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

SleepMaMi: A Universal Sleep Foundation Model for Integrating Macro- and Micro-structures

arXiv:2602.07628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While the shift toward unified foundation models has revolutionized many deep learning domains, sleep medicine remains largely restricted to task-specific models that focus on localized micro-structure features. These approaches often neglect the rich, multi-modal context of Polysomnography (PSG) and fail to capture the global macro-structure of a full night's sleep. To address this, we introduce SleepMaMi , a Sleep Foundation Model engineered to master both hour-long sleep architectures and fine-grained signal morphologies. Our framework utilizes a hierarchical dual-encoder design: a Macro-Encoder to model full-night temporal dependencies and a Micro-Encoder to capture short-term characteristics from biosignals. Macro-Encoder is trained via Demographic-Guided Contrastive Learning, which aligns overnight sleep patterns with objective subject metadata, such as age, sex and BMI to refine global representations. Micro-Encoder is optimized via a hybrid Masked Autoencoder (MAE) and multi-modal contrastive objective. Pre-trained on a massive corpus of $>$20,000 PSG recordings (158K hours),SleepMaMi outperforms or matches state-of-the-art existing foundation models across a diverse suite of downstream tasks, demonstrating superior generalizability and label-efficient adaptation for clinical sleep analysis.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Interpretable Neural Marked Statistics for Cosmological Inference

arXiv:2606.11295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering cosmological information beyond the power spectrum is a central goal for upcoming cosmological surveys, since late-time non-Gaussian signal in the matter density cannot be accessed through two-point statistics alone. Marked statistics fold part of this information back into the two-point level by reweighting the field with non-linear functions. We propose a neural marking scheme to generalize this process through a set of interpretable, physically motivated transformations that directly allow to interpret the gain in cosmological information at the morphological level. We employ a contrastive learning objective to align learnable marked summaries with the underlying cosmological parameters. At $k_{\max}=0.2\,h\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$, our neural mark tightens the marginalized constraint on $\sigma_8$ by $2.9\times$ and on $\Omega_m$ by $1.8\times$ compared to classical marks, breaking the $\Omega_m-\sigma_8$ degeneracy at the Fisher information level. It further reduces the parameter MSE across our cosmological parameter prior by $1.45\times$ over the best classical mark. The learned latent geometry aligns with the $\Omega_m$ and $\sigma_8$ directions in parameter space, indicating that the contrastive objective recovers the dominant axes of cosmological information. Our approach opens the door to more powerful, interpretable summary statistics for cosmological inference.

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

4DSloMo: 4D Reconstruction for High Speed Scene with Asynchronous Capture

Reconstructing fast-dynamic scenes from multi-view videos is crucial for high-speed motion analysis and realistic 4D reconstruction. However, the majority of 4D capture systems are limited to frame rates below 30 FPS (frames per second), and a direct 4D reconstruction of high-speed motion from low FPS input may lead to undesirable results. In this work, we propose a high-speed 4D capturing system only using low FPS cameras, through novel capturing and processing modules. On the capturing side, we propose an asynchronous capture scheme that increases the effective frame rate by staggering the start times of cameras. By grouping cameras and leveraging a base frame rate of 25 FPS, our method achieves an equivalent frame rate of 100-200 FPS without requiring specialized high-speed cameras. On processing side, we also propose a novel generative model to fix artifacts caused by 4D sparse-view reconstruction, as asynchrony reduces the number of viewpoints at each timestamp. Specifically, we propose to train a video-diffusion-based artifact-fix model for sparse 4D reconstruction, which refines missing details, maintains temporal consistency, and improves overall reconstruction quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances high-speed 4D reconstruction compared to synchronous capture.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

An Empirical Study of Automating Agent Evaluation

Agent evaluation requires assessing complex multi-step behaviors involving tool use and intermediate reasoning, making it costly and expertise-intensive. A natural question arises: can frontier coding assistants reliably automate this evaluation process? Our study shows that simply prompting coding assistants is insufficient for this task. Without domain-specific evaluation knowledge, frontier coding assistants achieve only a 30% execution success rate and produce over-engineered evaluations averaging 12+ metrics per agent, indicating that strong coding ability does not automatically translate to reliable agent evaluation. We introduce EvalAgent, an AI assistant that automates the end-to-end agent evaluation pipeline. EvalAgent encodes evaluation domain expertise as evaluation skills (procedural instructions, reusable code and templates, and dynamically retrieved API documentation) that compose into a trace-based pipeline producing complete evaluation artifacts including metrics, executable code, and reports. To systematically assess generated evaluations, we introduce a meta-evaluation framework alongside AgentEvalBench, a benchmark comprising 20 agents, each paired with evaluation requirements and test scenarios. We further propose the Eval@1 metric to measure whether generated evaluation code both executes and yields meaningful results on the first run. Our experiments show that EvalAgent produces focused evaluations, improving Eval@1 from 17.5% to 65%, and achieving 79.5% human expert preference over baseline approaches. Further ablation studies show that evaluation skills are critical for handling complex evaluation: removing them causes Eval@1 to drop significantly from 65% to 30%.

05.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-09

Prediction of hospitalisation in young children with pneumonia in Malawi: A machine learning-based approach

by Patrick Staunton, Mohammad Adib Makrooni, Master Chisale, Billy Nyambolo, Joseph Wu, Damien McCarthy, Mark Ledwidge, Yasir Bin Nisar, Chris Watson, Balwani Mbakaya, Cathal Seoighe, Joe Gallagher Background Globally, pneumonia remains the single biggest cause of mortality in children under 5 years of age. This study sought to train and test a prediction model for hospitalisation within 7 days after initial presentation in 2- to 59-month-old Malawian children with WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care and compare its performance to existing risk prediction models. Methods and findings BIOTOPE is a cohort study of children with pneumonia in a primary healthcare setting in Malawi. The training cohort involved nine primary care centres and the testing cohort involved two primary care centres in Northern Malawi. The training cohort was recruited between December 2022 and April 2023 while the testing cohort was recruited in 2016. Participants were consecutive children aged 2–59 months presenting with cough and/or difficulty breathing and who were diagnosed as WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care of any severity. The training cohort was used to train and validate a machine learning model with a prespecified primary outcome defined as hospitalisation and/or death within 7 days as the outcome. This model was then further evaluated in the testing cohort.Median age was 15 months (interquartile range 8−27) in the training and 17 months (interquartile range 9−29) in the external testing cohort (52.1% and 54.4% male, respectively). Hospitalisation occurred in 14.3% (294) of the training cohort and 12.1% (55) of the testing cohort. There was one death in the training cohort only. WHO danger signs were present in 17.6% (360) and 15.9% (70) of children in the training and testing cohorts, respectively. The optimal machine learning model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic and precision recall curves of 0.87 and 0.57, respectively, in the testing cohort outperforming existing risk prediction models; furthermore, this model produced an expected calibration error of 0.16 (a logistic regression model using severity status as the response variable and the log odds of the machine learning model’s calibrated probabilities produced an intercept estimate of −0.32 and a slope estimate of 1.13). Key limitations include the use of hospitalisation and/or death as a severity outcome, which may reflect health system factors rather than true disease severity, that mortality-based comparisons were not possible due to low mortality in these primary care cohorts, and that comparator tools were developed for hospital populations rather than primary care populations. Conclusion This machine learning score outperformed traditional pneumonia risk scores in predicting hospitalisation within 7 days in Malawian children presenting to primary care. Traditional pneumonia risk scores diminish in performance when externally applied to new datasets suggesting they may not generalise well beyond their original derivation settings. Mortality-related findings are not applicable as there was only one death in this cohort. Overall these findings support the potential of machine learning to meaningfully improve early identification of children at risk of severe pneumonia in low-resource primary care settings. Further external validation and clinical impact studies are needed to confirm these results.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Structure Bioinformatics of Eight Human ATP Synthase Fo Subunits and Their AlphaFold3-Predicted Water-Soluble QTY Analogs

Human mitochondrial ATP synthase is an essential rotary motor enzyme that produces most of the cellular ATP through oxidative phosphorylation. Its membrane-embedded Fo sector contains highly hydrophobic transmembrane subunits that are challenging to study in aqueous environments without detergents. This study explores whether applying the QTY code can reduce the hydrophobicity of selected ATP synthase Fo subunits while preserving their overall molecular structures. We applied the QTY code to eight human ATP synthase Fo subunits: ATP6, ATP8, ATPK, ATP68, ATPMK, AT5G1, AT5G2, and AT5G3. Hydrophobic amino acids leucine (L), isoleucine (I), valine (V), and phenylalanine (F) in transmembrane regions were systematically replaced with hydrophilic glutamine (Q), threonine (T), and tyrosine (Y). Four native subunits with available CryoEM structures from human ATP synthase (PDB: 8H9S) were superposed with their AlphaFold3-predicted QTY analogs. The native ATP synthase Fo subunits superposed well with their respective QTY analogs. For the CryoEM-native comparisons, RMSD values ranged from 0.565[A] to 2.546[A]. For the AlphaFold3-native comparisons of subunits without CryoEM structures, RMSD values ranged from 0.204[A] to 0.297[A]. Despite substantial QTY substitutions in the transmembrane regions, ranging from 38.89% to 50.79%, the QTY analogs retained similar overall folds, molecular weights, and isoelectric points. Hydrophobic surface analysis showed that the QTY analogs had reduced hydrophobic patches compared with their native counterparts, with average hydrophobicity decreasing from 0.2959 in native proteins to -1.1023 in QTY analogs. These structural bioinformatics studies suggest that the QTY code can be applied to ATP synthase Fo subunits to generate more hydrophilic, potentially water-soluble analogs while preserving overall structural similarity. These results extend the application of the QTY code to the membrane-embedded Fo sector of ATP synthase and provide a foundation for future experimental studies testing whether these QTY analogs can be expressed, purified, and evaluated for assembly or proton-transfer-related functions.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Diurnal variation in brain-derived tau and five other blood-based biomarkers for dementia and their association with cognitive performance

Blood-based biomarkers of dementia are a promising scalable tool for early diagnosis, tracking disease progression, and evaluating therapeutic efficacy. Utility of these biomarkers will not only be dependent on the reliability of their association with pathology but also contingent on their ability to track cognitive status. Previously, we demonstrated diurnal variation in several biomarkers (amyloid beta (A{beta}) 42 and 40, 42/40 ratio, glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), neurofilament light (NfL), and phosphorylated-Tau 217 (p-Tau217)) which has implications for their reliability. Here, we extend these observations to a larger cohort, include brain-derived tau (BD-Tau), which is assumed to be produced exclusively in the brain, and report endocrine measures of circadian rhythmicity. We not only assessed whether these biomarkers vary with time of day, but also whether they associate with daytime function and whether these associations vary with cognitive domain and number of repeated assessments. Data collected in 20 PLWA (72.4{+/-}5.9 years, mean{+/-}SD) and 19 controls (68.9{+/-}9.8 years) were analysed. Participants completed 14 days of home monitoring and one laboratory assessment of sleep and daytime function: mood, daytime sleepiness, reaction time, immediate and delayed memory recall, everyday memory errors. During the 27-hour residential laboratory session, 3-hourly blood samples were collected and analysed for the six blood-based biomarkers of dementia as well as melatonin and cortisol. Rhythmicity of melatonin and cortisol did not differ between groups. P-Tau217 and GFAP (p

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

LearnOpt: Recovering the Latent Cognitive Structure of Standardized Examinations via Knowledge Graphs and Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2606.15349v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standardized examinations are typically treated as uniform syllabus coverage problems. We argue they are better understood as adversarial systems with stable latent cognitive structures diverging systematically from official syllabi. We introduce LearnOpt, which recovers this structure from historical question papers and generates personalized, time-bounded study plans. Applied to nine years of NEET questions (2016-2024, n=1,496), LearnOpt builds an exam knowledge graph from LLM-tagged questions, extracts a five-category latent skill distribution, and formulates study planning as a knapsack-variant optimization over prerequisite-aware subgraphs with Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. Central finding: NEET's latent skill distribution is stable within a syllabus regime (consecutive-year KL divergence 0.004-0.032 for 2016-2021, non-significant under permutation testing) but shifts significantly with NCERT's 2023 syllabus rationalization: pooling 2016-2021 (n=1,072) vs 2023-2024 (n=392) gives KL=0.040 (p=0.0005), with Elimination/Negation questions rising from ~20-29% to ~31-35%. Latent structure, while not permanently stationary, is piecewise stable, with shifts detectable and attributable to curricular events. Within either regime, subject predicts skill profile more strongly than year. An optimization evaluation, using one real and two synthetic mastery profiles, shows the skill-weighted objective produces a modest but real reordering of recommended topics over a mastery-conditioned frequency baseline. Applying the pipeline to JEE Advanced reveals a profile dominated by Multi-concept Integration (80.9% vs. 33.3% for NEET), with a JEE-vs-NEET divergence (KL=0.505) exceeding NEET's largest cross-subject divergence: exam tier shapes latent cognitive structure more than subject, which shapes it more than time within a regime. Code, knowledge graph, and annotated dataset are released publicly.

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

Characterizing the Impact of NVFP4 Quantization for Low-Power Edge AI Deployment

arXiv:2606.06527v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Energy-efficient neural-network inference at the edge requires reducing arithmetic cost, memory traffic, computation energy, and storage overhead while maintaining acceptable accuracy. This paper presents an ablation-focused study of NVFP4 quantization for edge-efficient neural networks, with emphasis on the relationship between activation precision, weight precision, block-size scaling, retraining, and model accuracy. NVFP4 activations are represented using 4-bit FP4 data, an FP8 block scale, and an FP32 tensor scale, enabling ultra-low precision inference while preserving activation dynamic range. A block-size ablation over six edge-efficient models shows that block size B = 16 provides a practical accuracy/storage trade-off, requiring only 4.5078 bits per input for N = 4096. A weight precision ablation further shows that FP8 and FP16 weights provide only modest gains over FP4 weights under the same NVFP4 activation path, suggesting that activation quantization and scaling dominate much of the accuracy behavior. To isolate the benefit of the NVFP4 data type, this work compares conventional unscaled FP4 activation inference and NVFP4 activation inference with and without retraining. The results show that conventional FP4 inference collapses accuracy for most compact models, while NVFP4 without retraining already recovers substantial accuracy by restoring activation dynamic range through FP8 block scaling and FP32 tensor scaling. When combined with retraining, NVFP4 achieves the best accuracy across the evaluated models, demonstrating the effectiveness of scaling-aware FP4 (NVFP4) inference. These findings provide general design guidance for hardware-software co-design of low power edge inference across a broad range of accelerator platforms, including GPUs, Tensor Cores, FPGAs, domain-specific AI accelerators, near-memory computing systems, and emerging edge-computing architectures.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Score Approximation for Diffusion Models on Arbitrary Low-Dimensional Structures

arXiv:2606.19894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The remarkable success of score-based diffusion models has spurred significant efforts to establish their theoretical foundations. However, existing complexity bounds for score approximation rely heavily on restrictive assumptions like Lipschitz continuous densities or smooth manifold supports, which are routinely violated by the singularities, sharp boundaries, and disjoint clusters inherent to real-world perceptual data. This work establishes a universal score approximation theorem that works for any distribution supported on any compact set of upper Minkowski dimension $d$. Using a novel discrete-mixture formulation, we prove that the score function can be approximated with a ReLU network whose complexity grows exponentially only with $d$, thus breaking the exponential curse of ambient dimensionality. Combined with existing theories on accurately solving the backward diffusion SDE for arbitrary compact distributions, our work shows that diffusion models readily adapt to irregular, non-smooth data structures, explaining their competence in real-world generative tasks.

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

The Road to Artificial SuperIntelligence: A Comprehensive Survey of Superalignment

arXiv:2412.16468v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked discussion on Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical AI system that surpasses human intelligence. Although ASI remains hypothetical and far beyond current AI capabilities, discussing its potential and exploring its feasibility and potential risks is critical for the development of future AI systems. The idea of superalignment originates from scalable oversight, which studies how to supervise increasingly capable AI systems when direct human supervision becomes insufficient. In this paper, we focus on the superalignment problem: "The process of supervising, controlling, and governing artificial superintelligence." We first review scalable oversight paradigms-Sandwiching, Self-Enhancement, and Weak-to-Strong Generalization – then analyze the limitations of current paradigms through the lens of possibility and impossibility, discuss key challenges, and propose pathways for the safe and continual improvement of future AI systems.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

The Effectiveness of aromatherapy and its supportive Interventions on anxiety and pain among breast cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction: Breast cancer treatments are often associated with pain and anxiety, which can hinder physical functioning and overall quality of life, even after treatment. Complementary therapies, such as aromatherapy, can be used to alleviate pain and reduce anxiety in breast cancer patients. This project aimed to synthesize current global evidence on the effectiveness of aromatherapy. Method: This systematic review followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, with a comprehensive, systematic search conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and SCOPUS for randomized controlled trials (RCTS) published from 2015 to 2025. Eligible studies included adult women breast cancer surgery patients who received aromatherapy during various periods of breast cancer. Where possible, data from the included studies were pooled using meta-analysis. GRADE approach was used to assess certainty of findings. Results: The search yielded 84 studies. Out of these, six were included in this review. On average, aromatherapy reduces pain and anxiety scores by 0.79 (standard mean difference (SMD)=-0.79, 95% CI -1.42, -0.16) and 0.53 (SMD=-0.53, 95 CI=-0.90, -0.16) units, respectively, compared to control condition [Low-quality of evidence]. The combination of aromatherapy with music reduces pain and anxiety by 1.26 (SMD= -1.26, 95 CI=-1.65, -0.87) and 1.08 (SMD = -1.08, 95 % CI: -1.45, -0.70) units respectively compared to standard care [Low-quality of evidence]. Conclusion: There is a potential role for the use of aromatherapy and music therapy, to alleviate anxiety and pain, especially for non-preoperative anxiety and pain. Further research is needed to inform the integration of aromatherapy into the management of anxiety and pain.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Perturbation Curve models continuous transcriptional response trajectories and improves prediction of genetic modulations

Single-cell CRISPR screens, Perturb-seq, have revolutionized functional genomics by revealing biological causality. However, although perturbation assignments are typically represented as discrete labels, the cell-level effective strength of perturbations is often continuous and diverse. Current analytical frameworks struggle to decouple the variability in perturbation strength from the diversity of downstream responses. Here, we present Perturbation Curve (PertCurve), a nonlinear, curve-based computational framework that models the trajectories of transcriptomic responses by explicitly incorporating diverse perturbation magnitudes and strengths. By ordering cells by perturbation strength, we demonstrate that PertCurve accurately recapitulates the response magnitudes and reveals the distinct modularity and asynchrony patterns of downstream gene behaviors. These patterns are categorized into archetypes, including proportional, sensitive, and threshold responses. By applying this framework across CRISPRi/a modalities, we identify universal response patterns in viral infection, apoptosis, and proliferation genes, and reveal previously overlooked context-specific regulatory features in cell differentiation. Finally, incorporating PertCurve into perturbation prediction models and evaluation metrics enhances predictive performance, delivering actionable insights for refining established models.

14.
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.

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

A unified complexity bound for logconcave sampling

arXiv:2606.12694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a simple, unified, and nearly tight bound for sampling arbitrary logconcave distributions from a warm start using the In-and-Out algorithm along with exponential lifting. The main new ingredient in the analysis is an improved bound on the Poincaré constant of a lifted distribution. As a consequence, the resulting convergence rate is nearly tight for both constrained settings (e.g., Gaussian restricted to a convex body) and well-conditioned settings (e.g., strongly logconcave and smooth densities).

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

Conflict-Aware Retriever Editing for Knowledge Injection Attacks on LLM-Based RAG Systems

arXiv:2606.18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Injecting malicious knowledge into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can manipulate retrieved evidence and mislead downstream generation, posing a serious security threat for AI applications. Existing RAG injection attacks mainly rely on manipulating external knowledge bases, such as crafting malicious corpus. However, the synthetic text crafted by such data-centric methods could be detectable, leading to the failure of attacks. Beyond corpus manipulation, open-source retrievers are increasingly exposing RAG systems to model-centric attacks. In this paper, we propose conflict-aware retriever editing, i.e., CAREATTACK, a model-centric retriever attack framework for malicious knowledge injection in RAG. Specifically, CAREATTACK consists two stages of conflict-aware retriever editing and attack-preserving anchor repair. Conflict-aware retriever editing adapts efficient closed-form parameter editing to the dense retrieval model, promoting malicious knowledge above benign competing passages and resolving potential parameter conflicts through graph-based conflict detection and parameter editing projection. Then, attack-preserving anchor repair performs lightweight calibration on the edited retriever to further eliminate the impact on non-target prompts while preserving the attack effectiveness for target prompts. We instantiate CAREATTACK on Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B and BGE-M3, and conduct evaluation on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate our method substantially promote malicious passages into the retrieved knowledge of RAG systems and can perform attacks for batches of target prompts and passages, given the access of retrieval model parameters. Since most RAG systems are built upon open-source retrieval models, this work reveals a practical attack surface in RAG systems. Codes are public accessible at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CareAttack-3F1C.

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

A Clinician-Centered Pipeline for Annotation and Evaluation in Ultrasound AI Studies

arXiv:2606.19174v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clinician-centered evaluation is critical for validating medical AI systems, especially in ultrasound imaging where quantitative metrics do not always capture clinical usability. Existing medical image platforms primarily focus on dataset labeling. They lack integrated support for blinded model comparison and reproducible evaluation workflows. We present a clinician-centered pipeline for remote annotation and evaluation in ultrasound AI studies. The proposed pipeline uses a centralized server and lightweight browser interfaces to enable clinicians to perform annotation, blinded ranking, and review without local dataset downloads. The pipeline also supports multi-rater participation, centralized result aggregation, and automated statistical analysis. We validate the pipeline in a fetal ultrasound segmentation study with six raters spanning expert, generalist, and non-expert experience levels. The system automatically generated Spearman correlation, Kendall's $\tau$, and top-1 selection statistics. Results indicated moderate to strong agreement across experts and other groups. The blinded evaluation results showed a tendency for later active learning models to be preferred. These outcomes suggest that the pipeline can support clinician-centered annotation and reproducible human-\ac{AI} evaluation studies in ultrasound imaging. The proposed pipeline is available on \href{https://github.com/13204942/SonoRate}{GitHub}.

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

PhysVLA: Towards Physically-Grounded VLA for Embodied Robotic Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at mapping visual inputs and natural language instructions directly to robotic control policies. However, because they are trained primarily to fit behavioural demonstration data, they do not explicitly enforce fundamental physical principles such as rigid-body dynamics or contact constraints. This exposes a critical physics gap: standard temporal smoothing applied on top of single-step or chunked VLAs trades trajectory quality for added failures that short-term memory cannot resolve. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhysVLA (Physics-VLA), a plug-and-play, inference-time framework designed to wrap any frozen VLA backbone without retraining, fine-tuning, or weight access, with less than 1 ms of overhead per control step. PhysVLA intercepts the predicted control action, captures only the simulator or system state, and applies a dual-layered correction: (i) a phase-aware finite-state machine that structures discrete task segments (approach, grasp, transport, and place), and (ii) a selective Euler-Lagrange gate that activates only when a dynamics oracle detects kinodynamic inconsistency. Evaluated across OpenVLA, OpenVLA-OFT, Force-VLA, and Generalist-VLA on LIBERO-Spatial with a 7-DoF Franka Panda, the framework delivers absolute success rate increases of up to 17% and stability increases of up to 19% with no per-task regressions, improves trajectory efficiency by up to 15% across all four backbones, and shows up to a 10x improvement in trajectory jerk robustness on a Robosuite Lift cross-simulator sweep. We further validate the framework on a real Agilex Piper arm with a pick-and-place task, confirming that PhysVLA transfers to physical hardware without retraining, with success-rate improvements of up to 50%, establishing physical awareness as a composable, backbone-agnostic runtime module.

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

Granularity-Regulated Adaptive Computational Efficiency for Optimal Verification in Test-Time Scaling

Test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by investing additional compute at inference time. A central component of TTS is the verifier, which selects or scores candidate solutions to guide the search process. While prior work has explored the benefit of verification, a fundamental question remains underexplored: what is the optimal granularity of verification under a given compute budget? Coarse-grained outcome reward models (ORMs) and fine-grained process reward models (PRMs) represent two extremes, yet neither alone achieves compute-optimality across all regimes. In this paper, we establish a unified theoretical framework, called GRACE (\underline{G}ranularity-\underline{R}egulated \underline{A}daptive \underline{C}omputational \underline{E}fficiency), that characterizes the optimal verification granularity as an explicit function of problem difficulty, verifier accuracy, and compute budget. We prove that there exists a phase transition: fine-grained verification dominates when either the compute budget is large or the problem is hard, whereas coarse-grained verification is preferred in the low-budget, easy-problem regime. Our theory unifies Best-of-$N$, beam search, and step-level MCTS within a single Pareto-optimality framework, and motivates an adaptive granularity strategy that provably achieves the compute-performance Pareto frontier. Empirical results on MATH-500, GSM8K, and AIME benchmarks corroborate all four theoretical claims, with our adaptive strategy outperforming fixed-granularity baselines by up to 3.1\% accuracy at matched compute.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

KG-SoftMAP: Soft Knowledge-Graph Priors for Bayesian Network Structure Learning from Sparse Discrete Data

arXiv:2606.10358v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning Bayesian network (BN) structure from sparse discrete data is hard: when each instance records only a few variables, most variable pairs lack the joint observations needed for reliable scoring, and data-only methods recover little structure. However, imperfect domain knowledge, expressible as a weighted directed knowledge graph (KG), is often available. We propose KG-SoftMAP, which encodes such a KG as a finite-strength, confidence-weighted edge prior and maximizes a MAP objective combining the BDeu score with a logit-form prior; the KG may be expert-curated or LLM-extracted. On synthetic benchmarks with known DAGs, KG-SoftMAP reaches Directed-F1 (DF1) $0.19$–$0.32$ at observation rate $\rho=0.05$ and DF1 $0.44$–$0.97$ at $\rho\geq0.2$, while every data-only learner tested stays near zero under the same sparse masks. Recovery tracks KG quality: controlled corruption degrades it smoothly, a zero-signal KG yields DF1 $0.00$, and a blindly LLM-extracted KG with imperfect precision and recall still drives substantial recovery. On three real sparse educational datasets, the learned BN acts as a concept-level posterior model: on SAF it matches logistic regression (LR) within $0.03$ F1_FAIL while providing an inspectable concept graph, calibrated Fail probabilities, and tractable posterior queries from partial observations.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

GEN-Guard: Correcting Generalization Failures for Deployable Federated Surgical AI

Federated Learning (FL) in surgical video AI enables collaborative model training without sharing sensitive data. However, standard evaluation practices - selecting the "best" global model based only on validation data from participating hospitals - can lead to suboptimal deployment choices. We identify this critical failure mode as performance leakage, where the selected model overfits internal federation data and fails to generalize to unseen institutions. We propose GEN-Guard, a practical post-hoc framework to detect and correct generalization failures in federated surgical AI. It integrates Generalization Detection via Client-Blocked Evaluation (CBE), which validates performance on isolated client distributions to prevent performance leakage, and Generalization Correction through Disagreement-Aware Distillation (DAD), which learns adaptive feature-level corrections for cross-institutional robustness. Both components operate after standard FL convergence while providing robust support for zero-shot adaptation to unseen environments. We first quantify the severity of performance leakage, observing Model Selection Failures (MSFs) exceeding 80% under standard evaluation. GEN-Guard is evaluated on two multi-center clinical challenges: surgical phase recognition in laparoscopic cholecystectomy and polyp segmentation in colonoscopy. Across both datasets, GEN-Guard consistently corrects these failures, improving in-federation F1 scores by up to 2 points, unseen-institution performance by up to 3 points, and worst-case institutional performance by 3-9 points. Performance leakage represents a systematic and previously under-recognized risk in federated surgical AI. GEN-Guard provides a practical solution for detecting and correcting such failures. By improving cross-institutional robustness and zero-shot generalization, it strengthens the reliability of FL for real-world surgical deployment.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ParkingTransformer: LLM-Enhanced End-to-End Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Parking

arXiv:2606.17082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous parking has emerged as a critical task within the realm of autonomous driving. However, existing methods suffer from black-box characteristics, lacking high-level semantic understanding and interpretability, which impedes the realization of seamless long-distance autonomous parking from the road to the target spot. To address these limitations, we propose ParkingTransformer, a novel framework that leverages multi-view perception and the scene understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). By combining trajectory queries with LLMs implicit state features, our method interacts directly with historical information and raw sensor data to output planning trajectories, eliminating the need for dense Bird's-View (BEV) representations. To compensate for the inadequate spatial reasoning ability of LLMs, we introduce 3D positional encoding to explicitly inject spatial geometric awareness. Furthermore, a fixed-window streaming mechanism is designed for historical information processing, significantly improving long-term temporal processing efficiency and inference speed. Additionally, a coarse-to-fine decoding strategy is employed to progressively enhance trajectory precision. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted on the CARLA simulator and real-world vehicle platforms. The results demonstrate that our method achieves a driving score of 61.32 in CARLA simulator and an average success rate of 88.70% in real-world experiments, validating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

FlowRL: A Taxonomy and Modular Framework for Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion Policies

arXiv:2603.27450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Thanks to their remarkable flexibility, diffusion models and flow models have emerged as promising candidates for policy representation. However, efficient reinforcement learning (RL) upon these policies remains a challenge due to the lack of explicit log-probabilities for vanilla policy gradient estimators. While numerous attempts have been proposed to address this, the field lacks a unified perspective to reconcile these seemingly disparate methods, thus hampering ongoing development. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing a comprehensive taxonomy for RL algorithms with diffusion/flow policies. To support reproducibility and agile prototyping, we introduce a modular, JAX-based open-source codebase that leverages JIT-compilation for high-throughput training. Finally, we provide systematic and standardized benchmarks across Gym-Locomotion, DeepMind Control Suite, and IsaacLab, offering a rigorous side-by-side comparison of diffusion-based methods and guidance for practitioners to choose proper algorithms based on the application. Our work establishes a clear foundation for understanding and algorithm design, a high-efficiency toolkit for future research in the field, and an algorithmic guideline for practitioners in generative models and robotics. Our code is available at https://github.com/typoverflow/flow-rl.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Efficient On-Device Diffusion LLM Inference with Mobile NPU

arXiv:2606.13740v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) accelerate generation by denoising multiple tokens in parallel, making them attractive for latency-sensitive mobile inference. However, repeated denoising introduces substantial computation on smartphones. Mobile neural processing units (NPUs) offer high-throughput dense matrix computation, but efficiently exploiting them remains challenging: token commitment shrinks per-block effective workloads, token revision complicates KV cache reuse, and limited NPU-visible address space incurs costly remapping and data transfer overheads. In this paper, we propose llada.cpp, the first NPU-aware inference framework for accelerating dLLMs on smartphones. llada.cpp aligns block-wise dLLM inference with the execution characteristics of mobile NPUs through three techniques. (1) Multi-Block Speculative Decoding fills the shrinking workload in late-stage current-block decoding with speculative future-block tokens. (2) Dual-Path Progressive Revision keeps committed tokens revisable until stable and refreshes unstable tokens through a CPU-side path without stalling dense NPU execution. (3) Swap-Optimized Memory Runtime compacts NPU-visible address layouts and overlaps data staging with NPU computation to reduce remapping and transfer overheads. We implement llada.cpp as an end-to-end framework and evaluate it across diverse hardware platforms and dLLM workloads. llada.cpp reduces LLaDA-8B generation latency by 17x-42x over the CPU baseline with prefix KV cache reuse, while preserving generation quality.