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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

CDH13 is associated with cellular viability after exposure to ionizing radiation using genome-wide screening

Background: It is well known that genetic variants contribute to cellular sensitivity to chemotherapeutic agents and ionizing radiation (IR). The aim of this study was to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and genes associated with the spectrum of normal cellular sensitivity of lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) towards ionizing radiation and mitomycin C (MMC). Methods: In a first step, we determined the viability of LCLs established from male participants of the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) aged >=62 years following treatments with increasing doses of IR (n=137 cell lines) or MMC (n=140 cell lines) using the alamarBlue assay. Results from intra-experimental triplicates and three independent experiments for each cell line and treatment were used to calculate the area under the curves (AUCs) representing the specific sensitivity to IR and MMC of each LCL. The data from these experiments were subsequently used as outcomes in genome-wide association studies (GWASs). In addition, we calculated polygenic risk scores (PGS) from UK Biobank GWAS results for four cancer-related phenotypes and assessed the extent to which the variance in the IR and MMC sensitivity is explained by these PGS. Results: The GWAS analyses revealed one variant, rs74728080, located in CDH13 on chromosome 16, to show genome-wide significant (p < 5 x 10-8, beta = 2.81) association with cellular viability after treatment with IR. In the GWAS on MMC sensitivity the most interesting signal was elicited by SNP rs113978558 in an intron of the PLD5 gene on chromosome 1 (p = 9.232 x 10-8; beta = 1.44). Several other SNPs with statistically suggestive (i.e., p < 1 x 10-5) evidence of association with IR or MMC sensitivity were identified. PGSs calculations from GWAS of four cancer-related traits in UKB explained ~5% and ~3% of phenotypic variance in IR- and MMC-induced cell viability, respectively. Conclusion: The genome-wide significant association of rs74728080 with IR sensitivity and the location of this variant in CDH13 is interesting and functionally highly plausible given its known involvement in oxidative-stress response and function as tumor suppressor. Taken together, our novel data suggest that CDH13 may be genuinely involved in regulating cellular IR sensitivity.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

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

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.

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

Crossing the Validation Crisis: Cross-Validation Reduces Benchmarking Variance Surprisingly Well

arXiv:2606.12552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern machine learning progresses through empirical work, benchmarking new methods to evaluate relative performance. However, the statistical variability inherent to evaluation - exacerbated by the stochastic nature of many algorithms - often makes performance estimation unreliable due to the limited test samples available, leading to a validation crisis in which genuine advances are difficult to discern. In this work, we show that cross-validation improves markedly confidence when evaluating and comparing learning algorithm performances. We introduce the concept of sample gain, which quantifies the virtual data augmentation achieved by using multiple cross-validation splits to reduce benchmarking variance. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets (histopathologic scans and NLP fine-tuning) demonstrate that multiple splits can substantially improve the reliability and stability of performance estimates, with diminishing returns often setting in later than expected. We also introduce a procedure to dynamically early-stop cross-validation by estimating from the first few folds if subsequent folds will bring large sample gains. Our findings highlight the value of pushing cross-validation on available samples to achieve robust and reliable benchmarking.

04.
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.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

ASALT: Adaptive State Alignment for Lateral Transfer in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.24601v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) addresses the problem of training multiple agents that pursue collaborative, competitive, or mixed objectives. Prior work has investigated transfer learning between source and target domains in MARL; however, the majority of existing approaches impose the constraint that the dimensionalities of the observation space and the global state space must be identical across domains. In this paper, we introduce a method that explicitly accommodates mismatched state-space dimensionalities between source and target domains. The proposed approach, ASALT, incorporates both observation-level and state-level adapters that map the target-domain observations and global states into a shared embedding space, thereby enabling more effective transfer of knowledge across both actors and critics. These adapters can generate embeddings that support efficient strategy transfer across heterogeneous domains. Experimental results on multiple configurations in standard benchmark environments demonstrate that ASALT surpasses existing baselines in terms of sample efficiency and global return in cooperative settings, but its effectiveness depends on the degree of mismatch between source and target domains. Furthermore, our findings indicate that ASALT mitigates negative transfer, which frequently constitutes a major obstacle when transferring policies between domains with differing observation and action spaces.

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

MoECa: Aligning Feature Reuse with Expert Decomposition in Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers with Mixture-of-Experts (DiT-MoE) improve model capacity under sparse activation, but diffusion inference is still bottlenecked by redundant computation across timesteps. Existing caching methods mainly operate at the token level, which becomes suboptimal in DiT-MoE because each token update is internally decomposed into multiple routed expert branches. Our analysis shows that cross-timestep redundancy in DiT-MoE is better characterized at the expert-branch level than at the whole-token level. Based on this observation, we propose MoECa, a fine-grained caching framework that performs branch-level feature reuse across timesteps. MoECa further introduces expert-aware adaptive control and synchronized cache updates across MoE and attention paths to maintain stable intermediate states. Experiments on multiple DiT-MoE models show that MoECa consistently achieves a better speed-quality trade-off than prior caching methods, with up to 2.83$\times$ inference speedup and minimal quality degradation.

07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

‘Footballers are not superheroes’: we must tackle the mental and physical pressures of elite sport

作者:

As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge. As the men’s football World Cup gets under way, how the game weighs on the health of athletes still isn’t talked about enough, says player-turned-medic Vincent Gouttebarge.

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

Paying to Know: Micro-Transaction Markets for Verified Product Information in Agentic E-Commerce

Commercial NLP treats the shopping chatbot as a recommender or a conversion tool: its job is to match a user to a catalogue entry and close a sale. We argue that the arrival of agent-native micro-payment rails (e.g., x402, AP2) changes what is scarce. When the buyer is an autonomous agent that can investigate exhaustively, the bottleneck is no longer matching products but acquiring trustworthy, decision-relevant information about them. We envision agentic e-commerce as a micro-transaction market for verified information: buyer agents spend fractions of a cent to progressively unlock seller- and reviewer-supplied data – service histories, third-party test reports, bills of materials, audited sales and support metrics – paid for a la carte under a freemium model, with reviewer trust scored reputationally. We sketch the architecture of such a market and argue that it rewards genuine product quality and yields truer competition than ranking-based storefronts. We then translate the vision into concrete NLP problems – cost-optimal information acquisition, data pricing and negotiation, real-time entity resolution, grounded value exchange, and privacy-preserving persona modelling – and argue that these, not chat fluency, deserve the field's attention.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

ZeroGVC: Zero-Shot Generative Video Compression with Autoregressive Diffusion Priors

Recent generative video compression methods leverage powerful generative priors to achieve perceptually pleasing reconstructions. However, most existing approaches require additional training to adapt generative models to produce realistic reconstructions from compact representations. In this paper, we propose ZeroGVC, a zero-shot generative video compression framework that leverages pretrained autoregressive diffusion priors for low-delay video reconstruction. ZeroGVC encodes the first frame of each group of pictures (GOP) with an image codec and represents subsequent P-frames through Codebook-Guided Autoregressive Latent Compression. This design is motivated by our observation that the compression scheme of denoising diffusion codebook models is effective in few-step consistency sampling. By selecting compact combinations of reproducible codebook noise vectors, ZeroGVC steers the latent denoising trajectory toward the target P-frame while allowing the decoder to reproduce the same trajectory in only a few denoising steps. In addition, we design an optional bidirectional reference mode that mitigates error propagation by leveraging the next I-frame context without introducing any additional bitrate overhead. Extensive experiments on standard video compression benchmarks demonstrate that ZeroGVC achieves superior perceptual reconstruction quality at ultra-low bitrates without any additional training.

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

How Seemingly Inconsequential Design Choices Dictate Performance of LLMs in Pathology

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are routinely used as baselines when evaluating specialized pathology models on whole-slide images (WSIs). Because WSIs exceed contemporary model context limits, LLM baselines routinely use small, high-magnification patches processed independently via majority voting, without systematic evaluation of seemingly inconsequential design choices such as patch size, patch count, and magnification. Generalist LLMs have consistently underperformed specialized systems, reinforcing the perception that domain-specific training or architectural adaptation is necessary for pathology tasks involving WSIs. Here, we conduct a systematic factorial analysis of four input design factors: inference mode, patch size, magnification, and patch count. We demonstrate that prior studies have overstated the gap between specialized models and general-purpose LLMs by choosing non-optimized input configurations. On the MultiPathQA benchmark, switching to a single balanced configuration (large patches at lower magnification, processed jointly) raises GPT-5 from 15.1% to 39.5% on cancer-type classification (TCGA) and from 38.1% to 62.9% on organ classification (GTEx). Per-task optimization yields further gains up to 43.9% (TCGA) and 71.6% (GTEx). The same configuration generalizes to two other models and to a fully held-out CPTAC cohort, where it improves Gemini 3 Flash by 23.4 percentage points without any task-specific tuning.

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

Dr-DCI: Scaling Direct Corpus Interaction via Dynamic Workspace Expansion

Agentic search over large corpora relies on retriever-mediated interfaces (e.g., BM25 or ColBERT) for scalable candidate discovery. While effective at ranking relevant documents, these interfaces expose evidence only as ranked results or bounded document views, limiting agents' ability to reorganize material and verify constraints across documents. Direct Corpus Interaction (DCI) addresses this limitation by exposing shell-executable corpus operations for flexible search, filtering, comparison, and verification. However, full-corpus terminal commands become slow and unstable as the corpus grows, degrading performance and efficiency. We introduce DR-DCI, a retriever-steered DCI framework that treats retrieval as an agent-callable action for expanding a local workspace. Rather than operating directly over the full corpus, the agent dynamically pulls relevant documents into an evolving workspace and conducts DCI operations within it. This design combines retriever-level recall with DCI-style precision: retrieval keeps exploration scalable, while DCI preserves the local operations needed for effective evidence resolution. Experiments show that DR-DCI is both effective and efficient across scales. On Browsecomp-Plus, DR-DCI reaches 71.2\% accuracy, improving over raw DCI and ablated variants by up to 8.3 points while reducing tool usage, wall time, and estimated cost. With workspace-preserving context reset, accuracy further improves to 73.3\%. In corpus-scaling experiments, DR-DCI remains effective from 100K to 10M documents, whereas raw DCI becomes unstable and BM25 performs substantially worse. DR-DCI also scales to a 20M-scale file-per-document Wiki-18 QA setting, achieving an average score of 63.0 across six benchmarks and outperforming retrieval-based and trained search-agent baselines. Ablation analysis further shows that ranked previews and inter-document DCI are key to performance.

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

Machine-Learning Emulation of Satellite Greenhouse Gas Retrievals: Stability over Time

arXiv:2606.09313v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval algorithms are used to estimate atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), by solving inverse problems from high-spectral-resolution satellite radiance measurements. However, these algorithms are computationally expensive, which makes real-time estimation at scale difficult. Machine-learning models have therefore been proposed as fast emulators of retrieval algorithms. Most existing studies, however, evaluate them only on test data from the same period as the training data. We study the stability over time of such emulators using data from the Greenhouse Gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT). We show that prediction accuracy generally deteriorates when the test period moves away from the training period. We also show that including time as an input feature substantially improves XCH4 prediction for Lasso and neural-network models. Among the methods considered, a simple Lasso model performs as well as or better than more complex methods such as neural networks, and yields more stable predictions over time. We further validate the results using the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON), a ground-based observation network. On the TCCON-matched dataset, the time-augmented Lasso achieves errors against TCCON that are comparable to the disagreement between GOSAT and TCCON for both XCO2 and XCH4.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Primary care practitioners preconception health literacy and information-seeking: A cross-sectional survey.

Background Parental health before pregnancy influences maternal and child outcomes. Primary care professionals, including general practitioners [GPs], midwives, and naturopaths, can provide preconception care, yet many report limited knowledge and difficulty accessing relevant information. This study described Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths preconception health literacy, including knowledge and ability to access information. Methods Between July and September 2022, Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths completed a 32-item online cross-sectional survey. Participants were recruited through professional associations, and data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics Results Participants (N=373) included naturopaths (40.7%), GPs (32.4%), and midwives (26.8%). Reported barriers to clinician health literacy including lack of preconception care resources (25.5%), and limited clinician knowledge (23.6%). The proportion identifying limited clinician knowledge differed significantly between professions (GP: 31.4%; midwives: 23.0%; naturopaths: 17.8%; p=0.030). The highest level of accurate knowledge regarding preconception exposures was for pre-pregnancy obesity (82.7%), while low birth weight was the most accurately identified preconception outcomes (83.7%). Incorrect responses were most common for maternal multivitamin use as an exposure (28.3%) and childhood leukaemia as an outcome (26.3%). Differences between professions were strongest for infant outcomes, with moderate associations observed for shoulder dystocia (V=.2355), precipitous labour (V=.2173), macrosomia (V=.2060), labour dystocia (V=.2018) and cryptorchidism (V=.2018). Discussion Preconception health literacy varies across primary care professions. Clinicians require greater access to targeted resources and education tailored to their differing scopes of practice and experience. Improving clinician preconception health literacy may strengthen consistent evidence-based care and support better maternal, child, and long-term family health outcomes.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Uniform-in-time Gaussian fluctuations for multiscale nonlinear stochastic systems via Malliavin Calculus

arXiv:2606.23865v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We establish a uniform-in-time quantitative central limit theorem (QCLT) for a nonlinear slow-fast stochastic system. We identify significant weaker sufficient conditions that enable us to obtain time-independent bounds for the Wasserstein distance between the fluctuation process and a centered Gaussian random variable. To prove our main result, we utilize tools from Malliavin calculus, specifically the second-order Poincaré inequality. In this context, applying the Poincaré inequality requires demonstrating uniform bounds over time for both the first- and second-order Malliavin derivatives.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hand-4DGS: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for 4D Hand Reconstruction from Egocentric Videos

Dynamic 3D hand reconstruction from egocentric videos is essential for next-generation computing platforms such as AR/VR and AI glasses. Despite its importance, most prior works focus either on multi-view 3D hand reconstruction or on 4D human body reconstruction. Egocentric 4D hand reconstruction remains challenging due to fast head motion, rapid hand dynamics, severe occlusions, and inherent ambiguity from single-view observations. To address these challenges, we introduce Hand-4DGS, the first feed-forward framework for reconstructing dynamic 4D hands directly from egocentric videos, enabling both fast (~60 FPS) inference and strong generalization. Our approach incorporates a mesh-guided representation for structural priors and temporal convolutions to model dynamic motion. We evaluate our framework on two challenging egocentric datasets, H2O and ARCTIC, and demonstrate significant improvements over baselines. Our method benefits from the generalization capability of feed-forward networks and effective 2D image supervision through Gaussian splatting, without requiring expensive 3D hand pose ground-truth annotations.

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

Imbalanced Classification under Capacity Constraints

arXiv:2605.03289v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detecting observations from a minority class under severe class imbalance is a central challenge in applications such as fraud detection, medical screening, and industrial quality control. In these settings, each positive prediction triggers a costly follow-up action, an MRI scan, a transaction audit, whose execution is subject to real operational constraints. This paper proposes a formal classification framework under capacity constraints: given a user-defined bound limit $b$ on the proportion of observations that can be labeled as belonging to the minority class, the goal is to find the classifier that maximizes sensitivity on that class. We characterize the optimal classifier under this constraint and establish its equivalence with the classical Bayes classifier under a reweighting of the prior probabilities. We also introduce a capacity-adjusted performance metric $M$ that accounts for the effective detection rate when the capacity constraint is binding. The framework is implemented on top of standard learning methods, k-NN, SVM, random forests, and neural networks, and statistical consistency is established for each. We further show that these methods reduce to post-hoc thresholding when no hyperparameters are oriented toward the capacity-constrained objective, and introduce a capacity-aware support vector machine that exploits the constraint during training and achieves the strongest empirical performance. Experiments on the Taiwanese credit card default dataset confirm that capacity-constrained classifiers substantially outperform both classical approaches and SMOTE under high imbalance regimes. The framework extends naturally to multiclass settings and online environments.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

IBAD: Interpretable Behavioral Anomaly Detection on Human Mobility Data

arXiv:2606.16023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human mobility appears highly diverse, yet much of a person's daily mobility can be explained by a small set of recurring behavioral templates, such as commuting, school-centered activities, caregiving, nightlife, or errand patterns. We present \texttt{IBAD} (\underline{I}nterpretable \underline{B}ehavioral \underline{A}nomaly \underline{D}etection), a framework that learns interpretable daily mobility templates and represents each individual as a distribution over mixtures of these templates. Rather than focusing on specific locations, IBAD characterizes activities that individuals perform across locations. This approach first discovers global behavioral templates using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), then employs a hierarchical self-supervised model to learn normal behavior of individuals from their soft behavioral templates. We also introduce a splicing benchmark that creates controlled behavioral mismatches between an individual's historical profile and injected mobility patterns. Experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets show that daily behavior can be effectively decomposed into a small number of interpretable templates. Crucially, we show that the learned behavioral archetypes transfer across distinct geographic and demographic contexts. Furthermore, IBAD maintains a robust competitive performance across all settings. For reproducibility purposes, the code is accessible at ~\href{https://github.com/USC-InfoLab/IBAD}{https://github.com/USC-InfoLab/IBAD}.

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

SHARD: Safe and Helpful Alignment via Self-Reframing Distillation

Large language models often struggle with sensitive prompts. They may refuse outright, provide generic safety boilerplate, or fail to address the user's legitimate informational needs that can be answered safely. We introduce SHARD, a self-reframing distillation method to improve safe-helpfulness. It first rewrites sensitive prompts to surface benign intent using philosophical guidelines, then reframes its original responses into safe, more helpful ones, and finally fine-tunes the model on its self-reframed responses. Across DNA and the English subset of LINGUASAFE, SHARD improves helpfulness for most model families while preserving safety. It also remains competitive with distillation from a larger teacher model, suggesting that models can internalize safe and helpful behavior elicited from their own. Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or harmful.

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

HumP-KD: A Hybrid Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation Framework for Efficient Fire Classification

Real-time fire classification systems require models that are simultaneously accurate, computationally efficient, and deployable on resource-constrained hardware. This work proposes HumP-KD, a Hybrid Uncertainty-aware Multi-stage Progressive Knowledge Distillation framework for efficient fire classification. Two datasets, FlameVision and Dataset-II, containing 8,600 and 31,309 images, are used. Various CNN and transformer baselines are applied under standard preprocessing, online augmentation, Gaussian noise and motion blur robustness conditions. The proposed HumP-KD model distills knowledge from two frozen heterogeneous transformer teachers, Swin-Tiny and ViT-Base, along with their Meta-MLP ensemble, into a lightweight MobileViT-S student via three tightly integrated components. Hierarchical Progressive Knowledge Distillation employs a Hierarchical Feature Builder. It generates a fused spatial attention mask to guide distillation toward discriminative regions selectively. Multi-Stage Knowledge Distillation progressively activates three distillation stages across training. On Dataset-II, HumP-KD achieves a mean F1 score of $0.9876 \pm 0.0063$ across 10 independent trials, significantly outperforming the MobileViT-S baseline trained without distillation ($0.9537 \pm 0.0351$), with statistical significance confirmed by both independent t-test ($p = 0.0195$) and Wilcoxon signed-rank test ($W = 1$, $p = 0.0039$). The proposed method also demonstrates strong generalization across datasets and robustness under degraded visual conditions. The student model retains only 4.94M parameters and 19.01Mb model size, representing a $5.7\times$ parameter reduction over Swin-Tiny and a $17.5\times$ reduction over ViT-Base, while achieving 37.72 CPU FPS, making it suitable for real-time deployment.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When Does Language Matter? Multilingual Instructions Reveal Step-wise Language Sensitivity in Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in language-conditioned robotic manipulation, yet their robustness to linguistic variation remains poorly understood. In this work, we present the first systematic multilingual evaluation of VLA models by translating the LIBERO benchmark into ten languages, revealing severe performance degradation under non-English instructions, with success rates dropping by 30-50%. Through fine-grained analysis of task executions, we find that language influence is highly non-uniform across steps: certain steps exhibit strong language dependence and dominate overall task failure, while others are largely language-agnostic. Based on this insight, we propose a step-wise inference-time intervention that aligns representations according to step language sensitivity, substantially improving performance under linguistic variation. Our results indicate that language robustness in VLA models is fundamentally a step-wise control problem, highlighting the importance of temporally structured analysis for reliable embodied agents.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Another Look at Log-PCA for Probability Measures: A Dynamical Formulation and Statistical Convergence

arXiv:2606.17196v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper is concerned with learning principal variations of random probability measures on $\mathbb{R}^m$ under the Wasserstein geometry. We introduce a new dynamical formulation to interpret the log-PCA, a linearized principal geodesic analysis, as a variational approach. Our differentiable version, termed as the Wasserstein Tangential PCA (WT-PCA), captures the local principal modes of geodesic variations of a (weighted) probability measure on the Wasserstein space via its covariance operator at barycenter. Based on the dynamical perspective and leveraging parallel transport structure of the optimal transport problems, we derive a general statistical convergence rate of the empirical WT-PCA when estimated from data in terms of the 2-Wasserstein distance between the population and empirical barycenter reference measures.

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

Imitating What Works: Simulation-Filtered Modular Policy Learning from Human Videos

The ability to learn manipulation skills by watching videos of humans has the potential to unlock a new source of highly scalable data for robot learning. Here, we tackle prehensile manipulation, in which tasks involve grasping an object before performing various post-grasp motions. Human videos offer strong signals for learning the post-grasp motions, but they are less useful for learning the prerequisite grasping behaviors, especially for robots without human-like hands. A promising way forward is to use a modular policy design, leveraging a dedicated grasp generator to produce stable grasps. However, arbitrary stable grasps are often not task-compatible, hindering the robot's ability to perform the desired downstream motion. To address this challenge, we present Perceive-Simulate-Imitate (PSI), a framework for training a modular manipulation policy using human video motion data processed by paired grasp-trajectory filtering in simulation. This simulation step extends the trajectory data with grasp suitability labels, which allows for supervised learning of task-oriented grasping capabilities. We show through real-world experiments that our framework can be used to learn precise manipulation skills efficiently without any robot data, resulting in significantly more robust performance than using a grasp generator naively.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Non-Hermitian Delocalization Realizes Random Dirac Criticality in One Dimension

arXiv:2606.12089v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian systems can evade Anderson localization and exhibit delocalized states even in one dimension. Here, we show that such non-Hermitian delocalized states under periodic boundary conditions (PBC) are intrinsically critical, realizing the universality class of one-dimensional random Dirac fermions. By linking spectral winding to topological Anderson transitions via Hermitization, we demonstrate that the delocalized PBC states exhibit a Dirac-type criticality with universal algebraic correlations. In contrast to Hermitian systems, where this criticality occurs only at fine-tuned transition points, it emerges generically in non-Hermitian systems as a consequence of spectral topology. These results identify a universal mechanism by which non-Hermiticity promotes criticality, providing a unified description of non-Hermitian delocalization in one dimension.

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

Divination by Prompt: LLM-Mediated Xuanxue on Chinese Social Media

arXiv:2606.12418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has produced a striking cultural practice: using conversational AI for divination. This paper offers one of the first systematic studies of LLM-mediated divination in the context of Xuanxue, an internet-native umbrella term for mystical and spiritual practices on Chinese social media. Using a mixed-methods design, we analyze 23000+ posts and comments from Xiaohongshu and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with users and professional diviners. Users primarily consult LLMs about pragmatic concerns - romantic relationships, careers, exams, and in-game gacha draws - via two intersecting pathways: trend-driven curiosity enabled by viral visibility and zero-cost access, and event-driven anxiety under conditions of uncertainty. A defining feature is collaborative prompt refinement, which turns users into active prompt engineers. Among commenters expressing a clear stance, perceived efficacy skews positive, with "accuracy" often justified through biographical fit and retrospective confirmation, consistent with Barnum and confirmation bias. Users also develop verification practices such as repeated trials and cross-model comparison. Professional diviners, by contrast, portray LLMs as lacking the "spiritual power" required for genuine divination, reflecting both ontological commitments and economic boundary-work. We also show how participants navigate tensions between scientific and metaphysical frames when interpreting AI-generated readings. Situating these findings in anthropological and cognitive-evolutionary theories of divination, we argue that LLM divination preserves core functions of traditional practice while introducing scalability, repeatability, and prompt-driven co-production that reshape how divinatory authority is constructed and evaluated.