Debate

Authors:
Kevin Qiu↗Marek Cygan↗

arXiv:2510.25850v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Debate2Create (D2C), a multi-agent LLM framework that formulates robot co-design as structured, iterative debate grounded in physics-based evaluation. A design agent and control agent engage in a thesis-antithesis-synthesis loop, while criterion-specific LLM judges provide multi-objective feedback to steer exploration. Across five MuJoCo locomotion benchmarks, D2C achieves the highest default-normalized score among the evaluated LLM-based and black-box baselines, with gains up to 3.2x on Ant and nearly 9x on Swimmer. Iterative debate yields 18-35% gains over compute-matched zero-shot generation, and D2C-generated rewards transfer to default morphologies in 4/5 tasks. These results suggest that structured, simulator-grounded multi-agent interaction is a useful mechanism for joint morphology-reward optimization under a fixed-topology, per-candidate-RL protocol. Project page: debate2create.github.io.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Towards One-for-All Anomaly Detection for Tabular Data

Authors:
Shiyuan Li↗Yixin Liu↗Yu Zheng↗Xiaofeng Cao↗Shirui Pan↗Heng Tao Shen↗

arXiv:2603.14407v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tabular anomaly detection (TAD) aims to identify samples that deviate from the majority in tabular data and is critical in many real-world applications. However, existing methods follow a ``one model for one dataset (OFO)'' paradigm, which relies on dataset-specific training and thus incurs high computational cost and yields limited generalization to unseen domains. To address these limitations, we propose OFA-TAD, a generalist one-for-all (OFA) TAD framework that only requires one-time training on multiple source datasets and can generalize to unseen datasets from diverse domains on-the-fly. To realize one-for-all tabular anomaly detection, OFA-TAD extracts neighbor-distance patterns as transferable cues, and introduces multi-view neighbor-distance representations from multiple transformation-induced metric spaces to mitigate the transformation sensitivity of distance profiles. To adaptively combine multi-view distance evidence, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scoring network is employed for view-specific anomaly scoring and entropy-regularized gated fusion, with a multi-strategy anomaly synthesis mechanism to support training under the one-class constraint. Extensive experiments on 34 datasets from 14 domains demonstrate that OFA-TAD achieves superior anomaly detection performance and strong cross-domain generalizability under the strict OFA setting. The source code is available at https://github.com/Shiy-Li/OFA-TAD.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

A zero-parameter first-principles gate framework for full-length TP53 missense variant interpretation

Authors:
Masamichi Iizumi↗

by Masamichi Iizumi Missense variant interpretation often achieves useful predictive performance but remains mechanistically opaque, particularly in proteins that combine structured domains with intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs). We developed Gate & Channel, a zero-parameter, first-principles framework for full-length TP53 missense variant analysis in which each prediction is generated by explicit IF-THEN gates derived from physicochemistry, geometry, structural constraints, and polymer physics rather than fitted weights. Variants are evaluated across independent channels representing distinct physical failure modes; a variant is predicted disruptive if any gate closes. A second hierarchical layer (“Geta”) encodes physically grounded post-closure exceptions, allowing sensitivity and specificity to be improved on disjoint variant populations. The v18 framework consists of 12 channels and 2 Getas spanning structured domains and IDRs, capturing DNA-contact disruption, Zn coordination, burial-dependent packing, secondary-structure compatibility, post-translational modification chemistry, short linear motif disruption (including a multi-partner coupled-folding face), proline-directed kinase recognition, and IDR-specific proline and glycine backbone constraints. Across 1,369 TP53 missense variants, the framework achieved 84.5% sensitivity and 89.1% positive predictive value, with 90.9% sensitivity preserved in the DNA-binding core and all 9/9 hotspot mutations captured. A post hoc audit of discordant IDR calls indicated that many apparent false positives had plausible molecular rationales, consistent with a distinction between molecular mechanism disruption and clinical penetrance. Applied to KRAS, TDP-43, and BRCA1, the same channels capture the dominant pathogenic mechanisms in each protein as a proof of principle, while residual missed variants name specific gates yet to be written. The framework is distributed as the open-source Python package pathogenicity-gates (v0.5.1, MIT). These results show that a substantial fraction of full-length TP53 missense variation can be resolved through explicit, auditable physical gates that carry meaning beyond TP53, with each remaining failure naming the next rule to be written.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

PearlVLA: Progressive Embodied Action-Plan Refinement in Latent Space

Authors:
Bochen Yang↗Lianlei Shan↗

arXiv:2606.17924v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models face a trade-off between efficient action generation and explicit deliberation. Directly decoding actions from vision-language backbone representations enables low-latency control, whereas explicit reasoning through textual chains, pixel-level subgoals, or action search can improve planning but incurs substantial latency and computational cost. We propose PearlVLA, a VLA framework that moves deliberation into the latent space of a vision-language model (VLM). PearlVLA separates VLM meta-query representations into a fixed visual grounding branch and an iterative latent plan branch. At each refinement round, a plan-conditioned world query probes a lightweight frozen latent world model for an action-free future observation latent, which is fed back to guide plan refinement. A future-guided RefineNet then applies scheduled residual updates to progressively refine a coarse semantic draft into a fine-grained latent action plan. The refined plan after K rounds is then decoded in parallel into an action chunk for low-latency execution. We further introduce Causal Refinement-Grouped Process-Reward RL to optimize the latent refinement process with rewards from longer-horizon imagined futures induced by latent plan edits. Empirical evaluations on the LIBERO benchmark demonstrate that PearlVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing methods.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Neuro-Relational Programs: Unifying Queries and Neural Computation over Structured Data

Authors:
Arie Soeteman↗Balder ten Cate↗Maurice Funk↗Benny Kimelfeld↗Carsten Lutz↗Moritz Sch\"onherr↗

arXiv:2606.11946v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The conventional approach to deep learning over relational databases applies neural models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), to a graph representation of the database. Recent approaches instead operate on databases directly, associating tuples with embeddings and extending query mechanisms to jointly process embeddings and relational content. Inspired by these developments, we introduce Neuro-Relational Programs (NRPs), a declarative query language for relational databases whose facts carry numeric vector embeddings. NRPs extend Datalog-style rules with operations that combine, aggregate, and transform embeddings, thereby interleaving relational reasoning and learnable neural components within a single formalism. This yields a general approach to neural computation over relational data: an NRP can be read both as a query plan with trainable components and as a neural architecture with relational structure built in. Natural syntactic fragments of NRPs recover existing architectures and query formalisms. Zero-ary NRPs correspond to non-adaptive query algorithms; monadic NRPs generalize GNN-style message passing and precisely capture Deep Homomorphism Networks, a connection that we extend to frontier-guarded NRPs over databases with row-ids. We characterize the expressive power of unrestricted NRPs with ReLU-FFN transformations by FOCQ, an extension of first-order logic with counting interpreted over real-weighted structures, yielding a precise connection with uniform TC$^0$ over ordered databases. Together, these results establish NRPs as a broad declarative framework for querying and neural computation over relational data.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

From Bounding Boxes to Visual Reasoning: An On-Policy Data Annotation Tool for Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Like Zhang↗Runliang Niu↗Shiqi Wang↗Xiyu Hu↗Qianli Xing↗Pan Wang↗Qingzu He↗Qi Wang↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) are rapidly advancing toward sophisticated grounded structured visual reasoning. Training models for such advanced capabilities demands a new genre of data that seamlessly unifies spatial coordinates, open-vocabulary descriptions, structured attributes, and topological relationships into a singular representation. However, existing data annotation tools fundamentally fail to meet these intricate demands, suffering from three systematic bottlenecks: limited expressiveness, severe annotation-training decoupling, and poor data reusability. To bridge this infrastructure gap, we introduce an open-source annotation tool, ScreenAnnotator. First, we define a unified annotation atom schema that binds spatial, semantic, and structural primitives into a single unit. Second, we implement an on-policy annotation loop embedded with a Bayesian Annotation Verifier (BAV). Finally, we design a template-driven multi-task data synthesis process dynamically transforms static atoms into diverse multi-dimensional reasoning tasks, eliminating redundant re-annotation. The on-policy loop drives the annotation accept rate to nearly 100% on flowcharts and 77% on GUI screenshots, while steadily reducing per-image annotation time as labeled data accumulate. In the flowchart scenario, fine-tuning a VLM yields 76.1% average accuracy, which is a 35.1% point absolute gain. Our code is available at: https://github.com/WnQinm/Annotator.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

Challenges and progress in RNA velocity: Comparative analysis across multiple biological contexts

Authors:
Sarah Ancheta↗

by Sarah Ancheta, Leah Dorman, Guillaume Le Treut, Abel Gurung, Greg Huber, Loïc A. Royer, Alejandro Granados, Merlin Lange Single-cell RNA sequencing is revolutionizing our understanding of cell state dynamics, allowing researchers to capture and quantify the transcriptomic profile of a single cell at a specific timepoint. Among the computational techniques used to predict cellular trajectories, RNA velocity has emerged as a predominant tool for modeling transcriptional dynamics. RNA velocity leverages the mRNA maturation process to generate velocity vectors that predict the likely future state of a cell, offering insights into cellular differentiation, aging, and disease progression. Although this technique has shown promise across biological fields, the performance accuracy varies depending on the RNA velocity method and dataset. We established a comparative pipeline and analyzed the performance of five RNA velocity methods on three datasets based on local consistency, method agreement, identification of driver genes, and robustness to sequencing depth. This benchmark provides a resource for scientists to understand the strengths and limitations of different RNA velocity methods.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

VideoSketcher: Sequential Sketch Generation Using Video Model Priors

Authors:
Hui Ren↗Yuval Alaluf↗Omer Bar Tal↗Alexander Schwing↗Antonio Torralba↗Yael Vinker↗

Sketching is inherently sequential: strokes are drawn progressively to explore and refine ideas. Yet most generative approaches treat sketches as static images, ignoring the temporal process underlying creative exploration. Modeling this sequential structure remains challenging: prior methods either rely on large-scale human-drawn datasets with limited diversity, or use large language models (LLMs) to produce drawing instructions, often at the cost of visual fidelity. We present VideoSketcher, a method for generating high-quality sketching processes by adapting pretrained text-to-video diffusion models to the sparse, continuous nature of sketch formation. Our key insight is that LLMs and video diffusion models offer complementary strengths: LLMs act as semantic planners that decompose concepts into step-by-step instructions, while video diffusion models serve as powerful "renderers" that translate them into temporally coherent sketch sequences. We introduce a two-stage fine-tuning strategy that decouples temporal structure from visual appearance: stroke ordering is learned from synthetic shape compositions, while style is distilled from as few as seven hand-drawn examples. Despite minimal supervision, our method can generate diverse, high-quality sequential sketches that faithfully follow specified drawing orders. Our framework naturally extends to brush style control and autoregressive generation, supporting artistic applications.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Clinical Evaluation of Automated Self-Operated Transvaginal Ultrasound for Ovarian Stimulation Monitoring

Authors:
Shavit↗Bortoletto↗Szychter↗Mendel↗Corcos↗Petrozza↗Prisant↗

Objective To evaluate the feasibility, safety, patient acceptance, and preliminary clinical relevance of automated self-operated transvaginal ultrasound for ovarian stimulation monitoring. Design Prospective observational pilot study. Subjects Ten women undergoing ovarian stimulation for in vitro fertilization or fertility preservation at a single high-volume private IVF center. Exposure Participants performed investigational self-operated transvaginal ultrasound examinations immediately following standard monitoring visits. Patients inserted and stabilized the ultrasound probe while ovarian and endometrial imaging was acquired through controlled motorized probe rotation without real-time anatomical guidance. Main Outcome Measure(s) The primary outcome was feasibility, defined as the generation of evaluable imaging datasets suitable for ovarian stimulation monitoring. Secondary outcomes included bilateral ovarian visualization, procedural safety, patient-reported outcomes, follicular assessment, and agreement of endometrial thickness measurements with standard transvaginal ultrasound. Result(s) Nineteen investigational scan attempts were performed, yielding 18 evaluable datasets (94.7%). Bilateral ovarian visualization was achieved in 16 of 18 evaluable examinations (88.9%), whereas partial ovarian visualization occurred in 2 examinations (11.1%). No adverse events, adverse device effects, vaginal injury, bleeding, or infection were observed. Patient-reported outcomes demonstrated high procedural acceptability, with all participants expressing willingness to reuse the system. Compared with standard transvaginal ultrasound monitoring, investigational self-operated acquisition significantly improved overall examination experience (Wilcoxon p=0.002). Investigational imaging demonstrated clinically relevant agreement with standard transvaginal ultrasound for follicular categorization and endometrial assessment. Counts of follicles [≥]14 mm correlated strongly with mature oocyte recovery for both investigational and standard ultrasound measurements (Spearman {rho}=0.83 and {rho}=0.80, respectively). Endometrial thickness measurements also demonstrated strong correlation between modalities (Spearman {rho}=0.91). Conclusion(s) This prospective pilot study demonstrates the feasibility of automated self-operated transvaginal ultrasound during ovarian stimulation monitoring. Investigational imaging generated clinically relevant monitoring information without observed safety concerns and was associated with high patient acceptance. These findings support further investigation of patient-operated acquisition strategies and standardized imaging workflows in reproductive medicine.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A thalamus–brainstem attractor network drives history-biased decisions

Authors:
Shan Zhao↗

Natural environments often change gradually, making it adaptive to bias decisions on the basis of the recent past — a phenomenon known as serial dependence1–3. Large-scale recordings during behaviour have identified that serial dependence is a common motif for decision-making, with neural representations of past experiences found throughout the brain4–11. However, it remains unclear whether this bias arises from dedicated neural circuits with history-specific computations. Using whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging in zebrafish performing memory-guided evasive manoeuvres12–14, we identified a hierarchical circuit that maintains past information and biases future choices. Discrete attractors in the dorsal thalamus encoded the position of the most recent obstacle, maintaining a categorical memory via persistent activity lasting 10–20 s. Optogenetic manipulation of the dorsal thalamus abolished or imposed serial bias. A downstream hindbrain integrator received input from the thalamus and combined it with current sensory cues to produce graded responses reflecting multi-trial history. Leveraging a comprehensive brain atlas in zebrafish15, we constructed a whole-brain computational model that recapitulated behaviour and also predicted a key role for heterogeneous inhibitory subtypes in enabling flexible state transitions. This attractor–integrator architecture reveals a hierarchical and modular computation that unifies robust memory retention with flexible sensory integration, providing a general principle for history-biased decisions. Whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging reveals a hierarchical thalamus–brainstem attractor network that encodes recent history and shapes behavioural bias in zebrafish.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Pathwise integration beyond Young via Faber–Schauder energy spaces

Authors:
Donghan Kim↗

arXiv:2606.13331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a pathwise integration theory based on Faber–Schauder energy spaces. The approach replaces the classical Hölder–Young and finite-variation Young conditions by dyadic summability conditions expressed in terms of Faber–Schauder coefficients. On the normalized interval $[0,1]$, these conditions define Banach spaces $\mathcal{E}^p$, which we call Faber–Schauder energy spaces. For $p,q>1$ satisfying $1/p+1/q\ge1$, we prove that every pair $f\in\mathcal{E}^p$ and $g\in\mathcal {E}^q$ admits a continuous pathwise integral $I_{f,g}$, constructed from dyadic left Riemann sums. We call $I_{f,g}$ the Faber–Schauder integral, and show that it depends boundedly and bilinearly on $(f,g)$ in the corresponding energy norms. The integral satisfies additivity, integration by parts, and a dyadic Young–Loève estimate. It is also the uniform limit of classical Riemann–Stieltjes integrals of finite Faber–Schauder approximations. The Faber–Schauder integral agrees with the classical Young integral whenever the latter is available, but also applies to deterministic and Gaussian examples for which neither the Hölder–Young condition nor the finite-variation Young condition can be verified. In this sense, it provides a Faber–Schauder coefficient-based extension of Young's framework.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

IntElicit: Eliciting and Assessing Contextualized Creativity via Dialogue Policy Optimization

Authors:
Mingjia Li↗Jin Wu↗Hong Qian↗Wenhao Huang↗Yiyang Huang↗Yiwen Zhang↗Chanjin Zheng↗Xiangfeng Wang↗Aimin Zhou↗Jiajun Guo↗

arXiv:2606.12086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextualized assessment offers high ecological validity for evaluating creativity but introduces a critical challenge: observed performance may be confounded with cognitive proficiency (domain knowledge) and agency (willingness to engage). Meanwhile, in the age of generative AI, creative problem solving increasingly occurs in tool-mediated and human–AI interactive environments, making fully static assessment less aligned with contemporary creative practice. To address these issues, this paper proposes IntElicit, a framework for eliciting and assessing contextualized creativity via dialogue policy optimization. IntElicit functions as a constrained adaptive AI Interviewer: it provides non-directive knowledge and agency scaffolds in multi-turn interaction to reduce non-creative confounders, while preserving participants' responsibility for generating the creative content being evaluated. Specifically, to tackle sparse rewards and potential reward hacking (e.g., answer dictation) in open-ended educational dialogue, IntElicit introduces a decomposed process reward mechanism. This mechanism aligns the policy with pedagogical elicitation, rewarding prompts that draw out participant reasoning rather than producing optimal answers on their behalf. Extensive experiments, including participant simulation and a human subject study (N=64), show that IntElicit improves elicited creative outcomes over expert-designed baselines. Together, the results suggest that interactive elicitation can reveal creative potential that static FPSP-style assessment may miss, providing a formative and diagnostic lens for contextualized creativity assessment in AI-mediated learning contexts.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

NoContactNoWorries: Estimating Contact through Vision and Proprioception for In-Hand Dexterous Manipulation

Authors:
Soham Patil↗Avirup Das↗Sourabh Bhosale↗Spandan Roy↗

arXiv:2606.24450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perceiving physical contact is fundamental to dexterous manipulation. While robots often rely on dedicated hardware tactile sensors, humans exhibit a remarkable ability to infer contact by integrating visual information with an innate sense of their body's pose and movement. Inspired by this embodied perceptual skill, we investigate whether a robot can learn to infer contact from vision, an approach that also offers a scalable alternative to tactile hardware specifically for binary contact estimation, which faces practical challenges in cost, fragility, and integration. We present NoContactNoWorries, a transformer-based multimodal framework that fuses RGB-D vision with the robot's proprioception to infer binary contact states as a pseudo-tactile signal for hand-object interactions. We validate by training a single contact prediction model on multiple objects and show that the inferred contact signal supports downstream reinforcement learning agents for in-hand object reorientation, generalizing to novel objects. Experiments in both simulation and on a real-world robot validate our approach, highlighting the feasibility of inferring contact from vision and proprioception. Project Page: https://soham2560.github.io/no-contact-no-worries/

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Ensemble RL through Classifier Models: Enhancing Risk-Return Trade-offs in Trading Strategies

Authors:
Zheli Xiong↗

arXiv:2502.17518v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive study on the use of ensemble Reinforcement Learning (RL) models in financial trading strategies, leveraging classifier models to enhance performance. By combining RL algorithms such as A2C, PPO, and SAC with traditional classifiers like Support Vector Machines (SVM), Decision Trees, and Logistic Regression, we investigate how different classifier groups can be integrated to improve risk-return trade-offs. The study evaluates the effectiveness of various ensemble methods, comparing them with individual RL models across key financial metrics, including Cumulative Returns, Sharpe Ratios (SR), Calmar Ratios, and Maximum Drawdown (MDD). Our original experimental results demonstrate that ensemble methods often outperform base models in terms of risk-adjusted returns, providing better management of drawdowns and overall stability. However, both the original analysis and the additional reproduction reported in this version show that ensemble performance is sensitive to the choice of variance threshold \(\tau\), classifier group, RL-agent pair, and market universe. The reproduction evidence strengthens the conclusion that classifier-assisted ensemble selection can improve robustness, while also clarifying that the advantage is conditional rather than automatic across all datasets. This study emphasizes the value of combining RL with classifiers for adaptive decision-making, with implications for financial trading, robotics, and other dynamic environments.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

A Prototypical Signature Approach for Writer-Independent Offline Signature Verification

Authors:
Kecia G. de Moura↗Robert Sabourin↗Rafael M. O. Cruz↗

Offline handwritten signature verification aims to distinguish genuine from forged signatures using static images. Since real forgeries are rarely available, negative samples are usually randomly drawn from genuine signatures of other users to create training data. However, this random selection often lacks diversity, increases redundancy, and escalates computational cost, leading to inefficient training. We propose a data-driven strategy to generate diverse, informative negative samples using prototypical signatures, which are compact, non-identifiable summaries of genuine signature features. Based on the experiments results, we conclude that (i) prototypical signatures yield more informative negative samples, improving the detection of skilled forgeries; (ii) the proposed approach is backbone-agnostic, showing robustness across architectures; and (iii) when combined with a primal-form linear SVM, it serves as an alternative to RBF-based models while significantly improving scalability and computational efficiency. Implementation of the method is available at https://github.com/kdmoura/proto_hsv.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

A Simplex Witness Certificate and Escape Force for Constant Collapse in Variational Autoencoders

Authors:
Zegu Zhang↗Jian Zhang↗

arXiv:2605.18224v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study exact constant collapse in variational autoencoders: the deterministic encoder mean becomes independent of the input. The prior remains the standard Gaussian. Before VAE training, we select a fixed teacher posterior from a GMM-based view of the data and attach a fixed latent-only simplex witness to the encoder mean. This construction yields two linked objects. The first is a certificate: if the witness prediction improves on the best constant predictor of the teacher, the encoder mean cannot be input-independent constant. The second is a local escape direction: on the collapsed manifold, the teacher residual gives a sample-dependent descent direction for the alignment loss. For any full-support teacher posterior, the same geometry also gives a closed-form latent code with zero teacher-witness alignment error. Its scaled versions trace a margin-energy path from the constant predictor to the exact teacher code, which quantifies non-collapse inside the protected witness subspace. We instantiate the method on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100. With searched unsupervised PCA-GMM teachers, vanilla VAEs fail the teacher-witness certificate in all five seeds on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, while RST variants pass in all five seeds. Under collapse-stress settings with \(\beta_{\mathrm{KL}}\in\{2,4,8\}\), vanilla VAE again fails in all seeds, whereas RST-alpha-prefit remains certificate-positive. Escape trajectories on both natural-image datasets increase the witness margin from a low-margin initialization and exhibit nonzero teacher-induced gradient norms. The analysis is confined to exact constant collapse of the encoder mean; generation quality, decoder use, and other collapse modes remain separate questions.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Deep Unfolded Latent Optimally Partitioned-l2/l1 Networks for Data-driven Block-Sparse Recovery

Authors:
Takanobu Furuhashi↗Hidekata Hontani↗Qibin Zhao↗Tatsuya Yokota↗

arXiv:2606.12740v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The convex Latent Optimal Partition (LOP)-l2/l1 approach enables block-sparse signal recovery with unknown partitions but relies on manual hyperparameter tuning. Additionally, numerical instability in differentiating its proximal operator prevents its automatic parameter tuning via Deep Unfolding (DU). To address these limitations, we propose two architectures: a stable framework utilizing implicit differentiation and a flexible variant leveraging Deep Weight Factorization (DWF). The DWF-based approach also supports nonconvex smooth data fidelity terms. Numerical experiments demonstrate that DU-LOP-l2/l1 yields competitive performance and high resilience against impulsive noise.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Q-Learning with Fine-Grained Gap-Dependent Regret

Authors:
Haochen Zhang↗Zhong Zheng↗Lingzhou Xue↗

arXiv:2510.06647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for model-free reinforcement learning in episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes. Existing model-free algorithms achieve minimax worst-case regret, but their gap-dependent bounds remain coarse and fail to fully capture the structure of suboptimality gaps. We address this limitation by establishing fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for both UCB-based and non-UCB-based algorithms. In the UCB-based setting, we develop a novel analytical framework that explicitly separates the analysis of optimal and suboptimal state-action pairs, yielding the first fine-grained regret upper bound for UCB-Hoeffding (Jin et al., 2018). To highlight the generality of this framework, we introduce ULCB-Hoeffding, a new UCB-based algorithm inspired by AMB (Xu et al.,2021) but with a simplified structure, which enjoys fine-grained regret guarantees and empirically outperforms AMB. In the non-UCB-based setting, we revisit the only known algorithm AMB, and identify two key issues in its algorithm design and analysis: improper truncation in the $Q$-updates and violation of the martingale difference condition in its concentration argument. We propose a refined version of AMB that addresses these issues, establishing the first rigorous fine-grained gap-dependent regret for a non-UCB-based method, with experiments demonstrating improved performance over AMB.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-26

Requiring code sharing to strengthen transparency and trust in research

Authors:
Helen Lumbard↗

by Helen Lumbard, Lauren Cadwallader, Devin Soper, on behalf of the PLOS Medicine Staff Editors PLOS Medicine has always championed open science and data transparency. Now, recognizing that code is as essential a research artifact as the data it analyzes, we are strengthening our code sharing policy to further ensure reproducibility and trust in the scientific record. Recognizing that code is as essential a research artifact as the data it analyzes, this Editorial outlines how PLOS Medicine is strengthening its code sharing policy to further ensure reproducibility and trust in the scientific record.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Digital Twin-Driven Adaptive Sim-to-Real Alignment via Reinforcement Learning for Vibration-Based Bearing Health Monitoring Under Data Scarcity

Authors:
Jinghan Wang↗Yanjun Chen↗Wei Zhang↗Wentao Wu↗Tianchen Liu↗Gaoliang Peng↗

Vibration-based health monitoring of rotating machinery requires reliable fault diagnosis under operational data constraints, yet condition assessment remains challenged by structural scarcity of fault events and heterogeneous sim-to-real gaps in digital twin-generated signals. Each fault type generates impulses with distinct periodicity, amplitude modulation, and spectral character, making feature-space discrepancies fundamentally heterogeneous across fault classes. Existing domain adaptation methods apply a class-agnostic global transformation that cannot close all fault-specific gaps without distorting inter-class separability, while uniform source-target mixing introduces distributional noise into the data-abundant Normal class. These limitations stem from treating a sequential, state-dependent alignment problem as a one-shot optimization. Each corrective transformation simultaneously reshapes all class distributions, creating state dependencies that static gradient descent cannot resolve. We formulate feature alignment as a continuous-action Markov decision process solved via Proximal Policy Optimization, where the learned policy issues fault-type-specific affine corrections responsive to the current feature-space configuration, with a dual-objective reward balancing gap minimization against separability preservation. An asymmetry-aware strategy reserves real data for the Normal class while augmenting fault classes with policy-aligned simulated samples. Validation across XJTU-SY, CWRU, and a self-built slewing bearing testbed confirms the dominant gain from reinforcement learning-driven alignment, and cross-equipment linear probing achieves 92.8% without encoder retraining, demonstrating transferable monitoring capability.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

The 4/$\delta$ Bound: Designing Predictable LLM-Verifier Systems for Formal Method Guarantee

Authors:
Pierre Dantas↗Lucas Cordeiro↗Youcheng Sun↗Waldir Junior↗

arXiv:2512.02080v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The integration of Formal Verification tools with Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a path to scale software verification beyond manual workflows. However, current methods remain unreliable: without a solid theoretical footing, the refinement process acts as a black box that may oscillate, loop, or diverge. This work bridges this critical gap by developing an LLM-Verifier Convergence Theorem, providing the first formal framework with provable guarantees for termination in multi-stage verification pipelines. We model the interaction not as a generic loop, but as a sequential absorbing Markov Chain comprising four essential engineering stages: \texttt{CodeGen}, \texttt{Compilation}, \texttt{InvariantSynth}, and \texttt{SMTSolving}. We prove that for any non-zero stage success probability ($\delta > 0$), the system reaches the \texttt{Verified} state almost surely. Furthermore, because of the sequential nature of the pipeline, we derive a precise latency bound of $\mathbb{E}[n] \leq 4/\delta$. We stress-tested this prediction in an extensive empirical campaign comprising over 90,000 trials. The results match the theory with striking consistency: every run reached verification, and the empirical convergence factor clustered tightly around $C_f\approx 1.0$, confirming that the $4/\delta$ bound accurately mirrors system behavior rather than serving as a loose buffer. Based on this data, we identify three distinct operating zones – marginal, practical, and high-performance – and propose a dynamic calibration strategy to handle parameter drift in real-world environments. Together, these contributions replace heuristic guesswork with a rigorous architectural foundation, enabling predictable resource planning and performance budgeting for safety-critical software.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Agents All the Way Down; A Methodology for Building Custom AI Agents from Substrate to Production

Authors:
Marc Alier Forment↗Juanan Pereira↗Francisco Jos\'e Garc\'ia-Pe\~nalvo↗Mar\'ia Jos\'e Casa\~n Guerrero↗

arXiv:2606.11869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Custom AI agents areagents that live inside their own application, talk to their own data and tools, enforce their own security boundaries, and carry their own brand and audit trail. What separates them from the general-purpose tier is fit, not capability: each is built for one job, by the engineer who will maintain it. No published practice sets out how to build one end to end. The pieces are everywhere (function-calling APIs, the Model Context Protocol, code agents to pair with), but the practice that chains them lives in podcasts, blogs, and leaked system prompts. This paper writes that practice down as a methodology, Agents All the Way Down: two preconditions crossed once and kept, then three practices repeated for the agent's life. The preconditions are (P1) Substrate, the LLM as a software component, framed as tools, then system, then messages under prompt-caching; and (P2) Building blocks: function calling, MCP, CLI orchestration, the liteshell pattern, the agent loop, skills, characters, hooks, and scaffolding. The practices are (P3) prototype with a general-purpose agent; (P4) harvest, fold, and ship the result as a CLI, the Turtle pattern; and (P5) agent-tests-agent, in which a general-purpose agent drives it through behavioural scenarios, a complement to classical testing, not a replacement. The working loop is P3 to P4 to P5 and back, and one corollary falls out for free: multi-agent orchestration is just CLI composition. The methodology is framework-free by construction. It was distilled from the AAC, a custom agent for the open-source LAMB platform, built in about ten days by one developer with an AI pair-programmer and in production . We present it as a transferable practice, independent of any language or framework.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Associations between hematologic dynamics during pregnancy and obstetric complications: A retrospective observational study

Authors:
Veronica Tozzo↗

by Veronica Tozzo, Rachel Petherbridge, Kaitlyn James, Sarah Hsu, Deepti Pant, Chloe Michalopoulos, Brody H. Foy, Tanayott Thaweethai, Christopher Mow, Jacqueline Maya, Carolina Batlle Camero, Lydia Shook, Kathryn J. Gray, Logan Mauney, John M. Higgins, Camille E. Powe Background Pregnancy alters hematologic state as measured by complete blood count (CBC), but the longitudinal changes in CBC indices that define healthy pregnancies are not well established. In a large cohort based at an academic health system in the United States, we aimed to define reference intervals and typical longitudinal changes in CBC indices during pregnancy. We then tested for associations between extreme CBC values for gestational age or extreme longitudinal changes in CBC indices and obstetric complications. Methods and findings We studied nine CBC indices in individuals with singleton pregnancies who delivered after 30 weeks’ gestation and presented for prenatal care prior to 20 weeks. The electronic health record (EHR)-based Maternal Health Cohort (Massachusetts General Hospital; 1998–2016) formed our discovery cohort of 45,992 pregnancies, 18% of which had relevant complications. We developed a validation cohort of 48,868, 27% with complications from EHR data in the Mass General Brigham healthcare system from 2016 to 2024. In pregnancies without complications in the discovery cohort, we derived gestational-age-specific reference intervals (2.5th–97.5th percentile) and established typical intra-pregnancy longitudinal changes. In the validation cohort, we then tested CBC values outside of the 26–29 weeks’ gestation reference interval and CBC rare changes (uncommon changes in magnitude and direction) between 7–14 and 26–29 weeks’ gestation for association with a composite outcome (hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, small for gestational age birthweight, preterm birth) and its individual components using generalized estimating equations. Derived reference intervals differed from those in the literature for mean red cell volume, mean red cell hemoglobin, red cell count, and mean red cell hemoglobin concentration; reference intervals for other indices were similar to those previously published. In validation, hematocrit, hemoglobin, and red cell count values above their gestational-age specific reference intervals were associated with increased risk of the composite obstetric outcome: odds ratios (ORs) of 1.4 (95% CI [1.2, 1.5] p 

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum simulation of the Liouville equation in classical mechanics with discontinuous potential via Schrödingerization

Authors:
Shi Jin↗Shuyi Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.15066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop quantum simulation algorithms for the Liouville equation of classical mechanics with discontinuous potential. Such discontinuities represent potential barriers at which classical particles undergo energy preserving transmission or reflection, and the resulting interface conditions must be incorporated into the numerical flux. We combine Hamiltonian-preserving schemes by Jin and Wen in Commun. Math. Sci. 3(3), 285-315 (2005) with the Schrödingerization method, which embeds the resulting nonunitary semi-discrete dynamics into a unitary Schrödinger type system in one additional auxiliary variable [arXiv:2212.14703, arXiv:2212.13969]. For one-, two-, and $n$-dimensional problems with grid aligned interfaces, we construct sparse matrix representations of the transmission and reflection fluxes using step and hat functions, derive the corresponding Hamiltonians of the Schrödingerized systems, and analyze their sparse-access query complexity. In the sparse-access oracle model, the resulting algorithms have a polynomial dependence on the inverse accuracy and avoid the exponential dependence on the phase-space dimension suffered by classical grid based Hamiltonian-preserving schemes, up to the cost of implementing the oracles and the postselection overhead. We also describe the postselected recovery of the physical solution state and the quantum readout of macroscopic observables such as density and averaged velocity through overlap estimation. Numerical experiments based on classical simulation of the Schrödingerized dynamics validate the proposed formulation and illustrate the correct transmission/reflection behavior at potential barriers.

Read & Discuss → View Source →