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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Decoherence-free algebras in quantum dynamics

arXiv:2403.12926v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this Article we analyze the algebraic properties of the asymptotic dynamics of finite-dimensional open quantum systems in the Heisenberg picture. In particular, a natural product (Choi-Effros product) can be defined in the asymptotic regime. Motivated by this structure, we introduce a new space called the Choi-Effros decoherence-free algebra. Interestingly, this space is both a C*-algebra with respect to the composition product, and a B*-algebra with respect to the Choi-Effros product. Moreover, such space admits a direct-sum decomposition revealing a clear relationship with the attractor subspace of the dynamics. In particular, the equality between the attractor subspace and the Choi-Effros decoherence-free algebra is a necessary and sufficient condition for a faithful dynamics. Finally, we show how all the findings do not rely on complete positivity but on the much weaker Schwarz property.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Point-Identification of a Robust Predictor Under Latent Shift with Imperfect Proxies

arXiv:2603.15158v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Addressing the domain adaptation problem becomes more challenging when distribution shifts across domains stem from latent confounders that affect both covariates and outcomes. Existing proxy-based approaches that address latent shift rely on a strong completeness assumption to uniquely determine (point-identify) a robust predictor. Completeness requires that proxies have sufficient information about variations in latent confounders. For imperfect proxies the mapping from confounders to the space of proxy distributions is non-injective, and multiple latent confounder values can generate the same proxy distribution. This breaks the completeness assumption and observed data are consistent with multiple potential predictors (set-identified). To address this, we introduce latent equivalent classes (LECs). LECs are defined as groups of latent confounders that induce the same conditional proxy distribution. We show that point-identification for the robust predictor remains achievable as long as multiple domains differ sufficiently in how they mix proxy-induced LECs to form the robust predictor. This domain diversity condition is formalized as a cross-domain rank condition on the mixture weights, which is substantially weaker assumption than completeness. We introduce the Proximal Quasi-Bayesian Active learning (PQAL) framework, which actively queries a small, targeted set of diverse domains that satisfy this rank condition. PQAL can recover the point-identified predictor, demonstrates robustness to varying degrees of shift and outperforms previous methods on synthetic data and semi-synthetic dSprites, IHDP, ACS Folktables datasets.

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

Replay What Matters: Off-Policy Replay for Efficient LLM Reinforcement Unlearning

LLM unlearning has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to full retraining for removing hazardous knowledge from pretrained models while preserving general utility. Recent RL-based methods such as RULE reformulate unlearning as learning a refusal behavior, but their on-policy optimization repeatedly samples from the same forget and retain/boundary prompts throughout training. We identify a critical inefficiency in this process: easy cases quickly converge and provide little useful gradient signal, while hard cases near the forget/retain boundary continue to produce low-reward rollouts that are discarded after a single use. To address this issue, we propose ReRULE, an off-policy replay enhancement for reinforcement unlearning. ReRULE stores low-reward hard-case rollout groups in a replay buffer during early GRPO training and reuses them in later stages through importance-sampled off-policy updates, redirecting computation toward boundary cases that still require learning. Theoretically, we show that ReRULE yields a tighter hard-case convergence bound than pure on-policy RULE. Empirically, ReRULE improves MUSE-Books Retain Quality from 46.3 to 56.2 while adding only 5–11% training time across benchmarks. Its limited improvement on the simpler TOFU setting further supports the intended conditional behavior: replay is most beneficial when the hard/easy disparity is pronounced.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Mitigating Heterogeneity-Induced Drift in Hierarchical Sign-Based Federated Learning

arXiv:2602.02355v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) is well suited for large-scale wireless and Internet of Things systems, where devices communicate with nearby edge servers before reaching the cloud. In these environments, uplink bandwidth and latency impose strict communication constraints, making aggressive gradient compression essential. One-bit sign-based stochastic gradient descent methods provide an attractive solution in flat federated settings, but their behavior in hierarchical edge–cloud architectures remains insufficiently understood, especially under inter-cluster data heterogeneity. To address this gap, we develop a sign-based HFL framework in which devices transmit binary stochastic-gradient signs to edge servers, edge servers apply majority voting, and the cloud periodically aggregates edge models. Our analysis reveals that inter-cluster heterogeneity induces a persistent bias term in the convergence bound, reflecting the drift of edge models toward local objectives. This term cannot be removed by increasing the number of training rounds or by tuning standard hyperparameters alone. We therefore propose \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\), a drift-corrected sign-based HFL algorithm in which devices apply a cloud-assisted gradient correction before taking the sign. We show that this pre-sign correction mitigates the non-vanishing heterogeneity-induced bias while preserving binary device–edge communication during the repeated local sign-update steps. Experiments under severe inter-cluster heterogeneity demonstrate that \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\) improves the stability and accuracy of sign-based HFL and achieves performance comparable to full-precision hierarchical SGD with substantially lower device–edge communication.

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

From Simulation to Real-World: An In-Field 6D Pose Dataset and Baseline for Robotic Strawberry Harvesting

Robotic strawberry harvesting requires precise 6D pose estimation; however, collecting 6D pose ground truth in real agricultural fields is inherently challenging. Existing 6D pose estimation methods have therefore relied solely on synthetic data that lacks scene-level realism, leaving their performance under real agricultural field conditions unquantified. In this work, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first real-world 6D pose ground truth dataset of strawberries collected in actual agricultural fields (12,040 images). We also introduce a synthetic dataset rendered in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, featuring scene-level realism and domain randomization. Nevertheless, our experiments reveal that a significant sim-to-real gap persists, underscoring the necessity of real agricultural field data for reliable evaluation. We further quantify the sim-to-real gap through baseline 6D pose estimation results across backbone encoders, serving as a reference for future work. The real-world dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

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

EvoTrainer: Co-Evolving LLM Policies and Training Harnesses for Autonomous Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.03108v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous LLM training is often framed as recipe search, which leaves the training harness largely static. This limitation sharpens in agentic RL, where shifting bottlenecks and scalar rewards mask diverse failure modes. We introduce EvoTrainer, an autonomous training framework that co-evolves LLM policies and training-side harnesses through empirical feedback: it diagnoses rollout-level evidence, revises diagnostics, backtests interventions, and accumulates reusable skills. Evaluated on mathematical reasoning, competitive-programming code generation, and repository-level software engineering, EvoTrainer matches or exceeds the human-engineered RL references under the same data, codebase, and evaluation protocol, with the largest gain on long-horizon agentic SWE. Trajectory analyses show that retained strategies diverge across domains, evolving diagnostics prevent invalid high-scoring branches from being promoted, and reusable skills shape later search. Autonomous LLM RL should move beyond recipe search toward joint evolution of policies and the training harnesses that interpret them.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Delta-Based Target Reformulation for Short-Term Electricity Load Forecasting Using LSTM and Transformer Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting is critical for the reliable and economic operation of modern power systems, under non-stationarity arising from weather variability, calendar effects, and evolving consumption patterns. While deep learning models such as LSTMs and Transformers show promising performance, most existing studies focus on direct absolute load prediction without explicitly addressing target non-stationarity. Motivated by classical time-series differencing techniques in ARIMA models, this paper investigates a delta-based target reformulation for short-term electricity load forecasting using deep learning. Instead of directly predicting absolute load values, the proposed formulation trains models to predict the change in load between consecutive time steps, with final forecasts reconstructed using the last observed load. This aims to stabilize the learning target and reduce forecasting difficulty. Using multi-year, hourly real-world electricity load data from India, augmented with meteorological variables from the NASA POWER project and calendar features, this study evaluates LSTM and Transformer models under both formulations, benchmarking them against LightGBM. Experiments are conducted for hour-ahead and day-ahead horizons, assessing performance via Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Results show that delta-based reformulation consistently improves forecasting accuracy for hour-ahead prediction across all evaluated models, yielding MAPE reductions of over 50% compared to absolute formulations. For day-ahead forecasting, delta targets specifically benefit deep sequence models (LSTM and Transformer), while LightGBM remains competitive under the absolute formulation. These findings indicate that while delta reformulation is a powerful inductive bias for neural networks, its efficacy is model- and horizon-dependent.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

An Integrated Framework for Transcriptomic Characterization and Lorentzian Hyperbolic Visualization of a High-Risk Topological Branch in Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a highly heterogeneous brain disorder in which molecular alterations vary across brain regions, disease stages, and patient subgroups. This study introduces an integrated analytical framework for characterizing transcriptomic variation associated with a high-risk topological branch, which was identified based on Lorentz distance in postmortem Brodmann area 36 samples from the Mount Sinai Brain Bank cohort, where over 70% of samples were in Braak stages V-VI. The framework integrates weighted gene co-expression network analysis, repeated stability-based differential expression analysis, network-level gene filtering, Gene Ontology enrichment, and nested stratified cross-validation to evaluate whether topological branch-associated genes capture biologically meaningful signals and carry predictive information for high-Braak group status. The identified gene sets were functionally enriched for neuronal development, neuron projection organization, synaptic signaling, vesicle fusion, and regulated synaptic release, suggesting that the high-risk topological branch reflects biologically relevant transcriptomic programs linked to neurodegenerative progression. Nested cross-validation further showed that the selected genes achieved measurable internal predictive performance for distinguishing high-Braak samples. As a second methodological contribution, we introduced a Lorentzian hyperbolic variant of t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (Lorentz t-SNE) to explore latent non-Euclidean structure in transcriptomic data. This method embeds samples in hyperbolic space, providing an alternative to Euclidean embeddings for representing hierarchical or nonlinear structures. Compared with conventional Euclidean embeddings, the proposed Lorentz t-SNE revealed a more localized organization of high-Braak samples. Together, these results demonstrate the utility of the proposed analytical framework and Lorentz t-SNE for investigating heterogeneous, potentially non-Euclidean organization in AD transcriptomes.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Retro-Expert: Collaborative Reasoning for Interpretable Retrosynthesis

arXiv:2508.10967v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrosynthesis prediction aims to infer the reactant molecules based on a given product molecule, which is a fundamental task in chemical synthesis. However, existing methods rely on a static pattern-matching paradigm, which limits their ability to perform effective logical decision-making from chemical data, leading to a black-box process. We propose Retro-Expert, an interpretable retrosynthesis framework that performs collaborative reasoning by combining the complementary strengths of Large Language Models and specialized models via pure reinforcement learning. It outputs natural language explanations grounded in chemical logic through three components: (1) specialized models provide chemical knowledge that is distilled into a high-quality chemical decision space, (2) LLM-driven critical reasoning to generate predictions with an interpretable reasoning path, and (3) knowledge-grounded policy optimization refines the interpretable decision policy. Experiments show that Retro-Expert surpasses both LLM-based and specialized models across different metrics, while generating chemically grounded explanations that enhance chemists' trust in practice. The source code for this paper is available at https://github.com/MagixRab-ll/Retro-Expert.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance

While 10B-level industrial foundation models have pushed the boundaries of image inpainting, their prohibitive computational costs severely hinder practical deployment. Constructing a highly optimized task-specific specialist offers a promising solution; however, extreme structural compression inevitably triggers a severe representation bottleneck. To conquer this, we propose Moebius, a highly efficient lightweight inpainting framework. We systematically reconstruct the diffusion backbone by introducing the Local-$\lambda$ Mix Interaction ($L\lambda MI$) block. Comprising Local-$\lambda$ and Interactive-$\lambda$ modules, it elegantly summarizes spatial contexts and global semantic priors into fixed-size linear matrices, preserving complex latent interactions while drastically shedding parameters. Furthermore, to unlock the full representational capacity of this highly compact architecture, we synergistically pair it with an adaptive multi-granularity distillation strategy. Operating strictly within the latent space to avoid expensive pixel-space decoding, this strategy dynamically balances multiple gradient-based losses to achieve high-fidelity alignment. Extensive experiments across natural and portrait benchmarks demonstrate that this optimal synergy enables Moebius to rival or even surpass the generation quality of the 10B-level industrial generalist FLUX.1-Fill-Dev. Remarkably, Moebius achieves this using less than 2\% of the parameters (0.22B vs. 11.9B) while delivering a $>15\times$ acceleration in total inference time, setting a new efficiency standard for high-fidelity inpainting. Project page at https://hustvl.github.io/Moebius.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Geometry-Preserving in 3D Gaussian Splatting for LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration

Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is essential for robust multi-modal perception. Targetless approaches avoid manual setup but remain limited by the scarcity of discriminative cross-modal features. Recent methods address this by reconstructing the scene within a differentiable model, enabling extrinsic optimization through dense photometric supervision. Among these, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely adopted as a geometric proxy that bridges LiDAR and camera within a single differentiable framework. However, since 3DGS was originally designed for novel view synthesis, existing methods tend to prioritize rendering quality, causing the proxy geometry to drift from the true LiDAR structure. We propose a framework that preserves the metric geometry of the Gaussian proxy by aggregating multi-view LiDAR observations for dense depth supervision and blocking photometric gradients from updating the Gaussian spatial parameters. We validate our method on public driving datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing targetless methods in calibration accuracy.

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

Continual Backdoor Training in IoT/CPS

arXiv:2606.14987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical systems (CPS) increasingly rely on continual learning (CL) to adapt to evolving environments, device heterogeneity, and concept drift, thereby improving overall utility. While continual adaptation is essential for long-lived IoT deployments where data patterns evolve, it also introduces new security vulnerabilities. In particular, backdoor attacks can exploit incremental updates, replay buffers, and representation reuse to implant persistent malicious behaviors that remain dormant during normal operation but activate upon specific triggers. In this paper, we present a backdoor attack in continual learning used in IoT/CPS systems. To this end, we formalize an IoT/CPS-specific threat model, analyze why continual learning amplifies backdoor persistence in IoT pipelines, and evaluate our technique under varying conditions. Our analysis highlights critical open challenges in securing lifelong learning in IoT/CPS and industrial IoT (IIoT) environments, as well as the need for heightened security controls.

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

LegalWorld: A Life-Cycle Interactive Environment for Legal Agents

Civil litigation is inherently a life-cycle process: what a lawyer drafts on day one constrains what unfolds at trial months later. Yet existing legal benchmarks evaluate isolated subtasks, and prior legal-agent simulators reinitialize each scenario from shared ground truth, leaving cross-stage causal dependencies unmodeled. We present LegalWorld, a life-cycle interactive environment that models Chinese civil litigation as a causally connected state chain of five stages (seven sub-scenarios), grounded in 75,309 paired Chinese civil judgments. We pair it with reusable infrastructure (local memory, global case memory, a Skill/Tool library) that keeps each dispute consistent across its full life cycle. Building on this environment, we construct LongJud-Bench to evaluate agent capability across all five connected stages. 18,992 ratings from 217 legal-background evaluators confirm that LegalWorld trajectories are procedurally faithful and role-consistent; and a capability-level cross-model evaluation reveals sharp divergences that aggregate scores cannot expose, with no single backbone leading across consultation, drafting, and courtroom advocacy. Detailed resources will be released publicly.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Decoupling local classicality from classical explainability: A noncontextual model for bilocal classical theory and a locally-classical but contextual theory

arXiv:2511.19266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct an ontological model for the theory known as bilocal classical theory doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216. To our knowledge, this is only the second time that an ontological model has been constructed for an entire theory, rather than just for some particular scenarios within a theory. This result refutes a conjecture from doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216 which suggested that there might be no local-realist ontological model for bilocal classical theory. Moreover, it is the first time that an ontological model has been constructed for a theory that fails to be locally tomographic, showing that the assumption of local tomography underpinning the structure theorem in doi.org/10.22331/q-2024-03-14-1283 is a genuine limitation of the theorem. This demonstrates that in general there is no tension between failures of local tomography and classical explainability (i.e., generalised noncontextuality). In fact, bilocal classical theory is in many ways more simply understood via the underlying ontological model than it is within its original formulation (much as how odd-dimensional stabiliser subtheories can be more simply understood via Spekkens' toy theory). Furthermore, this result naturally leads to the question, does every locally-classical theory admit of an ontological model? By constructing a concrete counterexample, we show that this is not the case. Our findings demonstrate that there is no straightforward relationship between theories being locally-classical, and them being classically-explainable. This shows that the fundamental status of compositional properties (such as local tomography) is not a technical side-issue, but a central and unavoidable question for a coherent understanding even of classicality itself.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Continuous Language Diffusion as a Decoder-Interface Problem

Gaussian-corrupted sentence embeddings have no direct linguistic interpretation, yet continuous diffusion language models can generate fluent text from them. We study this puzzle through Embedded Language Flows (ELF) and identify a decoder-basin mechanism: our evidence suggests that denoising becomes reliable when trajectories reach regions where the native decoder can read stable tokens. We introduce a diagnostic protocol for denoisability, semantic recoverability, order sensitivity, decoder compatibility, and trajectory reliability. It exposes failures hidden by scalar metrics: low mean-squared error can discard linguistic content, low perplexity can reflect low-entropy collapse, and clean latent reconstruction can coexist with a narrow decoder basin. A decoder-margin bound explains why token recovery depends on margin and local decoder sensitivity, not latent error alone. Auditing public ELF checkpoints reveals an interface phase diagram: early predictions are weakly readable, mid-trajectory disagreement marks a competition region, and late predictions enter a high-margin decoder basin. Once inside, token realization is surprisingly simple on generated ELF states: frozen T5 (Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer) token-embedding lookup recovers $93$–$96\%$ of native decoder decisions, and a single linear readout reaches $97.9\%$ agreement at 32k samples, leaving an $\approx1.1$–$1.2$ perplexity gap in a structured residual tail. Under conservative held-out gates, a margin rule exits roughly $17$–$28\%$ earlier in denoising steps under an explicit diagnostic monitor. Boundary checks on LangFlow, BitstreamDiffusion, and the Continuous Latent Diffusion Language Model (Cola-DLM) show that the same interface questions remain meaningful when the state object and decoder change. Continuous and latent diffusion language models should therefore be evaluated as representation-decoder systems.

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

MLT-Dedup: Efficient Large-Scale Online Video Deduplication via Multi-Level Representations and Spatial-Temporal Matching

The explosive growth of user-generated video content on online platforms is accompanied by the emergence of numerous near-duplicate videos–videos that are identical or highly similar but differ by partial edits. These duplicates degrade user experience and increase storage and bandwidth costs, making large-scale video deduplication a critical task. Existing video deduplication frameworks face a fundamental challenge in retrieving sufficient high-quality candidates under a limited index budget, as well as trade-offs between efficiency and precision. To address these issues, we propose MLT-Dedup, an efficient large-scale online video deduplication framework with Multi-Level representations and spatial-Temporal matching. Our approach employs a Multi-Level Video Encoder (ML-VE) to extract both fine-grained frame-level and sparse clip-level embeddings: sparse embeddings support efficient candidate retrieval, while fine-grained embeddings are loaded for precise pairwise matching. During matching, we introduce DiF-SiM, a Differential Feature-enhanced Similarity Module capable of locating duplicated temporal segments and providing reliable similarity evidence to support policy-driven deduplication decisions. Extensive experiments on a real-world large-scale platform demonstrate that MLT-Dedup reduces online repetition rates by 91% at 90% precision. Furthermore, our sparse retrieval design achieves a 5x increase in indexing capacity, enabling broader candidate coverage in real-world deployment.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Confidence is Not Reliability: Rethinking MC Dropout in Brain Tumour Segmentation

Glioma segmentation in multiparametric MRI is a critical component of treatment planning. A segmentation model that fails silently on treatment-critical sub-regions represents a patient safety risk that overlap-based metrics such as Dice scores cannot expose. We ask whether voxel-level uncertainty estimation via Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout can reliably identify segmentation errors in clinically critical sub-regions, and whether calibration failure modes are detectable from standard reporting metrics alone. In an empirical two-model case study on 126 BraTS21 patients, we evaluate a high-performance pretrained SegResNet and a locally trained UNet with residual units (UNet-Res). MC dropout preserved segmentation accuracy ($|\Delta Dice|$ $

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

VEPHand: View-Efficient Photometric Hand Performance Capture at Scale

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

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

ARVO: Atlas of Reproducible Vulnerabilities for Open-Source Software

arXiv:2606.17283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Achieving reproducibility, quantity, and diversity in vulnerability datasets has long been viewed as an inherent three-way trade-off, where improving one dimension often comes at the cost of the others. In practice, reproducibility has been the dimension most often neglected. This has limited what can be automatically extracted from historical bug datasets, and has reduced their utility for downstream security research. In this work, we propose a method to produce a new security dataset which ensures reproducibility for diverse vulnerabilities at scale by identifying the key obstacles to large-scale bug reproduction and addressing them with general solutions. Using this method, we introduce full reproducibility to the largest open source software vulnerability dataset (OSS-Fuzz) and construct the ARVO dataset (an Atlas of Reproducible Vulnerabilities in Open-source software). ARVO is a large-scale dataset consisting of over 6,100 real-world vulnerabilities across 311 projects. Focusing on reproducibility, ARVO differs from existing datasets by providing each vulnerability in a form that can be consistently rebuilt, triggered, and analyzed across versions. Reproducibility also enables automatic identification of the corresponding patch for each vulnerability and supports direct interaction with vulnerabilities after code changes, capabilities that existing large-scale datasets do not provide. In our evaluation, ARVO successfully reproduces 81% of vulnerabilities and achieves 89.4% accuracy on the located patches. We also discuss ARVO's influence on both upstream practices and downstream security research.

20.
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.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Estimating Individualized Treatment Effects in Acute Ischemic Stroke with Causal Transformation Models (TRAM-DAG): A Multi-Centre Observational Study with External RCT Validation

arXiv:2606.12623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personalized medicine in acute ischemic stroke requires moving beyond average treatment effects (ATE) to individualized treatment effect (ITE) estimates to support treatment decisions. In acute ischemic stroke, mechanical thrombectomy has been shown to be more effective on average than lysis in randomized controlled trials (RCTs), such as the MR CLEAN study. We aim to identify which individual patients benefit most from mechanical thrombectomy compared to lysis. The outcome of interest is the modified Rankin Scale (mRS) at three months, an ordinal measure of functional disability (0: no symptoms, 6: death). We demonstrate that causal transformation models on directed acyclic graphs (TRAM-DAG) can be used for ITE estimation after being fitted on observational MAGIC multi-center stroke patient data. To ensure comparability with the MR CLEAN population, which we use for validation, we train the TRAM-DAG on a MAGIC sub-population with NIHSS at admission >= 6, corresponding to one inclusion criterion of MR CLEAN. The fitted model is then used to estimate ITEs for stroke patients in the MR CLEAN population. While these ITE estimates cannot be confirmed experimentally, we show that their average is consistent with the trial's reported ATE. Furthermore, the ITE estimates correctly rank trial patients by their observed frequency of a good outcome (mRS at three months

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

RSRCC: A Remote Sensing Regional Change Comprehension Benchmark Constructed via Retrieval-Augmented Best-of-N Ranking

Traditional change detection identifies where changes occur, but does not explain what changed in natural language. Existing remote sensing change captioning datasets typically describe overall image-level differences, leaving fine-grained localized semantic reasoning largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present RSRCC, a new benchmark for remote sensing change question-answering containing 126k questions, split into 87k training, 17.1k validation, and 22k test instances. Unlike prior datasets, RSRCC is built around localized, change-specific questions that require reasoning about a particular semantic change. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first remote sensing change question-answering benchmark designed explicitly for such fine-grained reasoning-based supervision. To construct RSRCC, we introduce a hierarchical semi-supervised curation pipeline that uses Best-of-N ranking as a critical final ambiguity-resolution stage. First, candidate change regions are extracted from semantic segmentation masks, then initially screened using an image-text embedding model, and finally validated through retrieval-augmented vision-language curation with Best-of-N ranking. This process enables scalable filtering of noisy and ambiguous candidates while preserving semantically meaningful changes. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/RSRCC.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Association of circulating endothelial progenitor cell count and functional outcome in patients with acute ischemic stroke due to intracranial large vessel occlusion

Background: Circulating endothelial progenitor cells (cEPCs) contribute to vascular repair following an ischemic stroke. The aim of the study was to evaluate the association between cEPCs and functional outcomes in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) due to large vessel occlusion (LVO) who received endovascular therapy (EVT). Methods: Prospective study of patients with LVO-AIS who received EVT. Blood samples were obtained within 24 +- 12 hours and on day 7+-1 from stroke onset. cEPCs were detected using flow cytometry (CD34+/VEGFR2+/CD133+). The primary endpoint was a favourable functional outcome (modified Rankin Scale 0-2) at three months of follow-up. Secondary endpoints include baseline to 24 hours/day 7 changes in the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score and collateral circulation (CC) status. Bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed. Results: Included were 90 patients (73.2+-12.7 years, 41.1% women) in 42 of whom (46.7%) cEPCs were detected at 24 hours. On day 7, cEPCs were detected in 27 (43.6%) of 62 patients for which this information was available. Atrial fibrillation, prior anticoagulant treatment and stroke onset-to-door time

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

VinQA: Visual Elements Interleaved Long-form Answer Generation for Real-World Multimodal Document QA

Real-world documents combine text with tables, charts, photographs, and diagrams arranged in diverse layouts, yet existing research on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for document QA predominantly produces text-only responses, underutilizing these visual elements. We introduce VinQA, a dataset for long-form answer generation where cited visual elements are explicitly interleaved with their supporting text and grounded in relevant document pages. To support this task, we study two encoding methods for feeding raw document page images into an MLLM, along with their visual-element citation mechanisms: (1) Page Encoding, which directly encodes full-page images with bounding boxes of visual elements and treats these boxed regions as citable units; and (2) Modality Encoding, which parses each page to extract text and crop visual elements, encodes them separately, and uses these cropped elements as citable units. In our experiments, we propose M-GroSE, a multimodal evaluation framework extending GroUSE to assess answers along four dimensions: completeness, answer relevancy, faithfulness, and unanswerability. We additionally report Visual Source F1 to directly measure visual citation accuracy. Although proprietary frontier models still achieve the best overall scores on the VinQA test split, fine-tuning open Qwen2.5-VL models on the training split substantially improves their performance and narrows this gap. Modality Encoding is initially more robust for complex documents with long text, many visual elements, and diverse citation requirements. After training on VinQA, however, Page Encoding reaches a comparable level, competing effectively even without the explicit parsing used in Modality Encoding. Finally, Visual G-Eval, an MLLM-based judge, confirms that fine-tuned models insert visual elements at semantically appropriate positions with faithful supporting text.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Arbor: Tree Search as a Cognition Layer for Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2606.12563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arbor is a multi-agent framework that introduces structured tree search as a cognition layer for autonomous agents operating in large, stateful action spaces. Prior autonomous optimization systems operate on isolated targets with stateless evaluation. Arbor instead maintains an explicit search tree of scored hypotheses that serves as the shared working memory across agents, evolving with every measurement, treating failures as diagnostic signal that reshapes subsequent exploration, and expanding as prior successes shift the bottleneck distribution. We validate Arbor on full-stack LLM inference optimization, a domain where achieving peak performance has historically required coordinated effort from engineering teams across the application, framework, compiler, kernel, and hardware stack. Arbor pairs an Orchestrator agent, which drives optimization by delegating to Domain Specialists across the inference stack, with a Critic agent that safeguards stability through root-cause analysis, introspection, and measurement validation – a checks-and-balances architecture where neither agent can unilaterally drive the system. Agent capabilities are decomposed into hard skills (domain expertise) and soft skills (coordination protocols that determine how contributions compose), enabling fully autonomous multi-day campaigns. Arbor achieves up to 193% inference throughput-latency Pareto improvement over vendor-optimized baselines, while a single agent without the harness plateaus at +33% throughput improvement and crashes irrecoverably within hours. Arbor generalizes to multiple generations of hardware platform, and run-to-run variance is within 2 percentage points demonstrating that the method is hardware-agnostic and reproducible.