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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Multimodal Brain Tumour Classification Using Feature Fusion

Clinicians diagnose brain tumors by synthesizing patient symptoms, medical history, and quantitative imaging data from modalities such as MRI and CT scans into a unified clinical judgement. However, most deep learning models rely on MRI/CT images alone, failing to replicate the clinicians multimodal reasoning. We explore a two-branch multimodal network combining raw MRI scans with 91 extracted radiomic features (intensity, texture, shape, and boundary descriptors) to classify brain tumors into glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no-tumor. A pre-trained CNN backbone encodes the image stream, whereas a dedicated MLP encodes the radiomic stream. Both streams are fused via concatenation, gated, or bidirectional cross-modal attention strategies. Across nine experimental runs on a balanced 7,200 image dataset, all multimodal configurations outperform unimodal baselines with gated fusion achieving the best accuracy of 96.13%.

02.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Heterogeneous suppressive effect of <i>Wolbachia</i> incompatible insect technique coupled with sterile insect technique across time and historical <i>Ae. aegypti</i> abundance - using distributional synthetic controls

Authors:

by Yichen Zhai, Chia-Chen Chang, Zhiyong Xi, Cheong Huat Tan, Lee Ching Ng, Jue Tao Lim Background Biological control tools such as Wolbachia incompatible-insect technique, are a promising class of interventions to modify and suppress Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to reduce risk of Aedes-borne diseases. Due to the spatial nature of the intervention, intervention effects can be spatio-temporally heterogeneous. Yet, most evaluations of field-based technologies rely on average treatment effects, which preclude characterization and understanding of treatment effect heterogeneities and the factors influencing it. Methods Here, we developed a causal inference framework using distributional synthetic controls to explicitly account for spatio-temporal trap-level mosquito abundance data to ascertain the entomological efficacy of Wolbachia in suppressing Ae. aegypti abundance. This method is able to construct counterfactual distributions of intervened areas, provide detailed comparisons to actual distributions and quantify treatment effects of the intervention on mosquito abundance over different quantiles. By employing our framework to trap-level mosquito abundance data from 57,990 unique mosquito traps routinely maintained and measured twice a week, and a large-scale field trial of Wolbachia incompatible-insect technique coupled with sterile insect technique (IIT-SIT) in Singapore, we (1) quantified heterogeneous treatment effects for IIT-SIT across the time-since-intervention, over the traps’ historical mosquito abundance, over calendar time, (2) quantified whether elimination of wild-type Aedes aegypti was possible in intervention locations and (3) addressed if suppressive effects in spillover locations adjacent to directly intervened locations were heterogeneous. Results IIT-SIT interventions led to a strong suppressive effect on adult Aedes aegypti abundance. From the onset of intervention in directly treated locations, sector-specific intervention effectiveness (IE) ranged from 24.04% in the earliest treatment period, and reached 86.08% in the latest treatment period. Raw reductions in aegypti abundance were also found to increase over time as sectors were intervened over longer time periods. In spillover sectors, IE was lower in magnitude and more variable, but average IE reached a maximum of 78.08% in 2-years post-treatment. Wolbachia interventions also led to an increase in the percentage of traps recording no mosquitoes from 6.8% at the start of intervention to 33.01% 124-weeks post-intervention. We found that IE was higher in sectors with lower historical mosquito abundance. However, IE converged across sectors with different historical mosquito abundance as intervention time increased. Conclusion This study revealed spatial heterogeneities in suppressing wild-type female Ae. aegypti by IIT-SIT and provided strong evidence that IIT-SIT can drastically suppress wild-type Ae. aegypti populations despite heterogeneous treatment effects over time.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

ResEdit: Residual embeddings for precise generative image editing

Conditional diffusion image generators can be repurposed for editing through inversion, without the need for large-scale paired fine-tuning data. However, producing high-quality, targeted edits while maintaining image identity and global consistency remains challenging, as weakly conditioned inversion often embeds conflicting image features into the noise. We demonstrate that incorporating a residual image encoding as additional conditioning enables both improved identity preservation and better editability. We optimize this residual encoding to provide a strong conditioning signal for reconstruction, thereby reducing the reliance on inversion and susceptibility to its aforementioned pitfalls. To ensure this residual does not interfere with desired edits, we incorporate a gradient reversal-based optimization strategy that disentangles the residual from the edited condition. We illustrate our method's ability to produce high-fidelity results across precise intrinsic-based editing and relighting, and show proof-of-concept text-guided manipulation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Proactive Conversational Assistant for a Procedural Manual Task based on Audio and IMU

Real-time conversational assistants for procedural manual tasks often depend on video input, which can be computationally expensive and compromise user privacy. For the first time, we propose a real-time conversational assistant that provides comprehensive guidance for procedural manual tasks using only lightweight privacy-preserving modalities such as audio and IMU inputs from a user's wearable device to understand the context. Using a furniture assembly task and a cooking task, we show how this assistant proactively communicates step-by-step instructions to a user performing a procedural task, and answers user questions. We illustrate the data generation method and the system design to achieve such an assistant. On observing that an off-the-shelf language model is a talkative assistant but is not always able to answer questions correctly, we demonstrate how finetuning the model improves its ability to limit unnecessary dialogues with a 50% increase in the precision, while also improving its ability to answer questions correctly, measured by a 150% increase in the recall of answers. We further describe how such an assistant is implemented on an edge device with no dependence on the cloud.

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

Attention by Synchronization in Coupled Oscillator Networks

arXiv:2606.12059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We address transformer attention on energy-constrained physical substrates. Softmax attention requires exponentiation and global reduction, operations with high energy cost on von Neumann hardware and no natural physical analog. We show that Kuramoto synchronization dynamics (which arise in electrical, mechanical, superconducting, and charge-density-wave oscillator arrays, among other physical systems) implement a well-defined attention operation without either. The resulting mechanism, fixed-query oscillator attention, replaces softmax's arithmetic with the equilibration of a gradient flow on the sphere: queries are learned anchors fixed on the sphere, and free oscillators evolve under Kuramoto-Lohe dynamics until they settle at positions encoding attention weights via cosine similarity. Because the computation is equilibration, it requires no exponentiation; the only global operation is an affine normalization at readout. The fixed point is provably unique and globally attractive from almost every initial condition, a guarantee that holds across every physical realization. Empirically, at the minimal hardware configuration (oscillator dimension $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2), oscillator attention outperforms softmax on keyword spotting (+1.00 pp) and on subject-verb agreement (+5.27 pp on hard sentences, with zero training failures versus one in five for softmax). On causal language modeling, where softmax retains an advantage, oscillator attention closes the gap as $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ grows: from +11.09 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2 to +2.98 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 32 on WikiText-2, and from +2.39 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 2 to +0.57 PPL at $d_{\mathrm{osc}}$ = 32 on TinyStories. The main objective of this work is not to replace softmax in software but to provide a mathematically grounded blueprint for accurate attention on physical substrates.

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

On the entanglement induced by the deformation of phase-space

arXiv:2606.17587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most quantum gravity theories propose that the fundamental concept of space-time is mostly compatible with quantum theory in noncommutative (NC) space. In the present paper, we revisit the notion of entanglement induced by NC deformations of phase space. The positive partial transpose (PPT) criterion for separability of bipartite Gaussian states is extended to a general class of Bopp's shift. In particular, we have considered both the position-position and momentum-momentum noncommutativity, with deformation parameters $\theta$ and $\eta$, respectively. It turns out that $\theta$ and $\eta$ induce the entanglement. We have directly applied the formalism for an anisotropic two-dimensional harmonic oscillator. Peres-Horodecki separability condition leads to a constraint equation for the parameter values of the oscillator in NC space. It turns out that the bipartite Gaussian state is almost always entangled in deformed space. To implement the theoretical idea, we provide an outline for a gedankenexperiment to identify the signature of phase-space noncommutativity, i.e., quantum gravity. In particular, the gedankenexperiment is devised to test the separability of supposedly separable Gaussian states in the usual commutative space, through the covariance matrix, which is constructed via measured output photocurrents after interaction of input Gaussian states and reference states. If the experiment shows that the supposedly separable states are actually entangled, then the entanglement is created through the intermediate background noncommutative space, which is a signature of the quantum nature of gravity.

07.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

A statistical framework for comparing epidemic forests

Authors:

by Cyril Geismar, Peter J. White, Anne Cori, Thibaut Jombart Inferring who infected whom in an outbreak is essential for characterising transmission dynamics and guiding public health interventions. However, this task is challenging due to limited surveillance data and the complexity of immunological and social interactions. Instead of a single definitive transmission tree, epidemiologists often consider multiple plausible trees forming epidemic forests. Various inference methods and assumptions can yield different epidemic forests, yet no formal test exists to assess whether these differences are statistically significant. We propose such a framework using a chi-square test and permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA). We assessed each method’s ability to distinguish simulated epidemic forests generated under different offspring distributions. While both methods achieved perfect specificity for forests with 100+ trees, PERMANOVA consistently outperformed the chi-square test in sensitivity across all epidemic and forest sizes. Implemented in the R package mixtree, we provide the first statistical framework to robustly compare epidemic forests.

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

DPRM: A Plug-in Doob h transform-induced Token-Ordering Module for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2604.24357v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models generate without a fixed left-to-right order, leaving token ordering as a central algorithmic choice. Existing systems mainly use random masking or confidence-driven ordering, which respectively suffer from train–test mismatch and myopic exploration. We introduce DPRM (Doob -transform Process Reward Model), a plug-in token-ordering module that keeps the host architecture, denoising objective and supervision unchanged, and modifies only the ordering policy. DPRM starts from confidence-driven ordering and gradually shifts to process-reward-guided ordering through online estimates. We characterize the exact DPRM policy as a reward-tilted Gibbs reveal law, prove convergence of its stagewise Soft-BoN approximation, show that the online bucketized controller tracks the exact DPRM score at empirical-Bernstein rates, and establish a sample-complexity advantage under tractable optimization assumptions. Across nine hosts covering language reasoning, test-time scaling, protein, single-cell, molecular, DNA, text-to-image generation, and VQA, DPRM order variants improve several language, DNA, and multimodal settings while also identifying boundary cases where confidence-only ordering or task-specific utilities are preferable. Code is available at: https://github.com/DakeBU/DPRM-DLLM

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Structure Over Nonlinearity: Explicit Interaction Architectures for Dynamical Learning

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most learning architectures for dynamical systems rely on generic nonlinear function approximation, often requiring high model complexity to capture structured behaviors. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm in which modeling capability arises primarily from structure rather than from expressive nonlinearities. We introduce a class of explicit structured dynamical units based on wave-inspired interaction structures with internal state. Inspired by wave-based computational principles, the proposed units adopt a strictly causal organization that eliminates algebraic loops, yielding fully explicit models that can be evaluated without implicit solvers. Stacking such units produces layered dynamical architectures with emergent hierarchical behavior. Through experiments on a nonlinear system identification task, we show that depth improves both representation quality and generalization, even under limited parameter optimization. In particular, the proposed architectures produce informative internal representations even under readout-only fitting, indicating that useful dynamical structure emerges from the organization of interactions prior to substantial parameter optimization. These results suggest that structure-first design provides a viable and effective alternative to conventional black-box approaches for learning dynamical systems, highlighting the role of interaction structure as a primary source of model expressivity.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

One Layer's Trash is Another Layer's Treasure: Adaptive Layer-wise Visual Token Selection in LVLMs

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse multimodal tasks, yet their practical deployment remains constrained by the computational burden arising from lengthy visual tokens. While visual token pruning has emerged as a promising solution, existing methods suffer from a fundamental limitation: once tokens are pruned at a specific layer, they become inaccessible to all subsequent layers, leading to premature information loss that can compromise model performance. Through empirical studies, we observe that different layers exhibit distinct visual region focus, indicating a varying optimal token subset across layers. Motivated by this insight, we propose Adaptive Layer-wise Visual Token Selection (ALVTS), a novel framework that breaks away from the conventional static token pruning paradigm. ALVTS incorporates a lightweight token selector to identify and route important tokens for further processing, while allowing less important tokens to skip the layer, thus minimizing computational redundancy. These two streams of tokens are seamlessly reintegrated before being fed into subsequent layers, facilitating adaptive compression across the entire model. Grounded in our importance consistency constrained low-rank approximation, the proposed token selection module closely emulates the full attention mechanism, effectively capturing its essential patterns without requiring model retraining. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, and Qwen2.5-VL validate the effectiveness of our method. With an 89% token compression ratio, ALVTS retains 96.7% of the original model's accuracy, achieving a superior efficiency-accuracy trade-off for LVLM inference.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

The censored stochastic six-vertex model and parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials

arXiv:2606.12670v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a censored version of the stochastic six-vertex model. We show that for parameters $b_1 < b_2$, this model started from the initial condition ${1}_{x>0}$ is stochastically dominated at any time by the blocking measure. This is a partial analog of the censoring inequality for monotone spin systems. In particular, this result allows us to control the behavior of second-class particles. The proof uses parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials, whose appearance is explained using a connection between the stochastic six-vertex model and the Iwahori–Hecke algebras of symmetric groups. Furthermore, we find an intertwining relation for this process using normalized parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials as an intertwining kernel.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ReMoT: Reinforcement Learning with Motion Contrast Triplets

We present ReMoT, a unified training paradigm to systematically address the fundamental shortcomings of VLMs in spatio-temporal consistency – a critical failure point in navigation, robotics, and autonomous driving. ReMoT integrates two core components: (1) A rule-based automatic framework that generates ReMoT-16K, a large-scale (16.5K triplets) motion-contrast dataset derived from video meta-annotations, surpassing costly manual or model-based generation. (2) Group Relative Policy Optimization, which we empirically validate yields optimal performance and data efficiency for learning this contrastive reasoning, far exceeding standard Supervised Fine-Tuning. We also construct the first benchmark for fine-grained motion contrast triplets to measure a VLM's discrimination of subtle motion attributes (e.g., opposing directions). The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance on our new benchmark and multiple standard VLM benchmarks, culminating in a remarkable 25.1% performance leap on spatio-temporal reasoning tasks.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Latent Geometric Chords for Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks

While decision-based black-box adversarial attacks present a severe security threat, current methodologies suffer from fundamental limitations. Pixel-wise attacks frequently introduce unnatural, high-frequency visual artifacts, while latent-space frameworks are confined by the limited search space of low-dimensional manifolds and inherent reconstruction flaws. To resolve these limitations, we propose Latent Geometric Chords (LGC) for Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks alongside a variant, LGC-H. At its core, LGC navigates decision boundaries by executing a curvature-aware geometric search within a compressed semantic manifold. To guarantee high visual fidelity and circumvent dimensionality bottlenecks, we introduce a Residual-based Adversarial Generation (RAG) mechanism. RAG isolates semantic perturbations as geometric chords and superimposes them directly onto the original source image. RAG substantially resolves baseline reconstruction flaws and effectively doubles the permissible search space dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that LGC achieves robust cross-dataset transferability and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, our method, LGC, minimizes perturbation magnitudes while achieving state-of-the-art visual fidelity–with a Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) exceeding 0.99 and a Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) below 0.01 at 5000 queries–and sustaining high attack success rates under stringent perceptual constraints, successfully compromising adversarially trained robust models. The source code is available at: https://github.com/eihmuekhine/Latent-Geometric-Chords.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Computing Applications for Flight Trajectory Optimization

arXiv:2304.14445v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Major players in the global aerospace industry are shifting their focus toward achieving net carbon-neutral operations by 2050. A considerable portion of the overall carbon emission reduction is expected to come from new aircraft technologies, such as flight path optimization. In pursuing these sustainability objectives, we delve into the capacity of quantum computing to tackle computational challenges associated with flight path optimization, an essential operation within the aerospace engineering domain with important ecological and economic considerations. In recent years, the quantum computing field has made significant strides, paving the way for improved performance over classical algorithms. In order to effectively apply quantum algorithms in real-world scenarios, it is crucial to thoroughly examine and tackle the intrinsic overheads and constraints that exist in the present implementations of these algorithms. Our study delves into the application of quantum computers in flight path optimization problems and introduces a customizable modular framework designed to accommodate specific simulation requirements. We examine the running time of a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm across various quantum architectures and their simulations on CPUs and GPUs. A temporal comparison between the conventional classical algorithm and its quantum-improved counterpart indicates that achieving the theoretical speedup in practice may necessitate further innovation. We present our results from running the quantum algorithms on IBM hardware and discuss potential approaches to accelerate the incorporation of quantum algorithms within the problem domain.

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

Bath memory as a precision resource in quantum transport

arXiv:2606.17026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured baths can reshape transport fluctuations in mesoscopic quantum devices, yet a predictive criterion for when this enhances precision has been lacking. We propose a route towards such precision advantages by utilizing bath memory in coherent fermionic transport through a noninteracting quantum-dot chain. Using the Landauer-Büttiker formalism, we derive a dual impedance-matching condition that synchronizes the conductor mode splitting, boundary dissipation, and bath bandwidth, and sustains constructive multimode interference across the transmission window. The analytical predictions for the optimal bath bandwidths show excellent agreement with exact nonequilibrium Green's function calculations of the transport for Lorentzian, Gaussian, and Newns spectral densities. The prescription yields an optimal bath bandwidth at which the current Fano factor is minimized and the thermodynamic and kinetic precision coefficients are simultaneously enhanced beyond their Markovian limits. The alignment of the optimal precision regime with the experimentally accessible current Fano factor minimum thus provides a practical strategy for designing precision-enhanced transport in mesoscopic platforms such as semiconductor quantum-dot arrays and ultracold fermionic channels.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Clinician-Centered Pipeline for Annotation and Evaluation in Ultrasound AI Studies

arXiv:2606.19174v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clinician-centered evaluation is critical for validating medical AI systems, especially in ultrasound imaging where quantitative metrics do not always capture clinical usability. Existing medical image platforms primarily focus on dataset labeling. They lack integrated support for blinded model comparison and reproducible evaluation workflows. We present a clinician-centered pipeline for remote annotation and evaluation in ultrasound AI studies. The proposed pipeline uses a centralized server and lightweight browser interfaces to enable clinicians to perform annotation, blinded ranking, and review without local dataset downloads. The pipeline also supports multi-rater participation, centralized result aggregation, and automated statistical analysis. We validate the pipeline in a fetal ultrasound segmentation study with six raters spanning expert, generalist, and non-expert experience levels. The system automatically generated Spearman correlation, Kendall's $\tau$, and top-1 selection statistics. Results indicated moderate to strong agreement across experts and other groups. The blinded evaluation results showed a tendency for later active learning models to be preferred. These outcomes suggest that the pipeline can support clinician-centered annotation and reproducible human-\ac{AI} evaluation studies in ultrasound imaging. The proposed pipeline is available on \href{https://github.com/13204942/SonoRate}{GitHub}.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

World Model Self-Distillation: Training World Models to Solve General Tasks

Pretrained video generators are promising visual world models that exhibit emergent task-solving abilities; however, their reliance on detailed textual descriptions limits their direct use for planning and decision-making. Existing approaches either outsource this reasoning to language or vision-language models, or rely on supervised fine-tuning with paired task-execution videos, which are costly to collect and difficult to scale. We propose a scalable framework that elicits task-solving ability in such models by combining self-distillation with reinforcement learning. Given an unlabeled scene image, a vision-language model generates a candidate task and a detailed step-by-step solution. The solution conditions a pretrained video diffusion model, the Demonstrator; we distill its behavior into an Executor conditioned only on the image and a short task prompt. This transfers execution knowledge from caption-guided generation to instruction-conditioned task solving without curated task-video supervision. We further improve the Executor with reinforcement learning from VLM feedback, exploiting the asymmetry between judging whether a sampled video satisfies a task and generating the solution. Experiments on our proposed WorldTasks-Benchmark and the DreamGen robotics benchmark show that the Executor surpasses the Demonstrator under our VLM-based evaluation protocol and transfers competitively to robotic tasks.

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

TerraBench: Can Agents Reason Over Heterogeneous Earth-System Data?

arXiv:2606.13148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Climate and environmental decision-making increasingly requires reasoning across heterogeneous inputs, including gridded physical data, satellite imagery, geospatial context, and simulator outputs. Weather and climate foundation models can forecast well, but do not reason interactively in language, while large language models (LLMs) reason in language but cannot operate directly on high-dimensional Earth-system data. As a result, real scientific workflows in Earth-science remain underserved. We introduce TerraBench, a benchmark for grounded Earth-science reasoning, built on TerraAgent, a ReAct-style executable framework that interleaves reasoning, tool calls, and observations to couple LLM planning with scientific tools for environmental retrieval, geospatial processing, simulation, and artifact-backed computation. TerraBench unifies analysis of Earth observation imagery, gridded data, GIS reasoning and simulation in a single executable interface, whereas prior benchmarks isolate these capabilities into narrow individual tasks. It is also the first in this space to pair process-level tool-use metrics with tolerance-aware numeric scoring. The benchmark comprises 403 extensive agentic tasks across three tracks (Fundamentals, Simulator-Grounded, and Document-Grounded Verification) and eight application domains with 24,500 verified execution steps. These results indicate that reliable Earth-science agents must go beyond tool access to coordinate heterogeneous workflows, parameterize tools precisely, and preserve artifact provenance.

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

Neural Tree Reconstruction for the Open Forest Observatory

The Open Forest Observatory (OFO) is a collaboration across universities and other partners to make low-cost forest mapping accessible to ecologists, land managers, and the general public. The OFO is building both a database of geospatial forest data as well as open-source methods and tools for forest mapping by uncrewed aerial vehicle. Such data are useful for a variety of climate applications including prioritizing reforestation efforts, informing wildfire hazard reduction, and monitoring carbon sequestration. In the current iteration of the OFO's forest map database, 3D tree maps are created using classical structure-from-motion techniques. This approach is prone to artifacts, lacks detail, and has particular difficulty on the forest floor where the input data (overhead imagery) has limited visibility. These reconstruction errors can potentially propagate to the downstream scientific tasks (e.g. a wildfire simulation.) Advances in 3D reconstruction, including methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), produce higher quality results that are more robust to sparse views and support data-driven priors. We explore ways to incorporate NeRFs into the OFO dataset, outline future work to support even more state-of-the-art 3D vision models, and describe the importance of high-quality 3D reconstructions for forestry applications.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Current World Models Lack a Persistent State Core

World models are increasingly regarded as a decisive step toward artificial general intelligence, yet modeling the physical world demands more than rendering convincing frames on demand: it requires an internal world state that keeps evolving over time, decoupled from observation, so that objects endure and events run to their conclusions whether or not a camera is watching, much as the moon holds to its orbit when no one is looking. This requirement is a blind spot of existing benchmarks, which reward surface properties such as fidelity, motion, and camera controllability while never asking whether a generated world keeps evolving once it is unobserved. We introduce WRBench, the first systematic diagnostic benchmark that treats camera motion as an intervention on observability and resolves evaluation into a human-calibrated chain that asks whether the camera executes the requested interaction, whether the scene stays continuous and identifiable while in view, and whether a returning target remains consistent with the event that was set in motion. Across 9{,}600 videos from 23 models spanning four control paradigms, one finding proves stubborn: current systems maintain the observed world as a tracking shot, resuming a returning target in the state at which it was abandoned rather than advancing the event while it went unseen. Because this failure recurs across control paradigms, model families, and increments of scale, robust world-state evolution does not follow from cleaner imagery, tighter control, richer geometric priors, or sheer parameter count We therefore argue that the stability of the physical state kernel and the consistency of worldlines under viewpoint intervention should become first-class objectives of world-model design, so that a world model captures how the world will unfold rather than how the next frame appears.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Projection and Quantisation: A Unifying View of Learning to Hash, from Random Projections to the RAG Era

Authors:

Approximate nearest-neighbour search underpins large-scale retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation, yet its methods are studied in communities that seldom read one another. We argue that they form one field with three design choices. We develop the projection-quantisation-organisation lens: every method places its projections, places its quantisation thresholds, and organises the resulting codes for search. We test the lens with a reproducible measurement, released as the open BitBudget benchmark, and report three findings. First, the quantisation axis delivers the largest memory savings: a one-bit code with full-precision re-ranking matches uncompressed quality for six of seven embedders, the scanned code one thirty-second of the float's size. Second, the orderings the lens anticipates, including a learned-embedding regime where binary codes overtake an inverted-file product quantiser at a matched byte budget, recur as the embedding is enlarged. Third, given class labels, an eight-byte supervised code more than doubles the retrieval quality of the two-kilobyte task-agnostic float it replaces. We also recast the semantic identifiers of generative retrieval as quantisation codes. The main contribution is a single, tested account of compact-code search, from random projections to the retrieval-augmented era.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Silhouette-Guided Animal Art

Generative AI has advanced the ability to render photorealistic or artistic images, yet it remains limited in a key aspect of human creativity: interpreting ambiguous shapes. This phenomenon, rooted in pareidolia, allows humans to perceive meaningful forms in random patterns such as clouds, stones, or leaves. To computationally replicate this imaginative process, we introduce Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Visual-RAG), a framework that generates animal art directly from natural silhouettes. Our method retrieves structurally similar animal shapes from a curated corpus of 28,586 high-quality silhouettes and uses them as reference exemplars to guide diffusion-based generation with ControlNet and IP-Adapter. Ablation studies confirm that shape Context with RANSAC provides the most accurate alignment, while removing shape standardization reduces the inlier ratio to just 13.4\%, underscoring the importance of structural fidelity in Visual-RAG. A user study with 12 participants evaluated the outputs in terms of aesthetics, silhouette fidelity, and overall impression. Results reveal that while Visual-RAG provides plausible interpretations, challenges remain in achieving high perceptual impact. This work lays the foundation for computational pareidolia, showing how machines can contribute to the early stages of imaginative discovery.

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

A Survey on Agentic Security: Applications, Threats and Defenses

LLM-based agents are now used throughout cybersecurity. While these agents facilitate powerful and autonomous security applications, their autonomy opens up new attack surfaces, and the security community is actively building defenses to secure them. Yet the literature on this subject has grown quickly and unevenly. Existing surveys treat applications, threats, and defenses in isolation, leaving no unified account of how an agent's capabilities, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures interconnect. In this work we present the first holistic survey of the agentic security landscape, structuring the field around the fundamental pillars of Applications, Threats and Defenses. We provide a comprehensive taxonomy of over 260 papers, explaining how agents are used in downstream cybersecurity applications, inherent threats to agentic systems, and countermeasures designed to protect them. In addition, we provide detailed pillar-specific and cross-cutting analyses that show the security-lifecycle coverage of agentic applications, comparison between red-teaming and blue-teaming agents, and the adversarial use of red-teaming applications. On the threat side, we analyze the entry points and agent-loop stages that attacks target, their specificity to the agentic setting, and the threat models they assume. On the defense side, we analyze the prevailing defense strategies, their cost and security trade-offs, and where in the agent lifecycle they are deployed. We further map which defenses cover which attack classes and chart trends in agent architecture, backbone model usage, data modality coverage, and the growth of attack and defense research over time. Taken together, these findings indicate that agentic systems are structurally fragile by default and that securing them will require defenses that span the full agent lifecycle rather than single-layer fixes.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Cross-Modal Masked Compositional Concept Modeling for Enhancing Visio-Linguistic Compositionality

Contrastively trained vision-language models like CLIP, have made remarkable progress in learning joint image-text representations, but still face challenges in compositional understanding. They often exhibit a "bag-of-words" behavior–struggling to capture the object relations, attribute-object bindings, and word order dependencies. This limitation arises not only from the reliance on global, single-vector representations for optimization, but also from the insufficient exploitation and modeling of the rich compositional information inherently present in paired image text data. In this work, we propose MACCO (MAsked Compositional Concept MOdeling), a framework that masks compositional concepts in one modality and reconstructs them conditioned on the full contextual information from the other, enabling the model to capture and align cross-modal compositional structures more effectively. To facilitate this process, we introduce two auxiliary objectives that jointly align and regularize masked features both inter-modally and intra-modally. Extensive experiments on five compositional benchmarks, along with in-depth analyses, demonstrate that our approach not only significantly enhances compositionality in VLMs but also improves their ability to capture syntactic structure and linguistic information. Additionally, the improved compositionality also benefits text-to-image generation and multimodal large language model. Code is available at https://github.com/hiker-lw/MACCO.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On the Influence of the Feature Computation Budget on Per-Instance Algorithm Selection for Black-Box Optimization

arXiv:2605.04954v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Per-instance algorithm selection (PIAS) takes advantage of complementarity between a set of algorithms by deciding which algorithm to run on a given instance. This decision is based on features of the instances, which, in the context of black-box optimization (BBO), require a part of the optimization budget to be computed. This raises two questions: (a) from which fraction of the budget spent on feature computation does PIAS become worth it for BBO, and (b) which fraction of the budget optimizes the tradeoff between feature accuracy and PIAS performance. To this end, we perform a broad study where PIAS with varying sampling budgets for feature computation is compared to the single best algorithm on a broad range of algorithm selection scenarios. These scenarios consist of two portfolio sizes, three problem sets, 4 dimensionalities, and 10 target budgets. We find that PIAS is viable for the majority of tested scenarios, even when as much as a quarter of the total budget is spent on feature computation. The tradeoff for the fraction of the budget spent on feature computation to maximize the benefit of PIAS is highly dependent on the specific AS scenario. Further, on average 20 percent of PIAS loss to the virtual best solver is explained by the budget spent on feature computation, highlighting the importance of properly accounting for the feature budget.