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

OneFocus: Enabling Real-World X-ray Security Screening with a Unified Vision-Language Model

X-ray contraband detection is critical for security in large-scale logistics and transportation, yet conventional detectors struggle to adapt to emerging contraband types and lack fundamental visual understanding. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer strong generalization but are hindered by the scarcity of high-quality X-ray image-caption data. To bridge this critical gap, we present MMXray, a meticulously curated benchmark of 52,124 image-caption pairs spanning 28 fine-grained classes of X-ray contraband. To enrich MMXray with realistic occlusion patterns, we further introduce CleanDET, a dedicated synthesis dataset containing clean foreground contraband images from 28 categories and background images with diverse density levels, together with AnyContraSyn, a controllable synthesis method designed to operate on CleanDET. We also develop OnePipe, an extensible pipeline for systematic data curation. Built on MMXray, we propose OneFocus, a unified VLM that supports four core tasks: visual question answering, contraband localization, classification, and image understanding. OneFocus achieves state-of-the-art performance in X-ray contraband understanding and demonstrates robust cross-domain generalization, establishing a strong vision-language baseline for security screening.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Question-Aware Evidence Ledgers for Video Relational Reasoning

The VRR-QA challenge evaluates visual relational reasoning in videos, where answers often depend on implicit spatial relations, event boundaries, target identity, and dialogue context rather than a single salient frame. We present a test-time reasoning pipeline built around a strong GPT-5.5 video QA solver and a set of question-aware evidence ledgers. The initial solver answers each question from a uniform video representation, while routed ledgers are prompted to make the required targets, count units, reference frames, and temporal or spatial scope explicit for counting, spatial, endpoint, viewpoint, and dialogue reasoning. External tools such as open-vocabulary detection, depth cues, pair crops, ASR, and scene-graph ledgers are used only as evidence sources. A conservative gate keeps the current answer unless independent evidence uniquely supports a different option. The final evidence-gated pipeline achieves 92.95% overall accuracy and 93.79% macro accuracy on the challenge test split.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

M4FC: a Multimodal, Multilingual, Multicultural, Multitask Real-World Fact-Checking Dataset

Existing real-world datasets for multimodal fact-checking have multiple limitations: they contain few instances, cover on only one or two languages, focus only on one task, or rely on external news article sets for sourcing true claims. To address these shortcomings, we introduce M4FC, a new real-world dataset comprising 4,982 images paired with 6,980 claims. The images, verified by professional fact-checkers from 22 organizations, represent a diverse range of cultural and geographic contexts. Each claim is available in one or two out of ten languages. M4FC spans six multimodal fact-checking tasks: visual claim extraction, claimant intent prediction, fake image detection, image contextualization, location verification, and verdict prediction. We provide baseline results for all tasks and analyze how combining intermediate tasks affects verdict prediction performance. We make our dataset and code publicly available.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Human Cognition in Machines: A Unified Perspective of World Models

This report of world models distinguishes prior works by the cognitive functions they innovate. Many works claim an almost human-like cognitive capability in their world models. To evaluate these claims requires a proper grounding in first principles from human and machine cognition theory. In moving towards human-like world models we present a conceptual unified framework for world models that fully incorporates all the cognitive functions (i.e., memory, perception, language, reasoning, imagining, motivation, and metacognition) and identify gaps in existing research as a guide for future states of the art. In particular, we find that motivation (especially intrinsic motivation) and metacognition remain drastically under-researched, and we propose concrete directions to address these gaps informed by active inference and global workspace theory. We also introduce epistemic world models, a new category encompassing agent frameworks for scientific discovery that operate over structured knowledge. Our taxonomy, applied to video, embodied, and epistemic world models, suggests research directions where prior taxonomies have not.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Harnessing cortical geometry, wiring, and function as inductive biases for recurrent neural networks

arXiv:2606.14975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How the wiring and functional organization of cortex shape recurrent computation remains a central question in both neuroscience and machine learning. Here, we leverage data released through the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program–a functional connectomics resource spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex, in which dense calcium imaging is co-registered with high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction from the same animal–to build biologically grounded recurrent neural networks. Using neuronal spatial coordinates, anatomical connectivity, and function-derived relationships from nearly 12,000 coregistered excitatory neurons, we initialize recurrent weights and impose communication-aware spatial constraints during learning. Across three cognitive decision-making tasks, networks constrained by cortical structure and function consistently outperform baseline and partially constrained models. Functional weight initialization provides the largest gain, while real spatial embedding yields robust additional improvements across conditions. These biologically grounded networks also develop low-entropy, modular, and small-world organization, and retain strong performance even when recurrence is restricted to positive weights. Together, our results show that the machinery of cortex–its geometry, wiring, and functional structure–can be harnessed as a powerful inductive basis for building recurrent networks that learn more effectively while converging toward key organizational principles of biological computation.

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

Cyclic Denoising Reveals Ultrastable Memories in Diffusion Models

We introduce cyclic denoising – repeated forward and reverse diffusion at controlled noise amplitudes – as an extraction attack for image diffusion models. Inspired by random organization in disordered solids, cyclic denoising exposes regions of the learned distribution that are largely inaccessible to standard sampling. The dynamics drive samples toward attractors with a broad stability spectrum. The deepest attractors are ultrastable: they regenerate after near-total corruption and persist through thousands of noising-denoising cycles. Many of these attractors correspond to memorized training images, including stock photographs, brand watermarks, and web-crawl artifacts. The attack requires only sampler-level control, with no gradients, weight inspection, prompts, captions, or prior knowledge of the training data. Unlike generate-and-filter attacks, which rely on large-scale prompted generation and post-hoc similarity or membership-inference filtering, our main protocol is fully unconditioned. We demonstrate the phenomenon in Stable Diffusion v1.4 and in a pixel-space DDPM, showing consistent behavior across latent- and pixel-space diffusion models. Across noise amplitudes, we observe a yielding-like transition: low-amplitude cycling produces trivial absorbing fixed points or limit cycles, while larger amplitudes induce rearrangements, basin hopping, and long-lived trapping in structured memorized attractor basins. We also observe hierarchical partial absorption, prompt-stabilized basins, and cross-initial-condition universality of the recovered attractor set. Our results therefore show that cyclic denoising is both a physics-inspired probe of generative landscapes and a practical tool for memorization auditing, with implications for privacy, copyright compliance, and model fingerprinting.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Efficiently Representing Algorithms With Chain-of-Thought Transformers

The increasing popularity of reasoning models – language models that output a series of reasoning or thought tokens before producing an answer – is justified, in part, by theoretical results showing that chain-of-thought (CoT) transformers can simulate Turing machines, and thus perform arbitrary computation. However, the Turing machine, while suitable for complexity-theoretic analysis, is not convenient, intuitive, or efficient for discussing algorithms. Algorithms are typically designed and analyzed at a higher level of abstraction, captured by the Word RAM model with random-access memory and unit-cost operations on $\bigO(\log n)$-bit words. As a result, Word RAM algorithms can be substantially more efficient than their Turing machine counterparts, raising the question: Can CoT transformers efficiently simulate Word RAM algorithms? For instance, can they sort $n$ items in $\bigO(n \log n)$ steps or run Dijkstra's algorithm in $\bigO(E + V \log V)$ steps? We answer affirmatively, up to poly-logarithmic overhead. We first establish this for finite-precision transformers with poly-logarithmic width and rightmost unique hard attention, then strengthen the result to two more practical settings with finite width and log-precision: continuous CoT, where reasoning takes the form of vectors rather than tokens, and a hybrid architecture in which transformer layers sit atop a recurrent (linear RNN) layer. In all three cases, we find that CoT can efficiently simulate any Word RAM algorithm with only a poly-logarithmic overhead in $n$. This overhead reduces to log-square when the Word RAM has a ``flat'' instruction set, and only logarithmic for multiplication-free flat instructions – in stark contrast to known CoT simulations of Turing machines, which require quadratic overhead over Word RAM.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Brain-IT-VQA: From Brain Signals to Answers

Decoding visual content from fMRI signals recorded while a person views images, and specifically answering questions about the seen images, is a long-standing challenge. While significant progress has been made in recent years in visual question answering (VQA) from fMRI, performance remains limited. Moreover, although recent models can make increasingly accurate predictions, they have rarely been used as tools for understanding the structure of visual representations in the brain. We present Brain-IT-VQA, a framework for visual question answering from fMRI. Building on the Brain Interaction Transformer (Brain-IT), our method decodes language tokens from brain activity and integrates them with a language model to answer visual questions. Our model substantially outperforms previous fMRI-based captioning and VQA approaches. We further introduce NSD-VQA, a new dataset and benchmark for visual question answering from fMRI. Unlike existing image-fMRI VQA datasets, which typically provide only a few broad and weakly controlled questions per image, NSD-VQA provides on average 20 question-answer pairs per image across 20 controlled question categories that disentangle multiple levels of visual understanding. This enables more reliable and interpretable evaluation despite limited fMRI test data. Together, Brain-IT-VQA and NSD-VQA provide both a strong predictive framework and a tool for studying brain representations. Using this benchmark, we quantify which forms of visual and semantic information can be reliably decoded from fMRI responses to natural images. We further analyze the contributions of different brain regions across question types.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Passive Generation to Investigation: A Proactive Scientific Peer Review Agent

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating scientific peer review. However, existing approaches often struggle to generate in-depth reviews supported by concrete evidence. We argue that a key limitation is the lack of flexibility to proactively investigate suspicious parts of a paper based on accumulated evidence, as human reviewers do. In this paper, we explore how to enable an LLM-based review agent to perform such proactive investigation. We find that this can be naturally formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and propose ProReviewer, a scientific peer review agent that proactively reviews a paper guided by a maintained, structured review log. The structured review log serves as a workspace for the agent to track evidence and intermediate findings collected during review. Experiments show that ProReviewer with an 8B backbone, trained by supervised fine-tuning and optimized by reinforcement learning, achieves the highest average score across five quality dimensions, outperforming prompt-based methods with much larger frontier LLMs by up to 39% and the strongest fine-tuned baseline by 16% relatively. It also attains the highest win rates against baselines in human evaluation.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedback

We present FronTalk, a benchmark for front-end code generation that pioneers the study of a unique interaction dynamic: conversational code generation with multi-modal feedback. In front-end development, visual artifacts such as sketches, mockups and annotated creenshots are essential for conveying design intent, yet their role in multi-turn code generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the front-end development task and curate FronTalk, a collection of 100 multi-turn dialogues derived from real-world websites across diverse domains such as news, finance, and art. Each turn features both a textual instruction and an equivalent visual instruction, each representing the same user intent. To comprehensively evaluate model performance, we propose a novel agent-based evaluation framework leveraging a web agent to simulate users and explore the website, and thus measuring both functional correctness and user experience. Evaluation of 20 models reveals two key challenges that are under-explored systematically in the literature: (1) a significant forgetting issue where models overwrite previously implemented features, resulting in task failures, and (2) a persistent challenge in interpreting visual feedback, especially for open-source vision-language models (VLMs). We propose a strong baseline to tackle the forgetting issue with AceCoder, a method that critiques the implementation of every past instruction using an autonomous web agent. This approach significantly reduces forgetting to nearly zero and improves the performance by up to 9.3% (56.0% to 65.3%). Overall, we aim to provide a solid foundation for future research in front-end development and the general interaction dynamics of multi-turn, multi-modal code generation. Code and data are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/frontalk

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

High-Fidelity 4D Hand-Object Capture via Multi-View Spatiotemporal Tracking and Physics-Aware Gaussians

The growing demand for high-fidelity 4D hand-object interaction (HOI) data in embodied AI and spatial computing is currently bottlenecked by the reliance on pre-scanned object templates and physical markers. While recent methods have demonstrated promising results in reconstructing 4D hand-object interaction from videos, they are highly sensitive to initial estimates of hand and object poses. Yet, estimating these poses from images is challenging, in particular under severe occlusion which is inherent in hand-object interaction scenarios. We propose a novel system for the robust and accurate reconstruction of hands and objects from synchronized and calibrated multi-view videos without requiring any templates or markers. Our system consists of two main components with key innovations: (1) a multi-view feed-forward transformer model that aggregates cross-view geometry and temporal cues to provide a reliable, metric-consistent initialization for both poses and dense object geometry, and (2) a hand-object physics-aware Gaussian-based optimization framework to refine the initial estimates, integrating tetrahedral constraints, collision refinement, and appearance decomposition to produce physically plausible and visually accurate reconstruction. Validated on public benchmarks and an extensive internal dataset, our pipeline achieves highly robust, artifact-free reconstruction, providing an efficient foundation for automated 4D asset generation. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/HOSTPG/.

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

TriAdReview: Triangular Adversarial Review Architecture for Multi-Model Technical Document Generation

arXiv:2606.15074v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for technical document generation, yet single-model outputs often suffer from over-engineering, security blind spots, and incomplete coverage. We propose TriAdReview, a triangular adversarial review architecture that employs two independent reviewer models (engineering and boundary perspectives) and a triangular judging mechanism to iteratively improve a generator model's output. We evaluate TriAdReview across five benchmark tasks - architecture design, code generation, proposal review, security audit, and requirements analysis - using three configurations: single model (baseline), dual model (single review), and triple model (full system). Results across 75 experiments (n=5 per cell) show that the triple model configuration achieves a 10.1% overall improvement over the single model baseline (26.2 vs. 23.8 out of 50; p

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

On the Benefits of Weight Normalization for Overparameterized Matrix Sensing

arXiv:2510.01175v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While normalization techniques are widely used in deep learning, their theoretical understanding remains relatively limited. In this work, we establish the benefits of (generalized) weight normalization (WN) applied to the overparameterized matrix sensing problem. We prove that WN with Riemannian optimization achieves linear convergence, yielding an exponential speedup over standard methods that do not use WN. Our analysis further demonstrates that both iteration and sample complexity improve polynomially as the level of overparameterization increases. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first characterization of how WN leverages overparameterization for faster convergence in matrix sensing.

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

IV-CoT: Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought for Structure-Aware Text-to-Image Generation

arXiv:2606.24849v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unified multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong text-to-image generation quality, but still struggle with structure-aware prompt following, where object counts, spatial relations, attribute bindings, and coarse layouts must be preserved. We attribute this limitation in part to the entanglement of structural planning and appearance rendering within a single conditioning stream. To address this issue, we propose Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought (IV-CoT), a latent visual reasoning framework for query-conditioned image generation. IV-CoT decomposes the visual conditioning queries into a structural-to-semantic cascade, where structural queries first form a latent visual plan and semantic queries then render appearance conditioned on this plan. To guide the structural queries, we introduce training-only sketch supervision, which encourages them to capture structure from sketches without requiring sketch extraction or intermediate decoding at inference time. IV-CoT performs implicit CoT reasoning in a single forward pass and achieves superior results on GenEval and T2I-CompBench. Visualizations and analyses demonstrate that the learned structural and semantic queries play complementary roles in structure-aware generation.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Illumination with Symmetry-Constrained Random Unitaries

arXiv:2606.15586v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum illumination provides a quantum advantage in detecting weakly reflecting objects embedded in a noisy environment, even when environmental noise destroys most of the initial entanglement. We investigate this advantage using Haar-random probe states constrained to symmetry-resolved subspaces. Employing tools from quantum channel discrimination and asymptotic hypothesis testing, we derive the discrimination exponents associated with Haar-random probe ensembles and identify the role of symmetry in determining their performance. We show that typical states drawn from fixed-charge sectors achieve the same asymptotic quantum-illumination advantage as maximally entangled probes. In particular, we show that the effective thermal-noise suppression and the corresponding Chernoff exponent are governed by the dimension of the accessible symmetry sector. Our results reveal that the operational resource underlying quantum illumination can be generalized from fine-tuned structure of a specific probe state to the existence of a large symmetry-protected correlation subspace. These findings establish a direct connection between quantum illumination, symmetry-resolved typicality, and quantum channel discrimination, and demonstrate that near-optimal quantum hypothesis testing resources can emerge naturally from generic many-body quantum states constrained by conservation laws.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Superconductor-"Metal" Transition of One-dimensional Interacting Bosons with Ohmic Quantum Dissipation

arXiv:2605.30746v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The phase diagram of a system of interacting bosons (Cooper pairs) hoping on a one-dimensional (1D) lattice with onsite phase dissipation describing the Josephson tunneling to a nearby diffusive normal-metal electrode is studied. Starting from the system at commensurate lattice filling, it is shown by a combination of analytical techniques that the phase diagram contains two quantum phases: A dissipative Bose-Einstein condensate (D-BEC) or superconductor with long-range phase coherence, and a dissipative Mott insulator (D-Mott) or "metal" with exponentially decaying phase correlations in space and local imaginary-time correlations decaying as the local pairing correlations of the electrode. The D-Mott/metal phase can be described as a 1D array of dissipative boson puddles, weakly coupled by Josephson tunneling. The puddle size roughly corresponds to the length scale beyond which phase slips suppress phase coherence. The dissipative time-dependent Ginsburg-Landau theory phenomenologically used by Sachdev, Werner, and Troyer [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 92} 237003 (2004)] for the superconductor-metal transition in quasi-1D wires is derived from this microscopic puddle picture. Thus, the criticality of the D-Mott/D-BEC transition is shown to belong to the Wilson-Fisher universality class with dynamical exponent $z\approx 2$. At small doping, the D-Mott/metal phase remains stable due to its finite compressibility, which is computed to leading order in a perturbation expansion of the dissipation strength and the inter-puddle Josephson coupling. At larger doping, using a mapping to a pseudospin chain combined with bosonization, the D-BEC/superconductor phase is the ground state for non-vanishing but arbitrarily small dissipation. Similarities and differences with deconfinement transition of an array 1D bosonic Mott insulators in anisotropic optical lattices are also discussed.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Global and local genetic overlap among ME/CFS, irritable bowel syndrome and psychiatric traits: a hypothesis-generating analysis

Authors:

Background. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) frequently co-occur following infection, yet shared genetic architecture at the locus level has not been systematically characterised. Aims. To estimate global and local genetic correlations between ME/CFS (including infection-onset subgroup), IBS, major depressive disorder (MDD) and loneliness/isolation, and characterise ME/CFS cell-type heritability enrichment. Method. GWAS summary statistics: DecodeME (15,579 ME/CFS; 9,738 infection-onset), FinnGen R9 (9,296 IBS), PGC MDD Wave 2 (45,396) and UK Biobank loneliness (N=455,364). LDSC for global correlations; LAVA for local correlations across 2,495 loci; MAGMA for cell-type enrichment (Descartes Human atlas); coloc.abf for colocalisation. Results. All pairwise global correlations were significant after Bonferroni correction, including ME/CFS-all-MDD (rg=0.598, 95% CI 0.46-0.74) and ME/CFS-all-IBS (rg=0.573, 0.39-0.75). Of 4,232 local tests, 16 reached FDR

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

How fast can you find a good hypothesis?

arXiv:2509.03734v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the hypothesis selection problem, we are given sample and query access to finite set of candidate distributions (hypotheses), $\mathcal{H} = \{H_1, \ldots, H_n\}$, and samples from an unknown distribution $P$, both over a domain $\mathcal{X}$. The goal is to output a distribution $Q$ whose distance to $P$ is comparable to that of the nearest hypothesis in $\mathcal{H}$. Specifically, if the minimum distance is $\mathsf{OPT}$, we aim to output $Q$ such that, with probability at least $1-\delta$, its total variation distance to $P$ is at most $C \cdot \mathsf{OPT} + \varepsilon$. The optimal approximation for proper algorithms (where $Q \in \mathcal{H}$) is $C=3$ using $\Theta(\log(n/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from $P$ and for improper algorithms (where $Q$ is not necessarily in $\mathcal{H}$) is $C=2$ using $\tilde{\Theta}(\log(n/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from $P$. In the improper setting, the algorithm achieving $C=2$ [Bousquet, Braverman, Kol, Efremenko, Moran, FOCS 2021] runs in time which grows polynomially with $|\mathcal{X}|$ – it does not run in finite time for real-valued distributions. A promising path towards improved runtime is to consider improper algorithms which output a mixture $Q$ of the hypotheses as such a distribution can be represented in $n$ words of memory. We show (1) a lower bound that no algorithm which outputs a mixture can achieve approximation better than $C = 3-2/n$ unless the number of samples is polynomial in $|\mathcal{X}|$, as well as (2) an algorithm which runs in time $poly(n)$ and achieves the same approximation guarantee. In the proper setting, [Aliakbarpour, Bun, Smith, NeurIPS 2024] provided an algorithm with $C=3$ running in $\tilde{O}(n/(\delta^3\varepsilon^3))$ time. We improve this time complexity to $\tilde{O}(n/(\delta \varepsilon^2))$, significantly reducing the dependence on the confidence and error parameters.

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

Towards Verifiable Agentic Data Science: Solving Irregular TSQA Via Tool-Grounded Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series data in real-world deployments is overwhelmingly irregular. Observations are asynchronous, missing values are informative rather than random, and sampling frequencies vary across sensors and operational windows. However, existing Time Series Question Answering (TSQA) benchmarks mostly assume regularly sampled inputs, leaving a fundamental gap in understanding how large language models (LLMs) and AI agents perform under irregular conditions. To bridge this gap, we introduce IRTS-ToolBench, a benchmark of 1,700 questions spanning 10 task types across 13 domains. IRTS-ToolBench is designed to be used independently by any researcher working on LLM-based irregular time series analysis, providing standardized inputs and a reproducible evaluation protocol. Code can be found in https://github.com/SanhornC/IRTS-ToolBench.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Interaction and non-Hermiticity controlled transmission in extended Su-Schrieffer-Heeger models

arXiv:2606.15245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the transport characteristics of an extended version of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model with next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) interactions and non-Hermitian onsite energies. We observed that transport in such a system is significantly modified by the NNN interaction and the non-Hermitian terms. The transmission coefficient exhibits oscillatory behavior as the strength of the NNN interaction varies in a fixed-length chain. Moreover, the transmission coefficient also shows oscillation with system size for a fixed strength of the NNN interaction. We find that novel oscillatory behavior of the transmission coefficient, arising form the NNN interaction, is a unique feature of such a model and has not been reported previously. The presence of the non-Hermitian terms also enhances/reduces the transmission coefficient depending on the values of the other system parameters like intra-, inter- and NNN hopping. It appears from our study that both the NNN interaction and the non-Hermiticity introduce significant changes in the transport properties of the extended SSH chain, which are not observed in the standard Hermitian nearest-neighbour variant of the SSH model.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TRACE: Learning to Compute on Circuit Graphs

arXiv:2509.21886v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning to compute, the ability to model the functional behavior of a circuit graph, is a fundamental challenge for graph representation learning. Yet, the dominant paradigm is architecturally mismatched for this task. This flawed assumption, central to mainstream message passing neural networks (MPNNs) and their conventional Transformer-based counterparts, prevents models from capturing the position-aware, hierarchical nature of computation. To resolve this, we introduce TRACE, a new paradigm built on an architecturally sound backbone and a principled learning objective. First, TRACE employs a Hierarchical Transformer that mirrors the step-by-step flow of computation, providing a faithful architectural backbone that replaces the flawed permutation-invariant aggregation. Second, we introduce function shift learning, a novel objective that decouples the learning problem. Instead of predicting the complex global function directly, our model is trained to predict only the function shift, the discrepancy between the true global function and a simple local approximation that assumes input independence. We validate this paradigm on various circuits modalities, including Register Transfer Level graphs, And-Inverter Graphs and post-mapping netlists. Across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks, TRACE substantially outperforms all prior architectures. These results demonstrate that our architecturally-aligned backbone and decoupled learning objective form a more robust paradigm for the fundamental challenge of learning the functional behavior of a circuit graph.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

The Latent Color Subspace: Emergent Order in High-Dimensional Chaos

Text-to-image generation models have advanced rapidly, yet achieving fine-grained control over generated images remains difficult, largely due to limited understanding of how semantic information is encoded. We develop an interpretation of the color representation in the Variational Autoencoder latent space of FLUX.1 [Dev], revealing a structure reflecting Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. We verify our Latent Color Subspace (LCS) interpretation by demonstrating that it can both predict and explicitly control color, introducing a fully training-free method in FLUX based solely on closed-form latent-space manipulation. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/LCS.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Critically Engaged Pragmatism: Scientific Norm and Social, Pragmatist Epistemology for AI Science Evaluation Tools

Authors:

arXiv:2601.09753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI science evaluation tools aim to assess research credibility. As with traditional metrics such as impact factors, their edicts can be decontextualised and repurposed in problematic ways. To address this, I propose Critically-Engaged Pragmatism as a scientific norm enjoining scientific communities to scrutinise the purposes and purpose-specific reliability of AI science evaluation tools. To foster Critically Engaged Pragmatism, creators of AI science evaluation tools should transparently and fully report design, training, and benchmarking details to facilitate assessments of purpose-specific reliability, liability to different types of error, and bias. What count as best practices for the transparent reporting of AI science evaluation tools should be updated as new forms of error, bias, and gamesmanship are discovered. Under this framework, AI science evaluation tools are not objective arbiters of scientific credibility. Rather, they are the object of critical discursive practices that ultimately ground the credibility of scientific communities.

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

Geometry-Preserving Encoder/Decoder in Latent Generative Models

arXiv:2501.09876v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative modeling aims to generate new data samples that resemble a given dataset. When using diffusion models for this task, one of the main challenges is solving the problem in the input space, which tends to be very high-dimensional. To address this, recent approaches solve diffusion models in the latent space through an encoder that maps from the data space to a lower-dimensional latent space, improving training efficiency and achieving state-of-the-art results. The variational autoencoder (VAE) is the most commonly used encoder/decoder framework in this domain, known for its ability to learn latent representations and generate data samples. In this paper, we introduce a novel encoder/decoder framework with theoretical properties distinct from those of the VAE, specifically designed to preserve the geometric structure of the data distribution. We demonstrate the significant advantages of this geometry-preserving encoder in the training process of both the encoder and decoder. Additionally, we provide theoretical results proving convergence of the training process, including convergence guarantees for encoder training, and results showing faster convergence of decoder training when using the geometry-preserving encoder.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Poly-Social Risk for Hypertension Among Black and Latina Women

Background: Hypertension is a leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor prominently influenced by health-related social needs (HRSN). Whether detailed information on HRSN can improve identification of hypertension among minoritized women is unknown. Methods: Black and Latina women aged 18-65 years completed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Accountable Health Communities Screening Tool, assessing 13 HRSN domains. Hypertension was ascertained by a validated EHR-based algorithm or self-report of hypertension. Logistic regression tested associations of HRSN with hypertension. LASSO regression with 10-fold cross-validation was used to derive a poly-social risk score in the training set (random 70%) and tested in the validation set (30%) against a sociodemographic model (age, race, income, education). Results: Among 1302 participants (mean [SD] age 40.1 [11.3] years, 70.4% Black, 44.3% Latina), higher cumulative burden of HRSN was associated with increased odds of hypertension (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] for each additional domain of HRSN: 1.07 [95% CI 1.01-1.14], P=0.02). Food insecurity (aOR 2.30 [1.37-3.87], P= 0.002), lapse in utilities (aOR 1.44 [1.04-1.96], P=0.02), poor concentration (aOR 1.57 [1.13-2.17], P=0.007), and social isolation (aOR 1.77 [1.14-2.73], P=0.01) were associated with hypertension. In the validation set, the poly-social risk score did not improve discrimination for hypertension vs. the sociodemographic model (AUC 0.76 [95% CI 0.71-0.81] vs. AUC 0.80 [0.75-0.85]). Conclusion: In this cross-sectional analysis of Black and Latina women, greater cumulative social disadvantage was associated with hypertension. While inclusion of HRSN did not improve hypertension prediction beyond conventional sociodemographic indices, findings may inform targeted interventions among minorities at cardiometabolic risk.