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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Accurate computation of the energy variance and $\langle\langle \mathcal{L}^\dagger \mathcal{L} \rangle\rangle$ using iPEPS

arXiv:2511.22669v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Infinite projected entangled-pair states (iPEPS) provide a powerful tensor network ansatz for two-dimensional quantum many-body systems in the thermodynamic limit. In this paper we introduce an approach to accurately compute the energy variance of an iPEPS, enabling systematic extrapolations of the ground-state energy to the exact zero-variance limit. It is based on the contraction of a large cell of tensors using the corner transfer matrix renormalization group (CTRMG) method, to evaluate the correlator between pairs of local Hamiltonian terms. We show that the accuracy of this approach is substantially higher than that of previous methods, and we demonstrate the usefulness of variance extrapolation for the Heisenberg model, for a free fermionic model, and for the Shastry-Sutherland model. Finally, we apply the approach to compute $\langle \langle \mathcal{L}^\dagger \mathcal{L} \rangle \rangle$ for an open quantum system described by the Liouvillian $\mathcal{L}$, in order to assess the quality of the steady-state solution and to locate first-order phase transitions, using the dissipative quantum Ising model as an example.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Benchmarking Cross-Domain Audio-Visual Deception Detection

Automated deception detection is crucial for assisting humans in accurately assessing truthfulness and identifying deceptive behavior. Conventional contact-based techniques, like polygraph devices, rely on physiological signals to determine the authenticity of an individual's statements. Nevertheless, recent developments in automated deception detection have demonstrated that multimodal features derived from both audio and video modalities may outperform human observers on publicly available datasets. Despite these positive findings, the generalizability of existing audio-visual deception detection approaches across different scenarios remains largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present the first cross-domain audio-visual deception detection benchmark, that enables us to assess how well these methods generalize for use in real-world scenarios. We used widely adopted audio and visual features and different architectures for benchmarking, comparing single-to-single and multi-to-single domain generalization performance. To further exploit the impacts using data from multiple source domains for training, we investigate three types of domain sampling strategies, including domain-simultaneous, domain-alternating, and domain-by-domain for multi-to-single domain generalization evaluation. We also propose an algorithm to enhance the generalization performance by maximizing the gradient inner products between modality encoders, named ``MM-IDGM". Furthermore, we proposed the Attention-Mixer fusion method to improve performance, and we believe that this new cross-domain benchmark will facilitate future research in audio-visual deception detection.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

M4-SAR: A Multi-Resolution, Multi-Polarization, Multi-Scene, Multi-Source Dataset and Benchmark for optical-SAR Object Detection

Single-source remote sensing object detection using optical or SAR images struggles in complex environments. Optical images offer rich textural details but are often affected by low-light, cloud-obscured, or low-resolution conditions, reducing the detection performance. SAR images are robust to weather, but suffer from speckle noise and limited semantic expressiveness. Optical and SAR images provide complementary advantages, and fusing them can significantly improve the detection accuracy. However, progress in this field is hindered by the lack of large-scale, standardized datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a new comprehensive dataset for optical-SAR fusion object detection, named Multi-resolution, Multi-polarization, Multi-scene, Multi-source SAR dataset (M4-SAR). It contains 112,174 instance-level aligned image pairs and nearly one million labeled instances with arbitrary orientations, spanning six key categories. To enable standardized evaluation, we develop a unified benchmarking toolkit that integrates six state-of-the-art multi-source fusion methods. Additionally, we propose E2E-OSDet, a novel end-to-end multi-source fusion detection framework that mitigates cross-domain discrepancies and establishes a robust baseline for future studies. Extensive experiments on M4-SAR demonstrate that fusing optical and SAR data can improve mAP by 5.7\% over single-source inputs, with particularly significant gains in complex environments. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/wchao0601/M4-SAR.

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

Quantum ring all-reduce: communication and privacy advantages for distributed learning

arXiv:2606.20344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning models have scaled to unprecedented sizes, making training across distributed devices the de facto standard in the field. In this work, we explore how quantum communications can make distributed training both more communication-efficient and information-theoretically private, for both classical and quantum learning models. Ring all-reduce is the foundational communication primitive for large-scale distributed training. We present a quantum version that reduces per-link online communication by a provably optimal factor of two using pre-shared entanglement and superdense coding, without requiring the learning model or gradient computation to change. Beyond bandwidth, the primitive enables privacy guarantees that are information-theoretically impossible for any classical protocol, achieving composable {\epsilon}-secure aggregation, via verified entanglement, at a 2x overhead in GHZ copies. Our hybrid quantum-classical communication architecture yields simultaneous communication and security advantages for large scale distributed training, regardless of whether the learning itself is quantum or classical. Finally, we characterise quantum advantages in gradient conflict detection for server-to-client communication under bandwidth constraints, a setting that arises after ring all-reduce is completed, when full gradient broadcast to external clients is infeasible. Two variants of the problem admit different separations. For margin-based alignment testing (\textsc{GapIP}_{\tau}), the quantum advantage is quadratic in the margin parameter: \widetilde{O}({\tau}^{-1}\log P) qubits versus \widetilde{O}(\min(\{\tau}^{-2},P)) bits. For sign-consistency auditing against a private parameter matching (\textsc{TieAudit}_{\epsilon}), the advantage represents an exponential separation in communication complexity: \Omega(\sqrt{P}) bits whereas O({\epsilon}^{-2}\log P) qubits suffice.

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

On the Memorization Behavior of LLMs in Generative Recommendation: Observations, Implications, and Training Strategies

arXiv:2606.17276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation (GR) has emerged as a promising direction for recommender systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted for GR, as their rich pretrained knowledge is expected to help them generalize beyond common user behavior patterns that traditional memorization-oriented baselines can capture. However, existing LLM-based GR works largely ignore LLMs' well-known tendency to memorize, which, if present in LLMs fine-tuned for GR, would restrict their utilization of pretrained knowledge. In this work, we investigate this concern by examining one-hop memorization, where a model recommends items that are direct successors of items in the training data. We show that LLMs do this more than non-LLM-based GR models-in fact, the vast majority of their gains over GR baselines are actually on users whose target items can be predicted through one-hop memorization. We intuit that improving performance on the remaining users requires LLMs to learn richer item-item relations beyond one-hop transitions. To achieve this, we propose IIRG, a novel training strategy that teaches LLMs to capture: (1) collaborative relations derived from item co-occurrences across multiple hops in user sequences, and (2) semantic relations among items with similar themes, both of which can serve as useful recommendation signals. We show that IIRG significantly improves over LLMs trained solely with standard next-item prediction, with especially large gains for users whose test items are not covered by train-time one-hop transitions.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

"Did you lie?" Evaluating Lie Detectors across Model Scale and Belief-Verified Model Organisms

arXiv:2606.12618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust lie detectors for language models could enable powerful techniques for auditing, monitoring, and post-hoc investigation of model behaviour, but evaluating them requires testbeds where models verifiably believe the opposite of what they say. We show that existing trained model organisms often fail this requirement, leaving prior positive and negative detection results difficult to interpret. We address this with 13 reasoning model organisms whose hidden beliefs are verified in chain-of-thought and shown to generalise to held-out tasks, alongside Varied Deception, a prompted-lying testbed covering a broad range of lie-inducing motivations. On these testbeds we evaluate four detectors: a chain-of-thought judge, a logprob classifier, and two activation probes, including Did-You-Lie (DYL), a new method for training follow-up probes. On prompted lying, across 31 open-weight models spanning 2B to 1T parameters, all four detectors show positive scaling with model capability. However, every activation- and logprob-based detector drops sharply on our trained model organisms, with DYL retaining the most signal; only the chain-of-thought judge remains strong, with 0.82 balanced accuracy, partly as an artefact of our verification process favouring CoT-readable beliefs. Current lie detectors therefore cannot support high-confidence claims about model beliefs, and we suggest research directions that may address some of their current limitations. We release our datasets, model organisms, and trained detectors.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

LoSoNA: A Benchmark for Local Social Norm Adaptation in Group Conversations

Online group chats are social spaces with local conversational norms that are rarely stated explicitly. The ability and willingness of LLM-based agents to recognize and adapt to these norms remains mostly unexplored. We introduce LoSoNA, a benchmark for local social norm adaptation in multi-party chat. Each scenario gives a subject model a curated group-chat transcript in which non-subject participants demonstrate a hidden local norm, followed by a final elicitor turn that forces a response revealing whether the subject has inferred that norm. We evaluate eight frontier and open-weight models under four prompting conditions that vary how explicitly the model is told to treat the prior conversation as evidence for how it should answer. Naive prompting remains limited for most models; explicit norm-aware prompting helps unevenly, with Gemini 3.1 Pro reaching $84.2\%$ and Claude Fable 5 reaching $81.6\%$, while several other models show small gains or regressions. LoSoNA contributes to recent calls for evaluating LLM social capabilities by testing whether models can infer local conversational norms from precedent and use them in a one-turn group-chat response.

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

ThousandWorlds: A benchmark for climate emulation of potentially habitable exoplanets

arXiv:2606.18338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The search for life beyond Earth will depend on detecting faint signatures in the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets. Interpreting those signatures requires understanding the host planet's climate: the same molecule may signal life on one planet and abiotic chemistry on another. Global climate models (GCMs) provide this understanding, but individual runs can require up to millions of core-hours and substantial domain expert time. Machine-learning emulators could remove this bottleneck, but progress has been limited by the absence of a curated, multi-model exoclimate dataset. We introduce ThousandWorlds, an ML-ready benchmark for exoclimate emulation and for the broader regime of low-data, multi-simulator, parameter-to-field regression. The dataset contains approximately 1800 simulations from five GCMs, mapping eight planet parameters to 3D atmospheric fields including temperature, humidity, winds, clouds, and radiation. Three nested subsets define progressively harder challenges: single-simulator regression, multi-simulator regression with complete observations, and multi-simulator regression with structured missingness. We propose two evaluation protocols: one for ranking methods, and one that measures performance relative to the disagreement between GCMs themselves. We evaluate seven baselines spanning simple methods, deep learning, and Gaussian processes. GP-based methods perform best, suggesting that ThousandWorlds exposes a regime where off-the-shelf deep learning does not yet succeed. Data: https://doi.org/10.57967/hf/8695. Code: https://github.com/edstevenson/ThousandWorlds.

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

ASyMOB: Algebraic Symbolic Mathematical Operations Benchmark

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to symbolic mathematics, yet existing evaluations often conflate pattern memorization with genuine reasoning. To address this gap, we present ASyMOB, a high-resolution dataset of 35,368 validated symbolic math problems spanning integration, limits, differential equations, series, and hypergeometrics. Unlike prior benchmarks, ASyMOB systematically perturbs each seed problem using symbolic, numeric, and equivalence-preserving transformations, enabling a fine-grained assessment of generalization. Our evaluation reveals three key findings: (1) most models' performance collapses under minor perturbations, while top systems exhibit an apparent regime shift in robustness; (2) integrated code tools stabilize performance, particularly for weaker models; and (3) we identify examples where Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) fail while LLMs succeed, as well as problems solved only via a hybrid LLM-CAS approach, highlighting a promising integration frontier. ASyMOB serves as a principled diagnostic tool for measuring and accelerating progress toward building verifiable, trustworthy AI for scientific discovery.

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

Context-aware Modality-Topology Co-Alignment for Multimodal Attributed Graphs

Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) model real-world entities by coupling graph topology with heterogeneous attributes such as text and images. They support graph-centric tasks requiring structural and class-discriminative representations, and modality-centric tasks requiring fine-grained cross-modal correspondence. However, existing MAG methods often rely on fixed graph contexts or uniformly fused representations, causing task-agnostic propagation and over-compressed fusion that hinder diverse task requirements and modality-specific evidence preservation. To address this, we propose CoMAG, a unified MAG backbone that learns task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment within them. CoMAG first conducts Reliable Context Learning by estimating edge reliability from multimodal semantic consistency, complementing raw topology with semantic neighbors, and selecting context components through a task-aware gate. It then performs Modality-preserving Hop-token Alignment by maintaining modality-specific multi-hop trajectories, matching modality-hop tokens across modalities, and decoupling shared and private representations. Thus, CoMAG produces graph and modality representations from one forward pass while retaining modality-specific cues. We further analyze stable propagation, over-smoothing mitigation, and modality-collapse control. Experiments on nine OpenMAG datasets compare CoMAG with feature-only, graph-only, multimodal, and unified MAG baselines across graph-level prediction, modality matching, and graph-conditioned generation. Results show that CoMAG achieves the best reported performance, demonstrating that task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment improve structural prediction, cross-modal matching, and graph-conditioned generation while retaining sparse edge-linear complexity.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

A unicellular relative links aggregative multicellularity to animal origins

Authors:

How animals evolved complex multicellularity from their unicellular ancestors remains unanswered. Unicellular relatives of animals exhibit simple multicellularity through clonal division, formation of multinucleate coenocytes, or aggregation. 1 Therefore, animal multicellularity may have evolved from one (or a combination) of these behaviours. Aggregation has classically been dismissed as a means to complex multicellularity. 2 However, aggregation occurs in many extant animal cells and has also been recently described in three close unicellular relatives of animals (the choanoflagellates Salpingoeca rosetta and Choanoeca flexa, and the filasterean Capsaspora owczarzaki). 3-5 It is unclear whether aggregation in these species is derived or ancestral, and its relevance for animal origins remains unknown. To fill this gap, we investigated whether an additional close unicellular relative of animals can undergo aggregation. We discovered that the marine free-living bacterivorous filasterean Ministeria vibrans 6 forms homogeneous aggregates with reproducible kinetics that have long-term stability, and that improved feeding and mating may be evolutionary drivers of this aggregation. Notably, we found that homologs of many animal multicellularity genes involved in cell adhesion, signalling, and transcriptional regulation were deployed during the aggregation process, indicating that they may have been used for aggregation in the unicellular ancestors of animals before being co-opted into animal multicellular development. Thus, our results imply that aggregative multicellularity was key to the development of the multicellular animal genetic toolkit.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum Correlations of Neutrinos in the Kerr-Newman Space-time

arXiv:2605.10424v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum phases provide a connection between gravitation and quantum information, which proposes a novel avenue to explore the properties of space-time. In this paper, we investigate the quantum correlations (QCs) of neutrinos in the Kerr–Newman space-time. Both radial and non-radial propagations are considered under the weak-field approximation. The results show that, for inward propagations, the oscillation probabilities and QCs differ significantly from those obtained in the Schwarzschild metric. In the case of radial outward propagation, the larger angular momentum $a$ increases the oscillation period of the survival probability $P_{ee}$, entanglement, and monogamy of nonlocality, whereas the larger charge $Q$ decreases the corresponding periods. For non-radial propagations, $M$ and $a$ can noticeably modulate the amplitudes of the considered QCs, which is not observed in the case of radial propagations. Furthermore, we find that, despite differences in their variation ranges, entanglement and coherence exhibit highly consistent oscillation behaviors in both radial and non-radial propagation cases. These findings provide a comprehensive understanding for the neutrinos-based relativistic quantum information.

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

Robust Regularized Policy Iteration under Transition Uncertainty

arXiv:2603.09344v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables data-efficient and safe policy learning without online exploration, but its performance often degrades under distribution shift. The learned policy may visit out-of-distribution state-action pairs where value estimates and learned dynamics are unreliable. To address policy-induced extrapolation and transition uncertainty in a unified framework, we formulate offline RL as robust policy optimization, treating the transition kernel as a decision variable within an uncertainty set and optimizing the policy against the worst-case dynamics. We propose Robust Regularized Policy Iteration (RRPI), which replaces the intractable max-min bilevel objective with a tractable KL-regularized surrogate and derives an efficient policy iteration procedure based on a robust regularized Bellman operator. We provide theoretical guarantees by showing that the proposed operator is a $\gamma$-contraction and that iteratively updating the surrogate yields monotonic improvement of the original robust objective with convergence. Experiments on D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that RRPI achieves strong average performance, outperforming recent baselines including percentile-based methods on the majority of environments while remaining competitive on the rest. Moreover, RRPI exhibits robust performance by aligning lower $Q$-values with high epistemic uncertainty, which prevents the policy from executing unreliable out-of-distribution actions.

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

ActionMap: Robot Policy Learning via Voxel Action Heatmap

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced rapidly across backbones, training recipes, and data scale, yet the action decoder, which converts the backbone's hidden state into a continuous control signal, has barely changed and remains a single-point predictor across the majority of current VLAs. Whether implemented via autoregressive token bins, L1 regression, or flow-matching denoising, the resulting decoder treats the action space as unstructured, leaving the geometric proximity of neighboring actions unexploited during training. To advance this, we introduce ActionMap, a voxel heatmap action head that drops into an existing VLA in place of its native action decoder. For each new action, the head predicts a voxel heatmap over the action space, where each voxel directly stores the probability of the corresponding action. Across LIBERO simulation and real-world Franka manipulation, our heatmap head surpasses two architecturally distinct backbones at matched training steps (e.g., +8.2% over OpenVLA-OFT's L1 regression head on the LIBERO four-suite average), converges at comparable or faster rates on both backbones, and remains markedly more data-efficient at low training data. The cross-backbone consistency indicates that action representation is a real lever for VLA performance, distinct from further backbone or recipe scaling. Project Page: https://showlab.github.io/ActionMap/.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Beyond task performance: Decoding bioacoustic embeddings with speech features

arXiv:2606.14662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained audio embeddings are standard in bioacoustics, yet little is known about which acoustic features these models encode, nor which are useful for a given task. This hinders transparency and limits extension to rare species or data-scarce domains. Here we reveal which speech-like features are encoded in bioacoustic representations. Using the 88~eGeMAPS features across six taxonomic groups, we apply linear and nonlinear regression probes to quantify which acoustic properties each model captures. Results confirm a ``no free lunch'' pattern: no single model captures the full feature space. A concatenated embedding achieves the highest performance, suggesting complementary acoustic space coverage across models. Loudness features are best encoded ($R^2 = 0.76$) while F0 is hardest to recover ($R^2 = 0.33$). By cross-referencing recoverability with per-species feature salience (NMI), we derive data-driven model selection guidance for bioacoustics.

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

Closing the Loop: Formally Verified Law as a Reward Signal for Self-Improving Legal AI

arXiv:2606.23913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This article develops an architecture that creates a formally verifiable reward signal to train legal AI, adapting the LLM proposes, verifier disposes paradigm from mathematical AI to the distinctive demands of law. We present an architecture comprising LLM-driven autoformalization into a formal legal calculus extending Catala, a verification kernel, and explanation generation grounded in formal proof traces. For the computational components of law, the architecture provides provable correctness. For open-textured legal analysis, it provides structural guarantees: every required stage of the legal argument is addressed, argumentation is exercised at the correct stages and not omitted, and the deductive links between steps are valid. We demonstrate the architecture on procedural deadline calculations in German law, Commerce Clause analysis in U.S. constitutional law, and cross-jurisdictional sanction proportionality. We further show that the same architecture has a structural advantage for legal AI training: a deterministic external verifier supplies verifiable outcomes for legal problems and thereby closes the traditional reinforcement-learning loop gap in law.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

MetaPilot: genome-aware adaptive search-space refinement for unified DDA and DIA metaproteomics

Metaproteomic peptide identification is constrained by the structure and size of the protein search space. Pooled gene catalogues provide coverage but obscure genome-level evidence, and current workflows for data-dependent (DDA) and data-independent (DIA) acquisition diverge in their database strategies. We present MetaPilot, a genome-aware workflow that uses conserved marker-protein evidence to rank candidate genomes from MGnify catalogues and construct adaptive, sample-specific search spaces. Applied to paired DDA/DIA datasets of defined mixtures and fecal samples, MetaPilot adapted genome selection to community complexity and reproduced published peptide evidence while expanding the detectable peptide space. In DDA-independent reanalysis of Orbitrap human gut DIA data, MetaPilot identified 24.4% more peptides than the published DDA-derived library and 2.06-fold more than the matched DDA-assisted DIA search. On timsTOF DIA-PASEF mouse intestinal data, it outperformed uMetaP by 41.8~119.7%, enabling genome-resolved functional interpretation without DDA-PASEF input.

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

Instance-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Semi-Supervised Learning of an On-Board Multi-Task Dense Prediction Model for Collision Avoidance System

Collision avoidance systems have evolved toward camera-based deep learning approaches for driving scene understanding. However, deployment in edge environments such as country clubs is constrained by limited computational resources and unreliable communication infrastructure. Moreover, constructing large-scale datasets for the target domain involves substantial annotation cost. To address these limitations, we propose an instance-aware knowledge distillation framework for semi-supervised learning. Specifically, we generate pseudo labels that mitigate teacher bias by leveraging domain priors from the teacher and instance-centric knowledge from foundation models. The trained lightweight student is deployed in the proposed collision avoidance system and performs multiple dense prediction tasks in real-time. The system detects frontal obstacles and encodes their spatial information into controller area network messages for automated guided vehicle operation. To achieve this, we construct a large-scale country club dataset and perform field validation of the proposed system. Experimental results demonstrate that the student outperforms the large teacher in instance segmentation while mitigating performance degradation in monocular depth estimation. Compared with the teacher, the student reduces FLOPs by 22.68$\times$ and parameters by 14.33$\times$, achieving 6.46 FPS on a low-cost edge device.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Learning the Geometry of Data: A Mathematical Review of Shape Space Analysis

arXiv:2606.17022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central objective of machine learning is to identify structure and patterns in data. Advances in data acquisition have increasingly produced datasets whose observations possess rich geometric form, giving rise to shape spaces that encode variability in object geometry. Such datasets arise across a wide range of disciplines, including biology, medicine, anthropology, and computer vision, where subtle geometric differences often carry important scientific information. Traditional machine learning methods, however, are frequently ill-equipped to account for the nonlinear geometric structure underlying these data. This survey synthesizes a rapidly growing body of work on shape space analysis, which provides a mathematical and computational framework for the study of geometric data. Drawing on ideas from differential geometry, statistics, and machine learning, we organize the literature around a common analytical pipeline: shape representation and parameterization, the rigorous construction of robust geodesic metrics, statistical analysis on shape spaces, and geometry-aware learning methods. We discuss how these tools enable the characterization of shape variability, the comparison of geometric objects, and the analysis of structural trajectories across populations and time. To illustrate the breadth of the field, we highlight applications spanning multiple scales of biological organization, including studies of subcellular morphology and primate tooth evolution. Across these and many other domains, researchers face common challenges arising from complex, nonlinear, and often unaligned geometric variation. The review concludes by identifying key theoretical and computational challenges, as well as emerging opportunities driven by increasingly large and diverse geometric datasets.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Effect of Lowering the Drink-Driving Blood Alcohol Limit in Scotland on Road Traffic Crashes: a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences Study

Objective: To evaluate the road safety impact arising from Scotlands 2014 reduction in the legal blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limit for drivers, and to assess whether the effect of the reform varied across different spatial contexts. Design: A quasi-experimental statistical longitudinal study using a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SDID) approach. Setting: Small-area panel data for Great Britain, with areas (Middle-layer Super Output Areas, MSOAs, in England and Wales and Intermediate Zones, IZs, in Scotland) classed into control and treatment groups according to whether they were exposed to Scotlands BAC reform. The control and treatment groups comprise 7088 spatial units in England and Wales and 852 spatial units in Scotland, respectively, observed over the period 2008-2019. Participants: The study primarily analyses police-reported road traffic collision data from the UK Department for Transports STATS19 system. Data were analysed at the MSOA/IZ level. This is a secondary dataset, and we therefore did not involve patients or the public in formulating the research question, determining outcome measures, or designing and conducting the study. Main Outcome Measures: The main outcome measures were log-transformed rates of total road traffic crashes, and (weekend) night-time crashes (22:00-04:00) per 100,000 population. The latter is used as a proxy measure for drunk driving. Results: Our results indicate that the reduction in the legal BAC limit led to statistically significant declines in road traffic crash rates. Aggregate estimates suggest reductions of 12.0% (95% confidence interval (CI): [-13.7%, -10.3%]) in total crashes, 15.6% (95% CI: [-20.7%, -10.2%]) in night-time crashes, and 12.4% (95% CI: [-16.7%, -7.9%]) in weekend night-time crashes. We also find substantial heterogeneity in treatment effects across spatial contexts. Effects were strongest in rural and less densely populated areas, where reductions exceeded 16% (95% CI: [-18.7%, -13.9%]) for total crashes and reached up to 29.6% (95% CI: [-35.8%, -22.8%]) for night-time and 21.4% (95% CI: [-28.3%, -13.9%]) for weekend night-time crashes. Moderate but statistically significant effects were also observed in dense urban areas, whereas effects in suburban and transitional areas were smaller and not statistically significant. Conclusions: Our analysis suggests that lowering the legal BAC limit in Scotland led to meaningful reductions in road traffic crashes, particularly during higher-risk periods and in rural areas. The findings further suggest that the effectiveness of BAC regulation may vary across local contexts, highlighting the importance of accounting for spatial heterogeneity when evaluating road safety policies.

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

Surflo: Consistent 3D Surface Flow Model with Global State

Geometry is invariant to viewpoint, which makes any collection of images a redundant encoding of a single 3D state. Existing feed-forward reconstruction models fail to exploit this: per-view methods emit overlapping, unaligned pointmaps that grow linearly with input count, while global-latent methods commit to a fixed, low-resolution output. We introduce Surflo, which compresses a variable number of unposed RGB views into K latent tokens-one global state-and decodes oriented 3D surface points by independently transporting them from noise onto the surface via flow matching. This frees the output from any fixed grid or token budget: the same latent yields from a few thousand to a million points in a single forward pass. To suppress the local inconsistencies inherent to independent per-point decoding, an inference-time guidance term correlates nearby points by injecting a photometric gradient during ODE integration. Surflo matches or surpasses feed-forward baselines on surface metrics, runs an order of magnitude faster than optimization-based methods that require hundreds of views, and is the only feed-forward approach to combine a global latent with arbitrary-resolution decoding.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Benchmarking LLMs' Mathematical Reasoning with Unseen Random Variables Questions

Recent studies have raised significant concerns regarding the reliability of current mathematics benchmarks, highlighting issues such as simplistic design and potential data contamination. Consequently, developing a reliable benchmark that effectively evaluates large language models' (LLMs) genuine capabilities in mathematical reasoning remains a critical challenge. To address these concerns, we propose RV-Bench, a novel evaluation methodology for Benchmarking LLMs with Random Variables in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we build question-generating functions to produce random variable questions (RVQs), whose background content mirrors original benchmark problems, but with randomized variable combinations, rendering them "unseen" to LLMs. Models must completely understand the inherent question pattern to correctly answer RVQs with diverse variable combinations. Thus, an LLM's genuine reasoning capability is reflected through its accuracy and robustness on RV-Bench. We conducted extensive experiments on over 30 representative LLMs across more than 1,000 RVQs. Our findings propose that LLMs exhibit a proficiency imbalance between encountered and ``unseen'' data distributions. Furthermore, RV-Bench reveals that proficiency generalization across similar mathematical reasoning tasks is limited, but we verified it can still be effectively elicited through test-time scaling.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LooseControlVideo: Directorial Video Control using Spatial Blocking

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

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Fine-Tuning SAM2 for Coronary Artery Segmentation in X-Ray Fluoroscopy

Authors:

SAM2 (Meta, 2024) provides a strong starting point for segmentation, but given the unique challenges in medical imaging (noise from patient movement, the projection-based nature of X-ray fluoroscopy, and low contrast between vessels and background), direct application is difficult. We fine-tune MedSAM2 on annotated coronary angiograms and apply it to video data for point-of-care use. On the ARCADE validation set (200 images), the fine-tuned model achieves Dice 0.767 compared to 0.033 zero-shot. On 10 fluoroscopic video studies from CoronaryDominance, it tracks vessels coherently and avoids falsely segmenting ribs, stents, and bypass grafts in 9 of 10 studies. Code is available at https://github.com/elakiyasivakumar/SAM2-Coronary-Angiography-VA and the fine-tuned checkpoint at https://huggingface.co/Elakiya17/CA-SAM2.