Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.01016

Implementation of Licensed Plate Detection and Noise Removal in Image Processing

Authors:

Yiquan Gao↗

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.

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02.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2512.20743

Systematic Construction of Time-Dependent Hamiltonians for Microwave-Driven Josephson Circuits

Authors:

Yao Lu↗Tianpu Zhao↗Andr\'e Valli\`eres↗Kevin C. Smith↗Daniel Weiss↗Xinyuan You↗Yaxing Zhang↗Suhas Ganjam↗Aniket Maiti↗John W. O. Garmon↗Shantanu Mundhada↗Ziwen Huang↗…

arXiv:2512.20743v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time-dependent electromagnetic drives are fundamental for controlling complex quantum systems, including superconducting Josephson circuits. In these devices, accurate time-dependent Hamiltonian models are imperative for predicting their dynamics and designing high-fidelity quantum operations. Existing numerical methods, such as black-box quantization (BBQ) and energy-participation ratio (EPR), excel at modeling the static Hamiltonians of Josephson circuits. However, these techniques do not fully capture the behavior of driven circuits stimulated by external microwave drives, nor do they include a generalized approach to account for the inevitable noise and dissipation that enter through microwave ports. Here, we introduce numerical techniques that leverage classical microwave simulations, efficiently executable in finite-element solvers, to obtain the time-dependent Hamiltonian of microwave-driven superconducting circuits with arbitrary geometries under charge, flux, or mixed electromagnetic modulation. Importantly, our techniques do not rely on a lumped-element description of the superconducting circuit, in contrast to previous approaches to tackling this problem. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by characterizing the driven properties of realistic circuit devices in complex electromagnetic environments, including coherent dynamics due to charge and flux modulation, as well as drive-induced relaxation and dephasing. Our techniques offer a powerful toolbox for optimizing circuit designs and advancing practical applications in superconducting quantum computing.

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16612

Beyond Artifacts: Towards Generalizable Synthetic Song Detection via Music-Intrinsic Features

Authors:

Yan Han↗Zhibin Wen↗Yuan Wang↗Shuangrun Shao↗Xiaobing Li↗Yang Xu↗Wei Li↗

arXiv:2606.16612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of AI music generators highlights the urgent need for reliable Synthetic Song Detection (SSD). Existing SSD methods often rely on low-level artifacts or fixed feature assumptions, struggling to capture generator-agnostic cues. To address this, we propose Sofia (Synthetic-song detection framework via music features), a flexible framework that models music-intrinsic attributes via feature-specific experts and an adaptive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module. By configuring Sofia with representative Vocal, Audio-effect, Global structure features, and their combinations, we present their individual and complementary contributions. To comprehensively evaluate our framework, we further construct MUSIC8K, a challenging benchmark featuring lastest emerging generators and realistic audio perturbations. Experiments show that Sofia learns generator-agnostic representations from music-intrinsic features, improving the F1 score by 18.5 points over the strongest baseline on MUSIC8K-O while maintaining strong robustness.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13662

EurekAgent: Agent Environment Engineering is All You Need For Autonomous Scientific Discovery

Authors:

Amy Xin↗Jiening Siow↗Junjie Wang↗Zijun Yao↗Fanjin Zhang↗Jian Song↗Lei Hou↗Juanzi Li↗

LLM-based agents have shown increasing potential in automating scientific discovery. Given an optimizable metric and an execution environment, they can propose, validate, and iterate scientific solutions, and have produced results that outperform human-designed approaches. As model capabilities continue to improve, we argue that the bottleneck for autonomous scientific discovery is shifting from prescribing agent workflows to designing agent environments: the resources, constraints, and interfaces that shape agent behavior. We frame this as environment engineering: building environments that amplify productive behaviors, such as open-ended exploration, systematic artifact management, and inter-agent collaboration, while suppressing harmful behaviors, such as reward hacking and high-friction human oversight. We present EurekAgent, an environment-engineered agent system for metric-driven autonomous scientific discovery. EurekAgent engineers the environment along four dimensions: permissions engineering for bounded agent execution and isolated evaluation; artifact engineering for filesystem and Git-based collaboration; budget engineering for budget-aware exploration; and human-in-the-loop engineering for easy human supervision and intervention. EurekAgent sets new state-of-the-art results on multiple mathematics, kernel engineering, and machine learning tasks, including new state-of-the-art 26-circle packing results discovered with less than $11 in total API cost. We open-source our code and results, and call for environment engineering as a core research direction for developing reliable autonomous research agents.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.09946

SPARX: Secure and Privacy-Aware Approximate CNN Acceleration with Edge RISC-V SoC

Authors:

Sonu Kumar↗Akash Sankhe↗Mukul Lokhande↗Santosh Kumar Vishvakarma↗

Edge-AI systems increasingly require real-time CNN inference under strict energy, performance, security, and privacy constraints. Approximate computing improves hardware efficiency by exploiting the error resilience of neural network workloads; however, most approximate CNN accelerators do not jointly consider secure, privacy-aware edge deployment. This paper presents SPARX, a Secure and Privacy-Aware Approximate CNN Acceleration framework integrated within a heterogeneous RV32IMC RISC-V System-on-Chip (SoC). SPARX combines a custom RISC-V instruction extension, an approximate logarithmic CNN acceleration unit, a lightweight differential-noise-based privacy engine, and a challenge-response authentication mechanism. To guide arithmetic selection, an approximation-aware decision framework is introduced that uses the Approximation Severity Index (ASI), Approximation Efficiency (AE), Quality of Approximation (QoA), Approximation Figure-of-Merit (AFOM), and Hardware Acceleration Efficiency (HAE). Evaluation across 11 state-of-the-art approximate MAC architectures identifies the Iterative Logarithmic Multiplier (ILM) as the most suitable design, achieving 51.7% area reduction, 81.5% power reduction, and 2.13x throughput improvement compared with an accurate radix-4 Booth MAC, while only reducing ResNet-20/CIFAR-10 accuracy by 2.82 percentage points. FPGA implementation on a Xilinx VC707 platform achieves 58.4 GOPS/W energy efficiency at 250 MHz, while 28-nm CMOS physical implementation validates ASIC feasibility

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15096

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

Authors:

Zhixin Hu↗Tao Xu↗Xiaodian Sun↗Li Jin↗Momiao Xiong↗

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.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20146

BIM-Edit: Benchmarking Large Language Models for IFC-Based Building Information Modeling

Authors:

Bharathi Kannan Nithyanantham↗Clemens Kujat↗Tobias Sesterhenn↗Stefan Telgmann↗J\"orn Pl\"onnigs↗Stefan L\"udtke↗Christian Bartelt↗

arXiv:2606.20146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to computer-aided design (CAD) to generate design artifacts from textual instructions. In engineering practice, this requires more than creating new geometry, models must also understand existing scenes, edit them correctly, and preserve semantics and relations. However, many CAD benchmarks focus on creating new models rather than editing existing ones, and mostly evaluate geometric correctness. We introduce BIM-Edit, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs on natural-language editing of Building Information Models (BIM) represented in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) format. BIM provides a challenging testbed because building models encode geometry together with semantic and relational structure. BIM-Edit contains 324 editing tasks spanning 11 realistic building models and 36 synthetic scenes. Tasks are expressed using three instruction categories - direct, spatial, and topological - covering both explicit and scene-grounded edits. We evaluate outputs along three dimensions: geometric accuracy, semantic validity, and topological consistency. Across evaluated LLMs, the best-performing model achieves only 49.5% average score across the three metrics, and no model fully solves more than 3.4% of tasks. These results demonstrate a substantial gap between current LLM capabilities and the requirements of structured engineering design workflows.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14724

VigilFormer: Deformable Attention for Video Anomaly Detection with Causal Risk Inference

Authors:

Xinze Zhang↗

Video anomaly detection in surveillance settings must balance detection accuracy against real-time throughput, a tension that existing methods address either through stronger feature extractors or more efficient architectures, but rarely both. We present VigilFormer, a unified framework that combines deformable spatio-temporal attention with causal temporal modeling to detect anomalies in untrimmed surveillance video. The proposed Deformable Spatio-Temporal Encoder (DSTE) attends to a sparse set of informative locations across frames, avoiding the quadratic cost of dense attention while retaining the ability to capture irregular motion patterns. A Causal Anomaly Classifier (CAC) applies dilated causal convolutions over snippet-level features and optimizes a contrastive multiple-instance learning objective that separates anomalous and normal representations without frame-level labels. To meet deployment constraints, an Adaptive Confidence Scheduler (ACS) dynamically skips low-information frames at inference time, reducing redundant computation in static scenes. Evaluated on UCF-Crime, ShanghaiTech, and CUHK Avenue, VigilFormer achieves AUC scores of 87.83%, 97.21%, and 89.74% respectively, at 41.5 FPS on a single GPU, outperforming recent weakly-supervised methods in both accuracy and speed.

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09.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:c351e0f28a484f38beb54738684a7740

The impact of changes in age-based eligibility criteria on seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in England between 2019 and 2024: A retrospective cohort study

Authors:

Suffel↗A. M↗Walker↗Barry↗E. V↗Campbell↗C. N↗Lopez Bernal↗J. V↗McDonald↗S. L↗H. I↗…

Objectives: To examine changes in seasonal influenza vaccine uptake among clinical risk groups over periods of differing age-based eligibility. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: Individuals in England registered in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum. Participants: Between 1,239,802 (2019/20) and 1,289,330 (2023/24) individuals aged 40-69 years in clinical risk groups. Interventions: Natural experiment involving temporary expansion of age-based eligibility for influenza vaccination to include 50-64-year-olds from 2020/21 to 2022/23. Main outcome measures: Influenza vaccine uptake from 1st September to 28th February, incidence rate ratio (IRR) of vaccine uptake across consecutive seasons within age groups, and the ratio of IRRs between age groups. Results: Influenza vaccine uptake increased in all age groups in 2020/21 relative to 2019/20. The increase was larger in individuals aged 50-64 years (13.3%; IRR 1.50, 95% CI 1.50-1.51) compared with those aged 40-49 years (8.3%; IRR 1.35, 95% CI 1.34-1.35) and 65-69 years (6.8%; IRR 1.34, 95% CI 1.33-1.35). From 2020/21 to 2022/23, vaccine uptake decreased, with a more pronounced decline among those aged 40-49 years (-5.4%) compared with age-eligible groups (50-64 years: -3.0%; 65-69 years: -3.1%). The reversion of age eligibility in 2023/24 was associated with a larger decrease in uptake among those aged 50-64 years (-9.6% vs 2022/23; IRR 0.79, 95% CI: 0.79-0.79) compared with those aged 40-49 years (-4.9%; IRR 0.87, 95% CI: 0.87-0.88) and 65-69 years (-3.3%; IRR 0.97, 95% CI: 0.96-0.97). Patterns were broadly consistent across clinical risk groups. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic saw a general increase in seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in clinical risk groups. This increase was larger and more sustained in 50-64 year-olds who had also become eligible based on age. Our findings highlight the potential gains in vaccine coverage among clinical risk groups based on expanded age-based eligibility.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2603.02818

Merged amplitude encoding for Chebyshev quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold networks: trading qubits for circuit executions

Authors:

Hikaru Wakaura↗

arXiv:2603.02818v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold networks based on Chebyshev polynomials (CCQKAN) evaluate each edge activation function as a quantum inner product, creating a trade-off between qubit count and the number of circuit executions per forward pass. We introduce merged amplitude encoding, a technique that packs the element-wise products of all $n$ input-edge vectors for a given output node into a single amplitude state, reducing circuit executions by a factor of $n$ at a cost of only 1–2 additional qubits relative to the sequential baseline. The merged and original circuits compute the same mathematical quantity exactly; the open question is whether they remain equally trainable within a gradient-based optimization loop. We address this question through numerical experiments on 10 network configurations under ideal, finite-shot, and noisy simulation conditions, comparing original, parameter-transferred, and independently initialized merged circuits over 16 random seeds. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests show no significant difference between the independently initialized merged circuit and the original ($p > 0.05$ in 28 of 30 comparisons), while parameter transfer yields significantly lower loss under ideal conditions ($p < 0.001$ in 9 of 10 configurations). On 10-class digit classification with the $8\times8$ MNIST dataset using a one-vs-all strategy, original and merged circuits achieve comparable test accuracies of 53–78\% with no significant difference in any configuration. These results provide empirical evidence that merged amplitude encoding preserves trainability under the simulation conditions tested.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12147

Towards Responsibly Non-Compliant Machines

Authors:

Marija Slavkovik↗Marie Farrell↗Louise Dennis↗Michael Fisher↗Simon Kolker↗Emily C. Collins↗

arXiv:2606.12147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of engineering autonomous intelligent agents that are capable to responsibly not comply with user requests. We argue that machine non-compliance comes in many different forms, and sketch the issues we should pursue on the road of accomplishing responsibly non-compliant intelligent machines. We anchor responsible non-compliance in justifications for task refusal, pathways to override the non-compliance, as well as careful tracking of security risks and liability transfers.

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12.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-09 DOI: HASH:45491c1ddea137b7f83e3b59ce751d13

Evolution of phenocopying in a dynamical model of developmental trajectories

Authors:

Yuuki Matsushita↗

by Yuuki Matsushita, Archishman Raju Developmental trajectories are known to be canalized, or robust to both environmental and genetic perturbations. However, even when these trajectories are decanalized by an environmental perturbation outside the range of conditions to which they are robust, they often produce phenotypes similar to known mutants, called phenocopies. This correspondence between the effects of environmental and genetic perturbations has received little theoretical attention. Here, we study an abstract regulatory model that is evolved to follow a specific trajectory. We then study the effects of small and large perturbations to the trajectory, both by changing parameters and by perturbing the state at specific times. We find that the phenomenon of phenocopying emerges in evolved trajectories and is not present in a null model of randomly sampled trajectories. Our results suggest that, in this class of dynamic models, evolution can allow high-dimensional phenotypic landscapes to simultaneously exhibit robustness and phenocopying.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11222

A Geometric Profile of Semantic Information in Text: Frame-Conditional Uniqueness and a Trade-Off Triangle for Scalar Summaries

Authors:

Dmitriy Kompaneets↗

How much meaning does a text carry? Shannon's theory measures uncertainty over symbols and is intentionally indifferent to meaning, while pairwise metrics such as BERTScore compare two texts rather than characterizing one. We develop a geometric framework that measures semantic content from the structure of a text's sentence embeddings. The framework has three parts. First, within a fixed embedding and baseline, six natural axioms uniquely determine a scalar measure up to scale, a frame-conditional uniqueness theorem. The resulting scalar is empirically too coarse, motivating a richer representation. Second, we propose a three-coordinate semantic profile capturing novelty (displacement from generic discourse), breadth (diversity of distinct ideas), and integration (connectedness among them), together with a discrete minimal unit (the semantic quantum) whose resolution is fixed by a clustering threshold $\tau$. Third, we prove a no-go theorem: no scalar summary of the profile can simultaneously satisfy analytic stability under paraphrase and concatenation, ordinal robustness across text scales, and cross-representation comparability. We exhibit two practical scalars, $S_{\mathrm{minmax}}$ and $S_{\mathrm{rank}}$, each occupying a distinct corner of this trade-off triangle. Validation across 23 synthetic categories, 5 Project Gutenberg novels, and 3 embedding models confirms the trade-off. The recommended rank-normalized configuration passes 25 of 28 ordinal checks as point estimates (21 of 28 after Benjamini-Hochberg correction), outperforming seven baselines including unigram entropy and a BERTScore-based novelty signal. A separate variational result connects the breadth coordinate to the log-determinant of a determinantal point process (Spearman $\rho = 0.985$ over 507 Gutenberg chapters), giving an optimization-theoretic foundation for breadth.

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14.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:02c192f2042d5e1a72396e5f58cd7321

GeroQubit: a lightweight, honesty-first de-novo design platform for geroscience-native small molecules with calibrated uncertainty

Authors:

Swetha↗

Computational molecule generation has outpaced its own credibility. We present GeroQubit, a GPU-free de-novo design platform that organizes candidates along a target x tissue x hallmark model and reports every signal alongside its measured baseline. We treat our tissue aging-signature readout as a mechanistic structural prior that we explicitly disclose is not validated against lifespan, and we surface efficacy only through a structure-to-lifespan k-NN whose weak but real signal (leave-one-out rho ~ 0.145) is wrapped in empirically-calibrated conformal intervals (90% target, 90.3% measured coverage). On a held-out retrospective recovery of ~1,940 ChEMBL binders against decoys, the score reaches ROC-AUC 0.945 with ~20x enrichment at 1% (BEDROC 0.91) and survives a scaffold-disjoint split - yet we report that it collapses to near-random (AUC 0.62) on genuinely novel chemotypes. Molecules are assembled reaction-first, so every candidate carries a verified synthetic route and atom-level synthon provenance; ADMET is handled as a multi-objective Pareto problem. We frame the disclosed weak signals and the hard-case failures not as flaws but as the honest, decision-useful output the field's own critics demand.

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15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18319

ASTRA: A Scalable Next-Generation ATCO Training Simulator with Autonomous Simpilots

Authors:

Ethan Chew↗Enjia Wu↗Iruss Eng Wei Yeow↗Ian Weiqin Lim↗Ranen Sim↗Brandon Koh Ziheng↗Kaleb Nim↗Caden Toh Jun Yi↗Wei Dong Soin↗Darius Kai Keat Koh↗Galen King Yu Tay↗Prannaya Gupta↗…

arXiv:2606.18319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air Traffic Control Operators (ATCOs) are vital in ensuring the safe, orderly, and efficient flow of air traffic, yet training capacity is constrained by reliance on specialized human trainers known as simpilots, who must role-play both pilots and ATCOs in a simulated airspace. Existing automated solutions rely on Western-centric speech models that perform poorly in Singaporean operational contexts, with off-the-shelf systems exhibiting Word Error Rates (WER) of up to 107.80% on Singaporean-accented aviation speech. We introduce ASTRA, an end-to-end training simulator that automates these simpilot roles through a pipeline that transcribes ATCO speech, interprets instructions, and generates appropriate pilot and ATCO responses using locally adapted voice models. Our fine-tuned Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) pipeline reduces WER to 23.45%, substantially outperforming existing approaches in this domain. Beyond traffic simulation, ASTRA incorporates an AI-assisted performance evaluation framework that assesses trainee radiotelephony communications across accuracy, brevity, and completeness, achieving post-optimization scores of 91.7%, 88.2%, and 86.9%, respectively. Built on open-source foundations such as DSPy and Unsloth, this approach enables scalable, standardized ATCO assessment while reducing instructor workload.

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.10678

One Step Closer to Ground Truth: A Multi-Scale Residual-Aware Representation Learning Pipeline for Predicting Time Series Data

Authors:

Amrijit Biswas↗Mustafa Kamal↗Robin Krambroeckers↗M. M. Lutfe Elahi↗Sifat Momen↗Nabeel Mohammed↗Shafin Rahman↗

arXiv:2606.10678v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformer-based models have emerged as leading paradigms in time-series forecasting in recent years, employing self-attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies. Despite their success, these single-stage forecasting architectures exhibit persistent systematic residual biases arising from structural discrepancies, unmodeled stochastic components, or inadequate multi-scale temporal representations. This limitation persists when residuals are treated as irreducible noise, precluding adaptive correction of structured error patterns. To address this limitation, we introduce a two-stage, model-agnostic framework that explicitly decouples forecasting and residual learning into distinct stages of representation learning. A base transformer first generates the initial predictions. Subsequently, a dedicated meta-corrector dynamically models structured error patterns across multivariate channels, preserves cross-variable dependencies, and iteratively refines the residual bias of the base transformer. By formalizing this pipeline as a hypothesis space expansion, our framework addresses approximation limitations inherent in single-stage architectures, removes reliance on restrictive assumptions, and enables end-to-end learning of complex error dynamics. Evaluated on eight popular benchmark datasets using established protocols, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in standard metrics (MSE, MAE). The results demonstrate the framework's ability to mitigate systematic biases and enhance robustness to complex temporal dynamics, advancing the practical applicability of transformer-based forecasting models.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2601.00215

Disentangling Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Reward Design

Authors:

Omar Sharif↗Eftekhar Hossain↗Nikhil Singh↗Patrick Ng↗

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has driven major gains in LLM reasoning, and it is intuitive to assume this recipe will transfer well to multimodal models. However, multimodal models do two things: first, perceive what is in an image, then reason about what it implies. Because these stages are graded jointly, it is hard to tell how much room reasoning alone has to grow. We study this on algorithmic visual puzzles, where both components are necessary and show that perception, not reasoning, is the binding constraint. Replacing images with simple textual descriptions raises performance by over 20 points on average for Claude models. We then evaluate six reward designs aimed at inducing visual grounding during reasoning without chain-of-thought supervision. Training Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with GRPO, reward design induces long, structured reasoning with self-reflection and visual references, yielding a 5.56-point gain over the base model. These gains are, however, uneven; no single reward improves all categories, and rewards with verifiable accuracy signals trade out-of-domain transfer for in-domain accuracy. These results point to perception-aware reward design as a path forward, so that signals correct perception at its source rather than the reasoning that inherits its errors.

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18785

Bayesian Anytime Pareto Set Identification for Multi-Objective Multi-Armed Bandits

Authors:

Lennert Saerens↗Bram Silue↗Eleni Litsa↗Peter Vrancx↗Pieter Libin↗

arXiv:2606.18785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying Pareto optimal solutions is critical to support multi-objective decision-making. We introduce the first anytime Multi-Objective Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm for the Pareto Set Identification problem, taking a Bayesian approach: Top-Two Pareto Front Thompson Sampling (TTPFTS). We benchmark TTPFTS against state-of-the-art fixed-budget Pareto Set Identification algorithms on synthetic environments. Next, we demonstrate its practical utility in a challenging multi-objective molecular discovery setting by efficiently exploring an ultra-large synthesis-on-demand molecular library. Furthermore, we introduce a novel uncertainty quantification metric that estimates our algorithm's confidence in the predicted Pareto set. We demonstrate that this metric effectively proxies true performance, yielding a robust methodology for monitoring learning progress in complex settings. Finally, we complement these empirical findings with a theoretical proof of the algorithm's asymptotic correctness.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.22873

When Do LLMs Reason? A Dynamical Systems View via Entropy Phase Transitions

Authors:

Wei Xia↗Haoqing Wang↗Zhi-Hong Deng↗Yehui Tang↗

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become the default strategy for enhancing LLM capabilities, yet its application raises a fundamental question: when is explicit reasoning actually beneficial? Empirical evidence reveals a striking paradox: CoT often provides marginal or even negative gains on factual and open-ended tasks while multiplying token consumption. In this work, we show that LLM reasoning is not a static property of tasks or models, but a dynamic decoding state that emerges during generation. Through systematic analysis, we find early-stage entropy dynamics provide a reliable signal of this state: tasks benefiting from CoT exhibit consistent entropy reduction, while others display unstable or increasing patterns. This behavior can be interpreted as a phase-transition-like shift from a high-entropy exploratory regime to a low-entropy structured reasoning regime. Based on these insights, we propose EDRM (Entropy Dynamics-based Reasoning Manifold), a lightweight and training-free routing framework that leverages early decoding entropy to adaptively select inference strategies. EDRM embeds entropy trajectories into a compact and interpretable manifold representation, enabling both zero-shot deployment and fine-grained instance-level adaptation. Across 15 benchmarks and 4 LLMs of varying scales and architectures, EDRM consistently outperforms static baselines. At the dataset level, EDRM achieves 41–55\% token reduction while improving accuracy with as few as 50 calibration samples. At the instance level, it further improves accuracy by up to 4.7\% while maintaining 27–45\% token savings. These results suggest that reasoning should be invoked selectively rather than by default, and demonstrate the effectiveness of entropy-driven decoding control for efficient and adaptive LLM inference.

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2509.22050

BrainPro: Towards Large-scale Brain State-aware EEG Representation Learning

Authors:

Yi Ding↗Muyun Jiang↗Weibang Jiang↗Shuailei Zhang↗Xinliang Zhou↗Chenyu Liu↗Shanglin Li↗Yong Li↗Cuntai Guan↗

arXiv:2509.22050v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) reflects underlying brain states, whose activities are distributed across brain regions and manifest as spatial patterns on the scalp. Learning these spatially structured, state-related patterns requires consistent spatial representations across datasets. However, existing EEG foundation models are typically based on self-attention, which does not preserve location-specific information and struggles to align signals recorded with different channel configurations. Moreover, brain states contain both shared and state-specific regional activity, suggesting that learning neurophysiologically plausible, state-aware representations can complement the shared representations targeted by current models and improve downstream decoding. To address these limitations, we propose BrainPro, a large EEG model that combines a retrieval-based spatial learning mechanism for cross-layout spatial alignment with a brain state-decoupling module that learns both shared and state-specific representations through parallel encoders and region-aware reconstruction. Pre-trained on a large EEG corpus, BrainPro achieves state-of-the-art performance across nine public BCI datasets spanning emotion, motor, speech, stress, mental disease, and attention tasks. Analyses of spatial filters, channel-drop robustness, and encoder contributions further validate the effectiveness of its spatial alignment and state-aware pathways. These results show that BrainPro achieves improved interpretability of learned spatial patterns and produces representations that benefit diverse EEG decoding tasks.

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21.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2604.04342

Generative models for decision-making under distributional shift

Authors:

Xiuyuan Cheng↗Yunqin Zhu↗Yao Xie↗

arXiv:2604.04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many data-driven decision problems are formulated using a nominal distribution estimated from historical data, while performance is ultimately determined by a deployment distribution that may be shifted, context-dependent, partially observed, or stress-induced. This tutorial presents modern generative models, particularly flow- and score-based methods, as mathematical tools for constructing decision-relevant distributions. From an operations research perspective, their primary value lies not in unconstrained sample synthesis but in representing and transforming distributions through transport maps, velocity fields, score fields, and guided stochastic dynamics. We present a unified framework based on pushforward maps, continuity, Fokker-Planck equations, Wasserstein geometry, and optimization in probability space. Within this framework, generative models can be used to learn nominal uncertainty, construct stressed or least-favorable distributions for robustness, and produce conditional or posterior distributions under side information and partial observation. We also highlight representative theoretical guarantees, including forward-reverse convergence for iterative flow models, first-order minimax analysis in transport-map space, and error-transfer bounds for posterior sampling with generative priors. The tutorial provides a principled introduction to using generative models for scenario generation, robust decision-making, uncertainty quantification, and related problems under distributional shift.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15802

CPS4: Class Prompt driven Semi-Supervised Spine Segmentation with Class-specific Consistency Constraint

Authors:

Qingtao Pan↗Hongzan Sun↗Bing Ji↗Shuo Li↗

Vision Language Model (VLM) has great potential to enhance the quality of pseudo labels in semi-supervised spine segmentation by leveraging textual class prompts to generate segmentation map, but no one has studied it yet. Although promising, it lacks explicit constraints to ensure consistency between spine class prompts and spine unit region, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in multi-class segmentation map generation. In this paper, we propose CPS4, the first text-guided semi-supervised spine segmentation network using class prompts to enhance the quality of spine pseudo labels. Specifically, CPS4 is implemented through two training stages. (i) Class-specific consistency constrained VLM pretraining stage: we propose token- and pixel-level attention loss to optimize the consistency between class prompts and spine units, forcing the textual class prompt to be closely coupled with the target spine unit in the semantic space. (ii) Class Prompt driven semi-supervised spine segmentation stage: using the pretrained vision-text encoder, we derive each class-specific binary segmentation map for the unlabeled spine image and integrate them into an unified multi-class segmentation map, improving the quality of the spine pseudo label generated by the semi-supervised spine segmentation network. Experimental results show that our CPS4 achieves superior spine segmentation performance with Dice of 80.44%, only using 5% labeled data on the public spine segmentation dataset, surpassing popular semi-supervised learning and VLM methods. Our code will be available.

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23.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:49f62c81fb6ed8fae370e92309d20b56

Ten simple rules for making the supplement increase your paper’s impact

Authors:

Volker Grimm↗

by Volker Grimm, Uta Berger, Stefano Mammola Have you ever lost hours navigating supplementary materials—clicking between the main text and dozens of auxiliary files only to encounter broken links, illegible figures, and undefined variables and acronyms? If so, you’re not alone. What should support scientific communication has instead become an obstacle: supplementary information (SI) increasingly suffers from inconsistent formatting, poor accessibility, and fragmented organization that impedes rather than advances understanding. This is disheartening since the SI, if used effectively, has the power to enhance transparency, credibility, and reproducibility of research. Therefore, we propose 10 simple rules to help authors design SI that genuinely increase the impact of their research. The rules emphasize treating SI with the same care as the main text, using it strategically to support the scientific narrative while preserving clarity and focus. Key recommendations include creating a single, well-structured, self-contained SI master document; ensuring explicit cross-referencing between the main text and SI; making SI machine-readable; and avoiding the misuse of SI as a substitute for proper data repositories. We also highlight the importance of creativity in choosing appropriate formats and strict adherence to journal-specific guidelines. Finally, when available, we advocate the use of standardized templates to improve consistency, readability, and reuse across studies. By following these rules, authors can substantially increase the scientific impact of their work while at the same time contributing to more sustainable research practices.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13345

JointEdit3D: Feed-Forward 3D Scene Editing in a Unified Latent Space

Authors:

Xinnan Zhu↗Ruijie Xu↗Jiayu Ying↗Daoguo Dong↗Jiachen Xu↗Yuan Xie↗Xin Tan↗

Existing 3D scene editing methods typically rely on per-scene optimization over explicit 3D representations or cascaded edit-and-reconstruct pipelines, resulting in high test-time cost, limited 3D awareness, and structural inconsistencies. To couple appearance synthesis and geometry prediction during editing, we build on a unified RGB-geometry reconstruction-generation latent space and adapt it to feed-forward 3D scene editing. The resulting framework, JointEdit3D, performs asymmetric latent inpainting by observing only a single edited RGB reference latent and generating the remaining RGB views and edited geometry latent under source-scene anchoring. JointEdit3D introduces a dedicated SceneAnchor Branch to inject source-scene structure without forcing direct copying, and adopts edit/background-aware losses to balance edited-region fidelity with unedited-content preservation. To address the lack of paired resources for standardized 3D scene editing evaluation, we introduce SceneEdit3D-15K, a dataset with 15K paired editing samples and renderer-provided 3D annotations, together with SceneEdit3D-Bench, a curated 100-sample benchmark. Experiments show that JointEdit3D improves edited-region quality and 3D structural completeness over prior baselines while maintaining competitive background preservation.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2602.08355

E-VAds: An E-commerce Short Videos Understanding Benchmark for MLLMs

Authors:

Xianjie Liu↗Yiman Hu↗Liang Wu↗Ping Hu↗Yixiong Zou↗Jian Xu↗Bo Zheng↗

E-commerce short videos represent a high-revenue segment of the online video industry characterized by a goal-driven format and dense multi-modal signals. Current models often struggle with these videos because existing benchmarks focus primarily on general-purpose tasks and neglect the reasoning of commercial intent. In this work, we first propose a multi-modal information density assessment framework to quantify the complexity of this domain. Our evaluation reveals that e-commerce content exhibits substantially higher density across visual, audio, and textual modalities compared to mainstream datasets, establishing a more challenging frontier for video understanding. To address this gap, we introduce E-commerce Video Ads Benchmark, which is the first benchmark specifically designed for e-commerce short video understanding. We curated 3,961 high-quality videos from Taobao covering a wide range of product categories and used a multi-agent system to generate 19,785 open-ended Q&A pairs, which consist of five distinct tasks. Finally, we develop E-VAds-R1, an RL-based reasoning model featuring a multi-grained reward design called MG-GRPO. This strategy provides smooth guidance for early exploration while creating a non-linear incentive for expert-level precision. Experimental results demonstrate that E-VAds-R1 achieves a 109.2% performance gain in commercial intent reasoning with only a few hundred training samples. Data is available at https://github.com/TaobaoTmall-AlgorithmProducts/E-VAds_Benchmark.

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