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

DecompSR: A dataset for decomposed analyses of compositional multihop spatial reasoning

arXiv:2511.02627v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce DecompSR, decomposed spatial reasoning, a large benchmark dataset (over 5m datapoints) and generation framework designed to analyse compositional spatial reasoning ability. The generation of DecompSR allows users to independently vary several aspects of compositionality, namely: productivity (reasoning depth), substitutivity (entity and linguistic variability), overgeneralisation (input order, distractors) and systematicity (novel linguistic elements). DecompSR is built procedurally in a manner which makes it is correct by construction, which is independently verified using a symbolic solver to guarantee the correctness of the dataset. DecompSR is comprehensively benchmarked across a host of Large Language Models (LLMs) where we show that LLMs struggle with productive and systematic generalisation in spatial reasoning tasks whereas they are more robust to linguistic variation. DecompSR provides a provably correct and rigorous benchmarking dataset with a novel ability to independently vary the degrees of several key aspects of compositionality, allowing for robust and fine-grained probing of the compositional reasoning abilities of LLMs.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mutual Distillation of Dual-Foundation Models for Semi-Supervised PET/CT Segmentation

Organ segmentation from PET/CT is critical for quantitative analysis and radiotherapy planning in oncology. To ease the high annotation cost of PET/CT segmentation, semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a practical and effective solution for developing deep models with limited labeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved efficiency. In this work, we propose a mutual distillation framework that seamlessly exploits both structural and functional foundation models, which act as modality-specific generalists for distilling knowledge from structural CT and metabolic PET imaging. By bridging the gap between the task-specific precision of student models and the segmentation priors of generalist foundation models, we propose MuDuo, a mutual distillation framework that synergistically leverages SAM-Med3D for CT and SegAnyPET for PET to distill their knowledge into a lightweight student network. Our approach eliminates the need for manual prompts while maximizing the utility of unlabeled data for automatic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the AutoPET dataset with only 5 labeled cases. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Wu-beining/MuDuo.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Exploring Multi-Modal Large Language Models and Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Fashion Image Retrieval

Composed image retrieval retrieves a target image using a composed query of a reference image and a modified text description. In the fashion domain, this task requires understanding subtle attribute variations such as color, pattern, and texture. However, existing approaches face limitations due to scarce annotated data and simplistic negative sampling. We propose a novel framework that integrates a multi-modal large language model (LLaVA) to generate attribute-aware triplets and introduces a two-stage fine-tuning strategy to enhance contrastive learning. We leverage pretrained vision-language models, such as CLIP-ViT/B32, to generate and concatenate sentence-level prompts with the relative caption and to scale the number of negatives using static representations. Experimental results demonstrate enhanced compositional reasoning and improved fine-grained retrieval behavior, underscoring the feasibility and potential of the proposed framework for fashion retrieval.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Stationary measures for higher spin vertex models on a strip

作者:

arXiv:2309.04897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a higher spin vertex model on a strip with fused vertex weights. This model can be regarded as a generalization of both the unfused six-vertex model on a strip arXiv:2212.09111 and an 'integrable two-step Floquet dynamics' model introduced in arXiv:1711.08884. We solve for the stationary measure using a fused version of the matrix product ansatz and then characterize it in terms of the Askey-Wilson process. Using this characterization, we obtain the limits of the mean density along an arbitrary down-right path. It turns out that all these models share a common phase diagram, which, after an appropriate mapping, matches the phase diagram of open ASEP. This provides evidence for the universality of this phase diagram.

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

Data Standards for Humanoid Robotics: The Missing Infrastructure for Physical AI

arXiv:2606.19769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The scalability of humanoid robots will depend not only on models and hardware, but also on whether physical experience can accumulate across robots, tasks, organizations, and time. Drawing on the authors' work in developing ISO/WD 26264-1, Humanoid robot datasets – Part 1: General requirements, within ISO/TC 299/WG 16, this article argues that data standards are becoming foundational infrastructure for Physical AI. We develop three insights. First, humanoid robot data is embodied interaction data, not a collection of isolated digital samples; a useful dataset must preserve the relationship among robot body, action, task, scene, execution trace, and outcome. Second, its value depends on physical coherence: multimodal streams are reusable only when timing, coordinate frames, calibration, kinematics, units, and synchronization assumptions remain inspectable. Third, the main bottleneck is not only data scarcity, but non-cumulative data caused by high collection costs, data silos, and inconsistent evaluation. We argue that humanoid robot data standards address these bottlenecks by making embodied experience interpretable, shareable, traceable, and reusable. A general standard should provide horizontal infrastructure for lifecycle management, metadata, provenance, quality, versioning, and traceability, while capability-specific parts should define domain grammar for manipulation, locomotion, human-robot interaction, cognition, and future humanoid capabilities. As AI moves from screens into bodies, data standards must evolve from organizing digital information to structuring physical interaction.

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

TechRAG: Evidence-Gated Multimodal Agentic RAG for Technical Literature Reasoning

arXiv:2606.01613v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents an agentic multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for domain-specific literature reasoning, instantiated on a curated corpus of several thousand papers in intelligent tires, vehicle dynamics, vehicle control, sensing, estimation, and machine learning. Unlike conventional single-pass RAG systems, the proposed architecture uses an autonomous, evidence-gated pipeline that classifies query intent, generates separate text and visual query rewrites, performs hybrid text retrieval with FAISS and BM25 followed by cross-encoder reranking, expands evidence through graph-guided chunk traversal over a Neo4j knowledge graph, and retrieves visual document evidence using ColSmol late-interaction embeddings with MUVERA fixed-dimensional encoding, approximate nearest-neighbor search, and MaxSim reranking. The framework scores evidence sufficiency using a 100-point rubric with hybrid rule-based/LLM review, retries retrieval through drift-guarded reformulation, searches external academic databases through optimize–search–vet loops, merges and deduplicates multimodal evidence, verifies citation integrity, and generates cited answers through Planner, Researcher, Writer, and Critic agents with self-correcting revision. Key contributions include: (i) a scalable multimodal retrieval architecture combining text, graph, and visual evidence over 40,000 document pages; (ii) an interpretable evidence sufficiency and retry mechanism; (iii) a multi-agent generation pipeline with evidence mapping and critic-driven revision; (iv) a domain knowledge graph with LLM-based entity extraction, OpenAlex author validation, and intra-corpus citation resolution; and (v) a route-dependent external search architecture for targeted literature expansion. The result is a practical, evidence-gated, multimodal agentic RAG architecture for technical reasoning over specialized research corpora.

07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Revealing competitive interfacial reactions in high-energy Li–S batteries

作者:

Charge transfer at solid–liquid interfaces plays a critical role in various energy-storage systems1, particularly under dynamically varying reactant concentrations. Deciphering these intricate reaction pathways remains a substantial challenge, notably in lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries, in which achieving high energy density requires efficient conversion of highly concentrated lithium polysulfides (LiPSs)2,3. However, the mechanisms governing lithium sulfide (Li2S) deposition and dissolution under lean electrolyte conditions remain poorly understood. Here, using in situ liquid-cell electron microscopy, we directly visualize concentration-driven phase segregation at the electrode–electrolyte interface. Within these high-concentration interfacial layers (HCILs), competitive surface and solution dictate the charge-transfer dynamics and ultimately govern Li2S deposition at different phase boundaries. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the aggregation of LiPSs alters molecular geometry, electronic properties and orbital hybridization, collectively facilitating charge transfer through highly concentrated LiPSs clusters. Guided by these insights, we design optimized electrodes that balance interfacial reaction pathways, enabling fast charging (4 C, 26.8 mA cm−2) and achieving high energy densities exceeding 400 Wh kg−1. These findings provide mechanistic understanding of interfacial reactions under practical working conditions and offer a design strategy to advance Li–S batteries. Visualization of concentration-driven phase segregation within high-concentration interfacial layers in the context of high-energy lithium–sulfur batteries using liquid-cell electrochemical transmission electron microscopy reveals competitive interfacial reactions under lean electrolyte conditions at different phase boundaries.

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

Higher-Order Token Interactions via Quantum Attention

arXiv:2606.11673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard dot-product self-attention computes, in a single layer, only pairwise (order-2) interactions between tokens; representing a generic order-$k$ interaction is known to require either super-quadratic resources in one layer or composition across depth. We introduce Quantum Higher-Order Attention (QHA), a shallow, hardware-realizable quantum attention head that, via data re-uploading and an all-to-all non-Clifford entangler, synthesizes order-$k$ token interactions inside the circuit and exposes them through a local single-qubit read-out. We prove (i) an expressivity separation: any single standard self-attention layer with embedding dimension $m$, $H$ heads and $p$-bit precision satisfying $mHp=o(N/\log\log N)$ cannot represent the order-$k$ correlation family that one QHA head represents with circuit depth $O(\log k)$ ($O(k)$ two-qubit gates); and (ii) a trainability guarantee for its local-design instantiation: with a local read-out and $O(\log n)$ depth the gradient variance is $\Omega(1/\mathrm{poly}(n))$ (no barren plateau), which we confirm empirically – while being explicit that the more expressive all-to-all instantiation we benchmark is trained empirically and shows exponentially decaying gradients. Empirically, at a $6.5\times$ smaller parameter budget, QHA generalizes hidden-subset parity of every order $k\le6$ from disjoint inputs, whereas the larger classical attention head collapses past order~2; consistent with theory, the size of the advantage tracks the target's Fourier degree - largest for parity and shrinking when low-order structure is present. As an application, QHA serves as a compact high-order interaction detector across three domains - genetic epistasis, learning-parity-with-noise, and graph triangle detection - reaching the noise ceiling at the smallest parameter budget where field-standard linear methods fail.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

How Auxiliary Reasoning Unleashes GUI Grounding in VLMs

Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding is a fundamental task for building GUI agents. However, general vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with this task due to a lack of specific optimization. We identify a key gap in this paper: while VLMs exhibit significant latent grounding potential, as demonstrated by their performance measured by Pointing Game, they underperform when tasked with outputting explicit coordinates. To address this discrepancy and bypass the high data and annotation costs of current fine-tuning approaches, we propose three zero-shot auxiliary reasoning methods. By providing explicit spatial cues such as axes, grids and labeled intersections as part of the input image, these methods enable VLMs to better articulate their implicit spatial understanding capabilities. We evaluate these methods on four GUI grounding benchmarks across seven open-source and proprietary VLMs. Experimental results show substantial gains from auxiliary reasoning. Mark-Grid Scaffold boosts Gemini-3.1-Pro from 11.72\% under direct inference to 95.20\% on ScreenSpot-v2, achieves state-of-the-art performance on ScreenSpot, and approaches the strongest fine-tuned methods on ScreenSpot-v2 and UI-I2E-Bench. Our code is available at https://github.com/liweim/AuxiliaryReasoning.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Asymptotic properties for fully coupled delayed forward-backward stochastic differential equations

arXiv:2606.19925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the asymptotic behavior of solutions to a class of fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with time-delayed generators. Such systems arise naturally in stochastic models with memory effects and constitute a significant extension of the classical fully coupled FBSDE framework. The presence of delay introduces additional analytical difficulties due to the dependence of the coefficients on the past trajectories of the solution processes and the resulting non-Markovian structure. Under suitable assumptions on the coefficients, we study the asymptotic properties of a perturbed delayed FBSDE driven by a small noise parameter. We first establish the convergence in distribution of the associated solution processes as the perturbation parameter tends to zero. We then prove almost sure convergence towards the solution of the corresponding deterministic limiting system. As a consequence of these asymptotic results, we derive a large deviation principle for the solution processes. Our results extend the asymptotic analysis of Cruzeiro, Gomes and Zhang (2014) from the classical fully coupled FBSDE setting to the delayed framework, and complement existing works on weakly coupled delayed forward-backward systems. They provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first large deviation principle for fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with delayed generators.

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

When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.05172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Behavior Cloning (BC) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for robot learning. However, BC lacks a self-guided mechanism for online improvement after demonstrations have been collected. Existing offline-to-online learning methods often cause policies to replace previously learned good actions due to a distribution mismatch between offline data and online learning. In this work, we propose Q2RL, Q-Estimation and Q-Gating from BC for Reinforcement Learning, an algorithm for efficient offline-to-online learning. Our method consists of two parts: (1) Q-Estimation extracts a Q-function from a BC policy using a few interaction steps with the environment, followed by online RL with (2) Q-Gating, which switches between BC and RL policy actions based on their respective Q-values to collect samples for RL policy training. Across manipulation tasks from D4RL and robomimic benchmarks, Q2RL outperforms SOTA offline-to-online learning baselines on success rate and time to convergence. Q2RL is efficient enough to be applied in an on-robot RL setting, learning robust policies for contact-rich and high precision manipulation tasks such as pipe assembly and kitting, in 1-2 hours of online interaction, achieving success rates of up to 100% and up to 3.75x improvement against the original BC policy. Code and video are available at https://pages.rai-inst.com/q2rl_website/

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

The AI Legal Specialist: A Juridically Autonomous Professional Profile for AI Governance

arXiv:2606.12415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid global expansion of artificial intelligence regulation has generated, across multiple jurisdictions, a demand for legal expertise dedicated to AI that the market has addressed in a fragmented manner. Data protection officers extend their remit beyond data protection law; privacy lawyers reposition themselves toward AI; compliance officers add AI chapters to their existing manuals. This paper argues that none of these adaptive responses adequately covers the professional space opened by the emerging global AI regulatory landscape, of which the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) is the most comprehensive instance, alongside the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, the United States executive and sectoral framework, and analogous initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, China, Japan, Singapore, and beyond. A distinct professional profile is required: the AI Legal Specialist, conceived as a jurist – understood broadly to encompass any professional with advanced legal training – operating at the intersection of legal interpretation and AI governance. The profile is juridically autonomous: it derives its existence from the structure of regulatory obligations generated wherever AI is subject to substantive regulation, rather than from any technical standard or the extension of adjacent roles. The paper provides a juridically grounded definition of the profile, argues for its autonomy from adjacent figures and international standards, proposes a reference competence architecture aligned with the European e-Competence Framework (e-CF, EN 16234-1) as a methodological choice, and articulates the conditions for its operational measurement through key performance indicators. The contribution is intended as a foundation for international standardization of the profile and as a reference for practice, curricula, and adoption across jurisdictions.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Kalman Linear Attention: Parallel Bayesian Filtering For Efficient Language Modelling and State Tracking

arXiv:2602.10743v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State-space language models such as Mamba and gated linear attention (GLA) offer linear-complexity, parallelisable alternatives to transformers, but their linear state updates limit expressivity and robust state tracking. We close this gap from a probabilistic angle, casting sequence mixing as exact Bayesian filtering with the Kalman filter as the core primitive. Classical Kalman filters give principled state and uncertainty estimates but are viewed as inherently sequential; we show that reparameterising them in information form turns their updates into an associative scan - so the per-token recurrent update is non-linear (a Möbius/precision recursion) yet remains temporally parallel. The resulting Kalman Linear Attention (KLA) layer is a drop-in sequence mixer that performs time-parallel probabilistic inference, carries an explicit belief-state uncertainty, and is strictly more expressive than GLA-style linear updates at the same computational cost. This expressivity translates directly into stronger state tracking: KLA solves permutation-composition ($A_5$) tasks that linear SSMs and attention cannot, while staying scan-parallel. As a drop-in primitive it also matches or improves on modern SSMs and GLAs across synthetic token-manipulation and zero-shot commonsense benchmarks, and is among the first stacked Bayesian-filtering primitives trained at the billion-token scale.

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

Space-sampled Value Decay: Forgetting Mechanisms for Non-stationary Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies on rodents such as mice have shown the capabilities to adapt their behavior when dealing with changing parameters (``drift'') of the environment even if no information about change is provided (uncertainty) – a behavior that can be modeled by forgetting mechanisms. Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning (NSRL) deals with adapting state-of-the-art RL methods to deal with changing environments: these however usually require (partially) perfect information about the drift such as ``task IDs'' or ``context''. To mitigate the effects of drift, this work develops Space-sampled Value Decay as an explicit forgetting mechanism for value-based deep RL architectures as a simple yet effective approach. In particular we demonstrate and discuss positive effects but also limitations in achieved returns for modifications of Deep Q-networks (DQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) when evaluated on non-stationary environments.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Exposure Bias as Epistemic Underidentification in Recursive Forecasting

arXiv:2606.12990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recursive multi-step forecasting is usually framed as distribution shift: models are trained on observed histories but deployed on their own predictions. We show this framing is incomplete by proving that, under partial observability or state truncation, recursive rollout is also an epistemic underidentification problem. Even with deterministic latent dynamics, one-step Bayes supervision identifies behavior only on observed contexts and need not identify the deployed recursive predictor once rollout queries self-generated induced states whose correct local targets are not determined by numeric state alone. We formalize this with induced states $Z$ and provenance variables $P$, and derive a decomposition of induced-state error into teacher-forcing/rollout mismatch, representation–class approximation, and provenance information gaps. Empirically, we show that rollout enters a distinct induced-state regime, that fixed induced states define a distinct local corrective task, and that closed-loop gains arise not only from local adaptation but also from changing the induced states visited during rollout. Using a simple binary provenance encoding, provenance-aware correction can further improve performance, though gains are conditional rather than uniform. These results recast exposure bias as reasoning under self-induced epistemic uncertainty.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SL-S4Wave: Self-Supervised Learning of Physiological Waveforms with Structured State Space Models

arXiv:2606.19888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling long-sequence medical time series data, such as electrocardiograms (ECG), poses significant challenges due to high sampling rates, multichannel signal complexity, inherent noise, and limited labeled data. While recent self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, based on various encoder architectures such as convolutional neural networks, have been proposed to learn representations from unlabeled data, they often fall short in capturing long-range dependencies and noise-invariant features. Structured state space models (S4) excel at long-sequence modeling, but existing S4 architectures fail to capture the unique characteristics of multichannel physiological waveforms. In this work, we propose SL-S4Wave, a self-supervised learning framework that combines contrastive learning with a tailored encoder built on structured state space models. The encoder incorporates multi-layer global convolution using multiscale subkernels, enabling the capture of both fine-grained local patterns and long-range temporal dependencies in noisy, high-resolution multichannel waveforms. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that SL-S4Wave (1) consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised baselines in a challenging arrhythmia detection task, (2) achieves high performance with significantly fewer labeled examples, showcasing strong label efficiency, and (3) maintains robust performance on long waveform segments, highlighting its capacity to model complex temporal dynamics in long sequences that most existing approaches fail to efficiently model, and (4) transfers effectively to unseen arrhythmia types, underscoring its robust cross-domain generalization. We additionally evaluate SL-S4Wave on multiple EEG tasks, achieving superior performance over strong baselines, demonstrating generalizability of our approach beyond cardiac waveforms.

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

SEAGym: An Evaluation Environment for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.17546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving LLM-based agents improve mainly by changing their agent harness: the structured execution layer around a base model, including prompts, memory, tools, middleware, runtime state, and the model-tool interaction loop. Existing evaluations often reduce this process to isolated task scores or a single sequential curve, obscuring whether an update produces reusable improvement, overfits recent tasks, increases cost, or harms older behavior. We introduce SEAGym, an evaluation environment for measuring agent harness updates across training, validation, test, replay, and cost records. SEAGym turns Harbor-compatible benchmarks into dynamic self-evolution task sources with train batches, frozen update-validation, held-out ID and OOD transfer views, replay diagnostics, and saved snapshot and metric records. Instantiating SEAGym on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and HLE, we compare ACE, TF-GRPO, and AHE under a shared epoch/batch protocol. The results show that these evaluation views provide complementary signals about the evolution process: frequent updates may fail to improve held-out performance, useful intermediate snapshots may collapse later, and source diversity and model backend can affect harness reliability.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Learning Cardiac Electrophysiology Digital Twins Through Agentic Discovery of Hybrid Structure

arXiv:2606.18154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building personalized cardiac electrophysiology (EP) digital twins requires identifying the appropriate model structure for each patient, not merely fitting parameters. Traditional methods rely on experts to manually prescribe hybrid physics-neural architectures, which requires deep domain expertise and does not transfer across patients. Recent works have applied large language models (LLMs) to generate or act as hybrid models. However, despite their promising generalization capacity, these LLM-based methods lack the structural priors needed for stable cardiac simulations. Hence, we propose LEADS, a framework that formulates cardiac EP domain knowledge as a structured action space and utilizes an LLM agent to discover hybrid models. The agent follows an iterative reasoning-and-action loop to select, combine, and refine hybrid models, whilst gradient descent handles parameter fitting. The proposed LEADS designs every candidate model towards physically grounded, interpretable, and numerically stable, while allowing open-ended architectural discovery. We validate LEADS on synthetic data with three ground-truth reaction models and on real cardiac EP data, demonstrating that it outperforms both human-designed hybrid models and other LLM-based hybrid modeling.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Beyond the Apnea-Hypopnea Index: Physiological and Demographic Predictors of Excessive Daytime Sleepiness in Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) is a common but inconsistently predicted symptom of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). OSA is typically diagnosed with polysomnography (PSG), and the current standard for severity assessment is the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI). AHI has many limitations, including its inability to explain physiological mechanisms or reflect variability in patient symptoms, such as EDS. This retrospective study aims to find physiological and demographic parameters that better predict EDS in patients with OSA and to evaluate whether these parameters outperform AHI using PSG data from the Mount Sinai Integrative Sleep Center. Clinical variables used to predict EDS included arousal index (AI), average oxygen desaturation during sleep, average heart rate during sleep, and AHI, along with demographic variables including age, sex, and BMI. Hypothesis tests, logistic regression models, and decision tree classifier models were performed on the data to discriminate sleepy from nonsleepy patients as determined by an Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) score [≥] 10. AI and oxygen desaturation were found to be the most predictive physiological variables, and sex and BMI were found to be the most predictive demographic variables. The final decision tree model with these four variables outperformed the AHI in predicting EDS. These findings suggest that daytime sleepiness in OSA can be better explained by measures of apnea burden, oxygenation impairment, and patient demographics than by AHI alone, although these remain only modestly predictive. Future studies should focus on investigating more comprehensive physiological markers, multi-night sleep data, and more objective assessments of sleepiness.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Encoder Winners Do Not Reliably Transfer Across VLA Backbone Scale: A Frozen-Backbone Grafting Diagnostic

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies typically inherit their vision encoder from upstream VLM releases, but it is unclear whether an encoder choice validated on a small VLA transfers to a larger backbone. We introduce a frozen-backbone grafting diagnostic: the vision tower of a released VLA is replaced by a candidate encoder under a fixed protocol (adaptive average pooling, LayerNorm, and a single trainable linear projector), with the language model and action expert frozen. Across four encoders, two LIBERO suites, two backbones (SmolVLA-450M and $\pi_{0.5}$-3.3B), and two-to-three seeds per cell (40 main grafting runs plus native, LoRA, pooling, and zero-/shuffled-image controls, all scored by offline action MSE), the small-backbone winner does not reliably select the large-backbone top tier: SigLIP is best on SmolVLA across both suites, while on $\pi_{0.5}$ DINOv2-small leads the spatial suite and the object suite is a seed-sensitive near-tie band; three of the four backbone-suite comparisons (and 11 of 12 seed-level cells) support backbone-dependent rankings. The grafting wrapper is itself non-neutral with opposite sign across backbones (+45-56% MSE on the SmolVLA native tower, -50-52% on $\pi_{0.5}$), so all conclusions are conditional on the fixed grafting protocol. We position frozen grafting as a cheap target-backbone diagnostic to run before committing to an encoder at scale, not as a closed-loop deployment claim.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

OSCS-SupCon: Orthogonal Sigmoid-based Common and Style Supervised Contrastive Learning for Robust Feature Disentanglement

Supervised Contrastive Learning (SupCon) has achieved strong performance by explicitly modeling pairwise relationships among samples. However, existing SupCon-based methods suffer from two key limitations: negative-sample dilution induced by the standard InfoNCE loss, and feature-space entanglement caused by the lack of explicit constraints separating category-relevant (common) and category-irrelevant (style) features. These limitations reduce feature discriminability and generalization ability. To address these issues, we propose OSCS-SupCon (Orthogonal Sigmoid-based Common and Style Supervised Contrastive Learning), a unified framework that combines a sigmoid-based pairwise contrastive objective with explicit orthogonality constraints. Specifically, we introduce a sigmoid-based contrastive loss with two learnable parameters, temperature and bias, which adaptively modulate pairwise decision boundaries and alleviate negative-sample dilution. Furthermore, we enforce orthogonality between common and style feature subspaces via a linear projection with ReLU nonlinearity, thereby reducing feature overlap and improving disentanglement of style-irrelevant representations. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that OSCS-SupCon consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised contrastive learning methods across multiple backbone architectures. In particular, on the fine-grained CUB200-2011 dataset with a ResNet-18 backbone, the proposed method achieves a 3.4% improvement in classification accuracy over CS-SupCon, highlighting its robustness and generalization capability. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each component.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Near–Real-Time Conflict-Related Fire Detection in Sudan Using Unsupervised Deep Learning

Ongoing armed conflict in Sudan highlights the need for rapid monitoring of conflict-related fire-affected areas. Recent advances in deep learning and high-frequency satellite imagery enable near–real-time assessment of active fires and burn scars in war zones. This study presents a near–real-time monitoring approach using a lightweight Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE)–based model integrated with 4-band Planet Labs imagery at 3 m spatial resolution. We demonstrate that these impacted regions can be detected within approximately 24 to 30 hours under favorable observational conditions using accessible, commercially available satellite data. To achieve this, we adapt a VAE–based model, originally designed for 10-band imagery, to operate effectively on high-resolution 4-band inputs. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner to learn compact latent representations of nominal land-surface conditions and identify burn signatures by quantifying changes between temporally paired latent embeddings. Performance is evaluated across five case studies in Sudan and compared against cosine distance, CVA, and IR-MAD using precision, recall, F1-score, and the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) computed between temporally paired image tiles. Results show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the other methods, achieving higher recall and F1-scores while maintaining viable precision in highly imbalanced fire-detection scenarios. Experiments with 8-band imagery and temporal image sequences yield only marginal performance gains over single 4-band inputs, underscoring the effectiveness of the proposed lightweight approach for scalable, near–real-time conflict monitoring.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Maternal BMI and Placental Transcriptomic Changes: A Meta-Analysis of Gene Expression at the Maternal-Fetal Interface

Objective: Maternal body mass index (BMI) is often used as a measure of metabolic status and increased or decreased maternal BMI is associated with a heightened risk of cardiometabolic diseases across generations. The placenta mediates these maternal metabolic cues; however, its genome wide transcriptional adaptations in response to maternal BMI remain incompletely defined. Methods: To delineate placental genes, pathways, and interaction clusters whose transcript abundance varies with maternal prepregnancy BMI through a genome wide meta analysis of human placental RNA sequencing datasets. Placental RNA seq reads from four publicly available cohorts (n=146) were mapped to the GRCh38 reference genome and differentially expressed genes were identified. An independent microarray cohort (n=19) was reanalysed separately to facilitate cross platform comparison. Functional enrichment employed GO, KEGG, and STRING protein interaction resources. Results: Meta-analysis of 146 RNA seq samples identified eight genes with genome-wide significance in placentae from underweight pregnancies including inflammatory signaling gene MAP4K1 and metabolic enzyme PSPH, while overweight and obese categories revealed nominally significant differential expression. KEGG analysis demonstrated significant downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation with increasing maternal BMI, and protein-protein interaction networks revealed inflammatory mediators as central nodes in overweight and obese groups. Independent microarray validation corroborated key findings, including consistent downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation in obesity. Conclusion: Maternal BMI is associated with placental transcriptomic signatures involving inflammatory, metabolic, and hormonal pathways, with consistent downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation across platforms. This genome-wide meta-analysis provides a reproducible catalogue of BMI-responsive placental transcripts that may contribute to developmental programming of offspring health.

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

The Dynamics of Human and AI-Generated Language: How Semantics Fluctuates across Different Timescales

Spoken language, whether produced by humans or large language models (LLM), unfolds over time with varying semantic content. However, we still lack simple, interpretable time-series features that capture how generic versus specific content is distributed over time, and that can be used to compare human and AI-generated speech. We introduce a semantic-timescale analysis pipeline that turns word-level transcripts with timestamps into semantic time-series. For each spoken narrative, we compute (i) semantic specificity using WordNet-based word depth and (ii) contextual similarity using SBERT embeddings and quantify their temporal dependence using autocorrelation-window measures (ACW-0 and related metrics). We then compare original speech to multiple shuffled controls that selectively disrupt lexical identity, temporal order, and word duration. Across human-read autobiographical narratives, TTS readings, and LLM-generated texts rendered with TTS, we find that segments with longer ACW-0 in the semantic time-series tend to contain more generic vocabulary, whereas segments with shorter ACW-0 are enriched in more specific words. These associations are strongly attenuated or abolished when word order and timing are randomized, indicating that ACW-based measures capture non-trivial temporal organization of semantic content beyond static lexical distributions. Our results suggest that ACW-based semantic timescales are a useful family of features for analyzing and comparing the temporal structure of human and AI-generated speech.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Brain-gut axis imaging, motion correction with 11C-carfentanil total-body PET

Background: Mu-opioid receptors (MORs) are expressed throughout the body including in the brain and gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Total-body PET imaging of the brain and GI tract offers a promising approach for cross-sectional in vivo evaluation of the MOR brain-GI axis. However, intestinal motility and bladder filling introduce motion throughout the GI tract over the scan window. Here we establish analysis methodology to account for motion for dynamic imaging of the brain-GI axis, to further characterize peripheral MORs throughout the body and provide a framework for semi-automatic total-body PET modeling. Methods: 4 subjects underwent 90-min dynamic [11C]-carfentanil (cfn) total-body PET acquisitions at baseline, after intravenous naloxone (central antagonist) administration, and after orally administered loperamide (peripheral agonist and P-glycoprotein substrate). Thalamic MOR availability was measured using the Logan reference tissue model. Using CT-based segmentation, the GI tract was subdivided into anatomical segments, in addition to other peripheral organs (e.g., liver, psoas muscle). Frame-by-frame semi-automatic motion correction was performed with three distinct reference frames (11-14 min post-injection, p.i., 35-40 min p.i., and 85-90 min p.i.). The performance of these three were compared to manual correction. Compartment modeling and Logan graphical analysis were performed to estimate relevant kinetic parameters (K1, VT, VTLogan). Results: Across the 4 subjects and regions, kinetic parameter estimates were highly correlated (r>0.7) for K1, VT and VT Logan when comparing semi-automatic (reference frame at 35-40 min p.i.) and manual correction. With semi-automatic motion correction, graphical-based estimation of VTLogan in the gastrointestinal tract was significantly decreased with loperamide relative to baseline (p