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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SceneCraft: Interactive System for Image Editing via Scene Graph

Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

ScoreGate: Adaptive Chunk Selection for Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Dual-Score Statistical Fusion

Fixed-cardinality retrieval injects a constant top-K chunks into the generator regardless of query complexity, causing over-retrieval for narrow queries and under-retrieval for compositional ones. We describe ScoreGate, a lightweight score-space decision mechanism that controls retrieval cardinality at inference time using two scores already produced by the standard pipeline: bi-encoder similarity s_i and cross-encoder reranker score r_i, with no additional model inference calls required. Its core insight is that cross-encoder affirmation can rescue semantically relevant chunks that bi-encoder retrieval ranks poorly due to vocabulary mismatch – a failure mode unaddressed by fixed-K or single-score thresholding. On MS MARCO (200 dev queries), ScoreGate achieves MRR@10 = 0.401 with 35% fewer retained chunks than Standard Top-K. On an internal benchmark (n=300, Fleiss' kappa=0.87), ScoreGate observed zero false positives (95% CI [96.4%, 100%]) at 97.77-99.34% recall, with 34.8% fewer tokens per query and only 31ms added latency. Results on both MS MARCO and real-world production traffic suggest that adaptive retrieval cardinality can improve retrieval efficiency without degrading retrieval quality.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

GENEB: Why Genomic Models Are Hard to Compare

Progress in genomic foundation models is difficult to assess due to fragmented benchmarks, incompatible evaluation protocols, and task-specific reporting. As a result, claims of superiority or generality across models are often not directly comparable. We introduce GENEB, a large-scale diagnostic benchmark that evaluates frozen representations from 40 genomic foundation models across 100 tasks spanning 13 functional categories under a unified probing-based protocol, including few-shot regimes. GENEB enables controlled comparison across model scale, architecture, tokenization, and pretraining data while explicitly exposing task-level trade-offs. Our analysis shows that aggregate leaderboards are unstable: model rankings vary sharply across task categories, scale provides only modest and inconsistent gains, and architectural and pretraining alignment frequently outweigh parameter count. These results highlight limitations of current evaluation practices and position GENEB as a reference framework for principled comparison and category-aware model selection in genomic machine learning.

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

CUPID: Reconstructing UV Texture Maps for Interpretable Person-of-Interest Deepfake Detection

Deepfakes targeting a high-profile individual, known as Person-of-Interest (POI), are a threat to modern democracies and societies. Current POI deepfake detection methods still struggle to combine robustness to post-processing, efficiency and interpretability, focal aspects of modern deepfake detectors. In this paper we propose CUPID, a POI video deepfake detector that combines UV texture maps, a facial appearance representation derived from 3D face reconstructions, with the representation learning capabilities of the Masked Autoencoder (MAE). Our method does not require any deepfake videos in its training phase. Moreover, it does not even require to include a specific POI in the training set: the combination of UV texture maps extracted from real video frames and the MAE context-guided reconstruction yields a latent space that captures rich and discriminative facial features also for identities unseen during training. In the testing phase, the embeddings extracted from a query video depicting the POI can be matched against pristine reference videos to assess the video authenticity. Furthermore, operating in the UV space naturally provides an additional layer of interpretability. Specifically, we can extract decoded residual maps that highlight which facial regions of a test video deviate most from the identity representation of the corresponding POI. Experiments on four deepfake datasets show that CUPID outperforms current state of the art on most datasets and achieves the best overall robustness against strong downscaling and compression, providing also substantially faster inference. Our experimental code will be released at https://github.com/polimi-ispl/CUPID.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Learning the Koopman Operator using Attention Free Transformers

arXiv:2606.23957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning Koopman operators with autoencoders enables linear prediction in a latent space, but long-horizon rollouts often drift off the learned manifold, leading to phase and amplitude errors on systems with switching, continuous spectra, or strong transients. We introduce two complementary components that make Koopman predictors more robust. First, we add an attention-free latent memory (AFT) block that aggregates a short window of past latents to produce a corrected latent before each Koopman update. Unlike multi-head attention, AFT operates in linear time and adds only $\approx$30k parameters ($3d^2 + T^2$, fewer than matched multi-head attention), yet captures the local temporal context needed to suppress error divergence. Second, we propose dynamic re-encoding: lightweight, online change-point triggers (EWMA, CUSUM, and sequential two-sample tests) that detect latent drift and project predictions back onto the autoencoder manifold. Across three benchmark systems – Duffing oscillator, Repressilator, IRMA – our model consistently reduces error accumulation compared to a Koopman autoencoder and matched-capacity multi-head attention. We also compare against GRU and Transformer autoencoders, evaluated both from initial conditions and with a 50-step context, and find that Koopman+AFT (with optional re-encoding) attains markedly lower long-horizon error while maintaining lower inference latency. We report improvements over horizons up to 1000 steps, together with ablations over trigger policies. The result is a fast, compact predictor that stays on the learned manifold over long horizons.

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

Counterexample Guided Learning in the Large using Reasoning Agents

arXiv:2606.11521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs and LLM agents should improve when given feedback, but identifying when they are able to do so is difficult: feedback is heterogeneous, domain-specific, and difficult to control. We approach this challenge by asking LLMs to perform regular-expression induction, a classical symbolic learning problem where precise mechanisms for feedback exist in the form of counterexamples. In counterexample-guided learning, a learner (LLM) proposes candidate regular expressions from positive/negative-labeled strings, and the teacher (verifier) returns counterexamples showcasing the difference between the candidate and target languages. We identify novel counterexample-guided refinement strategies that enable effective regex learning, such as regularization and symbolic counterexample clusters. We also explore agentic strategies such as reflection and repair loops. Empirically, we find that verifier feedback substantially improves sample efficiency on challenging regex-induction tasks, reducing the number of labeled examples required and enabling learning of complex target expressions where standard prompting fails. For example, on the hardest task groups, our counterexample-guided framework improves success from 3.2% to 38.1% and from 38.9% to 74.1% on two different regex domains. These results suggest that LLMs can benefit from rich feedback beyond treating it as additional data, opening the door for robust verifier-guided methods for LLM-based program synthesis and formal reasoning.

07.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-27

Sequential chemo-immunotherapy followed by standard versus reduced thoracic radiotherapy for older and/or frail stage III non-small-cell lung cancer: A randomized open-label cohort trial

Authors:

by Wei-Xiang Qi, Shuyan Li, Mengdi Wang, Huan Li, Feifei Xu, Lei Yao, Biao Yu, Linlin Chen, Gang Cai, Cheng Xu, Xianwen Sun, Zhiyao Bao, Jiayi Chen, Yi Xiang, Shengguang Zhao Background The appropriateness of concurrent chemoradiotherapy (cCRT) for older or clinically vulnerable stage III unresectable non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients remains contentious. Furthermore, the survival implications of de-escalating thoracic radiotherapy (RT) intensity in this population have not been conclusively elucidated. Methods and findings We conducted a phase II randomized, open-label, two-cohort (non-comparative) trial at a tertiary hospital in China (NCT05557552). Between September 30, 2022 and April 30, 2024, we enrolled 56 older and/or frail patients with stage III NSCLC who were ineligible for cCRT. The primary endpoint was the 1-year progression-free survival (PFS) rate estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method. Secondary endpoints included objective response rate (ORR), overall survival (OS), and safety. In the intention-to-treat (ITT) set, which included all 56 randomized patients who received at least one dose of study treatment, the 1-year PFS was 84.3% (95% confidence interval [CI] [70.3%, 98.3%]) in the standard RT group and 70.7% (95% CI [54.3%, 87.1%]) in the reduced RT group. In the per-protocol set (53 patients), the 1-year PFS was 82.9% (95% CI [68.9%, 98.8%]) in the standard RT group and 73.4% (95% CI [58.3%, 92.4%]), with a median follow-up of 24 months. Among 56 patients in the safety analysis set, 71.4% of patients experienced grade 3/4 adverse events (AEs) in the standard RT group and 53.6% in the reduced RT group. One patient (3.6%) in the reduced RT and three patients (10.7%) in the standardized RT experienced grade 5 AEs. The main limitations are the non-comparative design, small sample size, and lack of power to establish non-inferiority or superiority. Conclusion The current study suggested that reduced RT combined with sequential chemo-immunotherapy might be feasible for older/frail patients intolerant to cCRT, showing numerically similar survival outcomes. These exploratory findings warrant confirmation in larger, adequately powered randomized trials. Trial registration The trial had been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov on Sep 30, 2022.ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05557552

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

Detecting Functional Memorization in Code Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate code at scale. Meanwhile, prior work has investigated whether training data may be recoverable from model outputs, by auditing the textual overlap between training examples and model generations. Code, however, can be functionally equivalent while textually dissimilar. In this work, we study functional memorization: extraction of functional logic beyond what verbatim metrics detect. We construct a counterfactual setup for Olmo-3-32B, comparing a midtrained model (exposed to target code) against a pretrained reference (not exposed). We prompt both models with Python function signatures and measure both textual and functional similarity (i.e., LLM-as-a-judge, execution-based). Our results show clear evidence of functional memorization, highlighting the need for auditing metrics that go beyond textual overlap.

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

Catastrophic Compositional Generation: Why Vanilla Diffusion Models Fail to Extrapolate

arXiv:2606.23920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The task of compositional generation involves using a conditional generative model, trained only on a subset of the possible conditions, to produce samples from compositionally-defined target distributions such as a geometric combination of the source distributions. In this work, we argue that this task is often infeasible for vanilla conditional diffusion models: we conjecture that no inference-time technique can efficiently produce samples from the target distribution in certain well-motivated settings. This idea is supported by theory-guided generalization arguments and carefully-designed experiments on both synthetic and realistic data. In particular, while recent methods such as Feynman-Kac correction reduce inference-time approximation error, our results show that score estimation error has a more catastrophic effect on performance when the target distribution is out-of-distribution with respect to the sources, highlighting the need for a different approach to this task.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MotionVLA: Vision-Language-Action Model for Humanoid Motion

Generating realistic humanoid motion from scene images and text involves both low-frequency pose semantics and high-frequency physical dynamics. However, many existing methods tokenize motion with a single shared codebook, forcing heterogeneous motion signals into the same quantization space. Our frequency-domain analysis of human motion data reveals a clear mismatch between single-codebook quantization and motion statistics: five DCT coefficients capture 93% of joint-position energy but only 37% of joint-velocity energy, which can bias quantization toward pose statistics and under-represent high-frequency velocity components. A second challenge lies in adapting a standard autoregressive model to effectively model high-frequency physical signals in motion sequences. Therefore, we propose DSFT, a dual-stream frequency tokenizer that separates motion into Base and physical streams and compresses them independently with DCT truncation and BPE. Furthermore, we present MotionVLA, a Qwen3.5-based model that arranges Base and physical tokens in a unified sequence, where Phys tokens are predicted after Base tokens. Experiments on HumanML3D and MBench show that, despite using a lightweight 2B backbone, MotionVLA reduces the Diversity gap to real data by over 50% on HumanML3D and improves Motion-Condition Consistency by 3.8% on MBench, supporting frequency-aware dual-stream decoupling as an effective formulation for autoregressive motion generation. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/MotionVLA. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/MotionVLA.

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

On Skorokhod Problems for Reflected and Singular Stochastic Heat Equations

arXiv:2606.11951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a Skorokhod decomposition for the Markov processes $X^a$ and $X$ associated to the gradient Dirichlet forms with respect to the measures $\rho^a\mu^{\beta}$ and $\rho\mu^{\beta}$, respectively. Here, $\mu^{\beta}$ is the law of the standard Brownian bridge $\beta$, while $\rho^a$ and $\rho$ denote densities which are given by $\rho^a(z) := \mathbf{1}_{[0,\infty)}(\bar{z}_a)$ and $\rho(z) := \int_0^1 \mathbf{1}_{[0,\infty)}(\bar{z}_x) \, dx$, respectively, for all $z\in L^2(0,1)$ which have a (unique) continuous representative $\bar{z}$ which vanishes at zero and one. To this end, we derive infinite-dimensional integration by parts formulas (IbPFs) w.r.t. $\rho^a\mu^{\beta}$ and $\rho\mu^{\beta}$, which contain Hida distributions alongside the usual drift terms. We represent these Hida distributions by integration w.r.t. vector measures of bounded variation. The vector measures in question are constructed via an approximation argument, making use of a generalization of Prokhorov's theorem for vector measures. We further prove that, almost surely, the sample paths of $X^a$ and $X$ take values in the equivalence class of continuous functions vanishing at zero and one for all and $dt$-almost all times, respectively. The main motivation for studying $\rho^a\mu^{\beta}$ and $\rho\mu^{\beta}$ lies in the fact that the distributional terms in their IbPFs are simplifications of the distributional term in the IbPF w.r.t. the law of the reflected Brownian bridge on the unit interval $\mu^{|\beta|}$. Representing the latter by integration w.r.t. a vector measure of bounded variation is still an open problem.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Effective discrete-modulated continuous variable QKD under general attacks

arXiv:2606.20346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous variable quantum key distribution via discrete modulations ensures information-theoretic security using standard telecom technologies, providing affordable and scalable quantum communications with simplified classical postprocessing. However, existing security proofs against general attacks often rely on restrictive assumptions, such as a bounded dimension for coherent states, or require impractically large block sizes. In this work, we develop a finite-size security analysis that removes these limitations while incorporating realistic experimental features. Our approach combines the dimension reduction technique, a security proof based on the marginal-constrained entropy accumulation, and a trusted detector model accounting for the receiver imperfections. We report positive key rates in the finite-size regime for relevant block sizes of the order of $10^8$. These results contribute to narrowing the gap between theoretical security proofs and practical implementations of discrete-modulated continuous variable quantum key distribution protocols.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

The 1/4-phenomenon of placement probabilities of tilings in the Aztec diamond

arXiv:2512.08377v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider domino tilings of the Aztec diamond. Using the Domino Shuffling algorithm introduced by Elkies, Kuperberg, Larsen, and Propp in arXiv:math/9201305, we are able to generate domino tilings uniformly at random. In this paper, we investigate the probability of finding a domino at a specific position in such a random tiling. We prove that this placement probability is always equal to $1/4$ plus a rational function, whose shape depends on the location of the domino, multiplied by a position-independent factor that involves only the size of the diamond. This result leads to significantly more compact explicit counting formulas compared to previous findings. As a direct application, we derive explicit counting formulas for the domino tilings of Aztec diamonds with $2\times 2$-square holes at arbitrary positions.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation

Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation. Yet helpfulness-driven post-training pulls them toward a homogeneous, overly agreeable assistant register, creating a behavioral Sim2Real gap. We present OdysSim, the largest open systematic investigation of behavioral foundation models, i.e., models trained to simulate human behavior at scale. We propose SOUL, a taxonomy of five capability axes (CONV, SS, COG, ROLE, EVAL) that unifies 62 datasets and 23 benchmark tasks under one framework. Specifically, we curate the OdysSim corpus (21.4M interactions, 10B tokens, retrofitted with back-generated social contexts), construct the SOUL-Index benchmark, and develop an end-to-end training recipe combining midtraining, task-specific RL, and expert distillation. The resulting open 8B OSim model ranks first or tied-first on 8 of 23 tasks, outperforming any individual frontier model by this count, with the strongest gains on conversational and social tasks. Its outputs are also more human-like in length, formatting, and word choice, and it transfers zero-shot to out-of-distribution user simulation on $\tau$-bench, nearly matching real users on reaction alignment (93.2 vs. 93.5). We further show that LLM-as-judge RL induces reward-hacking patterns, and that our detectors can mitigate them during post-training. Together, our findings suggest that behavioral foundation models require rethinking the LLM training paradigm. We release all artifacts to support future research.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Opportunistic CKD Screening in Hospitalized Patients

Background. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects 10-13% of adults worldwide but remains largely undiagnosed until advanced stages. Hospitalization provides an opportunity for early detection through opportunistic urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) measurement. Methods. We conducted a prospective three-arm study of opportunistic CKD screening in general internal medicine wards at Hadassah Mt. Scopus (MS), Hadassah Ein Kerem (EK), and Shaare Zedek Medical Center (SZMC) in Jerusalem (Protocol HMO-23-0300). Adult inpatients without known CKD or recent UACR were enrolled. Pathological UACR was defined as [≥]30 mg/g. Confirmed CKD required two pathological measurements [≥]90 days apart (KDIGO-compatible). eGFR was computed using the 2021 CKD-EPI race-free equation. Pooled proportions were estimated by fixed-effects logit meta-analysis; odds ratios by DerSimonian-Laird random-effects models. Results. A total of 158 patients were enrolled (MS n=50, EK n=57, SZMC n=51). Pathological first UACR was identified in 43/158 patients (27.2%; 95% CI 21.3-34.1%; I2=0% across centers). Of 24 patients with a second UACR available, 14 (58%) confirmed CKD, yielding a pooled confirmed-CKD rate of 8.9% of all screened patients. In-hospital mortality was significantly higher among patients with pathological UACR (9.3% vs ~2%; Fisher's exact p=0.012). In per-center multivariate logistic regression, three predictors reached pooled significance: BUN (OR 1.10 per mg/dL, 95% CI 1.04-1.17, p=0.002, I2=0%), heart failure (OR 3.21, 95% CI 1.34-7.70, p=0.009, I2=0%), and diabetes mellitus (OR 2.54, 95% CI 1.11-5.82, p=0.028, I2=17%). Cardiac/vascular admissions had the highest pathological UACR rate (~42%); GI/hepatic admissions had 0%. Conclusions. Opportunistic inpatient UACR screening identifies previously unrecognized CKD in approximately 9% of general internal medicine patients, with consistent results across three independent centers. BUN elevation, heart failure, and diabetes are the strongest independent predictors. Pathological UACR carries significant short-term mortality risk, supporting integration of routine screening into inpatient care pathways.

16.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

A zero-parameter first-principles gate framework for full-length TP53 missense variant interpretation

by Masamichi Iizumi Missense variant interpretation often achieves useful predictive performance but remains mechanistically opaque, particularly in proteins that combine structured domains with intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs). We developed Gate & Channel, a zero-parameter, first-principles framework for full-length TP53 missense variant analysis in which each prediction is generated by explicit IF-THEN gates derived from physicochemistry, geometry, structural constraints, and polymer physics rather than fitted weights. Variants are evaluated across independent channels representing distinct physical failure modes; a variant is predicted disruptive if any gate closes. A second hierarchical layer (“Geta”) encodes physically grounded post-closure exceptions, allowing sensitivity and specificity to be improved on disjoint variant populations. The v18 framework consists of 12 channels and 2 Getas spanning structured domains and IDRs, capturing DNA-contact disruption, Zn coordination, burial-dependent packing, secondary-structure compatibility, post-translational modification chemistry, short linear motif disruption (including a multi-partner coupled-folding face), proline-directed kinase recognition, and IDR-specific proline and glycine backbone constraints. Across 1,369 TP53 missense variants, the framework achieved 84.5% sensitivity and 89.1% positive predictive value, with 90.9% sensitivity preserved in the DNA-binding core and all 9/9 hotspot mutations captured. A post hoc audit of discordant IDR calls indicated that many apparent false positives had plausible molecular rationales, consistent with a distinction between molecular mechanism disruption and clinical penetrance. Applied to KRAS, TDP-43, and BRCA1, the same channels capture the dominant pathogenic mechanisms in each protein as a proof of principle, while residual missed variants name specific gates yet to be written. The framework is distributed as the open-source Python package pathogenicity-gates (v0.5.1, MIT). These results show that a substantial fraction of full-length TP53 missense variation can be resolved through explicit, auditable physical gates that carry meaning beyond TP53, with each remaining failure naming the next rule to be written.

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

Unveiling Hierarchical Invariants in Multiphoton Linear Optics

arXiv:2506.12857v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linear optical networks driven by quantum states of light are important building blocks of photonic quantum technologies. They access large bosonic Hilbert spaces through multiphoton interference. At the same time, their dynamics are generated by single-particle mode transformations, thereby defining a highly structured subset of multiphoton unitaries and setting boundary on linear optics capability. To elucidate this boundary, we reveal an underlying fine-grained symmetry structure that partitions the multiphoton operator space into invariant subspaces and generates a hierarchy of invariants. We experimentally confirm the conservation of high-order invariants and demonstrate their operational utility in characterizing state reachability and the metrological capability of multiphoton probes. Our framework provides a symmetry-based perspective for understanding and harnessing structured multiphoton dynamics across photonic quantum technologies.

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

A Knowledge Theory of Capital:The Value of Natural and Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.18288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This volume develops a knowledge theory of capital for economies in which productive capacity increasingly resides in software, data, models, routines, expertise, platforms, organizations, commons, and public epistemic infrastructure. Beginning from Adam Smith's theory of labour, stock, specialization, and market extent, it asks what changes when knowledge becomes stock-like, mobile across forms, scalable, governable, recombinable, and imperfectly visible in accounting. The book introduces knowledge-bearing stock as the central object and analyses how it is generated, converted into governable form, deployed, improved through feedback, enclosed or shared, measured, impaired, and used as input to future production. It distinguishes embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons, and public knowledge forms and develops concepts such as first conversion, cognitive enclosure, feedback capture, dark capital, and expected knowledge loss. The argument is conditional and testable: modern wealth depends not only on capital accumulation, but on how productive knowledge is governed.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Applications: Segmentation, Editing, and Generation

In the context of novel view synthesis, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an efficient and competitive counterpart to Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), enabling high-fidelity photorealistic rendering in real time. Beyond novel view synthesis, the explicit and compact nature of 3DGS enables a wide range of downstream applications that require geometric and semantic understanding. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in 3DGS applications. It first reviews the reconstruction preliminaries of 3DGS, followed by the problem formulation, 2D foundation models, and related NeRF-based research areas that inform downstream 3DGS applications. We then categorize 3DGS applications into three foundational tasks: segmentation, editing, and generation, alongside additional functional applications built upon or tightly coupled with these foundational capabilities. For each, we summarize representative methods, supervision strategies, and learning paradigms, highlighting shared design principles and emerging trends. Commonly used datasets and evaluation protocols are also summarized, along with comparative analyses of recent methods across public benchmarks. To support ongoing research and development, a continually updated repository of papers, code, and resources is maintained at https://github.com/heshuting555/Awesome-3DGS-Applications.

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

Stringalign: Moving beyond summary statistics with a transparent Unicode-aware tool for evaluating automatic transcription models

Comparing text strings is crucial when evaluating and understanding the performance of various text processing tasks such as document recognition and audio transcription. With an increasingly complex landscape of AI-based handwritten text recognition (HTR), optical character recognition (OCR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, there is a need for tools that facilitate evaluation in a flexible and reproducible way. This paper presents Stringalign, a Python library designed to simplify the evaluation process for automatic transcription projects and facilitate transparent evaluation. Stringalign's tools to examine and visualise both the rate of errors and the types of errors a model makes, give insights into possible improvements and help inform model selection for a particular task. Widely used string comparison metrics, such as the character and word error rates (CER and WER), although useful, can be ambiguous due to varying definitions of what constitutes a character and a word. Stringalign addresses this challenge by ensuring all preprocessing (i.e. normalisation and tokenisation) is transparent and easily replicable, and by providing tools to move beyond summary statistics and analyse common model errors. Moreover, Stringalign adheres to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles for research software while staying lightweight and easy to adapt into researchers existing workflows. In this paper, we discuss challenges with character and word level string comparisons and show through examples that where existing tools can yield opaque and sometimes confusing results, Stringalign provides an easy-to-use and unambiguous alternative.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Reward hacking in physical reinforcement learning revealed by turbulent drag reduction

arXiv:2606.06227v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A reinforcement-learning agent maximises its reward, which can diverge from the outcome its designer intended. In physical control the reward rarely closes that gap, and drag reduction in wall turbulence makes it concrete. A mass-conservation projection couples agents' outputs and erases the per-agent credit the policy gradient needs; a memoryless policy cannot resolve the slow near-wall cycle it acts on; and a pressure-gradient reward pays for nominal drag reduction by pumping power through the wall. Two degenerate controllers achieve large drag reductions while total dissipation rises, so the reported figure can mask a more wasteful flow. We trace each fault to its cause and fix it: a differentiable projection that restores credit, a recurrent policy with a widened sensing stencil, and a reward scored on the true wall power. The corrected controller acts on the flow within a closed energy budget, earning a conservative $17\%$ under honest accounting.

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

MapReason-OSM: Can Vision-Language Models Make Graph-Verifiable Mobility Decisions from Street Maps ?

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to read maps for logistics, delivery, and accessible navigation, where the output is an actionable decision (a route, a pin, a parking choice) that must respect the road network. Yet most map benchmarks grade free text or multiple-choice answers that cannot be verified against the underlying graph. We present MapReason-OSM, a benchmark and evaluation harness for graph-verifiable mobility decisions on self-rendered OpenStreetMap panels. We render fixed-style maps for ten U.S. downtowns at two aligned zoom scales, overlay a consistent marker grammar, and pair each panel with a hidden street graph and exact oracles, yielding 6,000 instances (12,000 panels across the two zooms) over 12 routing, facility-location, and visual disambiguation tasks. Models return structured decisions that we snap back to the graph and score for validity, legality, optimality, and constraint satisfaction, plus cross-zoom consistency. Across seven VLMs, models read maps and route simply but fail at graph cost reasoning (single-facility pin placement is near chance even for frontier reasoning models), and are frequently scale-inconsistent. We release the benchmark, harness, and deterministic generator. Code and data: https://github.com/Vi-Sri/mapreason-osm

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Models vs. Traditional Clinical Calculators for Cardiovascular Risk Prediction

Background: Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) remain the leading global cause of mortality, responsible for approximately 31% of all deaths worldwide in 2021. Traditional risk calculators, including Framingham, ASCVD, SCORE, and SCORE2, have long constituted the cornerstone of primary prevention strategies; however, they were derived predominantly from high-income European and North American populations, thereby limiting their predictive accuracy in diverse epidemiological contexts, particularly among Hispanic/Latino communities. Machine learning (ML) offers an alternative to capture the non-linear interactions inherent in biomedical data. Objective: The present study develops and validates ML-based models for cardiovascular mortality prediction using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 1999-2018 dataset, and systematically compares their discriminative performance against eleven conventional clinical CVD risk calculators. Materials and Methods: A dedicated software platform, "CardioPrediQ," was designed to integrate multiple CVD calculators with ML-based risk assessment. A cohort of 12,847 participants with 16 predictor variables was derived from NHANES. Six algorithms (Logistic Regression, Cox Proportional Hazards, Gradient Boosting, AdaBoost, Random Forest, and Extra Trees) were trained in combination with six class-balancing strategies, yielding 36 model configurations. All models were trained on a stratified 70/30 split and calibrated using the Saerens prior probability adjustment method. Performance was evaluated using AUC-ROC, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and a weighted composite score. DeLong's test was employed to assess the statistical significance of AUC differences between the best-performing ML model and each conventional calculator. Results: Gradient Boosting with 2:1 oversampling and Saerens calibration achieved the best overall performance (AUC = 0.8934; composite score = 0.7904), outperforming all traditional calculators in composite ranking. The top six positions were occupied exclusively by ML and statistical models. The mean age of cardiovascular decedents was 67.43 years compared with 47.74 years among survivors. DeLong's test confirmed statistical superiority over six traditional CVD calculators (p < 0.05), whereas the difference against the top-performing calculators (ASCVD, HEARTS Caribbean, ASCVD Colombia, SCORE2, HEARTS North America) did not reach statistical significance. Age dominated feature importance at 41.2% relative weight, followed by systolic blood pressure (18.7%). Saerens calibration reduced the Brier score from 0.1286 to 0.1158, substantially improving probability calibration. Conclusions: ML models demonstrated superior composite performance over traditional calculators. The statistical equivalence with the highest-performing conventional calculators in the NHANES cohort is context-dependent and validates the methodological pipeline. The CardioPrediQ platform addresses the critical need for integrated, scalable CVD risk assessment tools, which is particularly relevant for Latin American populations where calculator validation remains limited. These findings support the integration of calibrated ML-based risk prediction into clinical practice while underscoring the importance of probability calibration for informed clinical decision-making.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Mechanisms underlying spontaneous and evoked calcium responses in oligodendrocyte precursor cells: A modeling investigation

Authors:

by Martin Lardy, Leqi Wang, Claire Guerrier, Veronica T. Cheli, Pablo M. Paez, Anmar Khadra Calcium (Ca2+) signaling has emerged as a central regulator of activity-dependent myelination in oligodendrocytes. These Ca2+ signals encompass both the stimulus-independent spontaneous Ca2+ local transients (SCaLTs) generated intrinsically in a voltage-independent manner or facilitated by the membrane voltage, as well as evoked responses triggered by ATP and glutamate release. To investigate the regulatory mechanisms underlying this combined spiking activity, we developed a stochastic spatiotemporal flux-balance model of Ca2+ transients in oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs). The model incorporates all the relevant fluxes in these cells and integrates membrane voltage dynamics with a Ca2+-induced Ca2+-release (CICR) mechanism using parameters fitted to Ca2+ fluorescence recordings. The model reproduced the intrinsic and voltage-facilitated SCaLTs in OPCs in the absence of purinergic and glutamatergic receptors, and captured the three distinct patterns of evoked Ca2+ responses induced by prolonged ATP and glutamate stimulations identified using machine classifier. The model highlighted the role of ATP and glutamate in generating these clusters, and showed that the fast dynamics of CICR is key to producing these evoked responses. Further analysis of the model also revealed that voltage-gated L- and T-type Ca2+ channels slightly increase the frequency of SCaLTs, while stimulation with ATP and glutamate, using randomly distributed pulses mimicking in vivo conditions, leads to an increase in both the amplitudes of Ca2+ spikes (i.e., the combination of SCaLTs and evoked responses) and the prevalence of wide spikes, especially upon glutamate stimulation. Bifurcation analysis of the deterministic version of the model, in the absence of diffusion, demonstrated that ATP and glutamate stimulation can shift the system into an oscillatory regime, thereby increasing the deterministic component of SCaLT dynamics. This study thus offers a comprehensive representation of OPC Ca2+ transients linking recorded in vitro behaviors to in vivo dynamics.

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arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Sign-Language Datasets at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey on Resources, Benchmarks, and Annotation Standards

Sign languages are expressive visual languages used by Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) communities. Despite substantial progress in sign-language recognition, translation, and production, advances remain constrained by fragmented datasets, inconsistent annotations, and limited linguistic coverage. Existing benchmarks often fail to reflect real-world communication needs, and systematic analyses of these limitations remain limited. In this survey, we present a comprehensive index of sign-language datasets, covering 120 resources across 35 sign languages. We analyze key challenges such as modality imbalance, annotation granularity, and signer bias, and outline considerations for future dataset design. We also introduce a 24-field Sign-Language Datasheet and release a public GitHub repository (https://github.com/Ginqwerty/Open-Sign-Language) to support standardized documentation and reproducible evaluation. Overall, our work provides a unified and practical foundation for developing inclusive, robust, and scalable sign-language technologies in real-world applications.