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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Graph Structured Combinatorial Semi-Bandit with Nonlinear Reward Associations through Separable Signals

arXiv:2606.14650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The identification of optimal structures within vast arrays of interconnected data necessitates significant sampling- and computational effort. Learning and leveraging underlying signal dependencies can improve efficiency and predictive capabilities considerably, but the ubiquity of nonlinear statistical relations amplifies the complexity of such undertakings. In this paper, we develop novel generic and adaptive strategies equipped with routines for graph-based causal reward modeling, analytic reproducing kernel methods, and Taylor approximation of functional processes. We establish theoretical performance guarantees sublinear in time and linear in data volume over time. Our analyses cover robustness to a multitude of uncertainties arising from noise interference, gradual model convergence, and solution space mismatch. The framework's general appeal is substantiated by a minimalistic set of conditions or reliance on prior estimates, while various outlined modifications address specific or extended settings. To demonstrate practical effectiveness, we conduct numerical experiments using both benchmarked synthetic and real-world transportation datasets.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grounded Chess Reasoning in Language Models via Master Distillation

arXiv:2603.20510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models often lack grounded reasoning capabilities in specialized domains where training data is scarce but bespoke systems excel. We introduce a general framework for distilling expert system reasoning into natural language chain-of-thought explanations, enabling compact models to acquire domain expertise and the ability to generate faithful, grounded explanations. Rather than distilling only final outputs, we capture the full reasoning process, transforming opaque expert computations into transparent, step-by-step explanations. We demonstrate this approach in chess, a canonical reasoning domain where language models continue to underperform. Our 4B parameter model, C1, advances from a near-zero baseline to 48.1\% accuracy, outperforming all open-source models and most frontier proprietary systems. Notably, C1 surpasses its distillation teacher and generates solutions in two orders of magnitude fewer tokens than baselines. Unlike prior neural chess approaches that predict only best moves, C1 generates explainable solutions revealing strategic reasoning. Our pipeline combines supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with theme-balanced data sampling for comprehensive tactical coverage. Master Distillation demonstrates how to inject expert-level knowledge into compact models for under-optimized domains, offering a recipe for unlocking RLVR where LLMs lack sufficient base capabilities.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

On the Addressability Problem on CSS Codes

arXiv:2502.13889v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent discoveries in asymptotically good quantum codes have intensified research on their application in quantum computation and fault-tolerant operations. This study focuses on the addressability problem within CSS codes: we ask what circuits might implement logical gates on strict subsets of logical qubits. With some notion of fault-tolerance, we prove several impossibility results: for CSS codes with non-zero rate, one cannot address a logical $H$, $HS$, $SH$, or $\mathsf{CNOT}$ to any non-empty strict subset of logical qubits using a circuit made only from 1-local Clifford gates. Furthermore, we show that one cannot permute the logical qubits in a code purely by permuting the physical qubits, if the rate of the code is (asymptotically) greater than 1/3 and the distance is at least 3. We can show a similar no-go result for $\mathsf{CNOT}$s and $\mathsf{CZ}$s between two such high-rate codes, albeit under a more restrictive assumption on the circuit, which we call "global" (though recent addressable CCZ gates use global circuits). This work pioneers the study of distance-preserving addressability in quantum codes, mainly by considering automorphisms of the code. This perspective offers new insights and potential directions for future research. We argue that studying this trade off between addressability and efficiency of the codes is essential to understand better how to do efficient quantum computation.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Fast mixing of all-to-all quantum systems at high temperatures

arXiv:2606.26090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: It is shown that arbitrary quantum $k$-local Hamiltonians with bounded strength interactions admit a quantum Gibbs sampler [CKG23] with a system-size independent spectral gap, at sufficiently high temperatures. This generalizes the existing quantum fast-mixing results beyond the geometrically-local setting. As a consequence, such systems admit fully-polynomial time quantum approximation algorithms for partition functions and global expectation values.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

S-GBT: Smooth Growth Bound Tensor for Certified Robustness Against Word Substitution Attacks in NLP

Despite recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP), models remain vulnerable to word substitution attacks. Most existing defenses focus on first order sensitivity and measure how much the output changes when the input is slightly perturbed. However, they ignore how this sensitivity evolves, which is described by curvature. When gradients vary sharply, models can still fail. This paper introduces the Smooth Growth Bound Tensor (S-GBT), a second order method that bounds the Hessian element-wise, for which we provide formal theoretical proofs on the resulting robustness bounds. A regularization term is added during training to minimize these bounds. This yields tighter certified robustness against word substitution attacks. The change in the output under word substitution is bounded by both a linear term and a quadratic term. S-GBT is derived for two architectures: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The method is integrated directly into the training objective. Its effectiveness is evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets. The results show that combining first and second order regularization improves certified robust accuracy by up to 23.4% compared to prior methods, while clean accuracy remains competitive. These findings indicate that controlling both the gradient and its variation is a promising direction for building more robust models.

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

WorldLines: Benchmarking and Modeling Long-Horizon Stateful Embodied Agents

arXiv:2606.18847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To assist humans over extended periods in real homes, embodied agents must remember user routines, world states, and past interactions. Existing long-term memory benchmarks mainly evaluate language-centric retrieval and question answering, while embodied benchmarks often focus on short-horizon task execution without testing long-term memory use in dynamic environments. We introduce WorldLines, a project-driven benchmark for long-horizon embodied household assistance. It constructs temporally extended household traces with dialogues, actions, execution feedback, object and device state changes, and converts them into evidence-linked samples for Memory QA and Embodied Task Planning. We further propose ObsMem, an observer-grounded memory framework that maintains visibility-aware memories and action-native state trails for state-aware decisions. Experiments reveal persistent challenges in partial observability, overwritten world states, and translating long-term memory into embodied plans, while ObsMem offers a stronger reference architecture for this setting.

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

An Empirical Investigation of Pre-Trained Deep Learning Model Reuse in the Scientific Process

arXiv:2603.13584v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has achieved recognition for its impact within natural sciences, yet the prohibitive financial and technical cost of training models from scratch inhibit adoption. Following software engineering community guidance, natural scientists are reusing pre-trained deep learning models (PTMs) to amortize these costs. While prior works recommend PTM reuse patterns, we present the first empirical study of PTM reuse patterns in the natural sciences, quantifying the utilization and impact of PTM reuse within the scientific process across 17,718 peer reviewed, open access papers. Our results show that "Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology" has outpaced other natural scientific fields in PTM reuse, "adaptation" reuse is the most prevalent PTM reuse pattern identified across all natural science fields, and the "testing" stage of the scientific process has been most impacted by PTM integration.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Adaptive and Explicit safe: Triggering Latent Safety Awareness in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.16808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks, they remain highly vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreaks and direct harmful queries. To address this vulnerability, prior works depend heavily on external manual data annotation for safety alignment. However, we observe that LRMs can inherently identify safety risks when being re-presented with original queries alongside their own reasoning trajectories – a capability we term Latent Safety Awareness. To leverage this safety awareness, we first employ Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to explicitly induce safe tags to trigger safety analysis and guidance following the initial reasoning content for unsafe queries, while preserving standard responses for general queries to ensure adaptive triggering. Subsequently, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to further enhance the correctness and stability of the safety analysis and guidance. Notably, responses required for both training stages are entirely generated by models being optimized. With (Safe Trigger) SFT and DPO, experimental results demonstrate significant safety enhancement. For example, the Attack Success Rate (ASR) of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B, on average, drops 24.65% and 36.72% on harmful and jailbreak benchmarks, respectively. Finally, our Safe Trigger method exerts almost no negative impact on general performance or user experience.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Spatial distribution of the proteome in the human body and in cancers

Authors:

A detailed, spatially resolved quantitative map of the human proteome is essential for a deeper understanding of human biology and disease1–4. Here we present a comprehensive human proteomic landscape, generated by profiling more than 13,000 proteins across 2,856 samples using data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry. The dataset spans 58 major tissue types, 251 specific tissue subtypes and 25 distinct carcinomas. This resource enables the depiction of spatially resolved proteome trajectories across tissue types and physiological states, including fetal, tumour, adjacent non-tumour and healthy adult tissue, thereby providing insight into both developmental processes and oncogenic progression. Furthermore, quantitative proteomics comparisons across diverse tissue types and states facilitate the indication of organ-specific toxicity, the identification of repurposable anticancer drug candidates and the prioritization of therapeutic targets for cancers. This study establishes a quantitative resource for navigating the proteome in the human body and in common cancers. A spatially resolved map of the human proteome across a variety of healthy tissues and cancers provides wide-ranging insights in developmental biology and oncology, and could aid the identification of therapeutic targets and development of treatments for cancer.

10.
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/.

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

Shuttling Compiler for Trapped-Ion Quantum Computers Based on Large Language Models

arXiv:2512.18021v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the first shuttling compiler based on large language models (LLMs) for trapped-ion quantum computers, where qubits are shuttled between segments for gate execution and qubit storage. We fine-tune pre-trained LLMs on examples from linear and branched one-dimensional shuttling architectures. Thus, we obtain a layout-independent compilation strategy that learns the required shuttling operations directly from data. Using benchmark circuits with up to 16 qubits, such fine-tuned LLMs can now generate valid schedules for shuttling architectures. Notably, we also obtain a valid schedule for a previously unseen four-way junction layout. This demonstrates that trained LLMs can generalize to layouts not encountered during training. For various architectures, LLM-based schedules improve upon state-of-the-art baseline compiler results, reducing the shuttling effort by up to 15%.

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

Shared Doubt: Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Confidence Estimation for Language Models

Confidence estimation (CE), i.e., quantifying the reliability of a model's prediction, has attracted great interest in the context of large language models (LLMs). However, most studies focus on English, ignoring the multilingual reality of LLM usage, while many CE methods degrade or require retraining across languages. To address this gap, we investigate whether multilingual LLMs encode shared, language-transferable confidence features in open-ended question answering. We use a lightweight linear probe that predicts answer correctness directly from intermediate representations. Trained monolingually, the probe generalizes zero-shot to unseen, typologically diverse languages without target-language supervision. Learned layer weights and multiple ablations reveal that confidence features concentrate in middle layers across languages, suggesting a shared confidence subspace. While zero-shot cross-lingual performance depends on similarity to the source language, the probe provides a strong baseline without any retraining and compares favorably to other popular confidence estimation methods.

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

Same Lesson, Different Story: Cross-Lingual Reconstruction of Cultural Narratives in Large Language Models

The evaluation of cultural grounding context becomes complex when multiple cultures convey the same moral lesson. This challenge is particularly relevant to large language models (LLMs), which produce narratives across a wide range of languages and cultural contexts. However, it remains uncertain whether these models preserve culturally grounded meaning when equivalent moral lessons are conveyed through distinct cultural forms. This study introduces a multilingual evaluation narrative framework that integrates a cross-linguistic collection of 414 proverbs spanning 15 languages and uses four LLMs to generate 13k narratives. By employing semantically equivalent proverbs as culturally grounded prompts, the analysis assesses whether models preserve meaning across languages, how cross-lingual conditioning influences narrative realization, and whether different model families converge on similar interpretations. Results indicate that cross-lingual prompting largely preserves proverb-level semantic meaning while systematically redistributing agency, social positioning, and narrative structure. Additionally, strong inter-model convergence is observed in both monolingual and cross-lingual settings, suggesting that multilingual LLMs rely on shared semantic abstractions despite architectural and linguistic differences. These findings shed light on the need for more comprehensive evaluations of cultural grounding. Relying exclusively on semantic similarity in multilingual narrative assessments may overestimate cultural preservation by neglecting culturally meaningful variations in narrative expression.

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

An End-to-End Hybrid Framework for Rumour Detection in Low-Resources Algerian Dialect

The rapid growth of social media has intensified the spread of rumours. This issue is more challenging in the Algerian context due to the informal and code-switched nature of dialectal content, the scarcity of annotated resources, and the limited effectiveness of standard Arabic NLP tools on dialect text. This paper presents an end-to-end rumour detection hybrid framework for Algerian dialect social media content. We build a domain-specific annotated dataset by combining real social media posts, synthetic data, and the FASSILA corpus, with automatic labeling based on a similarity-based annotation process. A transliteration pipeline is also introduced to generate parallel datasets in Arabic script and Arabizi. We evaluate multiple approaches, including classical machine learning, deep learning, transformers, and hybrid models. Experimental results show that a hybrid approach combining transformer embeddings with a classical classifier achieves the best performance, reaching an F1-score of 0.84. We also find that domain-specific pre-training is more important than model size, with social media-trained models outperforming larger models trained on formal Arabic corpora. These results demonstrate the feasibility of rumour detection in low-resource Algerian dialect settings.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

The Sparse Frontier: Sparse Attention Trade-offs in Transformer LLMs

Sparse attention offers a promising strategy to extend long-context capabilities in Transformer LLMs, yet its efficiency-accuracy trade-offs remain unclear due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation. We address this gap with the largest-scale empirical analysis to date of training-free sparse attention, evaluating six methods across multiple model families and sizes, sequences up to 128K tokens, and sparsity levels up to 0.95 (i.e., $1/20$ attention budget) on nine diverse tasks. We first organise the rapidly evolving landscape of sparse attention methods into a taxonomy along four design axes. Our analysis then yields actionable insights: 1) sparse attention is effective: larger sparse models outperform smaller dense ones at equivalent cost, improving the Pareto frontier; 2) for the training-free methods we study, fine-grained per-query importance estimation during prefilling remains impractical-due to both the cost of estimation and the lack of sparse kernels that translate fine-grained sparsity into wall-clock gains-forcing a task-dependent choice between global-to-token and block-to-block selection. Instead, during decoding, token-to-page selection becomes feasible, enabling better generalisation and higher sparsity tolerance; 3) longer sequences tolerate higher sparsity, suggesting that fixed-budget methods in production are suboptimal. Together, these findings provide practical guidance for deploying sparse attention and methodological recommendations for future evaluations. Our code is available at https://github.com/PiotrNawrot/sparse-frontier.

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

Learning Topology-Aware Implicit Field for Unified Pulmonary Tree Modeling with Incomplete Topological Supervision

Pulmonary trees extracted from CT images frequently exhibit topological incompleteness, such as missing or disconnected branches, which substantially degrades downstream anatomical analysis and limits the applicability of existing pulmonary tree modeling pipelines. Current approaches typically rely on dense volumetric processing, explicit graph reasoning, or generic point cloud completion priors, leading to limited efficiency, weak structural awareness, and reduced robustness under realistic structural corruption. We propose TopoField, a topology-aware implicit modeling framework that treats topology repair as a first-class modeling problem and enables unified multi-task inference for pulmonary tree analysis. TopoField represents pulmonary anatomy using sparse surface and skeleton point clouds and learns a continuous implicit field that supports topology repair without relying on complete or explicit disconnection annotations, by training on synthetically introduced structural disruptions over already incomplete trees. Building upon the repaired implicit representation, anatomical labeling and lung segment reconstruction are jointly inferred through task-specific implicit functions within a single forward pass. Extensive experiments on the Lung3D+ dataset demonstrate that TopoField consistently improves topological completeness and achieves accurate anatomical labeling and lung segment reconstruction under challenging incomplete scenarios. We further validate TopoField on real incomplete outputs from an external segmentation model, demonstrating its applicability to realistic segmentation pipelines. Owing to its implicit formulation, TopoField attains high computational efficiency, completing all tasks in just over one second per case, highlighting its practicality for large-scale and time-sensitive clinical applications.

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

Stochastic-Dimension Frozen Sampled Neural Network for High-Dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii Equations on Unbounded Domains

arXiv:2604.09361v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper introduces the Stochastic-Dimension Frozen Sampled Neural Network (SD-FSNN), a novel computational framework for solving high-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) on unbounded domain. The proposed method circumvents the curse-of-dimensionality that plagues traditional discretizations and the computational bottlenecks of gradient-based neural network solvers through a synergistic combination of techniques. First, a prescribed Gaussian envelope encodes the far-field decay of the wavefunction, enabling a space-time separation where the spatial approximation is handled by a frozen, single-hidden-layer neural network with data-driven sampled features. This yields a gradient-free formalism where spatial derivatives are analytically precomputed and time-dependence is evolved via reduced ODEs. Second, a stochastic-dimension sampler provides a conditionally unbiased estimate of the spatial operator by evaluating only a small subset of spatial dimensions at each time step, essentially reducing computational and memory costs. Discrete conservation laws are also enforced, ensuring long-term stability. Extensive numerical experiments on GPE in up to 1000 dimensions demonstrate that SD-FSNN achieves significantly higher accuracy and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods, including PINNs, randomized feature methods, and tensor-network approaches. The results confirm that SD-FSNN effectively mitigates the Kolmogorov $n$-width barrier for frozen-basis models on structured solution manifolds.

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

Achieving Precise Text-To-Cypher Via Grounded Knowledge Graph Data Generation

Property Graphs are rapidly being adopted as database frameworks for representing heterogeneous data sources. To enable precise access to the information contained in them we need conversational interfaces based on Text-To-Cypher (Text2Cypher) parsers. This paper presents an automatic synthetic data generation method that can be leveraged to fine-tune small LLMs for this task. We conduct experiments on all the major Text-To-Cypher benchmarks, demonstrating that with our synthetic data generation approach we can significantly increase the performance of small LLMs, allowing them to compete with much larger proprietary models. This means that in settings in which models must be locally deployed we can ensure data-sovereignty without sacrificing accuracy and without costly annotation campaigns.

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

EComAgentBench: Benchmarking Shopping Agents on Long-Horizon Tasks with Distributed Hidden Intent

As LLM-based shopping agents enter production, existing benchmarks fail to capture how a shopper's requirements arrive: stated implicitly in the query, recorded in a profile, or revealed only when the right question is asked. Benchmarks that expose full intent upfront and grade only the final choice can neither pose this long-horizon challenge nor explain which requirement an agent missed. To address this gap, we introduce EComAgentBench, a benchmark of 662 tasks grounded in real Amazon products and reviews. Each task scatters these requirements across a visible query, a tool-gated profile, and scripted clarification; an agent must uncover hidden intent, verify candidates against attributes and review evidence, and commit to a single product within 100 tool calls. Moreover, typed, source-tagged rubrics grade every task, attributing each failure to a requirement and its source. Construction is automated yet reliable, with every answer fixed in code before any text is generated and every sample validated. Our evaluation of seven models reveals that even the strongest attains only 57.1% overall accuracy, and rubric satisfaction degrades from visible to hidden sources. Overall, we believe EComAgentBench will serve as a reproducible foundation for moving shopping agents from single-query search toward dependable assistance over long horizons.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Benchmarking Vision Foundation Models for Domain-Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) remains challenging due to the requirement for robust domain generalization across unseen environments. While recent trends leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for semantic supervision, these multimodal approaches often demand prohibitive computational resources and exhibit high inference latency. Furthermore, their efficacy is inherently limited by the quality of the underlying visual features. This paper revisits the potential of vision-only foundation models to establish a highly efficient and robust baseline for FAS. We conduct a systematic benchmarking of 15 pre-trained models, such as supervised CNNs, supervised ViTs, and self-supervised ViTs, under severe cross-domain scenarios including the MICO and Limited Source Domains (LSD) protocols. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that self-supervised vision models, particularly DINOv2 with Registers, significantly suppress attention artifacts and capture critical, fine-grained spoofing cues. Combined with Face Anti-Spoofing Data Augmentation (FAS-Aug), Patch-wise Data Augmentation (PDA) and Attention-weighted Patch Loss (APL), our proposed vision-only baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance in the MICO protocol. This baseline outperforms existing methods under the data-constrained LSD protocol while maintaining superior computational efficiency. This work provides a definitive vision-only baseline for FAS, demonstrating that optimized self-supervised vision transformers can serve as a backbone for both vision-only and future multimodal FAS systems. The project page is available at: https://gsisaoki.github.io/FAS-VFMbenchmark-CVPRW2026/ .

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Data-driven sparse identification of governing PDEs via knockoff filters and multi-criteria trade-offs

arXiv:2605.26631v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose KO-PDE-IDENT, a data-driven framework for identifying parsimonious partial differential equations (PDEs) with false discovery rate (FDR) control. PDE discovery from noisy observations is often hindered by extreme multicollinearity among candidate terms, which causes typical sparse-regression methods to select spurious terms. To address this problem, KO-PDE-IDENT initially mines a support set of potential candidate terms via model-X knockoff filters with finite-sample FDR control, then refines and ranks the surviving PDE alternatives. The framework integrates three components. First, knockoff feature statistics are constructed by coupling $\ell_{0}$-constrained adaptive best-subset selection with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), yielding an effective and computationally efficient difference statistic. Second, a recursive feature elimination (RFE) procedure removes terms whose marginal contributions are dispensable and assesses statistical necessity through knockoff-perturbed hypothesis testing. Third, the final model selection is formulated as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, where the optimal governing equation is the alternative that best balances a wide range of criteria such as predictive accuracy, model complexity and coefficient uncertainty. We evaluate KO-PDE-IDENT on five canonical PDEs under severe noise corruption. Empirical results show that our framework can exactly recover the true PDE structure, eliminating false discoveries while retaining all true underlying terms, with low coefficient estimation error.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Point-Wise Geometry-Aware Transformer for Partial-to-Full Point Cloud Registration in Computer-Assisted Surgery

Partial-to-full registration remains challenging due to varying overlap ratios, fluctuating point densities, and the presence of noise. While transformers have shown strong potential for point cloud processing, prior methods typically confine them to global context aggregation, overlooking fine-grained local geometry crucial for accurate correspondence. We propose GAPR-Net, a learning-based point cloud registration framework with a coarse-to-fine architecture that combines convolution and transformer modules, in which local and global information is fused between the partial and full point clouds using a cross-attention mechanism. To achieve this, a transformation-invariant point-wise geometric feature representation is proposed, which can robustly capture relative geometric features for individual points with respect to their neighboring points. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments are conducted on four geometrically distinct bones, including the tibia, femur, pelvis, and thoracic cartilage. The overall registration recall reaches 94.2\%, the method results in a low RMSE of 1.992 mm and $R^2$ values of 0.908 and 0.974 for rotation and translation, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the partial-to-full point cloud registration problem. The proposed method enables highly accurate 3D point cloud registration using partial observation, providing a critical foundation for precise surgical navigation and robotic interventions in computer-assisted surgery. The code will be accessed after the double-blind review process.

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

From Passive Generation to Investigation: A Proactive Scientific Peer Review Agent

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating scientific peer review. However, existing approaches often struggle to generate in-depth reviews supported by concrete evidence. We argue that a key limitation is the lack of flexibility to proactively investigate suspicious parts of a paper based on accumulated evidence, as human reviewers do. In this paper, we explore how to enable an LLM-based review agent to perform such proactive investigation. We find that this can be naturally formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and propose ProReviewer, a scientific peer review agent that proactively reviews a paper guided by a maintained, structured review log. The structured review log serves as a workspace for the agent to track evidence and intermediate findings collected during review. Experiments show that ProReviewer with an 8B backbone, trained by supervised fine-tuning and optimized by reinforcement learning, achieves the highest average score across five quality dimensions, outperforming prompt-based methods with much larger frontier LLMs by up to 39% and the strongest fine-tuned baseline by 16% relatively. It also attains the highest win rates against baselines in human evaluation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Show, Don't Ask: Generative Visual Disambiguation for Composed Image Retrieval with Turn-Valid Coverage

Composed image retrieval (CIR) uses a reference image and a text modification to search for a target image. However, such queries often describe several possible images rather than one exact target, making the user's intent ambiguous. Recent methods address this by using conformal prediction to estimate ambiguity and by asking users clarifying text questions. However, these methods have two limitations: their coverage guarantee only holds at the first interaction, and text questions are often insufficient for resolving fine-grained visual differences such as appearance, attributes, or viewpoint. We propose CLARA, a clarification framework that resolves ambiguity by showing users a small panel of visual alternatives. Instead of answering text questions, the user simply selects the prototype image closest to the intended target. This provides a direct visual signal and avoids relying on a model to predict the user's answer. To maintain valid conformal guarantees across multiple interaction rounds, CLARA reweights calibration using the likelihood ratio induced by the user's selection. The displayed prototypes are also constrained to represent the current candidate set and are snapped to real corpus images, ensuring that generated images cannot artificially improve coverage. Experiments on open-domain and fashion benchmarks show that CLARA matches single-turn state-of-the-art retrieval performance, maintains nominal coverage across interaction rounds, and finds the intended target in fewer rounds than strong text-question baselines. Its advantage is especially clear when ambiguity involves viewpoint or fine-grained attributes, where visual clarification is more effective than textual questioning.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

MENTOR: Reinforcement Learning via Flexible Teacher-Optimized Rewards for Tool-Use Distillation

Distilling the tool-use capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into small language models (SLMs) is essential for their practical application. The predominant approach, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), suffers from poor out-of-domain (OOD) generalization due to its rigid alignment with static teacher trajectories. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers an alternative, the capacity limitations of SLMs pose a severe dilemma: sparse outcome rewards provide insufficient guidance, whereas strict trajectory matching imposes overly restrictive constraints. To bridge this capacity-driven gap, we propose MENTOR, which introduces a flexible yet process-aware reward structure. Instead of enforcing rigid replication, MENTOR uses the teacher's reference to guide tool-use behavior, balancing behavioral alignment with downstream performance. Extensive experiments on controlled executable-tool benchmarks demonstrate that MENTOR improves OOD tool-use performance compared to SFT and strict RL baselines. Our findings suggest that within verifiable tool-use environments, flexible tool-use alignment offers a more effective approach than strict trajectory replication for developing adaptable small models.