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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Investigation of Neural Network Methods for Reconstruction and Classification of Texture Images Under Conditions of Incomplete Information

The automated analysis of heterogeneous natural textures is frequently hindered by physical damage and data loss, presenting a significant challenge to computer vision. While deep learning has shown success in controlled environments, its application to complex geological materials under conditions of incomplete information remains underexplored. This study presents an integrated framework for the inpainting and classification of high-resolution core sample images. We propose an end-to-end pipeline that utilizes object detection for sample segmentation, followed by image inpainting using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with Contextual Residual Aggregation (CRA) to reconstruct missing high-frequency details. Subsequently, we evaluate the performance of modern Transformer-based (Swin, ViT) and CNN architectures on the reconstructed data. Our experiments revealed a critical divergence between reconstruction quality and downstream utility: despite high structural fidelity (PSNR 28.7~dB, FID 74.01), classification accuracy plateaued at 53\%. To improve minority-class detection, we propose a confidence-based hybrid ensemble that raises MCA from 48\% to 58\%. These results highlight the limitations of current state-of-the-art generative models, which may produce visually plausible but semantically ambiguous features ("hallucinations") that confound classifiers. This work provides insights into the dependencies between image reconstruction quality and classification performance, offering a reproducible baseline for future research in non-destructive testing and material science. Given that cross-well accuracy remains in the 49–53\% range, we position the resulting system as a decision-support and screening tool for lithofacies interpretation rather than as a fully autonomous classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/GalymzhanAbdimanap/Lithology_recognition

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Security and Privacy in Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Architectures, Threats, Defenses, and Future Directions for Building Trustworthy Systems

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for enhancing large language models with external knowledge. By coupling retrieval mechanisms with generative models, RAG systems improve factual grounding and adaptability across domains. However, integrating retrieval pipelines introduces new security and privacy risks that extend beyond conventional language modeling threats. Sensitive information may be exposed through retrieval indices, query logs, context construction, or federated updates, while adversarial manipulation of knowledge bases can undermine trust in generated outputs. This survey provides a comprehensive examination of privacy and security challenges across RAG systems deployed in centralized, on-device (Micro-RAG), federated, and hybrid paradigms. We present a unified taxonomy of threat surfaces spanning the retrieval, context construction, and generation stages and systematically analyze attack classes, including membership inference, index inference, poisoning, gradient leakage, and collusion. We further review architectural, algorithmic, and cryptographic defenses, highlighting privacy-utility trade-offs and deployment considerations. Finally, we outline open research challenges toward building trustworthy, secure, and resilient RAG systems for real-world applications.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Nutrient Composition of Foods Represented in the U.S. Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies, 2013-2023

Background: The U.S. Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS) is updated across NHANES dietary cycles and is central to U.S. nutrition surveillance. However, multi-cycle food-code-level changes in nutrient composition have not been comprehensively characterized across the full WWEIA nutrient panel. Objective: To characterize ten-year temporal patterns in nutrient composition across five FNDDS cycles, evaluate pandemic-period food-code compositional stability, and distinguish exploratory mean-level signals from distributional heterogeneity that may reflect reformulation, database coverage, or food-code definition changes. Methods: We analyzed five consecutive FNDDS biennial releases: 2013-14, 2015-16, 2017-18, 2019-20, and 2021-23. Nutrient values were extracted from the public FNDDS/FoodData Central release files and standardized to per-100-g food-code-level records. Cycle midpoints, 2013.5, 2015.5, 2017.5, 2019.5, and 2022.0, served as the independent variable in an exploratory ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. Mann-Kendall testing assessed monotonic rank trends, Welch's ANOVA assessed food-code-level distributional heterogeneity, and pairwise Welch comparisons with Cohen's d summarized pre-pandemic, pandemic-period, and post-pandemic differences. Equivalence testing using TOST with +/-10% bounds was restricted to the 2019-20 versus 2021-23 stability comparison. OLS sensitivity analyses were repeated after excluding the structurally atypical 2017-18 cycle. Results: Sixty-three nutrients were analyzed. Eight nutrients showed nominal OLS trends, p < 0.05, but none remained significant after Bonferroni correction. Mann-Kendall testing identified two nominal monotonic signals, and none after adjustment. Welch's ANOVA detected cycle-level distributional differences for 61 of 63 nutrients at nominal p < 0.05 and 57 of 63 after adjustment. Pairwise pandemic-period analyses showed many adjusted differences when the pre-pandemic baseline was compared with 2019-20 or 2021-23, but standardized effects were small, with all absolute Cohen's d values < 0.20. No nutrient differed after adjustment between 2019-20 and 2021-23, and 39 of 48 primary analytes met +/-10% TOST equivalence criteria for that comparison. Slope estimates were directionally stable after excluding 2017-18, but nominal significance status remained sensitive to the short time series. Conclusions: FNDDS food composition varied across cycles, but there was no clear decade-long linear trend for most nutrients. The main signal was a possible increase in total PUFA and linoleic acid, which may reflect changes in fat quality. The 2021-23 cycle was very similar to 2019-20, suggesting no major post-pandemic shift in the foods represented. These findings should be interpreted as food-database signals, not as direct estimates of what people consumed.

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

Phantoms and Disclosures: a Causal Framework for Auditing Synthetic Data

arXiv:2606.16952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid adoption of generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred interest in synthetic data as a privacy-preserving alternative to sensitive real-world datasets. However, generating high-utility synthetic data often carries the risk of memorizing and regurgitating private information from the training corpus. In this work, we present a customizable empirical auditing framework designed to detect and explain such data disclosures. Our framework introduces a mechanism to distinguish between "true disclosures"-where the system directly reproduces a user's information-and "phantom disclosures''-where the system incidentally generates a user's data. By partitioning input data into training and holdout sets and applying rigorous statistical hypothesis testing, we determine if observed disclosures are consistent with strict privacy baselines, such as zero-learning or specific Differential Privacy (DP) bounds. Crucially, this approach requires no model access, no canary insertion, and no reference model training -only the synthetic output and a held-out control set. We demonstrate that this framework effectively functions as a membership inference attack, providing empirical lower bounds on privacy leakage that are tighter than prior data-based auditing methods. Our approach is model-agnostic, applies to any synthetic data generation mechanism, and requires orders of magnitude fewer computational resources than shadow-model or canary-based alternatives.

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

Actionable Activation Directions for Detecting and Mitigating Emergent Misalignment Across Language Model Families

Fine-tuning language models on insecure code induces emergent misalignment with poorly understood internal structure. We investigate whether this misalignment corresponds to a causally actionable activation-space direction shared across architectures. Across four instruction-tuned model families (Qwen2.5-1.5B, Gemma-2-2B, Llama-3.2-1B, Ministral-3-3B) finetuned identically, a difference-in-means direction achieves 99.6% separation of aligned and misaligned activations at each model's final layer. Causal steering by subtracting this direction reduces code spillover by 21-51 points, while a secure-code control confirms content specificity. Cross-architecture transfer via ridge regression maps yields large behavioral suppression (up to 46 points) but fails specificity controls as random and orthogonal directions perform comparably. We identify a two-tier specificity structure: within-model directions are causally specific and actionable; cross-model directions are causally real but non-specific. An asymmetric transfer topology emerges, with Gemma and Qwen acting as geometric donors and Llama as a receiver. These findings define the limits of linear cross-architecture correction and recommend within-model probing for auditing.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Omnilingual SONAR: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Sentence Embeddings Bridging Massively Multilingual Text and Speech

Cross-lingual sentence encoders typically cover only a few hundred languages and often trade downstream quality for stronger alignment, limiting their adoption. We introduce OmniSONAR, a new family of omnilingual, cross-lingual and cross-modal sentence embedding models that natively embed text, speech, code, and mathematical expressions in a single semantic space, while delivering state-of-the-art downstream performance at the scale of thousands of languages, from high-resource to extremely low-resource varieties. To reach this scale without representation collapse, we use progressive training. We first learn a strong foundational space for 200 languages with an LLM-initialized encoder-decoder, combining token-level decoding with a novel split-softmax contrastive loss and synthetic hard negatives. Building on this foundation, we expand to several thousands language varieties via a two-stage teacher-student encoder distillation framework. Finally, we demonstrate the cross-modal extensibility of this space by seamlessly mapping 177 spoken languages into it. OmniSONAR halves cross-lingual similarity search error on the 200-language FLORES dataset and reduces error by a factor of 15 on the 1,560-language BIBLE benchmark. It also enables strong translation, outperforming NLLB-3B on multilingual benchmarks and exceeding prior models (including much larger LLMs) by 15 chrF++ points on 1,560 languages into English BIBLE translation. OmniSONAR also performs strongly on MTEB and XLCoST. For speech, OmniSONAR achieves a 43% lower similarity-search error and reaches 97% of SeamlessM4T speech-to-text quality, despite being zero-shot for translation (trained only on ASR data). Finally, by training an encoder-decoder LM, Spectrum, exclusively on English text processing OmniSONAR embedding sequences, we unlock high-performance transfer to thousands of languages and speech for complex downstream tasks.

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

LabOSBench: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents for Scientific Instrument Control

arXiv:2606.16802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current computer-use benchmarks primarily focus on software operation tasks in virtualized systems, whereas scientific instrumentation scenarios require coordinated control over complex interfaces, and feedback-driven parameter adjustment. However, directly evaluating agents on physical high-precision instruments is impractical due to high cost, safety risks, limited accessibility, and difficulty in ensuring reproducible evaluation. This motivates the need for a simulated yet realistic testbed that preserves the operational challenges of scientific instruments while enabling scalable and safe benchmarking. To this end, we introduce LabOSBench, a challenging benchmark for multimodal GUI agents built on a suite of web-based scientific-instrument simulators. Operating directly via a browser, LabOSBench avoids resource-heavy OS virtualization while supporting flexible task configuration and execution-based evaluation. Specifically, LabOSBench constructs 96 subtasks across eight instrument simulators, covering workflows from sample loading, alignment, parameter tuning, and data acquisition to result inspection. We evaluate general-purpose vision-language models, specialized GUI agent models, and advanced agentic frameworks at both subtask and end-to-end levels. Our experiments reveal that while existing agents can complete many structured GUI subtasks, they still struggle with feedback-driven operations and long-horizon workflow execution. Overall, LabOSBench provides a reproducible, low-cost testbed for advancing computer-using agents toward scientific-instrument control.

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

OrthoReg: Orthogonal Regularization for Hybrid Symbolic-Neural Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.19145v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamical systems are fundamental to modeling the natural world, yet modeling them involves a persistent trade-off: manually prescribed mechanistic models are interpretable by design but often overly simplistic and misspecified; in contrast, flexible data-driven neural methods lack physical insight. Hybrid modeling aims for the best of both worlds by combining a prescribed or symbolic, physics-based component with a flexible neural network. A critical challenge, however, is that the neural component may relearn mechanistic parts, yielding redundant and uninterpretable models, especially when the symbolic structure itself is discovered from data. Existing methods based on standard $L^2$ regularization rely on a projection argument that breaks when the symbolic component is learned through sparse discovery, allowing the neural augmentation to overlap with symbolic structure. We introduce OrthoReg (Orthogonal Regularization), which directly penalizes overlap between the symbolic and neural components, preventing symbolic structure from being absorbed by the neural residual. This yields a complementary decomposition: the symbolic part captures what the library can express, and the neural part captures what remains. On benchmark dynamical systems with partial library mismatch, OrthoReg improves symbolic recovery and out-of-distribution behavior.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

The Linguistics Olympiads: Towards a New Corpus for Linguistics Research?

Linguistics olympiad problems (LOPs) are a category of self-sufficient puzzles consisting of a scaled-down corpus representative of certain linguistic phenomena, from which the solver must deduce a primitive set of rules of the language and then translate a new set of elements. The linguistics olympiads (LOs) have become a worldwide phenomenon with 43 different territories taking part in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) 2025. While the typology and solving strategies of LOPs have been analysed, their scientific facet and connections to academic linguistics have yet to be explored. LOPs are directly connected to many linguistic fields, e.g., linguistic typology, linguistic relativity, and linguistics fieldwork. Recently, LOPs have become a research focus as benchmarks for large language models, thus highlighting their usefulness in computational linguistics. Nevertheless, they have not yet been integrated into mainstream linguistics research. This paper attempts to open new directions of including this particular type of puzzle in academic research by offering a structured evaluation of LOPs as linguistic data sources and proposes criteria for their responsible use in academic research. Starting from a set of over 1800 LOPs, this study critically examines the potential of LOPs as a novel corpus for linguistics research by discussing their strengths and limitations as tools, as well as the areas of linguistics into which these problems could fit. This work forms the foundation for a broader initiative aimed at bridging the gap between LOs and academic linguistics, by establishing a robust theoretical framework for LOPs.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Beyond U-Net: A Latent-Representation-Aligned Skip-Free Backbone for Flow-Matching Speech Enhancement

arXiv:2606.24745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative models, particularly diffusion and score-based approaches, have recently achieved strong performance in speech enhancement, but their iterative sampling process limits real-time deployment. Flow Matching offers an efficient alternative by transporting noisy speech toward clean speech through an ordinary differential equation with few function evaluations. In this work, we propose a skip-free encoder-decoder backbone for flow-matching speech enhancement, guided by Latent Representation Alignment (LRA). Instead of relying on U-Net skip connections, which may transfer noise-correlated low-level features to the decoder, the proposed model aligns its bottleneck and decoder representations with clean latent features extracted from a frozen Descript Audio Codec encoder-decoder without quantization. This codec-aligned supervision promotes compact clean-speech representations while preserving efficient few-step inference. Experiments on WSJ0-CHiME3 and VoiceBank-DEMAND show improved PESQ and perceptual quality, especially on VoiceBank-DEMAND, using only five function evaluations.

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

Online Learning for Supervisory Switching Control

arXiv:2603.14762v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study supervisory switching control for partially-observed linear dynamical systems. The objective is to identify and deploy a suitable controller for the unknown system by periodically selecting among a collection of $N$ candidate controllers, some of which may destabilize the underlying system. While classical estimator-based supervisory control guarantees asymptotic stability, it lacks quantitative finite-time performance bounds. Conversely, current non-asymptotic methods in both online learning and system identification require restrictive assumptions that are incompatible in a control setting, such as system stability, which preclude testing potentially unstable controllers. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel, non-asymptotic analysis of supervisory control that adapts multi-armed bandit algorithms to a control-theoretic setting. The proposed data-driven algorithm evaluates candidate controllers via scoring criteria that leverage system observability to isolate the effects of state history, enabling both detection of destabilizing controllers and accurate system identification. We present two algorithmic variants with dimension-free, finite-time guarantees, where each identifies the matching controller in $O(N \log^2 N)$ steps, while simultaneously achieving finite $L_2$-gain with respect to system disturbances.

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

Low-rank Updates in Slowly Time-varying Graphs for Spatial-Temporal Signal Interpolation

arXiv:2606.24011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A crucial assumption in graph signal processing (GSP) is the existence of an underlying graph that captures the pairwise similarities between nodes, allowing filters to be designed based on this graph for tasks such as denoising. For spatial-temporal data in which node-to-node similarities evolve over time, a static spatial graph is insufficient. In this paper, to represent slowly time-varying pairwise relationships, we model the graph changes in two consecutive adjacency matrices $P = W^{(2)} - W^{(1)}$ across time as a low-rank matrix. % Specifically, given an initial adjacency matrix $W^{(1)}$ at time $t=1$, we jointly interpolate a signal $x_2$ and estimate $W^{(2)}$ at $t=2$ using both a graph signal smoothness prior for $x_2$ and a low-rank prior on $\P$. We alternate optimization steps. With $W^{(2)}$ fixed, $x_2$ is interpolated by solving a linear system. Alternatively, holding $x_2$ fixed, $W^{(2)}$ is updated via proximal gradient descent (PGD). The proximal mapping of the rank term $Gamma(W^{(2)} - W^{(1)})$ is approximated in linear time using a fast orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm that selects a sparse combination of atoms from a dictionary $cR$ formed by the outer products of $W^{(1)}$'s eigenvectors. We unroll iterations of our algorithm into layers to build a lightweight neural network for limited data-driven parameter tuning. Experiments show that our joint optimization achieves better signal interpolation compared to existing time-varying graph models.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

1000 Rallies: An Event-Camera Dataset and Real-Time Learned Ball-State Estimation for Robotic Table Tennis

Robotic table tennis has emerged as a compelling benchmark for real-time robotic perception due to its fast ball dynamics and stringent timing requirements. Accurate, high-frequency, and low-latency ball state estimation is critical for reliable trajectory prediction and timely control. Traditional frame-based cameras face an inherent trade-off: low frame rates leave temporal blind spots that miss fast-moving objects and high frame rates raise data and computational cost. Event cameras instead offer microsecond temporal resolution and, under sufficient illumination, remain largely free of motion blur even at high ball speeds. However, the community lacks large-scale datasets to develop and benchmark event-based perception in realistic sports scenarios. We address this gap by introducing the first large-scale event-camera dataset for table tennis, comprising over 1000 rallies from a diverse group of players ranging from amateurs to elite-level athletes. Each recording captures the event stream alongside 14 synchronized high-speed frame-based cameras at 200 FPS, which we use to produce 1 kHz pseudo ground-truth labels for ball position, velocity, and spin. Building on this dataset, we train a convolutional neural network robust to background player motion that jointly estimates the ball's position and velocity in the image-plane from events. Treating the predicted velocity as an additional measurement in the Kalman filter reduces bounce-point prediction error by 36% relative to a position-only baseline. Finally, we close the perception-action loop by integrating the event-based system with a Stäubli robotic arm, enabling the first real-time human-robot table tennis rallies driven by event-based perception.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Urinary Creatine Riboside Complements PSA to Improve Disease Detection in the Diagnostic Gray Zone of Prostate Cancer

Circulating prostate-specific antigen (PSA) discriminates poorly in the diagnostic gray zone (3.0-9.99 ng/mL), where ~75% of biopsies yield no clinically significant prostate cancer (PCa). We evaluated whether urinary creatine riboside (CR), a tumor-derived metabolite excreted through the prostatic urethra, complements PSA for gray-zone detection and independently predicts prostate-cancer-specific mortality (PCSM). In the NCI-Maryland PCa Case-Control Study (951 cases, 962 controls; 47.6% African American men; median follow-up 11.5 years), urinary CR was quantified by UPLC-MS/MS. Within the PSA gray zone (n = 668), urinary CR was complementary to PSA, with markedly higher single-marker discrimination than PSA (AUC 0.93, 95% CI 0.88-0.98 vs 0.77, 0.66-0.89) and additive when combined ({Delta}AUC +0.17, p < 0.001; 91.4% sensitivity at 80% specificity). After adjustment for 11 clinical and sociodemographic covariates, urinary CR independently predicted PCSM complementary to PSA (Fine-Gray SHR 1.72, 1.35-2.19 for CR; 1.35, 1.08-1.68 for PSA; Harrell's C 0.85 for CR + PSA vs 0.77 for PSA alone), with strongest signal in African American men (SHR 2.43, 1.57-3.75 for CR). We conclude that urinary CR is a candidate non-invasive biomarker complementary to PSA - improving gray-zone triage and predicting PCSM; prospective validation in biopsy-referred cohorts is warranted.

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

Recursive Joint Simulation in Games

arXiv:2402.08128v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Game-theoretic dynamics between AI agents could differ from traditional human-human interactions in various ways. One such difference is that it may be possible to accurately simulate an AI agent, for example because its source code is known. Such an agent would then be fundamentally uncertain whether it is in the real world or in a simulation. Our aim is to explore ways of leveraging this possibility to achieve more cooperative outcomes in strategic settings. In this paper, we study an interaction between AI agents where the agents run a recursive joint simulation. That is, the agents first jointly observe a simulation of the situation they face. This simulation in turn recursively includes additional simulations (with a small chance of failure, to avoid infinite recursion), and the results of all these nested simulations are observed before an action is chosen. We show that the resulting interaction is strategically equivalent to an infinitely repeated version of the original game, allowing a direct transfer of existing results such as the various folk theorems. As evidence that the equivalence is robust, we show that it holds even when we relax some of the assumptions and that it also holds ``from the inside'' – meaning, for an agent that finds itself inside the game and has self-locating uncertainty.

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

RSRCC: A Remote Sensing Regional Change Comprehension Benchmark Constructed via Retrieval-Augmented Best-of-N Ranking

Traditional change detection identifies where changes occur, but does not explain what changed in natural language. Existing remote sensing change captioning datasets typically describe overall image-level differences, leaving fine-grained localized semantic reasoning largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present RSRCC, a new benchmark for remote sensing change question-answering containing 126k questions, split into 87k training, 17.1k validation, and 22k test instances. Unlike prior datasets, RSRCC is built around localized, change-specific questions that require reasoning about a particular semantic change. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first remote sensing change question-answering benchmark designed explicitly for such fine-grained reasoning-based supervision. To construct RSRCC, we introduce a hierarchical semi-supervised curation pipeline that uses Best-of-N ranking as a critical final ambiguity-resolution stage. First, candidate change regions are extracted from semantic segmentation masks, then initially screened using an image-text embedding model, and finally validated through retrieval-augmented vision-language curation with Best-of-N ranking. This process enables scalable filtering of noisy and ambiguous candidates while preserving semantically meaningful changes. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/RSRCC.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Topological entanglement and number theory

arXiv:2410.01492v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The recent developments in the study of topological multi-boundary entanglement in the context of 3d Chern-Simons theory (with gauge group $G$ and level $k$) suggest a strong interplay between entanglement measures and number theory. The purpose of this note is twofold. First, we introduce a $q$-deformed version of the Witten zeta function using the Chern-Simons theory at level $k$. We analyze the large $k$ limit of this function and show that it converges to an integer multiple of the classical Witten zeta function of $G$, where the integer multiple is precisely the order of the center of the group. This analysis provides an alternative way to compute the classical zeta functions, and we present some examples. Next, we study the quantum state associated with the $S^3$ complement of torus links of type $T_{p,p}$ and show that we can write the Rényi entropies at finite $k$ in terms of $q$-deformed Witten zeta functions. Using our first result, we obtain the $k \to \infty$ limit of the Rényi entropies and find that the entropies converge to finite values, which can be written in terms of the classical Witten zeta functions evaluated at positive integers. Since Witten zeta functions naturally appear in the symplectic volumes of moduli spaces of flat connections on Riemann surfaces, we give a geometric interpretation of the $k \to \infty$ limit of the Rényi and entanglement entropies in terms of these volumes. The results of this paper reveal an intriguing connection between topological entanglement, number-theoretic structures arising from Witten zeta functions, and the geometry of moduli spaces.

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

StylisticBias: A Few Human Visual Cues Drive Most Social Biases in MLLMs

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in personally and societally consequential settings, yet the visual cues that shape how these models judge people remain poorly understood. Prior work often compares different (groups of) individuals, making it difficult to separate appearance effects from identity differences. We introduce StylisticBias, a controlled benchmark for evaluating attribute-level social bias in MLLMs. We generate 500 photorealistic base faces and create about 50 single-attribute variations per face, producing about 25K images. This design keeps identity fixed and changes one visual attribute at a time. It lets us measure how specific cues shift model judgments. We evaluate six MLLMs across 25 binary social judgment scenarios. We find that age and body type dominate identity-level effects, while fashion style and other visual cues drive the largest attribute-level shifts. We further find that about 15 attributes account for nearly 80\% of the total variation, showing that bias is concentrated in a small set of visual cues. Sensitivity is strongest in judgments that are semantically aligned with appearance, especially socioeconomic and style-related judgments. We release StylisticBias as a benchmark for fine-grained bias evaluation in multimodal models. Code and dataset: https://github.com/timo-cavelius/StylisticBias and https://hf.co/datasets/shaghayegh/stylistic-bias-dataset.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

InVitroGap: an open-source tool for automated quantification of wound closure in the in vitro scratch assay

Abstract Background and Objective: Scratch assays are widely used to study wound closure in vitro, but quantitative image analysis remains constrained by manual variability, proprietary workflows, and tools requiring programming expertise. We developed InVitroGap, a Python-based application with a browser-accessible interface for automated quantification of scratch assay closure from sequential microscopy images. Methods: RCC-ER and Renca cells were seeded in 96-well ImageLock plates and scratched using a WoundMaker device for uniform linear wounds or a 200 uL pipette tip for crisscross wounds. Phase-contrast time-lapse images acquired at 0, 24, and 48 h with an IncuCyte SX5 system were independently analyzed using IncuCyte 2023A Rev2 and InVitroGap. The InVitroGap pipeline combines Gaussian smoothing, gradient-based texture mapping, adaptive percentile thresholding, and morphological post-processing to quantify wound confluence and relative wound density (RWD). Agreement was evaluated using paired comparisons, Pearson and Spearman correlations, Bland-Altman analysis, and mean absolute error (MAE). Results: InVitroGap measurements closely tracked IncuCyte outputs across both cell lines, with no significant between-method differences (p > 0.05), strong pooled correlations (R square = 0.964 for RWD; R square = 0.983 for wound confluence), and small mean biases (absolute bias [&le;] 1.64%). The tool successfully processed crisscross wounds from brightfield image series, and a complete four-timepoint series was analyzed in approximately 10 seconds, with robust performance across distinct cell morphologies and wound geometries. Conclusions: InVitroGap provides a transparent, computationally efficient, and platform-independent alternative for scratch assay analysis, delivering performance comparable to commercial systems while remaining freely accessible at https://invitrogap.vercel.app/.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Good recycling starts at home — and benefits the world

Authors: Unknown Author

New research supports the value of household-level waste separation. But policies must also carefully consider consumer behaviours to maximize the quality of material collected. New research supports the value of household-level waste separation. But policies must also carefully consider consumer behaviours to maximize the quality of material collected.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Learning Dynamical Systems from Multiple Sparse Datasets: A Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling Approach

arXiv:2606.24966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating parameters of dynamical systems from sparse, noisy, and irregularly sampled data is often severely ill-conditioned. When multiple related datasets are available, they provide additional information if the shared structure and variability are properly modeled. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian framework for probabilistic meta-learning in dynamical systems, modeling dataset-specific parameters as draws from a shared population distribution. A numerical ODE solver is embedded within gradient-based MCMC to enable efficient posterior inference of the shared population and dataset-specific parameter distribution. Experiments show improved predictive performance over unpooled methods, highlighting the potential for data-efficient system identification in settings with sparse data.

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

A Tool for the Synthesis of Adaptive Probabilistic Processors Based on the Ising Model

arXiv:2606.19533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a tool for the synthesis and simulation of probabilistic architectures for solving combinatorial optimization problems by mapping them to the Ising model. The proposed approach automatically constructs the Ising Hamiltonian and determines the number of probabilistic elements (p-bits) based on problem characteristics such as size and topology. Furthermore, the tool introduces an adaptive strategy for selecting the most suitable update algorithm among Gibbs Sampling, Simulated Annealing (SA), Simulated Quantum Annealing (SQA), and cluster-based methods. Experimental results using benchmark problems demonstrate improved convergence behavior and flexibility compared to fixed approaches. The proposed framework enables systematic evaluation of probabilistic computing strategies and supports the development of future hardware implementations based on MTJs and p-bits.

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

Limited Marginal Benefit of Reasoning-Heavy LLM Deployment in ESG Narrative Scoring: A 4-Model Consensus Study on Japanese Listed Firms

arXiv:2606.13693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated scoring of ESG narrative disclosures with large language models (LLMs) is gaining traction, yet whether reasoning-heavy frontier models add value commensurate with their cost remains empirically unsettled. We evaluate this question on a corpus of ten Japanese listed firms across three rubric axes – quantitative targets, progress-tracking infrastructure, and external-standard alignment – using a four-model consensus design that combines a reasoning-on frontier model with three reasoning-off contemporaries. Across 120 firm x axis x model scores, the pooled mean absolute deviation between the reasoning-on model and each reasoning-off counterpart is 0.38 on a 5-point scale; only 2% of pairwise comparisons reach a two-point deviation, and none exceeds two points. Per-firm cost accounting shows the reasoning-on arm alone costs roughly 5.6x as much as the three-provider reasoning-off ensemble, for outcomes that differ only within small margins. We conclude that in span-based ESG narrative scoring, reasoning-heavy deployment does not materially improve outcomes relative to reasoning-off consensus, while substantially increasing operational cost. We discuss implications for cost-effective ESG auto-scoring pipelines and LLM deployment governance in applied accountability settings. An earlier version of this work is available on SSRN (Abstract ID 6683303).

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

Steering Emotional Dynamics for Art Therapy: Controllable Narrative Script Generation through Hierarchically Guided LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.16481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Art therapy plays a vital role in emotional healing, in which narrative creation acts as the primary vehicle for emotional expression. Given the inherently dynamic nature of emotions during healing, narratives with finely controlled emotional fluctuations enable individuals to safely project inner conflicts and achieve emotional catharsis. Recently, with the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated narrative generation technology has provided a new pathway to support such artistic designs. However, while existing methods can produce fluent texts, they struggle to generate narratives that adhere to specified affective trajectories, failing to meet the demands of emotion-oriented psychological healing. To address these issues, this paper proposes EC-Script, an LLM agent-based framework that enables hierarchical control of the affective trajectory in narrative generation for emotional healing. To ensure that the generated narratives strictly follow the given emotional patterns, EC-Script establishes overall narrative direction through Emotion-Trajectory Planning, propels scene-level plot development with Character-Driven Scene Generation, and regulates local emotional changes of characters via Emotion-Controlled Script Writing. Ultimately, it outputs scene-by-scene script content that remains highly consistent with the preset affective trajectory. Experimental results demonstrate that EC-Script significantly outperforms baseline methods in affective trajectory adherence, exhibiting excellent and reliable emotional controllability, thereby providing effective technical support for AI-assisted emotional healing scenarios.