中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

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

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Parameter-Efficient Adapter Tuning for Tabular-Image Multimodal Learning

Authors:
Jiaqi Luo↗

Tabular-image multimodal learning aims to improve predictive modeling by jointly using structured tabular attributes and visual data. Although pretrained encoders provide strong modality-specific representations, full fine-tuning can be computationally expensive, while keeping encoders frozen may limit task-specific adaptation. We propose the Tabular-Image Adapter (TI-Adapter), a modality-specific adapter-based fine-tuning framework for efficient multimodal adaptation. TI-Adapter freezes the pretrained tabular encoder and learns an adapter after the extracted tabular embedding, while adapting the image branch with embedding-level and bottleneck-level adapters instead of full fine-tuning. Experiments on 20 tabular-image datasets show that TI-Adapter achieves competitive or better predictive performance than full fine-tuning while using substantially fewer trainable parameters. Ablation studies further demonstrate the importance of adapter placement for balancing performance and practical efficiency.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The circulating blood proteome of childhood acute leukemia

Authors:
Enblad↗A. P↗Globisch↗M. A↗Gogishvili↗Tuononen↗Krali↗Lundmark↗Oksa↗Hjort↗Lysenkova Wiklander↗Holmfeldt↗…

The circulating blood proteome provides a systemic readout of disease biology and holds promise for advancing diagnostics and disease monitoring in pediatric leukemia. Here, we profiled 3072 proteins in diagnostic serum from 54 children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), 21 with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), and 12 healthy controls using the Olink Proximity Extension Assay. We observed profound alterations in circulating protein levels in leukemia patients compared with controls and identified immunophenotype-specific proteins, including SIGLEC15 in B-cell precursor ALL (BCP-ALL), NOTCH1 in T-ALL, and CEBPA in AML, all which remained high even in patients with low (

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Large deviation principle for friendship-biases in Galton–Watson trees

Authors:
Frank den Hollander↗Azadeh Parvaneh↗

arXiv:2606.17381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider the friendship-bias of the vertices in an infinite rooted Galton–Watson tree. The friendship-bias of a vertex is the difference between the average degree of the neighbours of the vertex and the degree of the vertex itself. A vertex is said to be of type $\chi \in S$, with $S = \{-,0,+\}$, when its friendship-bias is, respectively, strictly negative, zero or strictly positive. We consider the fractions $f_l^\chi$ of vertices of type $\chi \in S$ along a random downward path up to branching depth $l \in \mathbb{N}$ and derive a large deviation principle (LDP) for the triple $(f_l^\chi)_{\chi \in S}$ as $l\to\infty$. The branching depth of a vertex counts the number of branchings that occur along the path that connects the vertex to the root of the tree. The rate in the LDP is $l$, while the rate function in the LDP is identified in terms of a variational formula minimising a relative entropy under a linear constraint. We focus on the case of binary branching, for which the rate function is already quite involved. We identify the qualitative properties of the rate function and show how it can be computed numerically. We briefly indicate how to proceed for more general branching and for vertex types along a tree consisting of a finite number of random downward paths. Our paper is the first to consider large deviations of vertex types.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Physics-Informed Discovery of Yield Functions in Plasticity via Convex Neural Representations

Authors:
Hyeonbin Moon↗Donghyuk Cho↗Jecheon Yu↗Jeong Whan Yoon↗Seunghwa Ryu↗

arXiv:2606.19375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying anisotropic yield functions remains challenging since yielding is not directly observed in full-field mechanical measurements, directional calibration can require many loading directions, and selecting an appropriate analytical form is nontrivial. This study proposes a physics-informed framework for discovering yield functions from full-field displacement data and reaction force data, without stress observations, plastic strain measurements, direct yield surface data, or a prescribed parametric yield function. The framework identifies the yield function as a mechanically constrained constitutive component inside elastoplastic stress integration, rather than through direct stress-space supervision. The yield function is represented by a convex neural network that enforces convexity and positive homogeneity of degree one while imposing the assumed tension-compression symmetry, and this neural yield function is trained with a differentiable stress update and a physics-informed force equilibrium loss across multiple loading cases. The proposed framework is validated using finite element (FE) benchmark studies with von Mises, Hill 1948, and Yld2000-2d yield functions, assessing yield contour agreement, displacement-noise sensitivity, identifiability through plastically active stress states, epistemic uncertainty, and polynomial-surrogate deployment. This study provides a mechanics-constrained pathway for discovering anisotropic yield functions from displacement and force data while keeping the identified component within the structure of elastoplastic stress integration.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

HarnessBridge: Learnable Bidirectional Controller for LLM Agent Harness

Authors:
Xiaoxuan Wang↗Haixin Wang↗Alexander Taylor↗Jason Cong↗Yizhou Sun↗Wei Wang↗

arXiv:2606.12882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents for long-horizon tasks, yet their performance is shaped not only by model capability and environment design, but also by the harness that mediates agent–environment interaction. Existing harnesses are largely manually engineered, making them difficult to scale as trajectories grow longer and interactions become more complex. In this work, we ask whether harness can be generated by a learnable plug-in module that can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. We introduce HarnessBridge, a lightweight learnable harness controller that parameterizes the agent–environment interface as a bidirectional projection. HarnessBridge learns two bidirectional projections: observation projection, which distills raw trajectories into compact, decision-relevant states, and action projection, which converts proposed actions into executable transitions or trajectory-grounded rejections. We train HarnessBridge on a harness supervision dataset via unified instruction tuning. On Terminal-Bench~2.0 and SWE-bench Verified, HarnessBridge matches or surpasses strong specialized harnesses while substantially reducing token usage and trajectory length, and generalizes from smaller generators to larger commercial models.

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

AI4SE and SE4AI Exploration: A Decade Looking Back and Forward

Authors:
H. Sinan Bank↗Daniel R. Herber↗Thomas Bradley↗

arXiv:2606.19630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The March 2020 INCOSE INSIGHT special issue on AI and Systems Engineering (SE) became the most downloaded issue in the publication's history and launched a research community that now draws over 250 registrants to its annual workshop. In this article, we trace the progress in AI and SE across three phases (labeled here foundational, applied, and LLM inflection) based on the authors' reading of the field's core papers, and describe our opinions of where the community has converged and where critical gaps remain. Separately, a human-AI agreement literature review leveraging both human expertise and six AI models was performed to assess the relevance of 1,712 INCOSE INSIGHT articles and 889 SERC publications. The results identify five critical research gaps and offer guidance for practitioners navigating AI adoption, assurance, and workforce transformation in SE. We share the agreement data and the AI4SE/SE4AI Explorer web application so readers can compare their own relevance judgments with the human and AI raters.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Quantizing Time-Series Models As Dynamical Systems: Trajectory-Based Quantization Sensitivity Score

Authors:
Mariya Pavlova↗Harrison Bo Hua Zhu↗Elizsveta Semenova↗Yingzhen Li↗

arXiv:2606.13300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Trajectory-based Quantization Sensitivity Score (TQS), a metric that reframes post-training quantization (PTQ) through the lens of dynamical-systems stability. By modeling the network's rollout as a discrete-time dynamical system, TQS characterizes how quantization-induced errors propagate and amplify over the rollout horizon. Unlike conventional PTQ methods, where sensitivity analysis is often coupled to the quantization procedure, TQS enables a priori sensitivity estimation decoupled from quantizer selection and bit-width assignment. This separation allows for quantization budget planning even for black-box or compiled networks with fused operators. Building on this, we present TQS-PTQ, a flexible mixed-precision framework that requires no calibration data or costly second-order approximations. Our experiments show that a dynamical-systems perspective provides a robust, high-performing pathway for low-precision deployment in resource-constrained settings.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

False Sense of Safety in Selective Signal Classification: Auditing Bound Tightness and Exchangeability for Risk Control

Authors:
Jingwen Zhou↗Mingzhe Wang↗

arXiv:2606.15153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selective prediction with distribution-free risk control promises that, with confidence 1-delta over the calibration draw, the error rate of accepted inputs stays below a user budget alpha. We audit this promise on signal-domain detectors – machine anomalous-sound detection (ASD) and AI-generated-image forensics – for four calibration rules: uncertified empirical thresholding (NAIVE) and certified Hoeffding, Clopper-Pearson (CP), and betting (WSR) upper confidence bounds. We report three findings. (i) NAIVE thresholding, common in practice, exceeds its declared budget in 49-73% of synthetic trials (n=200 calibration points) and in up to 68% of real-data splits: a false sense of safety rather than a broken theorem, since the rule never had a certificate. (ii) Tightness matters: CP and WSR certify substantial coverage where Hoeffding certifies none, with zero observed budget overruns under exchangeable splits. (iii) Under grouped deployment (unseen machine types or generators), certified rules overrun in 9-30% of trials – far above delta – showing the failure lies in the broken exchangeability premise, not in the bounds; a conservative per-group threshold restores validity at a severe coverage cost.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TrustErase: Auditable Instant Machine Unlearning with Passport-Embedded Representations

Authors:
Rutger Hendrix↗Leonardo G. Russo↗Concetto Spampinato↗Matteo Pennisi↗Giovanni Bellitto↗

arXiv:2606.17122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The demand for privacy-compliant AI has amplified the need for machine unlearning; yet, existing retraining or distillation-based methods remain unverifiable and computationally costly. We introduce TrustErase, a verifiable, data-free unlearning framework leveraging passport-embedded representations for instant, modular, and auditable forgetting. By treating passports as cryptographic keys within parameter-efficient adaptation layers, TrustErase enables the removal of specific classes or datasets through simple deactivation, without retraining, fine-tuning, or access to the original data. A singular value based decomposition conceals passports within model weights, ensuring that unlearning actions remain transparent and provably compliant. Evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 show that TrustErase matches or exceeds state-of-the-art benchmarks such as DELETE, L2UL, and Boundary Shrink, while operating in a strictly data-free regime. Ultimately, TrustErase establishes a new paradigm for trustworthy, accountable, and instantly forgettable AI systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

COVID-19 containment policies and hyperglycemia in pregnancy: correlation with the Stringency Index in a nationwide Belgian cohort

Authors:
Costa↗Vercoutere↗Alexander↗Boulvain↗Derisbourg↗Lamy↗Delbaere↗Racape↗

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, gestational diabetes (GD) prevalence showed variable changes across regions, with most reporting increases and others decreases; however, its association with perinatal outcomes in Belgium remains unknown. We aimed to compare the prevalence of hyperglycemia in pregnancy (HIP) in 2020 versus 2019 and examined the correlation between HIP prevalence and pandemic-related restrictions measured by the Stringency Index (SI) and evaluate neonatal weight percentiles changes. Methods: We included all singleton live births in Belgium in 2019 and 2020 from Belgian birth registry data. We compared monthly proportions of HIP prevalence and Small for gestational age (SGA) and Large for gestional age (LGA) newborns in 2019 and 2020. Crude and adjusted odds ratios (ORs, aORs) were estimated with logistic and multinomial regression. The Spearman correlation coefficient was used to assess the correlation between the monthly average SI and the monthly aORs of HIP. Results: For deliveries from January to June 2020, no significant differences in HIP prevalence were observed compared with 2019. From July to December 2020, there was a significant increase in HIP, with peaks in July (GD screening in April) (aOR 1.41, 1.26-1.58) and November (GD screening in August) (aOR 1.33, 95% CI 1.18-1.49). There was no significant change in neonatal weight percentiles. The Spearman correlation coefficient between the SI and HIP aORs was 0.86 (p = 0.02). Conclusion During the pandemic, we observed an increase in the prevalence of HIP, compared to 2019, without a measurable impact on LGA or SGA newborns. The aOR of HIP in a given month was strongly correlated with the corresponding SI.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MedLatentDx: Latent Multi-Agent Communication for Cross-Hospital Rare-Disease Diagnosis

Authors:
Ziqing Wang↗Lili Zhao↗Kaize Ding↗

Rare diseases affect over $300$ million patients across more than $7{,}000$ conditions, yet no single hospital encounters enough cases of any one condition for reliable diagnosis. Cross-hospital collaboration could help by allowing a diagnosing institution to use distributed, case-specific diagnostic evidence, but privacy regulations restrict the transmission of identifiable clinical text across institutional boundaries. This setting raises two challenges: existing medical agent systems often rely on textual evidence exchange, while raw latent states such as hidden states and KV caches may still reveal prompt-derived clinical content. We introduce MedLatentDx, a latent multi-agent communication framework in which hospital agents keep private clinical records and retrieved cases local, and send compact latent KV blocks to a host agent for rare-disease diagnosis. MedLatentDx supports two deployment settings: same-backbone hospital agents use latent KV distillation, while hospitals with different LLM backbones use cross-family latent alignment. On CrossRare-Bench, a self-built large-scale rare-disease benchmark with hospital-level partitions, MedLatentDx improves cross-hospital diagnostic performance while reducing reconstructable clinical content relative to raw-latent communication baselines.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for PDEs

Authors:
Xiang Rao↗Yuxuan Shen↗

arXiv:2606.20326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop QCPIKAN, the first quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold network designed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Built upon Chebyshev-polynomial KAN layers and parameterized quantum circuits, this hybrid framework embeds physical constraints into the training loss to enforce physical consistency. Our theoretical investigations grounded in approximation theory prove that this design accelerates high-frequency error convergence to an exponential rate and effectively mitigates numerical dispersion. We validate the framework across three typical seepage scenarios in porous media, including single-phase flow, component transport and two-phase flow. Compared with existing quantum-classical physics-informed neural networks, QCPIKAN achieves superior performance in global prediction accuracy, local error control, dynamic evolution tracking and displacement front localization. This work provides a robust and efficient alternative for solving complex PDEs.

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

SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-end In-Context Conditioning

Authors:
Wenhao Yan↗Fengjia Guo↗Zhuoyi Yang↗Jie Tang↗

Controlled character animation requires transferring motion from a driving sequence to a reference character. Prior works heavily rely on intermediate representations, including pose skeletons to represent motion or masked background to represent environment, which inevitably leads to information loss. To address this, we present SCAIL-2, a framework that bypasses those intermediates and achieves end-to-end character animation. By directly concatenating driving videos to the sequence, the model can obtain all the required visual information from the input video. To address the lack of end-to-end data, we unify sub-tasks of character animation with decoupled conditions and then curate a pipeline to synthesize MotionPair-60K, an end-to-end motion transfer dataset containing heterogeneous tasks of character animation. To achieve the unification, we utilize in-context mask conditioning and mode-specific RoPE as soft guidance beyond textual instructions and raw visual information. To address synthetic discrepancy in detailed regions, we propose Bias-Aware DPO to construct preference items to mitigate the errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in various character animation tasks. A large subset of synthetic data as well as model weights will be released at our project page: https://teal024.github.io/SCAIL-2/.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

findsylls: A Language-Agnostic Toolkit for Syllable-Level Speech Tokenization and Embedding

Authors:
H\'ector Javier V\'azquez Mart\'inez↗

Syllable-level units offer compact and linguistically meaningful representations for spoken language modeling and unsupervised word discovery, but research on syllabification remains fragmented across disparate implementations, datasets, and evaluation protocols. We introduce findsylls, a modular, language-agnostic toolkit that unifies classical syllable detectors and end-to-end syllabifiers under a common interface for syllable segmentation, embedding extraction, and multi-granular evaluation. The toolkit implements and standardizes widely used methods (e.g., Sylber, VG-HuBERT) and allows their components to be recombined, enabling controlled comparisons of representations, algorithms, and token rates. We demonstrate findsylls on English and Spanish corpora and on new hand-annotated data from Kono, an underdocumented Central Mande language, illustrating how a single framework can support reproducible syllable-level experiments across both high-resource and under-resourced settings.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SAAS: Self-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Over-Search Mitigation in Agentic Search

Authors:
Yunbo Tang↗Chengyi Yang↗Shiyu Liu↗Zhishang Xiang↗Zerui Chen↗Qinggang Zhang↗Jinsong Su↗

Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack of self-awareness leads to severe over-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novel RL framework designed to cultivate dynamic self-awareness that precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) a search boundary modeling mechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) a boundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness into trajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) a stage-wise optimization strategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoiding reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reduces over-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code and implementation details are released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Carbon-Aware Governance Gates: An Architecture for Sustainable GenAI Development

Authors:
Mateen A. Abbasi↗Tommi J. Mikkonen↗Petri J. Ihantola↗Muhammad Waseem↗Pekka Abrahamsson↗Niko K. M\"akitalo↗

arXiv:2602.19718v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) in the software development life cycle (SDLC) increases computational demand, which can raise the carbon footprint of development activities. At the same time, organizations are increasingly embedding governance mechanisms into GenAI-assisted development to support trust, transparency, and accountability. However, these governance mechanisms introduce additional computational workloads, including repeated inference, regeneration cycles, and expanded validation pipelines, increasing energy use and the carbon footprint of GenAI-assisted development. This paper proposes Carbon-Aware Governance Gates (CAGG), an architectural extension that embeds carbon budgets, energy provenance, and sustainability-aware validation orchestration into human-AI governance layers. CAGG comprises three components: (i) an Energy and Carbon Provenance Ledger, (ii) a Carbon Budget Manager, and (iii) a Green Validation Orchestrator, operationalized through governance policies and reusable design patterns.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

Authors:
Teagan Johnson↗Elliott Ash↗Andrew Piper↗Maria Antoniak↗

The narrative composition of web-scale LLM pretraining corpora remains largely unexplored even though narrative is a fundamental mode of human communication. We present the first fine-grained study of narrative features in Dolma, a 3-trillion-token open pretraining corpus. Drawing on narrative theory, we design a framework spanning three core narrative elements (agency, setting, and events) operationalized as 11 interpretable dimensions. After sampling and annotating a diverse set of 400 passages, we finetune and validate NarraBERT, a RoBERTa-based model for fine-grained narrative prediction. We apply NarraBERT to 3M passages, resulting in a new dataset, NarraDolma. We find (i) narrative structure is measurable at scale across extremely heterogeneous data, (ii) we uncover a continuous, multidimensional narrative structure underlying web text, and (iii) narrative qualities are unequally distributed across pretraining sources and topics in ways that current curation practices neither measure nor account for. Our framework, dataset, and analyses provide a foundation for understanding how narrative qualities are distributed in LLM pretraining data and for studying how data composition affects narrative reasoning tasks. We publicly release NarraDolma and NarraBERT.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Evolving Agents in the Dark: Retrospective Harness Optimization via Self-Preference

Authors:
Wenbo Pan↗Shujie Liu↗Chin-Yew Lin↗Jingying Zeng↗Xianfeng Tang↗Xiangyang Zhou↗Yan Lu↗Xiaohua Jia↗

AI agents rely on a harness of skills, tools, and workflows to solve complex problems. Continually improving this harness is essential for adapting to new tasks. However, existing optimization methods typically require ground-truth validation sets, yet such labeled data is difficult to acquire in practical deployment settings. To address this problem, we introduce Retrospective Harness Optimization (RHO), a self-supervised method that optimizes the agent harness using only past trajectories. Specifically, RHO selects a diverse coreset of challenging tasks from past trajectories and re-solves them in parallel. The agent analyzes these rollouts using self-validation and self-consistency, then generates candidate harness updates and selects the most effective one by its own pairwise self-preference. We evaluate RHO across three diverse domains, spanning software engineering, technical work, and knowledge work. Notably, a single optimization round improves the pass rate on SWE-Bench Pro from 59% to 78% without any external grading. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that RHO effectively targets prior failure modes. As a result, the optimized harness alters the agent's behavior patterns and sustains higher accuracy during long-horizon sessions.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Adaptive Identification and Modeling of Clinical Pathways with Process Mining

Authors:
Francesco Vitale↗Nicola Mazzocca↗

arXiv:2512.03787v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Clinical pathways are specialized healthcare plans that model patient treatment procedures. They are developed to provide criteria-based progression and standardize patient treatment, thereby improving care, reducing resource use, and accelerating patient recovery. However, manual modeling of these pathways based on clinical guidelines and domain expertise is difficult and may not reflect the actual best practices for different variations or combinations of diseases. We propose a two-phase modeling method using process mining, which extends the knowledge base of clinical pathways by leveraging conformance checking diagnostics. In the first phase, historical data of a given disease is collected to capture treatment in the form of a process model. In the second phase, new data is compared against the reference model to verify conformance. Based on the conformance checking results, the knowledge base can be expanded with more specific models tailored to new variants or disease combinations. We demonstrate our approach using Synthea, a benchmark dataset simulating patient treatments for SARS-CoV-2 infections with varying COVID-19 complications. The results show that our method enables expanding the knowledge base of clinical pathways with sufficient precision, peaking to 95.62% AUC while maintaining an arc-degree simplicity of 67.11%.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Provably Safe, Yet Scalable Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Kai S. Yun↗Zeyang Li↗Navid Azizan↗

arXiv:2606.14536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that optimize rewards while satisfying constraints. Predominant approaches rely on soft-constrained policy optimization, which has achieved empirical success but does not provide formal safety guarantees for the learned policy. In contrast, methods with strict guarantees typically rely on explicit certificate functions, whose construction requires the direct synthesis and verification of control-invariant sets, a process that scales poorly with state dimension and often yields overly conservative behavior. In this paper, we present the Provably Safe, yet Scalable RL (PS2-RL) framework, a novel two-phase architecture for learning provably safe policies in a scalable manner, designed to overcome the key bottlenecks of prior methods. Rather than explicitly computing invariant sets, PS2-RL leverages a learned backup policy to forward-integrate the system dynamics, generating an implicit control-invariant set online. In the first phase, the backup policy is trained with our proposed safe-arrival value function, which characterizes the optimal backup policy for invariant-set construction. In the second phase, an RL policy is trained end-to-end through a differentiable projection layer that strictly enforces the safety guarantees induced by the learned backup policy. By maximizing the volume of the implicit control-invariant set in the first phase, the resulting PS2 policy from the second phase is performant and scalable, while maintaining provable safety. Crucially, PS2-RL imposes no restrictions on the underlying RL algorithm and can be plugged into any existing training pipeline. We establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework and evaluate it on robotic control tasks with state dimensions up to 10, a regime in which prior provably safe RL methods struggle or become impractical.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools

Authors:
Zhao-Heng Yin↗Guanya Shi↗Pieter Abbeel↗C. Karen Liu↗

Articulated tool manipulation remains a major challenge in dexterous robotics due to the need to coordinate internal degrees of freedom and contact-rich interactions. While prior work has largely focused on rigid objects, articulated tool use remains underexplored because of its physical complexity and the difficulty of learning functional grasping and manipulation policies. We present Mana (Manipulation Animator), a general sim-to-real framework that reinterprets dexterous manipulation as an animation problem. Inspired by computer animation, Mana employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline that transforms procedurally-generated grasp keyframes into manipulation trajectories through motion planning and reinforcement learning. The data generation process is largely automatic, requiring only a few mouse clicks to specify functional affordances (

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development and reliability and validity test of the Questionnaire on Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of ICU Nurses on Blood Oxygen Saturation Management in Mechanically Ventilated Patients

Authors:
Xie↗Bian↗Yu↗He↗

Objective: A questionnaire on the knowledge, attitude and practice of ICU nurses regarding the management of blood oxygen saturation in patients with mechanical ventilation was compiled, and its reliability and validity were tested. Method: Drawing upon the knowledge-attitude-practice theory, the initial questionnaire draft was developed through literature review and consultation with Delphi experts. Employing convenience sampling, 32 nurses from the General ICU of Wuxi Second People's Hospital were surveyed between 1 August 2025 and 27 September 2025, enabling item screening and assessment of reliability and validity.The full version of the developed questionnaire is provided as Supporting Information (S1 File). All items are published under a CC BY 4.0 license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Result: A questionnaire on the knowledge, attitude and practice of ICU nurses regarding the management of blood oxygen saturation in mechanically ventilated patients was finalised, comprising 26 items: 11 in the knowledge dimension, 6 in the attitude dimension and 9 in the behaviour dimension. The overall Cronbach's coefficient for the questionnaire was 0.88, with dimension-specific coefficients of 0.787, 0.722, and 0.781 respectively. The Spearman-Brown coefficient for the entire questionnaire was 0.967, while dimension-specific coefficients were 0.796, 0.666, and 0.728 respectively. The content validity index at the questionnaire level (S-CVI) was 0.886, and the item-level content validity index (I-CVI) ranged from 0.913 to 0.967. 0.728. The questionnaire's level content validity index (S-CVI) was 0.886, and the item level content validity index (I-CVI) ranged from 0.913 to 1.00. Conclusion: The questionnaire on knowledge, attitude and practice of blood oxygen saturation management in mechanically ventilated patients demonstrates good reliability and validity. It may serve as an assessment tool for intensive care unit nurses regarding their knowledge, attitude, and practices concerning blood oxygen saturation management in mechanically ventilated patients, thereby establishing a foundation for developing targeted intervention strategies in future practice.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Rethinking One-Step Image Editing through ChordEdit: Reproduction, Simplification, and New Insights

Authors:
Minghan Li↗Jeremy Moebel↗Mengyu Wang↗

One-step image editing is important for making text-guided editing fast, practical, and easy to deploy, but its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. We revisit ChordEdit through reproduction, ablation, and simplification. Our analysis shows that a) the chord window $\delta$ largely acts as an effective timestep shift from $t$ to $t - \delta$; b) chord transport acts on high-noise images and mainly performs low-frequency semantic editing; and c) proximal alignment acts on low-noise images and complements it by adding high-frequency target details. In this view, ChordEdit naturally decomposes editing into a coarse low-frequency transport stage and a fine high-frequency alignment stage. These findings suggest a path toward prompt-conditioned dynamic timestep selection for adaptive image editing. All code and results can be found at \href{https://github.com/Harvard-AI-and-Robotics-Lab/ChordEdit-Reproduction}{link}.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Ride, Track, and Recover: Pilot Randomized Trial of a Wearable Digital Self-Management Intervention During a Veteran Endurance-Cycling Program

Authors:
Alan Ta↗Nilsu Salgin↗Caleb Armstrong↗Kala Phillips Reindel↗Farzan Sasangohar↗

arXiv:2606.13529v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans is characterized by persistent hyperarousal and comorbid anxiety and depressive symptoms that are difficult to monitor and manage outside clinical settings. Thirteen veterans participating in a Project Hero cycling event in Texas were randomized by computer-generated sequence in a naturalistic setting to two arms: (1) digital intervention plus physical activity, or (2) physical activity only, plus a third at-home monitoring control cohort consisting of 7 veterans selected from the broader Project Hero veteran community. Continuous smartwatch sensing combined heart rate and accelerometer features to detect hyperarousal events, which were confirmed in real time by participants. Weekly self-report measures of anxiety, depression, and PTSD severity were collected. Generalized additive mixed models characterized nonlinear trajectories over time. Baseline-normalized hyperarousal trajectories differed significantly across conditions, with the digital intervention group (n=7) showing structured stabilization compared to late-study escalation in the physical-only group (n=3). Both cycling groups exhibited acute symptom improvements during the endurance event; however, the digital intervention group demonstrated a higher overall maintenance of gains. The at-home control group (n=4) showed gradual symptom declines. Perceived precision of ML detections varied substantially across individuals and was positively associated with symptom severity, with higher-severity participants confirming a greater proportion of detected events. These results suggest that coupling wearable detection with digital self-management tools may support stabilization of hyperarousal and symptom improvement while emphasizing the importance of personalization and human-centered design in wearable mental health systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Wavelength-Multiplexed 2D Beam Steering via a Passive Diffractive Network

Authors:
Che-Yung Shen↗Yuhang Li↗Cagatay Isil↗Tianyi Gan↗Mona Jarrahi↗Aydogan Ozcan↗

We introduce a wavelength-addressable diffractive optical network that transforms illumination wavelength into a high-dimensional control parameter for arbitrarily programmable 2D beam steering. The proposed passive architecture comprises cascaded spatially optimized diffractive layers, jointly designed using deep learning, to rapidly map distinct wavelengths to predefined/desired output angles. Unlike conventional single-layer dispersive optical elements, which are physically restricted to 1D linear mapping, this framework harnesses complex wavefront transformations to utilize the illumination wavelength as an intrinsic addressing key for arbitrary 2D beam steering, eliminating the need for mechanical scanning or electronic phase control. We numerically demonstrate wavelength-controlled beam steering across 625 wavelength channels spanning 400-750 nm, realizing a 25 x 25 array of independently addressable beam positions with subwavelength positioning accuracy and high channel fidelity. Unlike conventional gratings, which constrain wavelength routing to a linear trajectory, the proposed diffractive network performs nonlocal wavefront transformations, enabling arbitrary wavelength-to-angle mappings across a 2D field of view. We further validate the proposed framework experimentally in both the terahertz and visible spectral regimes, demonstrating wavelength-multiplexed beam steering using 3D fabricated passive diffractive layers at terahertz frequencies and phase-only spatial light modulators in the visible spectrum. This wavelength-addressable diffractive architecture establishes a compact and scalable paradigm for high-speed programmable beam steering, with potential applications in optical communications, routing, imaging, sensing, and emerging photonic information-processing systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →