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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

SpeechDx: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Clinical Speech AI

Speech offers a uniquely informative window into health by simultaneously engaging neurological, motor, respiratory, and vocal systems. Current clinical speech AI methods have largely progressed through isolated condition-specific studies, making results difficult to compare and generalization difficult to assess. We introduce SpeechDx, a large-scale benchmark for clinical speech AI spanning 12 datasets and 27 tasks across diverse health conditions. To enable evaluation across shared clinical mechanisms, SpeechDx structures tasks by the stage of speech production they disrupt: conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. The benchmark tests generalization by including tasks with limited labeled data and evaluating the same health condition across multiple datasets, distinguishing clinically meaningful patterns from dataset artefacts. We systematically evaluate 12 state-of-the-art audio encoders across all tasks and under zero-shot cross-condition transfer. Results show that large-scale speech models represent the strongest overall baselines, domain-specific models improve performance only on closely matched tasks, and no current representation generalizes reliably across the clinical speech landscape. SpeechDx establishes a shared evaluation framework for tracking progress toward general-purpose clinical speech representations

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Global Offshore Wind Infrastructure: Deployment and Operational Dynamics from Dense Sentinel-1 Time Series

The offshore wind energy sector is expanding rapidly, increasing the need for independent, high-temporal-resolution monitoring of infrastructure deployment and operation at global scale. While Earth Observation based offshore wind infrastructure mapping has matured for spatial localization, existing open datasets lack temporally dense and semantically fine-grained information on construction and operational dynamics. We introduce a global Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) time series data corpus that resolves deployment and operational phases of offshore wind infrastructure from 2016Q1 to 2025Q1. Building on an updated object detection workflow, we compile 15,606 time series at detected infrastructure locations, with overall 14,840,637 events as analysis-ready 1D SAR backscatter profiles, one profile per Sentinel-1 acquisition and location. To enable direct use and benchmarking, we release (i) the analysis ready 1D SAR profiles, (ii) event-level baseline semantic labels generated by a rule-based classifier, and (iii) an expert-annotated benchmark dataset of 553 time series with 328,657 event labels. The baseline classifier achieves a macro F1 score of 0.84 in event-wise evaluation and an area under the collapsed edit similarity-quality threshold curve (AUC) of 0.785, indicating temporal coherence. We demonstrate that the resulting corpus supports global-scale analyses of deployment dynamics, the identification of differences in regional deployment patterns, vessel interactions, and operational events, and provides a reference for developing and comparing time series classification methods for offshore wind infrastructure monitoring.

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

The Initial Exploration Problem in Knowledge Graph Exploration

arXiv:2602.21066v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge Graphs (KGs) enable the integration and representation of complex information across domains, but their semantic richness and structural complexity create substantial barriers for lay users without expertise in semantic web technologies. When encountering an unfamiliar KG, such users face a distinct orientation challenge: they do not know what questions are possible, how the knowledge is structured, or how to begin exploration. This paper identifies and theorises this phenomenon as the Initial Exploration Problem (IEP). Drawing on theories from information behaviour and human-computer interaction, including ASK, exploratory search, information foraging, and cognitive load theory, we develop a conceptual framing of the IEP characterised by three interdependent barriers: scope uncertainty, ontology opacity, and query incapacity. We argue that these barriers converge at the moment of first contact, distinguishing the IEP from related concepts that presuppose an existing starting point or information goal. Analysing KG exploration interfaces at the level of interaction primitives, we suggest that many systems rely on epistemic assumptions that do not hold at first contact. This reveals a structural gap in the design space: the absence of interaction primitives for scope revelation, mechanisms that communicate what a KG contains without requiring users to formulate queries or interpret ontological structures. In articulating the IEP, this paper provides a theoretical lens for evaluating KG interfaces and for designing entry-point scaffolding that supports initial exploration.

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

State-Grounded Multi-Agent Synthetic Data Generation for Tool-Augmented LLMs

Training tool-augmented LLM agents requires large corpora of multi-turn, tool-grounded conversational data that is expensive to annotate, privacy-constrained in production settings, and largely absent from public datasets. We present StateGen, a synthetic data generation platform that produces scored, reasoning-trace-rich training conversations by orchestrating a four-role LLM loop: a persona-conditioned user simulator, an agent under test, a state-grounded tool simulator, and a multi-axis LLM judge. The key architectural contribution is an authoritative state manager that maintains a structured world-state object across turns, enforcing a backend-is-truth invariant that eliminates the dominant class of tool-call hallucinations by construction. StateGen extends naturally to hierarchical multi-agent settings by declaring sub-agents as tools, all sharing a single state object. We report results on 64,698 evaluated conversations across three production corpora: tool-call hallucination scores reach 9.66/10, the system supports persona-driven variation via a 23-dimensional trait vector, and a cleanly separated train and golden evaluation set split confirms the data is not memorization bait (per-criterion gap analysis). Comparison with eight external systems shows that no single publicly available platform combines multi-turn generation, state-grounded tool simulation, hierarchical multi-agent support, and built-in judge scoring.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Remote sensing data imputation using deep learning for multispectral imagery

Remote sensing techniques have been increasingly utilised in aquatic applications in recent years. A common challenge in using optical satellite data is the presence of missing observations due to cloud cover. These data gaps can lead to missed detection of critical events, such as algal blooms, in lakes of high interest to water authorities. As a result, enhancing the completeness of optical satellite datasets is crucial for improving the monitoring and prediction of algal blooms. In this study, we compared a traditional data imputation method (i.e., linear interpolation) with deep learning models for reconstructing missing spectral bands across four lakes with historical records of algal blooms. The deep learning models adopted include CNN-based architectures (i.e., CNN, Inception Resnet, and Autoencoder) and CNN-LSTM-based architectures (i.e., CNN-LSTM, Resnet-LSTM, and Autoencoder-LSTM). Our results demonstrated that deep learning models substantially outperformed the baseline linear interpolation method in imputing spectral band values within artificially masked regions. Among these models, CNN delivered the best performance across most lakes. Furthermore, we evaluated the performance of algal bloom indices (i.e., Green/Red and NDCI) derived from the imputed imagery by comparing them with the observed data. Our results demonstrate that deep learning models are effective for imputing missing data in PlanetScope SuperDove imagery, enabling more reliable applications in water monitoring.

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

Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meta-reinforcement learning enables fast adaptation by extracting shared structure from related tasks, but existing end-to-end methods often couple task inference with embodiment-specific control. This coupling can obscure non-parametric task semantics, reduce sample efficiency, and limit cross-agent reuse. We propose a meta-knowledge reutilization framework that learns task-level knowledge on a dynamics-simplified agent and transfers it to heterogeneous agents. The framework uses a Bayesian non-parametric prior to organize latent task modes and a high-level policy to generate task-level magnitude guidance. To bridge reusable task knowledge with different embodiments, we introduce a semantic-magnitude interface and a lightweight temporal adaptor, which convert frozen meta-knowledge into temporally aligned subgoals for embodiment-specific low-level controllers. Experiments on multiple locomotion agents show that our framework reduces final-step tracking error by 94.75% – 99.79% compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines and achieves comparable deployment performance with about 23.8% of their interaction data.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Safety-Aware Denoiser for Text Diffusion Models

arXiv:2605.08116v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work on text diffusion models offers a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, but controlling their safety remains underexplored. Existing safety approaches are geared toward autoregressive models and typically rely on post-hoc filtering or inference-time interventions. These are inadequate for effectively addressing safety risks in text diffusion models. We propose the Safety-Aware Denoiser (SAD), a safety-guidance framework in text diffusion models. The SAD modifies the iterative denoising process such that the text sample at the final denoising step is steered toward provably safe regions of the text space. This inference-time method can integrate safety constraints into the denoiser, avoiding computationally expensive retraining of the underlying diffusion model and enabling flexible, lightweight safety guidance. We evaluate the safety of the generated text using the SAD, with respect to hazard taxonomy, memorization, and jailbreak. Experimental results show that SAD substantially reduces unsafe generations while preserving generation quality, diversity, and fluency, outperforming existing methods. These results demonstrate that our safety guidance during denoising provides an effective and scalable mechanism for enforcing safety in text diffusion models.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroEngine: Generative single-cell aging trajectories reveal a bidirectionally traversable identity core and direction-specific inflammatory remodeling

Authors:

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps aging tissues at high resolution but is destructive, preventing longitudinal tracking; dropout and zero-inflation artifacts, amplified by shift-invariant linear simulations, confound age-associated variability. We developed GeroEngine, a technical-artifact-aware framework combining VAE-based trajectory simulation, LOPO cross-validation, linear baselines, reverse traversal, and reverse-directed network inference. In microglia and HSCs, the VAE reduced technical-artifact carryover while preserving trajectory heterogeneity and improving alignment to artifact-reduced reference manifolds. Consensus GeroTargets and GeroRegulators defined tissue-specific GeroNetworks organized into three pillars: lineage/replication identity collapse, a sex-dimorphic endocrine/stress core, and inflammatory remodeling. Forward and reverse simulations aligned to the common young[->]old aging axis revealed a sign-coherent, direction-specific program: identity/replication targets were bidirectionally recovered, whereas MHC/NF-{kappa}B inflammatory programs were preferentially forward-recovered. These results support identity collapse as a deep traversable core of aging and nominate upstream homeostatic restoration over downstream inflammatory suppression.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin counting via projection noise measurement of mesoscopic solid-state spin ensemble

arXiv:2606.14437v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum projection noise is the fundamental noise source for the population measurement of spin ensembles. While projection-noise-limited measurements have been extensively studied in atomic systems, corresponding experiments on solid-state spin ensembles remain challenging due to dominant classical readout noise. Here, we report direct measurement of the quantum projection noise of mesoscopic ensembles of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) spin defects at room temperature. Our experiment is enabled by a high optically-detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) contrast of over 20% for a single crystallographic orientation of the defect spins, obtained by combining polarization-selective optical excitation with spin-to-charge conversion. We use our protocol to demonstrate projection noise measurements and spin counting from nanoscale NV ensembles of up to 43 spins. We further demonstrate that the protocol allows for significant gains in sensitivity for magnetometry applications without need for cryogenic operation or high bias magnetic fields.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

When Less Is Not More: DICEPro Mitigates the Impact of Incomplete Reference Matrices on Cellular Frequency Deconvolution.

Cellular deconvolution aims to estimate the frequencies of different cell populations from gene expression measurements in a biological sample. Supervised approaches, such as CIBERSORTx and DISSECT, critically depend on the reference signature matrix, which encodes the gene expression profiles of cell-types based on prior knowledge. Despite numerous deconvolution methods, the impact of missing cell populations in the reference matrix remains understudied. Here, we evaluate the robustness of state-of-the-art deconvolution approaches using simulations based on real dataset examples combined with statistical modeling, validated against published data, and multiple real benchmark datasets. Results show that deconvolution performance remains stable when the reference matrix includes most cell-types, but declines sharply as the matrix becomes incomplete, especially for abundant cell populations. To address the limitations of incomplete reference matrices, we introduce DICEPro, an optimization-based framework designed to enhance existing deconvolution methods. By systematically adjusting the reference signatures, DICEPro better accounts for missing or underrepresented cell populations, leading to improved precision and robustness. We show that DICEPro consistently boosts deconvolution performance across both simulated datasets, derived from real data examples, and multiple real biological datasets, offering a practical solution when standard methods are hindered by incomplete references.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A uniform-in-time weakly convergent explicit numerical method for the underdamped Langevin equation with polynomial potentials

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15175v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The underdamped Langevin equation is a fundamental model in statistical mechanics for sampling Gibbs measures and simulating molecular dynamics, for which numerical methods with uniform-in-time weak convergence are essential for accurately reproducing long-time statistical observables and invariant measures of the underlying dynamics. Currently, such uniform-in-time weak convergence is established for implicit schemes, but remains unknown for explicit ones under polynomially growing potentials. To improve efficiency in long-time simulations, we propose the first explicit numerical method for the underdamped Langevin equation with polynomially growing potentials that is proven to achieve uniform-in-time weak convergence. The explicit numerical method is constructed by introducing a dissipativity on the scalar auxiliary variable (SAV), which we call the DSAV method. The proposed DSAV method enables the approximation of the invariant measure for the underdamped Langevin equation with a precision of $\varepsilon$ at a significantly reduced computational cost of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-1} \log(\varepsilon^{-1}))$. In addition, we establish the existence and positivity of the density function of the numerical solution without using the Malliavin calculus. Numerical experiments are performed to verify the theoretical findings and demonstrate the long-time stability of the proposed numerical method.

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

Runtime Skill Audit: Targeted Runtime Probing for Agent Skill Security

arXiv:2606.11671v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills let LLM agents reuse instructions, resources, tools, and workflows, but they also create a new place for malicious behavior to hide. A skill may look benign in its documentation or code while becoming harmful only when it is invoked with particular user requests, local assets, persistent state, or multi-step tool interactions. This makes purely static vetting brittle. We present Runtime Skill Audit (RSA), a dynamic analysis method that audits skills by asking what the skill-mediated agent actually does under targeted runtime conditions. Instead of testing every skill with the same generic tasks, RSA profiles risk-relevant interfaces, prepares the execution context needed to exercise them, and assigns security labels from the resulting trace evidence. We instantiate RSA on OpenClaw and evaluate it on 100 skills against representative static baselines. RSA achieves 90.0\% accuracy with an 88.0\% true positive rate and an 8.0\% false positive rate, improving accuracy by 13.0 percentage points over the best static baseline. Under self-evolving attacks, static detectors collapse after one or two rounds, while RSA continues to detect 19–20 out of 20 malicious skills across rounds.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

ATRIA: Adaptive Traceable ECG Reporting with Iterative Agents

arXiv:2606.24392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing ECG report generation is tightly coupled – interpretation and reporting fused end-to-end, so errors propagate without stage-level recourse – while agent-based systems decouple tasks but remain single-pass, never revisiting earlier outputs. Clinical ECG reporting instead unfolds iteratively, requiring progressive context integration and bidirectional editing. We present \textsc{ATRIA}, a multi-agent ECG reporting system that mirrors the clinician's iterative workflow: it binds every report claim to its supporting evidence, flags statements unsupported by that evidence, incorporates additional context mid-session, and lets clinicians verify and revise individual findings rather than accept one opaque output. Because its agents use ECG analysis models already in clinical use, the underlying findings are clinically trustworthy; and as a cloud-based web service, \textsc{ATRIA} is ready for immediate deployment. We demonstrate \textsc{ATRIA} through four interaction cases, with a live demo and video available.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

FALCON: Transforming Cyber Threat Intelligence into Deployable IDS Rules with Self-Reflection

Signature-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) detect malicious activity by matching network or host events against predefined rules. Security analysts manually develop these rules from Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI). As threats evolve, this manual pipeline faces two bottlenecks. Before authoring a new rule, an analyst must reconcile the incoming CTI with the existing rule base and determine whether to create, update, or retire one. This process is challenging due to the representational differences between the CTI and Rule formats. This gap limits the effectiveness of keyword- and embedding-based search, making rule reconciliation cognitively demanding and, in turn, contributing to "rule bloat". Second, automated verification of a new rule is inherently difficult as zero-day threats lack ground truth from simulated testing. Hence, standard metrics cannot prove that a rule semantically adheres to the CTI, and the use of LLMs leads to non-deterministic behavior. To address these challenges, we introduce FALCON, an agentic framework for CTI-grounded rule retrieval, generation, and validation. At its core, a novel CTI-Rule semantic scorer, quantifies the functional alignment between a CTI and a rule; the same signal drives a retriever that surfaces relevant deployed rules and a ground-truth-free validator that scores generated ones. Around it, a generation pipeline produces deployable rules from CTI in real time and refines them through self-reflective syntactic, semantic, and performance validators. Across network (Snort) and host-based (YARA) platforms on a purpose-built CTI-Rule dataset, FALCON attains a mean relevance of 0.72 (approx), with 84% inter-rater agreement among cybersecurity analysts, underscoring the promise of real-time security automation.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

EmbodiTTA: Resource-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation for Embodied Visual Systems

Continual Test-time adaptation (CTTA) continuously adapts the deployed model on every incoming batch of data. While achieving optimal accuracy, existing CTTA approaches present poor real-world applicability on resource-constrained edge devices, due to the substantial memory overhead and energy consumption. In this work, we first introduce a novel paradigm – on-demand TTA – which triggers adaptation only when a significant domain shift is detected. Then, we present OD-TTA, an on-demand TTA framework for accurate and efficient adaptation on edge devices. OD-TTA comprises three innovative techniques: 1) a lightweight domain shift detection mechanism to activate TTA only when it is needed, drastically reducing the overall computation overhead, 2) a source domain selection module that chooses an appropriate source model for adaptation, ensuring high and robust accuracy, 3) a decoupled Batch Normalization (BN) update scheme to enable memory-efficient adaptation with small batch sizes. Extensive experiments show that OD-TTA achieves comparable and even better performance while reducing the energy and computation overhead remarkably, making TTA a practical reality.

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

Structured Spectral Graph Representation Learning for Multi-label Abnormality Analysis from 3D CT Scans

With the growing volume of CT examinations, there is an increasing demand for automated tools such as organ segmentation, abnormality detection, and report generation to support radiologists in managing their clinical workload. Multi-label classification of 3D Chest CT scans remains a critical yet challenging problem due to the complex spatial relationships inherent in volumetric data and the wide variability of abnormalities. Existing methods based on 3D convolutional neural networks struggle to capture long-range dependencies, while Vision Transformers often require extensive pre-training on large-scale, domain-specific datasets to perform competitively. In this work, we propose a 2.5D alternative by introducing a new graph-based framework that represents 3D CT volumes as structured graphs, where axial slice triplets serve as nodes processed through spectral graph convolution, enabling the model to reason over inter-slice dependencies while maintaining complexity compatible with clinical deployment. Our method, trained and evaluated on 3 datasets from independent institutions, achieves strong cross-dataset generalization, and shows competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art visual encoders. We further conduct comprehensive ablation studies to evaluate the impact of various aggregation strategies, edge-weighting schemes, and graph connectivity patterns. Additionally, we demonstrate the broader applicability of our approach through transfer experiments on automated radiology report generation and abdominal CT data.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Automated AI-Based Ventricular Subcompartment Segmentation and Volumetry in Idiopathic Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus

Purpose In idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (iNPH), longitudinal monitoring of ventricular size is important for diagnosis and treatment follow-up. This study aimed to validate a fully automated AI model for CT ventricular volumetry with subcompartments and to compare AI-derived volume changes with routine radiology assessments. Methods This retrospective, single-center study included 88 patients with iNPH and 456 non-contrast-enhanced head CT examinations. The model was trained on 38 manually labeled CT scans with 12 ventricular subcompartments. Outcomes included segmentation accuracy, correspondence between AI-derived longitudinal ventricular volume changes and radiology report categories (decreased, unchanged, increased), radiologist detection thresholds for ventricular change, and paired pre- and postoperative volume changes in 22 patients with ventriculoperitoneal shunt. Results Mean segmentation accuracy was high (Dice, 0.83). 91% of 100 segmentations were rated as excellent by an expert neuroradiologist. AI-derived ventricular volume changes corresponded well to radiology report categories (median total ventricular volume changes of -17% in cases reported as decreased, 0% in unchanged cases, and +22% in increased cases; all p < 0.001). Radiologists reported ventricular volume change in 50% of cases at an AI-measured relative volume change of +/-6%, and in 90% of cases at +21% for enlargement and -18% for decrease. After shunt placement, ventricular volume decreased by -8% (median), with the largest relative reductions observed in the right temporal and occipital horns. Conclusions Automated AI-based ventricular segmentation on CT enables accurate and reproducible assessment of ventricular volume changes in iNPH and complements routine radiological evaluation for longitudinal and postoperative monitoring.

19.
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.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

PolicyGuard: Towards Test-time and Step-level Adversary Defense for Reinforcement Learning Agent

arXiv:2606.12896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under standard conditions but executes malicious actions when a specific trigger is activated. Existing backdoor defenses for RL either require access to the agent's internal parameters, operate only at the model or trajectory level, or are limited to specific attack types. To ensure the security of RL agents, we propose \texttt{PolicyGuard}, a test-time step-level backdoor defense which leverages Gaussian Process (GP) posterior variance and adapts pseudo trajectories to enable uncertainty computation for individual time step. Besides, we also provide theoretical foundations to explain the efficacy of GP posterior variance. Extensive experiments across seven RL games demonstrate that PolicyGuard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in most cases, with average AUROC of 0.856 for perturbation-based attacks and 0.859 for adversary-agent attacks.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

TACTFUL: Tactile-Driven Exploration For Object Localization and Identification in Confined Environments

arXiv:2606.24712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans effortlessly locate and identify objects by touch alone, even without vision. In contrast, robotic systems rely heavily on vision and struggle with autonomous tactile exploration and object identification. We present TACTFUL, a vision-free tactile exploration framework that enables a multi-fingered robot to autonomously explore confined workspaces, discover objects through contact, and identify them via tactile reconstruction. Trained entirely on real hardware without simulation, our system learns a single policy that balances global workspace exploration with local surface refinement through a dynamic reward schedule. Our results demonstrate that tactile sensing, when paired with structured learning, can serve as an effective primary modality for object-level reasoning, achieving 77% success with 0.015 m average reconstruction error and outperforming baseline approaches on real-world objects.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Cumulative Metabolic Exposure to Hyperglycemia and Risk of Cardiovascular and Limb Events in Peripheral Artery Disease

Background: Although diabetes is a potent risk factor for the development of peripheral artery disease (PAD), the effect of cumulative metabolic exposure to hyperglycemia on risk of cardiovascular or limb events in patients with PAD remains unclear. Methods: The Peripheral Artery Disease: Long-term Survival (PEARLS) is a longitudinal registry of Veterans with newly diagnosed PAD identified using a natural language processing approach. Included patients had ankle brachial index [&le;]0.9 or toe brachial index [&le;]0.7, and no history of lower extremity revascularization or major amputation. Among patients with diabetes in this cohort, we assessed cumulative exposure to hyperglycema based on a 24-month rolling average of hemoglobin (Hgb) A1c values, categorized as [&le;]7%, >7% to [&le;]8%, and >8%. Multivariable Cox regression models evaluated the association between categories of HgbA1c, modeled as a time-varying exposure, and risk of cardiovascular (CV: myocardial infarction or stroke) and limb (chronic limb threatening ischemia [CLTI] or major amputation) events. Results: Among 45,109 patients with new diagnosis of PAD and pre-existing diabetes, the mean HgbA1c at baseline was 7.5%, with nearly one-third (30.4%) having HgbA1c >8%. The mean age was 70.4 years, 19.8% were Black and 4% were Hispanic. Patients with baseline HgbA1c >8% were younger and compared to those with HgbA1c [&le;]7%, more likely to have coronary disease, kidney disease, and obesity. Over a median follow up of 4.2 years, 8,306 (18.4%) patients experienced a CV event, and 8,199 (18.2%) experienced a limb event. The adjusted association between HgbA1c and hazard of CV events was 12% higher in patients exposed to HgbA1c >7% to [&le;]8% (HR 1.12; 95%CI: 1.05-1.18) and 38% higher in those exposed to HgbA1c >8% (HR 1.38; 95%CI: 1.30-1.46), compared to HgbA1c 7% to [&le;]8% (HR 1.20; 95%CI: 1.13-1.28) and HgbA1c >8% (HR 1.60; 95%CI: 1.51-1.70), respectively when compared to HgbA1c [&le;]7%. These findings were consistent in subgroups based on age and severity of PAD. Conclusions: Among diabetic patients with PAD, cumulatiave metabolic exposure to hyperglycemia is associated with a markedly increased risk of clinical events, especially limb events.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

JustDiag!: A Diagnostic Justification Engine for Accountable Root Cause Analysis

arXiv:2606.19407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can produce fluent root cause analyses, but fluent final answers alone are insufficient evidence for accountability in high-stakes operations. In real incident response, engineers need to know what evidence supported a diagnosis, which alternatives were considered, where contradictions remained, and whether the system resolved the case or preserved uncertainty. We address this gap with JustDiag, a diagnostic justification engine for RCA that maintains an explicit process state over evidence, findings, competing hypotheses, conflicts, and next checks. We evaluated the system on 66 real-world incidents using a two-layer protocol that separately scores final-answer quality and process quality. Relative to a matched control without diagnostic justification, JustDiag achieved stronger outcome and process scores, while accepting slightly lower terminal completion due to more calibrated non-closure. These results suggest that accountable RCA requires explicit diagnostic justification artifacts and process-aware evaluation, not only fluent final answers.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DPRM: A Plug-in Doob h transform-induced Token-Ordering Module for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2604.24357v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models generate without a fixed left-to-right order, leaving token ordering as a central algorithmic choice. Existing systems mainly use random masking or confidence-driven ordering, which respectively suffer from train–test mismatch and myopic exploration. We introduce DPRM (Doob -transform Process Reward Model), a plug-in token-ordering module that keeps the host architecture, denoising objective and supervision unchanged, and modifies only the ordering policy. DPRM starts from confidence-driven ordering and gradually shifts to process-reward-guided ordering through online estimates. We characterize the exact DPRM policy as a reward-tilted Gibbs reveal law, prove convergence of its stagewise Soft-BoN approximation, show that the online bucketized controller tracks the exact DPRM score at empirical-Bernstein rates, and establish a sample-complexity advantage under tractable optimization assumptions. Across nine hosts covering language reasoning, test-time scaling, protein, single-cell, molecular, DNA, text-to-image generation, and VQA, DPRM order variants improve several language, DNA, and multimodal settings while also identifying boundary cases where confidence-only ordering or task-specific utilities are preferable. Code is available at: https://github.com/DakeBU/DPRM-DLLM

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

LLMs Prompted for Legal Context Object More: Overrefusal from Small On-Premises LLMs in Criminal Legal Context

arXiv:2606.24585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While the validity of LLMs' use in the legal context remains subject to ethical and legal debate, legal professionals are already experimenting with personal LLMs, if only for translation and reformulation. However, even such a seemingly innocuous use can introduce biases through case processing speed if LLM assistants selectively refuse assistance on certain topics. To better anticipate such biases, we investigate several modern small LLMs that are most likely to be used as on-device assistants, to assess the impact of overrefusal on legal prompts. Surprisingly, we find that authority-style prefixes (``you are acting as an assistant of the national supreme court'', ``[...] defense lawyer'') systematically increase refusal rates by 2–20x over the no-prefix baseline, while a known role-play jailbreak prefix shows mixed effects, sharply increasing refusals in some models and barely shifting them in others. The finding suggests that small on-prem deployable LLMs are unstable under contextual framings that a real institutional user might naturally introduce, and further investigation is essential to minimize opportunities for bias.