中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

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

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

The table maker's quantum search

Authors:
Benjamin C. A. Morrison↗Stefanos Kourtis↗

arXiv:2601.13306v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We show that quantum search can be used to compute the hardness to round an elementary function, that is, to determine the minimum working precision required to compute the values of an elementary function correctly rounded to a target precision of $n$ digits for all possible precision-$n$ floating-point inputs in a given interval. For elementary functions $f$ related to the exponential function, quantum search takes time $\tilde O(2^{n/2} \log (1/\delta))$ to return, with probability $1-\delta$, the hardness to round $f$ over all $n$-bit floating-point inputs in a given binade. For periodic elementary functions in large binades, standalone quantum search yields an asymptotic speedup over the best known classical algorithms and heuristics. We then estimate the resources required for a fault-tolerant implementation of the proposed algorithm for the $\sin$ and $\cos$ functions in double precision. We find that, although the algorithm can in principle compete with the fastest known practical method for computing the hardness to round over all binades in the format, it requires qubit coherence times that are unrealistically long for present technology.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Rethinking Dataset Distillation for Classification: Do Distilled Sets Outperform Coresets?

Authors:
Trisha Mittal↗Akshay Mehra↗Joshua Kimball↗

arXiv:2606.18209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dataset distillation (DD) has emerged as a prominent approach in data centric machine learning, aiming to synthesize compact training sets for efficient training by compressing the information in large datasets into a small number of synthetic samples. However, DD methods are often evaluated under inconsistent evaluation protocols, ranging from standard ERM to single/multi-teacher supervision, making it difficult to isolate the effectiveness of distilled data from evaluation. Moreover, many prior methods claim that DD outperforms data pruning approaches such as coreset selection (CS), based on the assumption that restricting condensed datasets to subsets of real samples fundamentally limits their expressiveness. In this work, we critically evaluate DD methods through large-scale experiments using standardized datasets and evaluation protocols to assess their intrinsic effectiveness. We benchmark seven state-of-the-art (SOTA) DD methods on ImageNet-1K, ImageNet100, and ImageNette, using three widely adopted training protocols against three CS strategies. Our results show that while some DD methods fail to outperform even simple random subsets, the SOTA DD approaches are comparable to or worse than coresets on large-scale datasets and incur a substantially higher cost for construction. Beyond accuracy, we also evaluate the representativeness, diversity, and quality of condensed sets, and find that coresets consistently achieve better coverage of the original data distribution. These findings highlight the limited practical advantages of current DD methods and show that coresets remain competitive and are often a more computationally efficient alternative for data-centric learning.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

DramaDirector: Geometry-Guided Short Drama Generation

Authors:
Hengji Zhou↗Sijie Liu↗Jianrun Chen↗Xingchen Zou↗Lianghao Xia↗Liqiang Nie↗

arXiv:2606.24107v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Short dramas, with their rapid shot rhythms, dialogue-driven focus shifts, and demanding cinematographic grounding, pose challenges that prompt-level or text-only video generation pipelines struggle to meet. We study plot-to-short-drama generation, where a global plot and local context are transformed into visually grounded multi-shot videos. We propose DramaDirector, a geometry-grounded framework that lets the planner borrow cinematographic geometry from a gallery of real short-drama shots indexed by depth and pose. DramaDirector decouples each shot into static visual and dynamic narrative conditions, trains the planner with schema-constrained SFT and GRPO under a learned text-visual alignment reward, and retrieves depth-pose references to guide first-frame generation and image-to-video synthesis. We also introduce DramaBoard, a benchmark built from 35 live-action dramas, 2.8K episodes, and 81K shots, with structured storyboards and multi-dimensional evaluation protocols. Experiments show that DramaDirector improves over representative multi-agent and video generation baselines on faithfulness, consistency, and controllability. Our code is released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/DramaDirector

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CacheRL:Multi-Turn Tool-Calling Agents via Cached Rollouts and Hybrid Reward

Authors:
Md Amirul Islam↗Sumiran Thakur↗Huancheng Chen↗Su Min Park↗Jiayun Wang↗Gyuhak Kim↗

We present CacheRL, a system for training small agent foundation models that achieves 92 percent process accuracy on multi-step tool-calling tasks, approaching GPT-5's 94 percent while requiring 100 times less compute. Our approach addresses three challenges in practical agent training: transferring tool-calling knowledge from large models at scale, enabling reinforcement learning without costly live tool execution, and learning robustly from noisy cached environments. CacheRL introduces three key innovations. First, a hybrid thinking trajectory pipeline augments agent trajectories with LLM-generated reasoning traces, producing training examples that teach models not only what tools to call but also why. Second, the CacheAgentLoop eliminates live execution costs through a three-tier fuzzy cache while preserving trajectory fidelity using token-level masking. Third, a cache-tier-aware reward dynamically adjusts answer-quality weights to avoid penalizing models for cache-induced limitations. Through iterative supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), CacheRL improves Qwen3-4B-Thinking's validation reward from 0.43 to 0.78. On public agentic tool-calling benchmarks, our model achieves competitive performance against frontier models such as GPT-5. Ablation studies show that removing knowledge transfer reduces performance by 41 percent, while cache-aware rewards contribute a 17 percent improvement. Interestingly, reinforcement learning improves training stability but yields limited gains beyond strong supervised fine-tuning, suggesting that data quality and reward design play a more important role than complex optimization methods in building practical small agent models.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Clinician-Centered Pipeline for Annotation and Evaluation in Ultrasound AI Studies

Authors:
Fangyijie Wang↗Jianjun Yu↗Wentao Shi↗Haixia Huang↗Ran Shi↗Gu\'enol\'e Silvestre↗Kathleen M. Curran↗

arXiv:2606.19174v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clinician-centered evaluation is critical for validating medical AI systems, especially in ultrasound imaging where quantitative metrics do not always capture clinical usability. Existing medical image platforms primarily focus on dataset labeling. They lack integrated support for blinded model comparison and reproducible evaluation workflows. We present a clinician-centered pipeline for remote annotation and evaluation in ultrasound AI studies. The proposed pipeline uses a centralized server and lightweight browser interfaces to enable clinicians to perform annotation, blinded ranking, and review without local dataset downloads. The pipeline also supports multi-rater participation, centralized result aggregation, and automated statistical analysis. We validate the pipeline in a fetal ultrasound segmentation study with six raters spanning expert, generalist, and non-expert experience levels. The system automatically generated Spearman correlation, Kendall's $\tau$, and top-1 selection statistics. Results indicated moderate to strong agreement across experts and other groups. The blinded evaluation results showed a tendency for later active learning models to be preferred. These outcomes suggest that the pipeline can support clinician-centered annotation and reproducible human-\ac{AI} evaluation studies in ultrasound imaging. The proposed pipeline is available on \href{https://github.com/13204942/SonoRate}{GitHub}.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

ATHENA: Agentic Team for Hierarchical Evolutionary Numerical Algorithms

Authors:
Juan Diego Toscano↗Daniel T. Chen↗George Em Karniadakis↗

arXiv:2512.03476v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Progress in computational science depends on complex numerical workflows that must faithfully encode physical laws, yet translating conceptual insight into reliable code remains a major bottleneck. Although large language models can generate isolated code fragments, they lack the structured reasoning required to design, verify, and iteratively refine complete scientific pipelines. Here we introduce ATHENA, an agentic framework explicitly designed to emulate scientific research modeled as a knowledge-driven contextual bandit process. Its core loop separates conceptual policy from numerical realization through expert-derived conceptual scaffolding, enabling principled diagnosis, reformulation, and repair of computational strategies. Across scientific computing and scientific machine learning tasks, ATHENA autonomously derives and correctly applies exact analytical solutions, constructs stable numerical solvers, diagnoses ill-posed formulations, and orchestrates hybrid symbolic-numeric workflows. Quantitatively, ATHENA matches and frequently surpasses the accuracy of expert-authored reference solutions reported in the literature on canonical benchmarks. By reframing computation as an object of agentic reasoning, our framework enables autonomous orchestration of heterogeneous algorithms across scientific domains.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

ViT-Up: Faithful Feature Upsampling for Vision Transformers

Authors:
Krispin Wandel↗Jingchuan Wang↗Hesheng Wang↗

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become a dominant architecture for visual representation learning, providing exceptionally strong and broadly reusable backbone features. However, ViTs are commonly operated on relatively small patch-token grids due to the quadratic cost of global self-attention, which creates a persistent bottleneck for dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation. This has motivated the development of task-agnostic feature upsamplers. While recent state-of-the-art methods produce visually sharp dense representations, their reliance on shallow image encoders for guided upsampling can introduce feature leakage, fragmentation, and blur. We introduce ViT-Up, an implicit feature upsampling framework that replaces external image guidance with layer-wise query construction from intermediate ViT hidden states. This enables feature prediction at arbitrary continuous image coordinates while preserving alignment with the backbone feature space. Experiments demonstrate that ViT-Up consistently outperforms state-of-the-art image-guided upsamplers across dense prediction and semantic correspondence. On DINOv3-S+, ViT-Up improves over prior methods by up to +2.07 mIoU on Cityscapes and +4.17 PCK@0.10 on SPair-71k. With the larger DINOv3-B backbone, these gains increase to +3.36 mIoU and +8.09 PCK@0.10, demonstrating that ViT-Up scales favorably with backbone capacity.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Context-Aware RL for Agentic and Multimodal LLMs

Authors:
Peiyang Xu↗Bangzheng Li↗Sijia Liu↗Karthik R. Narasimhan↗Pramod Viswanath↗Prateek Mittal↗Xingyu Fu↗

Large language models (LLMs) often fail when answering requires identifying a small but decisive piece of evidence within a long or complex context, such as a single line in a tool trace or a subtle detail in an image. We propose ContextRL, a context-aware reinforcement learning (RL) method that improves long-horizon reasoning and multimodal performance through an indirect auxiliary objective. Instead of supervising only the final answer, ContextRL presents the model with a query, an answer, and two highly similar contexts, and rewards it for selecting the context that supports the query–answer pair, thereby encouraging fine-grained grounding. We construct contrastive context data in two domains: for coding agents, trajectories serve as contexts, yielding 1k pairs built via condition filtering; for multimodal reasoning, images serve as contexts, yielding 7K pairs built via generative editing and similarity search. ContextRL achieves average gains of +2.2% over standard GRPO on 5 long-horizon benchmarks, and +1.8% across 12 diverse visual question answering benchmarks. To disentangle the effect of the proposed objective from that of additional data, we compare against data-augmentation baselines that repurpose the same contrastive contexts as standard query–context–answer examples. These baselines provide little to no improvement, showing that the gains arise from the proposed context-selection objective rather than from the contrastive data alone.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Semantic DLM+: Improving Diffusion Language Models through Bias-variance Trade-off in Transition Kernel Design

Authors:
Keyue Jiang↗Yuxiang Wang↗Yanan Zhao↗Xiang Yu↗Qifang Zhao↗Bohan Tang↗Baojian Zhou↗Yanghua Xiao↗Lin Qu↗Xiaoxiao Xu↗

arXiv:2606.15327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have demonstrated strong scaling capacity as alternatives to autoregressive language models. However, their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of transition kernels, and poorly designed kernels can lead to issues like training instability, slow convergence, and biased sampling. In this paper, we study this sensitivity through a principled analysis of generalization error and identify three critical factors: asymptotic bias (difficulty in approximating the posterior distribution), exposure bias (error propagation during sampling), and optimization variance induced by kernel dispersion. We further compare different transition kernels: masking diffusion yields sparse and easier posterior-approximation targets, while uniform diffusion provides stronger sampling-side repair but induces harder approximation. Motivated by this trade-off, we revisit a previously overlooked variant, semantic DLM (SemDLM), where the transition kernel corrupts tokens to neighborhoods that are semantically similar. Our theory suggests that SemDLM can serve as a plausible middle ground by reducing the posterior approximation difficulty of uniform diffusion while retaining repair ability. However, we find that SemDLM suffers from a semantic basin problem, where sampling repeatedly stays within a semantic region and produces low-diversity text. To address this, we propose SemDLM+, which adds a global transition and a semantic-frequency penalty during sampling. Experiments on LM1B and OpenWebText show that SemDLM+ improves training dynamics and achieves competitive language modeling and generation quality with satisfactory diversity.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

GENEB: Why Genomic Models Are Hard to Compare

Authors:
Daria Ledneva↗Mikhail Nuridinov↗Denis Kuznetsov↗

Progress in genomic foundation models is difficult to assess due to fragmented benchmarks, incompatible evaluation protocols, and task-specific reporting. As a result, claims of superiority or generality across models are often not directly comparable. We introduce GENEB, a large-scale diagnostic benchmark that evaluates frozen representations from 40 genomic foundation models across 100 tasks spanning 13 functional categories under a unified probing-based protocol, including few-shot regimes. GENEB enables controlled comparison across model scale, architecture, tokenization, and pretraining data while explicitly exposing task-level trade-offs. Our analysis shows that aggregate leaderboards are unstable: model rankings vary sharply across task categories, scale provides only modest and inconsistent gains, and architectural and pretraining alignment frequently outweigh parameter count. These results highlight limitations of current evaluation practices and position GENEB as a reference framework for principled comparison and category-aware model selection in genomic machine learning.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Coercivity and Local Convergence of Physical Learning in Linear Circuits

Authors:
Joshua A. McGinnis↗Xinbo Li↗Yoichiro Mori↗

arXiv:2606.15443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical learning methods train physical networks to perform computational tasks using only local update rules, exploiting the physics of the system to handle the global transfer of information. We provide the first local convergence analysis of three such methods – Equilibrium Propagation (EP), Coupled Learning (CL), and a new method we call Adjoint Coupled Learning (AL) – for linear circuits, in the limit of small-nudging for both discrete and continuous time. EP and AL perform gradient descent on a natural loss function, while CL follows modified dynamics with an additional cubic correction. Assuming the existence of a solution, we identify a coercivity condition, expressed as a rank condition on a matrix built from the network's incidence structure, under which the training loss decays exponentially and the parameters converge to the solution manifold. We show that coercivity can fail by exhibiting a kite circuit in which a symmetry causes the coercivity constant to degenerate on the solution manifold, but prove using Sard's theorem that such degeneracies are non-generic: coercivity holds at every point of the solution manifold for almost every choice of desired output.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Do Time Series Foundation Model Benchmarks Hide Regime-Dependent Failures? Evidence from Traffic Speed Forecasting

Authors:
Yingshuo Wang↗Xian Sun↗Lingdong Kong↗Wei Gao↗Yanhang Li↗Zhichao Fan↗Zexin Zhuang↗

arXiv:2606.18367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard benchmarks evaluate time series foundation models (TSFMs) using aggregate metrics, but these can mask severe failures in critical operating regimes. We introduce regime-stratified evaluation and apply it to three TSFMs on two standard traffic speed benchmarks. Traffic exhibits abrupt regime switching between free-flow and congested states, producing bimodal speed distributions during transitions. When we stratify by traffic regime, both accuracy and prediction-interval coverage degrade sharply during transitions: transition-regime MAE reaches 11 mph (versus 3 mph overall), and empirical coverage of 90% prediction intervals drops as low as 55%. These failures are invisible in aggregate metrics because free-flow observations dominate the sample. A simple historical conditional baseline (sampling from per-sensor training distributions) achieves better transition coverage than any TSFM, but has far worse overall accuracy. We propose bimodal mixture augmentation (BMA), a post-hoc method that combines TSFM forecasts with historical distributional knowledge, approaching the historical baseline's transition coverage while preserving the TSFM's accuracy. Our results suggest that TSFM benchmarks should incorporate regime-aware evaluation to surface failures that aggregate metrics hide.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CLAP: Contrastive Latent Action Pretraining for Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Human Videos

Authors:
Chubin Zhang↗Jianan Wang↗Zifeng Gao↗Yue Su↗Tianru Dai↗Cai Zhou↗Jiwen Lu↗Yansong Tang↗

Generalist Vision-Language-Action models remain constrained by the scarcity of robotic data relative to the abundance of human video demonstrations. Existing Latent Action Models attempt to use video data but often suffer from visual entanglement, encoding noise rather than manipulation skills. To address this limitation, we propose Contrastive Latent Action Pretraining (CLAP), a framework that first uses Act-VAE to learn an executable action-token vocabulary from robot trajectories and then aligns human visual transitions with this vocabulary through contrastive learning. This alignment maps unlabeled human videos into a physically grounded latent action space rather than reconstructing appearance. Building on the aligned tokens, we train CLAP-NTP as an autoregressive VLA using robot demonstrations and pseudo-labeled human videos, preserving instruction following and object generalization. For deployment and target-domain adaptation, we further introduce a post-training strategy that combines CLAP-RF, a Rectified Flow action head for low-latency continuous action chunk prediction, with Knowledge Matching regularization to preserve pretrained semantic knowledge during fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that CLAP achieves strong performance against competitive baselines while enabling effective skill transfer from human videos to robotic execution.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?

Authors:
Tongxu Luo↗Rongsheng Wang↗Jiaxi Bi↗Chenming Xu↗Zhengyang Tang↗Jianlong Chen↗Juhao Liang↗Ke Ji↗Shuqi Guo↗Yuhao Du↗Fan Bu↗Wenyu Du↗…

Game generation is an emerging application of coding agents, requiring models to transform natural-language specifications into playable interactive systems. Unlike traditional coding tasks, game generation takes place within a game engine, where scripts, scenes, assets, rendering, and runtime interactions must jointly produce coherent gameplay. We formalize end-to-end game generation as the problem of producing a complete game artifact that realizes a specification through observable player-game interaction in a target environment. We argue that evaluating this setting requires three desiderata: Engine Grounding, Artifact Completeness, and Interactive Verification. We propose an interaction-grounded evaluation framework that assesses executable gameplay through replayed demonstrations and rubric-guided multimodal judging. We instantiate this framework as GameCraft-Bench, a benchmark comprising 140 Godot tasks across 15 game families. Evaluations of frontier coding agents show that end-to-end game generation remains highly challenging: the strongest agent achieves only 41.46%, and most agents score below 40%. Further analysis reveals that while agents often implement recognizable mechanics, they struggle to deliver complete games with sufficient content, functional visual feedback, and coherent presentation. See https://tongxuluo.github.io/gamecraft-bench-website for demos, code, and data.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

EyeTheia: A Lightweight and Accessible Eye-Tracking Toolbox

Authors:
Stevenson Pather↗Niels Martign\`ene↗Arnaud Bugnet↗Fouad Boutaleb↗Fabien D'Hondt↗Deise Santana Maia↗

We introduce EyeTheia, a lightweight and open deep learning pipeline for webcam-based gaze estimation, designed for browser-based experimental platforms and real-world cognitive and clinical research. EyeTheia enables real-time gaze tracking using only a standard laptop webcam, combining MediaPipe-based landmark extraction with a convolutional neural network inspired by iTracker and optional user-specific fine-tuning. We investigate two complementary strategies: adapting a model pretrained on mobile data and training the same architecture from scratch on a desktop-oriented dataset. Validation results on MPIIFaceGaze show comparable performance between both approaches prior to calibration, while lightweight user-specific fine-tuning consistently reduces gaze prediction error. We further evaluate EyeTheia in a realistic Dot-Probe task and compare it to the commercial webcam-based tracker SeeSo SDK. Results indicate strong agreement in left-right gaze allocation during stimulus presentation, despite higher temporal variability. Overall, EyeTheia provides a transparent and extensible solution for low-cost gaze tracking, suitable for scalable and reproducible experimental and clinical studies. The code, trained models, and experimental materials are publicly available.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LentiAvatar: Pseudo-Multiview Reconstruction and Subpixel Prism Rendering for Real-Time Stereoscopic Communication

Authors:
Chufeng Fang↗Dongdong Teng↗Lilin Liu↗

Real-time stereoscopic video communication has long been a goal of immersive telepresence, yet practical systems still require specialized capture rigs or reduce remote users to a single portrait view. We present LentiAvatar, a Gaussian head-avatar system that connects monocular avatar capture with subpixel-encoded glasses-free lenticular display for real-time autostereoscopic communication. From a monocular portrait video, LentiAvatar reconstructs a controllable head avatar and optimizes it for the lateral viewing zones induced by the display. The method uses natural head turns as pseudo-multiview (PMV) supervision to constrain regions that are otherwise weakly observed in monocular training, including hair, ears, jaw contours, and neck boundaries. Reliable side frames are yaw-binned, aligned to virtual cameras, and supervised within a strict head-and-hair domain; contour-aware losses and staged regularization further suppress ghosting, alpha leakage, and depth instability while preserving lateral detail. At runtime, LentiAvatar renders 32 virtual views and encodes them into a 4K lenticular raster with calibrated subpixel-routing masks. The live-tracker prototype sustains 10.65 FPS, and a subject-specific distilled driver raises the same display pipeline to 38.49 FPS.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

DriveStack-VLA: Render-Teacher Alignment for BEV-Based DeepStack Vision-Language-Action Model

Authors:
Jingke Wang↗Zhenru Zhao↗Shuangming Lei↗Hao Su↗Yuehao Huang↗Yijia Xie↗Kai Tang↗Guanglin Xu↗AiXue Ye↗Yukai Ma↗Yong Liu↗

Vision-Language-Action driving models convert a pretrained Vision-Language Model into a driving policy, allowing them to use world knowledge and follow language guidances. However, existing VLA driving models still lack driving-oriented spatial intelligence: their policies are mainly grounded on perspective image tokens and language priors, while precise motion planning requires metric geometry, top-down scene structure, and attention to safety-critical perceptual cues. This limitation makes current models vulnerable to weak visual geometry modeling and perceptual coverage in expert demonstrations. In this paper, we present DriveStack-VLA, a framework built upon a large VLM backbone. To strengthen the spatial grounding of VLA driving, we develop dual visual modeling components. We inject a Bird-Eye-View representation into the Large Language Model decoder through a DeepStack-style connection, and propose Render-Teacher Alignment to align the perceptual focus of real images with that of rasterized images. Furthermore, to bridge the gap in multimodal trajectory selection, we introduce a head-based self-critique module that ranks sampled trajectories and conditionally refines the best one. DriveStack-VLA achieves 91.6 PDMS on NAVSIMv1, 91.0 EPDMS on NAVSIMv2 (with the human penalty filter enabled), and a driving score of 79.49 with a success rate of 56.36\% on the closed-loop Bench2Drive. More visualizations are available on our project page: https://anonymous.4open.science/w/drivestack-vla/.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning over Digital Twin Representations for Reasoning-Intensive Surgical VideoQA

Authors:
Yiqing Shen↗Han Zhang↗Mathias Unberath↗

Surgical video question answering requires multi-step reasoning across semantic, spatial, and temporal dimensions. Existing methods architecturally compress videos into discrete token representations and couple visual perception with reasoning. This approach fragments continuous spatial-temporal relationships and has been shown to restrict multi-step reasoning capabilities. We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that trains large language models (LLMs) to decouple perception from reasoning by operating over digital twin representations constructed from surgical foundation models. Additionally, we introduce hierarchical representations across frame, temporal window, and procedure levels with probabilistic uncertainty estimates. Finally, we propose a novel reward that combines format validation with accuracy assessment through clinical plausibility evaluation and uncertainty-aware calibration for training. To demonstrate the capabilities of this approach, we introduce REAL-Colon-Reason, a colonoscopic benchmark with 2000 question-answer pairs across three complexity levels. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on REAL-Colon-Reason and two existing surgical VideoQA benchmarks REAL-Colon-VQA and EndoVis18-VQA.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Ductile alloys offering 100 MPa tensile strength at 2,400 °C

Authors:
Mintao Xue↗

Extreme applications call for materials that are not only strong to withstand thermomechanical loads at temperatures in excess of 2,000 °C (refs. 1–3), but also highly formable at room temperature to allow for processing into complex-shaped parts. The latter excludes brittle ceramics4 and intermetallic compounds5, limiting the selection to highly ductile metals and their alloys, but for them, an adequate strength at ultrahigh temperatures seems unreachable. Here we show a breakthrough in casting alloys that achieve both simultaneously. A boron-stabilized HfO2-strengthened Ta-based alloy was carefully crafted using a new boron-intervened in situ oxidation reaction, producing about 50-nm diameter oxide particles dispersed densely and uniformly in the grain interior. The new alloy fills the blank at ultrahigh temperatures in terms of tensile yield strength, around 200 MPa at 2,000 °C and 100 MPa at 2,400 °C, while simultaneously possessing an excellent strength–ductility balance at room temperature (ultimate tensile strength >800 MPa, elongation-to-failure of about 35%), a property combination surpassing all previous refractory (including multi-principal-element) alloys. Moreover, the boron segregation around the oxide nanoparticles imparts excellent thermal stability against coarsening at 2,000–2,400 °C. Our strategy thus goes beyond traditional oxide-dispersion strengthening to enable highly ductile refractory alloys that are capable of load-bearing applications at extreme temperatures. A boron-stabilized oxide-strengthened tantalum alloy combines exceptional room-temperature ductility with record ultrahigh-temperature strength, enabling load-bearing applications above 2,000 °C.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Querying Counterfactuals on Tissue Graphs with Supervised Disentanglement

Authors:
Abdul Moeed↗Stefan Schrod↗Martin Rohbeck↗Marc Jan Bonder↗Pavlo Lutsik↗Oliver Stegle↗Daniel Dimitrov↗

arXiv:2606.08493v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tissue graph counterfactuals ask how a cell's expression would change under altered spatial neighbor contexts. Such queries are central to predicting cell behavior in tissues, but lack a unified definition, with existing methods targeting specific intervention types or treating cells as i.i.d. In this work, we first formalize tissue graph counterfactuals as a class of spatial interventions that either rewire connections between cells (edge perturbation) or modify the expression of their neighbors (node perturbation). We then introduce Cellina (https://cellina.readthedocs.io) - a framework that uses supervised disentanglement to decompose a cell's intrinsic state from its spatial context, using the latter as a conditioning input for counterfactual predictions. Across benchmarks spanning over 2.5 million spatially-resolved cells in colorectal cancer and mouse brain, Cellina outperforms spatially-informed and non-spatial competitors in in-silico graph perturbations, disentanglement, and scalability. Additionally, we show that Cellina reveals biologically distinct cancer subdomains in an unsupervised manner and enables targeted neighbor perturbation simulations.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Measuring Epistemic Resilience of LLMs Under Misleading Medical Context

Authors:
Hongjian Zhou↗Xinyu Zou↗Jinge Wu↗Sean Wu↗Junchi Yu↗Bradley Max Segal↗Tobias Erich Niebuhr↗Sara Amro↗Michael Petrus↗Sheikh Momin↗Alexandra M. Cardoso Pinto↗Rachel Niesen↗…

Large language models (LLMs) now reach expert-level scores on medical licensing exams, encouraging the assumption that high scores imply safe medical judgment while patients increasingly use them for health advice. We show this assumption is fragile: when misleading context is injected into questions that LLMs originally answer correctly, they abandon the correct answer. We call the ability to maintain correct judgment under adversarial context epistemic resilience, and introduce MedMisBench to measure it. MedMisBench contains 10,932 medical question items and 48,889 misleading context-option pairs spanning medical reasoning, agentic capability, and patient-journey evaluation. Across 11 model configurations, mean accuracy falls from 71.1% on original questions to 38.0% under focused misleading context, with 51.5% attack success. The most damaging injections are formal, rule-like fabrications: authority-framed falsehoods reach 69.5% attack success and exception-poisoning claims reach 64.1%. A 14-member clinical panel from 7 countries identified serious potential harm in 38.2% of reviewed cases. MedMisBench exposes a structural blind spot in LLM evaluation in medical settings: existing benchmarks measure what models know, but not whether they preserve correct medical judgment under misleading context.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

XPR: An Extensible Cross-Platform Point-Based Differentiable Renderer

Authors:
Steve Rhyner↗Sankeerth Durvasula↗Aleksandr Kovalev↗Hansel Jia↗Adrian Zhao↗Mrutunjayya Mrutunjayya↗Nilesh Ahuja↗Selvakumar Panneer↗Christina Giannoula↗Nandita Vijaykumar↗

Point-based differentiable rendering underpins modern 3D reconstruction, novel-view synthesis, and learning-based graphics pipelines, but developing new rendering methods often requires extensive low-level implementation, hardware-specific kernels, and manually written backward passes. This limits rapid prototyping, reproducibility, exploration, and deployment, especially across diverse hardware platforms. This paper presents XPR, an extensible cross-platform framework for point-based differentiable rendering. XPR introduces a high-level programming interface that separates method-specific logic from the shared rendering pipeline, allowing users to implement new methods in a few lines of code. Its pipeline decomposes rendering into modular, statically shaped parallel operations that can be lowered by a cross-platform compiler to GPUs, TPUs, CPUs, and other ML accelerators. We demonstrate implementations of 3DGS, 3DGUT, and LinPrim, with only a few 100s lines of Python code, each of which can be compiled to a range of hardware platforms with the XLA compiler. These results show that XPR enables fast experimentation and portable execution for emerging point-based differentiable rendering systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Self-Supervised Learning of Iterative Solvers for Constrained Optimization

Authors:
Lukas L\"uken↗Sergio Lucia↗

arXiv:2409.08066v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The real-time solution of parametric optimization problems is critical for applications that demand high accuracy under tight real-time constraints, such as model predictive control. To this end, this work presents a learning-based iterative solver for constrained optimization, comprising a neural network predictor that generates initial primal-dual solution estimates, followed by a learned iterative solver that refines these estimates to reach high accuracy. We introduce a novel loss function based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions, enabling fully self-supervised training without pre-solved optimizer solutions. Theoretical guarantees ensure that the training loss function attains minima exclusively at KKT points. A convexification procedure enables application to nonconvex problems while preserving these guarantees. Experiments on two nonconvex case studies demonstrate speedups of up to one order of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art solvers such as IPOPT, while achieving orders of magnitude higher accuracy than competing learning-based approaches.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Perceive, Interact, Reason: Building Tool-Augmented Visual Agents for Spatial Reasoning

Authors:
Changye Li↗Meng Lu↗Yi Wu↗Ligeng Zhu↗

While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal understanding, they remain limited in spatial reasoning tasks that require active evidence acquisition and multi-step visual interaction. This limitation suggests that relying solely on implicit visual representations from vision encoders is insufficient for recovering fine-grained spatial evidence. We introduce PERception-Interaction-reason Agent (PERIA), a tool-augmented visual agent for spatial reasoning tasks across map reasoning, visual probing, and vision reconstruction. PERIA uses two lightweight tool families: vision perception tools for exposing textual, symbolic, and spatial evidence, and vision interaction tools for manipulating visual context, tracing paths, and verifying spatial relations. To train PERIA, we develop a unified recipe that combines supervised tool-use trajectory synthesis, composite rewards, and Observation-Relaxed Group-in-Group Policy Optimization (OR-GIGPO) for effective multi-tool behavior. Experiments on 13 benchmarks from 8 datasets show that PERIA-8B improves over the Qwen3-8B backbone by 10.0% on in-distribution benchmarks and 4.4% on out-of-distribution benchmarks, while outperforming previous state-of-the-art baselines of similar size by 7.0%-14.8%. It also achieves performance comparable to much larger models such as Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Thinking and GPT-5, demonstrating the effectiveness of PERIA in enhancing spatial reasoning capabilities.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Uptake of minimal intervention dentistry among Romanian dental professionals and trainees: an exploratory cluster and network analysis

Authors:
Simionescu↗D. P↗Sfeatcu↗Vinereanu↗

Background Minimal intervention dentistry (MID) is promoted as a prevention-oriented approach to caries management, but its integration into routine practice remains uneven. Existing research often examines MID-related knowledge, attitudes, or practices separately, offering limited insight into how these dimensions co-occur within individuals or are conditionally associated. Methods This exploratory cross-sectional survey examined multidimensional MID uptake among 327 Romanian dental students, residents, and specialists from five university centers. Ten MID-related scores were analyzed, including nine formative composites and one single-item peer-norm indicator. K-means clustering examined uptake profiles, and Gaussian graphical model network analysis with stepwise BIC selection examined conditional associations among constructs. Results A two-cluster solution was highly reproducible but modestly separated (n = 144 vs n = 183; average silhouette width = 0.13; mean Jaccard similarities = 0.92 and 0.94). The profiles reflected broadly lower versus higher uptake across knowledge-, belief-, and practice-related dimensions, while perceived peer norms for hygiene instruction showed the opposite pattern. Profile membership was not clearly patterned by gender, age band, professional status, or clinical experience. The primary network included 14 non-zero edges out of 36 possible edges, all positive; the strongest partial association linked diagnostic knowledge to diagnostic methods used in practice (partial r = .22). Familiarity, diagnostic knowledge, and general practices occupied more interconnected positions descriptively, but limited centrality stability precluded interpreting them as intervention targets. Conclusions MID uptake in this sample was better represented as a continuum of modestly differentiated profiles than as sharply separated participant types. The findings provide an exploratory map of multidimensional MID uptake and may inform future survey validation, implementation research, and dental education studies. Because the study was cross-sectional, convenience-sampled, and based on self-report, findings should be interpreted as hypothesis-generating rather than causal or population-representative.

Read & Discuss → View Source →