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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Addressing Detail Bottlenecks in Latent Diffusion for RGB-to-SWIR Image Translation

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) enable efficient image-to-image translation but discard fine spatial details during compression, degrading downstream perception tasks. We identify two bottlenecks: the autoencoder, which loses spatial information, and the conditioning pathway, which further degrades the source signal through naive downsampling. We propose two lightweight, backbone-agnostic fixes: a Source-Conditioned Autoencoder (SCAE) that injects high-resolution source features into the decoder via skip connections, and a Learnable Guidance Encoder (LGE) that replaces naive downsampling with a learned conditioning signal. Evaluated on RGB-to-SWIR translation for driving scenes with two denoiser backbones (U-Net and DiT), our approach improves detection mAP by up to 2x over the latent diffusion baseline, with up to 3.4x gains on small objects (COCO-small,

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Causal Inference with Generative Artificial Intelligence: Application to Texts as Treatments

In this paper, we demonstrate how to enhance the validity of causal inference with unstructured high-dimensional treatments like texts, by leveraging the power of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Specifically, we propose to use a deep generative model such as large language models (LLMs) to efficiently generate treatments and use their internal representation for subsequent causal effect estimation. We show that the knowledge of this true internal representation helps disentangle the treatment features of interest, such as specific sentiments and certain topics, from other possibly unknown confounding features. Unlike existing methods, the proposed GenAI-Powered Inference (GPI) methodology eliminates the need to learn causal representation from the data, and hence produces more accurate and efficient estimates. We formally establish the conditions required for the nonparametric identification of the average treatment effect, propose an estimation strategy that avoids the violation of the overlap assumption, and derive the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator through the application of double machine learning. Finally, using an instrumental variables approach, we extend the proposed GPI methodology to the settings in which the treatment feature is based on human perception. The GPI is also applicable to text reuse where an LLM is used to regenerate existing texts. We conduct simulation and empirical studies, using the generated text data from an open-source LLM, Llama 3, to illustrate the advantages of our estimator over state-of-the-art causal representation learning algorithms.

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

PLATE: Plasticity-Tunable Efficient Adapters for Geometry-Aware Continual Learning

arXiv:2602.03846v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a continual learning method for pretrained models that requires no access to old-task data, addressing a practical barrier in foundation model adaptation where pretraining distributions are often unavailable. Our key observation is that pretrained networks exhibit substantial geometric redundancy, and that this redundancy can be exploited in two complementary ways. First, redundant neurons provide a proxy for dominant pretraining-era feature directions, enabling the construction of approximately protected update subspaces directly from pretrained weights. Second, redundancy offers a natural bias for where to place plasticity: by restricting updates to a subset of redundant neurons and constraining the remaining degrees of freedom, we obtain update families with reduced functional drift on the old-data distribution and improved worst-case retention guarantees. These insights lead to \textsc{PLATE} (Plasticity-Tunable Efficient Adapters), a continual learning method requiring no past-task data that provides explicit control over the plasticity-retention trade-off. PLATE parameterizes each layer with a structured low-rank update $\Delta W = B A Q^\top$, where $B$ and $Q$ are computed once from pretrained weights and kept frozen, and only $A$ is trained on the new task. The code is available at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/PLATE.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Viral Proteins Reveal Geometry of Protein Language Models

arXiv:2606.12609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models are trained on highly imbalanced datasets, raising the question of how they represent underrepresented biological sequences. Using viral proteins as a case study across ESM model families, we identify a dominant nativeness axis in embedding space, aligned with masked reconstruction perplexity, that orders sequences from well-modeled cellular proteins through viral proteins to shuffled and random sequences. Scaling contracts this axis unevenly across viral families. Despite this, protein language model embeddings retain viral-specific signal: viral proteins remain linearly separable beyond zero-shot perplexity and shallow sequence features. Together, these results suggest that pLM representations are structured by a general notion of nativeness while preserving information specific to distinct biological groups.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Fast formation to reinforce lithium-rich cathodes

作者:

Formation in lithium-ion battery manufacturing typically involves low-rate charge–discharge cycles to establish stable electrode–electrolyte interfaces—a time-consuming process1–4. Here, our findings on lithium-rich layered oxide cathodes challenge the necessity of conventional formation, which can even shorten battery lifespan. Fast formation, on the other hand, reduces production cost and enhances capacity and stability. Multiscale synchrotron-based techniques show that residual lithium ions after the initial charge are critical for subsequent structural evolution and cycling performance. Deep lithium de-intercalation causes severe structural degradation and capacity loss due to the inherently fragile lithium-deficient matrix. By contrast, the residual lithium ions from fast formation enhance reversibility through a self-pinning effect, preventing pernicious lattice deformation and reinforcing the ion-storage framework. Adjusting the initial charge current density from 0.2 C to 2 C improves reversible capacity by 20% and extends cycle life by more than 36%. This approach can also be extended to other electrode systems, providing insights for more-efficient battery production. Fast formation in lithium-ion batteries outperforms conventional slow formation, lowering costs and improving battery capacity, stability and cycle life, offering broader application to electrode systems.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Impact of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain: a representative interrupted time-series study 2022-2026

Objective: To examine changes in vaping and smoking trends following the announcement and implementation of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain. Design: Interrupted time-series analysis of representative monthly cross-sectional data from the Smoking Toolkit Study. Setting: Great Britain. Participants: 118,946 adults ([≥]16y), including 12,042 young adults (16-24y), surveyed between Jan-2022 and Feb-2026. Main outcome measures: Changes in trends in disposable vape use among vapers, and current vaping and smoking prevalence, using seasonally-adjusted generalised additive models with comparisons against a no-ban counterfactual in which pre-announcement trends continued unchanged. Results: The proportion of vapers mainly using disposable devices began to decline following the announcement of the ban in Jan-2024, with the fall accelerating after implementation in June-2025. By Feb-2026, 5.6% (95%CI 4.6-6.9) of adult vapers and 7.1% (5.1-10.1) of young adult vapers mainly used disposables, compared with 62.0% (53.6-71.8) and 63.6% (52.7-76.7), respectively, under a no-ban counterfactual. Increases in vaping prevalence slowed post-announcement and plateaued post-implementation; by Feb-2026, prevalence was lower than the no-ban counterfactual in adults (13.6% v 18.8%; difference -5.2 percentage points, 95%CI -7.1 to -3.3) and young adults (27.8% v 39.1%; -11.3, -18.6 to -4.1). Declines in smoking prevalence stalled among adults and reversed among young adults post-announcement, before shifting downward again post-implementation; by Feb-2026, smoking prevalence was similar to the no-ban counterfactual in adults (difference +0.9 percentage points, -0.5 to +2.2) but possibly higher in young adults (+3.3, -0.5 to +7.1). Conclusions: The disposable vape ban in Great Britain was associated with substantial changes after both announcement and implementation, including a marked reduction in disposable vape use and a slowing then plateauing of growth in overall vaping prevalence. However, declines in smoking also temporarily slowed–and among young adults, reversed–after the announcement, before downward trends resumed after implementation.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Reward hacking in physical reinforcement learning revealed by turbulent drag reduction

arXiv:2606.06227v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A reinforcement-learning agent maximises its reward, which can diverge from the outcome its designer intended. In physical control the reward rarely closes that gap, and drag reduction in wall turbulence makes it concrete. A mass-conservation projection couples agents' outputs and erases the per-agent credit the policy gradient needs; a memoryless policy cannot resolve the slow near-wall cycle it acts on; and a pressure-gradient reward pays for nominal drag reduction by pumping power through the wall. Two degenerate controllers achieve large drag reductions while total dissipation rises, so the reported figure can mask a more wasteful flow. We trace each fault to its cause and fix it: a differentiable projection that restores credit, a recurrent policy with a widened sensing stencil, and a reward scored on the true wall power. The corrected controller acts on the flow within a closed energy budget, earning a conservative $17\%$ under honest accounting.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

UMA-Split: unimodal aggregation for both English and Mandarin non-autoregressive speech recognition

This paper proposes a unimodal aggregation (UMA) based nonautoregressive model for both English and Mandarin speech recognition. The original UMA explicitly segments and aggregates acoustic frames (with unimodal weights that first monotonically increase and then decrease) of the same text token to learn better representations than regular connectionist temporal classification (CTC). However, it only works well in Mandarin. It struggles with other languages, such as English, for which a single syllable may be tokenized into multiple fine-grained tokens, or a token spans fewer than 3 acoustic frames and fails to form unimodal weights. To address this problem, we propose allowing each UMA-aggregated frame map to multiple tokens, via a simple split module that generates two tokens from each aggregated frame before computing the CTC loss.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Classical representation of the dynamics of quantum spin chains

作者:

arXiv:2502.10502v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Since the advent of quantum mechanics, classical probability interpretations have faced significant challenges. A notable issue arises with the emergence of negative probabilities when attempting to define the joint probability of non-commutative observables. In this work, we propose a resolution to this dilemma for quantum spin chains, by introducing an exact representation of their dynamics in terms of classical continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs). These CTMCs effectively model the creation, annihilation, and propagation of pairs of classical particles and antiparticles. The quantum dynamics then emerges by averaging over various realizations of this classical process.

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

Entangled states are typically incomparable

arXiv:2406.03335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Consider a bipartite quantum system, where Alice and Bob jointly possess a pure state $|\psi\rangle$. Using local quantum operations on their respective subsystems, and unlimited classical communication, Alice and Bob may be able to transform $|\psi\rangle$ into another state $|\phi\rangle$. Famously, Nielsen's theorem [Phys. Rev. Lett., 1999] provides a necessary and sufficient algebraic criterion for such a transformation to be possible (namely, the local spectrum of $|\phi\rangle$ should majorise the local spectrum of $|\psi\rangle$). In the paper where Nielsen proved this theorem, he conjectured that in the limit of large dimensionality, for almost all pairs of states $|\psi\rangle, |\phi\rangle$ (according to the natural unitary invariant measure) such a transformation is not possible. That is to say, typical pairs of quantum states $|\psi\rangle, |\phi\rangle$ are entangled in fundamentally different ways, that cannot be converted to each other via local operations and classical communication. Via Nielsen's theorem, this conjecture can be equivalently stated as a conjecture about majorisation of spectra of random matrices from the so-called trace-normalised complex Wishart-Laguerre ensemble. Concretely, let $X$ and $Y$ be independent $n \times m$ random matrices whose entries are i.i.d. standard complex Gaussians; then Nielsen's conjecture says that the probability that the spectrum of $X X^\dagger / \operatorname{tr}(X X^\dagger)$ majorises the spectrum of $Y Y^\dagger / \operatorname{tr}(Y Y^\dagger)$ tends to zero as both $n$ and $m$ grow large. We prove this conjecture, and we also confirm some related predictions of Cunden, Facchi, Florio and Gramegna [J. Phys. A., 2020; Phys. Rev. A., 2021].

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Certifiable Safe RLHF: Semantic Grounding and Fixed Penalty Constraint Optimization for Safer LLM Alignment

arXiv:2510.03520v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ensuring safety is a foundational requirement for large language models (LLMs). Achieving an appropriate balance between enhancing the utility of model outputs and mitigating their potential for harm is a complex and persistent challenge. Contemporary approaches frequently formalize this problem within the framework of Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) and employ established CMDP optimization techniques. However, these methods exhibit two notable limitations. First, their reliance on reward and cost functions renders performance highly sensitive to the underlying scoring mechanism, which must capture semantic meaning rather than being triggered by superficial keywords. Second, CMDP-based training entails tuning dual-variable, a process that is both computationally expensive and does not provide any provable safety guarantee for a fixed dual variable that can be exploitable through adversarial jailbreaks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Certifiable Safe-RLHF (CS-RLHF) that introduces a cost model trained on a large-scale corpus to assign semantically grounded safety scores. In contrast to the lagrangian-based approach, CS-RLHF adopts a rectified penalty-based formulation. This design draws on the theory of exact penalty functions in constrained optimization, wherein constraint satisfaction is enforced directly through a suitably chosen penalty term. With an appropriately scaled penalty, feasibility of the safety constraints can be guaranteed at the optimizer, eliminating the need for dual-variable updates. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that CS-RLHF outperforms state-of-the-art LLM model responses rendering at-least 5 times efficient against nominal and jail-breaking prompts

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Neuromorphic Trigger for Efficient Audio Event Detection

arXiv:2606.17775v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient processing of continuous audio streams remains a key challenge for real-time and resource-constrained systems. This paper introduces a neuromorphic trigger for audio event detection, based on a spiking neural network (SNN) that selectively gates input to downstream models. The proposed trigger acts as a low-cost front-end, identifying salient audio segments and forwarding only these to a more computationally intensive model for tasks such as classification. The trigger is implemented as a lightweight fully connected SNN and evaluated on two representative tasks: Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) and Sound Event Detection (SED). For ASD, the trigger achieves a one-second segment-based F1 score of 0.97 on a class-agnostic form of the URBAN-SED dataset, demonstrating high reliability in identifying relevant audio regions. For SED, the trigger is combined with the Dang classifier on the DCASE 2017 Challenge Task 2 dataset, showing a potential $42.6\times$ reduction in FLOPs while reducing the lower bound of the event-based error rate from 0.41 to 0.25. These results highlight the potential of neuromorphic triggers as real-time, energy-efficient front-end filters, enabling substantial reductions in computational cost.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

arXiv:2604.13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage large-scale multimodal pretraining to provide generalist, task-level reasoning, but current limitations hinder their direct use in fast and precise manipulation. In this paper, we propose Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting (VLAJS), a method that bridges sparse VLA guidance with on-policy RL to improve exploration and learning efficiency. VLAJS treats VLAs as transient sources of high-level action suggestions that bias early exploration and improve credit assignment, while preserving the high-frequency, state-based control of RL. Our approach augments Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a directional action-consistency regularization that softly aligns the RL agent's actions with VLA guidance during early training, without enforcing strict imitation, requiring demonstrations, or relying on continuous teacher queries. VLA guidance is applied sparsely and annealed over time, allowing the agent to adapt online and ultimately surpass the guiding policy. We evaluate VLAJS on six challenging manipulation tasks: lifting, pick-and-place, peg reorientation, peg insertion, poking, and pushing in simulation, and validate a subset on a real Franka Panda robot. VLAJS consistently outperforms PPO and distillation-style baselines in sample efficiency, reducing required environment interactions by over 50% in several tasks. Real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and robust execution under clutter, object variation, and external perturbations.

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

Characterizing Cultural Localization in AI-Generated Stories

The global use of artificial intelligence has increased interest in assessing the ability to generate culturally localized content, including stories. Cultural localization in stories often occurs through either templated localization – the use of cultural markers (e.g., names, locations) in a generic narrative – or holistic localization – the variation of plots, values, and themes, in addition to cultural markers. We propose a method to measure the degree to which content was generated through templated localization. Specifically, we identify the lexical tokens that distinguish stories across nationalities and measure the similarity of the narratives that remain after removing them. In stories generated by five models on 125 topics for 193 nationalities, our method is able to detect that only a small subset (9-17%) of the vocabulary accounts for the variation across nationalities and that the narratives that remain after removing them contain repeated multi-word sequences, suggesting the presence of a shared culturally-agnostic narrative template. Finally, we characterize the cultural markers for their stereotypicality and offensiveness, finding that markers from 19 countries, mostly located in the Global South, are on average offensive.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sticky CIR process with potential: invariant measure and exact sampling

arXiv:2605.13648v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the sticky Cox–Ingersoll–Ross (CIR) process in one dimension, a diffusion on $[0,\infty)$ with a sticky boundary condition at the origin, arising as the marginal process in a sparse Bayesian inference framework based on Hadamard–Langevin dynamics. For the parameter range $\delta\in(1,2)$, in which the origin is accessible but not absorbing, we prove well-posedness of the process and uniqueness of its invariant measure, which is a mixture of a point mass at zero and a weighted gamma-type density on the interior. We derive an explicit Green's function for the resolvent in terms of confluent hypergeometric functions, and use this to construct an exact sampler for the invariant measure in the zero-potential case. For a non-trivial potential $G$, we establish existence and uniqueness of the tilted invariant measure via a Girsanov change of measure, and develop two sampling algorithms: a Metropolis–Hastings corrected sampler that targets the invariant measure exactly, and a cheaper, biased unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) for a boundary-clamped variant of which we prove a first-order expansion of the stationary bias with an explicit constant: the leading error is a rank-one transfer of mass $K_\star h|\log h| $ onto the atom, so the total-variation bias is of exact order $h|\log h | $ – independent of $\delta$ – whenever the potential has nonzero boundary drift. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted behaviour: the Metropolis–Hastings sampler achieves the target invariant measure at all step sizes, while the ULA bias follows the proven first-order law, including its constant.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Temporal Conductance and Bounds on the Voter Model for Dynamic Networks

arXiv:2606.13374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The voter model is a classical stochastic process that models how opinions might spread through a network: at each step, every node lazily adopts the opinion of a random neighbour; eventually all nodes share the same opinion (consensus). Stronger connectivity should yield faster consensus. Berenbrink, Giakkoupis, Kermarrec, and Mallmann-Trenn (ICALP 2016) make this precise via the network's conductance: if the network has $m$ edges, minimum degree $d_{\min}$, and conductance at least $\phi$, then the voter model reaches consensus in expected $O(m/(d_{\min}\phi))$ steps. Their results extend to dynamic networks with fixed vertex degrees by considering the network's conductance at each time step. We introduce temporal conductance $\Phi$, a more general connectivity measure for dynamic networks. Unlike static conductance, which collapses to $0$ whenever some snapshot is disconnected, $\Phi$ captures connectivity through edges that appear at different times. We generalise the results of Berenbrink et al. from static conductance to temporal conductance, showing that the expected consensus time of the standard voter model is at most $O(m/(d_{\min}\Phi))$. Moreover, we prove that this bound is tight up to constant factors. We expect temporal conductance to be a useful primitive for analysing other dynamics on temporal networks, and potentially time-inhomogeneous Markov chains more generally.

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

An Integrable Token Mixing Layer from the Generalized Yang Baxter Equation

arXiv:2606.15085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The YB Mixer is a sequence token mixing layer derived from free fermion and generalized Yang Baxter structures. It applies a core principle from integrable systems where a local algebraic constraint guarantees global computational stability. By using the Ising exchange algebra the mixer creates a free fermionic structure that acts as an exactly norm preserving orthogonal map. This algebra also produces commuting transfer matrices which allow inference to be order free and adaptable to any variable budget. To ensure the model can generalize to longer sequence lengths it uses a spectral circulant generator. This generator maintains the crucial orthogonal and commuting properties of the system. The result is a highly stable and mathematically grounded architecture for sequence processing.

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

Optimal Order of Multi-Agent and General Many-Body Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.20485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a general framework for analyzing multi-agent systems with feedback loops between agents actions and collective observations. The framework is built on two fundamental agent-level variables: power, which measures agent influence on collective outcomes, and response functions, which determine how agents react to observations. We derive how macroscopic properties, including total power, useful power, entropy, order, fragility, and mobility, emerge from these two variables of heterogeneous agents. To study the trade off between growth and resilience, we introduce a system-level utility function parameterized by a risk-appetite coefficient and derive an optimal degree of order that balances productivity, stability, and adaptability. The analysis suggests that stronger synchronization can increase collective output but may also increase systemic fragility and reduce mobility. We further argue that order, entropy, information, and useful energy are task-dependent and system-relative concepts whose meanings depend on the objectives of the system. By measuring and designing agent power distributions and response functions, it may be possible to better understand, predict, and optimize collective behavior and identify the conditions under which collective intelligence and optimal order emerge.

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

Ultrastrongly coupled open systems and fine grained time

arXiv:2606.16634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of a d-level quantum system coupled to a bosonic reservoir when the coupling constant is large. It is known that in the limit of infinite coupling strength, the system undergoes an instantaneous nonselective measurement, resulting in the immediate decoherence in the measurement basis, followed by a unitary Zeno dynamics. Here we resolve this dynamical process by introducing a fine grained scaling regime of short times proportional to the inverse coupling. We provide a rigorous derivation of the open system dynamics in this regime of ultrastrong coupling and demonstrate how decoherence unfolds continuously in the new time scale. We show that Markovian dynamics which are not given by semigroups arise naturally, in contrast to what happens in the weak coupling theory.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago

Plague is among the most devastating diseases in human history1. However, early strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis lacked virulence factors that are required for the bubonic form until around 3,800 years ago2,3. Consequently, the morbidity and mortality of early plague strains remain unclear. Here we describe early plague strains that are associated with two phases of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, beginning from about 5,500 years ago. These outbreaks occur across four hunter-gatherer cemeteries, with a 39% detection rate for plague infection. By reconstructing kinship pedigrees, we show that small familial groups were affected, consistent with human-to-human spread of disease, and that the first outbreak occurred within a single generation. The infections appear to have resulted in acute mortality, especially among children (aged 8 to 11 years). We further note functional differences, including in the ypm superantigen locus, which is also present in present day Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. The new strains diverge ancestrally to known Y. pestis and constrain the timing of its emergence, indicating that this happened before approximately 5,700 years ago. These findings show that plague outbreaks happened earlier than previously thought and were indeed lethal. We contend that the occurrence of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherer communities well outside the sphere of Late Neolithic Europe challenges the notion that higher population densities and lifestyle changes during the Neolithic agricultural transition were prerequisites for plague epidemics. Analyses of ancient DNA from hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia around 5,500 years ago indicate that highly virulent Yersinia pestis emerged earlier than previously estimated, far from the next known cases of infection in Late Neolithic Europe.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Plasma protein prioritisation in rheumatoid arthritis reveals druggable targets and shared biology with cardiovascular diseases

Abstract Background Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune inflammatory disease with complex and incompletely understood molecular mechanisms. Understanding circulating proteins associated with RA may improve understanding of disease biology and clarify its pathological links with cardiometabolic comorbidities. Methods A proteome-wide two-sample Mendelian randomisation (MR) drug target analysis was conducted using plasma proteins measured in 54,219 participants from the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project as exposures and RA and cardiometabolic diseases as the outcomes. Summary statistics for RA included 53,663 cases and 1,070,200 controls. Colocalisation analysis was performed to confirm shared single causal variants and prioritise RA proteins supported by both MR and colocalisation. The prioritised proteins were then evaluated in the Accelerating Medicines Partnership RA Phase II synovial single-cell dataset for cell-type expression patterns. Druggability was then assessed followed by analysis of genetic overlap between RA-associated proteins and cardiometabolic diseases. Results 37 plasma proteins had a causal effect on RA risk, supported by combined evidence from MR and conditional colocalisation. In synovial tissue, TPPP3, RARRES2, AKAP12, and GGT5 were predominantly expressed in stromal and endothelial cell clusters. Druggability assessment identified IFNGR2, IL6R, CD40, and FCGR2B as Tier 1 targets. However, several biologically relevant proteins, including RARRES2, AKAP12, TPPP3, and SNX2, had limited available druggability data. Genetic overlap analysis demonstrated shared protein signals between RA and cardiovascular diseases, including overlap of RARRES2 and TPPP3 with coronary artery disease (CAD) and FCGR2B with atrial fibrillation (AF). To approximate the therapeutic effect of target inhibition, the direction of effect estimates for proteins showing overlap between RA-CAD and RA-AF was reversed. Conclusion This study identified circulating proteins involved in RA pathogenesis and reveals shared mechanisms between RA and cardiovascular diseases. While some proteins showed clear translational potential targets, several prioritised proteins had limited available druggability information and could not be confidently classified. Addressing these gaps may help identify new targets relevant to RA management. Future work should also use phenome-wide MR studies to evaluate potential on-target adverse effects of protein inhibition across RA-CAD and RA-AF.

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

DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

arXiv:2606.11901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially reproduced in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success and provide human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several dual-arm imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly in early interaction stages, parallel arm execution, and transfer between simulation and real-world settings. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for diagnosing these failure modes and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io/

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Semantic Reasoning in Medicine: The Role of Knowledge Graphs Across Five Key Domains

arXiv:2606.15155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a promising solution for integrating and reasoning over complex biomedical and clinical data in healthcare. By representing structured relationships among entities such as diseases, drugs, symptoms, and patient records, KGs provide a semantic backbone for decision-making, prediction, recommendation, and personalized care. Recent advances have demonstrated their utility across diverse medical applications–including clinical decision support systems, disease and treatment outcome prediction, health recommender systems, precision medicine, and medical question answering–where KGs often enhance interpretability, semantic coherence, and patient-specific reasoning. In parallel, a growing body of work focuses on medical KG generation itself, proposing frameworks that construct graphs from EHRs, clinical narratives, biomedical literature, and web resources using ontologies, semantic web technologies, deep-learning-based information extraction, and hybrid neuro-symbolic pipelines. Despite this progress, significant challenges remain, including limited and fragmented knowledge coverage, difficulties in aligning heterogeneous data sources, the fragility of current reasoning and representation-learning methods on dense multi-relational graphs, and unresolved issues related to privacy, bias, and accountability. This survey reviews and categorizes current research on KGs in medicine along both application-oriented and methodology-oriented dimensions, discusses their benefits and technical foundations, and outlines key limitations and open research directions. By analyzing trends, architectures, and evaluation practices, this work aims to guide future developments in KG-driven medical AI systems and support their safe and effective integration into healthcare environments.