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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

OnDeFog: Online Decision Transformer under Frame Dropping

arXiv:2606.19721v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In challenging real-world reinforcement learning applications, communication delays or sensor failures often cause frame dropping, in which the agent cannot receive the dropped states and associated rewards. To address the performance degradation caused by frame dropping, the Decision Transformer under Random Frame Dropping (DeFog) was developed by incorporating additional mechanisms into the decision transformer to tackle frame dropping. Although DeFog can mitigate performance degradation in frame-dropping environments, since DeFog is an offline learning method, it struggles to effectively generalize to novel states not adequately represented in the training dataset. In this study, we propose OnDeFog, which integrates the mechanisms in DeFog with the online decision transformer (ODT), an online reinforcement learning method that learns policies through direct environmental interaction. Comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our proposed OnDeFog achieves superior performance compared to ODT in environments characterized by high dropping frame rate and outperforms DeFog on datasets containing a large amount of low-reward data.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Power-law hypothesis and (un)fairness of PageRank on undirected multi-type PAMs

arXiv:2606.19583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The preferential attachment model (PAM) describes the sequential growth of a network based on the "rich-get-richer" principle. Several versions of it have become established for modeling, e.g., citation networks, capturing a power-law degree distribution. Directed versions of the preferential attachment model where the edges are directed from the new to the old vertices have been the subject of extensive research. They have been shown to exhibit remarkable properties such as heavier tails for the limiting graph-normalized PageRank than for the in-degrees. By contrast, for the undirected version, we recently showed that PageRank has similar tails as the degree. In the present paper, we discuss the PageRank asymptotics for a multi-type version of the undirected PAM (here vertices have different colors), complementing previous results of Antunes, Bhamidi, Banerjee and Pipiras on the asymptotics of PageRank on similar directed multi-type or colored PAMs. Our studies are motivated by the aim to go beyond the rigid rule of edge orientation in directed preferential attachment models. As the main result, for the case of a finite set of colors, we show that the power-law hypothesis for PageRank is fulfilled also for the colored undirected PAM, where, by contrast to the directed case, the power-law exponent is color-dependent for some choices of the initial color distribution and the attractiveness function. For the specific case of a two-type model, we discuss implications of our results on fairness in sampling underrepresented nodes from the network.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

The Hidden Environmental Cost of Poor Coding Practices in TensorFlow and Keras Applications: A Study on Resource Leaks and Carbon Emissions

arXiv:2606.19799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiency and sustainability are critical considerations in the development and deployment of machine learning (ML) applications. Among the factors influencing sustainability, resource leaks in ML code can introduce hidden inefficiencies that elevate energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Despite this, empirical evidence quantifying their environmental impact remains limited. This emerging results paper presents an initial empirical investigation of two common resource-leak smells, namely Improper Model Reuse (IMR) and Unreleased Tensor References (UTR), and their impact on energy consumption and CO2 emissions in TensorFlow and Keras workloads. Controlled experiments were conducted for each smell by executing identical training tasks while comparing against a smell-free baseline. Our preliminary results show that both smells consistently increase estimated electricity usage and carbon emissions. IMR and UTR increased electricity consumption by approximately 32% and 46%, respectively, with proportional increases in CO2 emissions. Paired statistical tests indicate that these differences are systematic and statistically significant, providing initial empirical evidence that resource-leak smells may degrade ML energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. These findings suggest that resource-leak smells pose measurable risks to both software quality and sustainability, emphasizing the importance of integrating resource-lifecycle management and energy-efficiency considerations into ML development.

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

A comparative and critical study of EEGNet for fNIRS-driven cognitive load classification

arXiv:2606.16160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately classifying cognitive load from functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals remains a significant challenge due to temporal variability, inter-subject differences, and sensitivity to preprocessing choices. This study provides a comprehensive evaluation of EEGNet for fNIRS-based cognitive load classification by systematically examining the effects of temporal segmentation strategies (overlapping vs. non-overlapping), window lengths (10s, 20s, 30s), feature extraction methods (Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA)), learning rate configurations (fixed and adaptive), and evaluation protocols (random split vs. subject-independent (SI)). Results from random-split experiments show that overlapping segmentation, combined with smaller fixed learning rates (0.01-0.001), yields the highest accuracies, due to temporal redundancy and dense sampling of hemodynamic transitions. However, SI evaluation reveals a substantial drop in accuracy, demonstrating limited generalization to unseen participants. Under SI evaluation, non-overlapping segmentation outperformed overlapping windows, with the best accuracy of 56.11% achieved using PCA features with a 20-second window and a 0.1 learning rate. These findings indicate that eliminating temporal redundancy helps the model learn more robust and generalizable representations of cognitive load across individuals. Although adaptive learning rate strategy improved training stability, it did not surpass the performance of optimally selected fixed learning rates. The study highlights the critical role of segmentation strategy and learning rate selection in improving model generalization and identifies methodological considerations essential for developing reliable, real-time, and SI cognitive load classification systems using fNIRS.

05.
Science (Express) 2026-06-18

Indium-free perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells with tin oxide recombination layer and electrodes | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Indium-based transparent conductive oxides are widely used as electrodes and recombination layers in perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells, yet their scalability is constrained by indium scarcity and sputtering-induced damage. Here we report high efficiency and stable indium-free perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells enabled by reactive plasma deposited tin oxide (RPD-SnO x ). For RPD-SnO x as the recombination layer, a certified efficiency of 33.6% is achieved. Fully indium-free tandems that used RPD-SnO x as both recombination layer and electrodes delivering a champion PCE of 33.2% (1 cm 2 ) and a mini-module with a certified efficiency of 31.0% (207.9 cm 2 ). Dense and uniform self-assembled monolayer anchoring enabled by RPD-SnO x suppressed non-radiative recombination and reduced halide migration. Indium-free mini-modules exhibited high thermal, damp-heat, and outdoor operational stability and retained 65% of their maximum initial efficiency after 105 days of outdoor operation.

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

RLRC: Reinforcement Learning-based Recovery for Compressed Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2506.17639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLA) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and strong potential in complex robotic manipulation. However, their large parameter sizes and high inference latency hinder real-world deployment, especially on resource-constrained platforms. To address this, we conduct a systematic empirical study of model compression for VLAs. Building on these insights, we present RLRC, a three-stage compression and recovery pipeline consisting of structured pruning, performance recovery via SFT and RL, and subsequent quantization. The RL stage incorporates a critic warm-up strategy and BC loss regularization to stabilize training and preserve policy behavior. RLRC achieves up to an 8 times memory reduction and 2.3 times inference speedup while maintaining the original task success rate. Extensive experiments across multiple VLA backbones show that RLRC consistently outperforms existing compression baselines, highlighting its effectiveness for on-device deployment. Project website: https://rlrc-vla.github.io

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Dimensionality Reduction of QAOA Parameter Space with Kernel PCA for Max-Cut

arXiv:2606.23718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a leading variational algorithm for combinatorial optimization on near term quantum devices. As circuit depth increases, the number of optimization parameters grows, making the search landscape increasingly nonlinear and difficult to optimize. Previous studies have shown that optimal QAOA parameters often lie on a low dimensional manifold that can be approximated using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) at shallow circuit depths. However, the effectiveness of PCA decreases at higher depths because the underlying parameter manifold becomes increasingly nonlinear. In this work, we investigate Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) with a radial basis function kernel as a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique for QAOA parameter optimization. The model is trained using 200 graphs from each of 3 graph families, namely Erdos-Renyi, Barabasi-Albert, and Watts-Strogatz, with graph sizes ranging from 7 to 10 nodes. Performance is evaluated on 30 test graphs containing 12 nodes at circuit depths 1, 2, 4, and 8. Experimental results demonstrate that KPCA consistently outperforms PCA at deeper circuit depths across all graph families. At depth 8, KPCA achieves approximation ratios above 0.86, while PCA declines to approximately 0.81 to 0.83. Both methods reduce the number of quantum circuit evaluations by more than 93 percent relative to unrestricted QAOA optimization. These findings suggest that nonlinear kernel methods more effectively capture the structure of the QAOA parameter manifold and provide a practical approach for scaling variational quantum optimization to deeper circuits.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Representing Time Series as Structured Programs for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.12481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and instruction-following capabilities, making them potentially powerful tools for time-series analysis. However, time series lie outside their native textual modality, raising a fundamental question: how should time series be represented so that LLMs can reason about them effectively? Existing work typically serializes raw numerical sequences or fine-tunes pre-trained LLMs on time-series data. These approaches place the burden of extracting temporal structure directly on the LLM, creating a modality mismatch that often degrades performance on long sequences and introduces substantial computational overhead. In this work, we introduce Time-Series-to-Structured-Program representation (T2SP), a deterministic, training-free method that represents a time series as a structured symbolic program. T2SP decomposes time series into trends, periods, and salient events, expressing them in a program-friendly format aligned with the textual and code-like modalities on which LLMs are natively trained. By shifting temporal-structure extraction from the model to the representation itself, T2SP enables off-the-shelf LLMs to leverage their existing reasoning capabilities for time-series understanding. We evaluate T2SP on three reasoning tasks – editing, captioning, and question answering – where it consistently improves performance, reduces reasoning time, and lowers failure rates compared with raw-string representations. Our results demonstrate that T2SP provides an effective interface between time series and LLMs.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Looked but didn't see: inattentional blindness and yes-bias confabulation in vision-language models

Previous work showed that many participants fail to notice a gorilla in a video of people playing basketball. Another study found that 83% of trained radiologists failed to report a gorilla figure inserted into a chest CT nodule-search task, even though eye-tracking revealed that most observers had foveated the figure. We ask whether a similar phenomenon exists in contemporary vision-language models (VLMs). We find that (i) VLMs are capable of spotting the gorilla in both still-frame images and videos of lung CT scans; (ii) models display inattentional blindness, which varies according to model generation and type of stimulus presented; (iii) Gemini-3.1-Pro outperforms most other flagship and open-weight VLMs at identifying the presence or absence of the gorilla. We additionally ran a segmentation experiment utilizing two different model classes: a generalist (SAM 3), which found the gorilla but produced little to no results for anatomy-based prompts; a medical specialist (BiomedParse), which produced more promising anatomy-based results but flagged "gorilla" on gorilla-free control videos on 82% of frames. The behavioral signature of inattentional blindness reproduces in VLMs, but a unique confabulation failure mode means that any "did the model see X" claim requires signal-detection analysis with a matched-control false-alarm baseline.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Mixing Times for the Facilitated Exclusion Process

arXiv:2402.18999v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The facilitated simple exclusion process (FEP) is a one-dimensional exclusion process with a dynamical constraint. We establish bounds on the mixing time of the FEP on the segment, with closed boundaries, and the circle. The FEP on these spaces exhibits transient states that, if the macroscopic density of particles is at least $1/2$, the process will eventually exit to reach an ergodic component. If the macroscopic density is less than $1/2$ the process will hit an absorbing state. We show that the symmetric FEP (SFEP) on the segment $\{1,\ldots,N\}$, with $k>N/2$ particles, has mixing time of order $N^{2}\log(N-k)$ and exhibits the pre-cutoff phenomenon. For the asymmetric FEP (AFEP) on the segment, we show that there exists initial conditions for which the hitting time of the ergodic component is exponentially slow in the number of holes $N-k$. In particular, when $N-k$ is large enough, the hitting time of the ergodic component determines the mixing time. For the SFEP on the circle of size $N$, and macroscopic particle density $\rho \in(1/2,1)$, we establish bounds on the mixing time of order $N^{2}\log N$ for the process restricted to its ergodic component. We also give an upper bound on the hitting time of the ergodic component of order $N^{2}\log N$ for a large class of initial conditions. The proofs rely on couplings with exclusion processes (both open and closed boundaries) via a novel lattice path (height function) construction of the FEP.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

No classical particle limit for massless quanta

arXiv:2606.14632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate whether relativistic massless classical particles may emerge as the classical limit of massless quanta. To address this question independently of any specific dynamics, environment, or pointer basis, we develop an axiomatic and purely kinematical framework for the coarse-graining approach. In this formulation, a candidate classical phase space is taken as the outcome space of a POVM subject only to minimal classicality and covariance under the relevant spacetime symmetry group. Applying this framework to the Poincaré group, we prove a no-go theorem for massless particles: the covariance requirement is incompatible with the operational conditions for classicality. The theorem leaves open field-like limits of massless quanta, for example the emergence of electromagnetic or gravitational fields, while ruling out classical massless particles, such as classical photons or gravitons.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Super Learner Ensemble Modeling of CPTAC Proteomic Data for Survival Prediction in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Survival analysis in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is traditionally performed using Cox proportional hazards models, alongside some exploration into black-box machine learning methods. The Super Learner (SL) algorithm addresses this model selection dilemma by combining diverse candidate algorithms into a weighted ensemble to perform comparably to the best candidate method. This study evaluates the performance of SL in HNSCC. Proteomic features as well as clinical covariates from 96 CPTAC HNSCC samples were modeled with three candidate algorithms (Cox LASSO, Cox Ridge, and Random Survival Forest) as well as the ensemble SL method. Models were optimized via Uno's time-dependent Concordance Index (C-index) and tested at 1- and 3-year time horizons using 2000 bootstrap resamples. The Cox Ridge regression model achieved the highest predictive accuracy among the four total methods. However, the SL demonstrated stable performance over both time horizons (1-year C-index: 0.985; 3-year C-index: 0.960). Variable importance analysis of the Cox Ridge model successfully identified malignant proteins (ATR, MAML1, MIEN1) alongside novel potential prognostic indicators (ZNF800, KERA). This analysis emphasizes the statistical necessity for larger cohorts for ensemble learning, while providing a benchmark of proteomic indicators in HNSCC.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

The Tatoxa System for Text Detoxification in Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Tatar

Text detoxification, the automated detection and mitigation of abusive and harmful content, is essential for ensuring the safety of online communities and protecting users. However, low resource languages such as Tatar have received little research attention. In this paper we present Tatoxa, a novel state-of-the-art system for text detoxification in the Tatar language. Comparative experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms existing open source and proprietary commercial LLMs on key quality metrics. We also introduce a new dataset for text detoxification in Tatar, designed for fine tuning and evaluation in low resource settings. Finally, cross lingual transfer experiments indicate that transfer from other languages, including the culturally close Russian, performs significantly worse than training on native Tatar data even when a large Russian corpus is available.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Sustainable Materials Discovery in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2601.21527v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed materials discovery, enabling rapid exploration of chemical space through generative models and surrogate screening. Yet current generative AI models for materials discovery, which now drive exploration of vast chemical and structural spaces, optimize candidates exclusively for structural stability and functional properties, with no integration of environmental assessment at any stage of the design loop. Prospective and ex-ante life cycle assessment methods exist and have been applied to emerging technologies, but they operate as standalone downstream analyses, not as active constraints within generative or active-learning pipelines. The result is that environmental feedback, even when produced, arrives after design decisions have been made rather than informing them. The disconnect between atomic-scale design and lifecycle assessment (LCA) reflects fundamental challenges: (i) data scarcity across heterogeneous sources, (ii) scale gaps from atoms to industrial systems, (iii) uncertainty in synthesis pathways, and (iv) the absence of frameworks that co-optimize performance with environmental impact. In this Perspective, we propose integrating upstream ML-assisted materials discovery with downstream LCA into the ML-LCA framework, comprising five components: information extraction for building materials-environment knowledge bases, harmonized databases linking properties to sustainability metrics, multi-scale models bridging atomic properties to lifecycle impacts, ensemble prediction of manufacturing pathways with uncertainty quantification, and uncertainty-aware optimization enabling simultaneous performance-sustainability navigation. Case studies spanning polymers, glass, photoresists, and cement demonstrate both necessity and feasibility while identifying material-specific integration challenges.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Instabilities in a Non-KAM System via Information Scrambling: A Note

arXiv:2606.12761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study operator growth in quantized non-KAM systems using out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), focusing on the kicked harmonic oscillator as a representative example. Since the classical harmonic oscillator is degenerate, the dynamics fall outside the usual Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) framework, and resonances play a central role in shaping the phase space. We examine the system near resonances, where the ratio between the oscillator and driving frequencies takes integer values. Even though the classical Lyapunov exponent remains small at these points, and hence no conventional chaos, the phase space still undergoes strong structural changes. The OTOCs are particularly sensitive to these resonances, with a quadratic-in-time growth at resonance compared to linear growth away from it. Within a perturbative treatment, we derive closed-form expressions for the OTOCs and uncover a number-theoretic structure emerging in the behavior of OTOCs, governed by the Euler totient function of the frequency ratio. Overall, the results we present in this short note imply that resonant structures can play an important role in controlling information spreading.

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

Essential Subspace Merging for Multi-Task Learning

arXiv:2606.19164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model. Its core challenge is inter-task interference among task-specific parameter updates. In this paper, we analyze the output shifts induced by task updates and observe that their energy is concentrated in a small number of principal directions. We call the subspace spanned by these directions the essential subspace. In contrast, most remaining directions carry little task-relevant energy, but their accumulation across multiple task updates can cause severe interference during merging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Essential Subspace Decomposition (ESD), which decomposes each task update according to the principal components of its activation shift. Based on ESD, we introduce Essential Subspace Merging (ESM), a training-free static merging method that orthogonalizes and fuses essential components into one compact multi-task model. We further extend ESM to ESM++, a training-free dynamic merging method that decomposes task-specific residuals into low-rank experts and selects the most relevant expert through prototype-based routing during forward inference. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that ESM and ESM++ effectively preserves task knowledge while reducing inter-task interference.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RL-Index: Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval Index Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieving external knowledge is essential for solving real-world tasks, yet it remains challenging when the relationship between a query and its relevant knowledge involves implicit and complex reasoning beyond surface-level semantic or lexical matching (e.g., mathematical problems relying on the same theorem or coding requiring deep reasoning). Existing approaches primarily rely on query-side reasoning (e.g., query rewriting), which introduces significant online latency and underutilizes the opportunity to perform reasoning over the knowledge corpus itself (i.e., index-side reasoning). In this paper, we propose RL-Index, an agentic indexing framework that formulates retrieval index reasoning as a reinforcement learning problem. Instead of performing reasoning at query time, RL-Index shifts reasoning to the indexing stage by augmenting documents with LLM-generated rationales that explicitly encode the latent query-knowledge relationship. To optimize the quality of these rationales, we employ Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and use retrieval similarity as a verifiable reward signal, enabling direct optimization of indexing decisions for retrieval effectiveness. Extensive experiments on the BRIGHT benchmark demonstrate that RL-Index consistently improves both retrieval and downstream question-answering performance, while significantly reducing online inference latency. Moreover, the learned rationale augmentation generalizes across diverse retrievers and generators, highlighting its robustness as a plug-and-play indexing strategy across different retrieval systems.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Development of iADJUST: a theory-informed, patient co-designed digital psychological intervention for adjustment in chronic kidney disease

Background: Psychological distress is common in chronic kidney disease (CKD) and is associated with reduced quality of life, treatment non-adherence, and worse clinical outcomes. Distress in CKD is also linked to difficulties adjusting to the demands of illness management. Despite this, psychological support remains inconsistently integrated within kidney care pathways, and existing interventions often lack clear theoretical specification and explicit targeting of mechanisms underpinning adjustment to CKD. Objectives: To describe the systematic development of iADJUST, a theory-informed patient co-designed digital psychological intervention targeting key cognitive and behavioural mechanisms involved in adjustment to CKD. Methods: Intervention development was guided by the Medical Research Council framework for complex interventions. A structured, iterative process integrated empirical evidence, psychological theory, and patient and public involvement and engagement. The Common-Sense Model of Self-Regulation and cognitive behavioural theories informed the identification of modifiable maintaining mechanisms associated with adjustment to CKD. Intervention components were mapped onto these mechanisms and refined through co-design with people living with CKD. Results: iADJUST is a six-session self-guided digital psychological intervention delivered over 12 weeks and supplemented by therapist contact. The intervention targets illness-related uncertainty, fatigue-related activity dysregulation, catastrophic what-if thinking, self-critical evaluation, and behavioural withdrawal. It integrates psychoeducation, cognitive and behavioural strategies, maintenance planning, and elements from acceptance and commitment therapy and compassion-focused approaches. Content is delivered through video, audio, and guided tasks and activities. Conclusion: iADJUST provides a theory-informed, evidence-based psychological intervention for CKD explicitly mapping intervention components to maintaining cognitive and behavioural mechanisms implicated in adjustment. Feasibility evaluation is underway.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum-HPC Software Stacks and the openQSE Reference Architecture: A Survey

arXiv:2604.20912v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum resources are increasingly integrated into high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud environments, but quantum high-performance computing (QHPC) software stacks remain isolated, often proprietary, full-stack solutions lacking common interfaces across runtime, resource management, orchestration, and execution layers. This paper analyzes nine production QHPC stacks and identifies common design patterns and emerging requirements, covering deployment models, application interaction patterns, SDK support, and readiness for fault-tolerant operation. The survey exposes consistent needs in runtime abstraction, resource management, interconnect semantics, and observability. Based on these findings, we propose the open quantum-HPC software ecosystem ( openQSE) reference architecture as a first step toward unifying the state-of-the-practice. openQSE defines a set of layer boundaries that allow different implementations to interoperate while preserving deployment flexibility, and is structured to support both current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) workloads and future fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) systems without changes to upper-layer application interfaces.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Artemis: Anatomy-Resolved inTervention for Eliminating Multimodal NeuroImage confounderS

arXiv:2606.18287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal neuroimaging, integrating functional connectivity from fMRI and structural connectivity from DTI, enables non-invasive analysis of brain networks using graph neural networks. However, demographic factors such as age and sex systematically confound the relationship between brain connectivity and clinical outcomes, causing GNNs to exploit spurious shortcuts rather than learning causally invariant representations. While recent causal GNN methods introduce causality at the graph-modeling level, their causal mechanisms remain domain-agnostic without accounting for the real-world confounders inherent in clinical neuroimaging data. Moreover, brain networks are constructed from atlas-based parcellations where each region exhibits distinct sensitivity to demographic factors, necessitating region-aware adjustment. We propose Artemis, a region-level causal framework that bridges this gap with causal intervention at each brain region independently by learning region-specific confounder representations with lightweight parameters. Our adjustment comprehensively utilized the multimodal functional and structural features for graph reasoning as a plug-in module compatible with arbitrary GNN backbones. Experiments on three benchmarks, ADNI for disease diagnosis, OASIS for dementia staging, and HCP for sex classification, demonstrate consistent improvements over representative GNN-based baselines. Multiple supporting experiments further demonstrate statistical significance and neuroscientific interpretability.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Curvature-Guided Geometric Representation for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2606.14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery. Despite the notable advancements in machine learning-based approaches, existing methods struggle to jointly characterize local geometric organization and globally coordinated cross-molecular interactions, limiting their ability to model complex binding mechanisms. Here, we propose RicciBind, a geometric representation framework that integrates curvature-guided hierarchical structure learning with optimal transport (OT)-based cross-domain alignment to model molecular interactions. Specifically, RicciBind leverages Ricci curvature to capture local interaction tightness within molecular structures, enhancing structural awareness and organizing atomic interactions into curvature-aware hierarchical representations. An OT-based cluster matching mechanism then aligns protein and ligand clusters across heterogeneous domains under geometric constraints, enabling globally consistent correspondences and revealing higher-order interaction patterns beyond local neighborhoods. By coupling curvature-guided structure encoding with OT-driven cross-domain alignment, RicciBind effectively models complex interaction semantics and substantially improves both the accuracy and interpretability of binding affinity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RicciBind achieved superior predictive performance and generalization across PLA benchmarks and virtual screening tasks. Ablation studies further confirmed the essential role of Ricci curvature in enhancing molecular interaction representations.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Beyond Visual Forensics: Auditing Multimodal Robustness for Synthetic Medical Image Detection

With the rapid adoption of generative AI, synthetic medical images pose growing risks, including diagnostic deception and insurance fraud. Although prior work has explored vision-language model (VLM)-based synthetic image detection, these evaluations typically consider images in isolation. In clinical practice, however, images are interpreted alongside structured records and metadata, and VLMs are increasingly deployed under joint image-record inputs. We uncover a previously underexamined multimodal vulnerability: when given both modalities, VLMs may overweight record context in authenticity judgments, such that the same image receives different predictions solely due to changes in its accompanying text. This raises concerns about robustness in real-world deployment. To systematically characterize this effect, we reformulate synthetic medical image detection as an audit of multimodal robustness at the image-record interface and introduce a paired benchmark that holds the image fixed while swapping controlled metadata variants. Across multiple imaging modalities, we evaluate diverse open-weight and frontier API VLMs and quantify how metadata alone shifts authenticity predictions. Our benchmark provides a standardized tool for assessing and improving multimodal robustness beyond image-only settings. The code is available at https://github.com/chiuhaohao/Beyond-Visual-Forensics.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

An AI Security Agent for Banking: Multi-Vector Fraud and AML Detection Across Retail and Corporate Accounts

arXiv:2606.17555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Banks simultaneously face signature-based fraud (card-not-present attacks, account takeover, ATM cloning) and behavioural financial crime (structuring, layering, mule networks, business email compromise) – two threat families with fundamentally different detection requirements. Static rule engines that reliably catch brute-force and high-velocity events are structurally blind to business-email-compromise (BEC) payment redirection, session hijacking, and money-laundering layering, which are engineered to appear indistinguishable from legitimate activity at the individual transaction or session level. This paper presents an AI security agent for retail and corporate banking that addresses this gap through a three-component fusion architecture operating on two parallel event streams: a transaction stream (card fraud, ACH/wire fraud, AML categories) and a session stream (account takeover, session hijacking, SIM-swap, insider abuse). Each stream combines an LSTM sequence model capturing per-account behavioural history, a statistical velocity/threshold monitor, and a graph/network module capturing account-counterparty relationship patterns (fan-in, fan-out, pass-through ratio) for money-laundering detection. Experiments on a synthetic event log of 237,669 transactions and 113,508 sessions across 13 threat categories and 3,470 simulated accounts demonstrate overall F1 of 0.787 (transaction stream) and 0.867 (session stream) for the proposed model, versus 0.562/0.733 for a rule-based baseline and 0.655/0.713 for an LSTM-only baseline. The agent includes a customer-facing transaction-verification chatbot (96.6% identity verification accuracy, 86.8% mass-reset attack detection) and an analyst case-summary assistant (99.3% action-recommendation F1), with Critical-tier automated response latency under 0.43 ms at the 95th percentile.

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

VietFashion: Benchmarking Sketch-Text Composed Image Retrieval for Cultural Outfits

Cultural garments pose a unique challenge for visual retrieval systems, as their identity often depends on subtle structural and symbolic details that are poorly captured by standard AI models. We introduce VietFashion, a new benchmark for sketch-text composed image retrieval centered on the Ao Dai, a traditional Vietnamese garment. VietFashion enables designers and researchers to retrieve culturally meaningful outfits using a combination of hand-drawn sketches, which convey garment structure, and textual descriptions, which encode cultural semantics. The dataset is initialized with 650 sketches and expanded using generative models to produce over 21,000 photorealistic images with aligned captions. Textual prompts that describe detailed outfit attributes, which are extracted from fashion magazines to ensure authenticity and diversity. To better reflect the inherent ambiguity of design intent, VietFashion adopts a multi-target retrieval setting, where a single query may correspond to multiple valid results. We establish standardized evaluation protocols and benchmark state-of-the-art composed image retrieval methods. Experimental results reveal significant performance gaps in modeling fine-grained cultural semantics and multi-modal composition, positioning VietFashion as a challenging benchmark for fine-grained fashion retrieval. The dataset is publicly available at: https://hng0303.github.io/VietFashion.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Tool for the Synthesis of Adaptive Probabilistic Processors Based on the Ising Model

arXiv:2606.19533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a tool for the synthesis and simulation of probabilistic architectures for solving combinatorial optimization problems by mapping them to the Ising model. The proposed approach automatically constructs the Ising Hamiltonian and determines the number of probabilistic elements (p-bits) based on problem characteristics such as size and topology. Furthermore, the tool introduces an adaptive strategy for selecting the most suitable update algorithm among Gibbs Sampling, Simulated Annealing (SA), Simulated Quantum Annealing (SQA), and cluster-based methods. Experimental results using benchmark problems demonstrate improved convergence behavior and flexibility compared to fixed approaches. The proposed framework enables systematic evaluation of probabilistic computing strategies and supports the development of future hardware implementations based on MTJs and p-bits.