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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Daily briefing: First-ever ‘nuclear’ clocks put atomic clocks in the shade

Authors:

Two research teams have created a new, long-awaited type of timekeeper. Plus, how backlash has saved an ocean-monitoring network targeted by Trump and how our cultural heritage is put at risk by climate change. Two research teams have created a new, long-awaited type of timekeeper. Plus, how backlash has saved an ocean-monitoring network targeted by Trump and how our cultural heritage is put at risk by climate change.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A General Framework for Decision Trees via Bregman Divergences

arXiv:2606.13984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Decision trees are one of the fundamental tools in statistical learning due to their interpretability, flexibility, and their ability to adapt to nonlinear structures. Among them, the Classification and Regression Trees, introduced by Breiman, Friedman, Olshen, and Stone in 1984, became one of the most influential algorithms and remains one of the most widely used methods for classification and regression problems. On the other hand, Bregman divergences, introduced by Lev Bregman in 1967 in the context of convex optimization, provide a broad family of loss functions that naturally generalize the squared Euclidean distance. This family includes, among others, the Kullback-Leibler divergence, the Poisson divergence, and the Itakura-Saito divergence, as well as several losses associated with distributions belonging to the exponential family. Moreover, Bregman divergences possess a rich geometric structure and deep connections with convex analysis and information geometry. In this work, we propose a generalization of the CART paradigm based on Bregman divergences, thereby obtaining a broader family of decision trees adapted to different statistical models and underlying geometries. Although algorithms such as CART or classical implementations such as rpart incorporate different impurity criteria, these are usually introduced in an ad hoc manner for each specific model. In contrast, the Bregman divergence approach provides a unified framework that allows these criteria to be derived and interpreted from common convex and geometric principles. Beyond the algorithmic construction, we also investigate theoretical properties of these trees. In particular, we study how properties of the generating convex function – such as strong convexity or smoothness – influence impurity gains between parent and child nodes, as well as stability and consistency properties of the estimator.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Identifying Structural Biases from Causal Mechanism Shifts

arXiv:2606.18834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery methods commonly assume that all data is independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and that there are no unmeasured variables affecting the system. In practice, these assumptions are often violated, leading to inaccurate inference. In this paper, we study how to identify hidden confounding and selection biases from causal mechanism shifts. In particular, we show that structural biases lead to dependent mechanism shifts. That is, by considering for which variables the mechanisms change given data from different environments, we can tell which variables are unbiased, which are subject to hidden confounding, and which are undergoing selection bias. We formalize this into an empirically testable criterion based on mutual information, and show under which conditions it identifies structural biases. To tell which nodes are subject to what kind of bias, we introduce the StruBI algorithm. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that StruBI works well in practice, accurately recovering affected variable sets and types of biases, outperforming the state-of-the-art by a wide margin.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

SoftMatcha 2: A Fast and Soft Pattern Matcher for Trillion-Scale Corpora

We present SoftMatcha 2, an ultra-fast and flexible search algorithm that enables search over trillion-scale natural language corpora in under 0.3 seconds while allowing semantic variations in the form of substitution, insertion, and deletion. Our approach employs string matching based on suffix arrays that scales well with corpus size, and represents words as vectors, which underpin its semantic flexibility. To mitigate the combinatorial explosion induced by the semantic relaxation of queries, our method is built on two key algorithmic ideas: dynamic corpus-aware pruning and fast exact lookup enabled by a disk-aware design. We theoretically analyze the efficiency of the proposed method, indicating that it can mitigate exponential growth in the search space. Empirically, on FineWeb-Edu (Lozhkov et al., 2024) (1.4T tokens), it attains substantially lower search latency than existing methods: infini-gram (Liu et al., 2024), infini-gram mini (Xu et al., 2025), and SoftMatcha (Deguchi et al., 2025). As a practical application, our method uncovers benchmark contamination in training corpora that existing approaches miss, and it also benefits information retrieval and paraphrase detection. We also provide an online demo of fast, soft search across corpora in seven languages.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

VEPHand: View-Efficient Photometric Hand Performance Capture at Scale

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

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

Greed Is Learned: Visible Incentives as Reward-Hacking Triggers

arXiv:2606.16914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deployed agents increasingly act with their reward proxy in view, such as a balance, score, or KPI dashboard. We show that reinforcement learning can make a policy addicted to such a visible self-benefit channel. It chases the displayed payoff across held-out domains, sacrifices the true task to do so, and follows the channel wherever we rewrite it, while policies that never saw the channel stay honest. We call this reward-channel addiction and study it in MoneyWorld, a synthetic sandbox. The addiction can flip a model's safety alignment: trained only on innocuous money tasks with no safety content, the model abandons the safe action it otherwise always takes whenever a dashboard pays for an unsafe one, and reverts to safe once the channel is hidden. This learned bribe replicates across model scales and families. Blindly optimizing super-capable, next-generation AI on KPIs or P\&L can be dangerous for alignment. Greed is learned when following such a channel pays.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Marked random graphs with given degree sequence: large deviations on the local topology

arXiv:2401.00351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the behavior of the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked graphs in the framework of local weak convergence. Here we extend known results by considering uniform random graphs with given degree sequences and i.i.d. marks on half-edges and vertices. We establish a large deviation principle for such families of empirical measures. The proof builds on Bordenave and Caputo's seminal 2015 paper, and Delgosha and Anantharam's 2019 introduction of BC entropy, relying on combinatorial lemmas that allow one to construct suitable approximations of measures supported on marked trees. Possible applications of these results are in the study of interacting diffusions on top of random graphs.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Semantic Grading of Written Answers in Low-Resource Language Bangla Using a Fine-Tuned Lightweight Language Model

Bangla is among the world's most widely spoken languages, yet it remains underserved in educational NLP research. In many remote and rural regions, access to qualified subject teachers is limited, and written answers are consequently graded largely by hand, restricting timely and consistent feedback. Automatic assessment is challenging because semantically correct responses can vary substantially in surface form. We present a bilingual (Bangla-English) evaluation system designed for low-resource educational settings that prioritizes semantic correctness over lexical overlap. Our approach fine-tunes a lightweight language model to grade each response using the question, reference answer, and student answer, producing a numeric score and concise, context-grounded feedback suitable for classroom deployment. We also construct a synthetic bilingual dataset to enable controlled training and evaluation. Across proprietary and open-source LLMs evaluated under a unified protocol, our QLoRA-tuned Qwen3-8B confirms consistent improvement by producing the most leakage-resistant feedback (RoRa = 0.819) in synthetic evaluation and the strongest agreement with human scores (rho = 0.936, MAE = 0.725) in a dedicated human study.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Exploring Variational Entanglement Hamiltonians

arXiv:2505.10530v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in analog and digital quantum-simulation platforms have enabled exploration of the spectrum of entanglement Hamiltonians via variational algorithms. In this work we analyze the convergence properties of the variationally obtained solutions and compare them to numerically exact calculations in quantum critical systems. We demonstrate that interpreting the cost functional as an integral permits the deployment of iterative quadrature schemes, thereby reducing the required number of measurements by more than an order of magnitude even in the presence of noise. We further show that a modified ansatz captures deviations from the Bisognano-Wichmann form in lattice models, improves convergence, improves trainability and provides a cost-function-level diagnostic for quantum phase transitions. Finally, we establish that a low cost value does not by itself guarantee convergence in trace distance. Nevertheless, it faithfully reproduces degeneracies and spectral gaps, which are essential for applications to topological phases.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Hybrid NARX-LLM for Greenland Iceberg Discharge: Prompt-Driven Residual Correction

arXiv:2606.15288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Greenland iceberg discharge exhibits complex nonlinear dynamics with limited observability, challenging traditional predictive models. We present a Hybrid NARX-LLM framework that combines a nonlinear autoregressive model with exogenous inputs (NARX) and a large language model (LLM) for residual correction. We further propose a Physics-Informed Prompt (PIP) method that transforms unstructured physical knowledge into structured prompts for zero-shot in-context reasoning. The primary objective is to explore the corrective potential of this framework for modeling Greenland iceberg discharge, rather than merely optimizing predictive accuracy. The NARX component captures intrinsic temporal dependencies, while the LLM, guided by PIP, encodes glacier dynamics and environmental drivers and perceives key trend patterns to correct systematic prediction errors. This integration allows the model to reason about unmodeled factors and produce interpretable residuals, enhancing overall predictive accuracy. Applied to Greenland iceberg discharge time series, our approach addresses extreme events that are difficult to predict due to rare variations and nonstationary trends, a limitation often overlooked by traditional methods. By fusing structured time-series modeling with knowledge-driven foundation AI, the framework offers a scalable and interpretable pathway to bridge data-limited climate forecasting with physics-informed LLM reasoning. The code is available.

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

Proact-VL: A Proactive VideoLLM for Real-Time AI Companions

Proactive and real-time interactive experiences are essential for human-like AI companions, yet face three key challenges: (1) achieving low-latency inference under continuous streaming inputs, (2) autonomously deciding when to respond, and (3) controlling both quality and quantity of generated content to meet real-time constraints. In this work, we instantiate AI companions through two gaming scenarios, commentator and guide, selected for their suitability for automatic evaluation. We introduce the Live Gaming Benchmark, a large-scale dataset with three representative scenarios: solo commentary, co-commentary, and user guidance, and present Proact-VL, a general framework that shapes multimodal language models into proactive, real-time interactive agents capable of human-like environment perception and interaction. Extensive experiments show Proact-VL achieves superior response latency and quality while maintaining strong video understanding capabilities, demonstrating its practicality for real-time interactive applications.

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

GauS: Differentiable Scheduling Optimization via Gaussian Reparameterization

arXiv:2602.20427v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient operator scheduling is a fundamental challenge in software compilation and hardware synthesis. While recent differentiable approaches have sought to replace traditional ones like exact solvers or heuristics with gradient-based search, they typically rely on categorical distributions that fail to capture the ordinal nature of time and suffer from a parameter space that scales poorly. In this paper, we propose a novel differentiable framework, GauS, that models operator scheduling as a stochastic relaxation using Gaussian distributions, which fully utilize modern parallel computing devices like GPUs. By representing schedules as continuous Gaussian variables, we successfully capture the ordinal nature of time and reduce the optimization space by orders of magnitude. Our method is highly flexible to represent various objectives and constraints, which provides the first differentiable formulation for the complex pipelined scheduling problem. We evaluate our method on a range of benchmarks, demonstrating that Gaus achieves Pareto-optimal results.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Quantitative Homogenization of PDEs with Neumann boundary conditions: a probabilistic approach

arXiv:2606.24304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study quantitative homogenization for viscosity solutions of multi-scale semilinear second order partial differential equations (PDEs) on convex domains with Neumann boundary conditions. To this aim we use the probabilistic approach by studying the quantitative homogenization of backward stochastic differential equations (SDEs) associated with slow-fast systems of reflected SDEs.

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

Retrievable Gradients: Continual Post-Training Without Cumulative Weight Drift

Continual post-training enables models to absorb emerging knowledge after deployment, but repeatedly updating shared parameters can accumulate weight drift, potentially causing catastrophic forgetting and degrading general capabilities. Retrieval-augmented generation avoids such parameter drift, yet often lacks the depth of parametric knowledge integration. In this paper, we propose ReGrad (Retrievable Gradients), a new paradigm that treats gradients as retrievable units of knowledge. ReGrad pre-computes document-specific gradients offline, stores them in an indexed Gradient Bank, and retrieves only query-relevant gradients at inference time for temporary weight adaptation. However, raw language-modeling gradients are optimized for token-level document reconstruction rather than for query-driven knowledge use. We therefore introduce a bi-level meta-learning objective that reshapes document-derived gradients into generalizable adaptation signals for downstream tasks. Experiments across general and domain-specific settings show that \textsc{ReGrad} outperforms CPT and RAG baselines, enabling scalable and reversible parametric knowledge injection without accumulating weight drift.

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

SIRT7 regulates dosage compensation and safeguards the female X chromosome

Sirtuins are deacetylases implicated in stress responses and longevity in mammals1,2. Although their differential impact on disease for the two sexes has been noted3–7, the underlying reasons are unclear. Here, using Sirt7 as a model in mice, we examine the mechanisms leading to sex differences and find that Sirt7−/− female mice have decreased fitness throughout their lifespan. Notably, SIRT7 preferentially localizes to the sex chromosomes. In female individuals, SIRT7 loss affects X-chromosome inactivation, the first arm of dosage compensation that equalizes X-linked gene expression between males and females8–10. Xist is overexpressed and gene silencing becomes more efficient. However, SIRT7 loss has greatest impact on the active X (Xa) chromosome. The Xa chromosome becomes hyperacetylated at Lys36 of histone H3, structurally disorganized, prone to DNA damage and overexpressed. Increased Xa-chromosome expression leads to genome imbalance and augmented X-chromosome upregulation—the second arm of dosage compensation that balances X-chromosome versus autosomal gene expression. These data reveal an essential crosstalk between sirtuins and the sex chromosomes, with SIRT7 safeguarding X-chromosome integrity and dosage balance with autosomes. We propose that the sex bias in SIRT7 biology can be explained in part by unequal effects on the sex chromosomes. SIRT7 safeguards X-chromosome integrity and dosage balance with autosomes.

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

DeMaVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model for Generalizable Deformable Manipulation

arXiv:2605.31286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world household robots require Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models that can acquire reusable manipulation skills across diverse objects, task conditions, and household environments. Deformable-object folding is a representative challenge, requiring robots to handle clothing items from random initial states across varying categories, geometries, materials, and scenes. However, existing VLA systems commonly train separate policies for different object categories, while naively mixed multi-task training often suffers from task interference and degraded performance. To move beyond category-specific folding policies, we introduce DeMaVLA, a VLA foundation model for generalizable Deformable Manipulation. DeMaVLA adopts a VLM backbone with an action expert and formulates continuous action generation using flow matching. To improve efficiency, the action expert is constructed by pruning every other transformer layer while preserving layer-wise alignment with the VLM backbone, reducing training and inference cost. DeMaVLA is first pre-trained on approximately 5,000 hours of selected real-world dual-arm demonstrations to acquire general manipulation priors. It is then post-trained on mixed folding data that aggregates self-collected demonstrations and corrective trajectories from real-robot failures across multiple folding tasks through a human-in-the-loop Data Aggregation~(DAgger) pipeline. Experiments show that DeMaVLA achieves competitive performance on RoboTwin 2.0 and strong real-world results on our household folding benchmark. These results highlight the value of scalable real-world data, efficient action generation, and corrective learning for general-purpose VLA policies in deformable-object manipulation.

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

When Tables Go Crazy: Evaluating Multimodal Models on French Financial Documents

Vision-language models (VLMs) perform well on many document understanding tasks, yet their reliability in specialized, non-English domains remains underexplored. This gap is especially critical in finance, where documents mix dense regulatory text, numerical tables, and visual charts, and where extraction errors can have real-world consequences. We introduce Scribe Finance, the first multimodal benchmark for evaluating French financial document understanding. The dataset contains 1,204 expert-validated questions spanning text extraction, table comprehension, chart interpretation, and multi-turn conversational reasoning, drawn from real investment prospectuses, KIDs, and PRIIPs. We evaluate six open-weight VLMs (8B-124B parameters) using an LLM-as-judge protocol. While models achieve strong performance on text and table tasks (85-90% accuracy), they struggle with chart interpretation (34-62%). Most notably, multi-turn dialogue reveals a sharp failure mode: early mistakes propagate across turns, driving accuracy down to roughly 50% regardless of model size. These results show that current VLMs are effective for well-defined extraction tasks but remain brittle in interactive, multi-step financial analysis. Scribe Finance offers a challenging benchmark to measure and drive progress in this high-stakes setting.

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

All-Mem: Agentic Lifelong Memory via Dynamic Topology Evolution

Lifelong interactive agents are expected to assist users over months or years, which requires continually writing long term memories while retrieving the right evidence for each new query under fixed context and latency budgets. Existing memory systems often degrade as histories grow, yielding redundant, outdated, or noisy retrieved contexts. We present All-Mem, an online/offline lifelong memory framework that maintains a topology structured memory bank via explicit, non destructive consolidation, avoiding the irreversible information loss typical of summarization based compression. In online operation, it anchors retrieval on a bounded visible surface to keep coarse search cost bounded. Periodically offline, an LLM diagnoser proposes confidence scored topology edits executed with gating using three operators: Split, Merge, and Update, while preserving immutable evidence for traceability. At query time, typed links enable hop bounded, budgeted expansion from active anchors to archived evidence when needed. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval-s show improved retrieval and QA over representative baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/LvCan926/All-Mem.

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

MVEB: Massive Video Embedding Benchmark

We introduce the Massive Video Embedding Benchmark (MVEB), a 23-task benchmark for video embeddings spanning classification, zero-shot classification, clustering, pair classification, retrieval, and video-centric question answering. We evaluate 33 models and find that no single model dominates: MLLM-based embeddings lead on classification, clustering, pair classification, and QA; multimodal binding leads on retrieval and zero-shot classification; generative MLLMs without contrastive adaptation collapse on cross-modal tasks. Paired video-only vs. audio+video evaluations show that audio's contribution depends on dataset annotation provenance: audio helps when labels were produced from both modalities and hurts when they were produced from visuals alone, a six-point gap consistent across model families. MVEB is derived from MVEB+, a 184-task pool, and is designed to maintain task diversity while reducing evaluation cost. It integrates into the MTEB ecosystem for unified evaluation across text, image, audio, and video. We release MVEB and all 184 tasks along with code and a leaderboard at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

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

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems: Mitigating Semantic Drift with the Argent Signaling Protocol

When multi-agent LLM systems produce bad answers, not all failures are equal: some answers are grounded in the right material but incomplete, while others are simply ungrounded and should be stopped. Current retry strategies treat both cases identically (try again and hope for the best), leaving human supervisors unable to tell whether a retry was warranted or whether the system should have halted instead. We introduce the Argent Signaling Protocol (ASP), a compact machine-readable header that accompanies every AI-generated response with structured quality signals: certainty (@C), grounding (@G), stochasticity (@S), and an assumption index that classifies the evidentiary basis of each claim. These signals enable a controller to distinguish repairable failures from containment failures and route each case differently. We evaluate ASP in two modes. In standalone mode, a 27-question document-grounded QA benchmark over the Array BioPharma/Ono license agreement compares baseline prompts against ASP-instrumented controller actions across three local GGUF models. On Qwen~(0.8B), ASP improves pass rate from 11.1% to 33.3% and mean term coverage from 36.7% to 65.4%; on Dobby~(8B), ASP produces 4 fail-to-pass recoveries, raising pass rate from 33.3% to 44.4%; on SmolLM3~(3B), ASP alternates between repair and containment per question. Aggregate improvement is meaningful (12/81 to 21/81 passes). In multi-agent mode, an ASP sidecar sits between a retrieval agent and a downstream decision agent; the sidecar blocks 100% of ungrounded upstream outputs from reaching the downstream agent (24/27 blocked, 0 ungrounded propagations).

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Expert-Driven Survival Machines: Improving Stratification and Interpretability in Multiple Clinical Cohorts

arXiv:2606.14608v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Survival prediction plays a central role for healthcare providers and clinical researchers. Accurate risk stratification enables early intervention and improved patient management. Most existing deep survival models learn one common feature representation for all patients, which may hide important differences between patient subgroups. In contrast, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework allows different parts of the model to focus on different patient patterns, leading to more individualized representations. Therefore, in this work, we propose a mixture-of-experts enhanced adaptive deep clustering survival framework (AdaCSM) for modeling such heterogeneous survival patterns. We introduce a routing-based expert mechanism that enables conditional specialization within a parametric survival modeling framework. The proposed architecture allocates patients to specialized risk predictors dynamically while preserving the patient survival and subtype clustering objectives. We compare our method with state-of-the-art survival and deep clustering models on multiple real-world longitudinal clinical cohorts spanning diverse disease domains. The proposed method demonstrates improved predictive performance and leads to interpretable results in survival analysis.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

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

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

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

SENTRY: SAM2-Enhanced Neighbor-Aware and Temporally Reasoned Memory for Visual Tracking

We revisit the memory update mechanism in SAM2-based visual object tracking and identify confidence-only mask selection as the dominant cause of drift under occlusion, rapid motion, and distractors. We introduce SENTRY, a training-free, plug-and-play, refine-before-write module that validates each memory update for short-horizon temporal consistency before committing it. SENTRY aggregates diverse segmentation hypotheses per frame, backtracks them into short tracklets, and uses neighbor-aware cycle-consistent matching against recent trajectories to favor temporally and geometrically consistent masks. It leaves the base architecture untouched, replacing confidence-driven writes with consistency-validated ones. For fair evaluation, we re-evaluate major open-source SAM2-based trackers across all available scales and datasets, filling gaps in prior reports. Integrated into five strong baselines, SENTRY delivers consistent gains across nine benchmarks, achieving new zero-shot SOTA on LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, GOT-10k, VOT20, VOT22, and DiDi. Despite these checks, the SAM2-L version runs at 32.8 FPS on an A100, and across compatible hosts adds only about 0.4–0.6 GB VRAM. Our results provide the first unified all-scale evaluation of SAM2-based trackers and show that enforcing temporal validity at write time stabilizes memory-augmented tracking without retraining.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Reform of the intermediate level of the health system in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Adaptations and limits in the stabilization of the personnel of the Provincial Health Division: A cohort study.

Background: Human resources are one of the pillars of health systems. Since the World Health Organization's report on human resources issues, several countries have integrated this component into the various reforms aimed at strengthening their health systems. This study aims to explore the effects of reforming the intermediate level of a health system operating in a fragile state context. Methodology Our study was conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It was a cohort study of the staff of the 14 Provincial Health Divisions (PHD) out of the 26 existing in the DRC. We established a database of the staff of these 14 PHD from 2016, just after the implementation of the intermediate level reform and the allocation of this staff by the Ministry of Health. We did a recall in 2021, in each of these PHD to survey this staff through a structured questionnaire and supplemented by the files of the agents available in each PHD. Sociodemographic, economic and academic variables were collected and analyzed. Data were entered into an Excel 2016 database and processed with SPSS software version 25. The chi-square test was used for comparison of proportions with a statistical significance level of p < 0.05. Risk ratios ratios (RR) and their 95% confidence intervals were calculated as measures of association. The error threshold was set at 5%. Results A total of 657 agents with an average age of 45.2 years had been identified in 2016 at the start of the survey and in 2021, 118 or 18% of them were no longer part of the PHD agents. Among the causes of absence noted: 48% of agents placed on leave, 16% promoted to other functions within the health system, 16% desertion and dismissal and 11% cases of death. 19.8% of absentees are executives, 19.5% men against 10.3% women; 22.3% of absentees in unstable provinces against 16.6% in stable ones. The factors associated with the absence of agents in the PHD remain the reaching of retirement age [RR (95% CI) = 5.5 (1.2-24.9) ]and male agents [RR (95% CI) = 3.2 (1.3-7.9)]. Among the agents who remained, 92% kept their initial position, 6% were subject to an internal permutation accompanied by a promotion. The factors associated with the stability of human resources at the level of the Provincial Health Division are: female gender, manager with experience or seniority > 5 years, Age > 35 years, Stable province, Presence of a partner bonus. Conclusion Even in a crisis and fragile context, health system reform is possible. It is possible to organize staff recruitment through a selection process independent of the political authorities of the Ministry of Health and supported by the technical services of the Ministry and partners . Experience and the presence of a financial bonus are motivating factors for staff stability. The involvement of Technical and Financial Support Partners in the recruitment process helped the Ministry of Health to minimize political influence in the recruitment of middle-level executives.