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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Phase-Aware Guidance Injection for Recurrent MAPPO in Assembly-Line Disruption Recovery

arXiv:2606.16330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Disruption recovery in industrial assembly lines requires timely decisions under machine faults, worker absence, and emergency orders. Existing methods either rely on rigid handcrafted recovery logic or learn adaptive policies that do not readily exploit heterogeneous external recovery knowledge at decision time to reduce abnormal recovery time (ART) and preserve on-time delivery (OTD). To address this gap, we propose a phase-aware guidance injection framework that augments a trained recurrent MAPPO (RMAPPO) scheduling policy through logit-level action bias during evaluation. The framework provides a unified decision-time interface for rule-based, replay-based, and online LLM-based guidance, while activating intervention only during abnormal and recovery phases. Experiments on a custom AssemblyLineEnv show that high-quality rule guidance yields the strongest gains, replay-based guidance degrades smoothly under imperfect availability, and online LLM guidance still provides useful intermediate improvements. These results show that decision-time guidance injection can exploit heterogeneous recovery hints without redesigning the actor.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Home-based binocular serious games in virtual reality to treat visual acuity and stereovision in residual amblyopia: AMBER study

Objectives: Amblyopia is a pediatric visual disorder traditionally treated by patching the fellow eye, though many patients retain residual amblyopia post-treatment. Increasing evidence suggests that visual plasticity allows treat-ment beyond the classical therapeutic window. AMBER evaluated the efficacy of binocular serious games in virtual reality (VR) in residual amblyopia. Methods and Analysis: The monocentric, prospective, randomized, crossover trial (reported as case series) includ-ed 14 anisometropic, strabismic, or mixed residual amblyopia patients (6-35 years; 5 children, 9 adults). Participants underwent two 2-month intervention phases: optical correction (standard care) and standard care plus VR games (2.5 h/week), each with a 2-month follow-up. Best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), stereoacuity, and reading speed were assessed (5 timepoints) using the Sloan and Landolt charts, the Titmus, TNO, Lang II, Asteroid, and Mnread tests. Compliance and adverse events (AE) were recorded. Results: VR training improved BCVA in 10 amblyopic eyes (Landolt and Sloan), with more pronounced effects in anisometropic patients. Six patients showed improved stereoacuity (Titmus; 4x mixed, 1x anisometropic, 1x stra-bismic amblyopia), persistent only in children (1x strabismic, 1x mixed amblyopia). Four improvements were ob-served with TNO (1x), Lang II (1x), Asteroid (0x), and MNread (1x). Despite positive trends, when comparing re-sults of individual patients, between both eyes, and with standard treatment, consistency of improvements cannot be conclusively demonstrated. One non-severe AE (dizziness) was reported. Conclusions: Following individual cases, VR training improved BCVA and stereoacuity, particularly in children and patients with high compliance. However, considering the cohort as a whole, consistency of effects has to be confirmed in larger groups. Thus, the methodologically sophisticated AMBER study revealed differences in VR treatment efficacy between amblyopia types, children/adults, endpoints and tests, offering precious data for the design of meaningful future studies. It shows that neurovisual plasticity gauged by VR-games offers safe, engaging treatment options for residual amblyopia.

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

Measurement Plasticity: Sensor-Level Adaptation for Vision-Language Models

We propose Multi-View Physical-prompt (MVP) for Test-Time Adaptation (TTA), a forward-only framework that moves TTA from tokens to photons by treating the camera exposure triangle (i.e., ISO, shutter speed, and aperture) as physical prompts. At inference, MVP acquires selected multiple physical views using a source-affinity score, evaluates digitally augmented variants of each retained view and filters the lowest-entropy predictions, and aggregates predictions with hard voting. This selection-then-vote design is simple, calibration-friendly, and requires no gradients or model modifications. On ImageNet-ES and ImageNet-ES-Diverse, MVP outperforms digital-only TTA on both Auto-Exposure and a combination with conventional sensor control. MVP remains effective under reduced parameter candidates that lower capture latency, demonstrating its practicality.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Uncertainty-Aware Reward Modeling for Stable RLHF

arXiv:2606.19818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) aligns large language models by training reward models on preference data and optimizing policies to maximize predicted rewards. However, this pipeline faces two fundamental challenges: (1) reward models cannot signal when their predictions are unreliable, since they usually act as deterministic point estimators; and (2) modern group-based policy optimization can amplify unreliable reward signals, as exemplified by GRPO's uniform treatment of rewards during advantage computation. As policies explore increasingly diverse responses, these two limitations create a critical vulnerability: unreliable reward estimates may be granted disproportionate influence, triggering severe reward hacking. We propose Uncertainty-Aware Reward Modeling (UARM), which equips reward models with calibrated uncertainty via quantile-based conformal prediction and reweights GRPO advantages through heteroscedastic variance decomposition. Experiments across HelpSteer, UltraFeedback, and PKU-SafeRLHF demonstrate that UARM significantly improves reward model calibration, reduces reward hacking, and enhances downstream alignment quality compared to standard GRPO and uncertainty-agnostic baselines.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Confidence Calibration for Multimodal LLMs: An Empirical Study through Medical VQA

arXiv:2606.19950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great potential in medical tasks, but their elicited confidence often misaligns with actual accuracy, potentially leading to misdiagnosis or overlooking correct advice. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between accuracy and confidence in medical MLLMs. It proposes a novel method that combines Multi-Strategy Fusion-Based Interrogation (MS-FBI) with auxiliary expert LLM assessment, aiming to improve confidence calibration in Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA). Experiments demonstrate that our method reduces the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by an average of 40\% across three Medical VQA datasets, significantly enhancing MLLMs' reliability. The findings highlight the importance of domain-specific calibration for MLLMs in healthcare, offering a more trustworthy solution for AI-assisted diagnosis.

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

EFIQA: Explainable Fundus Image Quality Assessment via Anatomical Priors

arXiv:2606.20108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image quality control is vital for a wide range of downstream applications. Deep learning-based image quality assessment methods typically train classifiers on dataset-specific quality labels, inheriting two limitations: (1) generalization is tied to the labeling criteria of the training set and (2) these methods cannot provide spatial feedback on where the quality is degraded, lacking explainability. In this work, we propose EFIQA, a framework that requires no quality-related supervision and produces spatial quality maps by design. Rather than learning ``what is degradation" from human-annotated labels, EFIQA learns ``what should be there" by leveraging anatomical priors. For fundus photography, we instantiate this as a two-stage approach, by first training an unsupervised anomaly detector via masked anatomical inpainting to identify regions of missing vasculature, and then distilling this prior knowledge into a shallow adapter mapping features of a frozen foundation model to precise quality maps. External-dataset evaluation demonstrates that this label-free approach with minimal adaptation achieves better performance and explainability compared with supervised methods across benchmarks with different quality criteria, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

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

A global log for medical AI

arXiv:2510.04033v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern computer systems rely on syslog, a universal protocol that records critical events across heterogeneous infrastructure. Medicine's rapidly growing AI stack has no equivalent. As medicine deploys AI tools at scale, there is no standard way to record how, when, by whom, and for whom these models are used. Without such records, it is difficult to measure real-world performance and outcomes, detect adverse events, or identify bias and dataset drift. Here we introduce MedLog, a protocol for event-level logging of medical AI. Each time an AI model interacts with a human, another algorithm, or an automated workflow, MedLog creates a record. Each record contains nine core fields: header, model, user, target, inputs, artifacts, outputs, outcomes, and feedback. We apply MedLog across four deployments in the US, Switzerland, and Vietnam: ICU deterioration prediction, tetanus progression monitoring from wearable signals, automated sepsis quality reporting, and patient attendance prediction. MedLog records capture model behavior, workflow interactions, and downstream outcomes, including AI performance degradation during severe weather events in patient attendance prediction and increased laboratory testing after ICU deterioration alerts. MedLog limits the data footprint through risk-based sampling, lifecycle-aware retention policies, and write-behind caching, enabling deployment in low-resource settings. It also supports detailed traces for complex, agentic, or multi-stage workflows, creating a foundation for continuous monitoring, auditing, and improvement of medical AI.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Graph-ESBMC-PLC: Formal Verification of Graphical PLCopen XML Ladder Diagram Programs Using SMT-Based Model Checking

PLCopen XML defines two encoding formats for IEC 61131-3 Ladder Diagram programs: a textual encoding using elements, and a graphical encoding that represents rung logic as a directed graph of localId/refLocalId connections. ESBMC-PLC supported the textual format but parsed graphical exports from CONTROLLINO, Beremiz, and OpenPLC Editor into an empty GOTO intermediate representation, causing vacuous verification success. This paper presents Graph-ESBMC-PLC, which closes this gap with a DFS-based graphical LD resolver. The resolver traverses the connection graph from leftPowerRail to each coil, extracts rung paths as Boolean contact conjunctions, and applies a three-tier I/O inference scheme. Ordering coils by rightPowerRail connectionPointIn sequence ensures SET coils process before RESET coils, matching IEC scan-cycle semantics. The graphical-to-IR conversion leaves the ESBMC backend unchanged. Validation on 3 graphical LD programs from CONTROLLINO/OpenPLC Editor shows all produce full GOTO IR with nondeterministic inputs and rung logic, versus the empty IR previously. All 3 verify SAFE at k=2 under 70ms. The 11 textual LD benchmarks are fully preserved, with no regression. Two Beremiz examples with no LD content or unsupported timer semantics are reported as discovered limitations. Artifact at Zenodo (DantasCordeiro2026graphical, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20699856).

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

LIBERO-Occ: Evaluating and Improving Vision-Language-Action Models under Scene-Induced Occlusion via Viewpoint Imagination

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance on standard manipulation benchmarks, but most evaluations assume that task-relevant objects are fully visible. This assumption often fails in realistic settings, where occlusion makes manipulation partially observable. In this paper, we study scene-induced occlusion as a fundamental challenge for VLA models and introduce LIBERO-Occ, an occlusion-oriented extension of LIBERO. Experiments show that state-of-the-art VLAs suffer substantial performance degradation under occlusion. To address this issue, we propose Viewpoint Imagination (VIM), which generates a complementary view from an occluded primary observation and conditions action prediction on both observed and imagined evidence. VIM improves robustness across task suites, occlusion types, and severity levels without requiring additional cameras at deployment time, suggesting that viewpoint imagination is an promising mechanism for perception completion in partially observable manipulation. Our benchmark and corresponding code are available at: \href{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Asymptotically Optimal Sequential Testing with Markovian Data

arXiv:2602.17587v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study one-sided and $\alpha$-correct sequential hypothesis testing for data generated by an ergodic, finite-state Markov chain. The null hypothesis is that the unknown transition matrix belongs to a prescribed set $P$ of stochastic matrices, and the alternative corresponds to a disjoint set $Q$. We establish a non-asymptotic instance-dependent lower bound on the expected stopping time of any valid sequential test under the alternative, which is asymptotically tight. Our novel analysis improves the existing lower bounds, which are either asymptotic or provably sub-optimal in this setting. Our lower bound incorporates both the stationary distribution and the transition structure induced by the unknown Markov chain. We further propose an optimal test whose expected stopping time matches this lower bound asymptotically as $\alpha \to 0$. We illustrate the usefulness of our framework through applications to sequential detection of model misspecification in Markov Chain Monte Carlo and to testing structural properties, such as the linearity of transition dynamics, in Markov decision processes. Our findings yield a sharp and general characterization of optimal sequential testing procedures under Markovian dependence.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Purity and bound energy in ancilla-assisted work extraction

arXiv:2606.19945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate ancilla-assisted work extraction in quantum batteries from the perspective of bound energy and purity. We show that the bound energy of the reduced system provides a tight upper bound to the daemonic gain and that this bound is saturated for globally pure system–ancilla states. Motivated by this relation, we introduce a purity-based gain that qualitatively predicts the daemonic gain without requiring explicit optimization over measurements. We further introduce a protocol to analyze the role of dissipation and intrinsic interactions on daemonic gain. Under a collective environment, dissipation can dynamically generate and stabilize finite daemonic gain through environment-induced correlations. In interacting systems, level crossings and spectral restructuring strongly modify the attainable gain through their influence on the accessible bound energy. Our results demonstrate that daemonic gain is governed not only by correlations, but also by the spectral structure of the underlying Hamiltonian and information loss captured by bound energy and purity.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Deep Neural Networks with Ordinal Loss for Medical Applications

arXiv:2606.25769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many prediction problems in medical applications, target labels exhibit an inherent ordinal structure, where class ordering reflects clinically meaningful severity levels. The cost associated with misclassification is often non-uniform and asymmetric, as errors between distant ordinal categories may have substantially more severe consequences than errors between adjacent ones, and overestimating disease severity may have different clinical implications than underestimating it. Traditional loss functions such as multi-class cross-entropy treat all misclassifications equally and fail to incorporate this ordering information. Recent advances in ordinal regression aim to address this limitation by integrating rank-based structures into deep learning models. In this work, we introduce the Ordinal Cross-Entropy (OCE) framework, a general and architecture-independent approach for learning from ordinal data. The proposed method extends the standard cross-entropy formulation to account for misclassification severity through an ordinal cost matrix while preserving the probabilistic interpretation and optimization benefits of the conventional loss. We provide a theoretical analysis of the OCE gradient behavior and show that it yields smoother optimization dynamics and improved ordinal consistency. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method achieves lower prediction error costs and better calibration compared to existing state-of-the-art ordinal approaches, establishing OCE as a simple yet effective solution for ordinal regression in deep neural networks.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Multi-Stream Temporal Fusion for Financial Fraud Detection

arXiv:2606.25007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial fraud detection in digital banking requires reasoning over multiple heterogeneous event streams – transactions, login sessions, risk signals – that individually appear benign but collectively reveal fraudulent patterns. We propose the Multi-Stream Fraud Transformer (MSFT), a unified architecture that encodes each event stream with independent Transformer encoders and fuses their representations through configurable mechanisms. We conduct a systematic ablation study comparing five fusion strategies: concatenation, gated fusion, time-aware positional encoding, cross-stream attention, and a full combination. On a large-scale dataset (10M users, 1.5% fraud rate) with 85M parameter models, we demonstrate that (1) sequence models significantly outperform gradient-boosted trees operating on aggregated features (0.74 vs. 0.99 AUROC), (2) per-stream encoding is essential – a single-stream Transformer baseline with matched parameter budget reaches only 0.82 AUROC, an 18-point gap that confirms the multi-stream inductive bias is necessary, (3) time-aware positional encoding achieves the highest discrimination (0.9961 AUROC), (4) gated fusion yields the best precision (0.989) suitable for production deployment, and (5) the risk event stream provides the strongest individual signal contribution. We further validate on proprietary production data from a digital banking platform, showing over 22% relative AUROC improvement over the XGBoost baseline.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

The Geometry of Sequential Learning: Lie-Bracket Prediction of Transfer Order

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sequential learning is order-dependent: from Pile-style next-token domain adaptation to instruction-SFT and DPO, N candidate sources induce N! possible curricula. We show that the local order effect is governed by a computable geometric quantity, the Lie-bracket commutator of gradient update fields, yielding a pairwise score for whether A->B or B->A is better for a target domain. The pairwise bracket primitive also defines a Lie-Bracket Tournament: with a shared theta_0 target-gradient reference, Hessian symmetry gives Borda/row-sum scores from one Hessian-vector product per source, O(N) dot products, and an O(N log N) sort, without materializing the O(N^2) edge matrix. Empirically, the planner reaches 98.1%/98.9% pairwise accuracy at k=1 for instruction-SFT/DPO, remains at 73.1%/72.2% at k=20, and preserves the original pretraining-domain evidence with 82.4-92.0% accuracy across four LLMs and 91.1% on diffusion. At curriculum scale, it recovers the best of all 3! schedules in 87.5% of trials, ranks 85 Stack programming-language source domains for a Python target in the 99th sampled percentile, and reaches the 99.0-99.6th sampled percentile on 56 MMLU subjects, sharply above the reported descending gradient-norm baseline. These results reframe sequential learning as a geometric tournament problem: commutators provide both local pairwise order information and a scalable primitive for many-domain schedules.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Confidence-Aware Automated Assessment of Student-Drawn Scientific Models

arXiv:2606.20264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Student-generated drawings are widely used in science education to assess learners' conceptual understanding in modeling-based tasks aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). However, scoring such drawings requires expert human judgment to interpret complex visual representations, making large-scale assessment costly to implement and sustain in classroom settings. In this work, we study automated scoring of student-generated scientific drawings using a vision-based model. We evaluate a Vision Transformer (ViT) with parameter-efficient adaptation and propose a confidence-aware scoring framework that derives response-level confidence from test-time predictive distributions. This confidence signal enables selective automation by scoring high-confidence responses automatically while deferring uncertain cases for human review. Experiments on six NGSS-aligned middle school assessment items show that the proposed approach improves scoring reliability while supporting a practical trade-off between automated coverage and scoring risk, highlighting the value of confidence-aware methods for trustworthy educational assessment.

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

Watching a Superconducting Coplanar Waveguide Heat Up with a Single Color Center

arXiv:2606.15398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single color centers in diamond offer a local probe of their cryogenic environment, providing a direct way to quantify heating in spin-control hardware. Here, we establish a single spectrally stable tin-vacancy (SnV) center as an on-chip thermometer for a diamond membrane and use it to characterize microwave- and radio-frequency-induced heating in a superconducting coplanar waveguide patterned on the same chip. We first calibrate the temperature dependence of the optical C-transition frequency and linewidth from $20\,\mathrm{K}$ down to the few-kelvin regime. At lower temperatures, where the optical response becomes weakly temperature dependent, we use the spin-lattice relaxation time $T_1$ as a complementary thermometer and tune its sensitivity with the transverse magnetic-field component. Applying this local thermometer to a niobium coplanar waveguide, we observe magnetic-field-dependent superconducting breakdown under GHz drive, accompanied by abrupt heating of the diamond. In contrast, at $20\,\mathrm{MHz}$ and $400\,\mathrm{mT}$, relevant for nuclear-spin control, we detect no measurable heating up to the breakdown threshold of $9.4\,\mathrm{dBm}$, corresponding to $B_\mathrm{ac}\sim1.2\,\mathrm{mT}$. These results define a safe operating window for superconducting microwave and RF control structures in diamond-based quantum nodes.

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

AerialFusionMapNet: Online HD Map Construction with Aerial-Onboard BEV Fusion

High-resolution aerial imagery has recently emerged as a complementary modality for automated driving perception and has shown potential to improve birds-eye-view (BEV) scene understanding when fused with onboard sensors. Prior work demonstrated performance gains for online high-definition (HD) map construction through aerial-onboard fusion; however, conventional end-to-end fusion does not fully exploit the structural information contained in aerial representations. In this work, we introduce AerialFusionMapNet, a fusion-based mapping framework with a structured two-stage training strategy that explicitly enhances the contribution of aerial features within a unified pipeline. The proposed training scheme enables more effective integration of structural aerial priors. On the nuScenes geographic split, AerialFusionMapNet achieves up to 54.7 mAP, improving over prior aerial-onboard fusion baselines from 48.8 mAP by +5.9 absolute and +12.1% relative. The results suggest that structured training design, rather than increased architectural complexity, plays a more decisive role in unlocking the full potential of aerial imagery for online HD map construction. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/DriverlessMobility/AerialFusionMapNet.

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

UltraEP: Unleash MoE Training and Inference on Rack-Scale Nodes with Near-Optimal Load Balancing

arXiv:2606.04101v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) is becoming pivotal for training and serving frontier MoE models, but it also amplifies device-level expert load imbalance into compute stragglers, token all-to-all bottlenecks, and activation-memory spikes. Existing balancers redistribute experts periodically based on historical load, which becomes unreliable for production deployments with non-stationary load patterns. We present UltraEP, the first exact-load, real-time balancer for large-EP MoE training and serving prefill on rack-scale nodes (RSNs). Leveraging the extended scale-up connectivity among dozens of GPUs within RSNs, UltraEP rebalances every microbatch and layer on critical paths, which requires nontrivial co-design of plan solving and expert replication communication to minimize exposed overhead. To this end, UltraEP eagerly reacts to post-gating load with an efficient quota-driven planner, and executes the resulting irregular expert-state transfers with RSN-native persistent tile streaming and relay-based fan-out mitigation. We evaluate UltraEP in a multi-RSN deployment of up to 256 GPUs, using cutting-edge MoE models from 106B to 671B parameters. Averaged across training and serving, UltraEP achieves 94.3% of the force-balanced ideal throughput, delivering 1.49$\times$ improvement over no-balancing, while reducing the final inter-rank imbalance from 1.30$-$4.01 to 1.01$-$1.04.

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

TW-LegalBench: Measuring Taiwanese Legal Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their performance on jurisdiction-specific legal reasoning remains underexplored. We present TW-LegalBench that utilizes Taiwanese legal system's rich official corpus open to the public to fill the gap in evaluating LLMs on Taiwanese law, among common-law benchmarks that focus on English sources and civil-law benchmarks focusing on sources of Simplified Chinese. TW-LegalBench comprises three task types: (1) over 16,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) across five years of official examinations in 18 professional domains; (2) 117 open-ended essay questions (OEQs) from examinations for legal professionals with official scoring rubrics; and (3) more than 14,000 legal judgment prediction (LJP) instances covering hundreds of crime categories. We evaluate 13 LLMs using accuracy for MCQs, a decomposed LLM-as-Judge framework based on the scoring rubric points for OEQs, and metrics for sentencing accuracy and statute citation for LJP. Our results reveal that top-performing models exceed the passing threshold for qualified lawyers (passing rate: 11%) but fall short of that for judges and prosecutors (passing rate: 1~2%). For LJP, while models demonstrate reasonable verdict type accuracy and sentence prediction capability, they struggle to cite exact legal articles. These findings highlight that reliable legal text generation remains challenging for LLMs, even though their performance on qualification examinations approaches human level.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

An integrated AI-microfluidic platform reveals the broad persistence and developmental potential of rare sperm in non-obstructive azoospermia

Non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA) represents the most severe form of male infertility, severely limiting a patient's prospects for biological fatherhood when surgical retrieval fails. However, the true biological limits of NOA remain obscured by the inherent limitations of conventional gamete recovery protocols: standard centrifugation frequently causes substantial cell loss, masking extremely rare sperm, while surgical interventions are constrained by spatial sampling biases. Here we report SpermSeek, an integrated AI-guided microfluidic platform for real-time, non-destructive isolation of single sperm directly from semen. Operating at scalable throughput (0.36 mL/h), the system achieves 98.3% detection precision and a 95.5% target encapsulation efficiency, suppressing background debris. In a 59-patient NOA cohort, SpermSeek detected morphologically identifiable sperm in 64.4% (38/59) of cases, spanning diverse genetic etiologies, including AZFb/c microdeletions, and severe histopathological phenotypes, such as Sertoli-cell-only syndrome (SCOS). Notably, among a sub-cohort of 41 patients who remained consistently sperm-negative despite prior medical or micro-TESE interventions, our platform identified gametes in 53.7% (22/41) of these cases. Comprehensive safety profiling in healthy human donors and wild-type mice confirmed that processed sperm retain high DNA integrity and epigenomic concordance (r=0.98), supporting transgenerational developmental stability in mice. Furthermore, in a 26-patient validation cohort, SpermSeek recovered rare sperm in 11 cases. Utilizing gametes from a subset (n=5), we demonstrated their capacity to support early human embryogenesis, yielding high-quality cleavage-stage embryos with confirmed genomic euploidy. This work establishes a highly sensitive framework for re-examining the biological limits of human spermatogenesis, laying the foundation to expand autologous reproductive options for patients refractory to conventional retrieval protocols.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Pitch Spelling Jazz Lead Sheets, Solo Transcriptions, Classical Piano and Monophonic Scores

We present an algorithm for pitch spelling and key estimation. Given an input in MIDI-like format, containing information on note pitches (expressed in semitones relative to the lowest reference note) and bar boundaries, it estimates the appropriate note names, a global Key Signature, and a local scale for each bar. This related information elements are evaluated jointly during two stages of optimisation. During an initial 'modal' stage, a probable scale is proposed for each bar, minimising the number of accidentals to be printed in the printed score with a shortest-path search. Then, during a second stage called 'tonal', these local scales are used to estimate the Key Signature and note names that would result in the best musical notation for the entire piece. We present evaluations conducted on datasets comprising a variety of digital musical scores: jazz lead sheets taken from the Real Book, transcriptions of recordings of jazz soli and bass lines, traditional tunes, as well as classical scores for piano and monophonic instruments. Our procedure was originally designed for use in music transcription, specifically for building digital collections of jazz solos transcribed from audio recordings, for the purposes of music analysis, teaching and the preservation of cultural heritage. This method should also prove useful for other tasks related to the processing of musical notation. Furthermore, to this end, we have defined new distances between various common jazz scales, which may be of some interest to musicological studies.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum thermodynamics of the Caldeira-Leggett model with non-equilibrium Gaussian reservoirs

arXiv:2405.00215v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a non-equilibrium version of the Caldeira-Leggett model in which a quantum particle is strongly coupled to a set of engineered reservoirs. The reservoirs are composed by collections of squeezed and displaced thermal modes, in contrast to the standard case in which the modes are assumed to be at equilibrium. The model proves to be very versatile. Strongly displaced/squeezed reservoirs can be used to generate an effective time dependence in the system Hamiltonian and can be identified as sources of pure work. In the case of squeezing, the time dependence is stochastic and breaks the fluctuation-dissipation relation, this can be reconciled with the second law of thermodynamics by correctly accounting for the energy used to generate the initial non-equilibrium conditions. To go beyond the average description and compute the full heat statistics, we treat squeezing and displacement as generalized Hamiltonians on a modified Keldysh contour. As an application of this technique, we show the quantum-classical correspondence between the heat statistics in the non-equilibrium Caldeira-Leggett model and the statistics of a classical Langevin particle under the action of squeezed and displaced colored noises. Finally, we discuss thermodynamic symmetries of the heat generating function, proving a fluctuation theorem for the energy balance and showing that the conservation of energy at the trajectory level emerges in the classical limit.

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

Finetuning Vision-Language-Action Models Requires Fewer Layers Than You Think

arXiv:2606.20246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference. In this work, we reveal a highly non-trivial architectural characteristic of these continuous control foundation policies (e.g., pi_0, GR00T-N1.5): despite being trained on diverse physical trajectories, they exhibit severe layer-wise representational redundancy. To exploit this, we introduce a structural compression pipeline that is entirely training-free, bypassing the need of existing methods to load full-scale models to learn optimized token reductions or dynamic layer selectors. Instead, using only a single forward pass via Centered Kernel Alignment to identify redundant layer features, we remove twin layers to permanently compress the model depth by up to 50% across both the VLM backbone and the continuous control policy head. Downstream fine-tuning of this streamlined architecture yields a dual acceleration benefit: a 40-50% reduction in training time and up to 30% faster real-time inference, while matching or exceeding full-scale base model performance. We comprehensively validate our method across three simulation benchmarks (LIBERO, RoboCasa, SimplerEnv) and 10 diverse real-world manipulation tasks across 4 unique robotic embodiments. These results prove that advanced VLAs require significantly fewer layers than previously assumed, offering a highly compute-efficient paradigm for scalable robot learning.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Human genetic evidence links serine biosynthesis to diabetic peripheral neuropathy

Diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN) is a common and disabling condition for which no disease-modifying therapies are available. Glycemic and metabolic drivers do not fully explain why only a subset of individuals with diabetes develop DPN, and genetic contributors remain poorly defined. We aimed to perform a multi-population genome-wide association study (GWAS) of DPN to highlight potential new etiological pathways and therapeutic targets. Methods We performed a multi-population GWAS of neuropathy in people with and without diabetes using the VA Million Veteran Program and UK Biobank, followed by replication in the All of Us Research Program (AoU), and gene-based and gene-set analyses to identify implicated pathways. Causal relationships between circulating serine levels and DPN were further tested using two sample Mendelian randomization. To further evaluate pathogenic potential, we analyzed rare, high impact variants in GWAS implicated genes among individuals with unresolved inherited neuropathies using the GENESIS platform. Findings Among individuals with type 2 diabetes, we identified seven genome wide significant loci (p

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Reducing stillbirth in high burden settings using biomarkers and ultrasound technologies: protocol for the multi-centre prospective iTECH cohort study

Introduction Stillbirth prevention requires reliable detection of potential causes for timely interventions. Currently, there is no effective screening strategy to identify fetuses at risk of stillbirth. Prognostic models have been proposed as a potential solution, but there is a shortage of robust, clinically applicable models in low- and middle-income countries. Early birth is frequently initiated without proper risk stratification, leading to increased neonatal and infant morbidity and mortality. This study aims to develop and validate multi modal multivariable prediction models for stillbirth and pathologies that lead to stillbirth (preeclampsia & fetal growth restriction) using widely accessible and cost-effective markers. Stakeholder perspectives will also be assessed. Methods and analysis This multi-center prospective cohort study is running in four high volume regional referral hospitals in Uganda: Kawempe, Hoima, Lira, and Mbale. We will enroll at least 6,075 pregnant women attending routine antenatal care (ANC), above 13 years of age, and greater than or equal to11 weeks of gestation. Data and biological samples will be collected at 11-23 weeks, 35-37 weeks and at birth in all women. In a subset of women, additional measurements will be obtained between 24-34 weeks and 38-42 weeks to allow for spread of the data across the full spectrum of pregnancy. This data will enable us to investigate the physiological changes with gestational development in healthy or unhealthy pregnancies, to guide future monitoring and management of women and establishment of reference values for novel markers. The placenta will be collected for histopathological analysis in women diagnosed with intrauterine fetal demise at greater than or equal to 20 weeks of gestation, stillbirth nearmiss and their corresponding controls. Data on socio-demographics, obstetric history, current pregnancy conditions, and tests such as maternal hemodynamics, ultrasound, and biochemical markers will be collected from each participant, and used to develop regression and machine learning prediction models. Models will be validated and evaluated by comparing their calibration plots, precision and recall, F1 scores and accuracy, aiming for less complexity and reliable predictions. Emerging models will be translated into software as a medical device (SAMD), while taking into account user experiences, regulatory requirements, data pipelines in clinical workflows and user-friendly interfaces that facilitate access and the interpretation of outputs, to allow for seamless integration into existing electronic health information systems and decision support tools. To assess stakeholder perceptions, we will employ an exploratory qualitative component using focus group discussions, semi-structured and key informant interviews. The sample will include 81 purposively selected women and their partners who use maternity care services, local leaders and healthcare providers in and out of the four hospitals implementing iTECH in Uganda. Qualitative data will be audio recorded, transcribed verbatim and thematic analysis performed using Nvivo 12.