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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

How should I respond to race-based exclusion in my lab?

作者:

A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position? A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position?

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Higher-order spectral perturbation expansions II: Kernel matrices and manifold learning

arXiv:2606.16373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study spectral concentration bounds for kernel matrices as approximation of the corresponding kernel integral operator. Results are established under weak assumptions on the data setting and the reproducing kernel relying only on a Mercer condition and a local Weyl law. This allows us to deal with key features of kernel matrices, such as large multiplicities, large effective dimension, and heavy-tailed distributions. Our results apply to infinite dimensional principal component analysis, manifold learning, and Bayesian nonparametric statistics. We illustrate this via two prototypical examples: The heat kernel on the sphere and a wavelet prior from Bayesian nonparametrics.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

AI Researchers Must Help Lead Arms Control to Mitigate Military AI Risks

arXiv:2606.11533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The advancement of AI capabilities compels researchers and the public to be more aware of its potential worldwide impact. A pressing near-term concern is the regulation of military AI applications. Armament manufacturers and defense contractors are increasingly investing in AI capabilities and forging partnerships with AI companies, creating a burgeoning coalition that demands military leaders, arms control diplomacy experts, and AI researchers collaborate to ensure a safer future. While AI researchers often focus on the long-term implications of superintelligent AI, this approach may not adequately address the immediate challenges posed by AI in military applications. Success requires acknowledging and mitigating the emerging risks of frontier AI models that plan to be integrated into defense applications, like military AI systems. Arms control has reduced past catastrophic risks, so lessons learned from nuclear deterrence can guide AI safety and security research towards innovations in verification and diplomacy. AI researchers, however, must assist in leading the technical research that clearly defines and alleviates instability in military settings. Given these new responsibilities and the lack of sufficiently reliable solutions, we argue that AI researchers must take a leading role in advancing arms control research to minimize risk in military AI applications.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Tri-Efficient Transfer Learning for Point Cloud Videos

While point cloud foundation models have significantly advanced point cloud video understanding, existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods still suffer from two critical limitations: prohibitive annotation costs for large-scale point cloud datasets and severe memory bottlenecks. In this paper, we aim to mine richer supervision signals from existing data rather than blindly scaling datasets. A further key principle is that the memory footprint of fine-tuning must be drastically reduced compared to full fine-tuning, which remains elusive for current PEFT techniques. Driven by these challenges, we identify three core desiderata: data-, parameter-, and memory efficiency, and present PoinTriE, a unified framework that excels along all three dimensions. For pre-training, pseudo-motion trajectories are synthesized via rigid transformations, paired with text corpora and 2D projections derived from raw point clouds. We then propose a Geometric-Motion Duality Network optimized via multimodal contrastive learning, rigid rotation prediction, and motion distribution divergence to produce dense self-supervision. During fine-tuning, we freeze the pretrained backbone and only update a lightweight Spatio-temporal Side Network built with LoRA units. Equipped with a gradient flow masking strategy, PoinTriE simultaneously reduces memory consumption and parameter overhead. Extensive experiments confirm that PoinTriE establishes new state-of-the-art results on action recognition and semantic segmentation tasks.

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

AURA: Active-Response Attribution under Treatment Ambiguity in Bacterial Cytological Profiling

When a bacterial sample is exposed to several antibiotics, not every applied drug necessarily acts: if the organism is resistant to one of them, that drug leaves no morphological trace. The clinically meaningful quantity is therefore not which antibiotics were applied, but which ones were active. We show that these two are sharply decoupled in real E. coli microscopy - naively assuming the applied combination equals the active one is correct only about 37% of the time - yet existing computational tools are ill-suited to recovering the active set. Forward perturbation models such as scGen, CPA, and IMPA are designed to predict appearance from treatment, not the reverse, and inverting them degrades sharply; discriminative image classifiers tend to memorise strain- and batch-specific texture and fail to transfer across experimental replicates. We introduce AURA, which reframes the task as constrained, energy-based inverse attribution. Its central inductive bias is that the active set must be a subset of the applied set; this collapses the candidate space and lets AURA infer the active subset of applied antibiotics by decomposing residual morphology into antibiotic response atoms and selecting the subset with the lowest reconstruction energy, using no strain label at test time. AURA-E adds evidence-aware abstention, withholding a prediction when candidate explanations remain near-equally plausible. On cross-replicate transfer in an E. coli cytological profiling dataset, AURA recovers the active antibiotic combination with 95.47% exact-match accuracy.

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

Machine Learning for Biomedical Raman Spectroscopy: From Spectral Acquisition to Clinical Translation

arXiv:2606.14169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Raman spectroscopy provides label-free, chemically specific characterization of biological systems and has become an important tool for cancer diagnosis, molecular subtyping, microbiological identification, and intraoperative decision support. Biomedical Raman spectra are, however, high-dimensional, noisy, and affected by fluorescence background, acquisition variability, and biological heterogeneity, making robust computational analysis essential. This review examines the role of machine learning across the biomedical Raman spectroscopy pipeline, from preprocessing and signal correction to unsupervised structure discovery, supervised diagnosis and molecular stratification, representation and transfer learning, explainability, biomarker discovery, and multimodal integration with imaging, pathology, and molecular profiling. Emphasis is placed on the use of machine learning not only for diagnostic classification, but also for biologically interpretable and clinically actionable analysis. We also discuss the main barriers to clinical translation, including limited dataset sizes, inter-instrument variability, inconsistent preprocessing, insufficient external validation, reproducibility concerns, and limited sharing of software, data, and metadata. We argue that progress will require methodological advances together with standardization, robust validation, explainability, and deployment-ready analytical frameworks. By integrating methodological, biomedical, and translational perspectives, this review outlines key directions for developing reliable and clinically deployable Raman-AI systems.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Linking mpox wastewater surveillance with reported clinical cases in three countries in Sub-Saharan Africa

The emergence of the novel monkeypox virus (MPXV) clade Ib in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and neighboring countries in late 2023 highlighted the need for rapid, scalable surveillance approaches to support outbreak detection and response. As part of the ODIN-Mpox project, wastewater surveillance (WWS) systems were established as an emergency public health measure in three Sub-Saharan African countries (DRC, Tanzania, and Burkina Faso) to evaluate the feasibility of wastewater-based monitoring for mpox and strengthen local surveillance capacity. Between January 2025 and April 2026, 117 wastewater samples were collected from selected sites and analyzed for MPXV DNA using targeted qPCR assays. Clinical mpox data were obtained from national surveillance systems and WHO reports to assess epidemiological linkages between wastewater detections and reported infections. Six wastewater samples tested positive for MPXV DNA. During the study period, DRC experienced the highest disease burden, with weekly reported cases peaking at about 3,000 in January 2025, while Tanzania reported a peak of 20 weekly cases in March 2025. No confirmed clinical cases were reported in Burkina Faso. No clear relationship was observed between reported case numbers and qPCR Ct values in positive wastewater samples. Despite the low detection frequency, the project demonstrated the operational feasibility of implementing MPXV wastewater surveillance in resource-limited settings and established laboratory capacity for environmental monitoring of emerging infectious diseases. Given the early stage of WWS implementation in the region, the study identified opportunities for further system strengthening, including optimization of sample processing and reporting workflows, improved access to laboratory supplies, and enhanced integration of environmental and clinical surveillance data streams. These findings highlight the value of WWS as a complementary component of integrated public health surveillance systems and emphasize the need for continued investment in laboratory capacity, harmonized methodologies, governance frameworks, and knowledge exchange to enhance outbreak preparedness and response in low-resource settings.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Helping Figures Tell their Story! Paper-Grounded Video Generation Explaining Complex Scientific Figures

Scientific figures compress complex pipelines into a single canvas, yet understanding them requires paper-grounded, step-by-step narration aligned with visual highlights a capability missing from current video generation systems and benchmarks. To address this, we introduce paper-grounded figure-to-video generation: generating narrated, region-grounded walkthrough videos from a figure and its paper. We propose MINARD (Multimodal Interpretation of Narrated Architecture via Region Decomposition), a pipeline that generates paper-grounded narrations and sequentially grounds them to figure regions. We also release FigTalk, a benchmark with new sequential and component-level grounding metrics derived. On FigTalk, MINARD generates humanlike, paper-faithful narrations and outperforms narration-conditioned figure spatial grounding compared to existing approaches in both automatic and human evaluation

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Mirage Probes: How Vision Models Fake Visual Understanding

Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided. This mirage behavior inflates benchmark scores without reflecting visual grounding. Prior work treats this as a single failure mode. We argue it is two. Using Mirage Probes, a contrastive probing framework that pairs paraphrased question variants with matched mirage and non-mirage labels on the same image, we show that mirage behavior is linearly decodable from internal activations across residual stream, MLP, post-attention, and attention-head sites in two open-source VLMs. We demonstrate that a Naive Bayes text baseline cannot recover this signal, ruling out surface lexical confounds. Cross-benchmark separability patterns, together with a novel Prior Harnessing Index (PHI) measuring how much a model can answer from text alone, expose two distinct regimes: textual biases, where the model answers from language priors without engaging visual representations, and spurious images, where it constructs false visual content in latent space and answers as if grounded. The distinction has direct mitigation consequences: text-distribution cleaning can address the first regime but cannot reach the second, since spurious-image mirages live in the model's visual representations rather than its text. Faithful visual grounding will require interventions at the representational level.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

APPO: Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.12384v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) have substantially improved the multi-turn tool-use capabilities of large language model agents. However, most existing methods assign credit over coarse heuristic units, such as tool-call boundaries or fixed workflows, making it difficult to identify which intermediate decisions influence downstream outcomes. In this work, we study agentic RL from two perspectives: where to branch and how to assign credit after branching. Our pilot analysis shows that influential decision points are broadly distributed throughout the generated sequence rather than concentrated at tool calls, while token entropy alone does not reliably reflect their impact on final outcomes. Motivated by these observations, we propose Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization (APPO), which shifts branching and credit assignment from coarse interaction units to fine-grained decision points in the sequence. APPO selects branching locations using a Branching Score that combines token uncertainty with policy-induced likelihood gains of subsequent continuations, enabling more targeted exploration while filtering out spurious high-entropy positions. It further introduces procedure-level advantage scaling to better distribute credit across branched rollouts. Experiments on 13 benchmarks show that APPO consistently improves strong agentic RL baselines by nearly 4 points, while keeping efficient tool-calls and maintaining behavior interpretability.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

DramaDirector: Geometry-Guided Short Drama Generation

arXiv:2606.24107v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Short dramas, with their rapid shot rhythms, dialogue-driven focus shifts, and demanding cinematographic grounding, pose challenges that prompt-level or text-only video generation pipelines struggle to meet. We study plot-to-short-drama generation, where a global plot and local context are transformed into visually grounded multi-shot videos. We propose DramaDirector, a geometry-grounded framework that lets the planner borrow cinematographic geometry from a gallery of real short-drama shots indexed by depth and pose. DramaDirector decouples each shot into static visual and dynamic narrative conditions, trains the planner with schema-constrained SFT and GRPO under a learned text-visual alignment reward, and retrieves depth-pose references to guide first-frame generation and image-to-video synthesis. We also introduce DramaBoard, a benchmark built from 35 live-action dramas, 2.8K episodes, and 81K shots, with structured storyboards and multi-dimensional evaluation protocols. Experiments show that DramaDirector improves over representative multi-agent and video generation baselines on faithfulness, consistency, and controllability. Our code is released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/DramaDirector

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

Naive Visual Memory is Not Enough: A Failure-Mode Study of GUI Agents

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents are increasingly used to automate complex computer tasks across applications, websites, and operating systems. To improve their reliability, recent work has introduced experiential memory, where agents retrieve prior trajectories to guide decision-making in similar states. More recent approaches further extend this idea to visual memory by storing and retrieving screenshots from past interactions, providing agents with richer contextual information than text-only memories. However, the effect of visual memory in GUI agents remains insufficiently understood: it is unclear which failures visual memory mitigates, or which failures it exacerbates. To systematically analyze the effect of visual memory, we introduce a taxonomy of four GUI agent failures (i.e., cognitive failure, visual state misunderstanding, hidden operation blindness, and grounding error) that map to distinct stages of the perception-reasoning-action pipeline. We find that prepending full-image memory has a divergent effect on the failure distribution: it reduces state-level failures but worsens action-level ones, and increases hidden operation blindness and grounding error. Motivated by this finding, we propose Action-Grounded Visual Memory (AGMem), an action-grounded memory framework for GUI agents. The core idea of AGMem is to store image crops that capture the local GUI region closely related to a successful action or a recovery, rather than storing full screenshots. Experiments on OSWorld show that AGMem improves task success rates by 33.3 % over full-image memory. These results demonstrate that AGMem is an effective representation for visual memory in GUI agents.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Order Is Not Control

AI alignment, interpretability, steering, and neural perturbation studies identify order-inducing objects. We argue that order is not control. Control requires a receiver-gated response law: a denominator-indexed operator mapping material state, action/drive, bath, and receiver state to response displacement, sinks, effort, and basin projection. We identify it across biological, LLM, adapter, and stochastic-operator panels. The laws are local: an intervention can be admitted, saturated, sign-changing, leaky, or overdriven depending on medium, bath, receiver state, action port, and comparator. Control is assigned when finite effort moves a target or outcome-readout class under the same denominator while damage, null/evasive, invalid format, overdrive, and unnecessary effort stay bounded. Mouse ALM, C. elegans, and zebrafish panels provide physical response-operator evidence while excluding coordinate identity and controller conclusions. LLM panels show generated-output response laws: across four material conditions, response vectors are predictable at 72.8-73.7% component-sign accuracy, rising to 84.3-84.8% on nonzero components; held-out observers predict system-effect and target/oracle families at 93.6% and 91.7% accuracy. Constitution-conditioned adapters reshape susceptibility as prepared media, and stochastic-operator panels separate measured opportunity from deployable action policies. This gives a driven-dissipative response-system account at the mesoscopic control level: drives act through prepared media, baths, and receivers, producing admitted movement, impedance, sinks, or overdrive. The evidence supports local admitted control and measurable stochastic response operators, while leaving deployable pre-generation control, hidden/logit causal sufficiency, biological-to-LLM coordinate identity, and literal thermodynamic quantities outside scope.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Frequency-Division Multiplexed CV-QKD System

arXiv:2603.20718v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a frequency-division multiplexed (FDM) continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) system with enhanced spectral efficiency through optimized channel spacing of low-symbol-rate signals. A four-channel 10-Mbaud FDM-CV-QKD system was experimentally demonstrated using Gaussian modulation, a transmitted local oscillator, and homodyne detection. Despite the inter-channel interference, under a finite-size scenario (m=1.25x10^6), the system achieved a 3.6-fold back-to-back secret key rate gain and outperformed the single-channel frequency-upconverted signal up to 26.8 km.

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

Advancing DialNav through Automatic Embodied Dialog Augmentation

arXiv:2606.19948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For embodied agents capable of physical interaction, the capability to create and understand dialog is crucial to ensure both safety and effectiveness. While DialNav[han2025dialnav] provides a framework for holistic evaluation of the dialog–execution loop in photorealistic indoor navigation, its performance remains limited by a critical scarcity of training data (2K episodes). To address this, we propose an automatic generation pipeline, and construct the RAINbow dataset, a large-scale training dataset with 238K episodes for DialNav. Our pipeline converts existing VLN datasets into multi-turn dialog and creates cost-efficient and high-quality dataset. Then, we introduce two additional complementary advances to unlock the data's full potential: (1) Dual-Strategy Training, a navigation training scheme to align the navigation training with the dynamic dialog-navigation loop, and (2) a localization model that leverages VLN knowledge. By combining these complementary solutions, our model substantially outperforms the baseline in success rate on both Val Seen (58.24, +89\%) and Val Unseen (29.05, +100\%) splits, establishing a new state of the art.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

EKF-Based Depth Camera and Deep Learning Fusion for UAV-Person Distance Estimation and Following in SAR Operations

arXiv:2602.20958v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) frameworks aid human search tasks by detecting and recognizing specific individuals, then tracking and following them while maintaining a safe distance. A key safety requirement for UAV following is the accurate estimation of the distance between camera and target object under real-world conditions, achieved by fusing multiple image modalities. As part of the system for automatic people detection and face recognition using deep learning, in this paper we present the fusion of depth camera measurements and monocular camera-to-body distance estimation for robust tracking and following. Deep learning based filtering of depth camera data and estimation of camera-to-body distance from a monocular camera are achieved with YOLO-pose, enabling real-time fusion of depth information using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm. The proposed subsystem, designed for use in drones, estimates and measures the distance between the depth camera and the human body keypoints, to maintain the safe distance between the drone and the human target. Our system provides an accurate estimated distance, which has been validated against motion capture ground truth data. The system has been tested in real time indoors, where it reduces the average errors, RMSE and standard deviations of distance estimation up to 15,3% in three tested scenarios. Based on the test results, the EKF fusion-based approach increases the depth detection range by reducing the errors outside the optimal depth camera working range. It also shows improved robustness and precision in challenging conditions, such as reflections and poor visibility, making it suitable for SAR.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

M{\o}lmer-S{\o}rensen gates in trapped-ions chains in the presence of correlated noise

arXiv:2606.23951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze the impact of correlated laser frequency noise on M{\o}lmer-S{\o}rensen gates in qubit registers based on trapped-ion chains. Using perturbation theory, we calculate gate fidelities in the presence of noise with arbitrary power spectral density for different chain lengths and ion positions in the chain. With our approach, we account for simultaneous excitation of multiple phonon modes during gate operation. We find out that the impact of medium-frequency laser noise depends considerably on the positions of the ions in the chain. In contrast, low-frequency noise has similar effect for different chain lengths and ion positions.

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

Where Did It Go Wrong? Process-Level Evaluation of Web Agents with Semantic State Tracking

arXiv:2606.15673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web agents act through long interaction sequences, yet existing benchmarks evaluate only terminal success, discarding all process information and offering little guidance on improvement. In this work, we conduct a process-level analysis of web agents. We introduce WebStep, a benchmark of 1,800 task instances with controlled difficulty and automatic semantic state tracking. Each website exposes a deterministic semantic MDP alongside the GUI: the agent operates on the interface, while the environment records high-level states and transitions in the background, enabling fine-grained analysis without manual annotation. Based on the semantic trajectory, we first show that process metrics reveal differences invisible to outcome evaluation: three agents whose success rates cluster within 31-33% diverge in exploration reach versus execution accuracy. Then, decomposing by skill characterizes the nature of these differences, exposing opposite per-skill rankings hidden within the same website: e.g., on Housing, OpenAI CUA outperforms Qwen3.5 by 23.7% on commit actions yet underperforms it by 15.6% on filtering, pinpointing a concrete skill to improve even within a domain. Bifurcation analysis further localizes the decisive error that loses the task and shows that this error is agent-specific rather than shared. Finally, these differences widen as tasks grow harder: success rate is similar on easy tasks but separates sharply as exploration becomes more demanding. Our process-level analysis opens a new avenue in web agent evaluation, providing fine-grained and actionable insight into where and how each agent should be improved.

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

Geometry-Preserving in 3D Gaussian Splatting for LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration

Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is essential for robust multi-modal perception. Targetless approaches avoid manual setup but remain limited by the scarcity of discriminative cross-modal features. Recent methods address this by reconstructing the scene within a differentiable model, enabling extrinsic optimization through dense photometric supervision. Among these, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely adopted as a geometric proxy that bridges LiDAR and camera within a single differentiable framework. However, since 3DGS was originally designed for novel view synthesis, existing methods tend to prioritize rendering quality, causing the proxy geometry to drift from the true LiDAR structure. We propose a framework that preserves the metric geometry of the Gaussian proxy by aggregating multi-view LiDAR observations for dense depth supervision and blocking photometric gradients from updating the Gaussian spatial parameters. We validate our method on public driving datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing targetless methods in calibration accuracy.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum optimal control of steady orbits

arXiv:2606.15383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Periodically driven dissipative systems can settle into steady orbits - fixed loops on their dynamical manifolds. In quantum mechanics, steady orbits occur in cooling engines (used to initialise quantum devices), coherent oscillators (such as lasers and masers), precision metrology devices (atomic clocks, optical and spin magnetometers), and magnetic resonance (steady state free precession, dynamic nuclear polarisation). Steady orbits and stroboscopic steady states are a promising target for quantum optimal control, but the numerical complexity is prohibitive: the infinite loop defeats gradient ascent pulse engineering (GRAPE) which relies on explicit numerical propagation in the time domain. Here we propose an efficient quantum control strategy for stroboscopic steady states and limit cycles that are approached asymptotically when a control sequence is repeated infinitely many times. The formalism is different from Floquet-Lindblad state engineering and effective Hamiltonian theories: it finds control sequences that drive a dissipative quantum system towards a steady orbit passing through user-specified waypoints. The software implementation (same numerical complexity scaling as GRAPE) is done for the Spinach library.

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

Generative-Model Predictive Planning for Navigation in Partially Observable Environments

arXiv:2606.18888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Navigation in partially observable environments presents a significant challenge for autonomous agents, requiring effective decision-making with limited sensory information in unknown environments. Belief-based methods, particularly those using neural networks to approximate the belief space, often fail to capture the inherent multimodality of belief spaces, especially in high-dimensional cases with perceptual aliasing. While generative models present a compelling alternative, they typically require substantial data or expert demonstrations and lack explicit mechanisms for long-term planning. In this paper, we introduce BeliefDiffusion, a novel framework that combines the benefits of both generation and planning. BeliefDiffusion leverages diffusion models to explicitly characterize multimodal belief distributions and utilizes Model Predictive Control (MPC) to simultaneously plan ahead. It consists of two steps: (1) Imagining plausible environment configurations based on observation history and (2) Planning efficient navigation strategies across an aggregated configurations. Through extensive experiments in synthetic map environments, we demonstrate that BeliefDiffusion significantly outperforms both model-free reinforcement learning baselines and other generative approaches in navigation success rate and path efficiency. Our results validate that explicitly incorporating multimodal belief representations into planning enables more robust navigation in partially observable settings.

22.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-02

Proteomic signatures of early retinal neurodegeneration in type 2 diabetes mellitus

作者:

by Huangdong Li, Ziyu Zhu, Shaopeng Yang, Weijing Cheng, Shaoying Tan, Zhuoyao Xin, Lei Zhang, Zhuoting Zhu, Shida Chen, Wenyong Huang, Wei Wang Background Retinal neurodegeneration is an early and independent feature of diabetic retinal disease and has been proposed as a window into the systemic neural consequences of diabetes, yet accessible molecular biomarkers and individualized prediction tools remain scarce. We aimed to identify circulating plasma protein signatures of diabetic retinal neurodegeneration (DRN) and to translate them into a clinically usable risk prediction system. Methods and findings In this multi-cohort prospective observational study, we integrated high-throughput plasma proteomics with longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) in two independent populations. The discovery cohort comprised 1,492 participants had baseline plasma proteomics and OCT, and 1,218 were followed with repeated OCT over 6 years in Guangzhou Diabetic Eye Study (GDES). DRN was quantified by the annualized OCT-derived retinal nerve fiber layer thinning rate. In multivariable analyses adjusted for age, sex, smoking, systolic blood pressure, HbA1c, and diabetes duration, we identified 71 plasma proteins associated with development and progression of DRN. These proteins mapped onto pathways governing inflammatory immune recruitment, extracellular matrix remodeling, and microvascular homeostasis, providing a plausible biological basis for DRN. We developed a proteomics-based DRN model (Pro-DRN) using eight machine learning (ML) algorithms, including XGBoost and LightGBM. In the independent test set, Pro-DRN achieved a C-index of 0.860, rising to 0.908 when integrated with clinical variables. Compared with six conventional models, Pro-DRN improved discrimination (ΔC-index 0.137 to 0.159; all P 

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DPC-VQA: Decoupling Quality Perception and Residual Calibration for Video Quality Assessment

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising performance on video quality assessment (VQA) tasks. However, adapting them to new scenarios remains expensive due to large-scale retraining and costly mean opinion score (MOS) annotations. In this paper, we argue that a pretrained MLLM already provides a useful perceptual prior for VQA, and that the main challenge is to efficiently calibrate this prior to the target MOS space. Based on this insight, we propose DPC-VQA, a decoupling perception and calibration framework for video quality assessment. Specifically, DPC-VQA uses a frozen MLLM to provide a base quality estimate and perceptual prior, and employs a lightweight calibration branch to predict a residual correction for target-scenario adaptation. This design avoids costly end-to-end retraining while maintaining reliable performance with lower training and data costs. Extensive experiments on both user-generated content (UGC) and AI-generated content (AIGC) benchmarks show that DPC-VQA achieves competitive performance against representative baselines, while using less than 2% of the trainable parameters of conventional MLLM-based VQA methods and remaining effective with only 20% of MOS labels. The code will be released upon publication.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Agentic Autodiscovery of Diastolic Dysfunction Phenotypes from Surface Electrocardiogram

Background: Left ventricular diastolic dysfunction (LVDD) is a major determinant of heart failure (HF), yet its assessment relies on multiparametric echocardiography, limiting scalability. We previously demonstrated that generative artificial intelligence (AI) can synthesize tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) waveforms from the 12-lead ECG. The growing complexity of candidate architecture creates a need for automated model-discovery frameworks. Objectives: To evaluate agentic AI-based auto-discovery for ECG-based LVDD assessment using either raw ECG or synthetic TDI waveforms. Methods: Two attention-based agentic AI architectures were developed using an automated large language model-driven refinement framework that optimized transfer-learning and multimodal architectures through autonomous proposal, validation, and selection of candidate model configurations. Development was performed in 1,011 paired ECG-echocardiography studies and externally validated in 983 patients using two reference frameworks: (i) data-driven phenogroups and (ii) the 2025 ASE Diastolic Function Guidelines. External validation was performed in CODE-15% (n=219,567) for HF-related mortality and EchoNext (n=35,718) for structural heart disease associations. Results: Despite the modest cohort size, the ECG-based agentic search achieved area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCs) of 0.87 (95% CI: 0.85-0.89) and 0.83 (95% CI: 0.80-0.86) for phenogroup and guideline-based LVDD severity classification. Corresponding AUCs for the synthetic TDI-based model were 0.82 (95% CI: 0.80-0.85) and 0.80 (95% CI: 0.77-0.84), respectively. In large-scale external validation, both models stratified incident HF mortality with subdistribution hazard ratios ranging 5.5 to 9.5 (Gray's p

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Percolation phase transition on planar spin systems

arXiv:2105.13314v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article we study the continuity and sharpness of the phase transition for percolation models defined on top of planar spin systems. The two examples that we treat in detail concern the Glauber dynamics for the Ising model and a Dynamic Bootstrap process. For both of these models we prove that their phase transition is continuous and sharp, providing also quantitative estimates on the two point connectivity. The techniques that we develop in this work can be applied to a variety of different percolation models based on spin-flip dynamics. We also discuss some of the problems that can be tackled in a similar fashion.