×

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Authors: lee ×
Shuffle
01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

L-Proto: Language-Aware Episodic Prototypical Training for Multilingual Speaker Verification

arXiv:2606.17416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual speaker verification remains challenging because language-dependent acoustic variability causes speaker identity to become entangled with linguistic characteristics, degrading generalization across languages. In multilingual training, embeddings often encode language cues with speaker identity, causing speakers to form language-specific clusters. We propose L-Proto, a language-aware episodic prototypical training strategy that constructs language-consistent episodes. By sampling speakers from a single language per episode, L-Proto reduces language-driven variation during training and encourages embeddings to focus more directly on speaker identity. Experiments on the TidyVoice Challenge benchmark demonstrate consistent performance improvements over conventional fine-tuning and random episodic sampling across multiple backbone architectures.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Deep Learning in Seismic Interpretation: Federated Advances in Salt Dome Segmentation

Salt-dome delineation is a critical, high-impact task in subsurface geological interpretation, driving decisions in hydrocarbon exploration, reservoir modeling, and drilling safety. While convolutional encoder-decoder architectures have delivered significant improvements in automated salt segmentation, their widespread application is severely limited by data sovereignty concerns, dataset bias, and the scarcity of labeled seismic volumes. This paper introduces FedSaltNet, a Federated Learning (FL) framework explicitly engineered for robust, generalizable, and privacy preserving salt-dome segmentation. We couple a lightweight Small U-Net backbone, chosen for its efficiency and regularization properties with a novel Foreground-Weighted (FG-WEIGHTED) aggregation strategy designed to tackle domain-specific class imbalance. Through an extensive comparative study emulating non-IID conditions across four diverse seismic datasets (TGS, SEAM, F3, GBS), we demonstrate two critical findings: The FG-WEIGHTED algorithm effectively mitigates data heterogeneity, yielding a 4.0% relative improvement in Intersection over Union (IoU) over the best conventional FL method. The simple U-Net architecture proved essential, outperforming the higher capacity ResNet-18 U-Net variant by 166% in average IoU, underscoring the necessity of architectural simplicity in data-constrained federated environments. FedSaltNet provides a validated, high-performance solution that establishes the viability of federated deep learning for collaborative, next-generation subsurface interpretation.

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

TuneJury: An Open Metric for Improving Music Generation Preference Alignment

arXiv:2606.17006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce TuneJury, an open, instance-level pairwise reward model for text-to-music that predicts a music preference score from a text prompt and an audio clip. The released checkpoint is trained on publicly available human-preference labels covering arena-style (A vs. B) votes, metric-alignment preference pairs, crowdsourced pairwise comparisons, and expert aesthetic ratings. The predicted score margin between two clips is well calibrated on our held-out test split, supporting data filtering via a simple score threshold. TuneJury generalizes to both held-out test pairs and out-of-distribution benchmarks, remaining competitive with prior baselines on the latter. For generators released after training, we introduce anchor calibration, a post-hoc, per-system Bradley-Terry calibration that recovers agreement at substantially better data efficiency than from-scratch retraining. The same frozen reward drives consistent reward-axis gains across three downstream applications: inference-time best-of-N selection, DITTO-style latent optimization, and expert-iteration post-training. TuneJury is available at https://github.com/yonghyunk1m/TuneJury.

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

Posterior Refinement: Fast Language Generation via Any-Order Flow Maps

Non-autoregressive generation offers a powerful paradigm for iterative refinement, allowing models to recursively critique, erase and regenerate arbitrary subsets of tokens. However, existing non-autoregressive models fail to realize this potential. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) suffer from factorization error, causing sample quality to collapse when generating multiple tokens simultaneously. Flow Map Language Models (FMLMs) circumvent this bottleneck via joint sequence transport for excellent few-step generation, but sacrifice the inference-time flexibility of MDMs. We introduce FMLM+, a framework that bridges this gap by equipping FMLM with masking-style noise schedules. While generating the full sequence in a single step, FMLM+ simultaneously scores the global consistency of each token a posteriori. We leverage this to introduce Posterior Refinement, a novel inference-time refinement strategy that enables the model to adaptively self-correct its outputs, matching the performance of discrete baselines with 32x fewer NFEs. Across diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that FMLM+ with Posterior Refinement improves the speed–quality tradeoff over both MDM and FMLM families, providing a scalable foundation for high-fidelity language modeling.

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

SSIL: Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for End-to-End Driving

arXiv:2308.14329v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In autonomous driving, the end-to-end (E2E) driving approach that predicts vehicle control signals directly from sensor data is rapidly gaining attention. To learn a safe E2E driving system, one needs an extensive amount of driving data and human intervention. Vehicle control data is constructed by many hours of human driving, and it is challenging to construct large vehicle control datasets. Often, publicly available driving datasets are collected with limited driving scenes, and collecting vehicle control data is only available by vehicle manufacturers. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the first self-supervised learning framework, Self-Supervised Imitation Learning (SSIL), for E2E driving. The proposed SSIL framework can learn vision-based E2E driving networks without using driving command data or a pre-trained model. To construct pseudo steering angle data, proposed SSIL predicts a pseudo target from the vehicle's poses at the current and previous time points that are estimated with light detection and ranging sensors. In addition, we propose a new cross-attention-based conditioning approach (CACA) for a vision encoder in E2E driving, where a high-level instruction serves as the conditioning signal for visual information. Our numerical experiments with three different benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SSIL framework achieves very comparable E2E driving accuracy with the supervised learning counterpart. Furthermore, the proposed pseudo-label predictor outperformed an existing one using proportional integral derivative controller, and proposed CACA achieved superior performance over existing conditioning approaches.

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

A matching decomposition algorithm for simulating quantum walk Hamiltonians

arXiv:2601.11418v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we present a new algorithm for generating quantum circuits that efficiently implement continuous time quantum walks on arbitrary simple sparse graphs. The algorithm, called matching decomposition, works by decomposing a continuous-time quantum walk Hamiltonian into a collection of exactly implementable Hamiltonians corresponding to matchings in the underlying graph followed by a novel graph compression algorithm that merges edges in the graph. We develop a greedy matching heuristic and a compression-aware matching heuristic, both of which can be used in the quantum circuit algorithm. Lastly, we convert the walks to a circuit and Trotterize over these components. The dynamics of the walker on each edge in the matching can be implemented in the circuit model as sequences of CX and CRx gates. We do not use Pauli decomposition when implementing walks along each matching. Furthermore, we compare greedy (compression-aware) matching decomposition to a standard Pauli-based simulation pipeline and find that greedy (compression-aware) matching decomposition consistently yields substantial resource reductions, requiring up to 43$\%$ (70\%) fewer controlled gates and up to 54$\%$ (75\%) shallower circuits than Pauli decomposition across multiple graph families. Finally, we also present examples and theoretical results for when matching decomposition can exactly simulate a continuous-time quantum walk on a graph.

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

AI4SLT: Empirical Processes in Lean 4 for Formal Statistical Learning Theory

We present the first comprehensive Lean 4 formalization of statistical learning theory (SLT) grounded in empirical process theory. Our en-to-end formal infrastructure implement the missing contents in latest Lean library, including a complete development of Gaussian Lipschitz concentration, Dudley's entropy integral theorem for sub-Gaussian processes, and an application to least-squares (sparse) regression with a sharp rate. The project was carried out using a human-AI collaborative workflow, in which humans design proof strategies and AI agents execute tactical proof construction, leading to the human-verified Lean 4 toolbox for SLT. Beyond implementation, the formalization process exposes and resolves implicit assumptions and missing details in standard SLT textbooks, enforcing a granular, line-by-line understanding of the theory. This work establishes a reusable formal foundation and opens the door for future developments in machine learning theory. The code is provided in https://github.com/YuanheZ/lean-stat-learning-theory.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

DeepJEB++: Foundation Model-Driven Large-Scale 3D Engineering Dataset via 2D Latent Space Augmentation

arXiv:2606.12994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-driven engineering design is constrained by the lack of large-scale 3D datasets that pair geometry with physics-based performance labels. In particular, existing 3D data augmentation techniques have limitations in preserving subtle and diverse geometric variations, and it remains difficult to automate the subsequent simulation-labeling process, where boundary conditions vary depending on the generated geometry. We present DeepJEB++, a foundation-model-driven data-augmentation framework that expands a small seed set of jet engine brackets into a large, simulation-labeled 3D dataset under constrained resources. Our key idea is to augment in the data-rich 2D latent space, then transfer to 3D. In Stage 1, we fine-tune a pretrained 2D latent diffusion model on multi-view renders and synthesize novel views by latent interpolation, retaining manufacturable designs through a vision-language-model (VLM) quality filter. In Stage 2, the validated images are lifted to 3D meshes by a domain-adapted generative foundation model. In Stage 3, an automated pipeline recognizes the load and bolt interfaces on each mesh and assigns finite-element labels – mass, stress, and displacement – without manual intervention. We assess augmentation quality along three intrinsic axes: manufacturability, label fidelity against the SimJEB ground truth, and distributional consistency. Starting from fewer than 400 seed designs, DeepJEB++ yields 15,360 simulation-labeled 3D brackets – a 40x expansion – using a single GPU per stage. The dataset will be made publicly available to support reproducible engineering-AI research.

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

Periodic-MAE: Periodic Video Masked Autoencoder for rPPG Estimation

In this paper, we propose Periodic-MAE, a self-supervised framework for learning generalizable spatio-temporal representations of periodic physiological signals from unlabeled facial videos. The proposed method leverages a masked autoencoder (MAE), which learns high-dimensional facial representations by reconstructing masked video tokens without relying on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) specific supervision. To explicitly align representation learning with the characteristics of rPPG, we introduce a periodicity-aware frame masking strategy based on video resampling, enabling the encoder to learn representations that capture quasi-periodic temporal patterns relevant to pulse signal estimation. In addition, physiological bandlimit constraints are integrated into the MAE pre-training framework, exploiting the sparsity of pulse signals in the frequency domain to guide the learned representations toward physiologically meaningful patterns. After pre-training, the learned representations are transferred to downstream rPPG estimation, where the encoder serves as a generic feature extractor for recovering pulse-related signals from facial videos. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including PURE, UBFC-rPPG, MMPD, and V4V. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed approach on a real-world rPPG dataset collected under unconstrained lighting conditions and subject motion. Experimental results demonstrate that Periodic-MAE consistently improves rPPG estimation performance, particularly in challenging cross-dataset and real-world evaluation settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziiho08/Periodic-MAE.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

TensorLDM: A Component-Wise Latent Diffusion Model for Volumetric DTI Reconstruction from Sparse DWIs

Reconstructing diffusion tensors from sparse DWIs is critical for accelerating Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) in clinical settings, yet current deep learning approaches frequently yield anatomically inconsistent or physically implausible tensors. We introduce TensorLDM, a component-wise latent diffusion model that processes the six tensor components through two group-specific encoders (for diagonal and off-diagonal elements) while maintaining anatomical consistency via shared DWI conditioning. TensorLDM uses an Anatomy-Conditioned Autoencoder that encourages the latent to focus on tensor properties rather than re-encoding structural information. A shared Cross-Component Attention (CCA) mechanism, applied in both autoencoder refinement and diffusion fine-tuning, models inter-component dependencies, while a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) DWI conditioner provides component-adaptive conditioning. On the Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset under a single-shell, four-volume sparse acquisition, TensorLDM produces the most accurate downstream tractography and tensors with near-ground-truth physical validity (SPD-violation rate 1.54% vs. 1.40%), with the best or comparable voxel-wise reconstruction accuracy. Geodesic tensor error measured by the Log-Euclidean Metric (LEM) corroborates these gains.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

BRDFusion: Physics Meets Generation for Urban Scene Inverse Rendering

Inverse rendering of urban scenes from captured videos enables numerous applications, including content creation and autonomous driving simulation. Physically-based rendering methods follow and control lighting physics, but suffer from reconstruction and rendering artifacts. While generative models produce realistic videos, they offer limited consistency and controllability. We present BRDFusion, a unified framework that combines two complementary models for inverse and forward rendering. Specifically, BRDFusion recovers explicit, consistent scene properties with physical modeling and alleviates optimization ambiguity with generative priors. During forward rendering, the physical model provides controllable rendering from the scene configuration, and the generative model denoises and fixes artifacts. Therefore, our method produces high-quality videos while allowing precise control, outperforming baselines in real and synthetic scenes. Moreover, BRDFusion supports novel-view relighting, night simulation, and dynamic object insertion/editing. Project page: https://shigon255.github.io/brdfusion-page/

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Probabilistic Signature Inversion: Learning Conditional Distributions from Truncated Signatures

arXiv:2606.15332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The signature transform is a principled feature map for continuous-time paths, valued for its uniqueness and universality. Recovering a path from its truncated signature is, however, structurally ill-posed because the truncated signature map is not injective. We therefore reframe truncated signature inversion as a probabilistic problem – learning the conditional distribution of a path given its truncated signature – and adopt a signature-conditioned flow matching model as a practical estimator. This probabilistic formulation elucidates the fundamental difficulty of inversion: Bayes reconstruction error quantifies the irreducible uncertainty remaining after conditioning on a statistic. We derive the Bayes-optimal error under linear statistics, obtaining a closed form for log-GBM and numerically tractable formulas for log-fBM and OU, yielding a concrete theoretical baseline for model validation. This baseline upper-bounds the Bayes error under truncated-signature conditioning, since truncated signatures provide richer information than linear statistics. Experiments show that empirical reconstruction errors under linear-statistics conditioning faithfully align with the theory-derived baseline, while errors decrease when the statistic is replaced with truncated signatures. Moreover, generated paths faithfully recover the conditioning signature while preserving key distributional and temporal structures, indicating that the estimator is well-calibrated to the target conditional distribution. Together, these results establish a well-posed probabilistic framework for truncated-signature inversion, with applicability demonstrated on real financial data beyond the parametric process families covered by theory.

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

SDS-LoRA: Overcoming Anisotropic Gradient Scaling in Low-Rank Adaptation

arXiv:2606.16454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables efficient adaptation of large pre-trained models to downstream tasks by parameterizing weight updates with low-rank matrices. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of the LoRA parameterization from a geometric perspective. Specifically, we show that when a full fine-tuning gradient is backpropagated to the low-rank matrices, it undergoes anisotropic scaling driven by their singular values. We argue that this phenomenon is undesirable because it distorts the full fine-tuning gradient by skewing it toward dominant singular directions while suppressing others. Our analyses demonstrate that anisotropic gradient scaling reduces the effective rank of the low-rank matrices' gradients and results in suboptimal alignment between the full fine-tuning gradient and its low-rank approximation in LoRA, thereby exacerbating the gap to full fine-tuning. To address these limitations, we propose a new low-rank parameterization, SDS-LoRA, which structurally decouples singular values from the backward pass. Our method ensures that the full fine-tuning gradient backpropagates only through the orthonormal bases of the low-rank matrices' subspaces, independent of their scales. Convergence analysis demonstrates that while LoRA's convergence rate degrades with the condition number of the low-rank matrices, SDS-LoRA remains independent of it. Experimental results across natural language and vision benchmarks show that SDS-LoRA improves loss convergence and reduces the gap to full fine-tuning, significantly enhancing adaptation performance.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Isolation to Entanglement: When Do Interpretability Methods Identify and Disentangle Known Concepts?

A goal of interpretability is to recover disentangled representations of latent concepts (features) from the activations of neural networks. The quality of features is typically evaluated in isolation, and under implicit independence assumptions that may not hold in practice. Thus, it is unclear to what extent common featurization methods such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and probes disentangle one concept from another. We propose a multi-concept evaluation setting using concepts including sentiment, domain, voice, and tense. We evaluate how well featurizers produce disentangled representations of each concept, observing that features are typically sensitive to only one concept, but also that concepts are distributed across many features. Then, we steer these features, measuring whether each concept is independently manipulable, and whether features interact. Even in idealized settings, steering a feature often affects many concepts, despite a near absence of interaction effects. These results suggest that correlational metrics are insufficient to establish steering selectivity, and that demonstrating that two features operate in separate spaces is insufficient to claim that they will be selective for one concept. These results underscore the importance of multi-concept evaluations in interpretability research.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Seeing What Matters: Perceptual Wrapper with Common Randomness for 3D Gaussian Splatting

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves impressive real-time rendering, it frequently struggles to synthesize high-frequency textures, a limitation heavily exacerbated in memory-constrained and rate-distortion-optimized (RDO) pipelines. To address this, we propose a versatile 2D perceptual wrapper that enhances the rendered outputs of existing 3DGS representations in a content- and view-dependent manner. Our method leverages a lightweight synthesis network conditioned on pseudo-random Gaussian noise to synthesize perceptually plausible textures. Supervised by Wasserstein Distortion, the network learns to match local feature statistics rather than strictly enforcing pixel-wise reconstruction fidelity, effectively mitigating the blurriness inherent in standard frameworks. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our plug-and-play approach across vanilla, memory-constrained, and RDO 3DGS methods. Comprehensive subjective and objective experiments confirm that our method significantly improves over existing baselines, yielding superior perceptual quality at sharply reduced file or model sizes.

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

Advancing DialNav through Automatic Embodied Dialog Augmentation

arXiv:2606.19948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For embodied agents capable of physical interaction, the capability to create and understand dialog is crucial to ensure both safety and effectiveness. While DialNav[han2025dialnav] provides a framework for holistic evaluation of the dialog–execution loop in photorealistic indoor navigation, its performance remains limited by a critical scarcity of training data (2K episodes). To address this, we propose an automatic generation pipeline, and construct the RAINbow dataset, a large-scale training dataset with 238K episodes for DialNav. Our pipeline converts existing VLN datasets into multi-turn dialog and creates cost-efficient and high-quality dataset. Then, we introduce two additional complementary advances to unlock the data's full potential: (1) Dual-Strategy Training, a navigation training scheme to align the navigation training with the dynamic dialog-navigation loop, and (2) a localization model that leverages VLN knowledge. By combining these complementary solutions, our model substantially outperforms the baseline in success rate on both Val Seen (58.24, +89\%) and Val Unseen (29.05, +100\%) splits, establishing a new state of the art.

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

A Composite Activation Function for Learning Stable Binary Representations

arXiv:2605.11558v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation functions play a central role in neural networks by shaping internal representations. Recently, learning binary activation representations has attracted significant attention due to their advantages in computational and memory efficiency, as well as interpretability. However, training neural networks with Heaviside activations remains challenging, as their non-differentiability obstructs standard gradient-based optimization. In this paper, we propose Heavy Tailed Activation Function (HTAF), a smooth approximation to the Heaviside function that enables stable training with gradient-based optimization. We construct HTAF as a sigmoid hyperbolic tangent composite function and theoretically show that it maintains a large gradient mass around zero inputs while exhibiting slower gradient decay in the tail regions. We show that Spiking Neural Networks, Binary Neural Networks and Deep Heaviside neural Networks can be trained stably using HTAF with gradient-based optimization. Finally, we introduce Implicit Concept Bottleneck Models (ICBMs), an interpretable image model that leverages HTAF to induce discrete feature representations. Extensive experiments across various architectures and image datasets demonstrate that ICBM enables stable discretization while achieving prediction performance comparable to or better than standard models.

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

EfficientRollout: System-Aware Self-Speculative Decoding for RL Rollouts

arXiv:2606.18967v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a representative post-training paradigm for LLMs, enabling strong reasoning and agentic capabilities. However, rollout generation remains a dominant latency bottleneck because autoregressive sampling decodes responses sequentially and a small number of long-tailed generations often determine completion time. Speculative decoding (SD) offers a natural way to address this bottleneck, as it is a well-established technique for serving fixed LLMs that reduces latency by rapidly drafting tokens and accepting them through parallel verification while preserving the target-model distribution. However, its practical speedups do not directly carry over to RL rollouts: (i) the evolving target policy makes any fixed drafter increasingly mismatched with the policy's output distribution; and (ii) active batch sizes shrink throughout rollout decoding, shifting decoding from compute-bound to memory-bound regimes where parallel verification can exploit underutilized compute. Therefore, accelerating RL rollouts requires both a drafter that remains effective under long, high-temperature generations from an evolving policy and system-aware use of SD that avoids compute-bound regimes. We present EfficientRollout, a system-aware self-SD framework designed to address this gap for RL rollouts. EfficientRollout induces a quantized drafter from the target model (i.e. self-speculative decoding), keeping it coupled to the evolving policy without separate drafter pretraining or online adaptation. It further coordinates a system-aware SD toggle policy with acceptance-aware draft-length adaptation, enabling speculation only in beneficial regimes while matching the drafting budget to evolving drafter quality. EfficientRollout reduces rollout and end-to-end latency by up to 19.6% and 12.7%, respectively, over an accelerated AR rollout baseline, while preserving final model quality.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Judging Against the Reference: Uncovering Knowledge-Driven Failures in LLM-Judges on QA Evaluation

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic judges for question answering (QA) and other reference-conditioned evaluation tasks, little is known about their ability to adhere to a provided reference. We identify a critical failure mode of such reference-based LLM QA evaluation: when the provided reference conflicts with the judge model's parametric knowledge, the resulting scores become unreliable, substantially degrading evaluation fidelity. To study this phenomenon systematically, we introduce a controlled swapped-reference QA framework that induces reference-belief conflicts. Specifically, we replace the reference answer with an incorrect entity and construct diverse pairings of original and swapped references with correspondingly aligned candidate answers. Surprisingly, grading reliability drops sharply under swapped references across a broad set of judge models. We empirically show that this vulnerability is driven by judges' over-reliance on parametric knowledge, leading judges to disregard the given reference under conflict. Finally, we find that this failure persists under common prompt-based mitigation strategies, highlighting a fundamental limitation of LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and motivating reference-based protocols that enforce stronger adherence to the provided reference.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Brain-gut axis imaging, motion correction with 11C-carfentanil total-body PET

Background: Mu-opioid receptors (MORs) are expressed throughout the body including in the brain and gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Total-body PET imaging of the brain and GI tract offers a promising approach for cross-sectional in vivo evaluation of the MOR brain-GI axis. However, intestinal motility and bladder filling introduce motion throughout the GI tract over the scan window. Here we establish analysis methodology to account for motion for dynamic imaging of the brain-GI axis, to further characterize peripheral MORs throughout the body and provide a framework for semi-automatic total-body PET modeling. Methods: 4 subjects underwent 90-min dynamic [11C]-carfentanil (cfn) total-body PET acquisitions at baseline, after intravenous naloxone (central antagonist) administration, and after orally administered loperamide (peripheral agonist and P-glycoprotein substrate). Thalamic MOR availability was measured using the Logan reference tissue model. Using CT-based segmentation, the GI tract was subdivided into anatomical segments, in addition to other peripheral organs (e.g., liver, psoas muscle). Frame-by-frame semi-automatic motion correction was performed with three distinct reference frames (11-14 min post-injection, p.i., 35-40 min p.i., and 85-90 min p.i.). The performance of these three were compared to manual correction. Compartment modeling and Logan graphical analysis were performed to estimate relevant kinetic parameters (K1, VT, VTLogan). Results: Across the 4 subjects and regions, kinetic parameter estimates were highly correlated (r>0.7) for K1, VT and VT Logan when comparing semi-automatic (reference frame at 35-40 min p.i.) and manual correction. With semi-automatic motion correction, graphical-based estimation of VTLogan in the gastrointestinal tract was significantly decreased with loperamide relative to baseline (p

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Re-evaluating the Cross-Sectional Prevalence of Severe Age-Related Hearing Loss Using Extreme Value Statistics

Authors:

Standard demographic models of age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) predominantly utilize symmetric functions, such as log-normal distributions for age-binned thresholds and 4-parameter logistic curves for prevalence estimates. While these models capture early-to-moderate degradation effectively, they structurally struggle to characterize the heavy tails associated with severe clinical impairment. In this study, we present a statistical critique using a secondary analysis of the historical Medical Research Council (MRC) National Study of Hearing (1980-1986) dataset. By applying Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution theory, we demonstrate that as severity increases, the underlying statistical geometry of hearing loss shifts. The asymmetric, heavy-tailed GEV distribution provides a parsimonious description of severe impairment, requiring fewer parameters than standard symmetric models. However, we explicitly acknowledge that utilizing static population data to infer progression introduces an ecological fallacy. Furthermore, the dataset's historical nature embeds unquantified generational cohort effects. We conclude that while extreme value statistics offer a compelling mathematical framework for modeling the variance of severe presbycusis, true longitudinal datasets are required to isolate physiological degradation from historical cohort variance.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Diffusion Integrated Gradients: Controllable Path Generation for Flexible Feature Attribution

arXiv:2606.22314v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Path-based attribution methods such as Integrated Gradients (IG) are widely adopted for their strong axiomatic properties and effectiveness in attributing model predictions to input features by integrating gradients along a path from a baseline to the input. However, the choice of the attribution path largely affects the quality of explanations, and existing approaches rely on fixed or hand-crafted paths that often produce noisy or distorted attributions. To address this limitation, we propose Diffusion Integrated Gradients (DiffIG), a novel method that reformulates path generation as a conditional generative modeling problem. DiffIG first trains a diffusion model to learn a distribution over paths generated from a Stick-Breaking Process, then employs guided sampling to embed user guidance during the sampling procedure. We demonstrate that DiffIG quantitatively matches or outperforms existing path-based methods, achieving perceptually aligned explanations. This work introduces a new generative perspective for flexible, inference-time controllable Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

SCALE: Self-uncertainty Conditioned Adaptive Looking and Execution for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2602.04208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic control, with test-time scaling (TTS) gaining attention to enhance robustness beyond training. However, existing TTS methods for VLAs require additional training, verifiers, and multiple forward passes, making them impractical for deployment. Moreover, they intervene only at action decoding while keeping visual representations fixed-insufficient under perceptual ambiguity, where reconsidering how to perceive is as important as deciding what to do. To address these limitations, we propose SCALE, a simple inference strategy that jointly modulates visual perception and action based on 'self-uncertainty', inspired by uncertainty-driven exploration in Active Inference theory-requiring no additional training, no verifier, and only a single forward pass. SCALE broadens exploration in both perception and action under high uncertainty, while focusing on exploitation when confident-enabling adaptive execution across varying conditions. Experiments on simulated and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SCALE improves state-of-the-art VLAs and outperforms existing TTS methods while maintaining single-pass efficiency.

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

Moving Out: Physically-grounded Human-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2507.18623v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The ability to adapt to physical actions and constraints in an environment is crucial for embodied agents (e.g., robots) to effectively collaborate with humans. Such physically grounded human-AI collaboration must account for the increased complexity of the continuous state-action space and constrained dynamics caused by physical constraints. However, most existing collaboration benchmarks are discrete or do not consider physical attributes and constraints. To address this, we introduce Moving Out, a human-AI collaboration benchmark that resembles a wide range of collaboration modes affected by physical attributes and constraints, such as moving heavy items together and coordinating actions to move an item around a corner. Moving Out consists of two challenges and human-human interaction data to comprehensively evaluate models' abilities to adapt to diverse human behaviors and unseen physical attributes. To give embodied agents the capability to collaborate with humans under physical attributes and constraints, we propose a novel method, BASS (Behavior Augmentation, Simulation, and Selection), to enhance the diversity of agents and their understanding of the outcome of actions. We systematically compare BASS and state-of-the-art models in AI-AI and human-AI experiments, showing that BASS can effectively collaborate with both unseen AI and humans. The project page is available at https://live-robotics-uva.github.io/movingout_ai/.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MoReBench: Evaluating Procedural and Pluralistic Moral Reasoning in Language Models, More than Outcomes

As AI systems progress, we rely more on them to make decisions with us and for us. To ensure that such decisions are aligned with human values, it is imperative for us to understand not only what decisions they make but also how they come to those decisions. Reasoning language models, which provide both final responses and (partially transparent) intermediate thinking traces, present a timely opportunity to study AI procedural reasoning. Unlike math and code problems which often have objectively correct answers, moral dilemmas are an excellent testbed for process-focused evaluation because they allow for multiple defensible conclusions. To do so, we present MoReBench: 1,000 moral scenarios, each paired with a set of rubric criteria that experts consider essential to include (or avoid) when reasoning about the scenarios. MoReBench contains over 23 thousand criteria including identifying moral considerations, weighing trade-offs, and giving actionable recommendations to cover cases on AI advising humans moral decisions as well as making moral decisions autonomously. Separately, we curate MoReBench-Theory: 150 examples to test whether AI can reason under five major frameworks in normative ethics. Our results show that scaling laws and existing benchmarks on math, code, and scientific reasoning tasks fail to predict models' abilities to perform moral reasoning. Models also show partiality towards specific moral frameworks (e.g., Benthamite Act Utilitarianism and Kantian Deontology), which might be side effects of popular training paradigms. Together, these benchmarks advance process-focused reasoning evaluation towards safer and more transparent AI.