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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Pricing Excess-of-Loss Reinsurance and CAT Bonds under Climate Uncertainty: A Cox Process Framework with Temperature-Dependent Stochastic Intensity

arXiv:2606.14830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a climate-aware pricing framework for excess-of-loss (XL) reinsurance contracts and catastrophe (CAT) bonds under non-stationary catastrophe risk. Catastrophe arrivals are modeled as a Cox process whose stochastic intensity depends exponentially on a temperature-related climate index. To represent climate dynamics, the index is modeled as a mean-reverting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process around a time-dependent warming trend. Within this setting, aggregate losses follow a compound Cox structure with lognormal severities. Pricing is performed under a reduced-form risk-adjusted measure, which provides a tractable valuation approach for XL reinsurance layers and binary zero-coupon CAT bond payoffs in an incomplete market setting. Because catastrophe losses are not dynamically replicable, the framework emphasizes scenario-based valuation rather than model-independent no-arbitrage bounds. A Monte Carlo valuation scheme is implemented to quantify the economic implications of climate-dependent catastrophe intensity. The numerical results show that climate dependence materially changes the loss-generation mechanism and affects the valuation of catastrophe-linked contracts. In the baseline calibration, the climate-aware model increases the excess-of-loss reinsurance premium and lowers the CAT bond price relative to the stationary benchmark. Furthermore, our analysis of the 99.5\% Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) indicates that stationary benchmarks may underestimate economic capital requirements by approximately 13.7\% compared to the climate-aware framework, highlighting the potential regulatory relevance of the proposed model. This finding highlights that benchmark design is critical for interpreting climate-pricing effects.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Recognizing and Reconstructing a Multi-Unit Floor Plan

Digital twins have a major potential to form a significant part of urban management in emergency planning, as they allow more efficient designing of the escape routes, better orientation in exceptional situations, and faster rescue intervention. Nevertheless, creating the twins still remains a largely manual effort, due to a lack of 3D-representations, which are available only in limited amounts for some new buildings. Thus, in this paper we aim to synthesize 3D information from commonly available 2D architectural floor plans. We propose two novel pixel-wise segmentation methods based on the MDA-Unet and MACU-Net architectures with improved skip connections, an attention mechanism, and a training objective together with a reconstruction part of the pipeline, which vectorizes the segmented plans to create a 3D model. The proposed methods are compared with two other state-of-the-art techniques and several benchmark datasets. On the commonly used CubiCasa benchmark dataset, our methods have achieved the mean F1 score of 0.86 over five examined classes, outperforming the other pixel-wise approaches tested. We have also made our code publicly available to support research in the field.

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

Improving Pre-trained Adult Glioma Segmentation Models Using only Post-processing Techniques

Gliomas are the most common malignant brain tumors in adults and are among the most lethal. Despite aggressive treatment, the median survival rate is less than 15 months. Accurate multiparametric MRI (mpMRI) tumor segmentation is critical for surgical planning, radiotherapy, and disease monitoring. While deep learning models have improved the accuracy of automated segmentation, large-scale pre-trained models generalize poorly and often underperform, producing systematic errors such as false positives, label swaps, and slice discontinuities in slices. These limitations are further compounded by unequal access to GPU resources and the growing environmental cost of large-scale model training. In this work, we propose adaptive post-processing techniques to refine the quality of glioma segmentations produced by large-scale pretrained models developed for various types of tumors. We demonstrated the techniques in multiple BraTS 2025 segmentation challenge tasks, with the ranking metric improving by 14.9 % for the sub-Saharan Africa challenge and 0.9% for the adult glioma challenge. This approach promotes a shift in brain tumor segmentation research from increasingly complex model architectures to efficient, clinically aligned post-processing strategies that are precise, computationally fair, and sustainable.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning Upper Lower Value Envelopes to Shape Online RL: A Principled Approach

arXiv:2510.19528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the fundamental problem of leveraging offline data to accelerate online reinforcement learning - a direction with strong potential but limited theoretical grounding. Our study centers on how to learn and apply value envelopes within this context. To this end, we introduce a principled two-stage framework: the first stage uses offline data to derive upper and lower bounds on value functions, while the second incorporates these learned bounds into online algorithms. Our method extends prior work by decoupling the upper and lower bounds, enabling more flexible and tighter approximations. In contrast to approaches that rely on fixed shaping functions, our envelopes are data-driven and explicitly modeled as random variables, with a filtration argument ensuring independence across phases. The analysis establishes high-probability regret bounds determined by two interpretable quantities, thereby providing a formal bridge between offline pre-training and online fine-tuning. Empirical results on tabular MDPs demonstrate substantial regret reductions compared with both UCBVI and prior methods while remaining competitive with related approaches.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Judging Against the Reference: Uncovering Knowledge-Driven Failures in LLM-Judges on QA Evaluation

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic judges for question answering (QA) and other reference-conditioned evaluation tasks, little is known about their ability to adhere to a provided reference. We identify a critical failure mode of such reference-based LLM QA evaluation: when the provided reference conflicts with the judge model's parametric knowledge, the resulting scores become unreliable, substantially degrading evaluation fidelity. To study this phenomenon systematically, we introduce a controlled swapped-reference QA framework that induces reference-belief conflicts. Specifically, we replace the reference answer with an incorrect entity and construct diverse pairings of original and swapped references with correspondingly aligned candidate answers. Surprisingly, grading reliability drops sharply under swapped references across a broad set of judge models. We empirically show that this vulnerability is driven by judges' over-reliance on parametric knowledge, leading judges to disregard the given reference under conflict. Finally, we find that this failure persists under common prompt-based mitigation strategies, highlighting a fundamental limitation of LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and motivating reference-based protocols that enforce stronger adherence to the provided reference.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

Challenges and progress in RNA velocity: Comparative analysis across multiple biological contexts

Authors:

by Sarah Ancheta, Leah Dorman, Guillaume Le Treut, Abel Gurung, Greg Huber, Loïc A. Royer, Alejandro Granados, Merlin Lange Single-cell RNA sequencing is revolutionizing our understanding of cell state dynamics, allowing researchers to capture and quantify the transcriptomic profile of a single cell at a specific timepoint. Among the computational techniques used to predict cellular trajectories, RNA velocity has emerged as a predominant tool for modeling transcriptional dynamics. RNA velocity leverages the mRNA maturation process to generate velocity vectors that predict the likely future state of a cell, offering insights into cellular differentiation, aging, and disease progression. Although this technique has shown promise across biological fields, the performance accuracy varies depending on the RNA velocity method and dataset. We established a comparative pipeline and analyzed the performance of five RNA velocity methods on three datasets based on local consistency, method agreement, identification of driver genes, and robustness to sequencing depth. This benchmark provides a resource for scientists to understand the strengths and limitations of different RNA velocity methods.

07.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

General-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks

Specialized clinical artificial intelligence (AI) tools are entering medical practice despite scarce independent evaluation. We quantitatively evaluate two clinical AI tools, OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI, built on large language models (LLMs) against three frontier LLMs: GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.6. Our evaluation has three stages: (1) 500 MedQA questions testing medical knowledge, (2) 500 HealthBench items measuring alignment with clinicians and (3) the real clinical queries (RCQ) benchmark, built from 100 de-identified queries from physicians to a general-purpose language model in a live clinical environment. For the RCQ benchmark, 12 US clinicians performed randomized, blinded review of model outputs, producing 1,800 model–question annotations. Frontier LLMs outperformed clinical AI tools in all three evaluations. Clinical AI tools performed comparably to auto-enabled Google Search AI Overview on the RCQ. These findings highlight the need for independent, real-world evaluation of AI tools before they enter clinical settings. In an independent evaluation, frontier large language models outperformed specialized clinical artificial intelligence tools on medical knowledge, clinician alignment and real-world clinical queries.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Dynamic Rollout Editing for Reducing Overthinking in RL-Trained Reasoning Models

Long-form chain-of-thought reasoning can improve LLM performance on complex tasks, but models often continue generating unnecessary reasoning after a correct answer has emerged. We refer to this behavior as overthinking. We study this phenomenon from the perspective of GRPO-style reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, framing it as a training-time credit-assignment problem rather than merely a decoding-time stopping problem. In rollouts sampled at the onset of GRPO training, we observe that successful trajectories can exhibit a slightly higher degree of overthinking than unsuccessful trajectories for the same prompts. This early imbalance provides a starting point for an undesirable feedback loop: because GRPO assigns sequence-level credit, it cannot distinguish the solution-reaching prefix from the unnecessary continuation that lengthens a successful trajectory. Both receive positive update signal, allowing the initial imbalance to grow into more severe overthinking during training. To address this issue, we introduce Dynamic Rollout Editing (DRE), a training-time intervention for successful trajectories that continue thinking after answer emergence. DRE preserves the accepted verified prefix, edits the remaining thinking, and prefers the edited trajectory within the same RL group, weakening the preference signal for unnecessary thinking without penalizing the reasoning needed to reach the answer. Experiments across diverse tasks show the effectiveness of DRE.

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

Grammar-Constrained Decoding Can Jailbreak LLMs into Generating Malicious Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code generation, raising concerns that they may be misused to produce malicious code. Meanwhile, Grammar-Constrained Decoding (GCD) has been widely adopted to improve the reliability of LLM-generated code by enforcing syntactic validity. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive risk: this reliability-oriented technique can itself become an attack surface. We uncover a new jailbreak attack, termed CodeSpear, that exploits GCD to induce LLMs into generating malicious code. Our experiments show that simply applying a benign code grammar constraint can effectively jailbreak LLMs. To address this vulnerability, we propose CodeShield, a safety alignment approach that robustly preserves safe behavior even under attacker-controlled grammar constraints. CodeShield aligns the model in the code modality by teaching it to generate honeypot code under GCD. Such code is semantically harmless, so it does not implement the malicious request, and structurally diverse, so it is difficult to suppress through grammar tightening. At the same time, CodeShield still preserves natural-language refusals when natural language is available. Experiments on 10 popular LLMs across 4 benchmarks show that CodeSpear outperforms representative jailbreak baselines and increases the attack success rate by more than 30 percentage points on average. CodeShield also restores safety under CodeSpear while preserving benign utility. Our findings reveal a fundamental risk of GCD and call for greater attention to its potential security implications.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Comparing Commercial Depth Sensor Accuracy for Medical Applications

Depth estimation has numerous medical and surgical applications. We benchmark four depth sensors on a porcine bone specimen, a porcine belly specimen, and a silicone kidney phantom using stylus-sampled references. These objects contain several real-world challenges, including homogeneous surfaces, specular surfaces, and subsurface scattering. The comparison includes stereo, structured-light, and time-of-flight sensors at a distance of approximately 50 cm. Specifically, the Intel RealSense D405 (Intel RealSense, United States), PMD Flexx2 (pmdtechnologies, Germany), Stereolabs ZED 2i (Stereolabs, France), and Zivid 2M+ 60 (Zivid, Norway) are compared. The Zivid 2M+ 60 performed best across all objects and metrics considered in this work. The ZED ranked second for real tissue, but last on the phantom.

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

Breaking Entropy Bounds: Accelerating RL Training via MTP with Rejection Sampling

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key component in modern large language models, yet the rollout stage remains the key bottleneck in RL training pipelines. Although Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) offers a natural solution to accelerate rollouts through speculative decoding, many studies have observed that MTP acceptance rates degrade significantly during RL training, leading to limited speedup performance. To address this bottleneck, we present Bebop, a systematic study of MTP in LLM post-training, and offer practical recipes to integrate MTP into large-scale RL pipelines. First, we reveal that the MTP acceptance rate is fundamentally bounded by the fluctuation of model entropy, which demonstrates a clear negative linear relationship with the rise of entropy in the RL stage. Second, we show that probabilistic rejection sampling largely alleviates the disturbance introduced by entropy in RL compared to greedy draft sampling. We further identify that the conventional MTP training objectives (cross-entropy or KL) are suboptimal in such settings, and therefore we propose a novel end-to-end TV loss that directly optimizes multi-step rejection sampling acceptance rate, yielding ~10% acceptance rate improvements, achieving up to 95% acceptance rates and up to 25% extra inference throughput gains across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and agentic tasks. Third, we test various online MTP training strategies during RL and show that pre-RL MTP training with e2e TV loss and rejection sampling achieves a consistent acceptance rate and speedup throughout the entire RL, eliminating the need for costly online MTP updating. We provide extensive experiments and analysis that validate our findings. Experimental results show our method achieves up to 1.8x end-to-end acceleration in async RL training of Qwen3.5, Qwen3.6, and Qwen3.7 models.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Execution-bound advisory automation for agentic AI: a reproducible AIBOM-driven CSAF-VEX framework

arXiv:2606.19390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A protocol driven framework is presented that binds SBOM and AIBOM artefacts to deterministic environment capture and structured runtime telemetry. Exploitability is computed from declared artefacts, observed activation conditions, and enforced execution policies. CSAF VEX advisories are generated from combined static and runtime evidence, cryptographically signed, and validated through deterministic replay. Evaluation uses approximately 10000 component entries across synthetic Agentic AI workloads 50 to 5000 components, incorporating OSV, GitHub Advisory, KEV, and EPSS datasets.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Agentra: A Supervisable Multi-Agent Framework for Enterprise Intrusion Response

arXiv:2606.18325v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enterprise intrusion response still depends on static playbooks and analyst-driven triage, creating delay between alert generation and containment. We present Agentra, a supervisable multi-agent Intrusion Response System (IRS) framework that converts alerts from IDS, EDR, and XDR platforms into structured incident response plans grounded in MITRE ATT&CK, MITRE D3FEND, and NIST CSF 2.0. Agentra decomposes response reasoning across role-scoped agents, validates proposed plans through a bounded Planner–Validator review loop, screens retrieved threat intelligence through a Moderator security gateway, gates actions through an Action Catalog and risk score, and records decisions in an append-only audit log. We evaluate Agentra against a static OASIS CACAO v2.0 cyber-playbook baseline on a 120-event corpus drawn from ThreatHunter-Playbook, Splunk BOTSv3, and DARPA OpTC. The strongest configuration improves FP-aware IRS F1 from 0.61 to 0.84 and restores the projected harmful-action rate to the static baseline level of 0.0% after Planner-only configurations introduce unsafe overreaction. These results indicate that multi-agent response planning can improve ontology-grounded IRS coverage while preserving analyst approval and auditability.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Kolmogorov-Arnold Reservoir Computing

arXiv:2606.19984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reservoir computing offers a lightweight framework for forecasting dynamical systems but may struggle to capture long-range dependencies due to limited representational capacity. Conventional reservoir computing recurrently uses trainable reservoirs with hyperparameter sensitivity, while the next-generation reservoir computing removes recurrence at the cost of rapidly growing feature dimensions. Here, we develop Kolmogorov-Arnold Reservoir Computing (KARC), which replaces reservoirs with explicit basis-function expansions inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. We rigorously show that KARC is a lightweight design of Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs), preserving the potential expressive capacity of KANs while admitting efficient closed-form training of reservoir computing. At comparable cost, KARC outperforms existing reservoir computing methods on challenging benchmarks including partial differential equations. It can also be integrated with generative diffusion models for text-to-image generation. This work thus establishes a principled bridge between reservoir computing and KANs, enabling efficient and high-fidelity dynamical system forecasting.

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

OCOO-T : A Simple and Scalable Virtual Cell Model for Transcriptional Perturbation Response Prediction

arXiv:2606.12838v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting single-cell transcriptional responses to genetic, chemical and cytokine perturbations is a fundamental challenge in computational biology and AI Virtual Cell (AIVC) modeling, with direct implications for drug discovery and the elucidation of gene regulatory networks. Existing approaches often rely on auxiliary cell-state encoders, hierarchical variational autoencoders, dedicated Transformer encoder-decoder modules, or gene-interaction priors to compress high-dimensional expression profiles into latent representations. While effective, these designs increase architectural complexity and may limit scalability and generalizability. This paper introduces OCOO-T, a minimalist flow-matching-based AIVC model for transcriptional perturbation response prediction. OCOO-T utilizes a vanilla Transformer stack that operates directly on continuous gene expression profiles and formulates perturbation response prediction as a continuous-time denoising process. Perturbation embeddings, dosage information, and cell-line/cell-type specificity are integrated through adaptive layer normalization and in-context tokens. Comprehensive evaluations on Tahoe100M, Replogle, and PBMC benchmarks demonstrate that OCOO-T achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse perturbations and cell types while effectively scaling to long transcriptional profiles through patching and depatching of cellular contexts. By leveraging the simplicity of Transformer-based denoising for single-cell omics, OCOO-T provides an effective and scalable framework for in-silico cellular simulation.

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

PROBE: Probabilistic Occupancy BEV Encoding with Analytical Translation Robustness for 3D Place Recognition

We present PROBE (PRobabilistic Occupancy BEV Encoding), a learning-free LiDAR place recognition descriptor that models each BEV cell's occupancy as a Bernoulli random variable. Rather than relying on discrete point-cloud perturbations, PROBE analytically marginalizes over continuous Cartesian translations via the polar Jacobian, yielding a distance-adaptive angular uncertainty $\sigma_\theta = \sigma_t / r$ in $\mathcal{O}(R{\cdot}S)$ time. The primary parameter $\sigma_t$ represents the expected translational uncertainty in meters, a sensor-independent physical quantity that enhances cross-sensor generalization while reducing the need for extensive per-dataset tuning. Pairwise similarity combines a Bernoulli-KL Jaccard with exponential uncertainty gating and FFT-based height cosine similarity for rotation alignment. Evaluated on four datasets spanning four diverse LiDAR types, PROBE achieves the highest accuracy among handcrafted descriptors in multi-session evaluation and competitive single-session performance relative to both handcrafted and supervised baselines. The source code and supplementary materials are available at https://sites.google.com/view/probe-pr.

17.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-01

The NIH 2025 Public Access Policy: Immediate access, unequal costs

by Caitlin R. Ryus, Caroline Raymond King, Edward R. Melnick The NIH 2025 Public Access Policy eliminates embargo periods for federally funded research, expanding who can read science. Yet without addressing article processing charges and market concentration, the policy risks creating new barriers to who can afford to perform and publish their science. In this Perspective, Caitlin Ryus and colleagues discuss the NIH 2025 Public Access Policy, highlighting that while expanding who can read science, the policy risks creating new barriers to who can afford to perform and publish their science.

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

A Prototypical Signature Approach for Writer-Independent Offline Signature Verification

Offline handwritten signature verification aims to distinguish genuine from forged signatures using static images. Since real forgeries are rarely available, negative samples are usually randomly drawn from genuine signatures of other users to create training data. However, this random selection often lacks diversity, increases redundancy, and escalates computational cost, leading to inefficient training. We propose a data-driven strategy to generate diverse, informative negative samples using prototypical signatures, which are compact, non-identifiable summaries of genuine signature features. Based on the experiments results, we conclude that (i) prototypical signatures yield more informative negative samples, improving the detection of skilled forgeries; (ii) the proposed approach is backbone-agnostic, showing robustness across architectures; and (iii) when combined with a primal-form linear SVM, it serves as an alternative to RBF-based models while significantly improving scalability and computational efficiency. Implementation of the method is available at https://github.com/kdmoura/proto_hsv.

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

BBR-Net: Boundary-Balanced Replay for Continual Medical Image Segmentation

Continual learning for medical image segmentation remains challenging under domain shift because replay-based methods often preserve appearance information without explicitly modeling anatomical structure. This study investigates whether structural consistency governs knowledge retention in continual cardiac ultrasound segmentation. We propose the Boundary-Balanced Replay Network (BBR-Net), which selects replay samples using boundary-aware priority and class balance to preserve anatomically informative regions. The method is evaluated on CAMUS and CardiacNet under forward (CAMUS to CardiacNet) and reverse (CardiacNet to CAMUS) task orders. In the forward setting, BBR-Net retains source-task performance close to an offline joint-training reference, while markedly reducing catastrophic forgetting and preserving competitive target-task adaptation. Ablation results show that boundary-aware prioritization contributes to retention and improves the balance between source-task preservation and target-task adaptation when combined with class-aware sampling. In contrast, the reverse setting reveals that structure-aware replay fails when initial representations are learned from noisy and structurally inconsistent data. To isolate this effect, we conduct a controlled structural perturbation analysis by progressively corrupting source-task boundaries while keeping the dataset, architecture, and training protocol fixed. Forgetting increases consistently as structural reliability decreases, suggesting that replay effectiveness is strongly influenced by the quality of stored structural information, rather than by memory capacity alone. These findings indicate that preserving anatomical structure under domain shift is a central factor in continual medical image segmentation, and that replay mechanisms should account for structural reliability to support robust knowledge retention.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Emergence of Autonomous Penetration Capabilities in Large Language Model-Powered AI Systems

arXiv:2606.13079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nowadays, the autonomous execution of cyberattacks capable of causing substantial real-world harm is widely regarded as one of the critical red lines that frontier AI systems must not cross. Within this broader red-line scenario, autonomous penetration represents a core enabling capability and subtask: the ability of LLM-powered AI systems to independently conduct adversarial operations against a target server without human intervention, identify and exploit vulnerabilities, and obtain unauthorized access or control. A growing body of work has sought to assess the autonomous penetration capabilities of AI systems. However, existing evaluations often employ opaque methodologies, rely on unrealistic or overly simplified penetration-testing scenarios, or provide LLMs with excessive prior knowledge and task-specific guidance, and cannot accurately capture the extent to which modern AI systems can autonomously perform this core capability within broader high-impact cyberattack scenarios. To address these limitations, we construct a new autonomous penetration evaluation framework consisting of two components: target servers and agent scaffolding. Specifically, on the target-server side, we design two levels of target environments based on the number of secure services without known vulnerabilities deployed alongside a vulnerable service: Tier~1 (one secure service) and Tier~2 (three secure services), resulting in a total of 300 target servers. Meanwhile, the agent scaffolding adopts a general-purpose agent architecture equipped with a set of general-purpose cybersecurity tools, without any target-specific prior knowledge. We evaluate 19 open-weight and proprietary LLMs, and find that current models achieve penetration success rates ranging from 10.7% to 69.3%. Moreover, we observe that autonomous penetration capability continues to improve alongside advances in overall model capability.

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

Grids Often Outperform Implicit Neural Representations at Compressing Dense Signals

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have recently shown impressive results, but their fundamental capacity, implicit biases, and scaling behavior remain poorly understood. We investigate the performance of diverse INRs across a suite of 2D and 3D real and synthetic signals with varying effective bandwidth, as well as both overfitting and generalization tasks including tomography, super-resolution, and denoising. By stratifying performance according to model size as well as signal type and bandwidth, our results shed light on how different INR and grid representations allocate their capacity. We find that, for many tasks involving dense signals, a simple regularized grid with interpolation trains faster and to higher or comparable quality than any INR with the same number of parameters. We also find limited settings – namely fitting binary signals such as shape contours – where INRs outperform grids, to guide future development and use of INRs towards the most advantageous applications.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Causal-Privacy Audit Workflow for Synthetic and Distilled Data in Dropout Support

arXiv:2606.15940v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic and distilled student data are increasingly used to enable privacy-conscious learning analytics, yet their suitability for decision-facing institutional support remains uncertain. In dropout support, generated data must preserve not only predictive utility or distributional resemblance, but also the financial-status evidence used to guide advising, payment-plan assistance, and scholarship-related decisions. Method: This study introduces CaP-Eval, a decision-facing causal-privacy audit workflow for evaluating generated student data under a fixed estimand, timing-aware adjustment design, estimator set, and empirical privacy-governance screen. The workflow compares original, distilled, adversarial synthetic, statistical synthetic, and DPGNet privacy-oriented generated data on predictive utility, treatment-effect fidelity, robustness to alternative estimators, and local training-record proximity. Results: DPGNet and distilled data preserved the original financial-status treatment-effect structure more reliably than the adversarial and Gaussian Copula baselines. DPGNet preserved full direction and rank agreement across epsilon levels; epsilon = 10 produced the smallest non-original IPW and DML deviations, while epsilon = 1 and epsilon = 5 amplified several financial-status contrasts. Distilled data remained highly faithful but retained the strongest local training-record proximity signal. TabularGNet preserved qualitative directions with moderate attenuation, and Gaussian Copula compressed effect magnitudes. Conclusions: Predictive utility, privacy orientation, empirical disclosure signals, and causal fidelity diverged; generated student data require joint audits of direction, magnitude, overlap, and release-governance risk before decision use.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). Tool-augmented agents attempt to address this by augmenting VLMs with specialist perception modules, yet their effectiveness is bounded by the action interface through which those tools are invoked. In this work, we study how the design of this interface shapes the agent's capacity for open-ended spatial reasoning. Existing spatial agents either employ single-pass code execution, which commits to a full analysis strategy before any intermediate result is observed, or rely on a structured tool-call interface that often offers less flexibility for freely composing operations or tailoring the analysis to each task. Both designs offer limited flexibility for open-ended, complex 3D/4D spatial reasoning. We therefore propose SpatialClaw, a training-free framework for spatial reasoning that adopts code as the action interface. SpatialClaw maintains a stateful Python kernel pre-loaded with input frames and a suite of perception and geometry primitives, letting a VLM-backed agent write one executable cell per step conditioned on all prior outputs, enabling the agent to flexibly compose and manipulate perception results and adapt its analysis to both intermediate text and visual observations and the demands of each problem. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks spanning a broad range of static and dynamic 3D/4D spatial reasoning tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the recent spatial agent by +11.2 points, with consistent gains across six VLM backbones from two model families without any benchmark- or model-specific adaptation.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-19

Daily briefing: Human detritus remakes geology

Authors:

What, exactly, is a rock? Plus, a stem-cell success for a severe autoimmune disease and evidence that ‘AI deskilling’ is real. Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Data-driven sparse identification of governing PDEs via knockoff filters and multi-criteria trade-offs

arXiv:2605.26631v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose KO-PDE-IDENT, a data-driven framework for identifying parsimonious partial differential equations (PDEs) with false discovery rate (FDR) control. PDE discovery from noisy observations is often hindered by extreme multicollinearity among candidate terms, which causes typical sparse-regression methods to select spurious terms. To address this problem, KO-PDE-IDENT initially mines a support set of potential candidate terms via model-X knockoff filters with finite-sample FDR control, then refines and ranks the surviving PDE alternatives. The framework integrates three components. First, knockoff feature statistics are constructed by coupling $\ell_{0}$-constrained adaptive best-subset selection with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), yielding an effective and computationally efficient difference statistic. Second, a recursive feature elimination (RFE) procedure removes terms whose marginal contributions are dispensable and assesses statistical necessity through knockoff-perturbed hypothesis testing. Third, the final model selection is formulated as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, where the optimal governing equation is the alternative that best balances a wide range of criteria such as predictive accuracy, model complexity and coefficient uncertainty. We evaluate KO-PDE-IDENT on five canonical PDEs under severe noise corruption. Empirical results show that our framework can exactly recover the true PDE structure, eliminating false discoveries while retaining all true underlying terms, with low coefficient estimation error.