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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Qwen-RobotManip Technical Report: Alignment Unlocks Scale for Robotic Manipulation Foundation Models

Foundation models in language and multimodality achieve strong generalization by aligning heterogeneous data under a unified formulation and training at scale. In this report, we investigate whether this scaling recipe can be applied to robotic manipulation to achieve genuine generalization. This is challenging because, unlike text, manipulation data is heterogeneous by nature, expensive to collect, and narrow in diversity, making alignment and scale simultaneously difficult. We present Qwen-RobotManip, a generalizable Vision-Language-Action foundation model built on Qwen-VL. Qwen-RobotManip introduces a unified alignment framework across the representation, motion, and behavioral dimensions of manipulation, making large-scale multi-source training coherent rather than conflicting. This alignment capability in turn enables Qwen-RobotManip to absorb manipulation data at a scale that prior training regimes could not sustain. A human-to-robot synthesis pipeline converts egocentric hand demonstrations into robot trajectories across 15 platforms, and a rigorous curation pipeline harmonizes heterogeneous datasets. Using only open-source datasets and human videos without proprietary data collection, Qwen-RobotManip constructs a ~38,100-hour pretraining corpus and exhibits emergent generalization capabilities, including zero-shot instruction following, robustness to perturbations, reactive error recovery, and cross-embodiment transfer. We find that standard benchmarks fail to capture pretraining quality and instead adopt OOD settings including RoboCasa365, LIBERO-Plus, EBench, RoboTwin-Clean2Rand, RoboTwin-IF, and RoboTwin-XE. Qwen-RobotManip substantially outperforms prior state-of-the-art models, including $\pi$0.5, across all OOD settings, ranks 1st in RoboChallenge with a 20% relative improvement, and is validated on real-robot platforms including AgileX ALOHA, Franka, UR, and ARX.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Model-based inference of gene expression noise from single-cell RNA-sequencing data

The heterogeneity of expression levels among genetically identical cells, termed gene expression noise, is a property of the gene expression process whose importance in the biology of organisms and their evolution is increasingly recognized. Measuring gene expression noise requires single-cell expression data, as obtained from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNASeq). Its estimation, however, is challenging owing to (i) the presence of technical noise in addition to biological noise, and (ii) the heterogeneity of cell types in the sampled population. We propose a maximum-likelihood framework to infer biological noise from scRNASeq data, while accounting for technical noise, dropout probabilities, and distinct cell sequencing depths. We demonstrate the parameter identifiability using simulations and that the resulting noise estimates are uncorrelated from the mean gene expression, and therefore do not need extra correction in downstream analyses, easing intra- and inter- genome comparisons. Using two technical replicates of scRNASeq data from the wild yeast *Saccharomyces paradoxus*, we show that expression noise can be inferred in a reproducible manner.

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

LegalHalluLens: Typed Hallucination Auditing and Calibrated Multi-Agent Debate for Trustworthy Legal AI

AI systems deployed in legal workflows hallucinate at rates that aggregate metrics report at ~52%, but this average conceals where errors concentrate and in which direction they run, leaving compliance officers without an actionable signal for trustworthy deployment. We present LegalHalluLens, an auditing framework with three components: typed hallucination profiles across four legally-motivated claim categories (numeric, temporal, obligation/entitlement, factual) over CUAD (Hendrycks et al., 2021); a Risk Direction Index (RDI) that reduces omission-versus-invention bias to a single deployment-comparable scalar; and a typed debate pipeline calibrated to both magnitudes and directions. Across 510 contracts and 249,252 clause-level instances we measure a within-model gap of approximately 38-40 pp between obligation/numeric and temporal claims that aggregate reporting hides, and show that two systems with matched 52% rates can carry opposite RDIs. The debate pipeline reduces fabricated detections by 45% with per-category gains tracking the diagnosis, matching commercial APIs with a substantially smaller backbone (4B active parameters). Typed profiles and RDI surface failure modes that aggregate metrics hide; we further show these diagnostics serve as calibration inputs for multi-agent debate pipelines, where Skeptic challenges and asymmetric gates targeted at measured failure modes outperform generically-tuned debate. The framework supports direction-aware procurement, accountability, and agent design for legal AI deployed in the wild.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Sustainable Metal-Organic Framework Water Harvesters in the Artificial Intelligence Era

arXiv:2605.29179v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are excellent candidates for water harvesting due to their tunable pore environments, which can be precisely engineered to capture and release water in arid conditions. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into MOF discovery can further accelerate the design of high-performance sorbents by identifying structural features that enhance atmospheric water harvesting (AWH), stability, and cycling efficiency. In this Perspective, we examine key MOF design principles, including cooperative adsorption, operational relative humidity (RH), uptake capacity, hysteresis, and scalability. We highlight recent design advancements such as multivariate strategies and long-arm linker extension, and examine how these principles tune pore capacity and hydrophilicity, while preserving stability and crystallinity. Furthermore, we discuss how AI, large language models (LLMs), and data mining can accelerate the discovery process through predictive synthesis, inverse design, and elucidating synthesis-structure-property relationships for the next generation of MOF water harvesters.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models

Processing video in vision-language models is expensive: each frame occupies hundreds of tokens, and inference cost scales with every frame and every repeated query. We introduce Frames2LoRA, a method for parametric video internalization. A perceiver hypernetwork reads the intermediate representations produced layer-by-layer as a frozen VLM encodes a video, and generates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter in a single forward pass. Unlike standard LoRA fine-tuning, which requires iterative gradient updates, Frames2LoRA predicts these weights directly from the video. Trained for SmolVLM2 500M and 2.2B on video summarization and captioning, Frames2LoRA enables the same frozen VLM to answer queries from the adapter alone, with zero visual tokens in its context at query time. Frames2LoRA is statistically non-inferior and equivalent to direct video-in-context inference across all five captioning benchmarks at both model scales, and across seven of eight video question answering benchmark-scale pairings. Although trained only on 12 frames at 384px, it remains stable up to 1,024 frames and 1024px, where direct video-in-context inference often degenerates. Across this sweep, it reduces answer-time visual-token load by up to 1,500x and query TTFT by 6-80x, while preserving video-faithful outputs. We also find that independently generated adapters for non-overlapping video segments can compose in rank space, suggesting a path toward chunked long-video internalization.

06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Contour-Constrained Deformable Registration with Parameter Characterization for Head and Neck Surgical Guidance

With 890,000 annual new cases globally, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma has one of the highest recurrence rates among solid malignancies. Although frozen section analysis is the standard of care for intraoperative margin assessment, accurately relocating detected positive margins on the resection bed remains challenging due to imprecise alignment between resected specimens and their resection bed, compounded by post-resection mucosal tissue shrinkage. We present a biomechanics-driven deformable registration framework that corrects post-resection tissue deformation to provide intraoperative guidance. Our approach registers 3D specimen meshes to intraoperative resection bed point clouds using a deformable registration approach based on regularized Kelvinlet basis functions. The registration matches surface point clouds, fiducial landmarks, and boundary contour constraints that directly penalize perpendicular distance-to-agreement between specimen and resection bed boundaries. Across nine specimens from skin, buccal mucosa, and tongue sites, the overall mean target registration error was $11.11 \pm 4.07$ mm using rigid registration, which decreased to $8.20 \pm 2.68$ mm (26.19\% reduction) using deformable registration without contour constraint. The proposed contour-constrained deformable registration further reduced the error to $5.62 \pm 2.28$ mm, a 49.41\% reduction relative to rigid registration. We observed the largest reduction in the most clinically challenging tongue specimens. We also performed a systematic two-stage parameter search to characterize the relative importance of surface alignment, fiducial correspondences, contour constraint, and strain energy regularization. This search revealed that contour weighting dominates registration accuracy for tissue types with large lateral deformation, while the algorithm operates over a broad range of parameter combinations.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A theory of learning data statistics in diffusion models, from easy to hard

arXiv:2603.12901v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models, their learning dynamics remain poorly understood. We address this issue first by empirically showing that standard diffusion models trained on natural images exhibit a distributional simplicity bias, learning simple, pair-wise input statistics before specializing to higher-order correlations. We reproduce this behaviour in simple denoisers trained on a minimal data model, the mixed cumulant model, where we precisely control both pair-wise and higher-order correlations of the inputs. We identify a scalar invariant of the model that governs the sample complexity of learning pair-wise and higher-order correlations that we call the diffusion information exponent, in analogy to related invariants in different learning paradigms. Using this invariant, we prove that the denoiser learns simple, pair-wise statistics of the inputs at linear sample complexity, while more complex higher-order statistics, such as the fourth cumulant, require at least cubic sample complexity. We also prove that the sample complexity of learning the fourth cumulant is linear if pair-wise and higher-order statistics share a correlated latent structure. Our work describes a key mechanism for how diffusion models can learn distributions of increasing complexity.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Stable, bidirectional electro-optic transduction in thin film lithium tantalate

arXiv:2606.12726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient and stable microwave-optical transduction is a key enabling technology for distributed superconducting quantum computing and heterogeneous quantum networks. Electro-optic transducers based on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) have shown strong promise, but demonstrations to date have been limited by various factors such as low frequency bias drift, low efficiency, fabrication complexity, and scalability. Here we demonstrate the first integrated electro-optic microwave-optical transducers realized in thin-film lithium tantalate (TFLT), a material platform offering Pockels nonlinearity comparable to TFLN together with improved bias stability and high-power handling. We fabricate superconducting microwave resonators coupled to tunable photonic-molecule optical resonators using wafer-scale deep ultraviolet lithography, offering high-throughput production of hundreds of devices per wafer. Across six devices we observe coherent bidirectional conversion between C-band optical photons and 4.9-5.5 GHz microwave photons, with measured on-chip efficiencies and inferred single-photon coupling rates g_0/2{\pi} ~ 1 kHz consistent with theory. Continuous operation over multiple days is achieved using a static bias field with minimal feedback, demonstrating a major operational advantage. We further characterize optical loss statistics, microwave resonator performance, and optically induced added noise under pulsed pumping, finding less than one added photon for 100 microsecond pulses at the highest measured efficiencies. These results establish TFLT as a scalable and robust electro-optic platform for future quantum interconnects and modular quantum processors.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Light-induced nonadiabatic dissipative quantum dynamics of the Na2 molecule

arXiv:2606.15292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Strong light-matter coupling between molecules and optical or plasmonic cavity modes has emerged as a promising platform for advancing photonics, materials science, and chemistry. However, optical cavities and plasmonic resonators in particular are inherently lossy systems characterized by finite photon lifetimes. Accurate theoretical descriptions of molecular dynamics under strong coupling therefore require a proper treatment of cavity losses. In this work, we compare three theoretical approaches for modeling dissipative molecule-cavity dynamics within a realistic parameter regime: the Lindblad master equation, the stochastic Schrödinger equation, and the non-Hermitian Schrödinger equation. As an example, we consider the two lowest energy state of Na2 molecule coupled to a cavity mode and analyze the time evolution of the excited-state population and the mean photon number. Our results demonstrate that the stochastic Schrödinger equation provides an accurate and computationally efficient alternative to the Lindblad master equation, while the non-Hermitian Schrödinger approach is found to be applicable only within a limited range of conditions. Furthermore, we show that inclusion of molecular rotation leads to rotational-vibrational-photonic coupling and gives rise to pronounced nonadiabatic dynamics through light-induced conical intersections. These findings highlight the importance of both dissipation and rotational degrees of freedom for a realistic description of molecular dynamics in strongly coupled molecule-cavity systems.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Structural variant discovery and diagnostic impact in rare diseases from short-read and long-read sequencing

Rare diseases collectively affect 1 in 10 individuals, yet current genetic testing fails to identify a causal variant for most cases. At present, cytogenetic methods and/or sequencing approaches such as exome (ES) or short-read genome sequencing (srGS) represent the state-of-the-art for comprehensive clinical discovery of sequence and structural variants (SVs), including copy number variants, balanced SVs, complex SVs, and tandem repeats (TRs). Recently, long-read genome sequencing (lrGS), coupled with multiomics data, has presented great promise to resolve variation in genomic regions recalcitrant to characterization by srGS such as highly repetitive simple repeat sequences and segmental duplications. However, there are few guidelines to enable clinical interpretation of genetic variation in these highly repetitive genomic regions, and the enthusiasm of the field in adopting lrGS has made it difficult to assess the true added diagnostic yield of this technology due to widely variable and inconsistently applied analytic pipelines and variable degrees of pre-screening by ES or srGS. Here, we investigated the contribution of SVs to rare diseases using srGS as a front-line strategy when paired with highly sensitive SV discovery and evaluate the added diagnostic yield of incorporating lrGS for a subset of cases. Our srGS analysis encompassed 1,462 families (3,450 individuals) recruited through the Broad Institute Center for Mendelian Genetics and the Genomics Research to Elucidate the Genetics of Rare Diseases (GREGoR) programs. Diagnostic SVs were identified in 5.4% of cases (79/1,462), of which 80% were uniquely detectable by srGS compared to standard cytogenetic techniques. For 96 families (including 10 families with a heterozygous variant observed in a known recessive gene of clinical relevance), we performed lrGS with methylation profiling, as well as long-read transcriptomic analyses in a subset of 20 trios. Analyses with lrGS yielded over 25,000 SVs per genome, 63% of which were not captured by srGS, along with an additional ~200 rare SNV/indels per genome not previously captured and 12 differentially methylated regions per genome. Among these, we identified only one diagnostic variant not interpreted by srGS, an apparently mosaic de novo SNV in CASK that was absent in the srGS callset due to allelic imbalance. No new diagnoses were supported by long-read transcriptomics or episignatures. In this well characterized rare disease cohort, the added diagnostic yield was thus 1.04% (1/96 families). Following a systematic literature review of prior lrGS studies, we find that most reported diagnoses were detectable by srGS and that our added diagnostic yield is consistent with those prior studies. These studies emphasize the significant impact of comprehensive SV discovery in rare disease cases and further demonstrate the power for increased discovery of novel genomic variation and episignatures from lrGS. Nonetheless, they also serve to temper expectations of dramatic diagnostic advances in rare disease patients until there is more extensive annotation of the functional and clinical impact of all coding and noncoding variation uniquely accessible to lrGS with extensive reference databases spanning highly repetitive genomic sequencing that could be enabled by this transformative technology.

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

Federated Causal Inference from Multi-Site Observational Data via Propensity Score Aggregation

arXiv:2505.17961v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Causal inference typically assumes centralized access to individual-level data. Yet, in practice, data are often decentralized across multiple sites, making centralization infeasible due to privacy, logistical, or legal constraints. We address this problem by estimating the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) from decentralized observational data via a Federated Learning (FL) approach, allowing inference through the exchange of aggregate statistics rather than individual-level data. We propose a novel method to estimate propensity scores via a federated weighted average of local scores using Membership Weights (MW), defined as probabilities of site membership conditional on covariates. MW can be flexibly estimated with parametric or non-parametric classification models using standard FL algorithms. The resulting propensity scores are used to construct Federated Inverse Propensity Weighting (Fed-IPW) and Augmented IPW (Fed-AIPW) estimators. In contrast to meta-analysis methods, which fail when any site violates positivity, our approach exploits heterogeneity in treatment assignment across sites to improve overlap. We show that Fed-IPW and Fed-AIPW perform well under site-level heterogeneity in sample sizes, treatment mechanisms, and covariate distributions. Theoretical analysis and experiments on simulated and real-world data demonstrate clear advantages over meta-analysis and related approaches.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Red-Teaming Agent Execution Contexts: Open-World Security Evaluation on OpenClaw

arXiv:2605.11047v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic language-model systems increasingly rely on mutable execution contexts, including files, memory, tools, skills, and auxiliary artifacts, creating security risks beyond explicit user prompts. This paper presents DeepTrap, an automated framework for discovering contextual vulnerabilities in OpenClaw. DeepTrap formulates adversarial context manipulation as a black-box trajectory-level optimization problem that balances risk realization, benign-task preservation, and stealth. It combines risk-conditioned evaluation, multi-objective trajectory scoring, reward-guided beam search, and reflection-based deep probing to identify high-value compromised contexts. We construct a 42-case benchmark spanning six vulnerability classes and seven operational scenarios, and evaluate nine target models using attack and utility grading scores. Results show that contextual compromise can induce substantial unsafe behavior while preserving user-facing task completion, demonstrating that final-response evaluation is insufficient. The findings highlight the need for execution-centric security evaluation of agentic AI systems. Our code is released at: https://github.com/ZJUICSR/DeepTrap

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Readout-Induced Leakage in Superconducting Circuits with Nonlinear Couplings

arXiv:2606.16055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In superconducting circuits, drive-induced unwanted transitions limit the readout power, thereby constraining readout speed and fidelity. When such transitions excite the qubit into leakage states, they produce correlated errors that are particularly harmful for quantum error correction. Native nonlinear qubit-readout resonator coupling is a promising alternative to conventional linear hybridization because it provides intrinsic Purcell protection and stricter selection rules for multiphoton processes. In realistic devices, however, we show that such a coupling alone neither eliminates nor necessarily suppresses drive-induced transitions. Instead, if not appropriately engineered, these couplings often worsen the situation by introducing additional parasitic processes. Moreover, the rates of these unwanted transitions remain sensitive to the choice of readout frequency, regardless of the coupling mechanism. We demonstrate that readout-induced leakage can thus vary by orders of magnitude even when readout frequencies differ by less than ~7%. Our results establish that the benefits of native nonlinear couplings are realized only through informed device design, including the spectral placement of relevant auxiliary modes and elimination of parasitic ones.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AP-GRPO: Anchor-Gated Phonetic Alignment with Policy Optimization for Pathological Speech Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.15540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pathological speech from patients with neurodegenerative and neuromotor disorders is often acoustically distorted and linguistically fragmented, making pathological speech reconstruction necessary to recover intended textual content from distorted and incomplete speech recordings. Crucially, such recordings are rarely uniformly degraded: some words or short phrases remain reliable and can serve as audible anchors for reconstructing the corrupted surrounding content. We introduce Anchor-gated Phonetic Group Relative Policy Optimization (AP-GRPO), a GRPO framework with phonetic reward that aligns speech language models (SLMs) through audible-anchor preservation and inter-anchor phonetic compatibility to the original speech signal. AP-GRPO consists of: (i) an anchor-gated reward that matches reliable audible anchors in clear regions; and (ii) an inter-anchor phonetic alignment reward that evaluates whether recovered contents are phonetically supported by the corresponding corrupted inter-anchor speech span. Across four disease conditions, AP-GRPO improves faithful speech reconstruction, and the learned anchor constraint automatically adapts to each condition and thus reveals interpretable disease-specific profiles: conditions with severe articulatory degradation require stronger anchor enforcement, whereas milder impairment or linguistically impaired conditions rely more on phonetic alignment for inter-anchor recovery.

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

Cross-modal Identity Mapping: Minimizing Information Loss in Modality Conversion via Reinforcement Learning

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often omit or misrepresent critical visual content in generated image captions. Minimizing such information loss will force LVLMs to focus on image details to generate precise descriptions. However, measuring information loss during modality conversion is inherently challenging due to the modal gap between visual content and text output. In this paper, we argue that the quality of an image caption is positively correlated with the similarity between images retrieved via text search using that caption. Based on this insight, we further propose Cross-modal Identity Mapping (CIM), a reinforcement learning framework that enhances image captioning without requiring additional annotations. Specifically, the method quantitatively evaluates the information loss from two perspectives: Gallery Representation Consistency and Query-gallery Image Relevance. Supervised under these metrics, LVLM minimizes information loss and aims to achieve identity mapping from images to captions. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method in image captioning, even when compared with Supervised Fine-Tuning. Particularly, on the COCO-LN500 benchmark, CIM achieves a 20% improvement in relation reasoning on Qwen2.5-VL-7B.

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

PANDA: An LLM-Enhanced Performance-Driven Analog Design Framework Bridging Design Intent and Layout Generation

arXiv:2606.15052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional design of analog circuits heavily relies on manual interventions across topology, sizing, and layout, with prior automation addressing stages in isolation. In this work, we propose PANDA, an LLM-enhanced framework that bridges high-level design intent to final layout by actively managing cross-stage dependencies through guided topology synthesis, substructure-aware sizing, and constraint-driven layout generation. This shifts automation from algorithm-centric execution to intent-centric co-design, reducing turnaround time from days or weeks to hours while improving design performance.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Sovereign Execution Brokers: Enforcing Certificate-Bound Authority in Agentic Control Planes

arXiv:2606.20520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous agents are increasingly connected to cloud, deployment, and data-control workflows, but production mutation authority should not reside inside non-deterministic reasoning processes. Existing access-control mechanisms authorize identities, while assurance layers certify proposed actions; neither alone provides a mandatory enforcement point for certified authority at the moment of mutation. This paper introduces the Sovereign Execution Broker (SEB), a runtime enforcement boundary for certificate-bound agentic infrastructure. SEB consumes certificates issued by the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), verifies that the requested mutation matches the certified execution contract, checks validity windows, policy epochs, revocation epochs, and live-state drift, mints scoped execution identity, invokes infrastructure APIs, and records signed decision and outcome records. By separating proposal, admission, and execution, SEB turns certified authority into a short-lived, revocable, auditable runtime capability, provided that production mutation APIs reject non-broker identities. We present the SEB execution model, certificate and replay-verification predicates, scoped identity semantics, bypass-prevention deployment patterns, failure behavior, and a concrete prototype implementation. We evaluate the prototype on AWS and Kubernetes clusters, measuring latency overheads, revocation propagation, drift detection, and security under fault injection.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Context-Aware Multimodal Claim Verification in Spoken Dialogues

Every day, millions absorb claims from podcasts and streams that no fact-checker ever sees. Spoken misinformation is built through conversation, where credibility comes not from facts alone but from how claims are framed, reinforced, or left unchallenged across turns. Yet fact-checking has focused on isolated text, leaving dialogue audio under-studied. We introduce MAD2, a new Multi-turn Audio Dialogues benchmark for spoken claim verification, containing 1,000 two-speaker dialogues with 3,368 check-worthy claims and approximately 10 hours of audio, and propose calibrated multimodal fusion of a context-aware audio encoder and a dialogue-aware text model. Across settings, adding dialogue context improves verification, but the gains depend on scenario type. Using only preceding context often matches offline performance, supporting live-moderation settings, and audio contributes most when transcript-based models are destabilized by additional context. Overall, conversational structure matters more for verification than misinformation framing.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

ECG-Guided Pre-Screening of Family Members for Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

Background: Current clinical guidelines recommend serial ECG and echocardiographic surveillance for first-degree relatives of probands with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM). Objectives: To evaluate the accuracy and validity of ECG alone as a pre-screening tool for the diagnosis of HCM and to develop a random forest (RF) model for HCM phenotype prediction. Method: Pediatric relatives of primary HCM probands attending the cardiomyopathy screening program at The Hospital for Sick Children were included from 1993 to 2025. Subjects were followed until the last follow-up, censored at phenotype conversion. ECGs were classified as normal or abnormal based on predefined parameters. Associations between binary ECG variables and HCM phenotype were assessed using Phi ({varphi}) coefficient. A Random Forest classifier was developed using significant ECG variables (70:30 training: test split) and evaluated using precision, recall, specificity, negative predictive value, F1 score and AUROC. Feature importance was assessed using SHAP analysis. Variables with an impact of >5% were included in a simplified model, which was evaluated by repeating performance metrics and externally validated in a healthy cohort. Results: 350 screened relatives (44% female, mean follow-up 6.8 +- 4.8 years) were included. At baseline, 13% (46350) were phenotype-positive for HCM. 9 subjects converted during the surveillance. Thirteen ECG variables were significantly associated with phenotype-positive HCM and were included in the full random forest model. Four variables had >5% impact (Left ventricular hypertrophy, right ventricular hypertrophy, T-wave inversion and ST-segment depression) and were included in a simplified model, which maintained high specificity (93% vs 97%), negative predictive value (97% vs 93%) and AUROC (90% vs 96%). The simplified model classified 83% subjects as phenotype-negative, with eight being false-negative, all of whom developed an abnormal ECG in a mean of 1 year, and none had an interim adverse cardiac event. The simplified model was evaluated in an independent healthy cohort of 153 school-age subjects and correctly identified 98% as phenotype-negative with 100% NPV. Conclusion: ECG abnormalities were strongly associated with phenotype-positive status. A simplified ECG-based random forest model using four ECG variables demonstrated high specificity and negative predictive value for identifying phenotype-negative subjects. If prospectively validated, this could reduce the need for concurrent echocardiographic screening by up to 83% per encounter, lowering screening burden and cost.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

External Validation and Calibration Assessment of Explainable Machine Learning Models for GVHD Prediction After Allogeneic HSCT

Background Graft versus host disease (GVHD) remains a major determinant of morbidity and mortality following allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo HSCT). Existing GVHD prediction models demonstrate modest discrimination and limited generalizability, and calibration drift across external populations is rarely characterized despite its essential role in the clinical interpretability of predicted probabilities. Objectives To develop and externally validate an explainable machine learning framework for predicting acute and chronic GVHD and associated overall survival in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) undergoing allo HSCT, and to systematically characterize calibration across heterogeneous external validation cohorts to inform deployment requirements. Study Design The model was developed on three publicly available registry-derived datasets (N = 2,509) and externally validated across six independent cohorts (N = 14,788) comprising adult and pediatric allo HSCT recipients, including a regional Middle Eastern cohort (UAE and Jordan). A standardized preprocessing pipeline harmonized heterogeneous datasets. Gradient boosting models (CatBoost) were used for binary GVHD prediction; exploratory overall survival analysis used a Cox proportional hazards model with predicted acute GVHD risk as a covariate. Discrimination (AUROC with bootstrap 95% CI), calibration (logistic recalibration intercept and slope with analytical 95% CI), and feature importance (SHapley Additive exPlanations, SHAP) were assessed in training out-of-fold and all external cohorts. Results In internal validation, AUROC was 0.63 (95% CI 0.61-0.65) for acute GVHD and 0.72 (95% CI 0.70-0.74) for chronic GVHD. External validation demonstrated AUROC ranges of 0.51-0.57 (acute) and 0.54-0.64 (chronic), with consistent performance across disease subgroups despite substantial heterogeneity in transplant practices and feature availability. In exploratory survival analysis, the acute-GVHD-informed Cox model achieved a training-cohort C-index of 0.679 (95% CI 0.658-0.697); external C-indices ranged from 0.47-0.53. Calibration analysis identified systematic external risk overestimation (negative calibration intercept in 10 of 11 evaluable external cohort-target combinations) with heterogeneous slope drift requiring cohort-specific recalibration. Key predictors included recipient age, graft source, conditioning intensity, GVHD prophylaxis, and HLA match ratio. Conclusions An explainable, externally validated GVHD prediction framework was developed using heterogeneous registry-derived datasets, with systematic characterization of calibration drift across multiple external cohorts, an analysis rarely reported in prior GVHD prediction literature. Predictive performance was modest for acute GVHD and moderate for chronic GVHD, constrained by missing immunobiological variables and incomplete HLA characterization. Per-cohort recalibration is required before clinical deployment, with prospective validation and benchmarking against established GVHD risk scores identified as priority next steps.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Motion-Focused Latent Action Enables Cross-Embodiment VLA Training from Human EgoVideos

Training generalist Vision-Language-Action(VLA) models typically requires massive, diverse robotic datasets with high-fidelity action annotations. While egocentric human manipulation videos are abundant and capture significant environmental diversity, the absence of action labels makes them difficult to use in conventional training paradigms. To address this, we propose a latent-action-based framework designed to extract general action priors from unlabeled human videos. The architecture features a Hybrid Disentangled VQ-VAE that decouples motion dynamics from environmental backgrounds through physical masks, enabling the construction of a cross-embodiment action codebook. By pre-training on human videos with the codebook, the VLM backbone learns deep representations of action intent. For adaptation to specific embodiments, we introduce an intent-perception decoupling strategy where the VLM predicts the action intent while a separate frozen visual encoder provides state-specific features to the action expert, thereby reducing action hallucinations. Results in simulation and real-world environments show that our method, pre-trained exclusively on unlabeled human videos, performs competitively with state-of-the-art VLA models trained on massive annotated datasets, requiring only 50 trajectories for downstream adaptation.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

More Skills, Worse Agents? Skill Shadowing Degrades Performance When Expanding Skill Libraries

arXiv:2605.24050v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Skill libraries allow LLM agents to load task-specific instructions on demand, letting non-expert users solve domain-specific tasks through natural language without knowing which skills exist or how they work. However, performance degrades as libraries grow – by up to 21\% when scaling from a small set of helpful skills to a 202-skill library. In this work, we formulate this performance degradation as the pass rate drop between loading a library of known-helpful skills and the full library. Moreover, we propose to decompose the pass rate drop by conditioning on the skill(s) invocation – which skills the agent selects during a trajectory – into two effects: skill shadowing, where the agent selects wrong skills more often as the library expands, and context overhead, where the enlarged context degrades execution even when selection is correct. We derive upper bounds on both effects to characterize their magnitudes of impacts to the pass rate drop. Our empirical estimates of the effects and their upper bounds both show that the skill shadowing effect grows with library size and significantly contributes to the performance degradation, whereas the context overhead effect remains small and indistinguishable from zero. This observed asymmetry establishes that the skill selection failure, not the enlarged context, is the primary bottleneck when expanding the skill libraries.

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

PearlVLA: Progressive Embodied Action-Plan Refinement in Latent Space

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.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Know Thy Reasoner: Not All Language Models Explore Alike

arXiv:2604.10827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Compute scaling for LLM reasoning trades off exploring solution approaches (breadth) against refining promising ones (depth), yet why a given trade-off works, and why it often fails to transfer across models, remains unclear. We argue that the optimal strategy depends on the model's diversity profile, the spread of probability mass across solution approaches, and that this must be characterized before any exploration strategy is adopted. We formalize this with a framework decomposing reasoning uncertainty, deriving when depth-based refinement outperforms parallel sampling, and validate it across three model families at both inference and training. Our central finding is that the diversity regime dictates the strategy: low-diversity aligned models benefit from depth-based refinement with lightweight intrinsic signals, whereas high-diversity base models are often harmed by it, and instead need breadth or stronger signals to compensate.