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MimicIK: Real-Time Generative Inverse Kinematics from Teleoperation with FK Consistency
arXiv:2606.15148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse kinematics (IK) remains a critical bottleneck for real-time robot manipulation. Classical numerical solvers achieve high geometric precision but often suffer from discontinuous branch switching and unstable behavior near kinematic singularities during closed-loop deployment. Meanwhile, learned IK approaches frequently struggle to balance spatial accuracy, motion smoothness, and real-time efficiency, particularly when trained on noisy human teleoperation data. We present MimicIK, a real-time generative inverse kinematics framework that learns smooth and robust joint-space motion priors from teleoperation demonstrations through conditional flow matching. Given the current joint configuration and a target end-effector pose, MimicIK predicts continuous delta-joint commands using an efficient two-step iterative refinement process based on a Minimal Iterative Policy (MIP) backbone. To enforce physical consistency, we further introduce an FK consistency loss, a differentiable forward-kinematics regularization that penalizes task-space deviations from the target pose during training. We evaluate MimicIK on a real-world 6-DOF robot dataset containing 8,848 teleoperation demonstrations. MimicIK achieves a mean position error of 4.65 mm, a 10 mm success rate of 92.01\%, and a trajectory spike rate of only 7.99\%. Compared with a UNet diffusion baseline, our method improves both spatial accuracy and motion smoothness while reducing inference latency from 21.66 ms to 6.74 ms. Furthermore, unlike deterministic MLP baselines that catastrophically diverge under out-of-distribution deployment, MimicIK remains stable near singular configurations and enables robust 20 Hz real-time control on deployment hardware.
HorusEye: Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis
We introduce HorusEye, Language as Dynamic Attention for Emergency Visual Analysis. Our investigation followed five stages. The first one is benchmarking RefCOCO-Degraded, a dataset of 15,244 images (3,811 base images x 4 conditions: Clean, Fog, Smoke and Thermal) with systematic visual degradation. Through four research questions, we evaluate multiple VLMs (Gemini, Qwen2-VL, BLIP-2, LLaVA, Kosmos-2) across visual grounding the second stage, language feedback recovery the third one, health VQA tasks the fourth, and hallucination analysis the final stage. Our key finding is that language feedback effectiveness is model-dependent: Gemini achieves +47.3% improvement in thermal conditions through iterative language feedback, while Qwen2-VL shows -5.1% degradation under the same protocol. We also identify the 'Thermal Paradox' where cropping strategies that improve RGB performance catastrophically fail in thermal imagery. Furthermore, BLIP-2 uniquely hallucinates more under degradation, making it unsuitable for emergency deployment
Benign in Isolation, Harmful in Composition: Security Risks in Agent Skill Ecosystems
arXiv:2606.15242v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skills are becoming the capability layer through which LLM agents turn plans into actions, but their use introduces security risks such as data leakage, unauthorized operations, and tool misuse. Existing vetting usually evaluates each skill in isolation, while real agent tasks often invoke multiple skills in a shared execution context. This creates Skill Composition Risk (SCR): a skill that appears benign alone can become harmful when its outputs, trust signals, authorization cues, or side effects influence later invocations along an activated path. We introduce SCR-Bench to evaluate this risk in controlled, sandboxed skill environments. Rather than relying only on textual intent or surface behavior, SCR-Bench records downstream state changes and path-level outcomes across composed skill executions. It contains three sub-benchmarks: SCR-CapFlow for capability-flow composition, SCR-TrustLift for trust-transfer composition, and SCR-AuthBlur for authorization-confusion composition. Across SCR-Bench, composed paths expose risks that are largely absent under isolated evaluation. In SCR-CapFlow, attack success rate reaches 33.6 percent under composition, compared with near-zero isolated baselines. In SCR-TrustLift, attack success rate exceeds 96.5 percent on four of five backends. In SCR-AuthBlur, the risky-approval rate increases by 71.8 percent relative to the L0 isolated baseline under the L1 context setting. These results show that agent skill security should be assessed at the level of activated paths rather than isolated artifacts. SCR and SCR-Bench provide a foundation for path-aware risk evaluation and defense in LLM agent skill ecosystems. Benchmark: https://github.com/saint-viperx/SCR_Bench.
Beyond Benchmarks: Continuous Edge Inference for Fine-Grained Roadside Perception
Continuous AI inference on resource-constrained edge hardware introduces deployment effects that are largely invisible to conventional benchmark evaluation, including temporal instability in streaming video, thermal throttling under sustained load, and workload-dependent performance variability. We present Edge-TSR, a deployment-oriented continuous edge inference system for sustained roadside perception on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Edge-TSR integrates detection, tracking, fine-grained classification, and a lightweight track-aware temporal stabilization mechanism that improves streaming inference consistency with negligible computational overhead. Our central finding is that benchmark-centric evaluation systematically overstates deployed edge inference performance. Across three state-of-the-art baselines, we observe consistent 20-30% relative degradation when transitioning from static-image evaluation to real-world streaming deployment. Edge-TSR addresses this gap through temporal inference stabilization, recovering up to 10.16% classification accuracy over per-frame inference baselines while maintaining sustained real-time performance under continuous operation. We evaluate the complete system under diverse real-world deployment conditions, jointly characterizing inference quality, latency, throughput, and thermal behavior during long-duration operation. A 55-minute vehicular deployment over a 26 km route demonstrates sustained operation at 16.18 FPS within safe thermal limits on a single embedded device without cloud offload. Our findings show that deployment-aware evaluation and temporal inference stabilization are necessary components of continuously operating edge AI systems intended for real-world sensing deployments. We release a sample annotated streaming video evaluation dataset and full system implementation to support reproducible deployment-centric evaluation.
Trustworthy Self-Composable Big-Data-as-a-Service: An LLM-Orchestrated Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Data Engineering, AutoML, MLOps Deployment, and Drift-Aware Lifecycle Optimization
arXiv:2606.17915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) platforms require re liable automation across data ingestion, cleaning, feature engi neering, model development, deployment, and post-deployment monitoring. However, existing LLM-based data science agents and AutoML systems mainly focus on isolated workflow stages, leaving limited support for lifecycle-level orchestration, artifact governance, human oversight, and drift-aware adaptation. This paper proposes a trustworthy self-composable BDaaS frame work based on LLM-orchestrated multi-agent collaboration. The proposed architecture decomposes the BDaaS lifecycle into specialized agents for data ingestion, data cleaning, feature engineering, AutoML training, model evaluation, MLOps de ployment, monitoring, and drift detection. A central LLM or chestration layer coordinates agent execution, validates interme diate outputs, manages workflow context, and enables dynamic workflow composition. The framework also incorporates shared artifact governance, reproducibility support, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and drift-aware feedback loops. A prototype-based evaluation is conducted using controlled tabular benchmark datasets with missing values, categorical variables, outliers, class imbalance, and simulated covariate drift. Compared with manual ML, AutoML-only, and single-agent LLM baselines, the pro posed multi-agent BDaaS pipeline achieves competitive predictive performance while improving lifecycle-level reliability, including workflow completion, artifact traceability, deployment readiness, reproducibility, and drift recovery. The results suggest that LLM-orchestrated multi-agent systems can extend conventional AutoML toward trustworthy, adaptive, and production-oriented BDaaS lifecycle automation.
ScaffoldAgent: Utility-Guided Dynamic Outline Optimization for Open-Ended Deep Research
arXiv:2606.20122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended deep research (OEDR) requires systems to acquire knowledge through multi-round retrieval and generate coherent long-form reports. The outline plays a central role as a structural scaffold that coordinates retrieval, evidence organization, and generation. However, existing methods either fix the outline before writing or refine it with local heuristics, leading to scaffold drift under continuous information accumulation and delayed feedback for evaluating outline modifications. We propose ScaffoldAgent, a utility-guided dynamic outline optimization framework for OEDR. ScaffoldAgent models outline evolution as a structured decision process with three operations: Expansion, Contraction, and Revision, enabling controlled updates to the report scaffold. It further introduces a utility-guided feedback mechanism that estimates the downstream value of each outline operation from retrieval gain, structural coherence, and trial-generation quality. The resulting utility signal guides node selection, operation scheduling, and termination during inference. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Gym show that ScaffoldAgent consistently improves long-form report generation and factual grounding over existing deep research agents.
Physics-Guided Spatiotemporal Learning for Coastal Wave Peak Period Estimation from Video
arXiv:2606.13302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wave parameters in the nearshore are crucial for coastal engineering, shoreline protection, marine hazard assessment, and coastal management for climate resilience. Traditional monitoring systems like buoys and radar platforms offer accurate monitoring but can have high installation and maintenance expenses and limited spatial coverage. Passive ocean monitoring using video has been achieved by leveraging deep learning, however, many methods are not physically interpretable, feasible, and validated for oceanography. In thiswork, a Physics-Guided Deep Spatiotemporal Learning Framework for direct estimation of nearshore wave peak periods from passive coastal video stream is proposed. The framework combines automated temporal-variance based region-of-interest detection, multi-stage Sim-to-Real transfer learning, and physics-informed regularization to enhance the predictive accuracy and physical consistency. A variety of spatiotemporal architectures were assessed, such as transformer-based and recurrent-convolutional ones, alongside synthetic pretraining,silver-label adaptation, and expert fine-tuning. The results show that transformer-based architectures outperformed in terms of the accuracy of the instantaneous prediction, while lightweight recurrent-convolutional architectures achieved higher temporal stability and operational oceanographic skill. Ablation studies also demonstrated the benefits of physics-guided regularization in terms of trend-following consistency, and physically implausible predictions. Explainability auditing also helped to focus attention in hydrodynamically active surf-zone regions and showed good agreement with the physically derived wave propagation behavior. In general, the proposed framework shows the promise of physics-guided video-based deep learning systems for long-term coastal wave monitoring that are cost-efficient and operationally feasible.
Phase Transitions in Attention: A Bayesian Theory of Copy Head Emergence
arXiv:2606.12058v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention is the key mechanism underlying in-context learning in transformers, and attention patterns have been observed empirically to emerge abruptly during training. We present a Bayesian theory of feature learning in attention; we then focus on how the copy subcircuit in the first layer of an induction head is learned by analyzing a single-layer softmax attention network trained on a copy task. We derive a closed-form posterior over the attention matrix and reduce it to a low-dimensional order parameter space. This reduction reveals a phase transition in the amount of training data, which we verify using both Bayesian sampling and standard training with Adam. We contrast our results with linear attention and find that softmax attention exhibits a first-order phase transition while in linear attention an initial second-order phase transition is followed by a smooth, continuous evolution toward the structured attention pattern (crossover). Our work provides a first-principles theoretical account of the abrupt emergence of the copy subcircuit, reminiscent of the one observed in training large language models.
Koshur Diacritizer: A Byte-Level Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Kashmiri Diacritic Restoration
Kashmiri, an Indo-Aryan language written in a modified Perso-Arabic script, frequently omits diacritic marks in digital text, creating ambiguity and challenging downstream NLP applications. We present Koshur Diacritizer, a ByT5-small byte-level sequence-to-sequence model for restoring diacritics in Kashmiri text. To support this task, we release a publicly available dataset of 23.7k aligned undiacritized diacritized Kashmiri sentence pairs. The proposed framework combines script-aware normalization, alignment validation, and skeleton-preserving inference to ensure reliable restoration while maintaining the original base-letter sequence. Experimental results on a held-out test set achieve a DERm of 0.2012 and a WER of 0.2159. Additionally, evaluation by a native Kashmiri linguistic expert yields a mean accuracy of 77.5%. The dataset, model, and source code are publicly released to provide a reproducible baseline for Kashmiri diacritic restoration and future low-resource language research.
Model Risk in Credit Portfolio Models
arXiv:2111.14631v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model risk in credit portfolio models is a serious issue for banks but has so far not been tackled comprehensively. We will demonstrate how to deal with uncertainty in all model parameters in an all-embracing, yet easy-to-implement way.
A comparative study of simulation-based inference methods for epidemic models with identifiability considerations
by Geunsoo Jang, K. Selçuk Candan, Gerardo Chowell Epidemic models play a critical role in understanding transmission dynamics, generating forecasts, and informing public health interventions when they are properly calibrated to epidemiological data. Traditional Bayesian inference methods rely on the likelihood function to update prior knowledge using observed data. However, for realistic epidemic models, likelihood functions are often analytically intractable or computationally prohibitive, which can limit the applicability of these methods. Simulation-based inference provides a promising alternative by approximating posterior distributions through forward simulations rather than an explicit likelihood evaluation. In this study, we present a systematic comparison of four approaches: Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC), Neural Posterior Estimation (NPE), a neural method with temporal embedding, and Preconditioned Neural Posterior Estimation (PNPE), which integrates elements of both classical and neural techniques. These methods are evaluated across epidemic models of increasing complexity under fixed simulation budgets and varying levels of observational noise, with explicit attention to both structural and practical identifiability. Our results show that neural methods generally improve posterior fidelity and predictive accuracy compared with ABC under constrained simulation budgets. PNPE achieved strong performance in several simulation settings, whereas temporal embeddings improved inference in models with complex epidemic dynamics by capturing sequential dependencies. These gains come with important trade-offs: PNPE required substantially greater computational resources and, unlike fully amortized NPE-based methods, may require reconditioning for each new observation. In contrast, ABC remained computationally efficient and provided reasonable, though often more conservative, posterior estimates. Overall, our findings highlight trade-offs among computational efficiency, posterior accuracy, uncertainty calibration, and inference reusability, suggesting that method selection should depend on model complexity, data quality, identifiability, and available computational resources.
Associations Between Social Responsiveness and Sleep Disruption are Modulated by Chronotype in Early Adolescence: Cross-Sectional and Prospective Findings from 10,108 Participants of the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study
Background: Sleep disruption is prevalent in people with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism but is not clear whether it occurs as an endophenotype or secondary to other behaviours. The ABCD Study is a population-based longitudinal study that monitors the health, demography and lifestyle of over 11,000 children in the US. In this study we leverage these data to investigate whether traits consistent with autism (social responsiveness) are associated with sleep disruption independent of lifestyle and other behavioural measures. Methods: Autistic traits were assessed using the Social Responsiveness Scale at age 11, and sleep disruption and behavioural outcomes were assessed at ages 11 and 13 years using the Sleep Disturbance Scale, and the Child Behaviour Check List, respectively. Demographic, health and lifestyle-related variables were assessed by caregiver questionnaires. Regression models were applied to investigate associations between autistic traits and sleep outcomes. Results: There was a significant cross-sectional association between sleep disturbance and SRS at age 11 years old that was independent of sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic position, physical activity, sedentary behaviour and anxiety/depression ({beta} = 0.12, 95% CI (0.07, 0.17); p < 0.001), that persisted at age 13, and that was modulated by chronotype, with evening types showing a stronger association. Discussion: Social responsiveness assessed in early adolescence (age 11) were associated with sleep disruption independent of multiple confounding factors and were prospectively associated with sleep disruption at age 13 years. These findings contribute to the evidence that disruption of sleep and circadian timing may have a primary role in the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate autistic traits.
Applicability Condition Extraction for Therapeutic Drug-Disease Relations
arXiv:2606.14031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying conditions that a certain drug takes therapeutic effect on a target disease is crucial for clinical decision-making support. However, most existing biomedical information extraction methods have focused on identifying only relations between drugs and diseases, while largely overlooking the context-specific conditions where such relations can apply. To address this problem, we introduce the task of applicability condition extraction for therapeutic drug–disease relations from biomedical research literature. We create the first dataset that has manually annotated triples of drugs, diseases, and applicability conditions on biomedical paper abstracts with 1,119 drug-disease pairs. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate the performance of a range of existing methods. In addition, we propose a new method that enhances LoRA to consider relations between drugs and diseases. Our method consistently outperforms strong baselines across different evaluation settings. The source code and dataset of this paper can be obtained from: https://github.com/guantingluo98/Drug-ACE
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}
Question-Aware Evidence Ledgers for Video Relational Reasoning
The VRR-QA challenge evaluates visual relational reasoning in videos, where answers often depend on implicit spatial relations, event boundaries, target identity, and dialogue context rather than a single salient frame. We present a test-time reasoning pipeline built around a strong GPT-5.5 video QA solver and a set of question-aware evidence ledgers. The initial solver answers each question from a uniform video representation, while routed ledgers are prompted to make the required targets, count units, reference frames, and temporal or spatial scope explicit for counting, spatial, endpoint, viewpoint, and dialogue reasoning. External tools such as open-vocabulary detection, depth cues, pair crops, ASR, and scene-graph ledgers are used only as evidence sources. A conservative gate keeps the current answer unless independent evidence uniquely supports a different option. The final evidence-gated pipeline achieves 92.95% overall accuracy and 93.79% macro accuracy on the challenge test split.
Quantifying Imaginarity in Neutrino Systems
arXiv:2412.01871v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: It is a fundamental question why quantum mechanics employs complex numbers rather than solely real numbers. In this work, we conduct the first analysis of imaginarity quantification in neutrino flavor and spin-flavor oscillations. As quantum systems in coherent superposition, neutrinos are ideal candidates for quantifying imaginarity within the resource theoretic framework, using measures such as the $\ell_1$-norm and the relative entropy of imaginarity. We show that in the case of two-flavor mixing, these measures of imaginarity are nonzero. The measures of imaginarity reach their extreme values when the probabilistic features of quantum theory are fully maximized, i.e., both the transitional and survival probabilities are approximately equal. Our study reveals that the imaginarity, as a resource, can be harnessed not solely from the presence of a complex phase in the mixing matrix but also from the intrinsic quantum dynamics of time evolution itself. We further extend our analysis to explore the dynamics of three-flavor neutrino mixing, incorporating the effects of a nonzero $CP$ phase.
X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMs
While the shift from cascaded dialogue systems to end-to-end (E2E) speech Large Language Models (LLMs) improves latency and paralinguistic modeling, E2E models often exhibit a significant performance degradation compared to their text-based counterparts. The standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) training methods fail to close this gap. To address this, we propose X-OPD, a novel Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation framework designed to systematically align the capabilities of Speech LLMs to their text-based counterparts. X-OPD enables the Speech LLM to explore its own distribution via on-policy rollouts, where a text-based teacher model evaluates these trajectories and provides token-level feedback, effectively distilling teacher's capabilities into student's multi-modal representations. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that X-OPD significantly narrows the gap in complex tasks while preserving the model's inherent capabilities.
Design Criteria for SGD Preconditioners: Local Conditioning, Noise Floors, and Basin Stability
arXiv:2511.19716v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise. We analyze preconditioned SGD in the geometry induced by a symmetric positive definite matrix $\mathbf{M}$, deriving bounds in which both the convergence rate and the stochastic noise floor are governed by $\mathbf{M}$-dependent quantities: the rate through an effective condition number in the $\mathbf{M}$-metric, and the floor through the product of that condition number and the preconditioned noise level. For nonconvex objectives, we establish a preconditioner-dependent basin-stability guarantee: when smoothness and basin size are measured in the $\mathbf{M}$-norm, the probability that the iterates remain in a well-behaved local region admits an explicit lower bound. This perspective is particularly relevant in Scientific Machine Learning (SciML), where achieving small training loss under stochastic updates is closely tied to physical fidelity, numerical stability, and constraint satisfaction. The framework applies to both diagonal/adaptive and curvature-aware preconditioners and yields a simple design principle: choose $\mathbf{M}$ to improve local conditioning while attenuating noise. Experiments on a quadratic diagnostic and three SciML benchmarks validate the predicted rate-floor behavior.
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.
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Investigating naming error patterns after non-invasive brain stimulation and language treatment in persons with aphasia
Abstract Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) paired with behavioral language therapy can improve naming in persons with aphasia (PWA), yet naming errors persist. Little is known about how naming error patterns change after non-invasive brain stimulation is combined with language treatment. Aims: To examine whether right cerebellar tDCS plus computerized aphasia therapy changes the types of naming errors in people with chronic aphasia across timepoints, and to determine whether effects differ by cerebellar tDCS polarity (anode vs. cathode). Methods and Procedures: In a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, within-subject crossover study, we retrospectively analyzed behavioral data from 24 individuals with post-stroke aphasia. Each participant completed two 15-session intervention periods (3-5 sessions/week) with active cerebellar tDCS + computerized aphasia therapy and sham + computerized aphasia therapy, separated by a two-month washout. General linear models (GLMs) assessed longitudinal changes in six error types (semantic, phonological real word, phonological nonword, no response, mixed, unrelated) on an untrained picture naming task (Philadelphia Naming Test; PNT) and a trained task (Naming 80; N80). Additional GLMs evaluated polarity effects with 2 (Group: anode vs. cathode) x 2 (Treatment) interactions, and treatment-order effects with 2 (Group: tDCS-first vs. sham-first) x 2 (Treatment) interactions. Outcomes and Results: Active cerebellar tDCS did not significantly change error types for trained items (N80). For untrained items (PNT), active tDCS reduced several error types relative to sham, with the clearest and most durable reduction in phonological nonword errors; more moderate reductions occurred for phonological real word and unrelated errors. Mixed errors showed a marginally opposite pattern, tending to increase after tDCS and decrease after sham. Polarity analyses indicated broadly similar effects across anodal and cathodal stimulation overall, but only the anode group showed a reliable treatment effect for phonological nonword errors on the PNT. Treatment-order analyses revealed no significant order effects. Conclusions: Our results indicate a shift in naming error types, particularly after tDCS treatment for the untrained naming task (PNT). These findings may help guide the course of treatment approaches of those with aphasia and what error naming pattern types may show changes post stroke when combining non-invasive brain stimulation and computerized aphasia therapy. Clinical Trial Registration: Cerebellar Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Aphasia Treatment [NCT02901574] Keywords: aphasia, naming errors, non-invasive brain stimulation, cerebellar tDCS, computerized aphasia treatment
Electromagnetic Wightman functions and vacuum densities for a brane intersecting the AdS boundary
arXiv:2604.17583v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the combined effects of a brane intersecting the AdS boundary and background gravitational field on the local characteristics of the electromagnetic vacuum. Two types of boundary conditions on the brane are considered, which are higher-dimensional generalizations of the perfect electric (PEC) and perfect magnetic (PMC) boundary conditions in Maxwell's electrodynamics. The brane-induced contributions to the Wightman functions of the vector potential and field tensor are explicitly extracted. Simple expressions in terms of elementary functions are provided. The behavior of the vacuum expectation values (VEVs) is mimicked by a scalar field with a negative effective mass squared determined by the radius of the AdS spacetime. The expectation values of the electric and magnetic fields squares and of the energy-momentum tensor are investigated as local characteristics of the vacuum state. The brane-induced contributions to these VEVs have opposite signs for the PEC and PMC conditions. For the PMC condition, this contribution is negative for the electric field squared and positive for the magnetic field squared. The VEV of the energy-momentum tensor has a nonzero off-diagonal component. The brane-induced vacuum energy density is positive for PMC condition, whereas the normal and parallel stresses change sign as functions of the distance from the brane. Unlike the problem involving a planar boundary in the Minkowski bulk, the vacuum energy-momentum tensor does not vanish in (3+1)-dimensional AdS spacetime.
Provably Safe, Yet Scalable Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2606.14536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that optimize rewards while satisfying constraints. Predominant approaches rely on soft-constrained policy optimization, which has achieved empirical success but does not provide formal safety guarantees for the learned policy. In contrast, methods with strict guarantees typically rely on explicit certificate functions, whose construction requires the direct synthesis and verification of control-invariant sets, a process that scales poorly with state dimension and often yields overly conservative behavior. In this paper, we present the Provably Safe, yet Scalable RL (PS2-RL) framework, a novel two-phase architecture for learning provably safe policies in a scalable manner, designed to overcome the key bottlenecks of prior methods. Rather than explicitly computing invariant sets, PS2-RL leverages a learned backup policy to forward-integrate the system dynamics, generating an implicit control-invariant set online. In the first phase, the backup policy is trained with our proposed safe-arrival value function, which characterizes the optimal backup policy for invariant-set construction. In the second phase, an RL policy is trained end-to-end through a differentiable projection layer that strictly enforces the safety guarantees induced by the learned backup policy. By maximizing the volume of the implicit control-invariant set in the first phase, the resulting PS2 policy from the second phase is performant and scalable, while maintaining provable safety. Crucially, PS2-RL imposes no restrictions on the underlying RL algorithm and can be plugged into any existing training pipeline. We establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework and evaluate it on robotic control tasks with state dimensions up to 10, a regime in which prior provably safe RL methods struggle or become impractical.
Nanostructure modelling with early fault tolerant quantum computers
arXiv:2606.06442v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Semiconductor nanostructures are central to many developing technologies. Notably, double quantum dots are especially important for semiconductor spin-qubit architectures, quantum sensing applications, and quantum-dot solar cells. Accurate modelling is highly desirable but conventional methods can struggle when dynamics involve more than two interacting electrons. In this work, we present a quantum simulation framework capable of addressing multi-electron double quantum dots. We adopt an efficiently scaling 1$^st$ quantised representation of the system and develop algorithms based on both Trotterisation and Qubitisation. Incorporating insights from classical simulations enables us to produce resource estimates that are more realistic than those obtained from theoretical error bounds. Using a standard surface code model with physical noise at $10^{-3}$, our results indicate that the ground-state energy of four electrons in a double quantum dot can be estimated in approximately 22 hours using 226k physical qubits, or an eight-electron system in 3.3 days with 314k qubits (with runtimes falling dramatically when more qubits are available). We anticipate that incorporating recent advances in surface code architectures may reduce these costs significantly further. Our results suggest that early fault-tolerant quantum computers may become valuable tools for designing mature-era quantum technologies.