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Authors: R J Hari ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LooseControlVideo: Directorial Video Control using Spatial Blocking

Precise 3D spatial orchestration in text-to-video generation remains a significant challenge, particularly for multi-object scenes where semantic layout and temporal dynamics are often entangled. While existing depth-conditioned models achieve good structural fidelity, they necessitate dense, frame-accurate guidance that is labor-intensive to author for dynamic events involving deformable objects. We present LooseControlVideo, a framework that enables intuitive and expressive control by using sparse, oriented 3D boxes as a "blocking" proxy. This allows users to author high-level layout and trajectory while leveraging a video generative model to generate realistic occlusions, dynamics and interactions. We achieve this by fine-tuning a Wan 2.2 backbone on a video dataset annotated with DNOCS, a novel encoding for 3D size, orientation and depth-ordered occlusions. Furthermore, our method allows for localized refinement, such as adjusting a jump trajectory or adding an interaction, with minimal disruption to the global scene context. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes, HO-3D, and BEHAVE benchmarks demonstrate that LooseControlVideo significantly outperforms existing 2D-box and flow-based baselines. Our findings indicate a 1.2x to 3x improvement in Trajectory Error; 2x improvement in Rigid Motion Consistency; and a 1.5x to 2x increase in Occlusion Accuracy over current state-of-the-art layout-conditioned models, demonstrating that oriented 3D primitives provide good geometric prior for complex, multi-agent video authoring.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

QPU-scale randomized benchmarking via Bell-pair injection

arXiv:2606.20123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mirror randomized benchmarking (MRB) is an established technique that provides a global error metric at the scale of a whole QPU. To expand upon this we introduce Mirror Quantum Awesomeness (MQA), a hybrid protocol that adds a structured entangling layer to MRB circuits. This enables per-edge correlation dynamics to be tracked via mutual information while preserving the MRB infidelity estimate. The resulting analysis of the injected entangled pairs locates a critical circuit depth, beyond which rudimentary error mitigation techniques can be expected to fail. A topological variant, Topological MQA, supplies a second critical depth via a decoder based on the surface-code decoding problem. Both are validated in simulation and demonstrated on the 156-qubit \texttt{ibm\_fez} and \texttt{ibm\_kingston} processors, where MQA closely agrees with MRB on the entanglement infidelity and the critical depth for \texttt{ibm\_fez} is found to be $\sim 50$.

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

HilDA: Hierarchical Distillation with Diffusion for Advancing Self-Supervised LiDAR Pre-trainin

arXiv:2606.20189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD). However, current approaches typically treat VFMs as black-box teachers, relying exclusively on frame-wise feature similarity. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the teacher's layer-wise semantic structure and global context, as well as the rich spatiotemporal information inherent in LiDAR sequences. We propose HilDA, a self-supervised pretraining framework for LiDAR backbones that better captures the semantic what and geometric where needed for driving tasks. HilDA combines hierarchical distillation comprising multi-layer distillation for progressive semantic alignment and global context distillation for scene-level semantics, with a temporal occupancy diffusion objective promoting spatiotemporal consistency. Models pre-trained with HilDA achieve state-of-the-art results on cross-modal distillation benchmarks and outperform models trained via prior distillation approaches on 3D object detection, scene flow, and semantic occupancy prediction. Code available at: https://maxiuw.github.io/hilda.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Hidden Evolution of Disguised Visual Context inside the VLM

arXiv:2606.20077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals. How they are transformed into meaningful representations and interact with the language space depends entirely on the integration architecture. Whether by treating visual tokens as in-context prompts within the input sequence or injecting them directly into the LLM's intermediate layers. A controlled comparison and understanding of how these architectural choices affect visual information and its internal transformation to integrate with the LLM remains underexplored. We provide a fair comparison by evaluating in-context and layer-wise injection VLM integration paradigms under identical training conditions across single image, multi-image, and video benchmarks. In doing so, we uncover a hidden evolution where visual tokens enter the LLM as disguised visual context, raw representations lacking linguistic structure, but are progressively reshaped depending on the integration paradigm, each capturing fundamentally different frequency characteristics of the visual signal. We show that this evolution inside the LLM determines what visual features the VLM can utilize effectively, how visual representations align with the language space, and ultimately how each paradigm performs across different tasks. We further demonstrate that attention allocation alone is insufficient, and that performance is driven by the quality of visual representations at each layer.

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

Context-Aware Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling of IVF Laboratory Environmental Conditions

arXiv:2606.20459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: IVF pregnancy rates are routinely modeled using patient-level variables, while high-resolution laboratory environmental data remain underutilized. We show that this is a missed opportunity. Rather than relying on raw sensor averages, we engineer 55 context-aware temporal features, including rolling thermal stability, simultaneous temperature-humidity adherence, peak stress duration, and post-stress recovery speed, that capture the dynamics of incubator microenvironments. On 61 weeks of data from an Asian IVF clinic, these features reduce cross-validated prediction error to 1.27%, compared to 3-5% for raw averages. We then train a hierarchical Bayesian Beta regression model that shares environmental effects across an Asian and a Northern European clinic via partial pooling, while preserving site-specific baselines. On held-out data from the Northern European clinic, the model achieves R2 = 0.86 and a 64% error reduction for the 35-39 age group over a naive baseline, demonstrating that structured environmental monitoring contains clinically meaningful, transferable signal.

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

Interpretable Sperm Morphology Classification via Attention-Guided Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.20438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Male infertility is a major cause of couple infertility, often linked to abnormal sperm morphology. While deep learning models offer automated analysis, most lack interpretability, limiting their clinical adoption. This study proposes an attention-guided deep learning framework for sperm morphology classification. We combine a pretrained EfficientNet-B0 with a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to focus on key areas of the sperm head, improving both accuracy and interpretability. Evaluated on the SMIDS and HuSHem public datasets, our model achieves accuracies of 90.2% and 93.9% (macro F1 scores of 0.913 and 0.948), outperforming SimpleCNN and standard EfficientNet-B0. Furthermore, we use Grad-CAM++ visualizations to highlight features influencing the model's decisions. The results demonstrate that this accurate and transparent framework is a practical tool for automated sperm analysis in fertility clinics.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Milstein-type Schemes for Hyperbolic SPDEs

arXiv:2512.19647v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This article studies the temporal approximation of hyperbolic semilinear stochastic evolution equations with multiplicative Gaussian noise by Milstein-type schemes. We take the term hyperbolic to mean that the leading operator generates a contractive, not necessarily analytic $C_0$-semigroup. Optimal convergence rates are derived for the pathwise uniform strong error \[ E_h^\infty := \Big(\mathbb{E}\Big[\max_{1\le j \le M}\|U_{t_j}-u_j\|_X^p\Big]\Big)^{1/p} \] on a Hilbert space $X$ for $p\in [2,\infty)$. Here, $U$ is the mild solution and $u_j$ its Milstein approximation at time $t_j=jh$ with step size $h>0$ and final time $T=Mh>0$. For sufficiently regular nonlinearity and noise, we establish strong convergence of order one, with the error satisfying $E_h^\infty\lesssim h\sqrt{\log(T/h)}$ for rational Milstein schemes and $E_h^\infty \lesssim h$ for exponential Milstein schemes. This extends previous results from parabolic to hyperbolic SPDEs and from exponential to rational Milstein schemes. Moreover, root-mean-square error estimates are strengthened to pathwise uniform estimates. Numerical experiments validate the convergence rates for the stochastic Schrödinger equation. Further applications to Maxwell's and transport equations are included.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On a class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks

arXiv:2504.14767v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A step-reinforced random walk is a discrete-time stochastic process with long-range dependence. At each step, with a fixed probability $\alpha$, the so-called positively step-reinforced random walk repeats one of its previous steps, chosen randomly and uniformly from its entire history. Alternatively, with probability $1-\alpha$, it makes an independent move. For the so-called negatively step-reinforced random walk, the process is similar, but any repeated step is taken with its direction reversed. These random walks have been introduced respectively by Simon (1955) and Bertoin (2024) and are sometimes refered to the self-confident step-reinforced random walk and the counterbalanced step-reinforced random walk respectively. In this work, we introduce a new class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks for which we prove the strong law of large numbers and the central limit theorem. In particular, our work provides a unified treatment of the elephant random walk introduced by Schutz and Trimper (2004) and the positively and negatively step-reinforced random walks.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Adaptive Speech-to-Spike Encoding for Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.19039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The mismatch between continuous acoustic signals and discrete event-driven processing remains a fundamental bottleneck for neuromorphic speech processing. Current systems typically rely on fixed spike encoders, forcing downstream Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to compensate for non-adaptive input representations. To address this, we present a learnable residual speech-to-spike encoder jointly trained end-to-end with a Recurrent Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (R-LIF) backbone. We validate this approach on the Google Speech Commands v2 (GSC-v2) benchmark, achieving up to 94.97% accuracy. Notably, the learned encoder remains highly parameter-efficient with a compact 35k-parameter variant that reaches 89.8%, matching or exceeding prior baselines that require an order of magnitude more parameters. Our encoder-focused analysis, including linear probing and gradient-residual inspection, indicates that the encoder does not target faithful signal reconstruction but instead learns task-aligned spike representations that enhance class separability. Finally, we benchmark bio-inspired, hardware-friendly credit assignment by comparing Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA) with surrogate-gradient BPTT under identical architectures and training conditions. We find that DFA reaches 91.5% accuracy, quantifying the performance trade-off of bio-inspired learning rules for modern neuromorphic audio.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Rethinking Cross-lingual Gaps from a Statistical Viewpoint

Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a bridge by acquiring knowledge from a source language and making it accessible when queried using target languages. A cross-lingual gap is a drop in accuracy incurred when querying knowledge in a target language rather than the source language. Existing research focused on modeling or training failures leading to cross-lingual gaps. In this work, we take an alternative view to characterize the nature of cross-lingual error, and hypothesize that the variance of responses in the target language is a key cause of this gap. For the first time, we formalize the cross-lingual gap in terms of biased and unbiased errors. We empirically validate our hypothesis through multiple inference-time interventions that control variance and reduce the cross-lingual gap. We demonstrate a few test-time ensemble methods that reduce response variance, and thereby improve source-target transfer scores by up to 12 absolute points yielding relative gains of 8% to over 50% across various LLMs.

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

IndicContextEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context Utilisation in Audio Large Language Models Across 8 Indic Languages

AudioLLMs enable speech recognition conditioned on textual prompts such as domain descriptions or entity lists. However, it remains unclear whether these models genuinely utilise such context or rely on parametric knowledge learned during pretraining. Existing benchmarks cannot answer this question because they evaluate transcription under fixed prompting conditions and rarely include explicit contextual inputs. We introduce IndicContextEval, a 56-hour multilingual benchmark of natural speech from 555 speakers across 8 Indian languages and 23 professional domains. We design a 7-level prompting framework that progressively introduces contextual signals, including metadata, natural-language descriptions, entity lists in English and native script, and adversarial prompts with incorrect entities. Evaluating five models reveals substantial differences in context utilisation behaviour, highlighting the need for explicit evaluation of contextual grounding in AudioLLMs.

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

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI – effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Do as I Do: Dexterous Manipulation Data from Everyday Human Videos

How can we scalably generate data for robotic manipulation, especially on human-like platforms such as dexterous multi-fingered hands? Learning from human videos has recently emerged as a likely answer to this question. However, difficulties in estimating hand-object interaction and crossing the human-to-robot embodiment gap have hindered the adoption of abundant monocular RGB-only human videos as the primary source of robot manipulation data. In this work, we present DO AS I DO, an algorithm to reconstruct and retarget monocular RGB human videos to multi-fingered dexterous robotic hands. DO AS I DO reconstructs hand-object interactions from various egocentric and exocentric in-the-wild video sources. The algorithm then retargets these hand-object interaction estimates into a sequence of actions executable in the real world, yielding robot-complete manipulation data from disparate human videos. Overall, DO AS I DO outperforms previous state of the art in estimating hand-object interactions and extracting dexterous manipulation trajectories from RGB videos, as we show in experiments on datasets with ground truths and on a dataset of video clips collected online. Our experiments enable us to propose an efficacy playbook for practitioners collecting human data for manipulation.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DART: A design-aware microfluidic chip paradigm for real-time live-cell image analysis

High-throughput microfluidic live-cell imaging generates rich single-cell data. Yet semi-automated procedures for locating regions of interest (RoIs), each containing one cell population, and removing surrounding microfluidic structures from recorded images, scale with the number of RoIs. This prevents real-time image analysis and delays time-to-insight by hours to days. We introduce the Design-Aware and Real-Time capable (DART) paradigm for microfluidic cultivation chips, which aligns the CAD blueprint with the physical chip and thereby enables throughput-independent localization of all RoIs and fully automated image processing across diverse RoI geometries and chip layouts. DART establishes this alignment through embedded fiducial markers and deep-learning-based marker detection. We validate DART using the Swiss Army Knife chip, which combines eight structurally distinct RoI designs across 1164 RoI locations. DART localizes all RoIs in five minutes, removes microfluidic structures from raw microscopy images in 40 ms, and performs fully automated image analysis, including cell segmentation, in under 1.1 s per image. Together, these capabilities establish DART as an end-to-end hardware-software paradigm with real-time-capable analysis that paves the way toward closed-loop and outcome-driven smart microscopy.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Multi-Class Brain Tumor Classification Using Advanced Deep Learning Models: A Comparative Study

Despite recent advancements in deep learning, accurately classifying brain tumors from MRI images continues to pose challenges. In this research, we present a comprehensive evaluation of five different convolutional neural networks (CNN) architectures, including a customized baseline model and four pre-trained models - for use in classifying multi-class brain tumors using a clinically-sourced dataset of approximately 10,000 MRI images. We have utilized five different architectures; VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, and EfficientNetB0, which were all tested and trained within an identical experimental framework. Performance was measured by both overall accuracy and tumor-wise recall as a means to measure the clinically-relevant performance of each architecture. We found that EfficientNetB0 had the best overall classification accuracy at 95%, when compared to the other architectures tested; specifically VGG16 (94.37%), VGG19 (92.29%), DenseNet121 (90.91%) and the customized CNN (78.00%). An especially important finding of our research was the considerable improvement in detecting meningiomas; specifically, while simple CNNs could detect meningiomas with a recall rate of approximately 20%, EfficientNetB0 was able to detect meningiomas with a recall rate of 89%. Meningiomas are often difficult to detect because they can appear very subtly on MRI images. Additionally, an interesting finding was that the deeper VGG19 performed worse than the shallower VGG16. This indicates that in many cases the architectural efficiency of a CNN model may be more important than its depth when working with medical images. Overall, EfficientNetB0 appears to provide the optimal trade-off between classification accuracy, number of parameters used in the model and clinically meaningful performance.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum mechanics in configuration space in context

arXiv:2606.17622v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To enhance the way in which wave-particle duality is implemented in the modelling of quantum mechanical systems, Bukhari et al. [New J. Phys. 27, 084501 (2025)] recently introduced an alternative approach to quantum mechanics, namely quantum mechanics in configuration space. This formalism is based on a physically motivated quantisation of Newtonian mechanics and promotes the classical position-velocity states (x,v) to pairwise distinguishable quantum states. The resulting |x,v> states form the basis of the Hilbert space of individual quantum mechanical particles and evolve along classical trajectories. In this paper, we consider the modelling of a mechanical particle in free space and put quantum mechanics in configuration space into context. It is shown that this formalism increases the continuity between quantum and classical mechanics by avoiding a conceptual inconsistency associated with the definition of momentum in canonical quantisation. In addition, we emphasise that standard quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics in configuration space are based on two distinct formulations of classical mechanics.

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

Confusion-Aware Transfer Teacher Curriculum Learning Framework: Disentangling Scoring and Pacing Effects

arXiv:2606.17706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Curriculum learning couples two design choices, how samples are scored by difficulty and how harder samples are paced into training, making it difficult to attribute observed gains to either component. We disentangle these factors with two evaluation protocols: stage-wise test subsets that validate scoring functions independently of curriculum training, and a baseline that applies the same pacing schedule to randomly ordered data. Within the Transfer Teacher framework (TTF), we use these protocols to evaluate a confusion-aware difficulty score that considers both correct-class confidence and the probability distribution over incorrect classes. On CIFAR-10 with ResNet-18 and VGG-16, the proposed score produces model-interpretable difficulty rankings that align with human intuition. However, at full data, neither curriculum nor anti-curriculum ordering improves accuracy over standard training, indicating that improving the scoring function alone is insufficient to overcome the known failure modes of curriculum learning in TTF. In contrast, We find that confusion-aware curriculum ordering result in consistent data-efficiency benefits, outperforming random ordering by up to 8.7% points at the 20% data regime, suggesting the potential of TTF as a data-efficient training method.

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

Unlocking LLM Code Correction with Iterative Feedback Loops

arXiv:2606.17514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models have shown remarkable capabilities in code generation. However, most existing evaluations focus only on single-attempt accuracy and overlook the iterative refinement process that is central to real-world programming. This study presents a systematic investigation of LLMs' ability to rectify their own code through execution feedback. Using real-world programming problems across four models and two major programming languages, this study evaluates performance using iterative refinement framework where LLMs receive compiler error messages and testcase feedback after each attempt. This study introduces metrics to evaluate code failures, analyze rectification patterns, and compare the effectiveness of reasoning and non-reasoning models, offering actionable insights into both the understanding and practical application of feedback loops in LLM-driven code generation systems. Results show that reasoning models consistently improve over iterations, substantially outperforming non-reasoning models in leveraging feedback, while syntactic and runtime errors are far more tractable than logical or algorithmic failures.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

An expressivity analysis of hierarchical modelling in deep transformers via bounded-depth grammars

Deep neural networks are widely believed to derive their expressive power from their ability to form hierarchical representations, capturing progressively more abstract and compositional features across layers. In language modeling, transformers have emerged as the dominant architecture, with early layers capturing local syntactic patterns and later layers encoding more complex clause-level dependencies. While this intuition has shaped model design, there remains a lack of rigorous theoretical work demonstrating how deep transformers represent such hierarchical structures. In this work, we analyze the expressiveness of deep transformer models through the formal lens of bounded-depth, non-recursive context-free grammars. For this class of grammars, we explicitly construct transformers with positional attention whose depth grows linearly with grammar depth, while the neuron count scales with the number of derivation-tree shapes and quadratically with the number of production rules. Our theoretical results support the linear representation hypothesis by demonstrating that these architectures possess the structural capacity to encode abstract grammatical states into low-dimensional, linearly separable subspaces within the residual stream.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Speaking in Self-Assessing Tongues: On the Verbalized Confidence of LLMs in Machine Translation

The rapid rise in popularity of large language models (LLMs) for translation calls for a thorough study of the reliability of their confidence in their own outputs. Unlike many generation tasks, translation errors and confidence levels can be useful at different levels of granularity (tokens, words, or spans). Unsupervised approaches based on internal signals like predicted probabilities can be misleading because they reflect certainty among alternatives rather than correctness. In addition, they require access to such internal signals. Here, we devise five verbalized methods of extracting an LLM's per-token confidence without those shortcomings and compare their reliability with that of the model's internal signals of certainty. We evaluate reliability using two forms of alignment: fine-grained error detection and calibration. For both, internal and verbalized methods perform similarly, although results vary by model. Interestingly, we find little to no correlation between internal and verbalized methods.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Disentangling Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Reward Design

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has driven major gains in LLM reasoning, and it is intuitive to assume this recipe will transfer well to multimodal models. However, multimodal models do two things: first, perceive what is in an image, then reason about what it implies. Because these stages are graded jointly, it is hard to tell how much room reasoning alone has to grow. We study this on algorithmic visual puzzles, where both components are necessary and show that perception, not reasoning, is the binding constraint. Replacing images with simple textual descriptions raises performance by over 20 points on average for Claude models. We then evaluate six reward designs aimed at inducing visual grounding during reasoning without chain-of-thought supervision. Training Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with GRPO, reward design induces long, structured reasoning with self-reflection and visual references, yielding a 5.56-point gain over the base model. These gains are, however, uneven; no single reward improves all categories, and rewards with verifiable accuracy signals trade out-of-domain transfer for in-domain accuracy. These results point to perception-aware reward design as a path forward, so that signals correct perception at its source rather than the reasoning that inherits its errors.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GeoDisaster: Benchmarking Orchestrated Agents for Operational Disaster Geo-Intelligence

Remote-sensing vision-language models (RS-VLMs) have advanced Earth-observation analysis toward visual interpretation and instruction-following, yet fall short of operational geo-intelligence, which demands tool-grounded spatial reasoning and structured, evidence-backed decisions. We introduce GeoDisaster, an operational geospatial disaster reasoning benchmark with 2,921 verified instances across 43 question types and five task families: deforestation monitoring, multi-hazard analysis, building-damage assessment, flood-safe routing, and Sentinel-1 SAR flood monitoring. Instances integrate heterogeneous EO/GIS evidence-optical and SAR imagery, raster masks, vector geometries, road networks, and exposure layers-spanning hazard detection, damage assessment, exposure estimation, and diagnostic report generation. Ground-truth answers are grounded in executable geospatial workflows and deterministic consistency checks, removing the need for language-model annotation. We further propose an orchestrated multi-agent framework with 18 disaster-oriented tools, where role-specialized agents coordinate through explicit execution contracts, aligned via Role-Contract Expectation Alignment (RCEA): failure-aware supervised fine-tuning combined with contract-grounded reinforcement learning over dense step-level signals. Experiments show that GeoDisaster challenges existing RS-VLMs and agentic systems, while RCEA improves tool use, evidence grounding, state consistency, and decision generation.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

A non-invasive liquid biopsy resolves the diagnostic blind spot in chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease is a major global health burden, and its early detection is critical for delaying progression to kidney failure using recently developed targeted therapies. However, current diagnostic screening relies heavily on blood markers that are confounded by muscle mass, and on urine tests that frequently miss structural damage occurring without protein leakage. This creates a critical diagnostic blind spot that hinders timely intervention. Here we show a non-invasive liquid biopsy platform that quantifies a specific protein marker, MUC1, on urinary extracellular vesicles to accurately assess renal parenchymal integrity. By bypassing the systemic metabolic noise of traditional blood tests, our assay provides a remarkably stable, person-specific functional signature. Following extensive validation across diverse cohorts, our longitudinal analysis demonstrated that the discrepancy between this novel urine-based readout and standard blood tests unmasks hidden renal vulnerability, successfully predicting rapid functional decline. By comprehensively evaluating both tubular and glomerular integrity from a single spot urine sample, these findings establish a completely non-invasive, highly scalable prescreening tool that resolves the diagnostic blind spot, enabling broader early detection strategies and ushering in a new era of proactive risk management.

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

MolE-RAG: Molecular Structure-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chemistry

arXiv:2606.05693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained. To bridge this semantic and chemical knowledge gap, we propose MolE-RAG, a training-free, molecule-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework for LLM-based molecular property prediction. MolE-RAG augments each prediction with three complementary sources of inference-time context: retrieved chemistry literature, molecule-specific information including compound synonyms, identifiers, functional group annotations, and physicochemical descriptors, and structurally similar molecules retrieved from the training set. We evaluate MolE-RAG across nine molecular property prediction tasks using proprietary, chemistry-specialized, and open-source LLMs. Across general-purpose LLMs, MolE-RAG improves ROC-AUC by up to 28 percentage points on classification tasks and reduces regression RMSE by up to 67% relative to a SMILES-only baseline. We further find that the utility of each context source varies across models and tasks, with different models benefiting most from textual retrieval, molecular context, or structural retrieval. These results suggest that molecule-centric retrieval can improve LLM-based molecular property prediction without model fine-tuning while providing a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous chemical knowledge at inference time.

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

Graph Learning Should Move Beyond Restrictive Views of Spectral and Message-Passing GNNs

arXiv:2602.10031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly divided into message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) and spectral GNNs, reflecting two largely separate research traditions in machine learning and signal processing. While MPNNs have a precise definition, there is no widely accepted criterion for what makes a mapping a spectral GNN. Most existing work restricts spectral GNNs to layered architectures based on linear spectral filters. Under this restriction, we show that spectral and spatial GNNs have largely equivalent expressive power. To promote progress in the field, we propose a precise definition of spectral GNNs based on eigenbasis symmetries, in contrast to the definition of MPNNs via neighborhood permutation symmetries. We further argue that the two perspectives offer complementary strengths. MPNNs provide a natural language for discrete structure and expressivity analysis through tools from logic and graph isomorphism, while the spectral perspective offers principled tools for understanding smoothing, bottlenecks, stability, and community structure. Overall, we argue that progress in graph learning will be accelerated by clarifying the similarities and differences between these perspectives and by moving toward a unified theoretical framework.