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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

WildIFEval: Instruction Following in the Wild

Recent LLMs have shown remarkable success in following user instructions, yet handling instructions with multiple constraints remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce WildIFEval - a large-scale dataset of 7K real user instructions with diverse, multi-constraint conditions. Unlike prior datasets, our collection spans a broad lexical and topical spectrum of constraints, extracted from natural user instructions. We categorize these constraints into eight high-level classes to capture their distribution and dynamics in real-world scenarios. Leveraging WildIFEval, we conduct extensive experiments to benchmark the instruction-following capabilities of leading LLMs. WildIFEval clearly differentiates between small and large models, and demonstrates that all models have a large room for improvement on such tasks. We analyze the effects of the number and type of constraints on performance, revealing interesting patterns of model constraint-following behavior. We release our dataset to promote further research on instruction-following under complex, realistic conditions.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

REDACT: A Systematically Controlled Multilingual Benchmark for Personal Information Detection

Benchmark infrastructure for personally identifiable information (PII) detection remains limited: existing corpora cover few entity types, use ad hoc generation conditions, and do not show which surface conditions cause detector failures. We present REDACT, a systematically controlled multilingual PII benchmark with 13,427 records, 324,078 entity annotations, 51 entity types, 4,127 surface-form patterns, and 25 languages across 9 scripts. A strength-2 covering-array sampler controls nine generation axes: domain, format, difficulty, length, density, code-switching, language, adjacency, and co-occurrence. Three entity-level metadata fields (disclosure status, disclosure form, and a GDPR-aligned sensitivity tier) enable stratified evaluation beyond aggregate or per-type F1. From the full benchmark, we evaluate five detectors (Presidio, GLiNER, the OpenAI Privacy Filter, GPT-4.1, and Claude Sonnet 4.6) on a locked, language-stratified sample of 1,000 records. Aggregate F1 masks an architecture-dependent failure structure: the rule-based detector performs poorly on the highest-stakes data, including HIGH-sensitivity categories (recall 0.07) and non-verbatim disclosure forms, while the LLM detectors remain more robust, with the HIGH tier as their strongest sensitivity slice. A three-model reference-free LLM-as-judge assessment corroborates that sensitivity-tier assignment is the task's hardest axis. We release the benchmark, schema, prompts, and stratified evaluation harness.

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

GRACE: Boosting Video MLLMs with Grounded Action-Centric Evidence for Viewer Sentiment Prediction

Viewer sentiment prediction in video advertisements aims to infer the latent affective response evoked in the audience. To bridge the gap between what is shown and what is felt, models must deduce hidden viewer emotions from explicit visual narratives, concrete character-object interactions, and visible textual cues. However, standard Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically rely on holistic frame representations, which leave these fine-grained, affect-relevant events implicit and complicate precise emotional reasoning. To address this, we propose a grounded action-centric evidence augmentation framework that enhances video MLLMs' clue extraction and comprehension by introducing explicit event structure and localized visual evidence. Our method extracts temporally ordered subject-verb-object (SVO) triplets and auxiliary visible textual cues from action-centric video descriptions, grounds subject and object entities as visual entity crops, and then enables the MLLM to perform clue-enhanced emotional reasoning based on these extracted structured clues. In this way, action triplets specify "what happens", while grounded visual entity crops anchor "who or what participates in each event" to concrete visual evidence. Experiments on the Pitts dataset show consistent improvements over Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL baselines. Ablation studies, cross-dataset evaluation on AdsQA, and transfer experiments on an emotion-focused TVQA subset further support the effectiveness and generalization of our approach.

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

Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning via Label Refinement and Threshold Adjustment

arXiv:2407.05370v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms often struggle to perform well when trained on imbalanced data. In such scenarios, the generated pseudo-labels tend to exhibit a bias toward the majority class, and models relying on these pseudo-labels can further amplify this bias. Existing imbalanced SSL algorithms explore pseudo-labeling strategies based on either pseudo-label refinement (PLR) or threshold adjustment (THA), aiming to mitigate the bias through heuristic-driven designs. However, through a careful statistical analysis, we find that existing strategies are suboptimal: most PLR algorithms are either overly empirical or rely on the unrealistic assumption that models remain well-calibrated throughout training, while most THA algorithms depend on flawed metrics for pseudo-label selection. To address these shortcomings, we first derive the theoretically optimal form of pseudo-labels under class imbalance. This foundation leads to our key contribution: SEmi-supervised learning with pseudo-label optimization based on VALidation data (SEVAL), a unified framework that learns both PLR and THA parameters from a class-balanced subset of training data. By jointly optimizing these components, SEVAL adapts to specific task requirements while ensuring per-class pseudo-label reliability. Our experiments demonstrate that SEVAL outperforms state-of-the-art SSL methods, producing more accurate and effective pseudo-labels across various imbalanced SSL scenarios while remaining compatible with diverse SSL algorithms. The code is publicly available (https://github.com/ZerojumpLine/SEVAL).

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

Measuring language complexity from hierarchical reuse of recurring patterns

We introduce the ladderpath index as a measure of language complexity grounded in algorithmic information theory. It counts the minimum steps needed to reconstruct a sequence through hierarchical reuse of repeated substructures, capturing an exactly computable but constrained form of algorithmic compressibility related to, but distinct from, Kolmogorov complexity. We apply the ladderpath approach to 21 parallel corpora from the Parallel Universal Dependencies dataset. The ladderpath index is approximately invariant across the languages, and varies much less than the corpus length. This is more pronounced when all corpora are mapped to a unified binary representation, providing evidence for the equi-complexity hypothesis from a representation-independent perspective. We also observe trade-offs between character inventory size and corpus length, and between vocabulary-level and corpus-level reconstruction complexity, supporting the trade-off hypothesis that total complexity is conserved and redistributed across linguistic levels. The reusable substructures identified by the ladderpath approach, without any linguistic input, overlap with words and morphological components attested in the natural vocabulary. The hierarchical reuse captured by the ladderpath approach parallels the chunking mechanisms proposed in cognitive science, where the human cognitive system compresses linguistic input into nested, reusable units under shared memory and processing constraints. This connection between cognitive chunking and the ladderpath approach provides a new interpretation for the equi-complexity and trade-off hypotheses, grounding both in the shared cognitive architecture that underlies language processing across human languages.

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

THEIA: Learning Complete Kleene Three-Valued Logic in a Pure-Neural Modular Architecture

arXiv:2604.11284v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present THEIA, a 2.75M-parameter modular neural architecture that learns the complete Kleene three-valued logic (K3) truth table from task data without external symbolic inference or hand-encoded K3 gate primitives. Across 5 seeds it passes all 39 K3 rules at >99% per-rule accuracy. K3 learnability is not the central finding: Transformer baselines also pass all 39 rules, and flat MLPs match THEIA on Phase-1 accuracy within 0.04pp. The contributions are two properties of the learned system. (1) Uncertainty-verdict asymmetric propagation. THEIA preserves Has-Unknown at every upstream boundary (80.0/91.1/90.8/99.7% across Arith/Order/Set/Logic vs. ~52% majority) while final-verdict decodability stays at or below a 73.4% U-vs-non-U oracle reference under linear and nonlinear probes. Activation patching on non-absorbent T->U cases flips 4,898/4,898 OR and 4,719/4,719 AND pairs across 5 seeds, ruling out residual shortcuts. (2) Reliability spectrum under discretized end-to-end training, on tasks decomposable along the engine boundaries. A mod-3 sequential composition task generalizes from 5- to 500-step evaluation at 99.96+-0.04% (5 seeds). Under identical Gumbel-softmax training, flat MLPs collapse to chance by 50 steps; a 2x2 ResMLP grid reaches >=99% on only 3/20 (config, seed) trials; a pre-LN Transformer reaches 99.24+-0.34%. Straight-through discretization prevents 0.999^500 compounding; the architectural separator is sustaining Phase-1 accuracy under Phase-3 training, where flat MLPs fail. Auxiliary: under per-architecture development defaults (not optimizer-controlled), THEIA reaches 12/12 Kleene coverage 6.5x faster than a parameter-comparable 8L Transformer; this narrows to ~3.6x with Transformer-standard tuning and 4.93x with the same recipe on both. Ratios are config-specific, not asymptotic.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma: Foundations and Applications

Authors:

arXiv:2603.07245v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma (LLL) is a central tool in probabilistic combinatorics, providing a sufficient condition under which a finite collection of undesirable events with limited dependencies can be simultaneously avoided with positive probability. This paper offers a self-contained expository treatment of the lemma and its strengthened versions, emphasizing mathematical foundations, conceptual clarity, and applications. We begin with a pedagogically motivated proof of the LLL based entirely on unconditional probability inequalities. Particular attention is given to the symmetric form of the lemma and several subsequent strengthenings. The paper also discusses a variety of classical applications of both the symmetric and asymmetric forms of the LLL in combinatorics and graph theory, including bounds for the edge-disjoint paths problem, satisfiability of Boolean formulas in conjunctive normal form, lower bounds on diagonal and off-diagonal Ramsey numbers, hypergraph coloring results, structural properties of directed graphs, and acyclic graph colorings. Additional observations and refinements are provided throughout. We also introduce the algorithmic framework of Moser and Tardos, highlighting its constructive counterpart to the LLL, together with an introduction to the entropy-compression principle. The lopsided LLL, a refinement of the LLL, is presented along with an application to the Latin transversal problem. We further discuss the cluster-expansion lemma and its relation to the LLL, and present an alternative treatment of the Latin transversal problem from the cluster-expansion perspective that yields an improved result. The paper concludes with a high-level overview of the iterated LLL, also known as the semi-random method.

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

Forecasting Future Behavior as a Learning Task

arXiv:2606.11445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trust in an AI system is often anchored by explanations of how it works, which one then uses to forecast its behavior on new inputs. For large reasoning models (LRMs), this conventional route is particularly difficult to follow: explanation methods for single token generations do not naturally generalize to long trajectories, and the trajectories themselves are often not faithful when read as natural language. We propose an alternative that bypasses the explanation step: treat behavior forecasting as a learnable task and train Behavior Forecasters that operates on a single reasoning trajectory to make the same forecasts one would typically seek from an explanation. The forecaster's training data is obtained by querying the LRM with no human annotation, and its inference is done in a single forward pass. We instantiate this approach on two tasks: how likely the LRM is to repeat its answer on re-runs, and how removing parts of the input changes its answer. We evaluate this approach on both tasks across three diverse reasoning datasets and find that trained Behavior Forecasters are more accurate than GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus-4.6 reading the same trajectories as naive readers, at a small fraction of their inference cost. We find that fine-tuning the backbone end-to-end and initializing it from the target LRM are each necessary for strong performance. These results show that the reasoning trajectory carries information about the LRM's future behavior that goes beyond what naive reading conveys.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Composite Activation Function for Learning Stable Binary Representations

arXiv:2605.11558v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation functions play a central role in neural networks by shaping internal representations. Recently, learning binary activation representations has attracted significant attention due to their advantages in computational and memory efficiency, as well as interpretability. However, training neural networks with Heaviside activations remains challenging, as their non-differentiability obstructs standard gradient-based optimization. In this paper, we propose Heavy Tailed Activation Function (HTAF), a smooth approximation to the Heaviside function that enables stable training with gradient-based optimization. We construct HTAF as a sigmoid hyperbolic tangent composite function and theoretically show that it maintains a large gradient mass around zero inputs while exhibiting slower gradient decay in the tail regions. We show that Spiking Neural Networks, Binary Neural Networks and Deep Heaviside neural Networks can be trained stably using HTAF with gradient-based optimization. Finally, we introduce Implicit Concept Bottleneck Models (ICBMs), an interpretable image model that leverages HTAF to induce discrete feature representations. Extensive experiments across various architectures and image datasets demonstrate that ICBM enables stable discretization while achieving prediction performance comparable to or better than standard models.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Target-Aware Linear Regression Under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.22775v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distribution shift between training and deployment is a pervasive challenge for modern AI systems. In many cases, the target marginals of covariates and response are known or specified through population-level observations, boundary conditions, properties of simulator configurations, or alignment-time distributional constraints. Such knowledge may provide valuable side information for regression estimation. We study this problem in the multivariate linear regression setting with a stable conditional mean $E[Y\mid X]$ across source and target, and identify the hybrid-loss estimator, which jointly incorporates both target marginals, as a benchmark target-aware estimator. Its direct computation, however, requires solving a coupled nonlinear optimization that is expensive at scale. Our main contribution is to develop and evaluate two computationally tractable alternatives: a constrained moment-matching estimator and a two-stage estimator that augments ordinary least squares with a calibration step. For all three estimators, we derive and compare closed-form asymptotic mean squared errors, yielding conditions under which the tractable alternatives match or closely approximate the hybrid benchmark, and regimes in which they do not. Monte Carlo experiments across three controlled shift regimes validate the theoretical results, investigate the accuracy-runtime tradeoffs among the three estimators, and translate into guidance on estimator choice. In particular, the two-stage estimator nearly matches the hybrid benchmark in the high signal-to-noise regime at essentially no additional cost, providing theoretical grounding for empirical observations in nonlinear settings.

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

SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). Tool-augmented agents attempt to address this by augmenting VLMs with specialist perception modules, yet their effectiveness is bounded by the action interface through which those tools are invoked. In this work, we study how the design of this interface shapes the agent's capacity for open-ended spatial reasoning. Existing spatial agents either employ single-pass code execution, which commits to a full analysis strategy before any intermediate result is observed, or rely on a structured tool-call interface that often offers less flexibility for freely composing operations or tailoring the analysis to each task. Both designs offer limited flexibility for open-ended, complex 3D/4D spatial reasoning. We therefore propose SpatialClaw, a training-free framework for spatial reasoning that adopts code as the action interface. SpatialClaw maintains a stateful Python kernel pre-loaded with input frames and a suite of perception and geometry primitives, letting a VLM-backed agent write one executable cell per step conditioned on all prior outputs, enabling the agent to flexibly compose and manipulate perception results and adapt its analysis to both intermediate text and visual observations and the demands of each problem. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks spanning a broad range of static and dynamic 3D/4D spatial reasoning tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the recent spatial agent by +11.2 points, with consistent gains across six VLM backbones from two model families without any benchmark- or model-specific adaptation.

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

VGPT-RSI for RH-Adjacent Formal Progress: Boundary Certificates, Verified Finite Lagarias Inequalities, and Explicit Failure Localization

arXiv:2606.15096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Riemann Hypothesis remains one of the central unsolved problems in mathematics. Rather than claiming proof, we investigate whether a verifiable AI-assisted reasoning system can produce reliable, formally checked partial progress while explicitly identifying the remaining mathematical obstructions. We apply the Verifiable Growing Physical Transformer with Recursive Self-Improvement (VGPT-RSI) to two RH-adjacent certification tasks. First, we construct and verify a finite RH-boundary certificate for inequality on a parameterized safe lower curve over a region. The numerical boundary curve is converted into a certificate-backed lower curve, audited using outward-rounded interval arithmetic and Arb/FLINT ball arithmetic, and then checked in Rocq/CoqInterval for the parameterized theorem. Second, we initiate a formal Lagarias-route certificate. Lagarias criterion states that RH is equivalent to the global inequality. We formalize the finite quantity and produce a Coq-checked finite certificate. The final system identifies the exact unresolved mathematical bottlenecks: formalizing the Lagarias equivalence, proving the global tail theorem beyond any finite cutoff, and potentially reducing counterexamples to colossally abundant or related extremal integers. These results demonstrate that VGPT-RSI can produce certified RH-adjacent formal progress, organize proof dependencies, and avoid overclaiming when the remaining obstruction is genuinely mathematical.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Mucosal and Systemic Antibodies Associated with Clinical Protection in a Pertussis Controlled Human Infection Model

Background The engagement of mucosal and systemic immunity in preventing Bordetella pertussis colonization and infection in humans, the impact of prior vaccination on host immunity and protective outcomes, and the dynamics of the host response following exposure remain poorly understood. Methods Healthy adults were challenged with increasing colony-forming units (CFUs) doses, 106-108, of B. pertussis D420 intranasally (NCT05136599). Shedding (PCR and culturing) and symptom development were monitored up to 21 days post-challenge. Serum and nasal wash IgA and IgG were measured before challenge (baseline) and up to 6 months post-challenge. Findings Antibodies increased post-challenge only in infected individuals, primarily nasal IgA. Participants who remained uninfected had higher baseline levels of filamentous hemagglutinin (FHA)- specific mucosal IgA and IgG, and higher serum IgA against fimbriae 2/3 (FIM). FHA was negatively associated with bacterial load and was a key discriminator between shedders and non-shedders, up to one week post-challenge. By day 14 post-challenge, pertussis toxin (PT) IgG and FIM IgA in both serum and mucosal samples were negatively associated with bacterial colonization. The majority (96.7%) of acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine recipients (n=23, median age 2.0 years) became infected, compared to 69.4% of those who received whole-cell pertussis vaccine (n=36; median age 32.0 years), and their antibody responses remained distinct following infection. Interpretation Nasal FHA antibodies emerged as early predictors of protection against pertussis infection, while PT IgG and FIM IgA antibodies may reflect clearance after infection. aP-primed individuals were more susceptible to infection, despite their younger age and more recent vaccination. Funding CDC Contract #75D30122C15467 and CDC IPA Agreement #24IPA2417512 Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US Department of Health and Human Services.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

What Is the Optimal Timing and Frequency of Workload-Matched Postprandial Physical Activity Breaks? A Randomized Controlled Crossover Study of Cardiometabolic and Cognitive Responses During Sedentary Behavior

Purpose Postprandial sedentary behavior is associated with negative health effects and constitutes a large part of daily life in modern society. This study investigated how the timing of physical activity after eating influences glucose levels, cerebral and muscle oxygenation, cognitive performance, and well-being during subsequent sitting. Methods In a four-armed randomized crossover trial, healthy adults consumed four standardized meals separated by 48-hour washout periods. Each meal was followed by 2 hours of sitting combined, in random order, with one of four interventions: (1) sitting only, (2) 15 minutes of moderate intensity cycling immediately after eating, (3) 15 minutes of cycling 20 minutes after eating, or (4) three workload-matched five-minute cycling bouts during sitting. Interstitial glucose (continuous glucose monitoring), cerebral and muscle oxygenation (Functional near infrared spectroscopy), cognitive performance (Stroop test), heart rate, blood pressure, and subjective ratings were assessed every 30 minutes. Data were analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVA. Results Twenty participants (mean age 27.1{+/-}10.3 years, 12 females) completed the study. Cycling immediately after eating reduced mean glucose levels during postprandial sitting, while both 15-minute cycling bouts increased cerebral oxygenation. All active conditions enhanced muscle oxygenation. Heart rate and arousal increased with delayed cycling and active breaks. No effects were observed for blood pressure, cognitive performance, focus, or well-being. Conclusion A short bout of physical activity immediately after eating reduces postprandial hyperglycemia and improves brain oxygenation during sitting, whereas delayed activity and brief breaks increase physiological activation without cognitive or perceptual benefits.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Escaping the Cognitive Well: Efficient Competition Math with Off-the-Shelf Models

arXiv:2602.16793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the past year, custom and unreleased math reasoning models reached gold medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Similar performance was then reported using large-scale inference on publicly available models but at prohibitive costs (e.g., 3000 USD per problem). In this work, we present an inference pipeline that attains best-in-class performance on IMO-style math problems at an average inference cost orders of magnitude below competing methods while using only general-purpose off-the-shelf models. Our method relies on insights about grader failure in solver-grader pipelines, which we call the Cognitive Well (iterative refinement converging to a wrong solution that the solver as well as the pipeline's internal grader consider to be basically correct). Our pipeline addresses these failure modes through conjecture extraction, wherein candidate lemmas are isolated from generated solutions and independently verified alongside their negations in a fresh environment (context detachment). On IMO-ProofBench Advanced (PB-Adv), our pipeline achieves 67.1 percent performance using Gemini 3.0 Pro with an average cost per question of approximately 31 USD. At the time of evaluation, this represented the state-of-the-art on PB-Adv among both public and unreleased models, and more than doubles the success rate of the next best publicly accessible pipeline, all at a fraction of the cost.

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

Information-Theoretic Decomposition for Multimodal Interaction Learning

Multimodal learning hinges on capturing redundant, unique, and synergistic information across modalities, which collectively constitute multimodal interactions. A critical yet underexplored challenge is that these implicit interactions vary dynamically across samples. In this work, we present the first systematic, information-theoretic analysis highlighting why learning these dynamic, sample-specific interactions is critical for effective multimodal learning. Our analysis further reveals deficits in conventional paradigms at learning these distinct interaction types: modality ensemble approaches struggle to capture synergy, while joint learning paradigms often under-utilize redundant information. This highlights the need for an approach that can adaptively learn from different interaction types on a per-sample basis. To this end, we propose Decomposition-based Multimodal Interaction Learning (DMIL), a novel paradigm that explicitly models and learns from sample-specific interactions. First, we design a variational decomposition architecture to isolate the constituent interaction components. Second, we employ a new learning strategy that leverages these explicit interaction components in a fine-tuning process to achieve comprehensive interaction learning. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks and architectures demonstrate that DMIL consistently achieves superior performance by adapting to holistic sample-specific interactions. Our framework is flexible and broadly applicable, establishing an interaction-centric paradigm for multimodal learning. The code is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/DMIL.

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

Implementation of Licensed Plate Detection and Noise Removal in Image Processing

Authors:

Car license plate recognition system is an image processing technology used to identify vehicles by capturing their Car License Plates. The car license plate recognition technology is also known as automatic number-plate recognition, automatic vehicle identification, car license plate recognition or optical character recognition for cars. In Malaysia, as the number of vehicle is increasing rapidly nowadays, a pretty great number of vehicle on the road has brought about the considerable demands of car license plate recognition system. Car license plate recognition system can be implemented in electronic parking payment system, highway toll-fee system, traffic surveillance system and as police enforcement tools. Additionally, car license plate recognition system technology also has potential to be combined with various techniques in other different fields like biology, aerospace and so on to achieve the goal of solving some specialized problems.

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

Disentangling Dynamical Systems: Causal Representation Learning Meets Local Sparse Attention

arXiv:2603.14483v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Parametric system identification methods estimate the parameters of explicitly defined physical systems from data. Yet, they remain constrained by the need to provide an explicit function space, typically through a predefined library of candidate functions chosen via available domain knowledge. In contrast, deep learning can demonstrably model systems of broad complexity with high fidelity, but black-box function approximation typically fails to yield explicit descriptive or disentangled representations revealing the structure of a system. We develop a novel identifiability theorem, leveraging causal representation learning, to uncover disentangled representations of system parameters without structural assumptions. We derive a graphical criterion specifying when system parameters can be uniquely disentangled from raw trajectory data, up to permutation and diffeomorphism. Crucially, our analysis demonstrates that global causal structures provide a lower bound on the disentanglement guarantees achievable when considering local state-dependent causal structures. We instantiate system parameter identification as a variational inference problem, leveraging a sparsity-regularised transformer to uncover state-dependent causal structures. We empirically validate our approach across four synthetic domains, demonstrating its ability to recover highly disentangled representations that baselines fail to recover. Corroborating our theoretical analysis, our results confirm that enforcing local causal structure is often necessary for full identifiability.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Development and Initial Validation of the Quality of life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST) Assessment

Individuals with NF2-related schwannomatosis (NF2-SWN) experience a complex constellation of physical, emotional, and social symptoms that substantially impact quality of life (QoL). Although disease-specific patient-reported outcome measures are increasingly important for evaluating treatment benefit in clinical trials, existing NF2-SWN QoL measures have limitations in content coverage and sensitivity to change. This study describes the development and initial validation a new disease-specific QoL assessment – the Quality of Life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST). Using a three-phase, mixed-methods approach, items were generated through concept elicitation interviews with individuals with NF2-SWN and clinicians, prioritized via patient survey data, and refined through iterative cognitive debriefing procedures. The resulting 21-item QUEST assesses the extent to which NF2-SWN has negatively impacted a persons daily life over the past seven days. Initial psychometric evaluation was conducted in an international sample of 174 individuals with NF2-SWN aged 15 years and older (117 women (67%), 158 White individuals (89%)). Exploratory factor analysis supported a four-factor structure, and the total score demonstrated excellent internal consistency and strong test-retest reliability. Evidence of construct validity was demonstrated through hypothesized associations with disease-specific, generic, and domain-specific QoL measures, as well as known-groups validity based on self-reported disease severity and number of prior surgeries. Incremental validity analyses indicated that QUEST explained unique variance beyond existing measures. Together, findings support the QUEST as a reliable and valid disease-specific QoL measure with strong content validity and feasibility for use as a clinical trial endpoint in NF2-SWN.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Thinking with Visual Grounding

arXiv:2606.16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) can produce natural-language reasoning traces, these traces often leave the supporting image regions implicit, making them hard to verify and difficult to supervise. We introduce visually grounded thinking, a reasoning process in which models interleave natural-language thoughts with explicit point or box groundings of the visual evidence used at each step. This lets the model express intermediate reasoning in language while grounding key objects in the image regions they refer to. To train this behavior, we construct a scalable synthesis pipeline that distills correct visual reasoning traces, extracts the visual objects required by the traces, grounds them with a SAM3-based agent, and derives aligned point and box supervision from the resulting masks. We further propose grounding-aware reinforcement learning, which combines answer correctness rewards with dense grounding rewards that score whether generated object references match the correct image evidence. Across two counting benchmarks and four spatial reasoning benchmarks, adding visually grounded thinking to Gemma3-4B-IT consistently improves performance over the original model and the non-grounded thinking baseline. On spatial reasoning, the visually grounded thinking 4B models match, and in some cases surpass, Gemma3-27B-IT from the same model family. Our analysis shows that point grounding is well suited to counting, while box grounding benefits most from explicit grounding rewards on spatial tasks. Overall, our results show that VLMs think better when their intermediate thoughts are tied to the image regions that make them true.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Sharp Favard length of random Cantor sets

arXiv:2512.17753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that for a large class of planar $1$-dimensional random fractals $S$, the Favard length $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))$ of the neighborhood $S(r)$ is comparable to $\log^{-1}(1/r)$, matching a universal lower bound; up to now, this was only known in expectation for a few concrete models. In particular, we show that there exist $1$-Ahlfors regular sets with the fastest possible Favard length decay. For a wide class of planar one-dimensional "grid random fractals", including fractal percolation and its Ahlfors-regular variants, we further show that $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))/\log(1/r)$ converges almost surely, and we identify the limit explicitly. Furthermore, we prove that for some $1$-dimensional Ahlfors-regular random fractals $S$, the Favard length of $S(r)$ decays instead like $\log\log(1/r)/\log(1/r)$, showing that the $1/\log(1/r)$ decay is not universal among random fractals, as might be expected from previous results.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

UniTranslator: A Unified Multi-modal Framework for End-to-end In-Image Machine Translation

In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to translate scene text in an image and render the translated text back into the original regions while preserving the overall visual appearance. Recent unified multimodal models provide a promising solution by combining visual-text understanding and image generation within a single framework. However, directly adapting such models to IIMT remains challenging. In particular, they often suffer from understanding-generation conflicts, where the translation inferred during understanding is inconsistent with the text supervision used in generation, and spatial position misalignment, where the rendered text does not accurately match the target text regions. To address these issues, we present UniTranslator, a unified multimodal framework for IIMT that tightly couples translation understanding and text editing. Specifically, we introduce an Understand-Generation Alignment Module (UGAM) to bridge the representation gap between understanding and generation, encouraging semantic consistency between translated content prediction and text rendering. We further propose a Spatial Mask Decoder (SMD) with pixel-level supervision over text regions to improve spatial grounding, geometric alignment, and layout controllability during generation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UniTranslator achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse language directions and complex real-world layouts. Moreover, our results reveal a strong mutual reinforcement effect between translation understanding and image generation, highlighting the advantage of unified translation multimodal learning. Code is available at https://github.com/SeerRay-Lab/Unitranslator.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Multi-Domain Feature Fusion Framework for Generalizable Deepfake Detection Across Different Generators

Deepfakes are artificially generated images, audio, or videos that threaten privacy, security, and information integrity. Detecting such content is crucial for countering disinformation, as the latest models generate highly realistic content. While spatial- or frequency-based approaches achieve good detection rates on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)-based generated deepfakes, they often struggle with recent diffusion model-generated images. In particular, existing approaches rarely exploit complementary multi-domain representations or systematically evaluate cross-generator robustness. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-domain deepfake detection framework called SGFF-Net (Spatial-Gradient-Frequency Fusion Network) that integrates spatial, gradient, and DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform)-based frequency representations within a dual residual learning architecture. Experimental results show that the SGFF-Net achieves 98.95\% accuracy in intra-dataset evaluation and improves performance in both cross-model (70.46\%) and cross-paradigm (69.94\%) settings. Incorporating multi-source training and data augmentation further enhances robustness, increasing accuracy from 70.46\% to 79.80\% in cross-model evaluation, from 69\% to 78\% in cross-paradigm evaluation, and from 61.50\% to 75.80\% on real-world data. Unlike single-domain detectors, the SGFF-Net learns complementary forensic cues across spatial, gradient, and wavelet-frequency domains, resulting in greater robustness under cross-generator and cross-paradigm evaluation. The results further show that combining multi-domain representations with data diversity and augmentation substantially improves generalization, providing practical insights for developing more reliable deepfake detection systems.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Approximating optimal decoding of quantum LDPC codes with narrow frontiers

arXiv:2606.20513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Frontier decoder, a pruned dynamic-programming decoder for sparse quantum decoding problems. Frontier processes error variables in a chosen order, merges prefixes with the same residual syndrome and logical label, and approximates logical-coset posterior masses by retaining only a narrow scored frontier. Without pruning, the recursion is exact ordered inference with exponential complexity. In the code-capacity setting, the decoder reaches thresholds close to optimal for the surface code and the color code. In the circuit-level noise model, it achieves state-of-the-art performance with a very small average retained list size: less than 100 for the gross code $[[144,12,12]]$ at a physical error rate of $0.001$. When the list size is constant, the decoder has linear complexity, suggesting the possibility of low-latency implementations.

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arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Fast LLM-Based Semantic Filtering: From a Unified Framework to an Adaptive Two-Phase Method

arXiv:2606.08090v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating a natural-language yes/no predicate over a document corpus under an accuracy target - the semantic filter - is a cornerstone of LLM-based data processing. Calling the LLM on every document (the oracle) is prohibitive, so cascades pair the oracle with a fast proxy. As deployed today, they leave four limitations on the table. (1) Each cascade family - model-free clustering, prebuilt small-LLM proxies, online-trained proxies - commits to a single representation and pipeline, and wins on only a narrow query regime. (2) The strongest online proxy invests in a custom training scheme on a bi-encoder over dense embeddings, missing the token-level evidence richer predicates require. (3) The proxy is trained against binary yes/no labels, wasting the LLM's per-document confidence at the boundary documents it most needs to learn. (4) Existing calibrations add a uniform safety margin, conflating genuine proxy uncertainty with small-sample noise and inflating cascade cost. We address these by (1) composing families adaptively - model-free clustering first, online proxy only when needed, with oracle calls shared across phases; (2) replacing the cosine bi-encoder with a hybrid of off-the-shelf token-aware models; (3) training the proxy with the oracle's per-document confidence as a soft label; and (4) a calibration that adds the safety margin only where the labeled sample is sparse. We are also the first to use the oracle's per-document confidence for three purposes: a query-level difficulty compass, a lower bound on the minimum oracle calls any proxy-based cascade can make, and the proxy's soft training label. At a 90% accuracy target on three 10K-document corpora, our methods are 1.6-2.0x faster than the best prior method per corpus and meet the target on 95% of queries; the BER-derived lower bound indicates a further ~4-20x of headroom for future work.