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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Non-invasive Detection of Fasciculation Using Surface EMG with a Wavelet-Based Analytical Method (DEWCS)

Objective: Needle electromyography (nEMG) is essential for diagnosing neuromuscular disorders but is invasive and often painful. We employed single-channel bipolar surface EMG (sEMG) analyzed with a novel wavelet-based analytical approach, Detecting and Extracting Elemental Wave Components based on a Wavelet Coefficient Set (DEWCS) and investigated whether fasciculation-related activity could be identified. Methods: In this prospective study, 28 patients undergoing nEMG for suspected neuromuscular disorders and 13 healthy controls were included. Resting-state sEMG was recorded from selected muscles using single-channel bipolar active electrodes at a high sampling rate. DEWCS was used to extract indices reflecting fast- and slow-type motor unit (MU)-related activity. These standardized indices were evaluated against nEMG-detected fasciculation potentials using generalized estimating equation logistic regression to account for within-subject clustering. Diagnostic performance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results: A total of 67 muscles from 38 participants were analyzed. Indices of fast- and slow-type MU-related activity were significantly associated with fasciculation potentials (slow: OR 5.10, p = 0.0041; fast: OR 2.38, p = 0.0162). The combined model showed excellent discrimination (area under the curve = 0.97), outperforming either index alone. Muscle region had no significant effect. Conclusions: A single-channel bipolar sEMG setup combined with DEWCS detected fasciculation-related activity with promising accuracy. This method may serve as a non-invasive surrogate marker of lower motor neuron involvement. Further validation in larger cohorts is warranted. Significance: This non-invasive sEMG approach may help detect fasciculation-related activity and complement nEMG in neuromuscular diagnostics.

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

Power Term Polynomial Algebra for Boolean Logic

arXiv:2603.13854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce power term polynomial algebra, a representation language for Boolean formulae designed to bridge conjunctive normal form (CNF) and algebraic normal form (ANF). The language is motivated by the tiling mismatch between these representations: direct CNFANF conversion may cause exponential blowup unless formulas are decomposed into smaller fragments, typically through auxiliary variables and side constraints. In contrast, our framework addresses this mismatch within the representation itself, compactly encoding structured families of monomials while representing CNF clauses directly, thereby avoiding auxiliary variables and constraints at the abstraction level. We formalize the language through power terms and power term polynomials, define their semantics, and show that they admit algebraic operations corresponding to Boolean polynomial addition and multiplication. We prove several key properties of the language: disjunctive clauses admit compact canonical representations; power terms support local shortening and expansion rewrite rules; and products of atomic terms can be systematically rewritten within the language. Together, these results yield a symbolic calculus that enables direct manipulation of formulas without expanding them into ordinary ANF. The resulting framework provides a new intermediate representation and rewriting calculus that bridges clause-based and algebraic reasoning and suggests new directions for structure-aware CNFANF conversion and hybrid reasoning methods.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DyMoTree decodes early cell state transitions and drivers from single-cell transcriptomes using a tree-structured neural network

Inferring early cell fate from single-cell RNA-sequencing data is essential for identifying cellular origins and fate plasticity in development and disease. However, existing methods often fail to exploit tree-structured lineage trajectories, limiting the accuracy and interpretability of fate mapping. Here we present DyMoTree, a computational framework that models cell fate decisions as nonlinear mappings between progenitor and terminal cell states under explicit lineage constraints. By integrating lineage graphs with a tree-structured neural architecture, DyMoTree learns lineage-resolved cell-state transition maps from single-cell transcriptomes, enabling robust inference of early fate bias and identification of fate-specific progenitor substates and driver genes. Across simulations, lineage-tracing experiments, and in vivo systems, DyMoTree outperformed existing methods in resolving early fate biases. Applications to mouse embryogenesis, lung adenocarcinoma progression, and CAR-T immunotherapy revealed regulatory programs underlying developmental and disease-associated transitions. DyMoTree provides a general framework for modeling lineage-resolved cell-state dynamics underlying development and disease progression.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Discovering Novel intracranial EEG Biomarkers of Seizure Generating Tissue through Time-Frequency Analysis

Objective: EEG biomarkers for seizure-generating tissue have historically been identified visually, which lacks objectivity and limits utility of automated approaches. For example, high frequency oscillations and interictal epileptiform discharges were promising markers to improve surgical outcomes for refractory epilepsy, but low specificity has hindered clinical implementation, and automated algorithms have not improved this. Methods: We developed Intracranial EEG Pattern Identification and Categorization, an automated, data-driven time-frequency framework for EEG biomarker discovery. It detects transient high-power intracranial EEG waveforms (1-500 Hz) and characterizes them using eight features. In seizure-free patients, waveforms occurring predominantly in resected intracranial EEG channels are candidate biomarkers. Results: In retrospective data from 14 seizure-free post-surgical patients from University of California, Los Angeles, we identified 9 waveform categories strongly associated with resected intracranial EEG channels. These included beta, gamma, and ripple band bursts, sometimes co-occurring with interictal epileptiform discharges; however, many were visually imperceptible in the broadband EEG. Using a support vector machine, we generated a unified classification metric based on these waveforms and tested it on 87 seizure-free subjects from Detroit Medical Center. This metric achieved higher area under the precision-recall curve than six state-of-the-art benchmark algorithms (p

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SPI: Query-Depth-Adaptive Indexing for Streaming RAG in Vector Databases

Vector databases (VecDBs) are increasingly deployed in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines where query processing and document ingestion occur concurrently. The index layer needs to provide low-latency search while incorporating new vectors without frequent global rebuilding. Existing VecDB pipelines typically operate within a uniform representation regime, despite substantial variation in the semantic granularity required across queries. This motivates an index design that supports incremental updates while adapting retrieval depth to query distribution and complexity. We propose Semantic Pyramid Indexing (SPI), a VecDB-layer indexing framework that organizes embeddings into $L$ semantically aligned resolution levels and selects retrieval depth per query via a lightweight uncertainty-aware controller. SPI supports progressive coarse-to-fine ANN search, level-wise streaming insertion without global rebuilds, and distributed execution through LSH partitioning with asynchronous gRPC coordination. Unlike hierarchical ANN structures with fixed traversal rules (e.g., SPANN), SPI adapts resolution at query time while remaining compatible with FAISS and Qdrant backends. On MS MARCO and Natural Questions, SPI achieves competitive Recall@10 with lower latency under the same dense encoder family, yielding a 1.4–2.3$\times$ average retrieval latency reduction under fixed Recall@10 targets relative to comparable approximate-ANN baselines. A prototype scaling study up to 8 nodes shows $6.2\times$ throughput scaling (${\approx}73\%$ efficiency); the 16-node configuration is included for completeness but shows diminishing efficiency. We provide a top-$K$ stability guarantee: queries with sufficient retrieval margin return an identical top-$K$ set at a shallower level. Code and configurations are available at https://github.com/FastLM/SPI_VecDB.

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

Learning What to Predict: Downstream-Guided Task Design for Continued Pretraining

arXiv:2601.22108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continued pretraining is optimized with fixed self-supervised tasks but selected by downstream performance, creating a coarse feedback loop in which practitioners evaluate checkpoints, change data mixtures or objectives, and restart runs, while individual updates remain blind to target capabilities. We ask whether a small set of verifiable downstream examples can provide step-level feedback without directly supervising the learner. We introduce V-pretraining, which decouples a learner trained only with a self-supervised loss from a lightweight task designer that constructs targets or views for unlabeled batches. Given the current learner and batch, V-pretraining scores a candidate construction by predicting the first-order reduction in downstream loss after the induced self-supervised update. The designer maximizes this value; the learner then applies the update with targets or views detached, so downstream labels never update learner parameters. We instantiate V-pretraining as adaptive top-K soft targets for language modeling and learned views or masks for self-supervised vision. Across both modalities, V-pretraining improves target capabilities without degrading generalization. Under wall-clock-matched continued pretraining, it improves GSM8K Pass@1 for Qwen models using 1,024 GSM8K examples only as feedback, including a +7.4 point single-run gain for Qwen2.5-0.5B. In vision, it improves DINOv3 transfer to ADE20K semantic segmentation and NYUv2 depth estimation while preserving ImageNet linear accuracy, suggesting that feedback-guided task construction can improve target capabilities without collapsing general-purpose representations.

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

Spherical-to-ERP Epipolar Rectification for Single-Axis Disparity in 360 Stereo

Omnidirectional stereo images provide full-surround perception but violate the geometric assumptions of classical disparity estimation: in spherical or fisheye views, epipolar correspondences follow curved great-circle paths, producing two-dimensional displacements that cannot be treated as single-axis disparity before geometric rectification. In this work, we adopt a standard spherical-to-equirectangular (ERP) projection as a preprocessing step, which straightens epipolar curves and restores a one-dimensional disparity structure - horizontal for left-right rigs and vertical for top-bottom rigs. Building on our previously introduced RAFT + Epipolar-Aligned Channel Selection (EACS) framework, originally developed for rectilinear and ERP stereo, we examine whether the same modular pipeline remains accurate when the input originates from spherical stereo imagery. After ERP projection, dense optical flow from RAFT is reduced to disparity by retaining only the baseline-aligned flow component. Experiments on synthetic fisheye stereo datasets show that this spherical-to-ERP-to-RAFT+EACS pipeline produces accurate, smooth, and structurally consistent disparity maps at real-time speed. These findings confirm that established ERP preprocessing can be effectively combined with our earlier RAFT+EACS method to enable practical, interpretable, and efficient disparity estimation from spherical stereo, providing a straightforward pathway for extending conventional stereo pipelines to 360 imaging.

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

Boosting Text-Driven Video Segmentation via Geometry-Aware Distillation

Text-driven Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to locate and segment target objects in videos given natural language. However, existing models are typically trained on 2D image or video datasets with naive segmentation losses, which overlooks the geometric consistency across frames and leads to weak spatial understanding. In this paper, we propose Geometry-enhanced Language-guided Video segmentation (GeoLaV), a two-stage framework that distills 3D geometric knowledge from images to enhance text-driven video segmentation. In the first stage, we perform monocular geometry pretraining with monocular novel-view synthesis, enabling the model to acquire geometry-consistent visual representations via spatial alignment on large-scale single-image datasets. In the second stage, we introduce geometry-aware distillation and fine-tune the model on video segmentation datasets, transferring 3D structural knowledge from a general 3D prior model. This process reinforces 3D awareness and improves both spatiotemporal coherence and language grounding in segmentation. Extensive experiments show that our method using only image segmentation data already provides notable zero-shot generalization in RVOS. When combined with geometry-aware distillation for fine-tuning on videos, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple RVOS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Tony1882880/GeoLaV.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Self-Supervised Learning as Discrete Communication

Most self-supervised learning (SSL) methods learn continuous visual representations by aligning different views of the same input, offering limited control over how information is structured across representation dimensions. In this work, we frame visual self-supervised learning as a discrete communication process between a teacher and a student network, where semantic information is transmitted through a fixed-capacity binary channel. Rather than aligning continuous features, the student predicts multi-label binary messages produced by the teacher. Discrete agreement is enforced through an element-wise binary cross-entropy objective, while a coding-rate regularization term encourages effective utilization of the constrained channel, promoting structured representations. We further show that periodically reinitializing the projection head strengthens this effect by encouraging embeddings that remain predictive across multiple discrete encodings. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over continuous agreement baselines on image classification, retrieval, and dense visual prediction tasks, as well as under domain shift through self-supervised adaptation. Beyond backbone representations, we analyze the learned binary codes and show that they form a compact and informative discrete language, capturing semantic factors reusable across classes.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Conditional channel entropy sets fundamental limits on thermodynamic quantum information processing

arXiv:2604.01217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The thermodynamic resourcefulness of quantum channels primarily depends on their underlying causal structure and their ability to generate quantum correlations. We quantify this interplay within the resource theory of athermality for bipartite quantum channels in the presence of a side channel acting as memory, referred to as the resource theory of conditional athermality. For channels with trivial output Hamiltonians, we characterize the optimal one-shot rates for distilling the identity gate from a given channel, as well as the cost of simulating the channel using the identity gate, under conditional Gibbs-preserving superchannels. We show that these rates have a direct trade-off relation with the conditional channel entropies, attributing operational significance to signaling in quantum processes. Furthermore, we establish an asymptotic equipartition property for the conditional channel min-entropy for classes of channels that are either tele-covariant or no-signaling from the non-conditioning input to the conditioning output. As a consequence, we demonstrate asymptotic reversibility of the resource theory for these channels. The asymptotic conditional athermality capacity of a tele-covariant channel is half the superdense coding capacity of its Choi state. Our work establishes the conditional channel entropy as a primitive information-theoretic concept for quantum processes, elucidating its potential for wider applications in quantum information science.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Drug-Prot: A query system for statistical inference of drug effects and interactions in dynamic proteomic networks

Understanding drug effects and drug-drug interactions is essential for developing combination therapies. We present Drug-Prot, a computational framework that leverages large-scale perturbation proteomics to quantify causal drug effects, drug-drug interactions, and dynamic protein relationships. Using data from 63 single drugs and 59 drug combinations applied to 18 breast cancer cell lines at 6, 24, and 48 hours, Drug-Prot estimates drug effects on protein expression and reconstructs directed temporal protein dependency networks. The publicly available software enables targeted analyses of user-defined protein sets, substantially reducing the multiple-testing burden. Through an interactive web application, users obtain corrected p-values for single-drug and combination effects, directed temporal dependency networks, and downloadable results without requiring access to the underlying proteomic dataset. As a use case, we apply invariance-regularized Random Forests to triple-negative breast cancer cell lines to identify proteins associated with drug response. Querying these proteins in Drug-Prot reveals drug-specific and interaction effects at the protein-network level, illustrating how the framework links candidate causal protein features to actionable drug combinations.

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

High-Fidelity Two-Step Image Generation via Teacher-Aligned End-to-End Distillation

Few-step diffusion distillation has become increasingly mature for 4-8-step generation, yet pushing further to 2 steps remains challenging. In this work, we introduce Z-Image Turbo++, a high-quality 2-step image generation model distilled from the 8-step Z-Image Turbo teacher. Our method addresses the central bottlenecks of increased task difficulty and limited model capacity in 2-step generation through three simple but effective design choices tailored to this regime. First, we propose Distribution-Aligned Adversarial Learning, which uses teacher-generated images rather than external real images as real samples for GAN training, providing a more attainable and informative adversarial target. Second, we adopt Step-Decoupled Parameterization, assigning independent model parameters to the two denoising steps to better match their distinct capacity demands. Third, we perform End-to-End Training with Iterative Regularization, allowing the first step to receive gradients from final image quality while preserving a meaningful intermediate generation through an explicit step-1 loss. Together, these designs substantially narrow the quality gap between 2-step and 8-step generation in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, highlighting the potential of carefully tailored distillation strategies for improving the quality-efficiency trade-off in few-step generation.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Certifying Macroscopic Quantum Mechanics via Hypothesis Testing with Finite Data

arXiv:2506.22092v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We address the challenge of certifying quantum behavior with single macroscopic massive particles, subject to decoherence and finite data. We propose a hypothesis testing framework that distinguishes between classical and quantum mechanics based on position measurements. While interference pattern visibility in single-particle quantum superposition experiments has been commonly used as a sufficient criterion to falsify classical mechanics, we show that, from a hypothesis testing perspective, it is neither necessary nor efficient. Focusing on recent proposals to prepare macroscopic superposition states of levitated nanoparticles, we show that the likelihood ratio test – which leverages differences across the entire probability distribution – provides an exponential reduction in measurements needed to reach a given confidence level. These results generalize to a broad class of quantum states, and offer a principled, efficient method to falsify classical mechanics in interference experiments, relaxing the experimental constraints faced by current efforts to test quantum mechanics at the macroscopic scale.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

RAIGen: Rare Attribute Identification in Text-to-Image Generative Models

Text-to-image diffusion models achieve impressive generation quality but inherit and amplify training-data biases, skewing coverage of semantic attributes. Prior work addresses this in two ways. Closed-set approaches mitigate biases in predefined fairness categories (e.g., gender, race), assuming socially salient minority attributes are known a priori. Open-set approaches frame the task as bias identification, highlighting majority attributes that dominate outputs. Both overlook a complementary task: uncovering rare or minority features underrepresented in the data distribution (social, cultural, or stylistic) yet still encoded in model representations. We introduce RAIGen, the first framework, to our knowledge, for label-free rare-attribute discovery in diffusion models, requiring no predefined minority categories. RAIGen leverages Matryoshka Sparse Autoencoders and a novel minority metric combining neuron activation frequency with semantic distinctiveness to identify interpretable neurons whose top-activating images reveal underrepresented attributes. Experiments show RAIGen discovers attributes beyond fixed fairness categories in Stable Diffusion, scales to larger models such as SDXL, supports systematic auditing across architectures, and enables targeted amplification of rare attributes during generation. The project page is available at https://vssilpa.github.io/RAIGen_webpage/ .

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Symmetry and Topology of Monitored Quantum Dynamics

arXiv:2412.06133v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The interplay between unitary dynamics and quantum measurements induces diverse phenomena in open quantum systems with no counterparts in closed quantum systems at equilibrium. Here, we generally classify Kraus operators and their effective non-Hermitian dynamical generators, thereby establishing the tenfold classification for symmetry and topology of monitored free fermions. Our classification elucidates the role of topology in measurement-induced phase transitions and identifies potential topological terms in the corresponding nonlinear sigma models. Furthermore, we establish the bulk-boundary correspondence in monitored quantum dynamics: nontrivial topology in spacetime manifests itself as topologically nontrivial steady states and gapless boundary states in Lyapunov spectra, such as Lyapunov zero modes and chiral edge modes, leading to the topologically protected slowdown of dynamical purification.

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

Benchmarking Quantum Extreme Learning based on Gaussian Boson Sampling

arXiv:2606.15230v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reservoir models offer a hardware-efficient learning paradigm for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices by exploiting untrained quantum dynamics as a fixed feature map and restricting optimization to a simple classical readout layer. We propose a quantum extreme learning machine implemented using gaussian boson sampling and an encoding strategy that achieves high classification accuracy while reducing optical resource requirements. Classical inputs are jointly encoded in the squeezing parameters and in the interferometer unitary, enabling sampling-based, highly nonlinear feature maps while leveraging large-scale GBS output statistics, which are conjectured to be classically intractable. We systematically compare multiple families of quantum features accessible in the same setup and find that photon-number sampling probabilities provide the best performance, consistent with their higher effective feature dimensionality. Finally, we benchmark against classical nonlinear baselines and analyse robustness under noisy scenarios, showing competitive performance with fewer trainable parameters and indicating practical promise for near-term photonic implementations.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

From Proteome Mining to Structural Validation: Phosphopyruvate Hydratase as a Structurally Tractable Drug Target in Kinetoplastid Parasites

Chagas disease, caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, demands novel therapeutic strategies that overcome the toxicity and limited efficacy of current treatments. To address this need, herein we report an integrative, target-centric strategy that combines parasite proteome mining, structural modeling, and experimental validation. Functional enrichment and druggability analyses identified phosphopyruvate hydratase (PPH) as a promising candidate due to its essential metabolic role and limited similarity to human homologs. Notably, proteome mining revealed the presence and conservation of PPH across kinetoplastid parasites, including Leishmania donovani, supporting its evaluation beyond T. cruzi. For the selected PPH sequences, AlphaFold-derived three-dimensional models underwent extensive molecular dynamics refinement, yielding stable conformational ensembles suitable for structure-based studies. Using this validated model, virtual screening of the Latin American Natural Products Database - LANaPDB - identified aptosimon as a top-ranked compound candidate. Molecular dynamics simulations further showed ligand-dependent binding behavior, suggesting alternative binding modes distinct from the canonical substrate configuration. In vitro assays demonstrated consistent antiparasitic activity against intracellular T. cruzi amastigotes (IC50 = 3.52 ug/mL) and Leishmania donovani promastigotes (IC50 = 13.06 ug/mL), supporting the biological relevance of the aptosimon-related lignan chemotype, hinokinin, across two kinetoplastid parasite models. Together, these results support PPH as a structurally tractable and biologically relevant candidate target, while identifying an aptosimon-related lignan chemotype, represented experimentally by hinokinin, as a cross-species antiparasitic scaffold that warrants further biochemical target-validation studies.

18.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-01

The NIH 2025 Public Access Policy: Immediate access, unequal costs

by Caitlin R. Ryus, Caroline Raymond King, Edward R. Melnick The NIH 2025 Public Access Policy eliminates embargo periods for federally funded research, expanding who can read science. Yet without addressing article processing charges and market concentration, the policy risks creating new barriers to who can afford to perform and publish their science. In this Perspective, Caitlin Ryus and colleagues discuss the NIH 2025 Public Access Policy, highlighting that while expanding who can read science, the policy risks creating new barriers to who can afford to perform and publish their science.

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

Hallucination Detection and Correction in Medical VLMs via Counter-Evidence Verification

Vision-Language models (VLMs) reliability in medical diagnosis is challenged by trust-undermining hallucinations. Existing hallucination detection approaches mainly focus on identifying factual inconsistencies between generated text and reference data. While some studies analyze where models attend in images, they seldom verify whether such attention truly reflects the visual evidence supporting the generated text. To address this gap, we propose Co}unter-Evidence Verification (CoEV), a training-free plug-and-play framework that detects and corrects hallucinations through evidence-based factual consistency verification. CoEV performs bidirectional verification between textual assertions and visual evidence, testing whether each statement is supported by its corresponding evidence region, and assigns each statement into a four-quadrant diagnostic map capturing combinations of text factuality and visual grounding. CoEV detects hallucinated content and serves as a post hoc refinement tool, correcting hallucinations without retraining. Extensive experiments on four medical datasets show that CoEV combats hallucinations in VLMs.For hallucination detection, CoEV consistently outperforms existing methods, improving average PR-AUC and ROC-AUC by 3.0% and 3.9% absolute points respectively, with notable gains of up to 18.5% in specific VQA scenarios. For hallucination correction, it improves Micro-F1 by up to 12.5%, reduces hallucination rates by over 11.9% on medical report generation, and also boosts medical VQA accuracy. These results show that CoEV enables reliable detection and correction of hallucinations, providing clinicians with dependable, evidence-based cues for diagnosis. Code will be released upon acceptance.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Fair Cognitive Impairment Detection Through Unlearning

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a medical condition characterized by a noticeable decline in memory, language, or thinking abilities. MCI detection from spontaneous speech is promising for scalable screening. However, learned models often exploit demographic cues correlated with labels, resulting in a large performance gap across subgroups. We present a multimodal framework that combines (i) cross-model fusion between modalities (speech, text, and image), and (ii) unlearning using gradient reversal that discourages the shared embedding from encoding task-irrelevant demographic attributes. Evaluated on the multilingual benchmarks TAUKADIAL and PREPARE, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art multilingual and multimodal baseline in MCI classification while substantially reducing the performance gap across patient subgroups (sex and language). We further analyze transfer across datasets, showing that demographic unlearning helps learn more robust representations for MCI detection.

22.
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.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

I Understand How You Feel: Enhancing Deeper Emotional Support Through Multilingual Emotional Validation in Dialogue System

Emotional validation - explicitly acknowledging that a user's feelings make sense - has proven therapeutic value but has received little computational attention. Emotional validation in dialogue systems can be decomposed into (i) validating response identification, (ii) validation timing detection, and (iii) validating response generation. To support research on all three subtasks, we release M-EDESConv, a 120k English-Japanese multilingual corpus created through hybrid manual and automatic annotation, and M-TESC, a multilingual spoken-dialogue test set. For timing detection, we propose MEGUMI, a Multilingual Emotion-aware Gated Unit for Mutual Integration, that fuses frozen XLM-RoBERTa semantics with language-specific emotion encoders via cross-modal attention and gated fusion. MEGUMI shows superior performance on both the M-EDESConv and M-TESC datasets, both objectively and subjectively. Finally, our EmoValidBench benchmarks of GPT-4.1 Nano and Llama-3.1 8B indicate that current LLMs generate contextually similar and diverse validating responses, but emotional understanding remains a major area for improvement. Project page: https://github.com/zihaurpang/Multilingual-Emotional-Validation

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Holo-World: Unified Camera, Object and Weather Control for Video World Model

Video world models are moving toward preserving an observed world under controllable camera and object motion while allowing its environmental state to change. Yet these controls remain isolated, and weather generation typically relies on a source video or reconstructed scene that already specifies future structure. We study a first-frame-anchored source-to-state setting, where the model starts from a single image and follows explicit camera and object controls and an optional weather instruction, then generates a video that either preserves the source world or transfers it to a target weather state. To address these challenges, we first build HoloStateData, a state video dataset that turns diverse videos into unified control samples for camera, object, and weather supervision. Second, we introduce Holo-World, a unified controllable video world model that jointly controls scene from a single image. Its Unified Scene Adapter factorizes world preservation and weather transfer into distinct parameter subspaces, using rendered background, geometry buffers, and object controls to maintain controlled scene structure while modeling weather-dependent appearance and particle effects. Additionally, Scene-Weather Decomposed CFG guides scene and weather residuals separately, strengthening target weather effects without over-amplifying the full condition. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Holo-World maintains precise camera and object control with consistent scene structure while transferring scenes into diverse target weather state, outperforming video-to-video weather editing baselines on weather-state generation. Our project page is available at \url{https://xiangchenyin.github.io/Holo-World/}.

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

Evaluating Interactive 2D Visualization as a Sample Selection Strategy for Biomedical Time-Series Data Annotation

arXiv:2603.26592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable machine-learning models in biomedical settings depend on accurate labels, yet annotating biomedical time-series data remains challenging. Algorithmic sample selection may support annotation, but evidence from studies involving real human annotators is scarce. Consequently, we compare three sample selection methods for annotation: random sampling (RND), farthest-first traversal (FAFT), and a graphical user interface-based method enabling exploration of complementary 2D visualizations (2DVs) of high-dimensional data. We evaluated the methods across four classification tasks in infant motility assessment (IMA) and speech emotion recognition (SER). Twelve annotators, categorized as experts or non-experts, performed data annotation under a limited annotation budget, and post-annotation experiments were conducted to evaluate the sampling methods. Across all classification tasks, 2DV performed best when aggregating labels across annotators. In IMA, 2DV most effectively captured rare classes, but also exhibited greater annotator-to-annotator label distribution variability resulting from the limited annotation budget, decreasing classification performance when models were trained on individual annotators' labels; in these cases, FAFT excelled. For SER, 2DV outperformed the other methods among expert annotators and matched their performance for non-experts in the individual-annotator setting. A failure risk analysis revealed that RND was the safest choice when annotator count or annotator expertise was uncertain, whereas 2DV had the highest risk due to its greater label distribution variability. Furthermore, post-experiment interviews indicated that 2DV made the annotation task more interesting and enjoyable. Overall, 2DV-based sampling appears promising for biomedical time-series data annotation, particularly when the annotation budget is not highly constrained.