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

How Far Can Machine Translation Quality Take You? Extrinsic Discourse Evaluation in Goal-Oriented Setups

Existing machine translation (MT) metrics and discourse-focused evaluations primarily assess translation quality intrinsically, without measuring the downstream consequences of translation errors. In this work, we focus on extrinsic discourse evaluation of machine translation under two distinct regimes: static and interactive. Under the static regime, we propose an entity counting task as a probe of referential consistency in discourse. We show that high intrinsic MT quality does not reliably predict downstream discourse success and strong MT systems still produce referential inconsistencies. For the interactive regime, we study the goal-oriented multi-agent Welfare Diplomacy game as a probe of long-horizon communication and coordination. We find that interaction-specific translation failures impact downstream coordination. Our results highlight goal-oriented environments as a viable framework for discourse-sensitive extrinsic MT evaluation.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Design Criteria for SGD Preconditioners: Local Conditioning, Noise Floors, and Basin Stability

arXiv:2511.19716v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise. We analyze preconditioned SGD in the geometry induced by a symmetric positive definite matrix $\mathbf{M}$, deriving bounds in which both the convergence rate and the stochastic noise floor are governed by $\mathbf{M}$-dependent quantities: the rate through an effective condition number in the $\mathbf{M}$-metric, and the floor through the product of that condition number and the preconditioned noise level. For nonconvex objectives, we establish a preconditioner-dependent basin-stability guarantee: when smoothness and basin size are measured in the $\mathbf{M}$-norm, the probability that the iterates remain in a well-behaved local region admits an explicit lower bound. This perspective is particularly relevant in Scientific Machine Learning (SciML), where achieving small training loss under stochastic updates is closely tied to physical fidelity, numerical stability, and constraint satisfaction. The framework applies to both diagonal/adaptive and curvature-aware preconditioners and yields a simple design principle: choose $\mathbf{M}$ to improve local conditioning while attenuating noise. Experiments on a quadratic diagnostic and three SciML benchmarks validate the predicted rate-floor behavior.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Toward Instructions-as-Code: Understanding the Impact of Instruction Files on Agentic Pull Requests

arXiv:2606.13449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot) collaborate as teammates in different software engineering tasks, including code generation proposed through pull requests (Agentic-PRs). For better agent efficiency, developers create instruction files that guide the AI-agents, including how to navigate the project, locate the right components, run tests, respect best practices, and more. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the creation of these instructions and the performance of AI-agents in creating better pull requests, which have a higher chance of success (i.e., the merge rate), address more complex tasks (e.g., code churn), and require less effort to be merged (e.g., time to merge). To this end, we analyze 15,549 agentic PRs from 148 projects in the AIDev dataset. Using the three dimensions, we compare each project before and after the creation of the instruction files. We find that specifying instructions for AI-agents does not necessarily lead to better results. With the instruction files, 27.7\% of the projects increased their merge rate by at least 20\%, while 26.35\% decreased it. The same observation is seen with the amount of changes (e.g., code churn, number of modified files) and with the efforts to merge an agentic PR (e.g., merge time and number of comments). From a first exploration, we find that projects that managed to increase their merge rate have substantially longer instruction files, which are also well structured into a higher number of sections and sub-sections. Our results motivate the need for research to assist practitioners in framing the development of instruction files as a software engineering activity (aka, Instructions-as-Code).

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Roto-Reflection Geometry of Pure Two-Qubit Entanglement

arXiv:2606.12637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pure two-qubit entanglement is usually characterized by scalar quantities such as concurrence. Here we show that it also has a natural geometric form. In the Pauli correlation tensor, maximally entangled states appear as improper orthogonal maps between two local Bloch spheres. These maps are roto-reflections. For partially entangled pure states, the same roto-reflection geometry is recovered after separating the contraction associated with concurrence. We call the corresponding geometric object the Entanglement Roto-Reflection Plane (ERRP). It organizes the maximally correlated directions of the two-qubit state and provides a covariant geometric complement to the scalar magnitude of entanglement.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Super-Arrhenius relaxation of the triangular plaquette model in any dimension

arXiv:2606.16259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consider the following plaquette model from statistical physics: a lamp lies at every vertex of the triangular lattice and a switch lies at every even vertex of the (bipartite) dual hexagonal lattice. Each switch toggles the three lamps on its face. The energy of a configuration is the number of ON lamps. For the Glauber dynamics associated with the Gibbs measure defined by this Hamiltonian at any inverse temperature $\beta>0$, we show that, in any dimension $d\ge 2$, the infinite volume relaxation time satisfies \[e^{\beta^2/C}/C \le T_{\mathrm{rel}}\le Ce^{e^{C\beta}}\] for some $C>0$. Our result entails that the Gibbs measure is unique. The $e^{\beta^2}$ scaling was conjectured by Newman and Moore in 1999 and matches the behaviour of supercritical rooted kinetically constrained models such as the East model, thus recovering fragile glass phenomenology in the absence of kinetic constraints. More precisely, we show that, on a torus of side length $2^k$, when $\beta\to\infty$ and $k/\beta\to0$, we have $T_{\mathrm{rel}}=e^{2\beta k(1+o(1))}$. Quite surprisingly, however, we also prove that, on non-periodic finite domains of size $n\le e^{\beta/C}$ for large $C>0$, we have the much larger asymptotics $\ln T_{\mathrm{rel}}=\beta n^{\Theta(1)}$. The main ingredients of the proofs are new results in extremal and enumerative combinatorics and rely on renormalisation ideas for the dynamics and its groundstates also known as the Ledrappier subshift. We note consequences of our results to geometric group theory (more precisely to the complexity of the word problem for the Baumslag finitely presented group) and to ergodic theory.

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

4DSloMo: 4D Reconstruction for High Speed Scene with Asynchronous Capture

Reconstructing fast-dynamic scenes from multi-view videos is crucial for high-speed motion analysis and realistic 4D reconstruction. However, the majority of 4D capture systems are limited to frame rates below 30 FPS (frames per second), and a direct 4D reconstruction of high-speed motion from low FPS input may lead to undesirable results. In this work, we propose a high-speed 4D capturing system only using low FPS cameras, through novel capturing and processing modules. On the capturing side, we propose an asynchronous capture scheme that increases the effective frame rate by staggering the start times of cameras. By grouping cameras and leveraging a base frame rate of 25 FPS, our method achieves an equivalent frame rate of 100-200 FPS without requiring specialized high-speed cameras. On processing side, we also propose a novel generative model to fix artifacts caused by 4D sparse-view reconstruction, as asynchrony reduces the number of viewpoints at each timestamp. Specifically, we propose to train a video-diffusion-based artifact-fix model for sparse 4D reconstruction, which refines missing details, maintains temporal consistency, and improves overall reconstruction quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances high-speed 4D reconstruction compared to synchronous capture.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Security Analysis of Long-Horizon Agentic AI Systems: Threats, Evaluation, and Framework Development

arXiv:2606.14816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a structured analysis of security challenges in long-horizon agentic AI systems. The study reviews existing threats, evaluation approaches, attack propagation mechanisms, and security frameworks. A taxonomy of security threats and a framework for analyzing attack propagation are proposed to support future research in agentic AI security

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Open Materials Generation with Inference-Time Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2602.00424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuous-time generative models for crystalline materials enable inverse materials design by learning to predict stable crystal structures, but incorporating explicit target properties into the generative process remains challenging. Policy-gradient reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled mechanism for aligning generative models with downstream objectives but typically requires access to the score, which has prevented its application to flow-based models that learn only velocity fields. We introduce Open Materials Generation with Inference-time Reinforcement Learning (OMatG-IRL), a policy-gradient RL framework that operates directly on the learned velocity fields and eliminates the need for the explicit computation of the score. OMatG-IRL leverages stochastic perturbations of the underlying generation dynamics preserving the baseline performance of the pretrained generative model while enabling exploration and policy-gradient estimation at inference time. Using OMatG-IRL, we present the first application of RL to crystal structure prediction (CSP). Our method enables effective reinforcement of an energy-based objective while preserving diversity through composition conditioning, and it achieves performance competitive with score-based RL approaches. Finally, we show that OMatG-IRL can learn time-dependent velocity-annealing schedules, enabling accurate CSP with order-of-magnitude improvements in sampling efficiency and, correspondingly, reduction in generation time. The OMatG-IRL code is included in a new release of the Open Materials Generation (OMatG) framework available at https://github.com/FERMat-ML/OMatG.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Operator Learning for efficient Quantum Computation

arXiv:2606.20184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An efficient implementation of quantum algorithms is often hindered by the lack of efficient primitives for operators and state preparation. This limits both the ability of near-term quantum hardware to simulate complex problems and the potential of fault-tolerant algorithms to achieve practical quantum advantage. To address this, we propose a full-stack variational framework that transforms arbitrary operators to compact quantum circuits. The resulting variational circuits can be tailored to the connectivity and long-range interaction of the target hardware. The learning process employs backpropagation together with a cost function that efficiently optimizes unitary operators and non-unitary – dense or sparse – operators using only a single ancilla qubit for block encoding. Additionally, we introduce a regularization term that reduces the approximation error. The approach is validated for both quantum mechanical and engineering applications. In the former case, we learn propagators that arise in native quantum problems – such as quantum simulation and quantum chemistry – and achieve improved resource scaling in comparison to standard Suzuki-Trotter expansions. In the latter case, we demonstrate the approach's ability to implement the second-order central finite difference approximation of the Laplace operator – relevant for solving partial differential equations – while improving upon current error metrics. The final example deals with learning a dense, non-unitary operator that arises in the analysis of inviscid potential flow around an airfoil. This universality of the framework opens the door for solving general problems beyond prototypical engineering and quantum applications.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Hospital-Level Variation in Antenatal Corticosteroids for Late Preterm Births

Objective: To determine whether and to what extent hospitals across the United States vary in their use of late-preterm steroids using a novel data set in which the timing of steroid administration relative to delivery can be observed. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study of singleton births with known gestational ages identified in the Premier Healthcare Database from 2015 to 2022. The primary variable of interest was hospital-level adoption of antenatal corticosteroids for late-preterm singleton deliveries, calculated as the proportion of late-preterm singleton births (34-36 completed weeks of gestation) with any betamethasone exposure during the same late-preterm period. Hospital adoption was defined as the weighted average rate of ALPS administration among late-preterm infants across the entire post-period. Hospitals were ranked by their late-preterm steroid adoption rates and categorized by quartile based on the empirical distribution. Temporal trends were assessed using annual hospital-level adoption rates and visualized using time-series plots and distributional plots. A logistic regression model was constructed to determine hospital characteristics associated with being a highest-quartile adopting hospital. Results: The analysis cohort included 728 hospitals and 5,452,791 births, of which 361,006 (6.6%) were singleton late preterm births. Hospital steroid exposure rates ranged from 0 to 82% and were categorized into quartiles based on overall exposure rate, with cutoffs at 20.6%, 29.8%, and 40.1%. Median exposure rates increased progressively across quartiles from 14.1% (IQR 9.3-17.4%) in the lowest adopting hospitals (Q1) to 47.6% (IQR 43.7-53.2%) in the highest adopting hospitals (Q4), with substantial within-quartile variation. In the multivariable model, urban location was a strong predictor of high adoption after adjustment (aOR 2.05; 95% CI 1.11-3.83, p=0.02). Compared to Midwest hospitals, Southern hospitals had significantly lower odds of being high adopters (aOR 0.37; 95% CI 0.20-0.69, p

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Longitudinal Attribute-Conditioned Neural Network for Modeling Health-State Transition Probabilities in Temporally Irregular Data: The LANTERN Framework

arXiv:2606.13880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate estimation of long-term care transition probabilities is central to disability insurance pricing, reserving, and solvency assessment. Classical actuarial multi-state models commonly rely on Markov, semi-Markov, or proportional-hazard specifications, which provide a direct connection to cohort projection but may be restrictive for irregular longitudinal health data with nonlinear aging patterns and heterogeneous covariate histories. This paper develops a well-calibrated estimator of multi-state transition probabilities for irregular longitudinal health data. The model learns from individual health history, incorporates the time elapsed between observations, and conditions transition probabilities on demographic and socioeconomic attributes. It produces a valid probability distribution over the next observed health state, with four possible states: healthy, mild disability, severe disability, and death. Individual probabilities are aggregated by age group and origin state to form transition matrices compatible with actuarial cohort projection. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study, we compare the proposed estimator with logistic regression, gradient-boosted trees, a recurrent neural network, and a last-state persistence benchmark. The evaluation considers probabilistic accuracy, endpoint discrimination and calibration for severe disability and death, risk concentration, and transition matrix error after aggregation. The proposed estimator improves severe disability discrimination relative to logistic regression and gradient-boosted tree benchmarks, maintains strong calibration, and yields the lowest transition matrix error among the evaluated models in the held-out test analysis. Results show that a structured machine learning estimator can support long-term care transition modeling when judged by calibration and projection fidelity, beyond discrimination.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Stereo Vision-Based Fall Prediction and Detection using Human Pose Estimation on the AMD Kria K26 SOM

Background and Objective: Falls among elderly people can cause serious injury and reduce quality of life. Timely prediction and detection are essential to prevent harm and support well-being. We propose a portable, low-power, battery-operated, vision-based fall prediction and detection system using HPE on an AMD Kria K26 System-on-Module (SOM). The objective is a non-intrusive, privacy-preserving system for real-time fall detection. Methods: The system uses an Intel RealSense D455 range-sensing camera connected to the K26 SOM by USB. It captures synchronized RGB and depth frames, 640 x 480 x 3 and 640 x 480 pixels, at 60 FPS. The SOM runs a three-stage pipeline with quantized YOLOX, Anchor-to-Joint (A2J), and fall-detection models. YOLOX identifies human bounding boxes from RGB frames, then discards the RGB frames to preserve privacy. A2J uses depth frames to estimate 15 joint keypoints per person. A CNN uses selected joint coordinates (x, y, z) to classify fall activity. YOLOX was trained on CrowdHuman; A2J on ITOP, MP-3DHP, UR Fall Detection, and a custom SDSU PSG dataset; and the CNN on UR Fall Detection and SDSU PSG. The design used a single-core DPU with a serial pipeline and a dual-core DPU running YOLOX and A2J with multiple threads. Results: Quantized accuracy was evaluated using IoU >= 50% for YOLOX, mAP with a 10-cm rule for A2J, and classification accuracy, (TP + TN)/(TP + TN + FP + FN), for the CNN. Accuracies were 74%, 84.13%, and 75.85%. Throughput improved from 2.5 FPS for the single-threaded pipeline to 4.5 FPS for the multi-threaded version. Conclusion: Results demonstrate the feasibility of privacy-preserving fall detection on an AMD Kria K26 edge device. On-device HPE and fall classification runs without cloud dependency, supporting elderly monitoring and assistive healthcare. Future work will improve model accuracy and speed.

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

A CEFR-Inspired Classification Framework with Fuzzy C-Means To Automate Assessment of Programming Skills in Scratch

arXiv:2604.00730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Context: Schools, training platforms, and technology firms increasingly need to assess programming proficiency at scale with transparent, reproducible methods that support personalized learning pathways. Objective: This study introduces a pedagogical framework for Scratch project assessment, aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), providing universal competency levels for students and teachers alongside actionable insights for curriculum design. Method: We apply Fuzzy C-Means clustering to 2008246 Scratch projects evaluated via Dr.Scratch, implementing an ordinal criterion to map clusters to CEFR levels (A1-C2), and introducing enhanced classification metrics that identify transitional learners, enable continuous progress tracking, and quantify classification certainty to balance automated feedback with instructor review. Impact: The framework enables diagnosis of systemic curriculum gaps-notably a "B2 bottleneck" where only 13.3% of learners reside due to the cognitive load of integrating Logic Synchronization, and Data Representation–while providing certainty–based triggers for human intervention.

15.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-12

Placenta accreta spectrum in the 21st century: Challenging dogma and redefining disorder

Authors:

by Eric Jauniaux, Helena C. Bartels, Yalda Afshar Placenta accreta spectrum (PAS) is a serious pregnancy complication caused by abnormal placental attachment to the uterus. In this Perspective, Eric Jauniaux and colleagues discuss emerging evidence that challenges our long-held pathophysiological understanding of PAS, and argue that a critical reassessment of definition, diagnosis, and management is overdue. In this Perspective, Jonathan Evans and colleagues discuss why restricting access to joint replacement surgery based on BMI alone is not supported by evidence, and highlight how such rest rictions risk exacerbating stigma, inequity and avoidable harm to those who would benefit from surgery.

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

MetaResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Self-Reflective Reinforcement Learning in Adversarial Virtual Environments

arXiv:2606.19893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in autonomous information gathering and synthesis, yet their training remains constrained by the static nature of simulated environments, the limits of fact-retrieval-only task designs, and the inefficiency of outcome-based reinforcement learning. In this work, we propose MetaResearcher, a novel framework that scales deep research agent training across four synergistic dimensions. First, we introduce an Evolving Virtual World that injects temporal dynamics and adversarial misinformation into the training environment, forcing agents to develop source credibility assessment and temporal conflict resolution skills. Second, we design Discovery-Oriented Tasks – including hypothesis generation and contradiction resolution – that transcend simple fact retrieval and push agents toward genuine research behaviors. Third, we propose a Self-Reflective Meta-Reward mechanism within the GRPO framework that jointly optimizes for answer correctness, search path efficiency, reflection depth, and tool call diversity, directly addressing the repetitive action loop problem observed in prior work. Fourth, we introduce a Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Swarm architecture comprising specialized Scout, Filter, and Synthesizer models that learn collaborative research strategies through coordinated reinforcement learning. Built upon the LiteResearcher infrastructure, MetaResearcher requires zero marginal API cost for training while targeting substantial improvements in both benchmark performance (GAIA, Xbench-DS) and epistemic robustness under adversarial conditions. We present the complete framework design, training methodology, and planned experimental validation.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

OmicOS: A Comprehensive Omics Ecosystem Infrastructure and Agent System for the AI Era

Biology has accumulated a vast ecosystem of omics methods, but much of this ecosystem remains built for expert humans rather than scientific agents. Methods are scattered across Python packages, R/Bioconductor and CRAN workflows, command-line tools, incompatible data containers and implicit object states, making even routine analyses difficult for an AI system to choose, execute and verify reliably. Here we introduce OmicOS, a comprehensive omics ecosystem infrastructure and agent system that turns OmicVerse V2, an open-source omics community, into an executable foundation for agentic biology. OmicVerse V2 provides the community substrate: scalable AnnDataOOM-compatible rust backends, agent-friendly Python algorithms for single-cell, spatial, bulk and multi-omics analysis, interfaces to single-cell foundation models, and Python-native reconstructions of historically R-centred Bioconductor/CRAN-style workflows. OmicOS makes this substrate actionable by registering analytical functions as state-aware capability contracts, allowing agents to inspect live data objects, select valid methods, execute controlled workflows and record provenance. The result is not a fixed pipeline, but a programmable omics environment in which agents compose real analyses from verified community methods rather than inventing tools. Across external and purpose-built benchmarks, OmicOS ranked first among the evaluated systems, reaching 81.2% on BiomniBench. Adding OmicVerse to a minimal agent improved task completion by up to 34.2 percentage points with qwen-3.6-35b, and controlled ablations showed that the gains came from registry-grounded execution rather than from larger models, documentation retrieval or unrestricted tool exposure. The same infrastructure scaled to atlas-sized data, reproduced R-centred workflows in Python and converted external pathology software into agent-usable skills. In a discovery task starting from a whole-body spatial map and the term Alzheimer disease, OmicOS composed a non-canonical workflow that integrated spatial expression, genetic association, eQTL and colocalization evidence to nominate a colon epithelial risk axis centred on PICALM, CD2AP and CR1. Together, OmicVerse and OmicOS define an open foundation for AI-era omics, showing how a community of biological methods can be transformed into a reliable, extensible and agent-operable system for discovery.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

PowerOPD: Stabilizing On-Policy Distillation with Bounded Power Transformation

arXiv:2606.17199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard on-policy distillation (OPD) for large language models estimates the reverse-KL objective using student-sampled tokens, yielding an unbiased single-sample Monte Carlo estimator that avoids vocabulary-wide computation. However, we show that this estimator suffers from severe training pathologies in practice: sample inefficiency, unstable generation dynamics, and a substantial performance gap compared to exact full-vocabulary OPD. Reward-level diagnosis traces these pathologies to the log-ratio reward, which is unbounded by construction, producing extremely high-variance gradients concentrated at early positions and persisting throughout training; standard post-hoc scaling fail as they operate only after this distortion occurs. To solve this problem, we propose PowerOPD: a family of natively bounded, sign-consistent rewards from the Box-Cox power transformation, parameterized by alpha > 0, of which the log-ratio is the degenerate alpha -> 0 limit. Across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks and four Qwen3 teacher-student pairs, PowerOPD achieves benchmark-averaged Avg@8/Pass@8 gains of up to +6.37/+5.71 over vanilla OPD, +3.01/+3.54 over post-hoc stabilization, and +2.59/+8.90 over full-vocabulary OPD, while reducing wall-clock time by 59.2% and peak GPU memory by 23.1%. Larger alpha generally improves accuracy, consistently shortens responses, and keeps gradient norms more than 3,000x smaller than vanilla OPD.

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

OmniPlan: An Adaptive Framework for Timely and Near-Optimal Network Planning Optimization

arXiv:2606.18105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network planning optimization is a fundamental problem across diverse domains, including transportation systems, communication networks, and power grids. It requires simultaneous optimization of multiple competing objectives under complex constraints. Existing network planning optimization frameworks rely on mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers, heuristics, and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models to compute planning decisions. However, they lack effective adaptability to diverse and dynamic user intents, thus leading to the trade-off between execution time and optimality. In this paper, we propose OmniPlan, an adaptive framework that achieves both timeliness and near-optimality in network planning optimization. To achieve the adaptability lacking in existing solutions, OmniPlan employs a large language model (LLM)-based interpreter to convert heterogeneous natural-language intents into a unified and quantifiable user-preference vector. Then it employs a mixture-of-experts architecture that integrates MIP solvers, heuristics, and DRL models as specialized experts, where OmniPlan adapts to diverse intents by dynamically selecting timely and near-optimal experts. Finally, it incorporates a DRL-based expert configuration module that fine-tunes optimization objective weights to align planning decisions with user-specific preferences. We evaluate OmniPlan with a representative real-world workload, i.e., distributed machine learning (ML), where we leverage OmniPlan to offload a wide spectrum of ML inference tasks, e.g., decision trees, SVM, naive Bayes, XGBoost, and random forests, onto a network of hardware devices. Our experiments on a real-world testbed indicate that OmniPlan achieves near-optimal and low-execution-time offloading for real-world ML inference tasks, reducing latency by up to 97.8\% and network device resource consumption by up to 11.5\%.

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

Near–Real-Time Conflict-Related Fire Detection in Sudan Using Unsupervised Deep Learning

Ongoing armed conflict in Sudan highlights the need for rapid monitoring of conflict-related fire-affected areas. Recent advances in deep learning and high-frequency satellite imagery enable near–real-time assessment of active fires and burn scars in war zones. This study presents a near–real-time monitoring approach using a lightweight Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE)–based model integrated with 4-band Planet Labs imagery at 3 m spatial resolution. We demonstrate that these impacted regions can be detected within approximately 24 to 30 hours under favorable observational conditions using accessible, commercially available satellite data. To achieve this, we adapt a VAE–based model, originally designed for 10-band imagery, to operate effectively on high-resolution 4-band inputs. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner to learn compact latent representations of nominal land-surface conditions and identify burn signatures by quantifying changes between temporally paired latent embeddings. Performance is evaluated across five case studies in Sudan and compared against cosine distance, CVA, and IR-MAD using precision, recall, F1-score, and the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) computed between temporally paired image tiles. Results show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the other methods, achieving higher recall and F1-scores while maintaining viable precision in highly imbalanced fire-detection scenarios. Experiments with 8-band imagery and temporal image sequences yield only marginal performance gains over single 4-band inputs, underscoring the effectiveness of the proposed lightweight approach for scalable, near–real-time conflict monitoring.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SegmentAnyTreeV2: Scaling Transformer-Based Tree Instance Segmentation Across Sensors, Platforms, and Forests

We present SegmentAnyTreeV2, a sensor- and platform-agnostic framework for semantic and instance segmentation of forest point clouds. The model combines a serialization-based Point Transformer v3 backbone with a lightweight semantic head and a tree-focused cross-attention mask decoder. Semantic predictions restrict instance decoding to tree-class voxels, while instance-aware query initialization, one-to-many seed supervision, and asymmetric mask scoring improve separation in dense and structurally complex stands. We further introduce FOR-instance v3, an expanded benchmark comprising 427 scenes and 26,496 annotated trees across diverse biomes, forest structures, and LiDAR platforms. On the FOR-instanceV2 test split, SegmentAnyTreeV2 achieves 90.5% precision, 80.2% recall, 85.0% F1, 90.7% coverage, and 87.6% semantic mIoU, outperforming previous learning-based methods in both instance detection and mask completeness. Zero-shot evaluation on independent sites further demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ZeSTA: Zero-Shot TTS Augmentation with Domain-Conditioned Training for Data-Efficient Personalized Speech Synthesis

arXiv:2603.04219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the use of zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) as a data augmentation source for low-resource personalized speech synthesis. While synthetic augmentation can provide linguistically rich and phonetically diverse speech, naively mixing large amounts of synthetic speech with limited real recordings often leads to speaker similarity degradation during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose ZeSTA, a simple domain-conditioned training framework that distinguishes real and synthetic speech via a lightweight domain embedding, combined with real-data oversampling to stabilize adaptation under extremely limited target data, without modifying the base architecture. Experiments on LibriTTS and an in-house dataset with two ZS-TTS sources demonstrate that our approach improves speaker similarity over naive synthetic augmentation while preserving intelligibility and perceptual quality. Audio samples are available on our web page.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

GPO: Learning from Critical Steps to Improve LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2509.16456v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in various domains, showing impressive potential on different tasks. Recently, reasoning LLMs have been proposed to improve the reasoning or thinking capabilities of LLMs to solve complex problems. Despite the promising results of reasoning LLMs, enhancing the multi-step reasoning capabilities of LLMs still remains a significant challenge. While existing optimization methods have advanced the LLM reasoning capabilities, they often treat reasoning trajectories as a whole, without considering the underlying critical steps within the trajectory. In this paper, we introduce Guided Pivotal Optimization (GPO), a novel fine-tuning strategy that dives into the reasoning process to enable more effective improvements. GPO first identifies the `critical step' within a reasoning trajectory - a point that the model must carefully proceed to succeed at the problem. We locate the critical step by estimating the advantage function. GPO then resets the policy to the critical step, samples the new rollout and prioritizes the learning process on those rollouts. This focus allows the model to learn more effectively from pivotal moments within the reasoning process to improve the reasoning performance. We demonstrate that GPO is a general strategy that can be integrated with various optimization methods to improve reasoning performance. Besides theoretical analysis, our experiments across challenging reasoning benchmarks show that GPO can consistently and significantly enhance the performance of existing optimization methods, showcasing its effectiveness and generalizability in improving LLM reasoning by concentrating on pivotal moments within the generation process.

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

3D Scene Graphs: Open Challenges and Future Directions

3D Scene Graphs (3DSGs) have emerged as a powerful representation for spatial AI by combining geometric grounding with semantic and relational abstractions of the environment. Their expressiveness has made them relevant to a broad range of problems in robotics and computer vision, including manipulation, navigation, task planning, scene understanding, and many others. However, the field remains fragmented: different communities adopt distinct formulations, construction pipelines, and evaluation protocols, making it difficult to compare methods, identify common assumptions, and assess remaining challenges for robust real-world deployment. This survey provides a unified and critical review of 3DSGs, with particular emphasis on open challenges and future directions. We first formalize 3DSGs under a common definition and analyze the principal modeling choices that characterize existing formulations, including node and edge attributes, hierarchical structure, dynamic scene representations, and affordance-aware extensions. We then review how 3DSGs are built from raw sensory observations, discussing the most common terminologies, conventions, and techniques. Finally, we examine downstream applications and evaluation strategies, from intrinsic graph quality to task-level performance. To support the community, we also provide a dedicated website that organizes and extends the surveyed content, accessible at https://3dscenegraphs.com/.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Single-Image Entanglement Verification with Spatially Encoded Measurement Contexts

arXiv:2606.15382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entangled photon pairs produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion exhibit rich spatial entanglement structure that is often difficult to probe with conventional measurements. Here, we show that spin-orbit optical elements can convert this spatial structure into directly observable quantum interference patterns. Using a $q$-plate, we demonstrate that the relative wavefront curvature of biphoton states generated by a pair of nonlinear crystals can be retrieved from the spatial modulation of coincidence images. Building on this principle, we introduce a liquid-crystal metasurface that performs spatially multiplexed Bell measurements across the transverse profile of the photon field. The device, which we call a Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) plate, assigns different polarization projections to different azimuthal sectors of the beam, allowing the sixteen joint measurements required for a CHSH test to be realized simultaneously in a single acquisition. In this architecture, the spatial coordinate acts as a classical register selecting the measurement context, while photon pairs sample these contexts according to their emission directions. We further demonstrate that the same measurement concept can be implemented using a programmable spatial light modulator, providing a dynamically reconfigurable realization of the scheme. Our results show that spatially structured optical elements can transform Bell tests into parallel measurements distributed across the transverse plane, enabling rapid characterization of spatially varying entanglement. This approach opens new possibilities for structured-light quantum measurements, Bell-inequality-based imaging, and the study of spatially engineered entangled photon sources.