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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

OracleAnalyser: Analysing Implicit Semantics of Oracle Bone Scripts through MLLMs with Post-training

Authors:
Zijia Song↗Yelin Wang↗Zhengyi Ma↗Zitong Yu↗Tianheng Wang↗Jiahuan Zhang↗Taorui Wang↗Kaicheng Yu↗

With the advancement of artificial intelligence, research on oracle bone scripts has entered a new era. However, existing methods and benchmarks remain largely confined to recognition tasks, overlooking the equally crucial aspect of oracle bone analysis. To address this gap, we propose OracleAnalyser, a reasoning framework for oracle bone analysis based on post-training techniques. Specifically, we fine-tune Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct through multiple post-training stages and introduce a new preference optimization algorithm, Stable Focal Preference Optimization (SFPO), tailored to the characteristics of oracle bone datasets. In addition, we release both an oracle bone reasoning dataset and an oracle bone preference dataset, and further construct a new benchmark to evaluate models' analytical capabilities for oracle bone scripts. Extensive experiments validate the superior analytical performance of OracleAnalyser, which achieves remarkable results with only 3B parameters, surpassing models with substantially larger scales.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Deep Learning-Driven Inverse Design of Doherty Power Amplifiers Using Pixelated Combiners and Dual-State Impedance Synthesis

Authors:
Han Zhou↗Haojie Chang↗David Widen↗Christian Fager↗

arXiv:2606.18395v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The output combiner of a Doherty power amplifier (PA) integrates load modulation, impedance matching, and phase compensation within a single network, making its design and synthesis highly challenging. In this paper, we propose a three-port Doherty combiner design methodology that combines deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), pixelated layout representations, and genetic algorithms (GA) with dual-state impedance synthesis to address both peak and back-off power conditions. As a proof of concept, two GaN HEMT Doherty PA prototypes incorporating three-port pixelated combiners are designed and fabricated. Both prototypes achieve a measured saturated output power exceeding 44.2 dBm with peak drain efficiency above 71.2% within 2.6-2.8 GHz. Furthermore, a drain efficiency as high as 64% is measured at the 6-dB back-off level. After applying digital predistortion, each prototype achieves an adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) better than -51.3 dBc.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Academic Concept Index

Authors:
Jeyun Lee↗Junhyoung Lee↗Wonbin Kweon↗Bowen Jin↗Yu Zhang↗Susik Yoon↗Dongha Lee↗Hwanjo Yu↗Jiawei Han↗Seongku Kang↗

arXiv:2601.00567v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adapting general-domain retrievers to scientific domains is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale domain-specific relevance annotations and the substantial mismatch in vocabulary and information needs. Recent approaches address these issues through two independent directions that leverage large language models (LLMs): (1) generating synthetic queries for fine-tuning, and (2) generating auxiliary contexts to support relevance matching. However, both directions overlook the diverse academic concepts embedded within scientific documents, often producing redundant or conceptually narrow queries and contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce an academic concept index, which extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them guided by an academic taxonomy. This structured index serves as a foundation for improving both directions. First, we enhance the synthetic query generation with concept coverage-based generation (CCQGen), which adaptively conditions LLMs on uncovered concepts to generate complementary queries with broader concept coverage. Second, we strengthen the context augmentation with concept-focused auxiliary contexts (CCExpand), which leverages a set of document snippets that serve as concise responses to the concept-aware CCQGen queries. Extensive experiments show that incorporating the academic concept index into both query generation and context augmentation leads to higher-quality queries, better conceptual alignment, and improved retrieval performance.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning

Authors:
Yosub Shin↗Michael Buriek↗Igor Molybog↗

Vision–language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views. We introduce m2sv, a scalable benchmark for map-to-street-view spatial reasoning that asks models to infer camera viewing direction by aligning a north-up overhead map with a Street View image captured at the same real-world intersection. We release m2sv-20k, a geographically diverse benchmark with controlled ambiguity, along with m2sv-sft-11k, a curated set of structured reasoning traces for supervised fine-tuning. Despite strong performance on existing multimodal benchmarks, the best evaluated VLM achieves only 65.2% accuracy on m2sv, below human annotators who reach 72.0% on average (and 95% for an expert) with strong inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa$ up to 0.76). While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield consistent gains, cross-benchmark evaluations reveal limited transfer. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we systematically analyze difficulty in map-to-street-view reasoning using both structural signals and human effort, and conduct an extensive failure analysis of adapted open models. Our findings highlight persistent gaps in geometric alignment, evidence aggregation, and reasoning consistency, motivating future work on grounded spatial reasoning across viewpoints.

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05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking attention-based methods for vision transformers' interpretability in retinal fundus imaging

Authors:
Bors↗Beyeler↗Trofimova↗VascX Consortium↗Presby↗Bontempi↗Bergmann↗

Deep learning models based on Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown strong performance in retinal fundus imaging, but their interpretability remains poorly understood. In particular, attention-based attribution methods are widely used to explain ViT predictions, despite limited evaluation of their faithfulness and biological relevance in medical imaging. Here, we systematically benchmark four attention-based interpretability methods for RETFound, a retinal ViT-based foundation model, that we previously fine-tuned to predict 17 retinal vascular phenotypes from UK Biobank fundus images1. We compare raw attention, attention rollout, gradient-weighted attention rollout, and Chefer's hybrid relevance-based method using both qualitative visualisation and quantitative evaluation frameworks. To assess attribution faithfulness, we perform perturbation-based deletion and insertion experiments, quantifying changes in model predictions as highly attended image regions are progressively removed or restored. To evaluate biological specificity, we run structure-aware analyses combining attribution maps with vessel segmentation and artery-vein labels through the Relative ratio of Attention Intensity (RAI) metric. Across models, attribution maps differed substantially depending on the selected interpretability method, highlighting the need for rigorous quantitative evaluation. Among the evaluated approaches, gradient-weighted attention rollout consistently achieved the strongest perturbation performance and produced attribution maps most closely aligned with the anatomical definition of the predicted retinal traits. Furthermore, vessel-type specific models systematically concentrate attention on the corresponding vascular structures despite being trained using only a single scalar value per image as supervision. These findings demonstrate that attention-based attribution methods capture biologically meaningful vascular representations, while also revealing method-dependent variability in attribution behaviour. This work provides a quantitative framework for evaluating interpretability methods in medical imaging with annotated segmentation and contributes toward more transparent and biologically grounded medical AI systems.

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06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Tumour evolution as ground truth for cancer whole-genome sequencing

Authors:
Valeriani↗Gandolfi↗Buscaroli↗Davydzenka↗Santacatterina↗Antonello↗Sadr↗A. H↗Gazziero↗V. A↗Milite↗Rivaroli↗…

Cancer genomes are shaped by evolutionary processes that couple mutagenesis, clonal selection, chromosomal instability, spatial growth and treatment response into structured genomic patterns, yet current benchmarking strategies largely ignore this evolutionary dependency. Here, we present SCOUT, a large-scale synthetic whole-genome sequencing resource of over 200 samples, designed for systematic benchmarking of tumour genomic analysis and evolutionary inference under controlled evolutionary ground truth. Unlike conventional task-specific simulations, SCOUT models tumour evolution as a latent generative process that simultaneously shapes mutations, copy-number alterations, variant allele frequencies, mutational signatures and clonal architectures. SCOUT recapitulates key features of solid and haematological malignancies, including driver mutations, chromosomal instability, intratumour heterogeneity, spatial sampling and treatment-associated evolutionary dynamics in tumour and matched-normal longitudinal and multi-region sequencing designs. Using SCOUT, we benchmarked widely used methods for somatic variant detection, copy-number analysis, mutational signature inference and tumour evolutionary reconstruction. Across analytical tasks, performance deteriorated in low-purity, highly subclonal and structurally complex tumours, while spatial sampling bias and hypermutation generated spurious evolutionary signals that confounded tumour interpretation across multiple inference layers. Evolutionary simulations further distinguished lineage-restricted genetic bottlenecks from multi-lineage resistance dynamics associated with tumour plasticity. Tumour purity consistently exerted a stronger effect on inference accuracy than sequencing depth. Together, our results establish evolutionary ground truth as a prerequisite for reproducible benchmarking and biologically interpretable analysis of cancer whole-genome sequencing data.

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Sensitivity of polaron-molecule observables to MDR/GUP-like ultraviolet deformations at low energies via quantum computing

Authors:
Ezequiel Valero↗Hugo Catala↗Victor Ilisie↗Germ\'an Rodrigo↗

arXiv:2606.14479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that impurity many-body observables can display enhanced sensitivity to ultraviolet deformations of generalized-uncertainty-principle and modified-dispersion-relation type at accessible energy scales. Using a deformed polaron-molecule Hamiltonian constructed to preserve the infrared sector, we quantify the impact of such deformations on spectral and Ramsey observables and implement the corresponding dynamics in a controlled quantum computing setting. We identify regimes near the polaron-molecule crossover where small ultraviolet deformations are strongly amplified, leading to experimentally resolvable changes in quasiparticle properties and spectral response. Our results establish a concrete sensitivity-based route to low-energy quantum-gravity phenomenology in a well-defined many-body platform and delimit the validity of the effective description. Furthermore, we report experimental validation on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS).

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

MINIF2F-DAFNY: LLM-Guided Mathematical Theorem Proving via Auto-Active Verification

Authors:
Mantas Baksys↗Stefan Zetzsche↗Olivier Bouissou↗Sean B. Holden↗

arXiv:2512.10187v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLMs excel at reasoning, but validating their steps remains challenging. Formal verification offers a solution through mechanically checkable proofs. Interactive theorem provers (ITPs) dominate mathematical reasoning but require detailed low-level proof steps, while auto-active verifiers offer automation but focus on software verification. Recent work has begun bridging this divide by evaluating LLMs for software verification in ITPs, but the complementary direction, LLMs for mathematical theorem proving in auto-active verifiers, remains unexplored. We present MINIF2F-DAFNY, the first translation of the widely-used mathematical benchmark miniF2F to an auto-active verifier: Dafny. We find that Dafny's automation alone solves 39-44% of problems with empty proofs, whereas many require substantial proof guidance in ITPs. We evaluate 8 off-the-shelf LLMs on proof generation, with the best model (Claude Opus 4.6) achieving 62.7% cumulative pass@4 on the full test set, improving over the 38.9% empty-proof baseline by 23.8 percentage points. These results show that auto-active verification offers a complementary empirical setting for AI-assisted mathematical reasoning, where LLMs provide high-level guidance while SMT automation handles low-level details. Our benchmark and evaluation infrastructure are publicly available on https://github.com/dafny-lang/miniF2F.

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

Semantic-Preserving Prompt Hijacking: A Black-Box Adversarial Attack on Auto-Prompt Optimization

Authors:
Chong Zhang↗Xiang Li↗Jia Wang↗Shan Liang↗Haochen Xue↗Xiaobo Jin↗

LLMs increasingly integrate auto-suggestion optimization modules, enabling them to rewrite and display user input before generating the final response. While this design aims to enhance transparency and trust, its process of autonomously selecting a single best result from multiple candidate solutions allows attackers to hijack this optimization process by inducing subtle, imperceptible semantic shifts. To address this, we propose a semantic preservation hijacking attack method based on black-box conditions: Adaptive Greedy Local Search. This method hierarchically decomposes the input text, masks key language units, and dynamically adjusts candidate replacement words at predefined semantic checkpoints. This maximizes the deviation between the model output and the original intent while strictly maintaining semantic similarity to the original text. Experimental results on commercial and open-source LLMs demonstrate that, under the same semantic similarity constraints, this method achieves a higher attack success rate than existing attack methods in over 2400 test cases. Code is available at: https://github.com/franz-chang/DOBS

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GeoDisaster: Benchmarking Orchestrated Agents for Operational Disaster Geo-Intelligence

Authors:
Maram Hasan↗Aman Verma↗Savitra Roy↗Hariseetharam Gunduboina↗Daksh Jain↗Muhammad Haris Khan↗Subhasis Chaudhuri↗Biplab Banerjee↗

Remote-sensing vision-language models (RS-VLMs) have advanced Earth-observation analysis toward visual interpretation and instruction-following, yet fall short of operational geo-intelligence, which demands tool-grounded spatial reasoning and structured, evidence-backed decisions. We introduce GeoDisaster, an operational geospatial disaster reasoning benchmark with 2,921 verified instances across 43 question types and five task families: deforestation monitoring, multi-hazard analysis, building-damage assessment, flood-safe routing, and Sentinel-1 SAR flood monitoring. Instances integrate heterogeneous EO/GIS evidence-optical and SAR imagery, raster masks, vector geometries, road networks, and exposure layers-spanning hazard detection, damage assessment, exposure estimation, and diagnostic report generation. Ground-truth answers are grounded in executable geospatial workflows and deterministic consistency checks, removing the need for language-model annotation. We further propose an orchestrated multi-agent framework with 18 disaster-oriented tools, where role-specialized agents coordinate through explicit execution contracts, aligned via Role-Contract Expectation Alignment (RCEA): failure-aware supervised fine-tuning combined with contract-grounded reinforcement learning over dense step-level signals. Experiments show that GeoDisaster challenges existing RS-VLMs and agentic systems, while RCEA improves tool use, evidence grounding, state consistency, and decision generation.

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

ProtoX-AD: Self-Explainable Time Series Anomaly Detection and Characterization

Authors:
Aitor S\'anchez-Ferrera↗Elisabeth Wetzer↗Kristoffer Wickstr{\o}m↗Michael Kampffmeyer↗Robert Jenssen↗

arXiv:2606.13277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in time series anomaly detection (TSAD) have highlighted the effectiveness of self-supervised classification-based approaches. These methods apply transformations to normal training samples, training a classifier to recognize transformation-specific patterns that help identify anomalies through increased classification errors. Despite their strong performance, a significant challenge is their lack of explainability, as they provide limited insight into the characteristics of flagged anomalies. To address this limitation, we propose ProtoX-AD, a prototype-based self-explainable framework for self-supervised TSAD. ProtoX-AD learns transformation-aware latent representations alongside interpretable prototypes, enabling both accurate anomaly detection and the identification of distinct anomalous profiles through prototype-based explanations. Additionally, it allows for systematic analysis of how transformation design impacts detection performance and explainability. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ProtoX-AD achieves detection performance comparable to its black-box counterparts while offering more consistent and semantically meaningful explanations than existing explainable baselines. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Aitorzan3/ProtoX-AD.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

EG-VQA: Benchmarking Verifiable Video Question Answering with Grounded Temporal Evidence

Authors:
Linpeng Huang↗Weixing Chen↗Zexin Chen↗Yang Liu↗Liang Lin↗

arXiv:2606.24797v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have yielded promising performance on video question answering (VideoQA). Nevertheless, existing benchmarks are predominantly evaluated through answer correctness, while the grounding of predictions in relevant video evidence remains largely unexamined. This disconnect between answer generation and evidence understanding motivates the construction of the Evidence-Grounded Video Question Answering Benchmark (EG-VQA), an open-ended evaluation protocol in which each QA pair is explicitly annotated with supporting temporal evidence, thereby requiring joint reasoning and precise evidence localization. EG-VQA is comprised of 2,067 videos and 11,838 QA pairs with fine-grained evidence annotations. To evaluate predicted evidence, Evidence-Grounded F1 (EG-F1) is introduced as a unified metric in which temporal alignment and semantic consistency against ground-truth evidence are jointly measured. Experimental evaluation reveals that even strong proprietary models struggle to accurately ground their predictions, exposing a fundamental discrepancy between answer correctness and faithful evidence localization. To bridge this gap, EG-Reasoner, an evidence-grounded reasoning model trained with explicit supervision, is proposed. State-of-the-art performance is achieved among open-source models, with results competitive against proprietary systems, particularly pronounced gains are observed on reasoning-intensive tasks such as counterfactual questions. These findings demonstrate that scaling alone is insufficient for robust video understanding and that structured evidence supervision is essential for the development of more reliable and interpretable VideoQA systems.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Alternate loss functions and regression models that achieve robustness to outliers by modulating the learning rate

Authors:
Mathew Mithra Noel↗Arindam Banerjee↗Yug D. Oswal↗Geraldine Bessie Amali D↗Venkataraman Muthiah-Nakarajan↗

arXiv:2606.22068v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Most real-world datasets used for training supervised learning models are contaminated with noisy data and outliers leading to large prediction errors. This paper proposes a new approach for achieving robustness where the learning rate is modulated by a factor that is sensitive to outliers. In this approach a reduction of the learning rate is shown to be achieved by using alternate loss functions that are infinitely differentiable, strictly convex or quasiconvex and more closely approximate the absolute error than Huber and log-cosh losses. A comparison of the performance of regression models trained with different loss functions on a wide variety of benchmarks and datasets is presented to demonstrate the superior performance of the Square Root Loss (SRL) and Smooth Mean Absolute Error (SMAE) losses proposed in this paper. Two new robust linear regression models are presented. Highly vectorized robust parameter update formulae that take advantage of modern GPUs for both stochastic and batch gradient descent are presented.

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

Reward-SQL: Boosting Text-to-SQL via Stepwise Execution-Aware Reasoning and Process-Supervised Rewards

Authors:
Yuxin Zhang↗Meihao Fan↗Ju Fan↗Mingyang Yi↗Yuyu Luo↗Guoliang Li↗Bin Wu↗Wenchao Zhou↗

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have improved Text-to-SQL performance. However, RL-based approaches still struggle with complex queries due to two key limitations: insufficient stepwise execution-aware reasoning grounded in database feedback, and the lack of process-level rewards for guiding reasoning optimization. To address these issues, we propose CoCTE, a divide-and-conquer and execution-aware reasoning framework that progressively composes SQL queries through intermediate view validation and structured Common Table Expressions (CTEs), improving both accuracy and interpretability. To realize a CoCTE reasoning process, we develop Reward-SQL, a unified approach with three stages: (1) model initialization, which equips LLMs with structured CoCTE reasoning capabilities; (2) process reward design, which delivers fine-grained, execution-aware supervision; and (3) process-supervised RL and inference, which integrates process rewards into training and guides the inference stage by process rewards. This paper addresses the core challenges in Reward-SQL and makes the following contributions. We introduce a process reward model (PRM) that combines execution-aware trajectory scoring with entropy-based step weighting, providing dense and interpretable supervision across reasoning steps. We integrate PRM into both RL training and inference stages, stabilizing optimization and improving trajectory exploration with process-level signals. Experiments show that Reward-SQL significantly outperforms baselines with comparable model sizes, and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization.

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

Securing the Future of IoMT in the Post-Quantum Era: An Edge-Native Federated Learning Approach

Authors:
Taym Alshoghri↗Deemah H. Tashman↗Mohammad Reza Gerami↗Soumaya Cherkaoui↗

arXiv:2606.14515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices operate under strict resource constraints while handling highly sensitive health data, making security and privacy critical concerns. Federated learning (FL) further complicates this landscape, as model updates exchanged during training may unintentionally expose private medical information. Emerging quantum computing capabilities threaten the long-term viability of conventional lightweight cryptographic mechanisms, motivating the integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) into IoMT systems. This article discusses key enabling technologies for quantum-resilient IoMT, including post-quantum key establishment, lightweight encryption, and edge-native orchestration. We propose a scalable Kubernetes-based framework that integrates PQC into FL-enabled IoMT environments and validate it on a Raspberry Pi testbed. Results demonstrate that distributed cryptographic processing significantly reduces latency compared to sequential designs while maintaining feasible resource overhead. The primary contribution of this work lies in the design and validation of a secure orchestration and communication framework for FL-enabled IoMT systems. We conclude by outlining future directions toward energy-aware architectures, intelligent security optimization, and resilient next-generation Intelligent Internet of Medical Things (IIoMT) ecosystems.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Human-centred design approaches to health facility design: Evidence from perinatal care settings in Ethiopia and Bangladesh

Authors:
Luna-Muse↗Chowdhury↗Sharif↗Olaya↗S. P↗Figueroa↗J. M↗Shao↗Brose↗Jassat↗Barker↗

While significant progress has been made in perinatal outcomes over recent decades in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), maternal and newborn quality improvement initiatives often fail to account for the spatial conditions in which they are implemented. Health systems are increasingly deploying evidence-based care models into built environments that are not optimally structured to meet the needs of its patient population. As the principal users, patients and health care workers can offer pragmatic insights about improving these structural designs. Our objective was to gather insights from patients, providers, and companions about how the physical design of their health facilities influenced their experience receiving or delivering perinatal care. We conducted a prospective observational study using a human-centred design (HCD) approach to analyse perceptions of the quality of perinatal care across two low resource settings: Ethiopia and Bangladesh. Using engagement and assessment tools, we conducted interviews, focus groups, facility walk-throughs, co-design workshops, and infrastructural assessments with patients, companions, providers, and Ministry of Health representatives. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis were used to identify key learnings and develop recommendations. Across both countries, participants identified the need for facility layouts that better support privacy, mobility during labour, alternative birth positions, companion involvement, cultural and religious practices, sanitation, and provider visibility. Based on these insights, we developed six recommendations to better align health facility infrastructure with maternal and newborn care delivery needs. Our findings suggest that investments in health facility infrastructure may improve care experiences and help enable respectful, safe, and evidence-based maternal and newborn care. Alongside targeted spatial improvements, government authorities responsible for health facility planning should incorporate participatory design processes to ensure infrastructure reflects the needs of patients, companions, and providers and supports high-quality care delivery.

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

What's Old is New Again: Classical Dimensionality Reduction for Efficient Saliency-Guided Biometric Attack Detection

Authors:
Samuel Webster↗Walter Scheirer↗

Saliency-guided training is a paradigm in visual recognition that encourages models to focus on the most relevant image regions during learning. While its application in biometric presentation attack detection (PAD) has shown strong benefits in robustness and generalization, adoption is often limited by the high cost, domain specificity, and limited scalability of existing saliency acquisition methods, such as human annotations over a limited dataset. We present a novel, cost-efficient, and highly-scalable approach to saliency acquisition using maps inspired by classical dimensionality reduction techniques: PCA and LDA. Our proposed methods generate saliency maps directly from raw training data, requiring no human annotation nor domain knowledge. We contextualize the effectiveness of these saliency sources in three saliency-explored domains (iris PAD, synthetic face detection, fingerprint PAD) and demonstrate its scalability in two saliency-novel domains (fingerprint vein PAD and ID card PAD). Across all domains tested, models trained using dimensionality reduction-sourced saliency maps exceed baseline and sometimes SOTA saliency methods without any resource investment or domain-specific tooling. Our findings overcome an important yet unaddressed barrier to saliency-guided training for biometric attack detection and beyond.

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

Whose hotel does the AI recommend? An algorithm audit of reputation signals in LLM-assisted hotel selection

Authors:
Mirza Samad Ahmed Baig↗Syeda Anshrah Gillani↗Asher Ali↗

Travelers increasingly ask large language model (LLM) assistants which hotel to book, making these systems gatekeepers of property visibility – yet what moves their recommendations is undocumented. We conduct a pre-specified algorithm audit using a randomized choice-based conjoint: across personas, prompt templates, and twelve open-weight and proprietary models, assistants choose among five hotels whose guest rating, review volume and recency, management response, chain affiliation, price, eco-certification, and list position are independently randomized. We estimate the average marginal component effect of each signal on the probability of recommendation. Guest rating and price dominate (a top rating raises selection by 31.6 percentage points; a high price lowers it by 30.0), reproducing human valence-and-price primacy but over-weighting eco-certification and ignoring management response. List position – a content-free artifact – shifts recommendations causally, worth about \$12 per night. Stated reasons track revealed weights imperfectly. The findings ground generative engine optimization and the accountability of AI infomediaries in causal evidence.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

SymQNet: Amortized Acquisition for Low-Latency Adaptive Hamiltonian Learning

Authors:
Yash Vardhan Tomar↗Dheeraj Peddireddy↗Vaneet Aggarwal↗

arXiv:2606.12808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adaptive Hamiltonian learning is central to calibrating and characterizing quantum devices. In an adaptive controller, choosing the next experiment is itself a computation. Bayesian design rules are recomputed after every posterior update, and that step can take seconds. Across hundreds of shots, those seconds become a significant wall-clock cost for adaptivity. We introduce SymQNet, an amortized reinforcement-learning approach for low-latency adaptive Hamiltonian learning. SymQNet learns a posterior-conditioned acquisition policy offline, then uses a fast policy forward pass online while retaining Bayesian posterior feedback. On transverse-field Ising benchmarks, SymQNet substantially reduces acquisition latency relative to bounded Fisher-information search and bounded two-step Bayesian active learning by disagreement (BALD). At five qubits, it reduces acquisition-only decision latency by $47.1\times$ and $72.6\times$ relative to these online baselines; at twelve qubits, full simulated steps take $1.02$ s for SymQNet versus $13.27$ s for bounded two-step BALD. Overall, we show that learned acquisition can make adaptive Hamiltonian learning practical for repeated low-latency workloads.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Attention mechanisms and transfer learning for robust peach leaf damage classification under domain shift

Authors:
Adri\'an C\'anovas-Rodriguez↗Miguel A. Gonz\'alez-Ill\'an↗Maria Fernanda Garc\'ia-Cruz↗Pedro Nortes Tortosa↗Jos\'e Salvador Rubio-Asensio↗Miguel A. Zamora Izquierdo↗Juan Antonio Mart\'inez Navarro↗Antonio F. Skarmeta↗

Artificial intelligence provides a practical framework for crop damage assessment from imagery data, supporting early decision-making in agricultural management. In peach orchards, climate change increases abiotic stress and biotic pressures, including pests and diseases, which often produce visually similar foliar symptoms. This overlap makes manual diagnosis difficult, especially across multiple fields with varying environmental conditions, highlighting the need for automated models with strong generalization ability. We propose an image-based classification approach for peach leaf damage detection. A benchmark dataset was created through manual annotation of publicly available images, consisting of 1,366 peach leaves across six damage categories. Several deep learning architectures were evaluated. EfficientNet models achieved the best results, with EfficientNetB0 reaching 92.9 percent accuracy, EfficientNetB3 achieving 91.5 percent, and EfficientNetB5 showing the strongest performance on minority classes. DenseNet121 reached 92.6 percent accuracy. The integration of the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) improved performance in several backbones, particularly EfficientNetB5 and InceptionV3, while showing limited or negative impact in others. The CBAM-enhanced EfficientNetB5 achieved the best overall accuracy of 93.3 percent. To evaluate robustness under realistic conditions, a local dataset of 180 images across four classes was collected, and transfer learning strategies were applied to address domain shift. Three fine-tuning strategies were tested. EfficientNetB3 combined with CBAM achieved the best performance in the local domain, reaching a 93 percent macro F1-score after transfer. Overall, attention-based models showed improved robustness for minority classes and better generalization across different field conditions.

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-13

Projected population level impact and cost-effectiveness of clinic and community-based tuberculosis screening approaches

Authors:
McCreesh↗Khan↗P. Y↗Yoon↗Govender↗Sithole↗Houben↗R. M↗White↗R. G↗Grant↗A. D↗…

The South Africa National Department of Health have set ambitious targets to scale up TB testing, focusing primarily on clinic attendees. In the context of declining funding for TB care and prevention, the most cost-effective approaches for targeting testing should be identified. We developed a mathematical model of TB in South Africa, explicitly incorporating clinic attendance by sex and HIV/ART status. We simulated six screening approaches over 2026-2035 (individually and in combination): three clinic-based (symptom screening, intensified targeted universal TB testing [TUTT, symptom-agnostic sputum testing of clinic attendees in key risk groups], and intensified TUTT allowing saliva samples) and three targeted community-based (community radiographic screening, symptom screening, and universal Xpert Ultra testing), each implemented at a range of coverage levels. Model outputs were combined with a mechanistic cost function to estimate potential impact and cost-effectiveness from a societal perspective. The most cost-effective standalone approach was community radiographic screening at 10% annual population coverage, with an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of $421 per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) averted. 10/11 scenarios along the expansion path included community radiographic screening at progressively higher coverage, combined with a clinic-based approach. Combining complementary approaches to reach both groups at increased risk of TB (e.g. clinic-based screening) and groups with lower screening coverage (e.g. community-based screening) may increase cost-effectiveness of TB screening, compared to standalone approaches. When designing TB screening strategies, both population risk and existing screening coverage should be considered.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Silhouette-Guided Animal Art

Authors:
Quoc-Duy Tran↗Anh-Tuan Vo↗Trung-Nghia Le↗

Generative AI has advanced the ability to render photorealistic or artistic images, yet it remains limited in a key aspect of human creativity: interpreting ambiguous shapes. This phenomenon, rooted in pareidolia, allows humans to perceive meaningful forms in random patterns such as clouds, stones, or leaves. To computationally replicate this imaginative process, we introduce Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Visual-RAG), a framework that generates animal art directly from natural silhouettes. Our method retrieves structurally similar animal shapes from a curated corpus of 28,586 high-quality silhouettes and uses them as reference exemplars to guide diffusion-based generation with ControlNet and IP-Adapter. Ablation studies confirm that shape Context with RANSAC provides the most accurate alignment, while removing shape standardization reduces the inlier ratio to just 13.4\%, underscoring the importance of structural fidelity in Visual-RAG. A user study with 12 participants evaluated the outputs in terms of aesthetics, silhouette fidelity, and overall impression. Results reveal that while Visual-RAG provides plausible interpretations, challenges remain in achieving high perceptual impact. This work lays the foundation for computational pareidolia, showing how machines can contribute to the early stages of imaginative discovery.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Rethinking Groups in Critic-Free RLVR

Authors:
Yihong Wu↗Liheng Ma↗Lingfeng Xiao↗Muzhi Li↗Xinyu Wang↗Yingxue Zhang↗Jian-Yun Nie↗

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for post-training large language models. Existing critic-free RL methods typically generate a group of rollouts for the same question to estimate value baselines for advantage computation. However, this design suffers from data inefficiency, group synchronization barriers, and inflexibility with structured rollouts. In this work, we revisit the role of the ``group'' and show that its underlying function is not merely to estimate baselines but to prevent false penalties on negative samples. Building on this insight, we propose negative token filtering, a simple and effective strategy that enables stable single-rollout training. We apply it to two batch-level advantage methods, achieving comparable performance on reasoning tasks and stronger performance on agentic tasks relative to group-based RL techniques.

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

BRITE: A Benchmark for Reliable and Interpretable T2V Evaluation on Implausible Scenarios

Authors:
Advait Tilak↗Jiwon Choi↗Nazifa Mouli↗Wei Le↗

The rapid advancement of photorealistic Text-to-Video (T2V) generation brings in an urgent need for up-to-date evaluation methods. Existing benchmarks largely overlooked implausible scenarios and do not measure audio-visual alignment. We introduce BRITE, the first framework that unifies (1) implausible prompting, (2) fine-grained assessment of audio-visual consistency, and (3) QA-based interpretable evaluation into a comprehensive T2V benchmark. Unlike fully automated Multimodal LLM-based pipelines, which are prone to hallucination and prompt ambiguity, BRITE guarantees reliability through a rigorous human-in-the-loop protocol for benchmark creation. Evaluating five state-of-the-art models (Sora 2, Veo 3.1, Runway Gen4.5, Pixverse V5.5, and Qwen3Max), we reveal a critical performance gap: while models excel at static object composition, they exhibit significant degradation in object-action binding and audio-visual synchronization. Our framework offers the community a reliable, interpretable benchmark and evaluation framework that can detect and locate limitations in the next generation of T2V models, especially for off-manifold prompts

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