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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

GePBench: Evaluating Fundamental Geometric Perception for Multimodal Large Language Models

Geometric shapes play important roles in both physical world and human cognition. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in visual understanding, their abilities to recognize geometric shapes and their spatial relationships, which we term geometric perception, are not explicitly and systematically explored. To address this gap, we introduce GePBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess the geometric perception capabilities of MLLMs. Our extensive evaluations reveal that even the current state-of-the-art MLLMs exhibit significant deficiencies in geometric perception tasks. Furthermore, we show that models trained with GePBench data demonstrate considerable improvements on a wide range of downstream tasks, highlighting the critical role of geometric perception in enabling advanced multimodal applications. Our code and datasets are available at \href{https://github.com/Changhao-Xiang/GePBench}{https://github.com/Changhao-Xiang/GePBench}.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Adaptive Distance-Aware Trunk Deep Operator Learning for Long-Span Roadway Bridges

arXiv:2606.20015v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-span roadway bridges exhibit highly localized structural responses under vehicular loading, making repeated FE analysis computationally expensive for applications such as influence surface generation and structural digital twins. Existing SciML approaches struggle to accurately capture these localized responses. To address this challenge, this study proposes an adaptive-trunk DeepONet for localized structural response prediction in large-scale bridge systems. The framework dynamically constructs a load-dependent learning domain using a KNN strategy, allowing the network to focus on structural influence zones. The trunk network is further enhanced using distance-aware features that encode the geometric relationship between the load and structural nodes. A physics-based full-field reconstruction is incorporated through a stiffness-informed Schur complement formulation, enabling predictions at adaptive nodes to be extended to the entire structural domain. To enable scalable training, response data are generated using a reduced-order equivalent shell model that preserves the dominant global behavior while significantly reducing computational cost. The proposed framework is validated on both a benchmark bridge model and the real-world Mussafah Bridge. Results show that the method achieves FEM-level accuracy with relative errors below 5%, while reducing the total response evaluation time (including full-field reconstruction) by approximately 60x; excluding the post-processing reconstruction step, the AD-DeepONet inference is up to four orders of magnitude faster than FEM. In addition, the framework enables rapid generation of full-field responses, influence lines, and influence surfaces under arbitrary vehicular loading configurations, demonstrating strong potential for large-scale bridge analysis and digital twin applications.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Arbitrarily Configurable Wavefunctions via Imaginary Gauge Phase Imprint in Non-Hermitian Lattices

arXiv:2603.28153v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a general framework, termed the imaginary gauge phase imprint (IGPI), which enables engineering arbitrarily configurable wavefunctions with exact solutions and self-organization dynamics in any-dimensional non-Hermitian lattices under imaginary gauge fields. Using this method, we uncover a novel phase with exact critical wavefunctions, dubbed the skin critical phase (SCP), which is marked by unconventional localization, topological-skin, and dynamical characteristics. Furthermore, we validate the IGPI by imprinting and visualizing complex fractal states with Sierpinski-carpet and Koch-snowflake profiles, as well as exotic super-moire and 3D-moire states in regular lattices. Our work not only offers fresh insights into non-Hermitian critical and fractal physics, but also provides a rigorous paradigm for controlling and visualizing wavefunction patterns using the IGPI in engineered non-Hermitian systems.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

DREG: A Layer-Wise Jacobian Regularization as a General-Purpose Penalty

arXiv:2606.23942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a large-scale empirical study isolating the contributions of the Derivative Regularization penalty (DREG). Across a fully-crossed factorial sweep of 960 experiments spanning 4 activations, 6 regularizers, 8 datasets, and 5 random seeds, we ask: when, where, and why does DREG work? Our results establish three principal findings. First, DREG achieves the highest overall and clean-regime accuracy among all regularizers evaluated (significantly so against the unregularized baseline, Weight Decay, and IGPen; Wilcoxon $p \leq 0.031$). It ranks second in noise robustness behind Spectral Normalization (SN) - the only two layer-wise regularizers in the study. Second, DREG is globally the best-performing regularizer under GELU, the default activation in modern transformer architectures, particularly on both messy vision and messy NLP benchmarks, suggesting direct applicability to frontier deep learning settings. Third, DREG's advantage over competing regularizers is most pronounced under data scarcity, consistent with its role as a geometric inductive bias that substitutes for the regularizing effect of data volume. Throughout, DREG is applied with a single fixed hyperparameter $\lambda = 10^{-2.5}$ and no per-dataset tuning, supporting its characterization as a plug-and-play regularizer for neural networks with nontrivial Jacobian structure. These findings are consistent with DREG's design: concentrating regularization pressure on layers where the activation derivative is largest, rather than constraining the network uniformly.

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

ParaScale: Scale-Calibrated Camera-Motion Transfer via a Gauge-Invariant Parallax Number

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19805v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transferring the camera motion of a reference video to a freshly generated one lets creators reuse cinematic moves. Yet reference and target often live at incompatible scales – a sweep across a galaxy versus a nudge across a desk – and naively reusing the recovered trajectory yields either imperceptible or violently exaggerated motion. We trace this to a geometric fact: translation-induced image motion scales as ||T||/Z, so a monocular trajectory is meaningful only up to a depth-scale gauge. We distill this into the Parallax Number Pi = ||Delta T|| / Zbar, a dimensionless, gauge-invariant descriptor of how strongly a camera move is felt, and prove that it – not the raw trajectory – is the quantity that scale-faithful transfer must preserve. ParaScale is a plug-and-play module that reads Pi off any reference video and re-realizes it against the target scene's own depth, per frame, leaving rotation untouched. Sitting between pose extraction and pose injection, it requires no retraining and drops into any pose-conditioned generator. We further introduce the Parallax Consistency Error (PCE), a scale-symmetric metric that – unlike the similarity-aligned TransErr – exposes scene-scale mismatch. Across scale regimes spanning four orders of magnitude and multiple backbones, ParaScale keeps the realized parallax on the identity line and cuts PCE by more than 3x over uncalibrated transfer with no loss of visual fidelity.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Spectral bounds and heat kernel upper estimates for Dirichlet forms

arXiv:2509.01115v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We use a Harnack-type inequality on exit times and spectral bounds to characterize upper bounds of the heat kernel associated with any regular Dirichlet form without killing part, where the scale function may vary with position. We further show that this Harnack-type inequality is preserved under quasi-symmetric changes of metric on uniformly perfect metric spaces. This generalized the work of Mariano and Wang [Stochastic Process. Appl. 189 (2025) 104707)].

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

CODEBLOCK: Learning to Supervise Code at the Right Granularity

arXiv:2606.18286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning of code LLMs typically applies uniform cross-entropy loss to all response tokens, implicitly assuming that every token provides equally useful learning signal. Recent token-level selection methods challenge this assumption in natural-language SFT by supervising only high-value tokens. However, directly transferring token-level masking to code can break syntactically and semantically coherent program units, because code depends on structural completeness and definition-use relations. We therefore propose CodeBlock, a structure-aware sparse supervision framework that selects structure-complete code evidence rather than isolated tokens. CodeBlock first selects high-quality instruction-response pairs, then partitions code responses into syntactically coherent coding items, estimates their utility by aggregating generalized cross-entropy over core logic tokens, and reranks them with data-flow reach and bridge signals to prioritize blocks that propagate or connect important program dependencies. During training, the full response remains available as context, while loss is applied only to selected code items and informative natural-language tokens. Experiments on six code-generation benchmarks show that CodeBlock achieves stronger average pass@1 than full-token SFT and competitive selection baselines, while using only 1.9% of supervised response tokens.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum walk-based optimisation for capacitated vehicle routing with homogeneous and heterogeneous fleets

arXiv:2606.12856v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is an appealing candidate for quantum optimisation due to its combinatorial complexity and practical importance. However, the problem's constrained search space poses a challenge for such quantum algorithms. We introduce a quantum walk-based optimisation algorithm (QWOA) for the CVRP with homogeneous or heterogeneous vehicle fleets, addressing this challenge through a continuous-time quantum walk over a product space that coincides with combinatorial structures intrinsic to the CVRP solution space. Relative to the prior QWOA-based formulation, this approach reduces the per-layer gate complexity from $\mathcal{O}(n^{3}\log n)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n^{2}\log n)$ and supports a circuit parameterisation schedule generated by a fixed number of classical parameters. Exact state-vector simulation on instances with up to $n=8$ customers and $K=3$ vehicles demonstrates improved convergence to low-cost solutions using markedly fewer objective function evaluations, with the advantage broadening as problem size increases. These results identify structured product-space walks as a promising tool for optimisation over constrained combinatorial spaces.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Resource-Efficient Variational Quantum Classifier

arXiv:2511.09204v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the unambiguous quantum classifier based on Hamming distance measurements combined with classical post-processing. The proposed approach improves classification performance through a more effective use of ansatz expressivity, while requiring significantly fewer circuit evaluations. Moreover, the method demonstrates enhanced robustness to noise, which is crucial for near-term quantum devices. We evaluate the proposed method on a breast cancer classification dataset. The unambiguous classifier achieves an average accuracy of 90%, corresponding to an improvement of 6.9 percentage points over the baseline, while requiring eight times fewer circuit executions per prediction. In the presence of noise, the improvement is reduced to approximately 3.1 percentage points, with the same reduction in execution cost. We substantiate our experimental results with theoretical evidence supporting the practical performance of the approach.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Adaptive Hebbian Memory Routing in Vision Transformers for Few-Shot Learning

Few-shot image recognition requires models to adapt to new classes from a small labeled support set. Hebbian fast-weight memory can provide temporary associative information during an episode, but fixed memory behavior may not be appropriate for every few-shot task. In this work, we propose Adaptive Hebbian Routing for few-shot Vision Transformers. The method uses a lightweight MLP router to control the contribution of Hebbian memory, the strength of memory updates, and the retention of previous memory from support-set features. We study Adaptive Placement, Adaptive Plasticity, and Fully Adaptive Hebbian Routing. Experiments use ViT-Small, DeiT-Small, and Swin-Tiny under 5-way 1-shot evaluation on Omniglot, CIFAR-FS, and cross-domain transfer from CIFAR-FS to Omniglot. In the direct Swin comparison, fixed and adaptive Hebbian variants use the same memory location. Adaptive Plasticity improves the fixed Hebbian result from 96.74\% to 96.92\%, while Fully Adaptive Routing achieves the best result at 96.94\%. The fully adaptive Swin model also reduces inference time from 16.51 ms to 14.05 ms relative to fixed Hebbian Swin. On CIFAR-FS, adaptive variants improve performance across all three backbones, and the multi-shot evaluation shows that these gains remain useful as the number of support examples increases. These results show that adaptive plasticity and adaptive memory activation can improve few-shot Transformer representations beyond fixed Hebbian behavior.

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

High-efficiency telecom conversion of heralded atomic biphoton wavepackets

arXiv:2603.09824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate high-efficiency telecom frequency conversion of heralded atomic biphoton wavepackets using a diamond-type atomic ensemble. By placing a 2.5 MHz heralded-photon spectrum within the high-efficiency region of the converter response, we achieve a conversion efficiency of 79.4(2.6)% while maintaining strong time-resolved correlations and well-defined temporal wavepackets. For a broader 17.4 MHz input bandwidth, the conversion efficiency is reduced to about 55%, whereas the temporal waveform remains largely preserved. This behavior reflects the nearly flat central response of the converter, which mainly causes spectral-edge loss rather than temporal-mode distortion. These results identify spectral matching as an effective route to efficient and low-distortion telecom conversion of narrowband quantum light from atomic systems.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Seeing Before Reasoning: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Shortcut-Resilient Multimodal On-Policy Self-Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a model on its own rollouts and uses a frozen copy to provide dense token-level targets conditioned on a reference target. This works well for LLM reasoning, but a direct extension to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can create a shortcut: the privileged target may guide tokens mainly based on the text reference target rather than the image. We propose ViGOS, a visually grounded OPSD framework for MLLM post-training. The student first writes a visual description and then reasons toward the final answer. For valid rollouts, an image-only perception teacher supervises the description, while a privileged reasoning teacher supervises the reasoning and final answer on the same student prefix. A reference teacher is used only for invalid rollouts to recover the output format. Across general vision-language, expert reasoning, visual math, spatial grounding, and visual-language-prior benchmarks, ViGOS keeps the main benefits of OPSD and improves image-grounded behavior in shortcut-prone settings.

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

Attention in Motion: Secure Platooning via Transformer-based Misbehavior Detection

arXiv:2512.15503v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vehicular platooning promises transformative improvements in transportation efficiency and safety through the coordination of multi-vehicle formations enabled by Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. However, the distributed nature of platoon coordination creates security vulnerabilities, allowing authenticated vehicles to inject falsified kinematic data, compromise operational stability, and pose a threat to passenger safety. Traditional misbehaviour detection approaches, which rely on plausibility checks and statistical methods, suffer from high False Positive (FP) rates and cannot capture the complex temporal dependencies inherent in multi-vehicle coordination dynamics. We present Attention In Motion (AIMformer), a transformer-based framework specifically tailored for real-time misbehaviour detection in vehicular platoons with edge deployment capabilities. AIMformer leverages multi-head self-attention mechanisms to capture intra-vehicle temporal dynamics, with a spatio-temporal variant that further models inter-vehicle spatial correlations. It incorporates global positional encoding with vehicle-specific temporal offsets to handle join/exit maneuvers. We propose a Precision-Focused Binary Cross-Entropy (PFBCE) loss function that penalizes FPs to meet the requirements of safety-critical vehicular systems. Extensive evaluation across 4 platoon controllers, multiple attack vectors, and diverse mobility scenarios demonstrates superior performance ($\geq$ 0.93) compared to state-of-the-art baseline architectures. A comprehensive deployment analysis utilizing TensorFlow Lite (TFLite), Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), and TensorRT achieves sub-millisecond inference latency, making it suitable for real-time operation on resource-constrained edge platforms. Hence, validating AIMformer is viable for both in-vehicle and roadside deployment.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

A Dual Edge Spatial Jacobian Image Graph for Interpretable Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Automated diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading from colour fundus photographs can achieve strong predictive performance, but clinical interpretation requires more than an image-level label. It requires understanding how lesion evidence is distributed around retinal vessels and how this evidence relates to quantitative vascular biomarkers. We present a dual-edge spatial-Jacobian image graph for interpretable DR grading. Each fundus image is represented as a graph node with four aligned evidence streams: AutoMorph vessel information ($X_1$), DR-XAI-style lesion evidence maps ($X_2$), a 128-dimensional lesion-based contrastive image embedding ($X_3$), and AutoMorph morphometric biomarkers ($X_4$). The spatial edge branch ($X_{12}$) encodes vessel-lesion geometry, while the Jacobian branch ($X_{34}$) models embedding-biomarker sensitivity. Lightweight two-token attention fuses both edge families into a final image graph. On 2,910 matched non-augmented APTOS images, the full graph achieves 0.8076 accuracy, 0.8312 quadratic weighted kappa, 0.5915 macro-F1, and 0.9330 adjacent-grade accuracy; referable DR reaches 0.9055 accuracy and 0.9711 AUROC. The framework is positioned as an explainable representation-learning tool for lesion-biomarker hypothesis generation, rather than as a deployment-ready clinical classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/Inamullah-Colab/dual-edge-dr-graph-xai.

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

Enhanced Graph Neural Networks using K-Hop Gaussian Diffusion

arXiv:2606.18317v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most graph neural network (GNN) cores rely on graph convolutions, typically implemented as message passing between direct (single-hop) neighbors. In many real-world graphs, edges can be noisy or poorly defined, limiting information propagation to local neighborhoods. Existing diffusion kernels, such as Personalized PageRank (PPR) and Heat Kernel, alleviate this issue through global propagation, but still struggle with complex local structures and distant node noise. To address these limitations, we propose a K-Hop Gaussian (KHG) diffusion kernel as a preprocessing module for graph data. KHG introduces multi-hop diffusion with Gaussian weighting for remote nodes, balancing local and global information propagation before applying standard GNNs. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that KHG significantly outperforms traditional message-passing GNNs, as well as PPR and Heat Kernel diffusion, particularly in noisy or structurally complex graphs.

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

Keep Policy Gradient in Charge: Sibling-Guided Credit Distillation for Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agents

Long-horizon tool-use reinforcement learning can learn from outcome verification, but its trajectory-level advantage is broadcast across many reasoning, API, and answer tokens. Self-distillation promises a denser signal by reusing a policy's own rollouts or a privileged teacher. We show, however, that direct token-level self-distillation can silently destroy tool use: it rehearses teacher behavior without knowing which actions the verifier rewards, so useful skills and harmful shortcuts are amplified together. We introduce Sibling-Guided Credit Distillation (SGCD), which uses distillation for credit assignment rather than as a competing actor loss. Dynamic sampling produces mixed successful and failed sibling rollouts; an external LLM summarizes their contrast into a training-only stepwise credit reference; dense teacher/student divergence drives credit reassignment; and bounded detached credit weights reshape GRPO token advantages. The deployed student sees no external LLM, sibling evidence, or oracle. Across AppWorld and $\tau^3$-airline, SGCD improves over matched GRPO comparators: AppWorld TGC $42.9 \to 45.6$ on test_normal and $24.7 \to 27.0$ on test_challenge, and $\tau^3$-airline pass@1 $0.583 \to 0.602$.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GRIP: Feedback-Guided Prompt Retrieval for Large Multimodal Models

In-Context Learning (ICL) has become a powerful mechanism for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to new tasks without fine-tuning. Extending this concept to Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL) relies on retrieving relevant examples, such as images, captions, or question-answer pairs, to guide predictions across tasks like classification, captioning, and visual question answering (VQA). Most existing approaches select in-context examples based on feature-space similarity, assuming that semantically similar samples provide the most useful context. However, our systematic analysis reveals that this assumption does not always hold: visually similar examples are not necessarily those that most effectively enhance in-context learning performance. To address this, we propose the Guided Retrieval of In-context Prompts (GRIP), a learnable vision-only retrieval framework that leverages feedback from LMMs to identify examples that truly improve model predictions. GRIP learns to distinguish beneficial from detrimental in-context examples through contrastive training, refining retrieval beyond pure similarity. Across three multimodal tasks, namely classification, captioning, and VQA, GRIP improves consistently over similarity-based retrieval on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, with its strongest gains in classification on Idefics2-8B. Moreover, we demonstrate that retrievers trained with feedback from one open LMM can be transferred to other models without retraining, including closed-source GPT-4o and Gemini, enabling scalable and cost-efficient deployment of M-ICL. Code will be published upon acceptance.

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

The Perceived Fragility of Explanations in Audio Models: Manipulation of Attribution with Unchanged Predictions

arXiv:2606.14466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the fragility of post-hoc explanation methods in audio deepfake detection. While previous work on explanation manipulation focused on images using standard $L_p$ metrics, we introduce a psychoacoustic framework that optimizes inaudible perturbations to decouple model attributions from final classifications. We evaluate this vulnerability across state-of-the-art architectures under strict prediction-preserving constraints. By evaluating the manipulation cost through domain-specific perceptual audio quality metrics alongside explanation alignment criteria, our framework demonstrates that an adversary can systematically distort automated explanation heatmaps while preserving the predicted deepfake label. Full code available at: https://github.com/cncPomper/Audio-XAI

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

WallZero: Mastering the Game of WallGo with Strategic Analysis

arXiv:2606.17847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: WallGo is a recently introduced strategic board game popularized by the 2025 Netflix series The Devil's Plan. Although played on a small 7 x 7 board, its combination of stone movement and wall placement yields high game-tree complexity and intricate strategic interactions. Despite its growing popularity, WallGo remains underexplored. This paper presents WallZero, an AlphaZero-based agent for the two-player WallGo setting. We introduce tailored action and feature designs to improve playing performance significantly. In the evaluation, WallZero defeats two professional Go players who participated in this study, securing on average 1.98x more territory per game. Beyond its strength, we use WallZero to assess game fairness and identify key strategies for mastering WallGo. Interestingly, our results show that the opening used in the Netflix series yields a more balanced game. Our code is available at https://rlg.iis.sinica.edu.tw/papers/wallzero.

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

WorldLines: Benchmarking and Modeling Long-Horizon Stateful Embodied Agents

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

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Three multimodal large language models fail at clinically actionable breast pathology in three different directions

Background. Breast cancer treatment depends on histopathological features, such as grade and receptor-defined subtype; however, specialist pathologist access is constrained when the workforce is limited. Commercial multimodal large language models (MLLMs) accept hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) image tiles through paid interfaces without local hardware or fine-tuning. However, prior pathology evaluations addressed only coarse tasks. Whether they reach treatment-determining accuracy and whether vendors agree remain unclear. Methods. We aimed to evaluate three vendor-designated flagship MLLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-5.5) in 427 invasive breast cancer cases. Each case went to all three with identical H&E tiles and prompts, and the subtype was inferred in the second call. The reference was an institutional sign-out report of an immunohistochemistry-derived subtype. We calculated the concordance, sensitivity, specificity, Cohen's kappa, and pairwise McNemar and Bowker tests. Findings. Claude ranked highest by raw histologic-type concordance but lowest by kappa, classifying all 23 lobular and seven micropapillary carcinomas as invasive breast carcinoma of no special type. The models anchored the Nottingham grade to three modal grades. None of the models reliably identified human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive disease. The failure direction was vendor-specific: Claude and GPT-5.5 were under-detected, whereas Gemini was over-called. Twelve prompt variants (4,056 calls) did not recover sensitivity. Interpretation. No current commercial MLLM reaches deployment-ready accuracy for any treatment-determining feature of breast pathology. As each vendor fails in its own fixed direction, changing vendors alters the type of error rather than removing it; therefore, the value of these models is assistive rather than autonomous. At USD 0.20-0.50 per case, they may serve as supervised draft generators that leave the diagnosis with the pathologist.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Empirical Validation and Predictive Utility of the Perinatal Grief Scale in Men after Perinatal Loss

Background. The Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS) is a widely used instrument for assessing grief following pregnancy loss, yet no study has validated it specifically in men despite documented use in several studies. This gap is critical given fathers' persistent underrepresentation in perinatal bereavement research and the absence of empirically supported screening thresholds for this population. Methods. This cross-sectional validation study used data from the OPALE project (Observatory on PerinatAL hEalth) conducted by the CiaoLapo Foundation in Italy. Among 276 fathers who experienced stillbirth or miscarriage, we examined criterion validity by testing the association between PGS scores and trauma-related symptomatology assessed via three validated instruments: the Revised Impact of Event Scale (RIES, n=103), National Stressful Events Survey Short Scale (NSESSS, n=95), and SCL-90 (n=173). We systematically tested multiple threshold combinations to identify optimal discriminative performance. Results. The PGS demonstrated excellent criterion validity. The optimal threshold (PGS >=92) showed sensitivity 81.0%, specificity 81.8%, and Youden's J index 0.628. Fathers scoring >=92 had 19.12 times the odds of high trauma symptoms (95% CI: 9.35 to 39.14, p

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

VERITAS: Verifier-Guided Proof Search for Zero-Shot Formal Theorem Proving

arXiv:2606.19399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based formal provers often collapse rich verifier signals (syntax errors, type mismatches, partial goal progress) into a binary pass/fail bit. We present VERITAS, a zero-shot framework that routes every verifier signal back into proof search through a two-phase protocol: Best-of-N sampling first, then a critic-guided MCTS pass that ingests Phase 1 failures as explicit negative examples. The protocol preserves every theorem solved by its own Phase 1 sweep, so Phase 2's additional solves are attributable to feedback-driven exploration. VERITAS reaches 40.6% on miniF2F (vs. an independently run Best-of-5 at 36.9%, Portfolio 26.2%) and 7.3% on VERITAS-CombiBench, a 55-theorem combinatorics benchmark we release on which Best-of-5 (1.8%) falls below Portfolio (3.6%), exposing that unguided sampling hurts when correct lemma names must be recovered iteratively from verifier feedback. Artifacts are available on GitHub.

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

RLRC: Reinforcement Learning-based Recovery for Compressed Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2506.17639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLA) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and strong potential in complex robotic manipulation. However, their large parameter sizes and high inference latency hinder real-world deployment, especially on resource-constrained platforms. To address this, we conduct a systematic empirical study of model compression for VLAs. Building on these insights, we present RLRC, a three-stage compression and recovery pipeline consisting of structured pruning, performance recovery via SFT and RL, and subsequent quantization. The RL stage incorporates a critic warm-up strategy and BC loss regularization to stabilize training and preserve policy behavior. RLRC achieves up to an 8 times memory reduction and 2.3 times inference speedup while maintaining the original task success rate. Extensive experiments across multiple VLA backbones show that RLRC consistently outperforms existing compression baselines, highlighting its effectiveness for on-device deployment. Project website: https://rlrc-vla.github.io

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Memory as a Wasting Asset: Pricing Flash Endurance for Embodied Agents, and the Limits of Doing So

arXiv:2606.18144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot's flash endurance is a non-renewable stock: every persisted write spends one of a few thousand program/erase cycles and never refills, yet no fielded robot memory system prices which memories are worth an erase cycle. We treat embodied memory as depreciating capital and price that stock with a single endurance shadow price $\eta$, which makes cost-minimizing placement across a RAM / on-board NVM / cloud hierarchy a threshold in a wear-augmented per-byte index. The index is cost-optimal whatever the sign of the value-write association $\chi$; only when $\chi > 0$ does the optimum turn non-monotone, sending a robot's most valuable memories off its flash. The pivot is thus empirical, and we measure $\chi$ on real robot logs at a pre-specified gate: its sign is a property of the deployment regime – positive on recurrent long-horizon manipulation ($\hat{\chi} \approx +1.0 \times 10^{-3}$, replicated at full power), null on a shorter-horizon suite, and negative on non-recurrent teleoperation. Two boundaries scope the result. The endurance budget is dormant on premium 3,000-P/E TLC at datasheet prices and binding on the commodity QLC/eMMC ($\sim$1,000 P/E) that cheaper edge robots run. And where it binds, a learned wear-aware controller only ties price-based routing on task value, because realized value is tier-invariant across RAM, NVM, and cloud: the rent governs device lifetime and cost, not task performance. Whether wear-aware placement improves task value remains open – $\chi$ is measured against a value proxy, and the non-monotone optimum, while proven, is not yet observed in data.