Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13452

Examining the Cognitive Gap Between Authors and Peer Reviewers on Academic Paper Novelty

Authors:

Novelty is a crucial metric for assessing the quality of academic papers. Scholars strive to highlight the novel aspects of their work, particularly in the title, abstract, and introduction. Peer review, serving as the gatekeeper of scientific rigor, rigorously evaluates the novelty of papers, yet a cognitive gap may exist between author self-promotion and reviewer evaluation. To investigate this, we analyzed 15,328 academic papers published in Nature Communications from 2016 to 2021, along with their peer-review comments. We found that both reviewers and authors emphasize result-oriented innovation, with reviewers adopting a more comprehensive evaluation perspective. Furthermore, by examining promotional intensity against inherent paper novelty, we found that its effect depends on the paper's actual innovation level. Highly innovative papers benefit from stronger promotional language, receiving more positive evaluations. We also found that promotional language significantly correlates with reviewer disagreement on novelty specifically for papers of moderate innovativeness, whereas it has negligible impact for papers with either very high or very low novelty. This reveals how promotional language operates most prominently in the gray area of academic evaluation.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12088

Debiasing Without Protected Attributes: Latent Concept Erasure from Textual Profiles

Authors:

Shun Shao ↗Zheng Zhao ↗Anna Korhonen ↗Yftah Ziser ↗Shay B. Cohen ↗

Most fairness research in NLP assumes direct access to protected attributes such as gender, race, or nationality. In practice, however, such information is often unavailable due to privacy constraints, missing metadata, or legal restrictions, even though models may infer it from indirect textual cues. This raises a key question: can debiasing succeed without direct access to sensitive attributes? We propose H-SAL, which performs post-hoc concept and attribute erasure using self-description text as an implicit debiasing signal. To support this setting, we introduce a multi-domain Stack Exchange-based fairness benchmark for helpfulness prediction that includes both explicit and implicit signals, enabling comparison between standard debiasing with protected labels and debiasing without access to sensitive information. Across encoder and decoder-only language models, we find that implicit self-description often matches or outperforms explicit-label-based debiasing. Our results broaden representation-level fairness research and provide a new benchmark for studying debiasing under realistic data constraints.

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13252

To GAN or Not To GAN: Segmentation Analysis on Mars DEM

Authors:

Douglas Dziedzorm Agbeve ↗Aditya V. Handrale ↗Salim Fares ↗Seif E. Idani ↗

arXiv:2606.13252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To better understand Martian Surface, which is needed to enable Rovers navigate Mars with ease, it is necessary to be able to determine the location of mounds. Detecting and studying these morphologies can also help us find evidence of extraterrestrial life, in this case, more specifically, water or signs of life conducive environments. Detection of mounds was done by manually mapping morphological parameters onto Digital Elevation Models. This paper solves the problem by automatically detecting and or predicting mounds on Mars using Neural Network based Semantic Segmentation methodologies. This is done by using supervised semantic segmentation model and generative adversarial approach. A comparison of the approaches shows that adding extra artificially generated data did not improve the result.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15527

Selective Synergistic Learning for Video Object-Centric Learning

Authors:

WonJun Moon ↗Jae-Pil Heo ↗

Typical video object-centric learning (VOCL) approaches employ slot-based frameworks that rely on reconstruction-driven encoder-decoder architectures, where learning is mediated by two spatial maps: attention maps from the encoder and object maps from the decoder. As these two distinct maps exhibit different properties, a recent dense alignment strategy attempted to reconcile this discrepancy by enforcing agreement across all spatio-temporal patches via contrastive learning. However, this indiscriminate alignment inadvertently propagates the inherent weaknesses of each module, such as noisy encoder predictions and blurred decoder boundaries. Moreover, computing dense similarities across all pairs incurs a computational cost quadratic in the total number of spatio-temporal patches, severely limiting scalability. Motivated by this, we propose Selective Synergistic Learning (SSync). Instead of exhaustive patch-to-patch alignment, SSync prevents error propagation by selectively distilling only the most reliable cues: leveraging the encoder strictly for boundary refinement and the decoder for interior denoising. This is realized via a pseudo-labeling with linear complexity, eliminating the need for quadratic spatial comparisons. Also, to prevent the reinforcement of architectural biases like slot redundancy, we introduce a transitive pseudo-label merging that consolidates overlapping slots based on spatio-temporal activation consistency. Extensive studies demonstrate that SSync improves decomposition quality and serves as a versatile, plug-and-play module while also exhibiting exceptional robustness to slot configurations. Code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SSync.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15623

Surprise-Guided MergeSort: Budget-Efficient Human-in-the-Loop Ranking via Adaptive Comparison Scheduling

Authors:

Yujin Park ↗Haejun Chung ↗Ikbeom Jang ↗

arXiv:2606.15623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pairwise comparison is the gold standard for subjective ranking tasks; however, exhaustive annotation requires a massive number of human comparisons ($O(n^2)$). While sorting-based methods have reduced this burden to $O(n\log n)$, they still require expensive human judgment for every single comparison. To further improve annotation efficiency, we propose leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM) not as an annotator replacement, but as a question prioritizer to identify which comparisons genuinely require human judgment. The proposed Surprise-Guided MergeSort (SGS) framework achieves this through three integrated components: (1) a bottom-up MergeSort scheduler that structures comparisons and exploits transitivity, (2) a composite Surprise Scorer – combining position-bias-cancelled VLM confidence, Elo gap, and vote entropy – to quantify comparison ambiguity, and (3) an adaptive budget allocator that routes high-surprise pairs to humans while automating low-surprise pairs via transitivity inference. Validation was conducted on six diverse benchmarks spanning text similarity (STS-B, BIOSSES, SICKR-STS) and image quality assessment (KonIQ-10k, TID2013, LIVE Challenge). SGS effectively identified and skipped up to 535 non-informative comparisons per session. Consequently, it achieved Kendall's $\tau{\times}100$ improvements of $+6$ to $+12$ over Active Elo under the same total budget. These results demonstrate that combining VLM-guided surprise metrics with algorithmic sorting provides a generally consistent accuracy-efficiency trade-off across diverse domains.

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06.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15493

Model Stealing Through the Lens of Model Multiplicity

Authors:

Eliott Baltz ↗Satoshi Hara ↗Ulrich A\"ivodji ↗

arXiv:2606.15493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model stealing attacks, where adversaries create high-fidelity surrogate models, are a significant threat to the intellectual property of machine learning services. Conventional wisdom suggests these surrogates could provide adversaries with economic leverage comparable to the original service providers. This paper challenges this assumption by evaluating model stealing attacks beyond mere fidelity to the target model. Because query-based extraction provides only partial supervision of the target's input-output behavior, the surrogate is not uniquely identified: many near-optimal surrogates can achieve comparable fidelity while differing in deployment-relevant properties. Instead of performing a classic learning-based model stealing attack, we compute the Rashomon Set (i.e., the set of almost-equally-accurate models) of surrogate models, and evaluate its diversity using multiplicity metrics (ambiguity, discrepancy, and Rashomon Capacity) and group fairness metrics. Across tabular, medical imaging, and NLP tasks, our experiments on real-world datasets reveal that despite exhibiting similar fidelity to the target model, surrogate models can display significant variances in other critical performance metrics. These findings cast doubt on the presumed equivalence between high-fidelity surrogates and the target model in practical deployment scenarios.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15786

Domain-Guided Prompting of the Segment Anything Model for Seismic Interpretation: The Role of Attributes, Visualization, and Hybrid Prompts

Authors:

Aniq Ahmad ↗Heather Bedle ↗Ahmad Mustafa ↗

The advent of large pretrained foundation models for computer vision has significantly improved the efficiency of visual data interpretation. The Segment Anything Model (SAM), in particular, offers powerful zero shot segmentation capabilities through prompt based interaction, thus making it a promising tool for seismic interpretation. However, most existing applications of SAM rely on fine tuning for specific geological targets, which requires extensive labeled data, incurs high computational cost, and often compromises the model's generalization capability. In this study, we introduce a principled framework for zero shot adaptation of foundation models to seismic data. The framework is built on two key components: (1) aligning seismic attributes and visualization choices (e.g., colormaps) with the geological target of interest, and (2) employing a hybrid prompting strategy that combines sparse user defined point prompts with dense mask prompts derived from SAM's internal feature activations. We systematically evaluate this framework across multiple geological targets, datasets, prompt configurations, and seismic attribute representations. Our results demonstrate that geologic target aware selection of seismic attributes and colormaps, combined with hybrid prompting, enhances the separability of geological features and improves boundary delineation and segmentation accuracy relative to point based prompting alone. Our findings show that, when these components are jointly applied, SAM can achieve competitive segmentation performance in a fully zero shot setting, thereby eliminating the need to retrain SAM for each geologic feature. This work establishes a practical and scalable pathway to leverage foundation models in seismic interpretation, reducing reliance on labeled data while preserving model generality.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2508.10523

Reasoning in Computer Vision: Taxonomy, Models, Tasks, and Methodologies

Authors:

Ayushman Sarkar ↗Zhenyu Yu ↗Mohd Yamani Idna Idris ↗

Visual reasoning matters for many computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite progress in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys typically cover only one part of the problem, such as visual question answering, scene-graph generation, neuro-symbolic AI, or multimodal chain-of-thought, and rarely analyze reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols together. This survey addresses that gap. Following a structured literature review, we group visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and examine how each is implemented across methods that range from graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems to reasoning with vision-language models (VLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including visual chain-of-thought, visual programming, and tool-augmented and test-time reasoning. We then review evaluation protocols for functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and we analyze their limits in generalizability, reproducibility, faithfulness, and explanatory power. We also identify open challenges: scaling to complex scenes, integrating symbolic and neural paradigms more deeply, the shortage of comprehensive benchmarks, language-prior shortcuts and hallucination in foundation models, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we set out a research agenda for vision systems and argue that connecting perception and reasoning is necessary for transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain models, especially in high-stakes settings such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2505.01869

Visual enhancement and 3D representation for underwater scenes: a review

Authors:

Guoxi Huang ↗Haoran Wang ↗Brett Seymour ↗Evan Kovacs ↗John Ellerbroc ↗Dave Blackham ↗Nantheera Anantrasirichai ↗

Underwater visual enhancement (UVE) and underwater 3D reconstruction pose significant challenges in computer vision and AI-based tasks due to complex imaging conditions in aquatic environments. Despite the development of numerous enhancement algorithms, a comprehensive and systematic review covering both UVE and underwater 3D reconstruction remains absent. To advance research in these areas, we present an in-depth review from multiple perspectives. First, we introduce the fundamental physical models, highlighting the peculiarities that challenge conventional techniques. We survey advanced methods for visual enhancement and 3D reconstruction specifically designed for underwater scenarios. The paper assesses various approaches from non-learning methods to advanced data-driven techniques, including Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting, discussing their effectiveness in handling underwater distortions. Finally, we conduct both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of state-of-the-art UVE and underwater 3D reconstruction algorithms across multiple benchmark datasets. Finally, we highlight key research directions for future advancements in underwater vision.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12373

Verifiable Environments Are LEGO Bricks: Recursive Composition for Reasoning Generalization

Authors:

Hao Xiang ↗Qiaoyu Tang ↗Le Yu ↗Yaojie Lu ↗Xianpei Han ↗Ben He ↗Le Sun ↗Bowen Yu ↗Peng Wang ↗Hongyu Lin ↗Dayiheng Liu ↗

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with verifiable environments has emerged as a powerful approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While prior research demonstrates that scaling environment quantity improves RL performance, existing manual or individual construction methods suffer from linear scaling limits, thereby hindering scalable reasoning generalization. This paper introduces RACES (Recursive Automated Composition for Environment Scaling), a framework that conceptualizes verifiable environments as composable building blocks that can be recursively assembled. The key insight is that when the codomain (output type) of one environment matches the domain (input type) of another, they can be automatically fused into a new verifiable environment, enabling recursive composition. RACES is implemented with 300 individual environments and defines a set of composition operators (\textsc{SEQUENTIAL}, \textsc{PARALLEL}, \textsc{SORT}, and \textsc{SELECT}) that induce diverse reasoning patterns. Extensive experiments show that RL training on these composite environments consistently enhances reasoning generalization. Specifically, RACES improves DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B by an average of 3.1 points (from 48.2 to 51.3) and boosts Qwen3-14B performance from 58.8 to 61.1 on six benchmarks, which are unseen during the construction of training environments. Moreover, RACES achieves performance comparable to training on 300 individual environments using only 50 base environments, demonstrating significant efficiency in environment utilization.

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17523

Beyond IGO-Flow: Toward Convergence Analysis of IGO in Continuous Spaces

Authors:

Ryosuke Kimura ↗Youhei Akimoto ↗

arXiv:2606.17523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information-Geometric Optimization (IGO) provides a unified framework for black-box optimization by interpreting the adaptation of a search distribution as a natural gradient update. Despite its conceptual importance, the convergence theory of IGO remains limited: most existing results concern continuous-time idealizations such as the IGO flow, rather than discrete-time updates with non-infinitesimal learning rates. In this paper, we study discrete-time IGO in continuous spaces, formulated as natural gradient updates in the expectation-parameter coordinates of an exponential family. In particular, we analyze IGO over the multivariate Gaussian family on strongly convex quadratic objective functions. Our analysis covers a setting that simultaneously incorporates full covariance adaptation, a fixed positive learning rate, and quantile-based weights. In this setting, we prove that the covariance matrix converges to the zero matrix. We further show that the mean vector converges to the global optimum, provided that the condition number of the appropriately scaled covariance matrix is bounded at sufficiently frequent iterations. These results advance the convergence theory of IGO and help bridge the gap between the mathematical theory of IGO and practical covariance-adaptive search methods such as CMA-ES.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12171

Beyond Dark Knowledge: Mixup-Based Distillation for Reliable Predictions

Authors:

Jos\'e Medina ↗Paul Honeine ↗Abdelaziz Bensrhair ↗Amnir Hadachi ↗

Knowledge Distillation (KD) and mixup have proven effective at inducing smoothness in class boundaries; KD captures inherent class relationships in probability distributions, and mixup enforces them through convex combinations of inputs. Their interaction, however, remains poorly understood, particularly when mixup is applied only during student training. In this setting, the teacher is queried on inputs drawn from a vicinal distribution it never saw during training, a controlled mismatch whose effect on knowledge transfer has not been characterised. We show that this mismatch causes the teacher's supervisory signal to be dominated by distributional confusion rather than inter-class structure. Despite it, the student does not merely imitate the teacher: it independently acquires greater linearity in the vicinal region, a structural property that the teacher lacks, and goes beyond dark-knowledge transfer. KD with mixup consistently improves student accuracy and reduces overconfidence by an order of magnitude relative to the baseline, across CIFAR and ImageNet with varying-capacity teachers. Crucially, calibration propagates from teacher to student independently of accuracy transfer, and temperature scaling governs a measurable accuracy-calibration trade-off that becomes more pronounced under vicinal training. These results reframe mixup distillation not as a degraded version of standard KD, but as a richer transfer channel that simultaneously shapes discriminative performance, uncertainty estimation, and representational geometry.

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13.

PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:2ca34b27e8af67c0c406d1c5ee089d5b

Comparisons of core component delivery in cardiac rehabilitation programs by country income classification and decade based on the 2025 Global Audit Update: A survey study

Authors:

Gabriela Lima de Melo Ghisi ↗

by Gabriela Lima de Melo Ghisi, Rachael P. Carson, Karam Turk Adawi, Rongjing Ding, Warner M. Mampuya, Mariya P. Jiandani, Jimena Martinez, Monserrat Cruz Rivero, Claudia V. Anchique, Dinah L. van Schalkwijk, Jonathan Gallagher, Buket Akinci, Dion Candelaria, Jirapa Champaiboon, Daniel F. Quesada-Chaves, Tone M. Norekvål, Iwona Szadkowska, Borut Jug, Evangelia Kouidi, Marta Supervia, Won-Seok Kim, Chamila Mettananda, Lilian Mbau, Gulsim T. Aimakova, Sherry L. Grace, on behalf of the ICCPR Global Cardiac Rehabilitation Audit Update Investigators Background Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains a leading global health burden. Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is essential to reducing morbidity and improving patient outcomes. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, CR delivery worldwide has evolved, yet these changes have not been systematically charactemkjrized. The objective of this study was to characterize globally: (1) the delivery of core CR components, including risk factors assessed, patient education practices, and program resources; (2) differences in these elements by country income classification and relative to the initial 2016 Global CR Audit. Methods and findings A cross-sectional Audit update was conducted. Program-level data were collected from May 1st to September 1st 2025 using a REDCap survey adapted from previous Audits. Eligible respondents were leads of phase II/post-discharge CR programs providing at least an initial assessment, structured aerobic exercise, and ≥1 additional core component. ICCPR associations and local leaders supported program identification. Main outcomes were core components delivered (10 assessed), risk factors assessed (14 assessed), patient education dose (hours/patient/program), and program resources (17 assessed). Generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) tested differences by income classification and (when applicable) changes since 2016. Of 7,025 programs identified globally, 1,505 (62% median country response rate) initiated a survey from 90/113 (80%) countries with CR. The median number of core components offered was 8/program (p25, p75 = 6, 10), with upper-middle income countries offering significantly more components overall (median = 9), and also high-income countries offering more than low-income countries (8 versus 6, p

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14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2603.12231

Temporal Straightening for Latent Planning

Authors:

Ying Wang ↗Oumayma Bounou ↗Gaoyue Zhou ↗Randall Balestriero ↗Tim G. J. Rudner ↗Yann LeCun ↗Mengye Ren ↗

arXiv:2603.12231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning good representations is essential for latent planning with world models. While pretrained visual encoders produce strong semantic visual features, they are not tailored to planning and contain information irrelevant – or even detrimental – to planning. Inspired by the perceptual straightening hypothesis in human visual processing, we introduce temporal straightening to improve representation learning for latent planning. Using a curvature regularizer that encourages locally straightened latent trajectories, we jointly learn an encoder and a predictor of a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world model. We show that reducing curvature this way makes the Euclidean distance in latent space a better proxy for the geodesic distance and improves the conditioning of the planning objective. We demonstrate empirically that temporal straightening makes gradient-based planning more stable and yields significantly higher success rates across a suite of goal-reaching tasks. Our code is available at https://agenticlearning.ai/temporal-straightening.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17973

Fine-tuning LLMs for Passive Depression Severity Estimation from AI Mental Health Dialogue

Authors:

Olivier Tieleman ↗Ziyi Zhu ↗Ting Su ↗Samuel J. Bell ↗Thomas D. Hull ↗Caitlin A. Stamatis ↗

Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and early detection of symptom change is essential for timely intervention. Validated instruments such as the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) support symptom monitoring at scale, but real-world completion rates are low, introducing response bias and systematic missingness. Passive approaches that infer severity from routinely generated data could close this gap. We address this by predicting PHQ-9 total scores directly from transcripts of conversations between users and an AI mental health application, requiring only conversation text and no additional clinical data. We fine-tune a Qwen3.5-27B backbone with a regression head, augment 3,111 ground-truth labels with pseudolabels generated by a reasoning model (Claude Opus) and iteratively trained intermediate models, for a combined dataset of 6,283 users. On a held-out test set of 842 users, our best model achieves MAE = 2.6, RMSE = 4.0, Pearson r = 0.80, and AUC = 0.91 at the PHQ-9 >= 10 clinical threshold. We also find AUC > 0.87 at every severity threshold from PHQ-9 >= 3 to PHQ-9 >= 24, demonstrating that the model captures depression severity across the full clinical spectrum. This work opens the door to passive, continuous symptom monitoring in AI mental health platforms, without requiring users to complete self-report measures.

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16.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17894

Demultiplexing Generalized Information via Quantum Transmission Lines

Authors:

Soham Sau ↗Anna Jen\v{c}ov\'a ↗Tamal Guha ↗

arXiv:2606.17894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Demultiplexers are the fundamental primitives of network architecture, enabling perfect routing of an input classical signal to a designated one, among multiple output ports. Quantum transmission lines, having access to the quantum systems directly, are able to transmit both the classical and quantum information encoded in quantum systems. A natural question therefore emerges that whether the scrambled classical and quantum information in a quantum system can be perfectly demultiplexed in the designated classical and quantum output ports? Here we answer this question by introducing a quantum to quantum-classical device, namely the quantum demultiplexer (Q-DEMUX). We characterize the class of Q-DEMUXs enabling perfect routing of both the classical and the quantum information along with their simple circuit realizations. Our results highlight an explicit connection between the strength of a Q-DEMUX with the incompatibility of quantum instruments. Finally, we extend the notion in a stronger variant where the sender is oblivious regarding the nature of the data to be transmitted through the Q-DEMUX.

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17.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:b09d8b1d795c4c84d6f6cc882a392862

Bayesian modeling of longitudinal metatranscriptomes of broiler meat spoilage microbiomes shows shared predictive signature associated with spoilage at refrigerated temperatures

Authors:

Nushi ↗Manninen ↗Johansson ↗Honkela ↗Björkroth ↗

Microbial spoilage of packaged meat is driven by complex microbial succession and related metabolic activity, yet conventional shelf-life assessment is mainly based on shelf-life studies relying on culturing and sensory analysis. In routine quality assurance, results are obtained retrospectively, and they are only indirectly linked to the metabolic activity related to sensory deterioration. Functional, time informative approaches that capture the active metabolic state of the spoilage microbiome and predict the rate of spoilage are lacking. We developed a censoring-aware Gaussian process (CAGP) framework to model longitudinal pathway expression profiles from broiler meat metatranscriptomes collected over consecutive storage days at 4 or 6{degrees}C. Samples were annotated using odor-based sensory scores defining fresh, early-spoilage, and late-spoilage phases. Because observed zeros in pathway-level data may reflect non-detection rather than true absence, the model treats low values as left-censored observations below a detection threshold while estimating smooth temporal trajectories with uncertainty. In leave-one-out prediction within the 4{degrees}C time series, predicted sampling days differed from the true days by an average of 0.43 days, and predicted spoilage phases agreed with the sensory classification. Trajectories learned at 4{degrees}C also transferred to an independent 6{degrees}C time series at the spoilage-phase level, suggesting that shared functional spoilage programs are preserved despite temperature-dependent changes in spoilage rate. Cross-entropy ranking further identified pathway modules carrying time- and phase-informative signals across temperatures. Overall, this framework provides a probabilistic approach for linking metatranscriptomic functional dynamics to sensory spoilage progression, supporting shelf-life assessment beyond retrospective microbial enumeration.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13707

Orchestra-o1: Omnimodal Agent Orchestration

Authors:

Fan Zhang ↗Vireo Zhang ↗Shengju Qian ↗Haoxuan Li ↗Hao Wu ↗Jinyang Wu ↗Donghao Zhou ↗Zhihong Zhu ↗Zheng Lian ↗Xin Wang ↗Pheng-Ann Heng ↗

The recent success of agent swarms has shifted the paradigm of large language model (LLM)-based agents from single-agent workflows to multi-agent systems, highlighting the importance of agent orchestration for task decomposition and collaboration. However, existing orchestration frameworks are limited to a narrow set of modalities and struggle to generalize to more complex settings where heterogeneous modalities coexist and interact. This limitation becomes particularly pronounced in omnimodal scenarios, where tasks require the unified understanding and coordination of diverse inputs such as text, image, audio, and video. In this work, we propose Orchestra-o1, an omnimodal agent orchestration framework designed to support efficient agent collaboration across multiple modalities. Orchestra-o1 introduces a unified orchestration mechanism that enables modality-aware task decomposition, online sub-agent specialization, and parallel sub-task execution. This scalable design allows agent systems to effectively tackle complex real-world tasks involving heterogeneous information sources, surpassing the second-best approach by 10.3% accuracy on the OmniGAIA benchmark. Furthermore, we introduce decision-aligned group relative policy optimization (DA-GRPO), an efficient agentic reinforcement learning approach for training Orchestra-o1-8B, which also achieves state-of-the-art performance against all existing open-source omnimodal agents.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2604.09737

STaR-DRO: Stateful Tsallis Reweighting for Group-Robust Structured Prediction

Authors:

Samah Fodeh ↗Ganesh Puthiaraju ↗Elyas Irankhah ↗Afshan Khan ↗Sreeraj Ramachandran ↗Linhai Ma ↗Srivani Talakokkul ↗Sarah Schellhorn ↗

arXiv:2604.09737v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structured prediction with large language models requires outputs that are label-accurate, ontology-constrained, structurally valid, and evidence-grounded under label imbalance and heterogeneous group difficulty. We present a unified framework for ontology-constrained generation. First, we introduce a modular prompt-engineering architecture combining XML-style structure, expert disambiguation rules, chain-of-thought reasoning, metadata-aware decision logic, schema contracts, and a self-validation gate. It targets recurrent in-context failures, including format drift, label ambiguity, evidence hallucination, and metadata-conditioned confusion. Second, we propose STaR-DRO, combining Tsallis mirror ascent, sparse entmax-style primal mapback, EMA-smoothed group-loss tracking, rescaled ascent signals, and bounded excess-only multipliers. Unlike conventional DRO, which relies on dense Shannon-entropy exponentiated-gradient updates, can introduce high-variance stochastic reweighting, assigns positive adversarial mass to groups that are not persistently hard, and incurs costs through simplex competition, STaR-DRO upweights only persistently hard groups without suppressing easier ones. We evaluate the framework on EPPC Miner, a clinically grounded high-stakes structured-prediction task requiring hierarchical label prediction and evidence-span extraction from patient-provider secure messages. Across 1B-70B Llama models, prompt engineering improves zero-shot extraction, yielding an average label F1 gain of +14.46 and a Span F1 gain of +17.40. Building on supervised fine-tuning, STaR-DRO further improves accuracy and robustness, increasing average label F1 by +1.08 and +2.20 while reducing mean groupwise validation cross-entropy by 21.3% and 14.8% relative to SFT and standard DRO, respectively. These results advance reliable automated communication mining for patient-centered clinical care analysis.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17436

UoU: A Universal Fingerprint Foundation Model Based on Large-Scale Unsupervised Learning

Authors:

Xiongjun Guan ↗Jianjiang Feng ↗Jie Zhou ↗

Fingerprint recognition is still dominated by task-specific pipelines, where enhancement, structural parsing, alignment, and matching are optimized in isolation. Although effective in narrow settings, this design limits representation reuse across sensors, qualities, and downstream applications. We therefore present UoU, short for ``a Universal fingerprint foundation model based on large-scale Unsupervised learning,'' which reframes fingerprint feature extraction as a domain-specific foundation-model problem. UoU is organized around a multi-level representation hierarchy spanning image restoration, structural fields, semantic tokens, point-level biometric entities, and compact global descriptors. Its training recipe combines a supervised cold start on precise annotations, large-scale weakly supervised refinement, and large-scale unsupervised consolidation, with the latter two stages iterated during large-scale training so that weak supervision broadens semantic coverage while unsupervised learning stabilizes correspondences, invariances, and representation geometry. Rather than treating fingerprint imagery as generic texture, UoU exploits domain-specific symmetries and intermediate structure, including orientation flow, periodic ridge patterns, sparse biometric entities, and spatial equivariance. The framework is intentionally architecture-agnostic: while the present study includes an initial transformer-based structured-prediction instantiation, the broader design supports multi-task learning, scalable model configurations, and downstream specialization for matching, alignment, enhancement, registration, and related fingerprint applications. This paper presents the technical motivation, system design, and validation protocol of UoU, and part of the baseline implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/UoU.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17821

DecoSearch: Complexity-Aware Routing and Plan-Level Repair for Text-to-SQL

Authors:

Esteban Schafir ↗Xu Zheng ↗Hojat Allah Salehi ↗Zhuomin Chen ↗Mo Sha ↗Wei Cheng ↗Dongsheng Luo ↗

arXiv:2606.17821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in translating natural language to SQL, yet existing methods still falter on complex queries requiring multi-step, data-aware reasoning. We introduce DecoSearch, a training-free framework that addresses this by routing each query to the appropriate level of reasoning effort. A lightweight Schema Selector first prunes the full database schema to the relevant tables and columns. An LLM Judger then decides whether the question requires decomposition: straightforward questions follow a direct generation path and complex ones are escalated to a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of atomic sub-questions, each solved by a targeted SQL generation step. A RAG component grounds the decomposer with semantically similar training examples, and a Topology Refiner restructures the reasoning plan when execution failures signal a flawed decomposition rather than a fixable SQL error. DecoSearch achieves 70.53% execution accuracy on BIRD and 88.31% on Spider with a DeepSeek backbone, surpassing all training-free baselines while consuming an order of magnitude fewer tokens than competing methods. It also functions as a model-agnostic wrapper, consistently improving fine-tuned SQL generation backbones without any modification to the pipeline.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18108

Querying an astronomical database using large language models: the ALeRCE text-to-SQL system

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a text-to-SQL (structured query language) system based on large language models (LLMs) using in-context learning and apply it to the Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events (ALeRCE) astronomical database. ALeRCE is a community broker for the Zwicky Transient Facility and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The system enables users to query the database in natural language (NL) and generates executable SQL queries. To develop and evaluate the system, we constructed a dataset of 110 NL/SQL pairs. We propose a step-by-step generation framework comprising four modules: schema linking, query classification, prompt decomposition, and self-correction. The performance of thirteen LLMs is evaluated using in-context learning and prompt engineering techniques. Text-to-SQL performance is assessed using the perfect-match (PM) rate for row identifiers (e.g., object identifiers) and column identifiers (i.e., column names). The proposed step-by-step framework consistently outperforms a direct-inference baseline, while the self-correction module consistently reduces execution errors. For Claude Opus 4.6, PM performance on row (column) identifiers is high for simple queries, reaching 0.97 (0.94), and decreases with query complexity to 0.44 (0.72) for medium queries and 0.59 (0.49) for hard queries. Among the thirteen evaluated models, the best-performing LLMs for the text-to-SQL task are Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash, and GPT-5.2-Codex.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13858

Mood-Aware Music Recommendation: Integrating User Affective Signals into Ranking Systems

Authors:

Terence Zeng ↗Abhishek K. Umrawal ↗

arXiv:2606.13858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommendation systems are essential in modern music streaming platforms due to the vast amount of available content. While collaborative filtering is widely used to suggest items based on the preferences of others with similar patterns, it performs poorly in domains where user-item interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based filtering is an alternative approach that examines the qualities of the items themselves. Genre, instrumentation, and lyrics have been explored; however, relatively little attention has been given to emotion recognition. Since a user's emotional state strongly influences their music choice, incorporating mood signals offers a promising direction for personalization. In this work, we propose a mood-conditioned ranking framework that integrates user affective signals into the recommendation process via softmax-based sampling in the energy-valence space. We evaluate the approach via single-blind experiments in which participants compare recommendations from the proposed system against a baseline. The results indicate improved perceived recommendation quality, providing preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of incorporating mood-based inputs into music recommendations.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19719

Closing the Calibration Gap in Semantic Caching

Authors:

Aditeya Baral ↗Radoslav Ralev ↗Iliya Sotirov Zhechev ↗Srijith Rajamohan ↗Jen Agarwal ↗

Semantic caching cuts LLM inference costs by serving a cached response to semantically similar queries. Standard practice evaluates these systems using PR-AUC, a metric that only measures how well scores rank and ignores whether they are usable at a fixed threshold. We show this mismatch leads to systematically poor deployment choices, as models with the highest PR-AUC are often the worst in operation. We introduce Precision-Cache Hit Ratio (P-CHR) AUC, a cache-aware metric that measures precision across cache utilization levels, and Calibration Retention Rate (CRR), which captures how much offline ranking quality survives at deployment. We decompose the operational gap between offline and deployed quality into a recoverable calibration component and an irreducible structural component fixed by the dataset's positive rate. Our experiments show that the calibration gap is governed by the training objective rather than data scale, and post-hoc calibration only partially closes it. Ultimately, model selection for semantic caching is a calibration problem, not a ranking one, and measuring it is the first step to closing the gap.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2503.23688

Mapping Geopolitical Bias in 11 Large Language Models: A Bilingual, Dual-Framing Analysis of U.S.-China Tensions

Authors:

William Guey ↗Wei Zhang ↗Pierrick Bougault ↗Vitor D. de Moura ↗Jos\'e O. Gomes ↗

Large language models are how hundreds of millions of people now encounter contested political questions, raising a subtle measurement problem: a model that simply agrees with whatever it is told can masquerade as biased, contaminating any claim that models hold political opinions. We address this by importing balanced keying from survey psychometrics, posing each proposition and its swapped reverse and signing the response so acquiescence cancels and genuine conviction accumulates. The result is a reproducible, quantitative instrument that maps geopolitical stance across 11 models and 2 languages (19,712 responses). Developer origin, query language and issue domain emerge as three near-equal, additive factors; every model, including those built in the United States, leans more Pro-China in Mandarin; and two models with identical agreement bias are told apart, one neutral, one biased. We release it as an open, interactive tool that extends to any contested-opinion domain.

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