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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

StanceNakba Shared Task: Actor and Topic-Aware Stance Detection in Public Discourse

We present StanceNakba 2026, a shared task on stance detection in polarized social media discourse related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, organized as part of Nakba-NLP 2026 at LREC-COLING 2026. The task introduces two subtasks: Subtask A (Actor-Level Stance Detection), which classifies English social media posts as Pro-Palestine, Pro-Israel, or Neutral; and Subtask B (Cross-Topic Stance Detection), which identifies Favor, Against, or Neither stances in Arabic posts toward two conflict-related topics, normalization with Israel and refugee presence in Jordan. The task is grounded in an annotated dataset of 2,606 social media posts. A total of 7 teams participated in Subtask A and 6 teams in Subtask B. Participating systems primarily fine-tuned Arabic and multilingual transformer-based models, including MARBERT, AraBERT, and DeBERTa-v3 variants, with several teams employing cross-validation, ensemble methods, and topic-conditioned architectures. The best-performing systems achieved a Macro F1 of 0.9620 on Subtask A and 0.8724 on Subtask B, demonstrating that transformer-based approaches are highly effective for conflict-domain stance detection while highlighting persistent challenges in cross-topic generalization and neutral class prediction.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On Skorokhod Problems for Reflected and Singular Stochastic Heat Equations

arXiv:2606.11951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a Skorokhod decomposition for the Markov processes $X^a$ and $X$ associated to the gradient Dirichlet forms with respect to the measures $\rho^a\mu^{\beta}$ and $\rho\mu^{\beta}$, respectively. Here, $\mu^{\beta}$ is the law of the standard Brownian bridge $\beta$, while $\rho^a$ and $\rho$ denote densities which are given by $\rho^a(z) := \mathbf{1}_{[0,\infty)}(\bar{z}_a)$ and $\rho(z) := \int_0^1 \mathbf{1}_{[0,\infty)}(\bar{z}_x) \, dx$, respectively, for all $z\in L^2(0,1)$ which have a (unique) continuous representative $\bar{z}$ which vanishes at zero and one. To this end, we derive infinite-dimensional integration by parts formulas (IbPFs) w.r.t. $\rho^a\mu^{\beta}$ and $\rho\mu^{\beta}$, which contain Hida distributions alongside the usual drift terms. We represent these Hida distributions by integration w.r.t. vector measures of bounded variation. The vector measures in question are constructed via an approximation argument, making use of a generalization of Prokhorov's theorem for vector measures. We further prove that, almost surely, the sample paths of $X^a$ and $X$ take values in the equivalence class of continuous functions vanishing at zero and one for all and $dt$-almost all times, respectively. The main motivation for studying $\rho^a\mu^{\beta}$ and $\rho\mu^{\beta}$ lies in the fact that the distributional terms in their IbPFs are simplifications of the distributional term in the IbPF w.r.t. the law of the reflected Brownian bridge on the unit interval $\mu^{|\beta|}$. Representing the latter by integration w.r.t. a vector measure of bounded variation is still an open problem.

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

Probing, Fusion, and Trustworthiness: A Systematic Evaluation of Foundation Model Representations for Multimodal Cancer Analysis

arXiv:2606.17115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) have emerged as powerful representation extractors for medical data, yet their generalizability to datasets under distribution shift remains underexplored. This work systematically evaluates FM-based representations on a suite of computational pathology tasks across two real-world commercial cohorts, IH-BC and IH-NSCLC, drawn from the licensed in-house (IH) oncology dataset. The analysis focuses on two modalities, whole-slide images and transcriptomic profiles, drawn from the IH multimodal data. We first benchmark unimodal probing performance across five FMs on eight downstream classification tasks, and find that image and omics representations carry complementary predictive signals. Then we investigate whether multimodal fusion can yield additional gains over unimodal baselines by comparing three image-omics fusion strategies built on paired representations. The trustworthiness of selected unimodal and multimodal pipelines is further assessed through conformal prediction. Our results show that FM representations achieve competitive performance on out-of-distribution data and that multimodal fusion helps mainly when no single modality dominates the signal. Conformal prediction reveals that in the majority of cases where a point prediction fails, the true diagnosis remains recoverable within the prediction set, reinforcing the value of uncertainty-aware inference for clinical support.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

DynAMO:Dynamic Asset Management Orchestration via Topological Multi-Agent Scheduling

arXiv:2606.19382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LLM-powered agents offer end-to-end automation for industrial asset lifecycles, real-world Industry 4.0 deployment is hindered by latency, concurrency instability, and safety risks. We present DynAMO (Dynamic Asset Management Orchestration), a deployment-ready engine using a Plan-then-Execute architecture to generate verifiable workflow graphs. DynAMO supports both SequentialWorkflow (topological execution) and ParallelWorkflow (dependency-aware concurrency). By dynamically identifying independent tasks, DynAMO preserves structural correctness and safety while significantly improving efficiency through controlled reasoning overlap. Across six controlled experiments on the AssetOpsBench industrial benchmark, DynAMO demonstrates substantial performance and robustness gains. Parallel execution reduces end-to-end latency by a median of 1.6x over sequential orchestration, rising to 1.8x on highly parallelizable workflows. After instrumenting external tool calls with realistic latencies, a latency decomposition shows that LLM reasoning and orchestration still account for more than 90% of execution time, identifying model inference as the primary system bottleneck. Structured context pruning reduces inference latency by approximately 30%, and DynAMO maintains correct functional behaviour (task completion, agent sequencing, and output quality) while exhibiting graceful degradation under controlled fault injection. Reproducibility analysis further confirms stable execution under repeated runs, with parallel scheduling reducing latency variance. These findings establish DynAMO as a practical blueprint for scalable, safe, and latency-aware agent deployment in Industry 4.0 automation pipelines. Code is available at: https://github.com/kushwaha001/DynAMO

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies

arXiv:2502.06866v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is essential to comprehend the long-term implications of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple dimensions of living conditions. In this study, we present an approach to quantifying the quality of life through the Global Ease of Living Index that combines various socio-economic and infrastructural factors into a single composite score. Our index utilises economic indicators that define living standards, which could help in targeted interventions to improve specific areas. We present a machine learning framework to address missing data for certain economic indicators in specific countries. We then curate and update the data and use a dimensionality reduction approach (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis) to create the Ease of Living Index for major economies since 1970. Our work significantly adds to the literature by offering a practical tool for policymakers to identify areas needing improvement, such as healthcare systems, employment opportunities, and public safety. Our approach with open data and code can be easily reproduced and applied to various contexts, providing transparency and accessibility for ongoing research and policy development in quality-of-life assessment.

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

Beyond Static Endpoints: Tool Programs as an Interface for Flexible Agentic Web Services

arXiv:2606.19992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the agentic web era, LLM-based agents increasingly invoke web services as tools, yet most interfaces remain static endpoints that poorly express long-horizon workflows with loops, conditionals, joins, and retries. We present ToolPro, which represents an agent's tool intent as an executable tool program that compactly encodes multi-step service interactions with explicit effect types. ToolPro combines constraint-guided program construction, effect-aware replay for exactly-once state-modifying calls, and a profile-driven policy that decides when program execution outperforms stepwise calling. We instantiate ToolPro over MCP-style services with WebAssembly sandboxing and evaluate it on diverse workflows of real-world applications. ToolPro reduces end-to-end latency by up to 53.4\% and client-side traffic by up to 96.1\%, with larger gains under higher network latency and workflow complexity.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Beyond AHI: An Interpretable Causal-Discovery-Guided Framework for Sleep Recovery in Connected Health

arXiv:2606.18506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Objective sleep assessment relies on polysomnography (PSG), yet clinical impact is often better reflected in patient-reported outcomes (PROs) such as sleepiness and fatigue. Existing summary indices, including the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI), provide limited insight into the multidomain physiology underlying functional recovery. We propose an interpretable, causal-discovery–guided framework for deriving a hierarchical Sleep Recovery Score (SRS) from multimodal PSG. Using two large population cohorts (MESA: n=1540; MrOS: n=825), we apply directed acyclic graph (DAG) learning to identify candidate physiological drivers spanning respiratory burden, hypoxic burden, sleep fragmentation, sleep architecture, and autonomic regulation. Although derived from clinical PSG, these domains map naturally to sensing streams increasingly available in connected health technologies, including wearable ECG, oximetry, and sleep-stage estimation devices. To preserve mechanistic plausibility, we introduce a two-stage screening process that combines physiology-based constraints with constrained LLM-assisted auditing to identify and remove structural confounders and construct-overlapping variables. Across cohorts, these five domains emerge as recurrent physiological domains associated with recovery, and the resulting SRS shows up to 2.5$\times$ stronger alignment with perceived recovery than AHI. By linking multimodal sleep physiology to patient-centered outcomes through an interpretable, bias-aware, and domain structured framework, this work provides a practical foundation for recovery modeling across both clinical sleep studies and emerging smart and connected health settings.

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

HD-Prot: A Protein Language Model for Joint Sequence-Structure Modeling with Continuous Structure Tokens

arXiv:2512.15133v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Proteins inherently possess a consistent sequence-structure duality. The abundance of protein sequence data, which can be readily represented as discrete tokens, has driven fruitful developments in protein language models (pLMs). A key remaining challenge, however, is how to effectively integrate continuous structural knowledge into pLMs. Current methods often discretize protein structures to accommodate the language modeling framework, which inevitably results in the loss of fine-grained information and limits the performance potential of multimodal pLMs. In this paper, we argue that such concerns can be circumvented: a sequence-based pLM can be extended to incorporate the structure modality through continuous tokens, i.e., high-fidelity protein structure latents that avoid vector quantization. Specifically, we propose a hybrid diffusion protein language model, HD-Prot, which embeds a continuous-valued diffusion head atop a discrete pLM, enabling seamless operation with both discrete and continuous tokens for joint sequence-structure modeling. It captures inter-token dependencies across modalities through a unified absorbing diffusion process, and estimates per-token distributions via categorical prediction for sequences and continuous diffusion for structures. Extensive results demonstrate that HD-Prot achieves competitive performance in unconditional sequence-structure co-generation, motif-scaffolding, protein structure prediction, and inverse folding tasks. Furthermore, our method can perform on par with state-of-the-art multimodal pLMs, despite being developed under limited computational resources (i.e., less than one-tenth the budget for modality extension fine-tuning). It highlights the viability of simultaneously estimating categorical and continuous distributions within a unified language model architecture, offering a promising alternative direction for multimodal pLMs.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Generative causal testing to bridge data-driven models and scientific theories in language neuroscience

Representations from large language models are highly effective at predicting BOLD fMRI responses to language stimuli. However, these representations are largely opaque: it is unclear what features of the language stimulus drive the response in each brain area. We present generative causal testing (GCT), a framework for generating concise explanations of language selectivity in the brain from predictive models and then testing those explanations in follow-up experiments using LLM-generated stimuli.This approach is successful at explaining selectivity both in individual voxels and cortical regions of interest (ROIs), including newly identified microROIs in prefrontal cortex. We show that explanatory accuracy is closely related to the predictive power and stability of the underlying predictive models. Finally, we show that GCT can dissect fine-grained differences between brain areas with similar functional selectivity. These results demonstrate that LLMs can be used to bridge the widening gap between data-driven models and formal scientific theories.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Manifold GCN: Diffusion-based Convolutional Neural Network for Manifold-valued Graphs

arXiv:2401.14381v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose two graph neural network layers for graphs with features in a Riemannian manifold. First, based on a manifold-valued graph diffusion equation, we construct a diffusion layer that can be applied to an arbitrary number of nodes and graph connectivity patterns. Second, we model a tangent multilayer perceptron by transferring ideas from the vector neuron framework to our general setting. Both layers are equivariant under node permutations and the feature manifold's isometries. These properties have led to a beneficial inductive bias in many deep-learning tasks. Furthermore, they enable novel, more flexible feature designs. Numerical examples on synthetic data and an Alzheimer's classification application on triangle meshes of the right hippocampus demonstrate the usefulness of our new layers: While they apply to a much broader class of problems, they outperform task-specific state-of-the-art networks.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Improved delta-kick cooling with multiple nonideal kicks

arXiv:2505.08413v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Delta-kick cooling is a technique employed to achieve low kinetic temperatures by decreasing momentum width at the cost of increased position width. In an ideal implementation, this method uses a harmonic potential to deliver a single near-instantaneous momentum kick. In practice, potentials that are approximately harmonic near their center are commonly used. As a result, the breakdown of the harmonic approximation far from the center limits the cooling performance. Inspired by aberration cancellation in optics, we propose to use compound matter-wave lens systems for $\delta-$kick cooling with Gaussian potentials. By strategically combining attractive and repulsive kicks, we show that it is possible to mimic the effect of a harmonic potential. For a test case with reasonable experimental parameters, our method suggests a reduction in kinetic temperature by a factor of $2.5$ using a 2-pulse sequence and by a factor of $3.2$ using a 3-pulse sequence.

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

ShowFlow: From Robust Single Concept to Condition-Free Multi-Concept Generation

Customizing image generation remains a core challenge in controllable image synthesis. For single-concept generation, maintaining both identity preservation and prompt alignment is challenging. In multi-concept scenarios, relying solely on a prompt without additional conditions like layout boxes or semantic masks, often leads to identity loss and concept omission. In this paper, we introduce ShowFlow, a comprehensive framework designed to tackle these challenges. We propose ShowFlow-S for single-concept image generation, and ShowFlow-M for handling multiple concepts. ShowFlow-S introduces a KronA-WED adapter, which integrates a Kronecker adapter with weight and embedding decomposition, and together with a novel Semantic-Aware Attention Regularization (SAR) training objective to enhance single-concept generation. Building on this foundation, ShowFlow-M directly reuses robust models learned by ShowFlow-S to support multi-concept generation without extra conditions, incorporating a Subject-Adaptive Matching Attention (SAMA) and a Layout Consistency guidance as the plug-and-play module. Extensive experiments and user studies validate ShowFlow's effectiveness, highlighting its potential in real-world applications like advertising and virtual dressing. Our source code will be publicly available at: https://htrvu.github.io/showflow.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

SproutRAG: Attention-Guided Tree Search with Progressive Embeddings for Long-Document RAG

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems must balance retrieval granularity with contextual coherence, a challenge that existing methods address through LLM-guided chunking, single-level context expansion, or hierarchical summarization. These approaches variously depend on costly LLM calls during indexing or retrieval, limit context aggregation to a single granularity level, or introduce information loss through summarization. We present SproutRAG, an attention-guided hierarchical RAG framework that addresses this trade-off by organizing sentence-level chunks into progressively larger but semantically coherent units, using learned inter-sentence attention to construct a binary chunking tree. Unlike prior approaches that rely on external LLMs, fixed context expansion, or lossy summarization, SproutRAG learns which attention heads and layers best capture semantic document structure, enabling multi-granularity retrieval without additional LLM calls or compressed summaries. At retrieval time, SproutRAG uses hierarchical beam search to retrieve candidates at multiple granularities, capturing multi-sentence relevance beyond flat retrieval. The framework is trained end-to-end with a joint objective that improves both embeddings and tree structure. Experiments across four benchmarks spanning scientific, legal, and open-domain settings demonstrate that SproutRAG improves information efficiency (IE) by 6.1% on average over the strongest baseline. Code is available on https://github.com/AmirAbaskohi/SproutRAG.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Skeleton Sparsification and Densification Scale-Spaces

The Hamilton-Jacobi skeleton, also known as the medial axis, is a powerful shape descriptor that represents binary objects in terms of the centres of maximal inscribed discs. Despite its broad applicability, the medial axis suffers from sensitivity to noise: Minor boundary variations can lead to disproportionately large and undesirable expansions of the skeleton. Classical pruning methods mitigate this shortcoming by systematically removing extraneous skeletal branches. This sequential simplification of skeletons resembles the principle of sparsification scale-spaces that embed images into a family of reconstructions from increasingly sparse pixel representations. We combine both worlds by introducing skeletonisation scale-spaces: They leverage sparsification of the medial axis to achieve hierarchical simplification of shapes. Unlike conventional pruning, our framework inherently satisfies key scale-space properties such as hierarchical architecture, controllable simplification, and equivariance to geometric transformations. We provide a rigorous theoretical foundation in both continuous and discrete formulations and extend the concept further with densification. By growing the skeleton successively instead of shrinking it, we allow inverse progression from coarse to fine scales. Densification scale-spaces can even reach beyond the original skeleton to produce overcomplete shape representations with relevancy for practical applications. Through proof-of-concept experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for practical tasks including robust skeletonisation, shape compression, and stiffness enhancement for additive manufacturing.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Retrieve, Don't Retrain: Extending Vision Language Action Models to New Tasks at Test Time

arXiv:2606.15631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to a new task typically requires task-specific teleoperated demonstrations and per-task fine-tuning, making adaptation costly in both data collection and compute. In this paper, we show that this target-side per-task adaptation cost can be replaced by retrieval. Our retrieval-augmented policy is trained once on paired demonstrations from the target embodiment (query) and a cheaper embodiment (pool, e.g., human-hand video), then frozen. New tasks are added at deployment by appending pool-side demonstrations to a retrieval pool. The frozen policy conditions on retrieved trajectories at every control step, so new tasks are absorbed by indexing data rather than updating parameters. Fine-tuning is needed only to take on a new, unseen embodiment, not for each new task. We show that retrieval improves policies beyond a specific backbone, including standard VLA policies, but its effect is especially pronounced in Cosmos Policy, a video-generation-based world-action model (WAM). In this setting, retrieval supplies coarse task progression, while the WAM's future-image objective provides an additional visual consistency signal that strengthens the retrieval-conditioned actions. On PushT, we study how retrieval provides a reusable high-level motion prior for cross-embodiment generalization to unseen goal angles, while on RoboTwin 2.0 our method outperforms cross-embodiment baselines on unseen tasks, and we additionally demonstrate the method on a real robot.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mach's principle in atomic transitions

arXiv:2606.11608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the atomic transition probabilities in atom-mirror set-ups that are in circular motion. In one scenario, the atom is in circular motion inside a static cylindrical mirror. In the other scenario, the cylindrical mirror rotates around its central axis while the atom remains static. We report structural similarity in the atomic transition probabilities between these two cases – these probabilities are equivalent upon interchanging the field frequencies between the two scenarios. We interpret such an observation as a semi-classical phenomenon analogous to the classical Mach's principle.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ARTEMIS: Agent-guided Reliability-aware Temporal Mask Evolution for Imperfectly Supervised Video Polyp Segmentation

Imperfectly supervised video polyp segmentation (VPS) aims to learn dense, temporally consistent masks from inexpensive supervision, including weak annotations (points, scribbles) and semi-supervision with few densely labeled frames. This setting is clinically valuable but challenging due to weak contrast, ambiguous boundaries, motion blur, and specular highlights, compounded by sparse pixel-level guidance. While SAM2 can generate dense masks from sparse inputs, direct pseudo-labeling often yields geometry-degraded masks with boundary leakage, underutilizes temporal consistency, and ignores reliability. To address these issues, we propose ARTEMIS, a unified framework for imperfectly supervised VPS driven by agent-guided reliability-aware temporal mask evolution. ARTEMIS initializes coarse masks from available supervision: SAM2 converts points/scribbles, while dense labels serve as reliable anchors. A debate-and-judge vision-language agent selects reliable temporal anchors under weak supervision, which are propagated bidirectionally with SAM2 to refine unreliable or unlabeled frames. Finally, ARTEMIS trains the segmenter using temporal reliability-aware robust learning, incorporating reliability-guided reference selection, a Reference Prototype Transport Module, and reliability-aware robust loss. These components assess mask reliability, evolve anchors over time, transport target identity across frames, and down-weight noisy supervision instead of discarding difficult samples. Experiments on SUN-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB-612 under scribble, point, and limited-label settings demonstrate that ARTEMIS achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released at https://github.com/wangtong627/ARTEMIS.

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

LoLA: Low-Rank Linear Attention With Sparse Caching

The per-token cost of transformer inference scales with context length, preventing its application to lifelong in-context learning. Linear attention is an efficient alternative that maintains a constant memory footprint, even on infinite context lengths. While this is a potential candidate for lifelong learning, it falls short in memory capacity. In this paper, we propose LoLA, a training-free augmentation to linear attention that boosts associative recall. LoLA distributes past key-value pairs from context into three memory systems: (i) recent pairs in a local sliding window cache; (ii) difficult-to-memorize pairs in a sparse, global cache; and (iii) generic pairs in the recurrent hidden state of linear attention. We show through ablations that our self-recall error metric is crucial to efficiently manage long-term associative memories. On pass-key retrieval tasks, LoLA improves the base model's performance from 0.6% to 97.4% accuracy. This is achieved with a 4.6x smaller cache than Llama-3.1 8B on 4K context length. LoLA also outperforms other 1B and 8B parameter subquadratic models on zero-shot commonsense reasoning tasks.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Graph Reinforcement Learning for Calibration-Aware Quantum Circuit Routing

arXiv:2606.12816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum circuit routing is a key step in compiling programs for noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors. Routes that appear efficient by standard overhead metrics can still lose fidelity when they pass through poorly calibrated couplers. We study a calibration-aware graph reinforcement-learning router that uses same-day IBM Heron r2 calibration data to choose hardware-edge SWAPs. We train the policy with proximal policy optimization and evaluate it with exact simulated fidelity across nine Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) Bench circuits and three calibration snapshots. Across these evaluations, pooled mean exact fidelity is $0.727$, compared with $0.440$ for SABRE-best20 and $0.481$ for target-aware SABRE. Fidelity gains come with higher routed two-qubit counts and are concentrated in the 5q and 8q circuit families; under the fixed tree action graph, all 10q families favor SABRE-best20. Overall, our results show that calibration-aware learned routing can improve fidelity beyond gate-count-driven compilation.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Comparative Study on Agility, Efficiency, and Impact Absorption of Bipedal Robots with Active Toes

arXiv:2606.19699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human legs exhibit high efficiency, agility, and impact absorption, with toes playing a crucial role in these capabilities. While many attempts have been made to implement human-like toes in robots, they have not fully replicated human characteristics nor rigorously validated their benefits. We propose a 14-DOF biped robot emulating human toes' lightweight, high-torque, robust nature. To quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of the active toes in terms of agility, efficiency, and impact absorption, we developed a high-fidelity simulation training environment that reflects actual actuators with coupled transmissions and accurate power consumption. To ensure a fair comparison between configurations with and without active toes, we designed a minimal RL reward function and applied an identical training procedure to both. The simulation results indicate that, at 1.33 m/s walking, the toe-equipped robot reduced CoT by 17.5% and heel-strike GRF by 5.0% compared with the toe-ablation configuration. On the agility test, average and maximum path deviation decreased by 25.0% and 34.0%, respectively.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Eyring-Kramers asymptotics for infinite-dimensional stochastic gradient systems

arXiv:2606.16083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study small-noise asymptotics for a class of reversible stochastic evolution equations in infinite dimensions. The dynamics are of the form \[ dX_t=-A\nabla F(X_t)\,dt+\sqrt{2\beta^{-1}A}\,dW_t, \] where $F$ is a regular multi-well potential, $A$ is a selfadjoint mobility operator, $W$ is a cylindrical Brownian motion and $\beta\gg 1$ is the inverse noise strength. The invariant measure is a Gibbs perturbation of a Gaussian reference measure, and the resulting framework covers, in particular, the stochastic Allen-Cahn and stochastic Cahn-Hilliard equations on bounded intervals. In the double-well case, we derive a sharp asymptotic formula for the first nonzero eigenvalue of the generator. This gives an infinite-dimensional Eyring-Kramers law for the spectral gap, with exponential rate determined by the communication height and leading prefactor determined by the local quadratic behavior at the relevant minima and saddle points. Our approach provides a general strategy for lifting finite-dimensional Eyring-Kramers analysis to infinite-dimensional stochastic gradient systems.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Illumination-Robust Camera-Based Heart-Rate Estimation for Physiological Sensing in Robots

Physiological awareness is important for service, social, and assistive robots that interact with humans in everyday environments. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact heart-rate (HR) estimation from an RGB camera, making it a promising sensing modality for robot-mounted vision systems. However, illumination variation remains a major barrier to robust deployment. This paper presents an end-to-end spatial-temporal transformer framework for remote HR estimation on a new dataset with varied illumination. Our estimator integrates PRNet-based 3D face alignment, clip-level illumination augmentation, the Residual Temporal Standardization Module, and controlled hybrid temporal-frequency supervision. The training objective combines a Soft-Shifted Pearson waveform loss with a spectral Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where a tuned weight ($\mathbf{\beta}$) controls the contribution of frequency-domain heart-rate guidance. Experiments on a static all-level mix protocol covering three illumination levels show that $\mathbf{\beta}=5$ provides the strongest result among the tested beta settings, achieving a best-run HR mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.79 bpm and an HR correlation of 0.982. Compared with the PhysFormer baseline evaluated on our dataset, our estimator reduces HR MAE by 93.6 %, while increasing HR correlation from 0.088 to 0.982, making it usable when illumination varies.

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

DiRecT: Safe Diffusion-Based Planning via Receding-Horizon Denoising

arXiv:2606.15359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for planning and control by learning multimodal distributions over actions and trajectories. Yet reliable inference-time safety enforcement remains a key barrier to their deployment in safety-critical tasks. Existing approaches typically project each denoising iterate onto the feasible set, even though constraints are defined only on the final clean trajectory. Enforcing feasibility on noisy intermediate samples can therefore overconstrain the sampling dynamics, substantially degrading sample quality. To address this limitation, we introduce DiRecT (Diffusion-based planning via Receding-horizon denoising with Terminal constraints), a training-free algorithm for constrained sampling from diffusion models via stochastic optimal control (SOC). DiRecT enforces constraints only on the final clean sample, avoiding unnecessary restrictions on the intermediate denoising dynamics. Inspired by model predictive control, we derive a principled receding-horizon surrogate for the otherwise intractable constrained SOC formulation, yielding an efficient algorithm that cleanly separates stochastic denoising from constraint satisfaction, progressively steering samples toward feasible final trajectories without distorting the learned diffusion dynamics. Furthermore, DiRecT is highly flexible: it can leverage off-the-shelf or domain-specific optimizers, incorporate priors over environment dynamics, and optimize additional soft rewards. Extensive experiments on safe planning benchmarks demonstrate that DiRecT substantially improves deployment safety and task performance over existing diffusion-based planning baselines.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quantitative insights into the role of phages and plasmids in the persistence of nontuberculous mycobacteria in chloraminated drinking water

Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) are opportunistic pathogens that persist in chloraminated drinking water systems, yet the roles of phages and plasmids in their persistence remain largely unexplored. Using genome-resolved and quantitative metagenomics, we characterized NTM, phages, prophages, and plasmids in a chloraminated building plumbing system. Bacterial metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) and viral operational taxonomic units (vOTUs) were quantified at mean concentrations of 8.41 * 10^7 and 8.00 * 10^8 copies/L, respectively, including seven NTM MAGs at a mean total concentration of 4.01 * 10^5 copies/L. NTM concentrations were highest at the site with the lowest bacterial and viral diversity. Predicted NTM-infecting virus concentrations were inversely related to NTM concentrations across sites, suggesting complex phage-host dynamics that warrant direct experimental investigation. NTM, putative phages, prophages, and plasmids encoded functions related to disinfectant tolerance, stress response, metal resistance, and secretion. These findings identify phage interactions, prophages, and plasmids as overlooked genomic and ecological dimensions of NTM persistence in engineered water systems.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Tree-Structured Orthonormal Decomposition of the Aitchison Simplex

arXiv:2606.11646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compositional data – vectors encoding relative proportions – arise across scientific domains, including ecology, geochemistry, and genomics. The features in these data often come with known hierarchical structure (e.g., taxonomies, phylogenies, ontologies), yet existing methods either ignore this structure, discard the intrinsic Aitchison geometry, are designed for binary trees, or yield incomplete coordinate systems. We describe PolyILR, a canonical orthonormal decomposition of the Aitchison tangent space aligned with any tree topology. Our construction defines a weighted local geometry at each internal node capturing full branching structure, then lifts these to a global orthonormal basis where every coordinate corresponds to a specific tree location. On microbiome and single-cell benchmarks, PolyILR yields stable, interpretable features and enables inference at multiscale tree resolution. We also establish a novel theoretical connection to softmax classifiers, suggesting possible applications to probabilistic modeling.