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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

DramaDirector: Geometry-Guided Short Drama Generation

arXiv:2606.24107v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Short dramas, with their rapid shot rhythms, dialogue-driven focus shifts, and demanding cinematographic grounding, pose challenges that prompt-level or text-only video generation pipelines struggle to meet. We study plot-to-short-drama generation, where a global plot and local context are transformed into visually grounded multi-shot videos. We propose DramaDirector, a geometry-grounded framework that lets the planner borrow cinematographic geometry from a gallery of real short-drama shots indexed by depth and pose. DramaDirector decouples each shot into static visual and dynamic narrative conditions, trains the planner with schema-constrained SFT and GRPO under a learned text-visual alignment reward, and retrieves depth-pose references to guide first-frame generation and image-to-video synthesis. We also introduce DramaBoard, a benchmark built from 35 live-action dramas, 2.8K episodes, and 81K shots, with structured storyboards and multi-dimensional evaluation protocols. Experiments show that DramaDirector improves over representative multi-agent and video generation baselines on faithfulness, consistency, and controllability. Our code is released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/DramaDirector

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

An Improved Generative Adversarial Network for Micro-Resistivity Imaging Logging Restoration

An improved GAN-based imaging logging image restoration method is presented in this paper for solving the problem of partially missing micro-resistivity imaging logging images. The method uses FCN as the generative network infrastructure and adds a depth-separable convolutional residual block to learn and retain more effective pixel and semantic information; an Inception module is added to increase the multi-scale perceptual field of the network and reduce the number of parameters in the network; and a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block are added to combine the channel attention. The multi-scale module adds a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block, which combine the channel attention mechanism and the residual block to achieve multi-scale feature extraction. The global discriminative network and the local discriminative network are designed to gradually improve the content and semantic structure coherence between the restored parts and the whole image by playing off each other and the generative network. According to the experimental results, the average structural similarity measure of the five sets of imaged logging images with different sizes of missing regions in the test set is 0.903, which is an improvement of about 0.3 compared with other similar methods. It is shown that the method in this study can be used for the restoration of micro-resistivity imaging log images with good improvement in semantic structural coherence and texture details, thus providing a new deep learning method to ensure the smooth advancement of the subsequent interpretation of micro-resistivity imaging log images.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Instrument for Measuring Regional Human Mobility: The Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE)

arXiv:2603.21639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurately estimating human mobility in peripheral regional economies presents a fundamental measurement challenge: physical ground-truth sensors are sparse, behavioral intent signals are heterogeneous, and environmental friction introduces systematic bias into demand inference. We introduce the Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE), a multi-modal sensor fusion architecture that addresses this challenge by integrating physical instrumentation (Edge-AI cameras), digital intent signals (route search impression metrics), behavioral records (90,350 spending records, 97,719 standardized survey responses), and meteorological data across four geographically distributed nodes in Fukui, Japan. The primary measurement-science contribution is the design, deployment, and cross-node validation of the DHDE as a sparse-sensor compensation instrument: a heterogeneous sensor fusion architecture that anchors non-stationary digital intent signals to concurrent physical ground-truth counts, correcting for systematic bias introduced by meteorological planning friction. The instrument is implemented as an ensemble inference pipeline (Random Forest and Ordinary Least Squares with Newey-West robust inference), calibrated across 397 daily observations and validated by chronological holdout replication across four geographically distinct node types. The primary OLS specification achieved an in-sample explanatory power of R2 = 0.810 and a chronological out-of-sample predictive performance of R2 = 0.683. Results identify an Under-Vibrancy Paradox where macro-regional visitor satisfaction correlates positively with crowd density (Spearman rank correlation rs = +0.150, p = 0.002). We estimate an annual proxy gap of 865,917 intent-implied visits, corresponding to JPY 11.96 billion (USD 72.6 million) in foregone revenue.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Counterintuitive problems in discrete probability

arXiv:2606.07516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This manuscript contains a collection of counterintuitive problems in discrete probability, together with detailed solutions. The dataset was constructed as part of a broader research project investigating the capabilities of the latest-generation Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving discrete probability problems, in order to assess whether LLMs tend to make systematic reasoning errors associated with known cognitive biases. The problems collected here are specifically designed to challenge heuristic reasoning strategies that often lead to intuitively appealing but mathematically incorrect conclusions. The dataset combines several types of problems. Some are adapted from classical probabilistic paradoxes and cognitive-bias literature, while others originate from recreational mathematics sources or were developed by ourselves following similar principles. The primary purpose of this document is to provide a transparent and publicly accessible reference for the problems used in our experimental evaluation of language models, as well as providing detailed human-made solutions. At the same time, we believe that this collection may also prove useful for future research on probabilistic reasoning, cognitive biases, and the evaluation of reasoning capabilities in artificial intelligence systems.

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

Spatially Selective Self-Training for Unsupervised Building Change Detection

Unsupervised building change detection aims to learn building-change masks from unlabeled bi-temporal remote sensing images. Existing label-free methods often follow a discrepancy-to-mask paradigm, directly using temporal differences, frozen foundation-model responses, prompt-based outputs, or post-processing results as final change maps. Although these strategies provide annotation-free cues, they do not learn a task-specific building-change detector and remain vulnerable to the gap between generic temporal discrepancies and building-defined structural changes. In practice, such discrepancies are often noisy and task-irrelevant, as appearance shifts, registration errors, and non-building modifications can produce strong but misleading responses. To address this problem, we propose SST-CD, a spatially selective self-training framework that reformulates fully label-free building change detection as end-to-end detector learning under noisy pseudo supervision. SST-CD uses temporal discrepancies as candidate pseudo labels and trains the detector only on spatially reliable pixels, whose reliability is estimated by a local consistency criterion that filters inconsistent regions from supervision. To further stabilize noisy self-training, a lightweight feature adapter recalibrates bi-temporal features, while a prototype-based decoder produces compact change and no-change representations. Experiments on LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, and DSIFN-CD show that SST-CD achieves F1 scores of 83.08%, 91.69%, and 86.60%, respectively, outperforming existing unsupervised and label-free baselines.

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

DEFINED: A Data-Efficient Computational Framework for Fine-Grained Creativity Assessment in Debate Scenarios

Human creativity has emerged as a critical competency in the era of large language models. Assessing creativity in complex, open-ended environments is a grand challenge in data mining, currently hindered by a reliance on standardized simple tasks and the scarcity of fine-grained expert data. As an ecologically valid assessment context, debate reflects multiple dimensions of creativity, encompassing both divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Moreover, debate is a data-rich domain, with a large volume of publicly accessible materials. Current mainstream automated scoring methods are poorly suited to complex settings such as debate, and therefore still rely on costly human evaluation. To this end, this paper proposes DEFINED, a data-efficient computational framework for fine-grained creativity assessment in debate scenarios. DEFINED operationalizes debate creativity through a hierarchical eight-dimensional metric system, implemented via a pre-trained autoregressive language model with a hierarchical scoring head that supports both fine-grained and coarse-grained evaluation. Statements and their associated expert scores were obtained from authentic debate competitions, and a constrained data augmentation strategy was employed to address the elite bias inherent in the original data. DEFINED adopts a mixed-granularity training strategy enabling robust learning from limited fine-grained supervision annotated by trained graduate experts. To rigorously validate ecological validity beyond synthetic benchmarks, we incorporate an empirical study with debate-naive participants, utilizing these authentic data to serve as a qualitative case study for mid-to-low proficiency populations. Across our evaluation protocol, our scoring model achieves accurate and stable scoring, outperforming prompt-based large language model evaluators and existing debate scoring methods.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

TIDAL: Temporally Interleaved Diffusion and Action Loop for High-Frequency VLA Control

arXiv:2601.14945v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer semantic generalization but suffer from high inference latency, limiting them to low-frequency batch-and-execute paradigm. This frequency mismatch creates an execution blind spot, causing failures in dynamic environments where targets move during the open-loop execution window. We propose TIDAL (Temporally Interleaved Diffusion and Action Loop), a hierarchical framework that decouples semantic reasoning from high-frequency actuation. TIDAL operates as a backbone-agnostic module for diffusion-based VLAs, using a dual-frequency architecture to redistribute the computational budget. Specifically, a low-frequency macro-intent loop caches semantic embeddings, while a high-frequency micro-control loop interleaves single-step flow integration with execution. This design enables approximately 9 Hz control updates on edge hardware (vs. approximately 2.4 Hz baselines) without increasing marginal overhead. To handle the resulting latency shift, we introduce a temporally misaligned training strategy where the policy learns predictive compensation using stale semantic intent alongside real-time proprioception. Additionally, we address the insensitivity of static vision encoders to velocity by incorporating a differential motion predictor. TIDAL is architectural, making it orthogonal to system-level optimizations. Experiments show a 2x performance gain over open-loop baselines in dynamic interception tasks. Despite a marginal regression in static success rates, our approach yields a 4x increase in feedback frequency and extends the effective horizon of semantic embeddings beyond the native action chunk size. Under non-paused inference protocols, TIDAL remains robust where standard baselines fail due to latency.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Continuum Neural Momentum Eigenstate for Variationally Solving Quasiparticles

arXiv:2606.12928v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We design the first neural quantum state for continuum particles that, for any chosen allowed momentum $\mathbf{k}$, is by construction an exact eigenstate of total momentum with eigenvalue $\mathbf{k}$. Our architecture, EVE, enables off-the-shelf VMC to solve for momentum-sector ground states. We test EVE on 2D bosons with mutual $1/r$ interactions, finding that a single unified ansatz is capable of describing four qualitatively different states: superfluid, roton, crystal, and phonon. At different densities, we extract the underlying phase of matter from the dispersion's shape. At $r_s = 20.0$, we see the roton minimum at finite $k$ expected of a superfluid. At $r_s = 100.0$, we see striking zone folding indicative of crystalline order, with periodically spaced minima representing floating crystals connected by phonon arcs in between. Using density-density correlation functions, we confirm the phase diagnoses and probe the excitations' correlation structures. Finally, we analyze the roton's phase texture and find unexpected multi-particle phase strings, formed when several vortex dipoles merge, leaving two vortices connected by a phase slip.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Beyond Trajectory Imitation: Strategy-Guided Policy Optimization for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.24064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling reasoning capabilities from strong to weak language models typically involves imitating specific solution trajectories, effectively transferring what to answer rather than how to reason. This trajectory-level imitation encourages memorization of instance-specific steps rather than acquisition of transferable problem-solving skills, limiting generalization to novel problems. We propose Strategy-Guided Policy Optimization (SGPO), which replaces instance-level trajectory imitation with reusable strategy distillation. SGPO extracts structured strategy descriptions from strong-model responses and, for each problem, constructs both autonomous and strategy-guided trajectories to enable direct comparison of the model's behavior with and without strategic guidance. The framework then addresses two key questions. For how to distill, a token-level forward-KL objective selectively transfers the distributional shift induced by strategy conditioning into the unguided policy, with proximal constraints ensuring stability. For when to distill, adaptive instance-level weighting strengthens guidance when autonomous exploration falls short and reduces it as the model's own competence grows. Experiments on four mathematical benchmarks across two model families show that SGPO consistently outperforms SFT, on-policy RL, and hybrid-policy baselines, improving the average score by 2.2 points over the strongest baseline on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. Analysis reveals that the forward-KL objective provides an inherently selective distillation signal that outperforms direct trajectory imitation, and that strategy distillation exhibits complementary scaling with base model capability.

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

ToolSense: A Diagnostic Framework for Auditing Parametric Tool Knowledge in LLMs

arXiv:2606.12451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models deployed as agents over large tool catalogs face a critical tool-retrieval bottleneck. As embedding-based retrieval approaches rely on compact encoders that may under-capture specialized tool semantics, parametric tool retrieval addresses this by encoding each tool as a virtual token appended to the LLM vocabulary, fine-tuned in two stages (memorization then retrieval SFT) to use the LLM as a retriever, achieving strong performance on standard ToolBench retrieval benchmarks. Yet these benchmarks use verbose, fully-specified queries, and their evaluation applies constrained decoding that restricts outputs to valid token paths, neither reveals whether the model actually understands its tools. We introduce ToolSense, an open-source LLM-powered diagnostic framework that takes any tool catalog as input and automatically generates three benchmarks: a Realistic Retrieval Benchmark (RRB) with queries at three ambiguity tiers, an MCQ probing benchmark, and a QA probing benchmark. Applying ToolSense to ToolBench (~47k tools) and evaluating five parametric model training configurations reveals a knowledge-retrieval dissociation: on RRB queries, several configurations collapse by ~50-64 percentage points compared to fully-specified ToolBench benchmarks, falling below the embedding-model baseline. Additionally, despite strong retrieval performance, some models score near-random on factual probes, suggesting a knowledge-retrieval dissociation. We open-source the ToolSense framework and the ToolBench diagnostic benchmarks at https://github.com/SAP/toolsense.

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

Optimal scenario design for climate emulation

arXiv:2606.19302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As deep learning for physical systems continues to grow in popularity, efforts to improve generalizability have primarily focused on designing architectures that embed physical constraints. However, for machine-learning surrogate climate models (emulators), we show that the low structural diversity in existing scenarios commonly used to generate training data places a ceiling on predictive skill. Here, we examine whether training datasets themselves can be optimized to improve generalization. We introduce a method to create datasets that produce emulators capable of generalizing to new, structurally different scenarios absent from the training data. We use a differentiable Simple Climate Model (SCM) to calculate the sensitivity of emulator loss to perturbations in the training data, iteratively updating the training data to maximize emulator skill. For an SCM, training on one scenario optimized in this fashion outperforms an emulator trained on six standard ScenarioMIP pathways. We achieve this higher predictive skill despite training on a smaller dataset, finding that our emulator successfully isolates distinct physical behaviors of different climate forcing agents (e.g., greenhouse gases vs. aerosols) without single-forcing runs. We then demonstrate that scenarios optimized using an SCM, when used to drive an intermediate-complexity climate model, produce a training dataset that yields a more skillful emulator than training on ScenarioMIP outputs. Our results suggest that, in the compute-constrained environment of running full-scale climate models, generating a small number of dynamically rich scenarios provides greater marginal value for emulation and characterizing system responses than expanding the suite of traditional emissions pathways.

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

Speech Codec Probing from Semantic and Phonetic Perspectives

Speech tokenizers are essential for connecting speech to large language models (LLMs) in multimodal systems. Speech tokenizers are expected to preserve both semantic and acoustic information for downstream understanding and generation tasks. However, emerging evidence suggests that the term "semantic" in speech processing does not align with linguistic lexical-semantic, leading to a mismatch between speech and text modality. In this paper, we systematically analyze the information encoded by several widely used speech tokenizers, evaluating their lexical-semantic and phonetic content through three tasks. Our results show that current tokenizers primarily capture phonetic rather than lexical-semantic structure, deriving practical implications for the design of next-generation speech tokenization methods. Code is released to public at https://github.com/Alexuan/codec_probing_release.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SDQM: Synthetic Data Quality Metric for Object Detection Dataset Evaluation

The performance of machine learning models depends heavily on training data. The scarcity of large-scale, well-annotated datasets poses significant challenges in creating robust models. To address this, synthetic data generated through simulations and generative models has emerged as a promising solution, enhancing dataset diversity and improving the performance, reliability, and resilience of models. However, evaluating the quality of this generated data requires an effective metric. We introduce the Synthetic Dataset Quality Metric (SDQM) to assess data quality for object detection tasks without requiring model training to converge. This metric enables more efficient generation and selection of synthetic datasets, addressing a key challenge in resource-constrained object detection tasks. In our experiments, SDQM demonstrated a strong correlation with the mean average precision (mAP) scores of YOLO11, a leading object detection model, whereas previous metrics only exhibited moderate or weak correlations. In addition, it provides actionable insights into improving dataset quality, minimizing the need for costly iterative training. This scalable and efficient metric sets a new standard for evaluating synthetic data. The code for SDQM is available at https://github.com/ayushzenith/SDQM

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Identifying anaphylaxis using weakly-supervised prediction models and natural language processing

Objectives Scalable computable phenotyping algorithms are critical for conducting high-throughput disease-outcome research in large, distributed-data electronic health record (EHR) and claims data settings. We developed and evaluated a claims- and EHR-based computable phenotyping algorithm for anaphylaxis, a rare acute condition that is challenging to accurately identify using claims data alone. Materials and Methods Potential anaphylaxis events came from two healthcare systems (Kaiser Permanente Washington [KPWA] and Vanderbilt University Medical Center [VUMC]). We engineered features from clinical text using automated natural language processing (NLP) methods. We then developed a phenotyping algorithm using four NLP- and diagnosis code-based silver labels (proxies for the gold-standard labels). Gold-standard abstracted outcomes were used to evaluate algorithm performance. Results The largest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 0.931 for an NLP-based silver-label model at KPWA. Depending on the model and healthcare system site, positive predictive value (PPV) and sensitivity at the threshold of predicted probability that maximized F1 score ranged from 0.52 to 0.77 (PPV) and 0.78 to 1 (sensitivity). Discussion NLP-based silver-label models had large AUC at KPWA but not at VUMC. This may be because clinical text at KPWA is only available for outpatient encounters and secure messaging. High sensitivity for identifying anaphylaxis can be obtained using our best-performing models. Conclusion The best-performing models had better PPV and sensitivity tradeoffs than prior bespoke anaphylaxis models with costly, manually curated features. The simplicity of the approach compared to traditional phenotyping methods allows it to be deployed easily at multiple health care systems.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Measuring Research Difficulty of Academic Papers: A Case Study in Natural Language Processing

With the rapid growth of the number of academic papers, systematically evaluating the difficulty of research and its relationship to academic impact offers important significance for research topic selection and resource allocation. However, current studies lack quantitative assessments of research difficulty and its correlation with academic impact. This paper proposes a comprehensive evaluation system for research difficulty, incorporating factors such as academic collaboration, content, and references. Taking the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a case study, we extract both internal and external features from academic papers, compute multiple research difficulty indicators. We assign their weights using the entropy weight method and perform a weighted sum to obtain the research difficulty score of academic papers. This paper uses the citation frequency of academic papers to measure academic impact. To validate our approach, NLP experts assessed the difficulty of a sample of papers, and correlation analyses confirmed the reliability of our measurement. Empirical results reveal that in NLP, factors such as the number of pages, reference count, and participation of high-level institutions are significantly associated with academic impact. Moreover, we identify an inverted U-shaped relationship between research difficulty and academic impact. It suggests that moderately difficult research tends to achieve greater academic impact.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Thermodynamics of quantum processes: An operational framework for free energy and reversible athermality

arXiv:2510.12790v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We explore the thermodynamics of quantum processes (quantum channels) by axiomatically introducing the free energy for channels, defined via the quantum relative entropy with an absolutely thermal channel whose fixed output is in equilibrium with a thermal reservoir. This definition finds strong support through its operational interpretations in designated quantum information and thermodynamic tasks. We construct a resource theory of athermality for quantum processes, where free operations are Gibbs preserving superchannels and golden units are unitary channels with respect to absolutely thermal channel having fully degenerate output Hamiltonian. We exactly characterize the one-shot distillation and formation of quantum channels using hypothesis-testing and max-relative entropy with respect to the absolutely thermal channel. These rates converge asymptotically to the channel free energy (up to a multiplicative factor of half the inverse temperature), establishing its operational meaning and proving the asymptotic reversibility of the athermality. We show the direct relation between the resource theory of athermality and quantum information tasks such as private randomness and purity distillation, and thermodynamic tasks of erasure and work extraction. Our work connects the core thermodynamic concepts of free energy, energy, entropy, and maximal extractable work of quantum processes to their information processing capabilities.

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

A biological vision inspired framework for machine perception of abutting grating illusory contours

Higher levels of machine intelligence demand alignment with human perception and cognition. Deep neural networks (DNN) dominated machine intelligence have demonstrated exceptional performance across various real-world tasks. Nevertheless, recent evidence suggests that DNNs fail to perceive illusory contours like the abutting grating, a discrepancy that misaligns with human perception patterns. Departing from previous works, we propose a novel deep network called illusory contour perception network (ICPNet) inspired by the circuits of the visual cortex. In ICPNet, a multi-scale feature projection (MFP) module is designed to extract multi-scale representations. To boost the interaction between feedforward and feedback features, a feature interaction attention module (FIAM) is introduced. Moreover, drawing inspiration from the shape bias observed in human perception, an edge detection task conducted via the edge fusion module (EFM) injects shape constraints that guide the network to concentrate on the foreground. We assess our method on the existing AG-MNIST test set and the AG-Fashion-MNIST test sets constructed by this work. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that ICPNet is significantly more sensitive to abutting grating illusory contours than state-of-the-art models, with notable improvements in top-1 accuracy across various subsets. This work is expected to make a step towards human-level intelligence for DNN-based models.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

C-QUERI: Congressional Questions, Exchanges, and Responses in Institutions Dataset

Questions in political interviews and hearings serve strategic purposes beyond information gathering including advancing partisan narratives and shaping public perceptions. However, these strategic aspects remain understudied due to the lack of large-scale datasets for studying such discourse. Congressional hearings provide an especially rich and tractable site for studying political questioning: Interactions are structured by formal rules, witnesses are obliged to respond, and members with different political affiliations are guaranteed opportunities to ask questions, enabling comparisons of behaviors across the political spectrum. We develop a pipeline to extract question-answer pairs from unstructured hearing transcripts and construct a novel dataset of committee hearings from the 108th–117th Congress. Our analysis reveals systematic differences in questioning strategies across parties, by showing the party affiliation of questioners can be predicted from their questions alone. Our dataset and methods not only advance the study of congressional politics, but also provide a general framework for analyzing question-answering across interview-like settings.

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

How Controlling the Variance can Improve Training Stability of Sparsely Activated DNNs and CNNs

arXiv:2602.05779v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Edge-of-Chaos (EoC) theory developed for the random initialization of deep networks allows more efficient training by both preserving information in the initial outputs of the network and minimising exploding or vanishing gradients through characterisation of the intermediate layers as Gaussian processes. This EoC theory provides formulae for the choice of the initialisation distribution variances of the weights and biases. For activations which are approximately linear around the origin, the EoC theory typically encourages the Gaussian process variance to converge towards zero with increasing depth. Here we consider the less studied setting of highly sparsity inducing activations where a large region of values near the origin are set to zero. In this setting we prove a new phenomenon whereby initialisations leading to larger fixed Gaussian processes are beneficial to training stability. This theory informs a new, yet simple, initialisation strategy that allows training DNNs and CNNs with as large as 90\% sparsity in the hidden layers.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Daily briefing: First-ever ‘nuclear’ clocks put atomic clocks in the shade

Authors:

Two research teams have created a new, long-awaited type of timekeeper. Plus, how backlash has saved an ocean-monitoring network targeted by Trump and how our cultural heritage is put at risk by climate change. Two research teams have created a new, long-awaited type of timekeeper. Plus, how backlash has saved an ocean-monitoring network targeted by Trump and how our cultural heritage is put at risk by climate change.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Better Adherence, Richer Context: A Field Evaluation of LLM-Powered Conversational Voice Diaries for Sleep

arXiv:2606.18596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sleep diaries are central to behavioral sleep medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, yet daily completion is difficult to sustain, and static forms often provide limited context for interpreting night-to-night sleep variation. We designed an LLM-powered conversational voice diary that delivers clinically grounded morning and evening sleep diary questions through proactive smart-speaker prompts, structured conversational intake, and adaptive follow-up dialogue. We evaluated the system in a four-week between-subjects field study with 30 university students, comparing it with a text-based mobile diary using matched diary items, reporting windows, and reminder intervals. Compared with the text-based diary, the conversational voice diary showed higher adherence and elicited more detailed contextual self-report about routines, stressors, environmental conditions, and other sleep-related factors. Participants also described the voice diary as easier to integrate into daily routines, despite longer perceived completion time. However, voice-based conversational intake produced lower completeness for some structured diary fields, revealing a trade-off between expressive richness and structured precision. These findings show both the promise and the challenge of using LLM-powered conversational voice assistants for longitudinal health self-report.

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

Binary Black Hole Parameter Estimation with Hybrid CNN-Transformer Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.13941v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The detection of gravitational waves has revolutionized our ability to explore fundamental aspects of the Universe. Traditionally, modeled gravitational-wave signals have been identified using template-based matched filtering, followed by coincidence analysis across multiple detectors in the signal-to-noise ratio time series. Recent advances in Machine Learning and Deep Learning have sparked growing interest in their application to both signal detection and parameter estimation. In this study, a hybrid Deep Learning strategy is proposed that leverages the effectiveness of Transformer encoders alongside well-established Convolutional Neural Network architectures in an attempt to estimate the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of non-precessing binary black hole systems. The primary focus of this work is point estimation, producing single best-fit values for each parameter rather than full posterior distributions. This method is evaluated on both simulated signals embedded in Gaussian noise and real gravitational-wave events, and it demonstrates strong predictive performance and robustness across key astrophysical parameters.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Optical metasurfaces for general vision processing on the edge

Authors:

Large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models achieve notable performance in computer vision but require substantial computational resources, limiting their deployment on edge devices1,2. Optical neural networks (ONNs) promise reduced latency and energy consumption by making use of the inherent parallelism of light3. However, present ONNs struggle to scale and are confined to simple tasks, owing to the challenges of replicating exact algebraic operations of digital models using physical (analogue) systems. This work introduces a new paradigm that directly embeds core computer vision principles, including similarity-based recognition, attention-guided perception and detail–context fusion, into a large-scale optical metasurface. By unifying optical physics with these computer vision fundamentals, we develop a photonic–electronic engine that overcomes scalability and generality barriers, enabling high-accuracy, general-purpose computer vision at the edge. The resulting system combines a 41-million-parameter optical metasurface front end with a co-designed, ultraefficient 87,000-parameter digital back end, outperforming many digital models with tens of millions of parameters across object detection, segmentation, 3D reconstruction and video understanding. We build a deployable prototype and demonstrate real-time edge visual processing in natural scenes. This work represents a path towards practical optical computing for general vision tasks in complex natural environments, enabling a new paradigm for low-energy, low-latency, real-time on-device vision intelligence. By embedding core computer vision principles into a large-scale optical metasurface, an efficient vision processing system using far fewer parameters is demonstrated to outperform many digital models and enables deployment on edge devices.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Texture-Shape Bias Balancing for Robust Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation in Automotive NIR Imagery

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental component of visual perception in modern automotive systems, enabling pixel-level scene understanding. Near-Infrared imaging (NIR) offers stable detection under difficult illumination conditions, but the development of domain-specific semantic segmentation models remains challenging due to the lack of high-quality annotated data from real-world scenarios. Synthetic datasets offer a scalable alternative, but models trained on synthetic images often suffer performance degradation when transferred to real domains. We present the first systematic study on synthetic to real domain adaptation for semantic segmentation in NIR images in the automotive domain. We propose a generative augmentation framework that transforms synthetic images into realistic NIR-style variants via our introduced target style adaptation (TSA). TSA fine-tunes a latent diffusion model via low-rank adaptation on a small curated set of real NIR images and applies it to synthetic training data using structure-preserving multi-signal conditioning. To reduce texture bias and improve segmentation robustness, we further apply a Voronoi-based style diversification strategy (VSD) that modifies the original textures while preserving scene geometry. Experiments with multiple model architectures on NIR data from vehicle interiors and street scenes show that balancing inductive bias during training leads to noticeably more robust semantic segmentation and effectively reduces the domain gap in our real-world scenarios by up to 63.6% on exterior and 28.4% on interior data. The code is available at GitHub.