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01.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-22

Biological aging and generational shifts in early-onset cancer risk

作者:

Incidence of early-onset cancer is rising globally in recent generations, which underscores the need to elucidate the influence of emerging generational risk factors. Systemic and organ-specific aging reflects the cumulative impact of exposures and may provide an integrative and complementary approach to understand early-onset cancer risk. Here among 154,169 young adults from the United Kingdom Biobank, systemic aging measured by PhenoAge increased across birth cohorts, with 23% s.d. increase for those born 1965–1974 versus 1950–1954, and was associated with early-onset solid cancer risk (hazard ratio (HR)per s.d. 1.08; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.03–1.13), driven by lung, gastrointestinal and uterine cancers, independent of genetic risks of aging and cancer. Patterns were consistent using alternative systemic aging measures, including the Klemera–Doubal method-defined age gap and metabolomic-based age gap. These findings were validated partially among 10,262 participants in the United States All of Us Research Program. Proteomics-based organ-specific aging analyses linked immune aging with early-onset lung cancer (HRper s.d. 1.89; CI, 1.20–2.97) and adipose tissue aging to early-onset colorectal cancer (HR 1.60; CI, 1.11–2.32). Greater age gap, reflecting more advanced biological aging relative to chronological age, may serve as a driver associated with risk of early-onset solid cancers, highlighting the importance of uncovering underlying mechanisms to guide effective prevention strategies. Analyses of population cohorts found that young adults exhibited earlier systemic and organ-specific aging, which was associated with increased risk of early-onset cancer compared with older adults born decades earlier.

02.
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.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

When LLMs Analyze Scars: From Images to Clinically-Meaningful Features

Medical image classification faces a fundamental dilemma: while deep learning models achieve remarkable performance at scale, real-world clinical scenarios often suffer from severe data scarcity due to annotation costs, privacy constraints, and disease rarity. This challenge is particularly pronounced in pathological scar classification, where differentiating keloids from hypertrophic scars requires subtle expert knowledge and labeled images are extremely limited. We propose a novel paradigm that repositions large language models (LLMs) as knowledge-driven feature engineers rather than end-to-end classifiers. We call this framework ScaFE (Scar Feature Engineering). Our key insight is that LLMs encode rich medical knowledge that can be externalized as executable feature extraction code, enabling the transformation of high-dimensional images into low-dimensional, clinically interpretable representations. Specifically, we prompt an LLM with established scar assessment criteria to generate deterministic Python code that extracts features aligned with clinical scoring systems such as the Vancouver Scar Scale. Our approach offers three key advantages: (1) data efficiency, achieving robust performance with limited training samples by decoupling knowledge acquisition from statistical learning; (2) privacy preservation, as raw images are processed locally without exposure to external LLMs; and (3) interpretability, through explicit features grounded in clinical reasoning. Extensive experiments on scar classification demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms end-to-end deep learning baselines or using LLMs as black-box classifiers under limited data conditions, establishing a promising direction for integrating LLMs into data-efficient and clinically transparent medical AI systems.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

RAMAC: Multimodal Risk-Aware Offline Reinforcement Learning and the Role of Behavior Regularization

arXiv:2510.02695v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In safety-critical domains where online data collection is infeasible, offline reinforcement learning (RL) is attractive only if policies achieve high returns without catastrophic lower-tail risk. Prior work on risk-averse offline RL achieves safety at the cost of either (i) value/model-based pessimism or (ii) restricted policy classes that limit expressiveness, whereas diffusion/flow-based expressive generative policies have largely been used in risk-neutral settings. We introduce Risk-Aware Multimodal Actor-Critic (RAMAC), a simple, modular, model-free framework that couples an expressive generative actor (e.g., diffusion/flow) with a distributional critic and optimizes a composite objective that combines Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) with behavioral cloning (BC), enabling risk-sensitive learning in complex multimodal scenarios. Since out-of-distribution (OOD) actions are a major driver of catastrophic failures in offline RL, we further provide an objective-level analysis showing that controlling behavior divergence via BC suppresses OOD actions and stabilizes CVaR. Instantiating RAMAC with a diffusion actor, we illustrate these insights on a 2-D risky bandit and evaluate on Stochastic-D4RL, observing consistent gains in $\mathrm{CVaR}_{0.1}$ while maintaining strong returns. The code and experimental results are available on the \href{https://kaifukazawa.github.io/ramac-project/} {project website}

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

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606.08881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored. We present a standardized real-world benchmark for evaluating representative VLA and imitation learning policies on the low-cost SO-101 robotic platform. The benchmark comprises four representative manipulation tasks together with unified evaluation protocols, enabling systematic comparison under embodiment uncertainty. Using real-world teleoperated demonstrations, we fine-tune and evaluate $\pi_{0.5}$, SmolVLA, Wall-X, and ACT directly on the physical platform. Beyond conventional task success rates, the benchmark incorporates a structured failure taxonomy, semantic- and execution-level failure decomposition, and recovery-aware evaluation metrics to characterize policy robustness. Experimental results show that stronger pretrained VLA policies generally outperform the imitation learning baseline, although performance remains highly task-dependent under low-cost robotic deployment conditions. Execution instability emerges as the dominant failure source, while recovery capability varies substantially across architectures. These results highlight the importance of failure and recovery analysis beyond binary task success and establish SO-101 as a practical benchmark for evaluating embodied AI systems under realistic low-cost robotic deployment conditions.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A2SG:Adaptive and Asymmetric Surrogate Gradients for Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks

Training deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) remains challenging due to sharp loss landscapes and temporal inconsistency caused by surrogate gradients. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework: adaptive and asymmetric surrogate gradients A2SG. The adaptive gradients adjust an effective window for spatio-temporal adaptation, reducing spatial gradient variation and maintaining directional consistency of gradients over time. The asymmetric gradients reflect neuronal dynamics by assigning larger gradients to neurons with higher membrane potentials, and we prove that they yield lower variation than symmetric surrogates. Our analysis further establishes a direct connection between local gradient variation and the curvature of the loss landscape, providing a principled explanation for how A2SG promotes convergence to flatter minima and improves generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse models, including CNN-based and Transformer-based SNNs, across various tasks such as image classification using both static and neuromorphic datasets, as well as segmentation. The results demonstrate that A2SG consistently improves accuracy and energy efficiency, establishing it as a general and reliable solution for training deep SNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/KIST-NCL/A2SG.git.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

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

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.

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

ClaimFlow: Tracing the Evolution of Scientific Claims in NLP

Scientific papers advance $claims$ that later work supports, extends, or sometimes refutes. Yet existing methods for citation and claim analysis capture only fragments of this dialogue. In this work, we make these interactions explicit at the level of individual scientific claims. We introduce $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$, a claim-centric view of the NLP literature, built from $1{,}617$ ACL Anthology papers $(1979 - 2025)$ that are manually annotated with $5{,}689$ claims and $4{,}871$ cross-paper claim relations, indicating whether a citing paper $\texttt{supports}$, $\texttt{extends}$, $\texttt{qualifies}$, $\texttt{refutes}$, or references a cited claim as $\texttt{background}$. Building on $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$, we define a new task – $Claim Relation Classification$ – which requires models to infer the scientific stance toward a cited claim from the text and citation context. Evaluating neural models and large language models on this task, we report baseline performance of $0.81$ macro-F1, suggesting that the task is tractable while leaving room for improvement. We then scale this framework to $\sim$$13k$ NLP papers to study claim evolution across decades of NLP research. We show that $63.5\%$ claims are never reused; only $11.1\%$ are ever challenged. Widely propagated claims are more often $reshaped$ through qualification and extension than supported or refuted. Overall, $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$ offers a lens for examining how ideas shift and mature within NLP.

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

Zero-order Parameter-free Optimization for LMO-based Methods: Novel Approach for Efficient Fine-tuning

arXiv:2606.14970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has become a central application of modern optimization, enabling pretrained models to adapt to diverse downstream tasks and domain-specific data. A major obstacle in large-scale fine-tuning is the memory overhead of backpropagation, which requires storing activations, gradients, and optimizer states. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization offers a memory-efficient alternative, but its performance is highly sensitive to the stepsize and smoothing parameter, often requiring costly task-specific tuning. Parameter-free (PF) optimization addresses this issue by adapting algorithmic parameters without prior knowledge of problem-dependent constants. Moreover, large-scale fine-tuning can benefit from geometry-aware updates that account for the heterogeneous structure of parameter blocks, which can be modeled through methods that exploit linear minimization oracle (LMO). In this work, we study PF adaptation for LMO-based ZO optimization and introduce $\texttt{AdaNAGED}$, a method that unifies gradient-free training, adaptive tuning, and non-Euclidean update geometry. We establish convergence guarantees and validate the method on large-scale LLM fine-tuning task with $\texttt{OPT}-1.3\mathrm{B}$ model.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Optimism Stabilizes Thompson Sampling for Adaptive Inference

arXiv:2602.06014v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used for stochastic multi-armed bandits, yet its inferential properties under adaptive data collection are subtle. Classical asymptotic theory for sample means can fail because arm-specific sample sizes are random and coupled with the rewards through the action-selection rule. We study adaptive inference for Thompson sampling with Gaussian randomized indices in $K$-armed stochastic bandits with independent sub-Gaussian reward noises, and identify optimism as a key mechanism for restoring stability, meaning that each arm's pull count concentrates around a deterministic scale. This stability yields asymptotically valid Wald inference despite adaptive sampling. First, we prove that variance-inflated TS is stable for any $K \ge 2$, including the challenging regime where multiple arms are optimal, with asymptotically uniform allocation over optimal arms and sharp logarithmic pull-count asymptotics for suboptimal arms. This resolves the $K$-armed extension question raised by \citet{halder2025stable}, using new winner-map and Lyapunov-drift techniques to control allocation among multiple optimal arms. Second, we analyze an alternative optimistic modification that keeps the Gaussian index variance unchanged but adds an explicit mean bonus to the index center, and establish a similar stability conclusion. In summary, suitably implemented optimism stabilizes Thompson sampling and enables asymptotically valid Wald inference in multi-armed bandits, while incurring only a mild additional regret cost.

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

SalArt-VQA: Diagnosing Whether VLMs Understand Salient Artifacts in Generated Images

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to detect whether AI-generated images contain visible artifacts, yet their ability to analyze such artifacts remains poorly understood. A correct image-level decision can still hide important failures: a model may correctly flag an artifact while relying on the wrong visual cue, selecting the wrong region, or describing a defect that the image does not support. To evaluate these behaviors directly, we introduce SalArt-VQA, a diagnostic benchmark for fine-grained SALient ARTifact understanding in AI-generated images. SalArt-VQA contains 950 images and 3,681 human-authored multiple-choice questions spanning artifact images, matched real reference images, and paired generated reference images. Four aligned question types evaluate presence detection, semantic localization, spatial grounding, and evidence-grounded defect identification, while the reference splits test calibration and abstention when the annotated defect is absent. Across 20 VLMs, SalArt-VQA reveals failures that image-level detection accuracy hides: the strongest model reaches 99.37% detection recall on artifact images but answers all four artifact-side questions correctly on only 53.26% of images. Comparing artifact images with artifact-free references reveals a sensitivity-calibration tradeoff: sensitive models often make unsupported artifact claims, while conservative models avoid false alarms largely by missing real artifacts. These results show that high artifact detection accuracy alone does not imply grounded artifact understanding. SalArt-VQA exposes these hidden failure modes and provides a fine-grained evaluation of whether VLM artifact claims are supported by local visual evidence.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Spatial Analysis and Multilevel Determinants of Hypertension in Zambia: Analysis of the 2017 WHO STEPS Survey

Background: Hypertension is the leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor globally, with the fastest-growing burden in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to estimate national hypertension prevalence, map provincial patterns, assess spatial clustering, and identify individual and community-level determinants among Zambian adults using the 2017 WHO STEPS survey. Methods: This cross-sectional study used data from the 2017 WHO STEPS survey, a nationally representative sample of 4,301 adults aged 18-69 years. Hypertension was defined as systolic BP [&ge;]140 mmHg, diastolic BP [&ge;]90 mmHg, or current antihypertensive use. Spatial autocorrelation was assessed via Moran's I and LISA. Four nested generalised linear mixed models with PSU-level random intercepts identified individual and community-level determinants. Results: Overall weighted hypertension prevalence was 24.0%. Lusaka recorded the highest prevalence (30.2%), followed by Southern (29.9%) and Muchinga (28.3%) provinces; Western Province had the lowest (12.4%). Spatial clustering was statistically significant but modest (Moran's I = 0.0247, p < 0.001). Between-cluster variation reduced from ICC = 5.9% to 1.8% in the full model, indicating geographic differences were largely explained by individual characteristics. Age was the strongest predictor; adults aged 60-69 had nearly sevenfold higher odds than those aged 18-29 (AOR 6.92, 95% CI: 4.95-9.66). Women had lower odds than men (AOR 0.64, 95% CI: 0.52-0.79). Obesity (AOR 2.34), overweight (AOR 1.65), high cholesterol (AOR 1.40), diabetes (AOR 1.35), and single marital status (AOR 1.34) were independently significant. Western Province showed consistently lower odds than Central Province (AOR 0.48). Conclusion: Hypertension affects one in four Zambian adults, driven primarily by age, sex, obesity, dyslipidaemia, and diabetes. Geographically prioritised interventions, including community health worker-led screening programmes in Lusaka and Southern Province, would maximise population-level impact. Population-level salt reduction and alcohol policies represent cost-effective complementary strategies. Longitudinal studies with finer spatial resolution are needed to clarify causal pathways underlying observed geographic clustering and inform SDG Target 3.4 progress.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

The New Social Image: How AI Competency and AI Proactivity Influence Self- and Peer-Perceptions in the Workplace

arXiv:2606.00182v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human-AI collaboration is considered the most promising way to incorporate AI in the workplace. What remains unexplored are the experiential consequences of this teaming. More specifically, in a team with AI, how humans perceive themselves (self-perception) and how they are perceived by their coworkers (peer perception) in terms of work ownership and job meaningfulness. In a 2x2x2 vignette study (n=50), participants rated perceptions of ownership, affect, job meaningfulness and satisfaction, and role dynamics across two levels (low/high) of AI proactivity and AI competency as within-subject factors, with point-of-view (self perception/peer perception) as between-subjects. Our results showed that AI with low competency or low proactivity generally improved feelings related to ownership, meaningfulness, satisfaction, and role dynamics, and also increased positive affect while reducing negative affect. However, these effects were often influenced by point-of-view. For instance, low AI proactivity resulted in higher job satisfaction from self-perception rather than peer perception. Based on our findings, we argue that designing AI for the future of work solely around performance metrics may not be adequate. Highly competent and proactive AI-driven systems can have undesirable impacts on perceptions of ownership, job identity, social image and team dynamics, and consequently, job meaningfulness.

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

Do Vision-Language Models Understand 3D Scenes or Just Catalogue Objects?

arXiv:2605.20448v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models reliably name objects in a scene, but do they represent the 3D layout those objects inhabit? We introduce a 3,034-sample human-curated benchmark targeting three components of spatial understanding: depth-ordered occlusion (probed via three independent counterfactual operationalisations), optical-geometry inference over visible reflections, and volumetric rearrangement planning. Six frontier and open-weight VLMs, scored by trained annotators on 18,204 responses with no LLM-as-judge, reveal a sharp dissociation: models that plan rearrangements over visible layouts at 53–97% accuracy and rarely violate collision constraints fall to 6–45% on occlusion and below 7% on reflections. An embodied-reasoning model reproduces the same profile. White-box analysis on Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking localises the failure to the visual-token merger: spatial information recoverable throughout the vision encoder becomes inaccessible after token compression and only stabilises again when clean post-merger activations are patched into the language decoder.

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

Atom–photon Entanglement with a Single Trapped Cesium Atom

arXiv:2605.28968v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate atom–photon entanglement using a single cesium atom trapped in an optical tweezer. Entanglement is generated by resonant excitation and subsequent spontaneous decay, which entangles the atomic Zeeman state with photon polarization. The photon is collected with a high numerical aperture objective (NA = 0.55) and coupled into a single-mode fiber, enabling atom photon measurements and measurement of the Bell-state fidelity. We obtain raw entanglement fidelity of ${\mathcal F} = 0.942(16)$ and inferred fidelity of ${\mathcal F}_inf = 0.962(26)$ after correcting independently characterized atom measurement errors. Compared with related free-space experiments using $^{87}$Rb, the multilevel structure of the relevant excited state in $^{133}$Cs requires the use of a single short excitation pulse in each entanglement attempt in order to suppress unwanted re-excitation. These results establish a free-space Cs atom–photon interface and provide a step toward dual-species Rb–Cs quantum networking.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

PianoKontext: Expressive Performance Rendering from Deadpan Context

arXiv:2606.12282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expressive performance rendering (EPR) aims to generate realistic performances constrained on sequences of notes. However, flow matching audio editing models manipulate only synchronized music samples of the same duration, limiting their understanding of expressive timing. We introduce PianoKontext, a flow matching rendering model for classical piano music that generates variable-length performances in the latent space of a pretrained Music2Latent model. We synthesize MIDI scores into deadpan audio and employ Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in the latent space to construct paired data for training. The aligned embeddings are concatenated in DiT blocks, allowing for a simple and effective learning of the dependencies between the score and performances. Audio samples are available at our demo page: https://realfolkcode.github.io/pianokontext_demo/.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MLaGA: Multimodal Large Language and Graph Assistant

arXiv:2506.02568v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial efficacy in advancing graph-structured data analysis. Prevailing LLM-based graph methods excel in adapting LLMs to text-rich graphs, wherein node attributes are text descriptions. However, their applications to multimodal graphs–where nodes are associated with diverse attribute types, such as texts and images–remain underexplored, despite their ubiquity in real-world scenarios. To bridge the gap, we introduce the Multimodal Large Language and Graph Assistant (MLaGA), an innovative model that adeptly extends LLM capabilities to facilitate reasoning over complex graph structures and multimodal attributes. We first design a structure-aware multimodal encoder to align textual and visual attributes within a unified space through a joint graph pre-training objective. Subsequently, we implement a multimodal instruction-tuning approach to seamlessly integrate multimodal features and graph structures into the LLM through lightweight projectors. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MLaGA compared to leading baseline methods, achieving superior performance in diverse graph learning tasks under both supervised and transfer learning scenarios.

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

Scaling Self-Play for End-to-End Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on offline human-demonstration datasets that provide limited state coverage and often no closed-loop feedback, making them prone to compounding errors when deployed in closed-loop and brittle to long-tail agent interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative strategy for training end-to-end driving models: large-scale self-play directly from pixels in simulation. While prior self-play approaches have shown promising transfer to real-world driving, they typically assume vectorized Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) observations that are incompatible with end-to-end policies operating directly on sensor observations. To this end, we introduce Gigapixel, a high-throughput batched driving simulator with perspective rendering, enabling scalable self-play directly from pixel observations. Rather than targeting compute-costly photorealistic sensor simulation, Gigapixel renders a simplified bounding-box world that preserves essential scene structure while achieving throughput at 50k agent steps per second. Since direct pixel-space self-play RL is prohibitively sample-inefficient at end-to-end model scale, we propose self-play DAgger training: we train pixel-based policies in self-play via on-policy distillation from a privileged RL teacher. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we subsequently transfer the self-play trained policies to real-world sensor data through lightweight perception adaptation. Policies trained in Gigapixel and adapted to real-world sensor data achieve competitive performance on the HUGSIM and NAVSIM-v2 benchmarks without human trajectory supervision. Moreover, scaling self-play training yields proportional gains in policy performance, establishing self-play as a practical and scalable strategy for training end-to-end models.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Distribution-Agnostic Robust Trajectory Optimization via Chance-Constrained Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.13605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a distribution-agnostic robust trajectory-optimization framework based on chance-constrained reinforcement learning. The uncertainty is represented here through initial conditions and process noise, with the only requirement being that it can be sampled. A deterministic nominal trajectory is first computed offline, and reinforcement learning is then used only to robustify that baseline through a structured affine closed-loop correction law comprising a feedforward control adjustment and time-varying feedback gains. Probabilistic feasibility is enforced empirically through rollout-based upper-tail quantiles, while terminal dispersion is regulated through covariance-feasibility penalties. The framework is assessed on two materially different trajectory design problems. The flagship case study is a three-dimensional multi-impulse Earth-Mars transfer, where the learned policy is benchmarked against a recent robust trajectory-optimization reference under Gaussian uncertainty and then evaluated under bounded uniform uncertainty and under process disturbances not seen during training. The second case study is a stochastic atmospheric pinpoint rocket landing problem, used to assess portability to a short-horizon continuous-thrust setting with drag, mass depletion, and glide-slope constraints. The results show that the proposed framework can remain competitive in upper-tail fuel cost while preserving probabilistic feasibility, and that the same robustification scaffold can be carried across heterogeneous spacecraft trajectory planning problems without redesign of its core stochastic-control structure.

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

From Specification to Execution: AI Assisted Scientific Workflow Management

arXiv:2606.18425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific workflow management systems (WMS) support scalable and reproducible execution of complex pipelines, but workflow design, implementation, and debugging remain largely manual and require significant expertise. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs) show promise for workflow generation from natural language, but often rely on direct code synthesis, which limits transparency, reproducibility, and integration with workflow systems. We present an AI-assisted approach to scientific workflow management that combines specification-driven workflow generation, automated debugging, and distributed execution. The method introduces a structured specification phase that separates workflow intent, design, and implementation, allowing validation prior to code generation. We also develop an LLM-based debugging agent that diagnoses and resolves failures across multiple system layers. To support distributed execution and user interaction, we integrate Pegasus, a widely used WMS, with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer, providing a unified interface for workflow submission, monitoring, and control. We evaluate the approach using a federated learning workflow for medical imaging, chosen for its parallel, iterative, and dependency-intensive structure. The system generated and executed large-scale workflows with thousands of jobs, reduced debugging effort, and allowed non-expert users to construct workflows with expert-level design patterns. These results indicate that end-to-end AI-assisted workflow generation and execution is feasible, and point toward AI-driven platforms for managing the scientific workflow lifecycle.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Towards the Virtual Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Patient: Inferring Cortical Excitability through Whole-Brain Dynamical Modeling

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is increasingly recognized as a multisystem neurodegenerative disorder in which motor-neuron degeneration is accompanied by widespread alterations in cortical dynamics. Among its most reproducible neurophysiological signatures is cortical hyperexcitability, yet how this local excitability imbalance shapes distributed whole-brain activity remains poorly understood. Here, we combined source-reconstructed resting-state MEG data, tractography-informed whole-brain modeling, and simulation-based inference to investigate whether ALS-related alterations in large-scale brain dynamics can be mechanistically explained by changes in cortical excitability. First, we characterized empirical brain dynamics using complementary features spanning regional activity amplitude and variability, functional connectivity, and avalanche-based metrics. These analyses revealed significant alterations in ALS patients relative to healthy controls, as well as associations with clinical impairment and disease staging. To mechanistically interpret these changes, we employed a reduced Wong-Wang whole-brain model in which local recurrent excitation modulates emergent large-scale neural dynamics. Simulations showed that increasing excitability systematically reproduced the empirical dynamical signatures observed in ALS. We then applied a simulation-based inference framework to estimate latent excitability parameters directly from empirical observations. Whole-brain model inversion revealed increased excitability in ALS patients compared with controls. The recovered excitability parameter was associated with disease staging, supporting its clinical relevance as a model-derived descriptor of ALS progression. Finally, by extending the model to estimate frontal and non-frontal excitability separately, we found that ALS-related alterations were predominantly associated with increased frontal excitability, whereas non-frontal regions appeared comparatively less affected. The recovered parameters related to disease staging. Together, these findings provide a mechanistic framework linking altered large-scale brain dynamics in ALS to selective cortical hyperexcitability, explaining how local excitability changes can give rise to global network reorganization. More broadly, they show how computational model inversion can recover latent multiscale pathophysiological processes from empirical neural recordings, offering a non-perturbative alternative to complex experimental paradigms typically required to causally probe local-to-global mechanisms.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning Patterns and Abstractions from Perceptual Sequences

作者:

arXiv:2503.10973v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cognition swiftly breaks high-dimensional sensory streams into familiar parts and uncovers their relations. Why do structures emerge, and how do they enable learning, generalization, and prediction? What computational principles underlie this core aspect of perception and intelligence? A sensory stream, simplified, is a one-dimensional sequence. In learning such sequences, we naturally segment them into parts – a process known as chunking. In the first project, I investigated factors influencing chunking in a serial reaction time task and showed that humans adapt to underlying chunks while balancing speed and accuracy. Building on this, I developed models that learn chunks and parse sequences chunk by chunk. Normatively, I proposed chunking as a rational strategy for discovering recurring patterns and nested hierarchies, enabling efficient sequence factorization. Learned chunks serve as reusable primitives for transfer, composition, and mental simulation – letting the model compose the new from the known. I demonstrated this model's ability to learn hierarchies in single and multi-dimensional sequences and highlighted its utility for unsupervised pattern discovery. The second part moves from concrete to abstract sequences. I taxonomized abstract motifs and examined their role in sequence memory. Behavioral evidence suggests that humans exploit pattern redundancies for compression and transfer. I proposed a non-parametric hierarchical variable model that learns both chunks and abstract variables, uncovering invariant symbolic patterns. I showed its similarity to human learning and compared it to large language models. Taken together, this thesis suggests that chunking and abstraction as simple computational principles enable structured knowledge acquisition in hierarchically organized sequences, from simple to complex, concrete to abstract.

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

Ex-Omni: Enabling 3D Facial Animation Generation for Omni-modal Large Language Models

Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) aim to unify multimodal understanding and generation, yet extending them to jointly produce speech and 3D facial animation remains largely unexplored despite its importance for natural human-computer interaction. A key challenge is the mismatch between the discrete semantic reasoning of LLMs and the dense temporal dynamics required for 3D facial motion. We propose Expressive Omni (Ex-Omni), an open-source model that augments OLLMs with native speech-accompanied 3D facial animation. Ex-Omni decouples semantic reasoning from temporal generation through a blendshape-aware speech unit generator and a blendshape decoder, where speech units provide temporal scaffolding and hidden speech representations carry facially relevant cues. We further introduce a unified token-as-query gated fusion (TQGF) mechanism for controlled semantic injection, as well as InstructS2SF-1200K, a dataset consisting of 1200K samples for pre-training. Extensive experiments show that Ex-Omni maintains competitive speech understanding and generation ability while achieving better audio-visual synchronization and lower face-generation latency than cascaded pipelines.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum conditional entropies from convex trace functionals

arXiv:2410.21976v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study geometric properties of trace functionals that generalize those in [Zhang, Adv. Math. 365:107053 (2020)], arising from a novel family of conditional entropies with applications in quantum information. Building on new convexity results for these functionals, we establish data-processing inequalities and additivity properties for our entropies, demonstrating their operational significance. We further prove completeness under duality, chain rules, and various monotonicity properties for this family. Our proofs draw on tools from complex interpolation theory, multivariate Araki–Lieb and Lieb–Thirring inequalities, variational characterizations of trace functionals, and spectral pinching techniques.