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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

3-Key-Input: Exploring the Theoretical Minimum Keys for Text Entry

Authors:
Naoki Kimura↗

How far can we reduce the number of physical keys if we endow an ambiguous keyboard with modern language models? Fewer keys increase hardware design freedom in constrained settings such as assistive devices and mobile form factors. This paper systematically evaluates text entry systems using 2-5 physical keys combined with language-model-based disambiguation. On a 300-sentence English corpus (100 sentences each for Business / Conversational / Technical), we compare key counts (2-5), letter-to-key mappings (layout-based / frequency-based / intentionally worst-case), and decoders (Trie-only, GPT-2 beam search, GPT-4o selection). We find that 3 keys + GPT-4o achieves character error rate (CER) 9.46% and word error rate (WER) 12.20%, reducing CER by 59% relative to 2 keys (CER 23.3%). At 3 keys, the key-stream entropy is 1.54 bits/char; while increasing to 5 keys improves accuracy (CER 5.4%), the marginal gains diminish. Mapping choice has a small impact under standard designs ({\Delta}CER < 0.5 pp), and even an intentionally worst mapping degrades CER by only +0.5 pp, whereas Technical sentences yield roughly twice the error rate of Business. These results suggest that, in our evaluated offline setting under a strong LM prior, 3 keys are a practical minimum for general English.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Challenges of Balancing AI Compliance and Technological Innovations in Critical Sectors: A Systematic Literature Review

Authors:
Ayush Enkhtaivan↗Chinazunwa Uwaoma↗

arXiv:2606.12423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into critical infrastructure including healthcare, finance, energy, and defense, offers transformative benefits but also conflicts with evolving regulatory and governance frameworks. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to examine the challenges of balancing AI compliance and technological innovation across critical infrastructure sectors. The review follows established SLR guidelines to extract and synthesize insights from peer-reviewed articles, report, and institutional sources published between 2020-2025. The study identifies three interrelated challenges: fragmented regulations, excessive compliance burdens for smaller to medium enterprises (SMEs), and misaligned governance models. To address these challenges, the study highlights practical governance strategies, including risk-tiered regulation, compliance by design, and explainable AI, to support scalable and trustworthy AI deployment in critical sectors. Key contributions include a concise mapping of core AI-governance challenges and a conceptual diagram illustrating their overlap, as well as actionable strategies for policymakers and practitioner to harmonize oversight with innovation.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Two Wrongs, No Right: Auditing Social-Desirability Bias in LLM Annotators for Computational Social Science

Authors:
Varun Kotte↗

LLM annotators are increasingly used in computational social science (CSS), but it is unclear whether their alignment-shaped errors preserve the empirical conclusions a researcher would report. We audit three open-source 7B instruction-tuned models (Zephyr, Mistral-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Instruct) across six TweetEval tasks under four prompt conditions (72 cells) and find that social-desirability failures do not run in a single direction. Zephyr exhibits leniency bias, systematically under-applying harmful labels (offensive language: false benign rate 0.729, false alarm rate 0.031). Mistral and Qwen exhibit overcorrection, over-applying the same labels (Mistral hate-speech FAR = 0.604). All three models exhibit neutrality bias on abortion stance, underestimating opposition prevalence by 24 to 40 percentage points and inflating the neutral label. None of the four prompting interventions we test (neutral, safety framing, depersonalized, chain-of-thought) corrects these failures across models; safety framing can worsen stance distortion. Strikingly, Zephyr's hate-speech prevalence estimate matches the gold rate exactly while its class-conditional errors are large in both directions, an accidental cancellation that misleads aggregate validation. We translate these patterns into a three-part taxonomy with diagnostic FBR/FAR signatures and a lightweight gold-sample validation protocol. The headline for trustworthy CSS: a model that looks calibrated on aggregate metrics can still flip the substantive empirical conclusion a researcher would report.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Magnifying What Matters: Attention-Guided Adaptive Rendering for Visual Text Comprehension

Authors:
Shenglai Zeng↗Qirui Wang↗Kai Guo↗Xinnan Dai↗Xianxuan Long↗Hui Liu↗

Visual Text Comprehension (VTC) renders text into images for a vision-language model (VLM) to read, sidestepping LLM context-window limits and powering applications from long-page OCR to multi-page memory QA. Yet existing VTC pipelines treat rendering and layout as a fixed, content-agnostic preprocessing step and offer little mechanistic understanding of how VLMs internally process visualized text. Through a focused empirical study on VTC QA tasks, we reveal that VLMs exhibit a localization-without-utilization regime: evidence-localizing attention emerges sharply in the middle-to-late layers and is largely decoupled from answer correctness, yet simply enlarging the localized spans on the rendered page recovers a large fraction of the failures. Building on these observations, we propose AGAR (Attention-Guided Adaptive Rendering), a training-free, model-agnostic method that leverages a VLM's own middle-to-late layer attention to identify the top-K important visual patches, maps them back to word spans, and re-renders the page with those spans enlarged before re-inferring the answer. Extensive experiments across nine VTC benchmarks (short-form, long-context, and multi-page memory QA) and four VLM backbones show that AGAR (i)consistently improves off-the-shelf VLMs as a plug-and-play enhancement, (ii)composes with VLM post-training to yield further gains, and (iii)remains robust under both visual- and text-side input degradation.

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

Towards Fully Automated Exam Grading: Fairness-Aware Recognition of Handwritten Answers with Foundation Models

Authors:
Hartwig Grabowski↗

Correcting handwritten exams by hand is time-consuming and error-prone, particularly for large cohorts, while fully digital exams tend to force a didactic narrowing towards closed question formats. A practical middle ground keeps paper-based, problem-oriented tasks but records the assessment-relevant answers as single capital letters in a table that a machine can read. The open question is whether this reading can be made accurate and, above all, fair enough for unsupervised grading. Earlier automated approaches reached only about 88%–91% recognition – too low – and failed on the cases that matter most: answers placed outside the cell, crossed out, or written in cursive. We show that general-purpose vision-language foundation models (VLMs), which interpret the page rather than match pixel templates, close this gap. On a benchmark of 61 anonymised exams (3141 answer positions) the best model reaches 98.4% accuracy, well above the previous baseline. Crucially, we centre the evaluation on fairness: we distinguish false negatives (a correct answer marked wrong, which disadvantages the student) from false positives, and a lightweight prompt that supplies the reference solution as context lowers the false-negative rate to 0.58%. Under an exemplary grading scheme only three of the 61 exams would be graded worse, all caught by a student self-review step. Fully automated, fairness-aware exam grading at scale is therefore defensible; we release the anonymised benchmark to support reproducibility.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Everywhere Valid Bounds on False Discovery Proportions in Conformal Inference

Authors:
Ziang Song↗Ying Jin↗Emmanuel J. Cand\`es↗

arXiv:2605.20726v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern applications of conformal inference to multiple testing problems, such as outlier detection and candidate selection, often involve selecting test samples whose conformal p-values fall below a threshold. The quality of such methods is often measured by the false discovery proportion (FDP), defined as the fraction of incorrect selections. Existing approaches typically control the expected value of the FDP, using methods such as the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure. This approach fails to provide high-probability bounds on the realized false discovery proportion and invalidates statistical guarantees if the rejection threshold is selected after inspecting the data. This paper establishes finite-sample, distribution-free upper bounds on the FDP that hold simultaneously over all possible rejection thresholds, enabling arbitrary post hoc selection of the threshold. Simultaneous validity is achieved by constructing a high-probability envelope for the empirical distribution function of null conformal p-values by sampling from their joint distribution. Furthermore, our framework allows practitioners to modulate the envelope's shape, thereby producing tight bounds in rejection regions of primary interest. We use this flexible approach to derive simultaneous FDP upper bounds for both outlier detection and conformal selection. We demonstrate through synthetic and real-data experiments that the resulting bounds are both valid and substantially less conservative than those derived from existing approaches.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Entropic order parameters and topological holography

Authors:
Hua-Chen Zhang↗Germ\'an Sierra↗Javier Molina-Vilaplana↗

arXiv:2512.24225v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that the symmetry topological field theory (SymTFT) construction, also known as the topological holography, provides a natural and intuitive framework for the entropic order parameter characterising phases with (partially) broken symmetries. Various examples of group and non-invertible symmetries are studied. In particular, the origin of the distinguishability of the vacua resulting from spontaneously broken non-invertible symmetries is made manifest with an information-theoretic perspective, where certain operators in the SymTFT are excluded from observation.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

CuMA: Aligning LLMs with Sparse Cultural Values via Demographic-Aware Mixture of Adapters

Authors:
Ao Sun↗Xiaoyu Wang↗Zhe Tan↗Yu Li↗Jiachen Zhu↗Shu Su↗Yuheng Jia↗

As Large Language Models (LLMs) serve a global audience, alignment must transition from enforcing universal consensus to respecting cultural pluralism. We demonstrate that dense models, when forced to fit conflicting value distributions, suffer from Mean Collapse, converging to a generic average that fails to represent diverse groups. We attribute this to Cultural Sparsity, where gradient interference prevents dense parameters from spanning distinct cultural modes. To resolve this, we propose \textsc{CuMA} (Cultural Mixture of Adapters), a framework that frames alignment as a conditional capacity separation problem. By incorporating demographic-aware routing, \textsc{CuMA} internalizes a Latent Cultural Topology to explicitly disentangle conflicting gradients into specialized expert subspaces. Extensive evaluations on WorldValuesBench, Community Alignment, and PRISM demonstrate that \textsc{CuMA} achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming both dense baselines and semantic-only MoEs. Crucially, our analysis confirms that \textsc{CuMA} effectively mitigates mean collapse, preserving cultural diversity. Our code is available at https://github.com/Throll/CuMA.

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10.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Comparative impacts and cost-effectiveness of tuberculosis systematic screening strategies in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru: A mathematical modeling study

Authors:
Yiran E. Liu↗

by Yiran E. Liu, José Victor Bortolotto Bampi, Ronan F. Arthur, Argita D. Salindri, Caroline Busatto, Pedro Avedillo Jiménez, Daniele Maria Pelissari, Fernanda Dockhorn Costa Johansen, Robert Arana-Narvaez, Alvaro Fernando Moreno Roca, Wilfredo Santos Solís Tupes, Esther Mori Jiu, Christian Alfredo Moreno Roca, Erika Albertina Abregú Contreras, Valentina Antonieta Alarcón Guizado, Julián Trujillo Trujillo, Belkys Marcelino, Mónica Alonso Gonzalez, Mayra Cecilia Córdova Ayllon, Ted Cohen, Moises A. Huaman, Jeremy D. Goldhaber-Fiebert, Julio Croda, Jason R. Andrews Background Incarceration is a leading driver of tuberculosis in Latin America. Systematic screening in prisons may reduce tuberculosis burden, but optimal strategies and cost-effectiveness remain uncertain. We examined the population-wide health impacts and cost-effectiveness of systematic screening in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, comparing different timepoints, frequencies, and screening algorithms. Methods and findings Using dynamic transmission models calibrated to Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, we simulated annual or biannual (twice-yearly) prison-wide screening, alone or combined with entry and exit screening from 2026 to 2035. We evaluated four algorithms: (1) symptom screening, (2) chest X-ray with computer-aided detection (CXR-CAD), (3) symptoms and CXR-CAD (follow-up testing if either is positive), and (4) GeneXpert Ultra (Xpert) with pooled sputum. Individuals screening positive then received individual Xpert. We projected impacts on within-prison and population-level tuberculosis incidence in 2035, along with discounted costs (2023 US dollars) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Model projections showed that combined entry, exit, and biannual screening with CXR-CAD was highly impactful and cost-effective across countries, reducing tuberculosis incidence by 61%–87% in prisons and 18%–28% population-wide. Compared to only biannual CXR-CAD (the next best strategy), the incremental cost per DALY averted of adding entry and exit screening was $2,984 (Brazil), $2,925 (Colombia), and $645 (Peru). Adding symptom screening to CXR-CAD marginally increased benefit and was only cost-effective in Peru’s higher-incidence prisons. Biannual screening alone remained cost-effective at prison incidence levels well below national averages, as well as at far lower willingness-to-pay thresholds. In settings without CXR-CAD, pooled Xpert was an impactful, cost-effective alternative. Key limitations include the model’s simplified representation of tuberculosis disease states and lack of stratification by age, gender/sex, HIV, or drug resistance. Conclusions These modeling results support immediate national-level adoption of prison-wide tuberculosis screening twice-yearly and at entry and exit, using CXR-CAD or pooled Xpert.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Curse and Blessing of Mean Bias in FP4-Quantized LLM Training

Authors:
Hengjie Cao↗Zhendong Huang↗Mengyi Chen↗Yifeng Yang↗Fang Dong↗Anrui Chen↗Ruijun Huang↗Xin Zhang↗Mingzhi Dong↗Yujiang Wang↗Jinlong Hou↗Qin Lv↗…

arXiv:2603.10444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial memory and compute savings for large language models, but remains fragile because blockwise quantization is dictated by extreme activation magnitudes, which inflate dynamic range and compress long-tail signals. We identify a counterintuitive source of this failure: dominant activation outliers are not merely arbitrary sparse events, but are largely induced by a coherent rank-one mean bias, whose direction aligns with the leading anisotropic spectral component. This mean component strengthens during training, is amplified and reshaped by attention and FFN operators, and increasingly dominates top activation magnitudes. Crucially, this discovery reveals that a seemingly complex outlier-suppression problem admits a truly simple solution: isolate the coherent mean before quantization. We therefore propose Averis, a mean-residual splitting quantization method that separates the mean component using only reductions and elementwise subtractions before FP4 quantization. Across Qwen3 0.6B Dense trained on 100B tokens and Qwen3 7B A1.5B MoE trained on 50B tokens, Averis enables robust W4A4G4 FP4 training, reducing BF16 loss gaps to 1.19%/0.81% versus 2.05%/1.10% for NVIDIA's recently released Hadamard-based outlier-smoothing method, while limiting downstream gaps to 0.89/0.71 points. With only 2.20% end-to-end overhead over vanilla NVFP4, about 30% of NVIDIA's Hadamard-based design, Averis provides a hardware-efficient path to stable low-bit LLM training. Complementary to Hadamard, Averis further reduces the Qwen3-0.6B loss and downstream gaps to 0.94% and 0.73 points when combined. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/averis-504D.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learned JPEG Compression for DNN Vision

Authors:
Kaixiang Zheng↗Ahmed H. Salamah↗Siyu Chen↗En-Hui Yang↗

JPEG, a lossy image compression technique designed for human viewers, has maintained its dominance for decades. However, in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), a substantial portion of image data, often compressed by JPEG, is and will continue to be consumed by deep neural networks (DNNs) instead of humans, thus creating a need to optimize JPEG for DNN inference performance. To this end, we propose learned JPEG compression for DNN vision (J4D), a novel training framework for determining JPEG encoding parameters to minimize compression rate while maximizing DNN inference performance. The major challenge of solving this optimization problem lies in representing the JPEG codec and compression rate in closed form. By incorporating a differentiable soft quantizer based on a probabilistic quantization scheme, we not only obtain a differentiable proxy for the JPEG codec, but are also able to compute the entropy of the coded source analytically, which is a close estimate of the actual compression rate. Equipped with both the differentiable JPEG codec and the information-theoretic rate estimator, we are then able to solve the aforementioned optimization problem with backpropagation. After training, the learned encoding parameters will be subsequently used in actual JPEG encoding based on probabilistic quantization. Extensive experimental results across multiple datasets and DNN architectures demonstrate that J4D consistently and significantly outperforms the default JPEG and other competitive JPEG codecs optimized for DNNs. Notably, compared to the default JPEG, J4D achieves an increase in accuracy by as much as 11.60% at the same rate, or a reduction of compression rate up to 80.05% at the same accuracy. Additionally, with the help of J4D, we show the potential to design universal JPEG encoding parameters for various DNN architectures for the first time.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Phase controlled spectral topology, dynamic stability and sensitivity in Non-Hermitian Cavity Magnonics

Authors:
Sachin Singh Bargahi↗Rajeev Singh↗Biswanath Bhoi↗

arXiv:2606.16522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We theoretically investigate a non-Hermitian cavity-magnon platform in which coherent photonmagnon interactions and reservoir-mediated dissipative coupling interfere through a single externally tunable phase. We show that this interference phase provides a universal control parameter that continuously rotates the effective coupling between Hermitian and anti-Hermitian regimes, enabling dynamic transitions between level repulsion and level attraction without modifying intrinsic system parameters. The resulting phase-controlled non-Hermitian topology gives rise to exceptional points, linewidth engineering, and zero-damping conditions. Owing to the propagation-direction dependence of the dissipative interaction, the system further exhibits strong nonreciprocal transport and phase-tunable isolation arising from asymmetric hybridization of the cavity and magnon modes. Beyond its spectral and transport properties, we establish a direct connection between nonHermitian spectral topology and nonequilibrium population dynamics. The interference phase governs the stability of the hybrid modes, driving transitions between stable relaxation, critical slowing down near exceptional points, oscillatory energy exchange, and exponentially amplified dynamics. We further demonstrate that the same phase-controlled exceptional topology can be exploited for enhanced sensing, where the eigenvalue response exhibits the characteristic square-root scaling associated with exceptional-point physics. Our results provide a unified framework linking spectral topology, directional transport, dynamical stability, and sensing functionality through reservoirengineered interference in cavity magnonic systems.

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14.
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.

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15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Cancer cells adopt unprecedented strategies to produce a molecule that protects them from iron-dependent death

Authors:
Amaia Zabala-Letona↗

The finding that spermine molecules in cells bind to iron to prevent it unleashing ferroptosis, a type of cell death, opens up strategies for treating tissue damage and cancer. The finding that spermine molecules in cells bind to iron to prevent it unleashing ferroptosis, a type of cell death, opens up strategies for treating tissue damage and cancer.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Re-evaluating the Cross-Sectional Prevalence of Severe Age-Related Hearing Loss Using Extreme Value Statistics

Authors:
Bleeck↗

Standard demographic models of age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) predominantly utilize symmetric functions, such as log-normal distributions for age-binned thresholds and 4-parameter logistic curves for prevalence estimates. While these models capture early-to-moderate degradation effectively, they structurally struggle to characterize the heavy tails associated with severe clinical impairment. In this study, we present a statistical critique using a secondary analysis of the historical Medical Research Council (MRC) National Study of Hearing (1980-1986) dataset. By applying Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution theory, we demonstrate that as severity increases, the underlying statistical geometry of hearing loss shifts. The asymmetric, heavy-tailed GEV distribution provides a parsimonious description of severe impairment, requiring fewer parameters than standard symmetric models. However, we explicitly acknowledge that utilizing static population data to infer progression introduces an ecological fallacy. Furthermore, the dataset's historical nature embeds unquantified generational cohort effects. We conclude that while extreme value statistics offer a compelling mathematical framework for modeling the variance of severe presbycusis, true longitudinal datasets are required to isolate physiological degradation from historical cohort variance.

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17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On the Influence of the Feature Computation Budget on Per-Instance Algorithm Selection for Black-Box Optimization

Authors:
Koen van der Blom↗Diederick Vermetten↗

arXiv:2605.04954v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Per-instance algorithm selection (PIAS) takes advantage of complementarity between a set of algorithms by deciding which algorithm to run on a given instance. This decision is based on features of the instances, which, in the context of black-box optimization (BBO), require a part of the optimization budget to be computed. This raises two questions: (a) from which fraction of the budget spent on feature computation does PIAS become worth it for BBO, and (b) which fraction of the budget optimizes the tradeoff between feature accuracy and PIAS performance. To this end, we perform a broad study where PIAS with varying sampling budgets for feature computation is compared to the single best algorithm on a broad range of algorithm selection scenarios. These scenarios consist of two portfolio sizes, three problem sets, 4 dimensionalities, and 10 target budgets. We find that PIAS is viable for the majority of tested scenarios, even when as much as a quarter of the total budget is spent on feature computation. The tradeoff for the fraction of the budget spent on feature computation to maximize the benefit of PIAS is highly dependent on the specific AS scenario. Further, on average 20 percent of PIAS loss to the virtual best solver is explained by the budget spent on feature computation, highlighting the importance of properly accounting for the feature budget.

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

Fast LLM-Based Semantic Filtering: From a Unified Framework to an Adaptive Two-Phase Method

Authors:
Kyoungmin Kim↗Martin Catheland↗Anastasia Ailamaki↗

arXiv:2606.08090v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating a natural-language yes/no predicate over a document corpus under an accuracy target - the semantic filter - is a cornerstone of LLM-based data processing. Calling the LLM on every document (the oracle) is prohibitive, so cascades pair the oracle with a fast proxy. As deployed today, they leave four limitations on the table. (1) Each cascade family - model-free clustering, prebuilt small-LLM proxies, online-trained proxies - commits to a single representation and pipeline, and wins on only a narrow query regime. (2) The strongest online proxy invests in a custom training scheme on a bi-encoder over dense embeddings, missing the token-level evidence richer predicates require. (3) The proxy is trained against binary yes/no labels, wasting the LLM's per-document confidence at the boundary documents it most needs to learn. (4) Existing calibrations add a uniform safety margin, conflating genuine proxy uncertainty with small-sample noise and inflating cascade cost. We address these by (1) composing families adaptively - model-free clustering first, online proxy only when needed, with oracle calls shared across phases; (2) replacing the cosine bi-encoder with a hybrid of off-the-shelf token-aware models; (3) training the proxy with the oracle's per-document confidence as a soft label; and (4) a calibration that adds the safety margin only where the labeled sample is sparse. We are also the first to use the oracle's per-document confidence for three purposes: a query-level difficulty compass, a lower bound on the minimum oracle calls any proxy-based cascade can make, and the proxy's soft training label. At a 90% accuracy target on three 10K-document corpora, our methods are 1.6-2.0x faster than the best prior method per corpus and meet the target on 95% of queries; the BER-derived lower bound indicates a further ~4-20x of headroom for future work.

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

Blind Dexterous Grasping via Real2Sim2Real Tactile Policy Learning

Authors:
Shengcheng Luo↗Xiyan Huang↗Zhe Xu↗Wanlin Li↗Ziyuan Jiao↗Chenxi Xiao↗

arXiv:2606.11767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Blind grasping with a dexterous hand is a crucial manipulation capability. Nevertheless, learning such tactile-only policies for real robots remains challenging due to the tactile sim-to-real gap and the limited expressiveness of sparse tactile signals. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework for tactile-only blind grasping that is deployable on a physical multi-fingered robotic hand. Our approach combines three key components. First, we introduce a Real2Sim tactile calibration pipeline that constructs a contact-calibrated digital-twin simulator capable of reproducing real tactile signals. Second, we improve the expressiveness of sparse tactile observations using a layout-aware tactile encoder, which incorporates sensor-geometry priors through self-supervised pretraining. Third, to improve generalization to unseen objects, we train object-specific reinforcement-learning experts in the calibrated simulator and aggregate their successful grasp trajectories into a tactile-conditioned Diffusion Policy. We evaluate our method on a physical LEAP Hand equipped with distributed tactile sensing across 10 seen and 10 unseen objects. The deployed policy achieves a 27\% real-world grasp success rate across all 20 objects, without real-world grasping demonstrations or visual input. Simulation ablations show that layout-aware tactile pretraining improves grasping performance, while sensing-level evaluations confirm that Real2Sim calibration increases the consistency of tactile contact events between simulation and hardware. Together, these results suggest that contact-event calibration, geometry-aware tactile representation learning, and diffusion-based policy aggregation provide an effective path toward tactile-only blind grasping on real dexterous robotic hands. Project page:Dex-Blind-Grasp.github.io.

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20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

PepAnno: A structure-aware deep learning framework for bioactive peptide prediction, structural visualization, and physicochemical profiling

Authors:
Enyan Liu↗

by Enyan Liu, Yueming Hu, Liya Liu, Yifan Chen, Shilong Zhang, Sida Li, Haoyu Chao, Luyao Xie, Yi Shen, Liangwei Wu, Julio Raúl Fernández Massó, Ming Chen Peptides are gaining prominence as therapeutic candidates due to their diverse physiological functions and structural simplicity. Although multiple computational tools exist for bioactive peptide prediction, many suffer from limitations such as non-intuitive interfaces, sequence-only representations, insufficient structural awareness, restricted interpretability, or fragmented analysis workflows, leading to reduced research efficiency and higher costs. To address these challenges, we present PepAnno (https://bis.zju.edu.cn/pepanno/), a comprehensive and user-friendly web server for multi-functional peptide annotation. PepAnno is powered by a novel structure-aware, multi-view geometric deep learning framework that integrates pre-trained sequence embeddings with predicted 3D structural graphs through a dual-stream architecture combining a Transformer and a GATv2 network. A cross-modal attention mechanism is employed to effectively fuse semantic and geometric representations, enabling accurate multi-task prediction across 7 key bioactivities, including antimicrobial and anticancer properties. Comprehensive evaluation on seven curated bioactivity datasets demonstrates that PepAnno achieves robust and competitive predictive performance across tasks, consistently outperforming or matching existing methods in terms of discrimination and stability. Beyond functional prediction, PepAnno provides automated calculation of physicochemical properties, structure visualization, and access to an integrated repository of peptide-related databases and tools. By enabling one-click peptide annotation, PepAnno offers an efficient and interpretable solution for large-scale peptide analysis and facilitates downstream experimental design and peptide-based drug discovery.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Human genetic evidence is associated with drug approval across therapeutic areas: an observational analysis of 26,278 target-disease pairs with temporal validation and feature ablation

Authors:
Victoria Paterson↗

Genetic evidence is enriched among approved drug targets: in an observational analysis of 26,278 target-disease pairs from Open Targets and ChEMBL, targets with any genetic association had a 3.25-fold higher approval rate than those without (OR = 3.25, 95% CI 2.79-3.79, p = 1.91e-42). A target-level analysis accounting for non-independence of pairs sharing the same gene gave OR = 2.79 (bootstrap 95% CI 2.22-3.53); the oncology pair-level OR of 6.72 attenuates to 2.71 at the target level, illustrating how non-independence inflates area-specific estimates. The enrichment replicated in post-2015 approvals (OR = 3.51, p = 1.72e-8). Feature ablation across six evidence types revealed that literature mining alone accounts for most classifier performance (AUPRC = 0.099 versus 0.109 for all features), consistent with temporal leakage from post-approval publications. Excluding literature, remaining evidence types retain above-baseline signal (AUPRC = 0.084, 1.63x baseline). Sensitivity analyses bracket the pair-level OR between 3.25 and 4.93. Genetic evidence alone yields only a 1.0-percentage-point absolute AUPRC gain and the best model has poor calibration; the classifier has limited practical predictive value. We catalogue 1,433 genetically supported Phase 1/2 pairs as a hypothesis-generating resource. All findings are observational.

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

FairGen: Preference-Aligned Diffusion for Demographically Equitable Medical Image Synthesis

Authors:
Zhimin Li↗Ruichen Zhang↗Zhen Tan↗Howard J Aizenstein↗Jingtong Hu↗Tianlong Chen↗

Medical imaging is central to modern diagnostics, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly used to support image-based analysis by improving efficiency, accuracy, and access to care. However, inequities in healthcare access and differential disease prevalence create severe demographic imbalances in clinical image data. Such imbalances are compounded by the fact that diseases can manifest with distinct features across demographic groups, rendering certain phenotypic presentations naturally rare. AI models trained on such imbalanced data risk perpetuating diagnostic bias and widening healthcare disparities. Here we introduce FairGen, a fairness-aware diffusion framework that synthesizes demographically balanced medical images while preserving pathology-relevant visual features. By embedding physician-aligned preferences into the generation process, FairGen improves subgroup coverage during synthesis and downstream classification. Applied to dermatology, radiology, and neuroimaging benchmark tasks, FairGen achieves fairness improvements of 95.9% for skin images, 80.0% for chest radiography, and 35.2% for brain MRI, while maintaining competitive diagnostic accuracy relative to models trained on original clinical data. Clinician-facing expert review and external validation on independent cohorts further support that these gains extend beyond standard fidelity metrics and are not confined to the original in-distribution datasets.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Spatial-Aware Reduction Framework: Towards Efficient and Faithful Visual State Space Models

Authors:
Jindi Lv↗Aoyu Li↗Yuhao Zhou↗Zheng Zhu↗Xiaofeng Wang↗Qing Ye↗Yueqi Duan↗Wentao Feng↗Jiancheng Lv↗

arXiv:2606.19932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mamba demonstrates strong efficiency in modeling long visual sequences. However, when token reduction is applied to structurally enhanced Mamba variants, these models exhibit a severe performance collapse. We attribute this degradation to the spatially agnostic nature of existing reduction methods, which violate the two-dimensional structural premise required by the selective scanning mechanism. In this work, we propose STORM, a spatial-aware token reduction framework designed to maintain structural integrity throughout the compression process. STORM reformulates reduction into a structured operation on spatial units, enforcing localized constraints to maintain both grid topology and neighborhood coherence. As a plug-and-play module, STORM equips existing reduction pipelines with explicit spatial awareness without any training. Empirical results demonstrate that STORM achieves state-of-the-art pruning accuracy across diverse vision Mamba backbones under training-free settings. Notably, STORM delivers a substantial accuracy recovery on VMamba, outperforming prior methods by up to 63.3\% in top-1 accuracy. Meanwhile, STORM incurs only a 1.0\% accuracy drop on PlainMamba, achieving performance comparable to ViT.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

A Machine Learning Framework for Real-Time Personalized Ergonomic Pose Analysis

Authors:
Manex Atxa↗Bruno Simoes↗Julen Balzategui↗

This paper introduces a new methodology for real-time prediction of ergonomic and non-ergonomic human poses using volumetric video data in three dimensions. Although the methodology was designed for ergonomic assessments, it can be adapted to other applications requiring real-time analysis of human posture. One aspect that makes this system stand out is its ability to analyze 3D point clouds during the assessment, enabling computation from multiple angles. This overcomes a critical limitation of cameras which provide often a fixed viewpoint, thereby restricting the data available for a thorough postural evaluation, especially when occlusions occur. The system continuously and automatically performs pose inference using the chosen perspective on the real-time streaming data; however, only the poses manually selected and labeled by the user are used to train the personalized deep learning classifier. The methodology has been refined through a case study in which RGB-D cameras captured subjects performing load-lifting tasks, enabling real-time skeletal labeling. The model was trained on this data and, following the training phase, performs inference on new streaming data in real time. This research offers a scalable and pragmatic approach for real-time ergonomic evaluation by combining state-of-the-art 3D data technologies and traditional 2D pose estimation algorithms. It addresses the increasing need for safety and health monitoring in workplace environments, marking a notable contribution to the domain.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CoffeeBench: Benchmarking Long-Horizon LLM Agents in Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Economies

Authors:
Issa Sugiura↗Daichi Hattori↗Kazuo Araragi↗Keita Ogawa↗Shota Onose↗Taro Makino↗Teppei Usuki↗Takashi Ishida↗

arXiv:2606.16613v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents become capable of increasingly long-horizon tasks, evaluating their performance in economic systems is becoming increasingly important. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily evaluate a single agent interacting with a passive environment, economic systems are inherently multi-agent, requiring autonomous agents to communicate, negotiate, and transact while pursuing their own objectives over extended periods. We introduce CoffeeBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLM agents in a long-horizon multi-agent economy composed of heterogeneous firms. In CoffeeBench, two farmers, two roasters, and two retailers autonomously operate their businesses over a 90-day simulation, each seeking to maximize cumulative net income through communication and transactions while managing cash, inventory, and pricing. The evaluated model controls one coffee roaster, while the remaining firms are controlled by fixed reference agents. Across several recent open-weight and proprietary LLMs, all models outperform a passive baseline that takes no actions, with most achieving positive net income. Analysis of agent behavior reveals substantial differences in long-horizon economic interaction: higher-performing models communicate more actively with other firms, whereas Claude~Haiku~4.5 exhibits an idle-drift failure mode, repeatedly choosing inaction despite producing coherent assessments and plans. We release our code and agent trajectories to support future research.

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