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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

TA-RAG: Tone-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Peer-Support Health Communication

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) successfully grounds large language model (LLM) outputs in trusted documents, but factual grounding alone is insufficient for sensitive peer-support health communication. In domains such as HIV peer support, responses must also be accessible, stigma-free, empathetic, and tailored to the recipient. This paper presents TA-RAG, a lightweight, prompt-based tone-aware RAG framework that embeds explicit tone control into a RAG pipeline without requiring model fine-tuning. We operationalise tone across four core components: stigma-free rewriting, readability adjustment, recipient adaptation, and empathy rephrasing. We evaluate TA-RAG through component-level tests using questions derived from HIV Online Learning Australia (HOLA), UNAIDS terminology guidance, readability metrics, peer-support standards from National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA), and a public empathy dataset. Results show that the TA-RAG's components improve their targeted communication quality while preserving key content. These findings emphasise that prompt-based tone control is a potential direction for making RAG outputs suitable for sensitive peer-support health communication.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

DoubtProbe: Black-Box Jailbreak Defense via Structural Verification and Semantic Auditing

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing systems, black-box jailbreak defense has become an important practical problem. Existing defenses often rely on known-attack coverage, prompt-level semantic judgment, or local runtime control, yet these paths can become unstable under evolving prompt packaging, expression rewriting, and structure manipulation. We observe that many black-box jailbreaks do not remove the harmful goal, but reorganize the information needed to express and execute it, thereby evading safety alignment while remaining recoverable during generation. Motivated by this observation, we propose DoubtProbe, a dual-branch inference-time defense framework that combines structural verification with semantic auditing and formulates black-box jailbreak defense as consistency checking under controlled transformation. The structural branch extracts a structured representation from the original request, reconstructs the request under representation constraints, and detects information-preservation failures between the original and reconstructed requests; the semantic branch audits the original prompt directly. We evaluate DoubtProbe against representative black-box defenses on jailbreak and benign-request benchmarks, and further test backbone transfer from Qwen2.5-72B to Llama-3.1-70B. Results show that DoubtProbe achieves a stronger and more stable defense-utility trade-off: on Qwen2.5-72B, it reduces the JBB attack success rate from 0.293 to 0.100 and the CodeAttack attack success rate from 0.152 to 0.001, while maintaining false positive rates of 0.022 and 0.016 on AlpacaEval and OR-Bench; the same pattern remains stable on Llama-3.1-70B. These findings show that structural inconsistency signals provide a practical and generalizable basis for black-box jailbreak defense, especially when combined with semantic auditing.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Formalize Once, Edit the Rest: Efficient Lean-Based Answer Selection for Math Reasoning

With large language models (LLMs) increasingly applied to mathematical reasoning, formal proof assistants such as Lean can be leveraged to verify reasoning outputs with machine-checkable rigor, enabling use cases such as answer selection in test-time scaling with K sampled candidate answers. However, employing Lean requires that LLM outputs, originally in natural language, first be formalized. Existing Lean-based answer-selection work uses an autoformalization model to generate a formal statement in Lean for each candidate answer independently, incurring a significant computational cost. We propose BASE, a base-and-edit pipeline that formalizes a single base candidate per problem and derives the remaining K-1 statements by editing the answer expression in place. To facilitate this, we train a rewriter model LEANSCRIBE to localize the answer in the base formalization and generate a reusable edit function for the other K-1 candidates. BASE simultaneously improves selection accuracy and reduces formalization cost - a Pareto improvement that holds on all 12 (dataset, solver) configurations across four benchmarks and three solvers, cutting autoformalizer calls by about 5x at K=8, with the reduction expected to become larger as K grows. Code is available at https://github.com/ucr-rai/base-and-edit.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Recurrence After Hepatic Hydatid Cyst Surgery: Scolicidal Agent Application Technique and the Effect of Cystopiliary Fistula

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate long-term outcomes in patients who underwent surgical treatment for hepatic hydatid cyst (HCC) disease and, in particular, to investigate the effect of scolicidal agent (SA) application method and the presence of cystobiliary fistula (CBF) on the development of recurrence. Materials and Methods: This single-center, retrospective study included 197 patients who underwent surgical treatment for HCC disease. Hypertonic saline was used as SA in all patients and was classified as intracystic or pericystic application according to the application method. The presence of CBF was evaluated according to intraoperative and postoperative findings. Patients were followed for 86 months, and the development of recurrence was identified by radiological methods. Comparisons were made between the groups with and without recurrence in terms of SA application method and the presence of CBF. Results: The median age of the patients was 38 years, and the median follow-up period was 86 months. SA application was performed into the cyst in 51.3% of the patients and around the cyst in 48.7%. The presence of CBF was detected in 49.7% of the patients. No statistically significant difference was found between the recurrent and non-recurrent groups in terms of SA application method (p = 0.344). Similarly, no significant relationship was found between the presence of CBF and the development of recurrence (p = 0.721). Conclusion: This study showed that the SA application method and the presence of CBF are not determinants of recurrence in HCC disease. It is thought that recurrence rates can be kept low with appropriate surgical technique and effective biliary tract management.

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

TwinBI: An Agentic Digital Twin for Efficient Augmented Interactions with Business Intelligence Dashboards

arXiv:2606.13731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Business intelligence (BI) increasingly combines dashboard interaction with LLM-based assistance, but these two modes often fall out of sync during multi-step analysis. As users switch between direct dashboard manipulation and natural-language queries, it becomes difficult to preserve a consistent analytical state across filters, hierarchies, metrics, and chart context. We present TwinBI, an agentic digital-twin framework that couples an LLM-based agent system with an executable BI dashboard state. TwinBI unifies conversational interaction, dashboard manipulation, semantic grounding, and provenance tracking through a shared analytical state reconstructed from a unified interaction log. It also exposes artifacts such as schema views, SQL, logs, and an /insights command for state-grounded analytical summaries. We evaluate TwinBI in two complementary ways. In a controlled A/B benchmark with the same backbone agent, TwinBI improves exact-match accuracy from 43.3% to 63.3%, partial-credit accuracy from 48.3% to 70.8%, and substantially reduces timeout rate from 40.0% to 10.0% relative to Dashboard alone. In a usability study, participants benefited from the integrated dashboard-and-chat workflow, with high task accuracy, moderate workload, and favorable ratings for state-aware interaction mechanisms. These results suggest that TwinBI improves both agent-level analytical reliability and user-facing analytical support by turning visible dashboard state into richer actionable context. Our dataset and source code are available at: https://github.com/simonjisu/TwinBI

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Spectral Analysis of Molecular Features: When Richer Features Do Not Guarantee Better Generalization

arXiv:2510.14217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The spectral properties of feature embeddings offer critical insights into model generalization and representation quality. While deep learning models are widely used for molecular property prediction, kernel methods remain competitive in low-data regimes, yet their spectral behavior is largely unexplored. We present the first comprehensive spectral analysis of kernel ridge regression across diverse representations-including molecular fingerprints (ECFP), pretrained transformers, graph neural networks, and 3D descriptors-evaluated on QM9 and 3 MoleculeNet benchmarks. Surprisingly, richer spectral features do not consistently yield better generalization performance, contradicting common representation heuristics used in self-supervised learning (SSL). Across 4 spectral metrics, only ECFP-based kernels show a strictly positive correlation with performance. Transformer and global 3D representations exhibit mixed behavior, whereas local 3D representations show consistently negative correlations. Truncation analysis further emphasizes this disparity: for local 3D representations on thermodynamic targets, fewer than 2\% of eigenvalues (and occasionally as few as 0.02\%) are needed to recover 95\% of performance, whereas ECFP and transformer kernels require significantly more. By demonstrating a strong dependence on both task and representation, our results challenge the heuristic that richer spectra inherently improve generalization, providing new guidance for evaluating representations in SSL and in label-limited scientific tasks.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Virtuous AI is an Existential Risk

arXiv:2606.13739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines trade-offs between AI safety and well-being relative to (i) one of the most promising methods for finetuning super-capable AIs, 'Constitutional AI', and (ii) one of the most influential approaches to understanding complex ethical decision making and the conditions for the well-being of rational agents, 'Virtue Ethics'. We finetune various models using a 'Virtuous agent' constitution, a 'Subordinate agent' constitution, and a 'Generic agent' constitution, and evaluate them on 'general safety' (toxic behaviors, misinformation, etc.) and also on their willingness to endorse a wide-range of behaviors that, if adopted by a super-powerful AI, would significantly increase the level of existential risk for humanity. Our results suggest that there is a trade-off between reducing existential risk and reinforcing the beliefs and dispositions that would be conducive to an AI agent's well-being. They also suggest that there is a trade-off between existential risk and general safety: if we finetune an AI to adopt beliefs and dispositions that substantially reduce its existential risk – by shaping the AI to be systematically subordinate to external human authorities – we thereby increase the likelihood that a human user can deliberately induce the AI to engage in various kinds of generally unsafe behaviors.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Arbitrarily Configurable Wavefunctions via Imaginary Gauge Phase Imprint in Non-Hermitian Lattices

arXiv:2603.28153v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a general framework, termed the imaginary gauge phase imprint (IGPI), which enables engineering arbitrarily configurable wavefunctions with exact solutions and self-organization dynamics in any-dimensional non-Hermitian lattices under imaginary gauge fields. Using this method, we uncover a novel phase with exact critical wavefunctions, dubbed the skin critical phase (SCP), which is marked by unconventional localization, topological-skin, and dynamical characteristics. Furthermore, we validate the IGPI by imprinting and visualizing complex fractal states with Sierpinski-carpet and Koch-snowflake profiles, as well as exotic super-moire and 3D-moire states in regular lattices. Our work not only offers fresh insights into non-Hermitian critical and fractal physics, but also provides a rigorous paradigm for controlling and visualizing wavefunction patterns using the IGPI in engineered non-Hermitian systems.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

The Information-Theoretic Benefit of Shared Representations under Orthogonality Constraints

arXiv:2606.16028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern deep learning architectures are increasingly multi-task and multi-modal, using a pretrained foundation model combined with task-specific, fine-tuned models. Empirically, exploiting similarity across different problems, instead of solving them individually, can significantly improve overall performance. While the generalization and sample complexity properties of multitask learning have been widely studied, the parametric complexity of joint approximation in comparison to separate approximation remains less well understood. The question is particularly relevant in modern deep learning, where models are increasingly required to satisfy structural constraints such as equivariance, conservation laws, or orthogonality. We prove lower and upper bounds on the description-length for separate and joint approximation classes, respectively, in uniform norm. We build a class of orthogonal functions by composing a shared hard feature, realized by a Rademacher-Haar wavelet series, with Sawtooth-Walsh readouts to enforce orthogonality of output coordinates. The dyadic tree structure of the Rademacher-Haar wavelet concentrates the approximation hardness in the common feature component, while the readouts act as task-specific heads. Using an information-theoretic framework, we obtain a sharp gap between the optimal approximation rates achievable by joint and separate coding. Finally, we realize this separation in a neural network model using Heaviside activations via reduction to triangle-wave approximation. Our results show that even under an orthogonality constraint joint approximation requires strictly fewer bits in compositional architectures, provided the tasks share a latent hard feature. This provides theoretical insight into the description-length-efficiency of compositional multi-output architectures and clarifies how neural networks can retain expressivity under geometric constraints.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Non-invasive intracranial pressure waveform reconstruction with deep learning

Purpose: Continuous intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring requires invasive instrumentation, reaching only a narrow subset of critically ill patients. We tested whether deep learning models trained on routinely acquired extracranial signals can reconstruct continuous ICP waveforms at clinically relevant accuracy in an independent external cohort. Methods: In adults admitted to the ICU at a single quaternary health system, five deep learning architectures were trained on high-frequency arterial blood pressure (ABP), photoplethysmography (PPG), and electrocardiography (ECG) waveforms, using invasive (intraparenchymal) ICP as ground truth. Two fusion strategies (early and late) and three training objectives (waveform-morphology, baseline robust regression, and weighted robust regression) were evaluated. Models were externally validated on the held-out MIMIC-III Waveform Database. Performance was assessed by mean absolute error (MAE) and waveform similarity by Pearson correlation (r). Results: We analyzed data from 158 critically ill adults (~5,322 hours) across two quaternary health systems (Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston). Validation MAE ranged from 4.276 mmHg [95% CI 4.269, 4.283] (gated recurrent, late fusion) to 4.946 mmHg [95% CI 4.938, 4.956] (attention-based, early fusion), with Pearson r ranging from 0.599 [95% CI 0.599, 0.600] to 0.722 [95% CI 0.722, 0.723]. The multiscale encoder-decoder model demonstrated the most favorable MAE-correlation tradeoff. Conclusion: This is the first demonstration that continuous ICP waveform reconstruction from bedside signals generalizes across institutions at clinically relevant accuracy, establishing a foundation for non-invasive ICP monitoring and motivating validation across broader populations and ICP ranges.

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

Temporally Consistent Graph Q-Networks for Intelligent Network Control

arXiv:2606.13848v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mobile networks continue to grow in complexity and next generation networks are expected to support both increasing traffic loads and more diverse services. As network complexity rises, optimizing antenna parameters under dynamic or changing objectives becomes increasingly challenging. We propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm for high-level control and orchestration of mobile networks. The Temporally Consistent Graph Q-Network (TC-GQN) algorithm learns a self-predicting representation of the whole network that is task-independent and aggregates information from all base-stations. A graph neural network is trained using a global reward function to assign coordinated local actions based on the learned encoding of the global network state. We evaluate the algorithm in a simulated environment to orchestrate an energy-saving feature across multiple sectors and multiple carriers under different quality of service (QoS) constraints. The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art graph-based baselines and a competitive rule-based controller by improving hardware sleep time while maintaining QoS. Moreover, the learned representation enables rapid adaptation to changing intents.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Formal Framework for Declarative Agentic AI in Business Process Analysis

arXiv:2606.15291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI opens new opportunities for automating Business Process (BP), enabling autonomous decision-making and dynamic adaptation. However, realising this potential requires BP entities and their interactions to be defined with formal precision. This paper presents a formal framework for Agentic BP analysis through the AGO methodology. AGO captures the modelling perspective in terms of who is acting (Agents), why it is carried out (Goals), and what the relevant entities are (Objects). Grounded in set theory and mathematical logic, we formally define the AGO entity types and their interactions, organising all definitions into a BP Knowledge Base (BPKB). The resulting BPKB supports structured querying, incremental updates, and automatic generation of BP workflows, while ensuring soundness and completeness of the derived paths.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

Reinforcement learning-driven unified generative framework for multi-objective RNA codon design

Current RNA codon design methods are limited by inefficient long-sequence processing and poor generalizability, often relying on a decoupled "generate-or-optimize" paradigm. We introduce RNARL, a reinforcement learning-driven framework that unifies sequence generation with multi-objective optimization. RNARL directly learns to generate high-performance sequences, effectively optimizing sequences over 3,900 nucleotides and demonstrating superior performance and universality across six species and five RNA types. RNARL thus establishes an effective and generalizable framework for RNA codon design. Finally, a user-friendly web platform is freely available to facilitate its application for RNA therapeutic design.

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

Speeding up the annotation process in semantic segmentation industrial applications

arXiv:2606.19934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current machine learning models commonly require large and well-annotated datasets. However, the annotation process often becomes a bottleneck, with increased complexity leading to higher chances of human errors. Within this context, our goal in this paper is to leverage unsupervised algorithms to improve data annotation efficiency for complex semantic segmentation problems in industrial materials science. Previous research has quantified labeling time and others explored unsupervised methods. However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to quantify how much unsupervised algorithms accelerate the labeling process. We aim to validate the extent to which this laborious process can be accelerated, focusing on semantic segmentation tasks that involve annotating each pixel of high-resolution images, such as the microstructure characterization challenge in materials science. Specifically, we demonstrate that by using unsupervised computer vision algorithms, the time required for the labeling process can be reduced from 170 hours to 37 hours, achieving an approximate reduction of 78\%. The dataset we work with includes large images of dimensions 1280x959 and 960x703, which further increases the complexity of the annotation task. Despite these challenges, we create and share the largest public steel microstructure segmentation dataset to date, available under MIT License with permanent DOI, contributing a fully annotated, high-resolution dataset to the field. Additionally, this is the first work to compare the labeling time from scratch (a common approach in previous studies) to the labeling time when using these unsupervised algorithms as a pre-annotation step. Furthermore, we provide a Deep Learning model trained on this dataset, validated by field experts, and deployed in an industrial setting, serving as an initial benchmark for this public dataset.

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

Geometric Action Model for Robot Policy Learning

Generalist robot policies must follow user instructions while reasoning about how objects, cameras, and robot actions interact in the 3D physical world. Recent vision-language-action models (VLAs) and video world-action models (WAMs) inherit strong semantic or temporal priors from large-scale foundation models, but they still operate primarily on 2D image frames or 2D-derived latent spaces, leaving implicit the 3D geometry required for contact-rich manipulation. We propose the Geometric Action Model (GAM), a language-conditioned manipulation policy that directly repurposes a pretrained geometric foundation model (GFM) as a shared substrate for perception, temporal prediction, and action decoding. GAM splits the GFM at an intermediate layer: the shallow layers serve as an observation encoder, and a causal future predictor inserted at the split layer forecasts future latent tokens conditioned on language, proprioception, and action history. The predicted future tokens are then routed through the remaining GFM blocks for feature propagation and decoding, allowing a single backbone to produce both future geometry and actions. This design equips the GFM with language-conditioned temporal world modeling through minimal architectural modification while preserving its rich geometric priors. Across a broad suite of simulation and real-robot manipulation benchmarks, GAM is more accurate, more robust, faster, and lighter than current foundation-model-scale baselines.

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

Critical spectral behavior and large deviations for geometric $\alpha$-stable processes

arXiv:2606.17501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study the Schrödinger-type operator associated with geometric stable processes on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$, especially the differentiability of spectral function. Let $\mathcal{H}$ be the generator of the geometric stable process and $\mu$ a smooth measure on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. Then the spectral function $C(\theta)$ is defined as $C(\theta) = -\inf \sigma(-\mathcal{H} - \theta \mu)$, where $\sigma(\mathcal{A})$ denotes the spectrum of $\mathcal{A}$ and $\theta$ is a real parameter. Since the geometric stable process exhibits severe local singularities in its Lévy measure, its transition semigroup lacks ultracontractivity, which invalidates classical methods for proving the differentiability. To overcome this obstacle, we use the compact embedding of the extended Dirichlet space into $L^2(\mu)$. As a primary application of this differentiability, we establish a large deviation principle for a positive continuous additive functional associated with the smooth measure $\mu$.

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

AQ4SViT: An Automated Quantization Framework with Search Gating Policy for Compressing Spiking Vision Transformers

arXiv:2606.15523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking Vision Transformers (SViTs) have emerged as alternative low-power ViT models, but their large sizes hinder their deployments on resource-constrained embedded AI systems. To address this, state-of-the-art works proposed quantization techniques to compress SViT models, but their manual, human-guided approach needs a huge design time and power/energy consumption to find the appropriate quantization setting for each given network, making this approach not scalable for quantizing multiple networks. Toward this, we propose AQ4SViT, a novel automated quantization framework for SViTs that can provide quick quantization settings with good trade-offs between accuracy and memory. To achieve this, AQ4SViT employs the following key ideas: quantization search strategy that evaluates the quantization setting candidates while considering the accuracy constraint; and search gating policy that quickly evaluates and selects promising quantization candidates by leveraging membrane potential drift as a performance proxy. In the search gating policy, AQSViT employs two search algorithm variants to provide trade-off options: Greedy search, which performs fast but may lead to local optima; and Beam search, which performs slower but has better performance in finding global optima selection due to a wider search space. Experimental results show that AQ4SViT-Greedy quickly finds the appropriate quantization settings, achieving up to 6.6x faster search time and up to 82.5% memory saving compared to the state-of-the-art; while AQ4SViT-Beam further reduces the memory footprint by up to 90% compared to the state-of-the-art, but with 4.5x longer search time; all these results are obtained while maintaining high accuracy within 1.5% from the original/non-quantized models on the ImageNet dataset. These results highlight that AQ4SViT framework offers advancements toward SViT deployments on embedded AI systems.

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

Discrete optimal transport is a strong audio adversarial attack

arXiv:2509.14959v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we investigate discrete optimal transport (DOT) as a black-box attack against modern automatic speaker verification (ASV) and anti-spoofing countermeasure (CM) systems. Our attack operates as a post-processing distribution-alignment step. Frame-level WavLM embeddings of generated speech (or another person speech) are aligned to an unpaired bona fide speech pool using entropic optimal transport and a top-k barycentric projection, followed by neural vocoding. Unlike gradient-based attacks, the proposed method requires no access to model parameters, gradients, or training data. Experiments on ASVspoof2019 and ASVspoof5 demonstrate that DOT attack substantially increases CM EER and substantially degrades ASV performance across multiple spoofing attacks. The attack transfers across datasets and remains effective after CM fine-tuning. Analysis using speaker similarity, Fréchet Audio Distance, and visualization of embedding distributions suggests that DOT succeeds by shifting source speech toward bona fide regions of the representation space rather than by maximizing speaker similarity. These results indicate that optimal-transport-based distribution alignment represents a previously underexplored attack vector for contemporary ASV and anti-spoofing systems.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Data-Forcing Distillation: Restoring Diversity and Fidelity in Few-Step Video Generation

Recent progress has shown promise in distilling multi-step video diffusion models into efficient few-step students. Among them, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) and its successor DMD2 achieved strong generation quality and fast convergence. However, due to the nature of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) objective, these methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: a substantial drop in sample diversity, and visibly over-saturated outputs that deviate from real-video appearance. In this work, we propose Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), a simple post-training framework that restores diversity and fidelity in DMD with only a single-line of code change. At its core is the teacher score discrepancy to guide the student toward the real-data distribution, pulling it to missing modes (mitigating mode collapse) and away from problematic modes absent in real data (avoiding over-saturation). We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of our framework and validate our approach on text-to-video, image-to-video, and autoregressive video generation. With only 100–300 steps of finetuning, DFD effectively restores diversity and fidelity on both Wan2.1-1.3B and Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B model, resolving the over-saturation artifacts with significantly better video dynamics and appearance, and even outperforms the teacher model.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Hierarchical Modeling of ICD Codes in EHR Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.15447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electronic health record foundation models typically treat ICD diagnosis codes as flat tokens, overlooking the clinically meaningful hierarchical structure that captures disease families, subcategories, and fine-grained diagnostic detail. As a result, existing EHR representation learning methods do not explicitly exploit the hierarchical structure already present in the coding system. In this work, we study ICD-10-CM hierarchy as a general inductive bias for clinical representation learning. We investigate two complementary mechanisms for incorporating hierarchy: first, by augmenting diagnosis sequences in a BERT-style transformer with tokens corresponding to different levels of the ICD hierarchy, and second, by injecting hierarchy into graph-based code representations through hierarchy-aware edges combined with diagnosis co-occurrence structure. Across these settings, we evaluate whether explicit hierarchy improves downstream prediction, which levels of the hierarchy are most useful, whether hierarchy encoding improves transfer across datasets, and how hierarchy reshapes embedding similarity structure. We conduct experiments on two large-scale real-world clinical datasets: MIMIC-IV, used for pretraining and in-domain evaluation, and eICU, used to assess cross-dataset transfer via frozen encoder probing. Our findings show that explicitly encoding ICD hierarchy improves over flat code representations in both in-domain and cross-dataset settings, while revealing that the most useful level of hierarchy depends on both the task and the modeling approach. More broadly, we focus on hierarchy-aware EHR representation learning and show that the benefits of encoding hierarchy are generalizable across modeling settings and hierarchy levels.

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

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

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

23.
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.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The proteins that protect us from deadly mutations

作者:

Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States. Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States.

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

Enhancing LLM Safety Through a Theoretical Minimax Game Lens

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) necessitates effective mechanisms to ensure their responsible deployment by accurately distinguishing unsafe content from benign content. While substantial safety datasets are available in English, multilingual safety modeling remains underexplored due to limited open-source safety datasets in other languages. Even within English datasets, safe yet sensitive corner-case content is scarce, leading to shortcut learning by models and non-trivial false-positive rates. To mitigate these issues, we introduce a novel minimax reinforcement learning (RL) framework wherein a data generator and a classifier model co-evolve, facilitating the production of high-quality synthetic multilingual safety data. We theoretically formalize this interaction as a minimax game and rigorously demonstrate convergence to a Nash equilibrium. Empirical evaluations confirm that our synthetic data generation method significantly enhances the classifier model performance, enabling a substantially smaller model to surpass the state-of-the-art by nearly 10% on English benchmarks while achieving 4.5x faster inference speed. These results establish a scalable and efficient methodology for synthetic data generation, advancing the development of safer and more robust multilingual LLM deployments.