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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

ProductConsistency: Improving Product Identity Preservation in Instruction-Based Image Editing via SFT and RL

Recent advances in instruction-based image editing have enabled models to perform complex visual edits from natural language instructions. However, in product-centric scenarios where preserving product features, branding, and textual elements are critical, current open and closed source models often struggle to maintain this fine-grained object identity. This issue is further compounded by the lack of datasets for instruction-based product image editing with text fidelity constraints, leaving it largely treated as an implicit capability of instruction-based image editing models. In this work, we introduce the ProductConsistency dataset which is designed to improve product-centric image editing. Our approach includes a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset of 87k samples for product editing, a reinforcement learning (RL) dataset with 869 unique product images, and a new benchmark dataset, the ProductConsistency Benchmark, to allow rigorous and standardized evaluation of editing models. To guide RL training, we propose a Cyclic Consistency reward that enforces semantic preservation of product identity by using caption similarity between the original product description and captions generated from the edited image. We fine-tune both Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and Flux.1-Kontext-dev using our dataset and demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline models in OCR and Perceptual metrics, and MLLM-based evaluations as well, indicating stronger product consistency, text rendering, and overall visual quality; with the Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 model achieving a 5x reduction in the character error rate. The code and pipeline is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProductConsistency-6FCC/README.md

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Reading Weakly, Acting Strongly: A Static Parity Horizon and its Dynamical Bypass in the Monitored Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick Model

arXiv:2606.24928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the broken-symmetry phase of the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model, whose two lowest states form a near-degenerate parity doublet split by tunnelling. We show that the same instanton action S_inst that sets the doublet splitting also controls how much parity information a static J_z magnetisation readout can extract. Although J_z measures magnetisation rather than parity - and so distinguishes the two wells easily while remaining almost blind to their relative sign - WKB barrier arguments together with exact diagonalisation show that the spectral gap, the total-variation distance, and the nonlinear distinguishability measures (Jensen-Shannon divergence and Chernoff information) share a single instanton exponent, rather than the doubled exponent a naive small-deviation expansion in the lobes would suggest. Exact diagonalisation up to N = 4500 supports a common leading exponent for all four quantities, with fitted values within a few percent of the WKB instanton value in the largest reliable windows. The same coupling acts strongly inside the doublet: its off-diagonal element grows as |J_01| -> N m_*/2, so the bath can disturb the parity label far more strongly than it can read it from a frozen histogram. We call this separation the static parity horizon - a benchmark for the idealised static J_z channel, not a universal bound on time-resolved monitoring. Restoring the full monitored dynamics, continuous-monitoring simulations (1.48 million full-LMG trajectories with matched QND controls across 77 independent settings) show that a time-resolved homodyne record extracts parity information hidden from the single-shot histogram, over a finite window of system sizes organised by the ratio xi = omega_01/Gamma_01 of coherent doublet rotation to measurement-induced dephasing, and closing again under strong measurement.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Achieving Heisenberg limit under noisy conditions with quantum Zeno dynamics and dynamical decoupling

arXiv:2606.13205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum Zeno dynamics (QZD) and dynamical decoupling (DD) are useful tools that enable the effective suppression of noise in quantum systems. We consider the problem of when (i) noise can be suppressed and (ii) Heisenberg limit (HL) can be achieved in quantum metrology, and prove necessary and sufficient conditions for when QZD and DD are useful for achieving these two goals. We also show that in the Markovian regime, there are scenarios where preventing errors using QZD/DD may enable HL to be achieved where current QEC methods may not. Finally, we demonstrate that the combination of both techniques can allow individually imperfect QZD and DD strategies to saturate HL.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

CredibleDFGO: Differentiable Factor Graph Optimization with Credibility Supervision

arXiv:2605.06100v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning is widely used for urban navigation, but the covariance reported by the GNSS solver is often unreliable in urban canyons. Existing differentiable factor graph optimization (DFGO) methods learn measurement weighting through the solver, but they still use position-only objectives. As a result, the position estimate may improve while the reported covariance remains too small, too large, or incorrectly oriented. We propose CredibleDFGO (CDFGO), a differentiable GNSS factor graph framework that makes covariance credibility an explicit training target. A Weighting Generation Network (WGN) predicts per-satellite reliability weights, and a differentiable Gauss-Newton solver maps these weights to a position estimate and a Hessian-derived posterior covariance. We use proper scoring rules to supervise the East-North predictive distribution end to end. We study negative log-likelihood (NLL), the energy score (ES), and their combination. Results on three UrbanNav test scenes show consistent gains in covariance credibility. Positioning accuracy also improves on the medium-urban and harsh-urban scenes; on the deep-urban scene, both the mean horizontal error and the 95th-percentile error improve. On the harsh-urban Mong Kok (MK) scene, CDFGO-Combined reduces the mean horizontal error from 13.77 m to 11.68 m, reduces NLL from 40.63 to 6.59, and reduces ES from 12.31 to 9.05 relative to DFGO (MAE). Case studies link the MK improvement to better axis-wise consistency, more credible local covariance ellipses, and satellite-level reweighting.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

GPT-Based Fast Simulation of CLAS12 Detector Hits via Conditional Autoregressive Generation

arXiv:2606.16035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern particles physics experiments have demonstrated an increasing need for fast, high-fidelity detector simulation as detector components have improved and subsequent computational requirements approach the limits of available resources. Recently, deep generative models have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Monte-Carlo methods, with recent works drawing inspiration from large language models (LLMs) and self-supervised next-token prediction methods. In this work, we present an application of a GPT-style autoregressive transformer as a fast surrogate model for the calorimeter inside the CLAS12 experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The model is conditioned on incident momentum and generates realistic detector hits autoregressively across all nine calorimeter layers as sequences of strip, ADC, and TDC tokens. We demonstrate that the model faithfully reproduces hit multiplicity, spatial distributions, energy deposits, and the energy-momentum response of the electromagnetic calorimeter. The generator achieves inference rates exceeding 700 events per second on a single GPU, providing a substantial speedup over traditional Geant4-based simulations while maintaining physics fidelity essential for high-luminosity experimental programs.

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

Upper tails for irregular graphs beyond the mean-field regime

arXiv:2606.14564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $G_{n,p}$ be the binomial random graph of density $p$ and let $X_H$ be the number of copies of a fixed graph $H$ in $G_{n,p}$. We prove asymptotically tight bounds on the logarithmic upper-tail probability of $X_H$ whenever $H$ is a connected, irregular graph with maximum degree $\Delta \ge 2$ and $p \ge n^{-1/\Delta - \varepsilon_H} (\log n)^{\omega(1)}$ for an explicit $\varepsilon_H >0$. These bounds are expressed in terms of a new variational problem that generalises the combinatorial optimisation problem arising from the naïve mean-field approximation. This new variational problem includes an entropy term that corresponds to the large number of embeddings of certain highly structured graphs in $K_n$. For a certain class of irregular graphs $H$ that we call stable, we show that this description of the upper-tail probability is valid in a range of densities that is optimal up to a poly($\log\log n$) factor. For a further subclass of stable graphs, which includes all irregular complete bipartite graphs, we show that this range of densities is optimal up to a multiplicative constant.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Anomaly Detection for Sparse and Irregular Multivariate Time Series with Latent SDEs

arXiv:2606.18898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) is critical for a wide range of application areas, such as industrial monitoring, cybersecurity, or healthcare. Real-world data is often sparse, irregularly sampled or partially observed, yet existing methods assume uniformly sampled time series. We propose a generative approach based on Latent SDEs that projects the observed time series on a continuous-time stochastic dynamical system, directly being able to handle missing observations and irregular sampling, while also naturally capturing possible cyclic behavior that many real-world use cases inherently possess. Experiments on six anomaly benchmark datasets show that our proposed method ranks first among state-of-the-art baselines. We further demonstrate that our method remains robust under severe data sparsity, while performance significantly degrades for the tested baseline methods. These results highlight latent SDEs as a natural inductive bias for anomaly detection in multivariate time series, especially in presence of real-world irregularities.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Clifford Volume and Free Fermion Volume: Complementary Scalable Benchmarks for Quantum Computers

arXiv:2512.19413v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing advances toward the late-NISQ and early fault-tolerant eras, scalable and platform-independent benchmarks are essential for quantifying computational capacity in a classically verifiable manner. We introduce two volumetric benchmarks, Clifford Volume and Free Fermion Volume, that assess quantum hardware by testing the execution of random Clifford and free fermion operations. These two groups of unitaries possess a combination of properties that make them ideal for benchmarking: (i) each is individually efficient to simulate classically, enabling verification at scale; (ii) together they form a universal gate set; (iii) they serve as essential algorithmic primitives in practical applications (including shadow tomography and quantum chemistry); and (iv) their definitions are formulated abstractly, without explicit reference to hardware-specific features such as qubit connectivity or native gate sets. This framework thus enables scalable and fair cross-platform comparisons and tracks meaningful computational advancement. We demonstrate the practical feasibility of these benchmarks through extensive numerical simulations across realistic noise parameters and through experimental validation on Quantinuum's H2-1 trapped-ion quantum computer, which achieves a Clifford Volume of 34.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Generalised Medical Phrase Grounding

Medical phrase grounding (MPG) maps textual descriptions of radiological findings to corresponding image regions. These grounded reports are easier to interpret, especially for non-experts. Existing MPG systems mostly follow the referring expression comprehension (REC) paradigm and return exactly one bounding box per phrase. Real reports often violate this assumption. They contain multi-region findings, non-diagnostic text, and non-groundable phrases, such as negations or descriptions of normal anatomy. Motivated by this, we reformulate the task as generalised medical phrase grounding (GMPG), where each sentence is mapped to zero, one, or multiple scored regions. To realise this formulation, we introduce the first GMPG model: MedGrounder. We adopted a two-stage training regime: pre-training on report sentence–anatomy box alignment datasets and fine-tuning on report sentence–human annotated box datasets. Experiments on PadChest-GR and MS-CXR show that MedGrounder achieves strong zero-shot transfer and outperforms REC-style and grounded report generation baselines on multi-region and non-groundable phrases, while using far fewer human box annotations. Finally, we show that MedGrounder can be composed with existing report generators to produce grounded reports without retraining the generator.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

FedReLa: Imbalanced Federated Learning via Re-Labeling

Federated learning has emerged as the foremost approach for decentralized model training with privacy preservation. The global class imbalance and cross-client data heterogeneity naturally coexist, and the mismatch between local and global imbalances exacerbates the performance degradation of the aggregated model. The agnosticism of global class distribution poses significant challenges for data-level methods, especially under extreme conditions with severe class absence across clients. In this paper, we propose FedReLa, a novel data-level approach that tackles the coexistence of data heterogeneity and class imbalance in federated learning. By re-labeling samples with a feature-dependent label re-allocator, FedReLa corrects biased global decision boundaries without requiring knowledge of the global class distribution. This modular, model-agnostic approach can be integrated with algorithmic methods to deliver consistent improvements without additional communication overhead. Through extensive experiments, our method significantly improves the accuracy of minority classes and the overall accuracy on stepwise-imbalanced and long-tailed datasets, outperforming the previous state of the art.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Cross-Attention Multimodal Learning for Predicting Response to Neoadjuvant Imatinib in Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors: A Multicenter Retrospective Study

Background: Response to neoadjuvant imatinib in gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) is highly variable and cannot be reliably predicted using current clinical or molecular markers. This study developed and evaluated an explainable multimodal deep learning framework integrating computed tomography (CT) imaging and clinical variables to predict treatment response. Methods: Patients from four tertiary centers were retrospectively included between 2000-2023 in independent pretraining (n=935) and prediction (n=213) cohorts. A cross-attention framework integrating clinical variables and tumor-centered CT imaging was developed to predict response to neoadjuvant imatinib. Two training strategies were evaluated: (1) self-supervised pretraining with low-rank adaptation and (2) training from scratch. Hyperparameters were optimized using SMAC3. Performance was assessed through internal cross-validation and external testing. Ablation analyses and attention-based explanations were used to quantify modality contributions. Results: Among 213 patients (54.5% responders), responders had larger tumors (112 vs. 89 mm, P=0.026), higher mitotic index (3 vs. 0, P

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Information Gap and Feasibility-Aware Inference in Binomial Logistic Mixtures

arXiv:2606.15665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies the information gap between mixture detection and label recovery in binomial logistic mixtures. Standard likelihood-based criteria such as the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) can detect the presence of two components, but this does not guarantee that the corresponding labels are recoverable. We show that this gap is intrinsic to binomial logistic mixtures with a fixed number of trials: observed-data evidence for mixture structure and per-observation information for label recovery have different local orders in the component separation, and only the former accumulates with the sample size. As a result, there exists a detectable-but-unrecoverable regime in which BIC selects two components while the posterior labels remain essentially uninformative. To address this issue, we propose two feasibility-aware inference procedures: a recoverability-aware BIC with a posterior-entropy penalty and an entropy-regularized estimator that mitigates the tendency of the maximum likelihood estimator to produce overly separated components and overly concentrated posterior responsibilities. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted gap and demonstrate that the proposed methods avoid misleading component selections and improve the calibration of posterior label probabilities.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

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

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.

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

Polyp-D2ATL: Deep Domain-Adaptive Transfer Learning for Colorectal Polyp Classification under Label Distribution Shift

Early and highly accurate prediction of colorectal polyps, as an important sign of one of the most dangerous types of cancer, will result in saving more lives. Despite the advancements in colorectal polyp classification, many challenges remain in obtaining an automated polyp prediction system that is able to diagnose the difficult-to-predict polyps accompanied by different features in real scenarios, where the model can handle imbalanced data, label distribution shift, and cross-modality generalization successfully. In this study, we propose Polyp-D2ATL, a novel framework accompanied by a specific training strategy, which mitigates these limitations and effectively predicts the different classes of polyps belonging to the NICE classification. Our extensive experiments on the PICCOLO validation and test sets demonstrate that the proposed Polyp-D2ATL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across various reliable metrics, achieving an accuracy of 82.38%, a Macro-F1 of 77.49%, and a specificity of 87.47% on the validation set, alongside consistent improvements on the held-out test set which demonstrates the generalization capacity and clinical applicability of the proposed approach.

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

Variational Graph Neural Networks for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems

arXiv:2603.29515v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasingly wide use of deep machine learning techniques in computational mechanics has significantly accelerated simulations of problems that were considered unapproachable just a few years ago. However, in critical applications such as Digital Twins for engineering or medicine, fast responses are not enough; reliable results must also be provided. In certain cases, traditional deterministic methods may not be optimal as they do not provide a measure of confidence in their predictions or results, especially in inverse problems where the solution may not be unique or the initial data may not be entirely reliable due to the presence of noise, for instance. Classic deep neural networks also lack a clear measure to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions. In this work, we present a variational graph neural network (VGNN) architecture that integrates variational layers into its architecture to model the probability distribution of weights. Unlike computationally expensive full Bayesian networks, our approach strategically introduces variational layers exclusively in the decoder, allowing us to estimate cognitive uncertainty and statistical uncertainty at a relatively lower cost. In this work, we validate the proposed methodology in two cases of solid mechanics: the identification of the value of the elastic modulus with nonlinear distribution in a 2D elastic problem and the location and quantification of the loads applied to a 3D hyperelastic beam, in both cases using only the displacement field of each test as input data. The results show that the model not only recovers the physical parameters with high precision, but also provides confidence intervals consistent with the physics of the problem, as well as being able to locate the position of the applied load and estimate its value, giving a confidence interval for that experiment.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

SIGMA: Search-Augmented On-Demand Knowledge Integration for Agentic Mathematical Reasoning

Solving mathematical reasoning problems requires not only accurate access to relevant knowledge but also careful, multi-step thinking. However, current retrieval-augmented models often rely on a single perspective, follow inflexible search strategies, and struggle to effectively combine information from multiple sources. We introduce SIGMA (Search-Augmented On-Demand Knowledge Integration for AGentic Mathematical reAsoning), a unified framework that orchestrates specialized agents to independently reason, perform targeted searches, and synthesize findings through a moderator mechanism. Each agent generates hypothetical passages to optimize retrieval for its analytic perspective, ensuring knowledge integration is both context-sensitive and computation-efficient. When evaluated on challenging benchmarks such as MATH500, AIME, and PhD-level science QA GPQA, SIGMA consistently outperforms both open- and closed-source systems, achieving an absolute performance improvement of 7.4%. Our results demonstrate that multi-agent, on-demand knowledge integration significantly enhances both reasoning accuracy and efficiency, offering a scalable approach for complex, knowledge-intensive problem-solving. We will release the code upon publication.

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

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

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.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Solver-Free Training Method for Predict-then-Optimize

arXiv:2606.19587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a scalable method for training prediction (machine learning) models in the predict-then-optimize paradigm, where model outputs serve as coefficients for a subsequent linear optimization task. Directly minimizing the empirical decision regret is intractable for linear programming and combinatorial optimization since the decision mapping is piecewise constant, and the gradients are zero almost everywhere. While existing methods address this by smoothing the differentiation process, they suffer from scalability issues, since a computationally expensive solver call is required for every gradient evaluation. To address this, we propose a decision-focused learning pipeline based on a measure transformation principle, which yields a new surrogate loss that is completely optimization-solver-free during training. We establish theoretical guarantees, including Fisher consistency and excess risk bounds. Empirically, our method achieves decision quality competitive with state-of-the-art methods while reducing training time by orders of magnitude.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Perfect State Transfer on Quotient Graphs in Shunt Decomposition-Based Quantum Walks

arXiv:2606.24440v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates perfect state transfer (PST) in discrete-time quantum walks constructed via the shunt decomposition method. The walks are defined on a graph $G$ and its associated quotient graph $G/\pi$, induced by an equitable partition $\pi$. Through the shunt decomposition of $G$, we derive an explicit relation between the shift operator of the parent graph $G$ and that of its quotient graph $G/\pi$. We construct a reflection operator based on the characteristic matrix, which establishes a connection between the transition operator of the parent graph and that of its lower-dimensional quotient graph. We then prove that PST occurs on $G$ if and only if it occurs on $G/\pi$. Furthermore, we express the unitary evolution operator of the quotient graph in terms of Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind, from which we derive explicit criteria for PST. As an application, we establish PST on the cycle graph $C_{n}$ at time $k = n/2$, and lift the result to the parent graph $C_{2n}$ via the equitable partition $\pi$. We further show that if an equitable partition $\pi$ of $G$ induces a quotient isomorphic to $K_n^{\circlearrowleft}$, the complete digraph on $n$ vertices with a loop at every vertex, then PST occurs at step $k = n$, and the walk is periodic at $k = 2n$. This framework is applied to two families of graphs, which are the complete bipartite digraph $K_{n,n}^{\rightleftharpoons}$ and the circulant graph $\operatorname{Circ}(2n, S)$, where $S$ consists of all odd residues modulo $2n$ and $n = 2^s$ for some $s \geq 1$, establishing PST in their respective line digraphs. Collectively, these results also answer the question posed by Godsil and Zhan concerning which shunt decompositions or embeddings of a graph admit PST.

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

Variational autoencoders with latent high-dimensional steady geometric flows for dynamics

Authors:

arXiv:2410.10137v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop Riemannian approaches to variational autoencoders (VAEs) for PDE-type ambient data with regularizing geometric latent dynamics, which we refer to as VAE-DLM, or VAEs with dynamical latent manifolds. We redevelop the VAE framework such that manifold geometries, subject to our geometric flow, embedded in Euclidean space are learned in the intermediary latent space developed by encoders and decoders. By tailoring the geometric flow in which the latent space evolves, we induce latent geometric properties of our choosing, which are reflected in empirical performance. We reformulate the traditional evidence lower bound (ELBO) loss with a considerate choice of prior. We develop a linear geometric flow with a steady-state regularizing term. This flow requires only automatic differentiation of one time derivative, and can be solved in moderately high dimensions in a physics-informed approach, allowing more expressive latent representations. We discuss how this flow can be formulated as a gradient flow, and maintains entropy away from metric singularity. This, along with an eigenvalue penalization condition, helps ensure the manifold is sufficiently large in measure, nondegenerate, and a canonical geometry, which contribute to a robust representation. Our methods focus on the modified multi-layer perceptron architecture with tanh activations for the manifold encoder-decoder. We demonstrate, on our datasets of interest, our methods perform at least as well as the traditional VAE, and oftentimes better. Our methods can outperform this and a VAE endowed with our proposed architecture, frequently reducing out-of-distribution (OOD) error between 15% to 35% on select datasets. We highlight our method on ambient PDEs whose solutions maintain minimal variation in late times. We provide empirical justification towards how we can improve robust learning for external dynamics with VAEs.

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

Fair Online Resource Allocation

arXiv:2606.18679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the problem of fair online resource allocation, motivated by applications such as refugee resettlement and airline scheduling, where agents arrive sequentially and must be assigned to facilities with limited capacities. We introduce a model that maximizes the overall welfare subject to resource constraints and a Lipschitz fairness requirement, which ensures that similar agents arriving in the same batch receive similar expected outcomes. We first analyze the offline problem, proving that the value of the optimal fair allocation is at least an $\Omega(1/\gamma)$ fraction of the optimal unfair allocation, where $\gamma$ is the fairness coefficient, thereby bounding the price of fairness. For the online setting, we propose an algorithm based on dual mirror descent that enforces fairness constraints within batches while estimating optimal dual variables. We prove that this algorithm achieves sublinear regret relative to the optimal offline fluid benchmark. Finally, we validate our theoretical results using real-world data from the Refugee Economies Programme, demonstrating the algorithm's performance and examining the trade-offs between welfare maximization and fairness enforcement.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Microscopic Plant Image Understanding

Microscopic imaging provides essential visual evidence for studying plant biology and pathology at the cellular and subcellular levels. However, existing benchmarks on vision-language models primarily focus on macroscopic plant imagery, while the microscopic domain remains underexplored. To address this gap, we present PlantMicro, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) in microscopic plant imagery. PlantMicro integrates more than 5,000 images collected across diverse hosts, biological domains, and imaging modalities. Building on this diversity, we design a set of complementary tasks that capture different facets of microscopic image understanding. To support these tasks, we construct over 9,000 VQA pairs that systematically evaluate the capabilities of VLMs. Experiments on PlantMicro show that current VLMs struggle with fine-grained recognition and biologically grounded reasoning. For example, GPT-5 achieves 34.93% accuracy on the pathogen classification task, which is only modestly above the random-guessing baseline. The results highlight a significant gap in current VLMs' ability to comprehend plant microscopic images. PlantMicro provides a standardized foundation for advancing VLMs toward reliable and comprehensive microscopy-level plant understanding.

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

The Measurable Majority

arXiv:2606.23853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies strict majority reasoning in finite electorates using so-called $social decision frames$: finite sets of voters equipped with distinguished families of coalitions interpreted as those voting blocs evaluated to form a strict majority. A coherence criterion for qualitative majority judgments is identified and shown to give an exact characterization for representability of strict majorities by finitely additive measures. In addition, a minimal natural logic for reasoning about strict majorities is shown to be sound and complete. These developments motivate examination of associated combinatorial questions concerning incoherence in finite families of sets; partial results and a conjecture are given. Finally, the results of this paper are applied to correct a classical representation theorem for weak qualitative probability structures due to Patrick Suppes and to establish a May-type characterization for ordinary strict majority rule for social decision frames.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

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

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.