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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Context-Aware Prediction of Student Quiz Performance with Multimodal Textbook Features

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24770v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Educational platforms often predict student performance from prior interactions, but the assessment content itself also varies in linguistic and visual complexity. This paper studies whether lightweight content features extracted from CourseKata chapter-review questions improve prediction of end-of-chapter quiz scores beyond a student's average prior exercise performance. The study combines 2023 CourseKata student response data with chapter-level text features from review-question wording and image features from textbook visuals. Across 4,742 student-chapter observations from 562 class-student IDs, adding content features improves student-grouped five-fold quiz prediction performance by 9.1% relative to a prior-performance baseline. In leave-chapter-out validation, text features reduce prediction error relative to the baseline, while image-containing models have higher error. This paper suggests that a context-aware model adds useful signal about the text and visual features of questions to better predict student quiz performance compared with using past student performance alone.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Prompt, Plan, Extract: Zero-Shot Agentic LLMs Workflows for Lung Pathology Extraction from Clinical Narratives

Information extraction from pathology reports is essential for cancer staging, tumor registry population. Yet key data remains embedded in narrative reports, making manual extraction labor-intensive and error-prone. Traditional supervised Natural Language Processing pipelines address this through fully supervised Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction, but require expensive manual annotation and suffer cascading failures when upstream entities are missed. In this study, we developed a zero-shot, agentic workflow, and evaluated five open-source generative Large Language Models (LLMs) to populate 13 College of American Pathologists synoptic fields from lung resection pathology reports. We compared them against a state-of-the-art supervised GatorTron NER-RE baseline using a novel, registry-aligned evaluation framework. The baseline achieved Micro-F1of 0.960, while the best zero-shot model (GPT-OSS-20B) achieved Micro-F1 of 0.893 (recall: 0.949), accurately extracting complex relations like Pathologic Stage without task-specific training. These results suggest that open-source, zero-shot agentic LLMs are a low-cost solution for extracting lung pathology information.

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

Beyond Rebalancing: Benchmarking Binary Classifiers Under Class Imbalance Without Rebalancing Techniques

arXiv:2509.07605v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class imbalance poses a significant challenge to supervised classification, particularly in critical domains like medical diagnostics and anomaly detection where minority class instances are rare. While numerous studies have explored rebalancing techniques to address this issue, less attention has been given to evaluating the performance of binary classifiers under imbalance when no such techniques are applied. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess the performance of binary classifiers "as-is", without performing any explicit rebalancing. Specifically, we systematically evaluate the robustness of a diverse set of binary classifiers across both real-world and synthetic datasets, under progressively reduced minority class sizes, using one-shot and few-shot scenarios as baselines. Our approach also explores varying data complexities through synthetic decision boundary generation to simulate real-world conditions. In addition to standard classifiers, we include experiments using undersampling, oversampling strategies, and one-class classification (OCC) methods to examine their behavior under severe imbalance. The results confirm that classification becomes more difficult as data complexity increases and the minority class size decreases. While traditional classifiers deteriorate under extreme imbalance, advanced models like TabPFN and boosting-based ensembles retain relatively higher performance and better generalization compared to traditional classifiers. Visual interpretability and evaluation metrics further validate these findings. Our work offers valuable guidance on model selection for imbalanced learning, providing insights into classifier robustness without dependence on explicit rebalancing techniques.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

AdversaBench: Automated LLM Red-Teaming with Multi-Judge Confirmation and Cross-Model Transferability

Scaling adversarial evaluation of large language models requires both a method for generating hard inputs and a reliable way to confirm that resulting failures are real. We present AdversaBench, an end-to-end red-teaming pipeline that mutates seed prompts with five structured operators, queries a target model, and confirms failures through a three-judge panel with a meta-judge tiebreaker. We report experiments on 45 seeds across three categories: reasoning, instruction-following, and tool use. Every seed produced a confirmed failure. Four findings stand out. First, operator effectiveness varies sharply by category: inject_distractor scores 0.00 mean reward on instruction-following seeds but 0.80-0.83 on reasoning and tool-use. Second, binary failure rate hides difficulty: instruction-following seeds required 2.4 attacker iterations on average versus 1.1 for other categories, a gap visible in survival curves. Third, pairwise judge agreement of 80-87% coexists with near-zero Cohen's kappa due to label skew; category-level disagreement rates are more informative. Fourth, adversarial prompts generated against Llama 3.1 8B transfer zero-shot to Llama 3.3 70B, suggesting the mutations exploit general behavioral patterns rather than model-specific weaknesses. Code, dataset, and analysis scripts are available at https://github.com/khanak0509/AdversaBench .

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Beyond Bayer: Task-Optimal Sensor Co-Design for Robust Autonomous-Driving Segmentation

arXiv:2606.24096v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust perception underpins autonomous driving, and most recent progress comes from scaling the model-larger backbones, foundation models, and cooperative multi-agent fusion. We pursue a complementary, upstream question: what should the camera itself measure? Using a differentiable RAW-to-task pipeline, we decompose which sensor degrees of freedom benefit dense prediction. Learning the spectral colour-filter-array (CFA) weights is the dominant lever, improving mIoU by +0.017 (KITTI-360) and +0.023 (ACDC) over a fixed camera. In contrast, point-spread-function (optics) co-design is net-negative (-0.020 mIoU on KITTI-360) - a consequence of the data-processing inequality, which also bounds the task information that any downstream model, however large or cooperative, can recover. Noise co-optimisation is marginal, and counter to intuition enlarging the CFA tile beyond 2x2 consistently hurts, as the filters are confined to the rank three sRGB input. Because the intervention is at the sensor, the gains are model-agnostic; we validate robustness on ACDC's fog, night, rain, and snow, and conclude with a simple recipe: learn the 2x2 CFA weights and keep an identity PSF.

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

Can Language Model Agents be Helpful Circuit Explainers in Mechanistic Interpretability?

arXiv:2606.24026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability has made substantial progress in automatically localizing circuits, but explaining what localized components do remains labor-intensive and difficult to standardize. In this work, we study whether language model (LM) agents can assist with this explanation problem once a circuit has already been identified. We introduce AgenticInterpBench, a benchmark for circuit explanation built from 84 semi-synthetic transformer circuits with 163 component-level annotations. We propose HyVE (Hypothesize, Validate, Explain), an agentic explainer that analyzes each component through an iterative loop of observation, hypothesis generation, and causal validation, eventually producing a component-level explanation and a circuit-level task description. Across four LM backbones, HyVE recovers useful component- and task-level explanations, but no backbone is uniformly best. Our analysis shows that strong backbones usually form observation-grounded hypotheses, while failures more often arise later in the validation loop, through incomplete validation plans, code execution errors, or unresolved hypotheses. A case study on an arithmetic circuit in Llama-3-8B shows that the same formulation can extend beyond semi-synthetic benchmarks to naturally trained models. Overall, LM agents are promising circuit explainers, but reliable validation remains the key obstacle.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

PRInTS: Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Information Seeking

Information-seeking is a core capability for AI agents, requiring them to gather and reason over tool-generated information across long trajectories. However, such multi-step information-seeking tasks remain challenging for agents backed by language models. While process reward models (PRMs) can guide agents by ranking candidate steps at test-time, existing PRMs - designed for short reasoning with binary judgment - cannot capture richer dimensions of information-seeking steps, such as tool interactions and reasoning over tool outputs, nor handle the rapidly growing context in long-horizon tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce PRInTS, a generative PRM trained with dual capabilities: (1) dense scoring based on the PRM's reasoning across multiple dimensions of step quality (e.g., interpretation of tool outputs, tool call informativeness) and (2) trajectory summarization that compresses the growing context while preserving essential information for step evaluation. Extensive evaluations across FRAMES, GAIA (levels 1-3), and WebWalkerQA (easy-hard) benchmarks on multiple models reveal that best-of-n sampling with PRInTS enhances information-seeking in open-source models as well as specialized agents, matching or surpassing frontier models with a much smaller backbone agent and outperforming other strong reward modeling baselines.

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

Functional Equivalence in Attention: A Comprehensive Study with Applications to Linear Mode Connectivity

arXiv:2606.17830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural network parameter spaces are inherently non-injective, as distinct parameter configurations can realize identical functions through functional equivalence. While this symmetry is well understood in classical fully connected and convolutional models, it becomes substantially more intricate in modern attention-based architectures. Existing analyses of multihead attention have largely focused on the vanilla formulation, overlooking positional encodings that fundamentally reshape architectural symmetries. In this work, we provide a formal study of functional equivalence in Transformers with positional encodings. Focusing on the two most widely used variants–sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings (RoPE)–we show that sinusoidal encodings preserve the equivalence structure of vanilla attention, whereas rotary encodings significantly reduce the symmetry group, thereby enhancing expressivity. This offers a principled explanation for the growing prominence of RoPE in practice. We further examine how positional encodings affect linear mode connectivity, and through an alignment algorithm, empirically demonstrate that the presence and variability of connectivity across Transformer settings crucially depend on the positional encoding.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

An Improved Generative Adversarial Network for Micro-Resistivity Imaging Logging Restoration

An improved GAN-based imaging logging image restoration method is presented in this paper for solving the problem of partially missing micro-resistivity imaging logging images. The method uses FCN as the generative network infrastructure and adds a depth-separable convolutional residual block to learn and retain more effective pixel and semantic information; an Inception module is added to increase the multi-scale perceptual field of the network and reduce the number of parameters in the network; and a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block are added to combine the channel attention. The multi-scale module adds a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block, which combine the channel attention mechanism and the residual block to achieve multi-scale feature extraction. The global discriminative network and the local discriminative network are designed to gradually improve the content and semantic structure coherence between the restored parts and the whole image by playing off each other and the generative network. According to the experimental results, the average structural similarity measure of the five sets of imaged logging images with different sizes of missing regions in the test set is 0.903, which is an improvement of about 0.3 compared with other similar methods. It is shown that the method in this study can be used for the restoration of micro-resistivity imaging log images with good improvement in semantic structural coherence and texture details, thus providing a new deep learning method to ensure the smooth advancement of the subsequent interpretation of micro-resistivity imaging log images.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

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

ScholaWrite: A Dataset of End-to-End Scholarly Writing Process

Writing is a cognitively demanding activity that requires constant decision-making, heavy reliance on working memory, and frequent shifts between tasks of different goals. To build writing assistants that truly align with writers' cognition, we must capture and decode the complete thought process behind how writers transform ideas into final texts. We present ScholaWrite, the first dataset of end-to-end scholarly writing, tracing the multi-month journey from initial drafts to final manuscripts. We contribute three key advances: (1) a Chrome extension that unobtrusively records keystrokes on Overleaf, enabling the collection of realistic, in-situ writing data; (2) a novel corpus of full scholarly manuscripts, enriched with fine-grained annotations of cognitive writing intentions. The dataset includes \LaTeX-based edits from five computer science preprints, capturing nearly 62K text changes over four months; and (3) analyses and insights into the micro-dynamics of scholarly writing, highlighting gaps between human writing processes and the current capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in providing meaningful assistance. ScholaWrite underscores the value of capturing end-to-end writing data to develop future writing assistants that support, not replace, the cognitive work of scientists.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

ProductConsistency: Improving Product Identity Preservation in Instruction-Based Image Editing via SFT and RL

Recent advances in instruction-based image editing have enabled models to perform complex visual edits from natural language instructions. However, in product-centric scenarios where preserving product features, branding, and textual elements are critical, current open and closed source models often struggle to maintain this fine-grained object identity. This issue is further compounded by the lack of datasets for instruction-based product image editing with text fidelity constraints, leaving it largely treated as an implicit capability of instruction-based image editing models. In this work, we introduce the ProductConsistency dataset which is designed to improve product-centric image editing. Our approach includes a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset of 87k samples for product editing, a reinforcement learning (RL) dataset with 869 unique product images, and a new benchmark dataset, the ProductConsistency Benchmark, to allow rigorous and standardized evaluation of editing models. To guide RL training, we propose a Cyclic Consistency reward that enforces semantic preservation of product identity by using caption similarity between the original product description and captions generated from the edited image. We fine-tune both Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and Flux.1-Kontext-dev using our dataset and demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline models in OCR and Perceptual metrics, and MLLM-based evaluations as well, indicating stronger product consistency, text rendering, and overall visual quality; with the Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 model achieving a 5x reduction in the character error rate. The code and pipeline is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProductConsistency-6FCC/README.md

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Objects Before Words: Object-First Inductive Biases for Grounding Language in Child-View Video

Learning grounded word meaning from natural experience requires resolving two ambiguities in infant-view recordings: when the named referent appears and where it is in a cluttered frame. In SAYCam-style data, caregiver speech is sparse and weakly synchronized with egocentric video, so single-frame contrastive pairing yields noisy positives in which the intended object is absent or entangled with distractors. We propose BabyMind, an object-first bias for child-view contrastive learning under sparse, noisy supervision. BabyMind extracts candidate object embeddings using an offline mask-based region interface, links candidates across a short utterance-centered window into lightweight object files via tracking, and aligns utterances to bags of object files with a prototype-space multiple-instance contrastive objective. Track-coherence and global-object agreement regularizers stabilize learning and transfer object-file structure into the global frame embedding used at evaluation. On SAYCam-S, BabyMind improves Labeled-S 15 forced-choice accuracy by +2.6 points over CVCL and yields consistent gains on in-vocabulary out-of-distribution benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/sathiiii/BabyMind.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

PVminerLLM2: Improving Structured Extraction of Patient Voice via Preference Optimization

Motivation: Patient-generated text contains critical information on patients' lived experiences, social context, and care engagement, but remains largely unstructured, limiting its use in patient-centered outcomes research. Prior work introduced the PV-Miner benchmark and PVMinerLLM models for structured extraction. However, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone struggles with rare, fine-grained, and unevenly distributed errors, particularly in token-critical structured outputs. Results: We present PVminerLLM2, an improved set of LLMs for structured patient voice extraction that applies preference optimization to address token-critical errors beyond the reach of supervised fine-tuning. Our method introduces (i) a preference objective with token-level gated stabilization term that prevents degradation of absolute token likelihood under preference optimization, and (ii) confusion-aware preference pair construction to better capture low-separation distinctions. We further incorporate token-importance weighting and inverse-frequency reweighing to address token imbalance and class skew. Across multiple model sizes, PVMinerLLM2 consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving gains of up to 4.43% (Code), 3.50% (Sub-code), and 1.55% (Span), and outperforms baseline LLM trained with existing preference optimization methods. Availability and Implementation: The supplementary material, code, evaluation scripts, and trained models for PVminerLLM2 are publicly available at: https://github.com/Data-Mining-Lab-Yale/PVminerLLM2

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SceneCraft: Interactive System for Image Editing via Scene Graph

Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity.

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

A comparative and critical study of EEGNet for fNIRS-driven cognitive load classification

arXiv:2606.16160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately classifying cognitive load from functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals remains a significant challenge due to temporal variability, inter-subject differences, and sensitivity to preprocessing choices. This study provides a comprehensive evaluation of EEGNet for fNIRS-based cognitive load classification by systematically examining the effects of temporal segmentation strategies (overlapping vs. non-overlapping), window lengths (10s, 20s, 30s), feature extraction methods (Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA)), learning rate configurations (fixed and adaptive), and evaluation protocols (random split vs. subject-independent (SI)). Results from random-split experiments show that overlapping segmentation, combined with smaller fixed learning rates (0.01-0.001), yields the highest accuracies, due to temporal redundancy and dense sampling of hemodynamic transitions. However, SI evaluation reveals a substantial drop in accuracy, demonstrating limited generalization to unseen participants. Under SI evaluation, non-overlapping segmentation outperformed overlapping windows, with the best accuracy of 56.11% achieved using PCA features with a 20-second window and a 0.1 learning rate. These findings indicate that eliminating temporal redundancy helps the model learn more robust and generalizable representations of cognitive load across individuals. Although adaptive learning rate strategy improved training stability, it did not surpass the performance of optimally selected fixed learning rates. The study highlights the critical role of segmentation strategy and learning rate selection in improving model generalization and identifies methodological considerations essential for developing reliable, real-time, and SI cognitive load classification systems using fNIRS.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Calibrated Triage, Not Autonomy: Confidence Estimation for Medical Vision-Language Models

A vision-language model can answer a question about a medical image fluently and confidently while barely using the image, leaning instead on language priors. In medicine this is the failure that matters most, because the answer looks trustworthy and is not, and the only protection is a confidence score reliable enough to tell the system when to abstain. We ask a deployment question rather than an accuracy one: how much imaging work a model can safely handle alone, and which confidence signal makes that possible. We evaluate seven confidence estimators across five open-weight LVLMs and three medical visual-question-answering datasets spanning broad clinical imaging, radiology, and pathology, with every probe trained only on natural images and applied without adaptation. Recast as bounded selective prediction (automate a case only when confidence clears a threshold, defer the rest), the comparison is cautionary. The standard metrics are poor guides: discrimination barely separates the methods, and the weak calibration of a cheap self-report is cheaply removed by off-domain temperature scaling without changing deployable yield. What distinguishes a usable estimator is the high-confidence region a clinician acts on: the weakest baselines are confidently wrong on 41 to 45 percent of their errors against 1 to 4 percent for the best probe, and no estimator is reliably best across domains or models. Safe handoff is governed at two levels: base-model competence sets a ceiling, so a well-calibrated score recovers roughly a third of radiology cases at a 20 percent error tolerance but almost none of pathology; the confidence layer then decides how much of that ceiling is reachable. The usable role today is calibrated triage, not autonomy: automate the cases a calibrated score marks safe, route the rest to a clinician. We release all outputs, correctness judgments, and confidence scores, with code.

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

YTClickbait21K: Human-Annotated Multimodal Dataset for YouTube Clickbait Detection Across Diverse Channels and Content Categories

Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.

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

Composed Object Retrieval: Object-level Retrieval via Composed Expressions

Retrieving fine-grained visual content based on user intent remains a challenge in multimodal systems. Although current Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) methods combine reference images with retrieval texts, they are constrained to image-level matching and cannot localize specific objects. To this end, we propose Composed Object Retrieval (COR), a new object-level retrieval task that retrieves target object(s) from candidate objects in a target image and grounds the retrieved result with pixel-level masks. Given a reference object, its mask, a target image, and a retrieval text describing the desired modification, COR requires models to perform composed visual-textual reasoning rather than relying on explicit category names. This setting introduces several challenges, including fine-grained compositional matching, negative-object filtering under visually similar distractors, and flexible single- or multi-object retrieval. We construct COR125K, the first large-scale COR benchmark, containing 125,541 retrieval triplets across 408 categories with base/novel splits for evaluating category-level generalization. We also present CORE, a unified end-to-end model that integrates reference region encoding, adaptive vision-text interaction, and region-level contrastive learning to align composed representations with target objects while suppressing background and distractors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CORE significantly outperforms existing CIR-based pipelines and strong baselines in both base and novel categories, establishing a simple and effective foundation for fine-grained object-level multimodal retrieval. Code will be released publicly at https://github.com/wangtong627/COR.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Generative Molecular Design with Steerable and Granular Synthesizability Control

arXiv:2505.08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Designing molecules that are both property-optimal and readily synthesizable is a central challenge in drug discovery. Existing works that do consider synthesizability can jointly output predicted synthesis routes for generated molecules. However, there has been minimal attention in addressing the ease of synthesis and with flexibility to incorporate desired reaction constraints. On the other hand, virtual screening searches for commercially available compounds, but imposes challenges when scaling to ultra-large (billion-size and beyond) chemical spaces. Here, we propose a generative design framework that unifies synthesis-constrained molecular design and ultra-large-scale virtual screening through steerable and granular synthesizability control. Generated molecules satisfy arbitrary multi-parameter optimization objectives with predicted synthesis routes satisfying mix-and-match constraints: including or avoiding certain reactions, incorporating specific building blocks, and minimizing synthesis route length. In an end-to-end in-house campaign targeting BRD4, we designed molecules synthesizable with specific selected reactions and building blocks, synthesized all six selected compounds, and identified two micromolar binders. We further demonstrate that reaction control enables efficient navigation of ultra-large make-on-demand chemical spaces to identify property-optimal candidates. By applying our framework to Chemspace's Freedom 4.0 make-on-demand space (142 billion molecules), we generated ~320k molecules (0.00023% of the library) on a single consumer-grade GPU (with only 8 GB GPU memory) and identified a micromolar Wee1 binder amongst 60 synthesized candidates. The single unified framework thus enables generating novel synthesizable molecules and retrieving catalogue-ready candidates, offering a flexible solution to mitigating the synthesizability bottleneck.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Realistic noise synthesis reduces bias and improves tissue microstructure estimation with supervised machine learning

arXiv:2606.02044v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion MRI enables non-invasive probing of tissue microstructure, but accurate parameter estimation is challenged by noise-related effects. In supervised machine learning frameworks trained on simulated data, discrepancies between the noise characteristics of simulated and acquired signals introduce a form of covariate shift, whereby the input signal distribution differs between training and inference. We investigated the impact of this mismatch on microstructure parameter estimation and propose a realistic noise synthesis (RNS) framework to mitigate it. RNS incorporates both the Rician expectation and the effective post-processing noise variance into simulated training signals. The Rician expectation was modelled using a noise standard deviation estimated with MPPCA, while the effective standard deviation was derived from spherical harmonic residuals of preprocessed data. The method was evaluated using the cylinder-zeppelin and the SANDI models on simulated datasets across multiple SNR levels and on in vivo diffusion data with repeated acquisitions. Sensitivity to noise misestimation was also assessed. Ignoring magnitude-induced noise effects during training produced systematic, SNR-dependent parameter bias, particularly at low SNR. Incorporating the Rician expectation substantially reduced bias to the level of noise-aware nonlinear least-squares fitting. Modelling the effective standard deviation further improved precision. Performance was largely independent of regression architecture but sensitive to accurate noise estimation. These findings demonstrate that realistic noise modelling in simulated training data mitigates signal-domain covariate shift and is essential for unbiased supervised microstructure estimation, particularly in low-SNR regimes associated with high b-values or high spatial resolution.

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

Pass@K Policy Optimization: Solving Harder Reinforcement Learning Problems

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms sample multiple n>1 solution attempts for each problem and reward them independently. This optimizes for pass@1 performance and prioritizes the strength of isolated samples at the expense of the diversity and collective utility of sets of samples. This under-utilizes the sampling capacity, limiting exploration and eventual improvement on harder examples. As a fix, we propose Pass-at-k Policy Optimization (PKPO), a transformation on the final rewards which leads to direct optimization of pass@k performance, thus optimizing for sets of samples that maximize reward when considered jointly. Our contribution is to derive novel low variance unbiased estimators for pass@k and its gradient, in both the binary and continuous reward settings. We show optimization with our estimators reduces to standard RL with rewards that have been jointly transformed by a stable and efficient transformation function. While previous efforts are restricted to k=n, ours is the first to enable robust optimization of pass@k for any arbitrary k

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

Conservation Laws for Modern Neural Architectures

arXiv:2606.17816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding gradient descent dynamics is key to explaining the success of over-parameterized models, where implicit bias manifests through conservation laws in gradient flow. While such laws are well understood for linear and ReLU networks, they remain largely unexplored for modern architectures. This work develops a unified framework to characterize conservation laws for contemporary models, including feedforward networks with GELU, SiLU, and SwiGLU activations, multihead attention with sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings, and Mixture-of-Experts architectures under diverse gating designs. Our theoretical findings are supported by experiments that validate the predicted invariants.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Bengal-HP_RU: A Dataset of Bengal People For Head Pose Estimation

Existing head pose datasets predominantly feature subjects of Western or East Asian origin, leaving South Asian populations, particularly Bengali individuals, largely underrepresented. We introduce Bengal-HP_RU, the first publicly available head pose dataset centred on Bengali subjects, comprising 12,894 labelled head images annotated with continuous yaw, pitch, and roll values. Images were collected from Wikimedia Commons under free licences and processed through an automated pipeline followed by manual label correction. The dataset is partitioned by Wikimedia uploader identity to prevent data contamination, yielding 10,494 training and 2,400 test images across 296 unique uploaders. Bengal-HP_RU exhibits substantial diversity in subject age, gender, occlusion, illumination, and background, reflecting realistic in-the-wild conditions. The dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.17632/xbw9kr37jb.2.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Multimodal Brain Tumour Classification Using Feature Fusion

Clinicians diagnose brain tumors by synthesizing patient symptoms, medical history, and quantitative imaging data from modalities such as MRI and CT scans into a unified clinical judgement. However, most deep learning models rely on MRI/CT images alone, failing to replicate the clinicians multimodal reasoning. We explore a two-branch multimodal network combining raw MRI scans with 91 extracted radiomic features (intensity, texture, shape, and boundary descriptors) to classify brain tumors into glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no-tumor. A pre-trained CNN backbone encodes the image stream, whereas a dedicated MLP encodes the radiomic stream. Both streams are fused via concatenation, gated, or bidirectional cross-modal attention strategies. Across nine experimental runs on a balanced 7,200 image dataset, all multimodal configurations outperform unimodal baselines with gated fusion achieving the best accuracy of 96.13%.