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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?

Game generation is an emerging application of coding agents, requiring models to transform natural-language specifications into playable interactive systems. Unlike traditional coding tasks, game generation takes place within a game engine, where scripts, scenes, assets, rendering, and runtime interactions must jointly produce coherent gameplay. We formalize end-to-end game generation as the problem of producing a complete game artifact that realizes a specification through observable player-game interaction in a target environment. We argue that evaluating this setting requires three desiderata: Engine Grounding, Artifact Completeness, and Interactive Verification. We propose an interaction-grounded evaluation framework that assesses executable gameplay through replayed demonstrations and rubric-guided multimodal judging. We instantiate this framework as GameCraft-Bench, a benchmark comprising 140 Godot tasks across 15 game families. Evaluations of frontier coding agents show that end-to-end game generation remains highly challenging: the strongest agent achieves only 41.46%, and most agents score below 40%. Further analysis reveals that while agents often implement recognizable mechanics, they struggle to deliver complete games with sufficient content, functional visual feedback, and coherent presentation. See https://tongxuluo.github.io/gamecraft-bench-website for demos, code, and data.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Performance of five risk stratification tools for paediatric pneumonia against WHO scores using data from the PediCAP trial in sub-Saharan Africa

Background Risk stratification tools for childhood pneumonia have been proposed to improve identification of children at highest risk of death, particularly in low-resource settings. However, their added value over the WHO Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) criteria and danger signs remains uncertain. Methods We conducted a secondary analysis of a multi-country randomised controlled trial of children without HIV hospitalised with pneumonia in Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. We evaluated the performance of five published risk scores alongside WHO IMCI severity classification and danger signs. Discrimination for (1) in-hospital mortality, (2) 28-day mortality, and (3) 28-day readmission or death was assessed using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Comparative performance and clinical utility were examined. Results Of the 1010 participants, 18 (1.8%) died in hospital, 22 (2.2%) died in hospital or in the 7 days post-discharge, and 63 (6.2%) died or were readmitted by day 28. Univariate case-fatality rates were highest for variables associated with malnutrition, convulsions, and hypoxaemia. All risk scores demonstrated moderate discrimination for in-hospital and in-hospital+7-day mortality (AUC range approximately 0.75-0.84), with no meaningful differences between models, and performed similarly to the WHO danger signs and IMCI severity classification. In contrast, all approaches performed poorly in predicting 28-day readmission or death (AUC approximately 0.54-0.58). No risk score consistently outperformed simple clinical criteria. Conclusions In this multi-country dataset, we found no evidence that published paediatric pneumonia risk scores meaningfully outperform WHO IMCI-based clinical assessment for predicting mortality. The relatively small number of mortality events limits precision, and modest differences cannot be excluded. These findings suggest that, in low-resource settings, strengthening implementation of existing WHO clinical criteria may be more effective than adopting more complex prediction tools.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

From Noise to Order: Learning to Rank via Denoising Diffusion

arXiv:2602.11453v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning-to-rank (LTR) methods have traditionally been limited to discriminative machine learning approaches that model the probability of the document being relevant to the query given some feature representation of the query-document pair. We propose an alternative denoising diffusion-based generative approach to LTR that instead models the full joint distribution over features and relevance labels. While in discriminative LTR, an over-parameterized ranking model may find different ways to fit the training data, we posit that candidate solutions that can explain the full data distribution under the generative setting maybe better at estimating relevance. Thus, we propose DiffusionRank that extends TabDiff, an existing diffusion model for tabular datasets, to create generative alternatives to classical discriminative pointwise and pairwise LTR objectives. Our work demonstrates improvements from DiffusionRank over discriminative counterparts on four standard LTR datasets and points to a rich space for future exploration to leverage ongoing advancements in deep generative models for LTR. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sadjadeb/DiffusionRank.

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

Substrate Asymmetry in User-Side Memory: A Diagnostic Framework

Authors:

User-side memory in LLMs is typically scored as a single "personalization" capability: given a user's history, is the output more user-aware? We show this aggregate metric hides opposite-direction failures. Memory factorises into at least three orthogonal axes – behavioral consistency (style, voice), factual presence (recall facts in history), and factual absence (abstain when a fact is absent) – and no single substrate wins all three. Comparing per-user gamma-LoRA (a small LoRA adapter trained on each user's history; gamma denotes per-user, not per-task) against BGE-large dense top-K retrieval on a controlled 50-user synthetic corpus and a real-data probe (LaMP-3), we find gamma-LoRA decisively wins behavioral style while RAG decisively wins factual absence – and the same query-projection cells in attention layers 21-35 causally load-bear both effects in opposite directions (zeroing those LoRA weights raises absence-probe TPR by +33 pp and drops presence-probe TPR by 20 pp). On the more heavily RLHF-tuned Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct the asymmetry strengthens, not heals: parametric memory's behavioral advantage collapses while its absence-calibration deficit against retrieval widens – an alignment tax on parametric user-memory. On real-data LaMP-3, gamma-LoRA underperforms a majority baseline; a 9-condition mitigation sweep diagnoses this as instruction-following collapse, not substrate failure (a 9x2 cross-product shows the eval-time {1..5} logit mask drives main_acc to >=0.995 on every recipe), and the best training-time fix replicates bit-identically on Llama. Finally, substrate-selection routing is question-classification, not calibration: a 110M DistilBERT on the question text alone beats every logit-based router. We contribute the diagnostic framework, the diagnosed real-data negative, the alignment-tax replication, and the routing-as-classification finding.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Trajectory inference of epithelial-centered neighborhood profiles reconstructs a pseudo-temporal continuum in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is characterized by complex lung architecture and spatially heterogeneous remodeling, which have hindered integrated analysis of cell-intrinsic activity and intercellular communication during disease progression. Here we profiled six IPF lung specimens comprising more than 630,000 cells using the Xenium 5k panel and developed an epithelial-centered neighborhood profiling framework based on the local cellular composition around each epithelial cell. This approach captured fibrosis-associated variation in epithelial niches without requiring predefined histological regions. Pseudo-temporal continuum inference of these profiles reconstructed a continuous axis that reflected the spatial progression of fibrotic remodeling from relatively preserved alveolar regions to fibrotic and airway-like remodeled regions. Within this spatial dataset, we mapped coordinated changes in epithelial states, local microenvironments, epithelial intracellular pathway activities, and directional interactions with neighboring cell types along the same axis. Our findings provide a spatial framework that generates testable hypotheses for progressive epithelial niche remodeling in IPF.

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

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

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

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Driving, Fast or Slow? Neuro-Symbolic Guidance for Motion Prediction in Multi-Modal Ground Mobility

arXiv:2606.15251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate and interpretable motion prediction for heterogeneous traffic spaces, including pedestrians, bicycles, cars, and trucks, is essential for safe autonomous navigation. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art approaches remain predominantly black-box, lacking explicit encoding of the regulatory and behavioral constraints of real-world mobility. We propose Trajectory Compliance-Shaping (TraCS), a neuro-symbolic framework that augments existing black-box motion prediction backbones with interpretable and probabilistic first-order logic. To do so, TraCS employs an agentic code-generation pipeline to bridge the gap between natural-language descriptions of traffic regulations and probabilistic motion prediction. Furthermore, TraCS employs a reactive data-streaming inference engine that maintains and efficiently updates compliance landscapes as scenes evolve. To prevent TraCS from overconfidently steering the backbone's predictions in the wrong direction, we propose a neural confidence rating learned as a context-aware attenuation of the compliance signal. We demonstrate on the Argoverse 2 benchmark how TraCS consistently improves state-of-the-art prediction backbones, showing that probabilistic and symbolic compliance reasoning is a broadly applicable and computationally efficient complement to purely neural motion predictors.

08.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

Assessing the importance of sex and disease-specific anatomy in electrophysiology and mechanical simulations with a newly developed public virtual cohort of four-chamber heart models

by José Alonso Solís-Lemus, Rosie K. Barrows, Cristobal Rodero, Marina Strocchi, Natalie Montarello, Nishant Lahoti, Cesare Corrado, Abdul Qayyum, Shahrokh Rahmani, Caroline Roney, Gernot Plank, Christoph Augustin, Hao Xu, Alistair Young, Pras Pathmanathan, Ronak Rajani, Steven A. Niederer This work presents a study on how differences in cardiac anatomy attributed to sex and disease can influence cardiac electrophysiology and mechanics using a virtual cohort of four-chamber heart models. Patient anatomy varies across sex and disease. However, capturing this variation in in-silico studies remains poorly accounted for, with studies often using either single representative cases or imbalanced virtual cohorts. Whole-heart electromechanics models incorporate the patient’s anatomy, electrophysiology and mechanics across different scales, from molecular, tissue and whole-heart and circulatory system levels. However, cardiac models are typically built from one or a small number of anatomies, with sex rarely reported and the effects of anatomical variability, which include those due to sex or disease, largely unexplored. This limits clinical translation and reduces regulatory credibility. We developed fifty patient-specific anatomical models of 25 male and 25 female hearts in heart failure and control cases. We ran benchmark passive inflation and paced activation simulations with consistent parameters and boundary conditions across cases to isolate the impact of anatomical variations with sex and disease. Heart failure models exhibited increased chamber volumes, larger volume changes during inflation, and delayed activation times relative to controls. These trends were consistent across sexes, although right ventricular activation showed a significant sex-based difference. Variations in anatomy with sex and disease have a significant impact on cardiac simulations, which support the inclusion of multiple heart anatomical models in in-silico trials. The resulting virtual cohort captures key anatomical variability and is publicly available, along with the underlying code (see Data Availability statement).

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

PASQA: Pitch-Accent-Focused Speech Quality Assessment Model Trained on Synthetic Speech with Accent Errors

Existing mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models typically predict utterance-level naturalness MOS and can be insensitive to localized pitch-accent errors. We propose Pitch-Accent-focused Speech Quality Assessment (PASQA), which explicitly targets pitch-accent correctness. To train our model, we construct a controlled Japanese accent-error dataset by changing accent patterns using an accent-controllable text-to-speech system, and compute a pseudo accent-quality score from the accent-error rate. PASQA builds on self-supervised representations and employs mora-conditioned fusion, ranking loss, an auxiliary accent-error localization task, and speaker-invariant training. Experiments show that conventional models fail to preserve the ordering by accent-error severity, whereas PASQA achieves high ordering accuracy on both seen and unseen speakers. Further, PASQA shows stronger agreement with human accent-correctness judgments. The code is available at https://github.com/lycorp-jp/PASQA.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Off-Policy Evaluation for Missingness-Aware Policies in MDPs with Rewards Missing Not at Random

arXiv:2606.20206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In offline Reinforcement Learning, immediate rewards in logged batch data are often unobserved due to sparse or irregular record-keeping, or censored beyond certain reward values. This issue arises in practical settings, including health care and marketing. We investigate off-policy evaluation (OPE) in finite-horizon Markov decision processes when rewards are missing not at random (MNAR), which breaks ignorability and induces selection bias even after conditioning on states and actions. To address this, we formalize a reward-dependent propensity model and use future states as shadow variables to identify the full-data conditional mean reward. We further introduce a bridge function that recovers the conditional mean reward without explicitly modeling the MNAR mechanism, and estimate it via a min-max procedure to avoid double sampling. Building upon these identification results, we propose an Fitted-Q-Evaluation-style estimator that propagates the recovered rewards while allowing target policies to depend on past missingness indicators. Finally, we establish consistency and finite-sample error bounds for our OPE estimator, and show through experiments the strong performance of our method compared to existing methods on simulated and MIMIC-III Sepsis data.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

The Market in the Model: Latent Diffusion as Neural Economy

Valuable critique of generative image models within visual culture and the humanities has emphasized the role of datasets in shaping the images they produce. Yet, close studies of the ideological positions embedded into the mechanism of the models have been neglected, leaving them imagined as "black boxes." In a bid to expand, rather than replace, dataset critique, this paper examines the mechanisms of the latent diffusion model in terms of the problems they were brought in to solve on behalf of computer vision engineers, and the decisions each component was tasked with automating. I interpret that ensemble through the histories of its parts and the theory of vision the system inscribes into every generated image. Drawing on Impett and Offert's notion of neural exchange value, I offer this analysis to argue that the model operates as a neural economy: a contained symbolic system that abstracts social communication into commensurable vectors as it transfers the social sphere into parcels for sale. Tracing the training and generation pipelines component by component reveals what each operation displaces, and how it further entrenches the logics of platform and attention economies over social communication. The paper warns that any critique fixated exclusively on copyright and commodity defenses risks reaffirming the very fetishism the model produces, and argues instead for centering social exchange.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM: Element-Level Assessment of Randomized Controlled Trial Reporting Using Large Language Models

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) play a central role in assessing the benefits and harms of interventions. Incomplete reporting in RCT publications can compromise the verifiability and usefulness of RCTs. SPIRIT and CONSORT reporting guidelines aim to improve the completeness of RCT protocols and results publications, respectively. However, many RCTs are not reported completely. Checking manuscripts automatically could help authors improve the completeness of reports prior to publication. We previously annotated SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, a corpus of 200 articles (comprising 100 protocol-results publication pairs) using 83 checklist items drawn from SPIRIT 2013 and CONSORT 2010. We also trained machine learning models to automatically assess reporting at the item level. Each checklist item can include multiple constituent elements (i.e., specific details required for that item), and an item might be considered fully reported when all of its elements are present. However, prior work does not explicitly capture or evaluate reporting at the element level. To address this gap, we extended SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM by incorporating element-level annotations and using them to assess reporting completeness (SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM). We formulated element-level assessment as a machine reading comprehension task, operationalized through 119 questions, where each question targets a specific reporting element within a checklist item. Using the 200 articles included in SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, two annotators independently answered 119 questions for 50 articles (25 protocol-results pairs) and resolved any discrepancies through discussion; the remaining 150 articles (75 protocol-results pairs) were assessed by a single annotator. We then developed an automated pipeline for element-level assessment using SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM. The pipeline first applies a PubMedBERT-based model to identify sentences containing item-level reporting information, then it uses a generative large language model (LLM; GPT-5) with chain-of-thought reasoning to answer element-level questions based on the retrieved evidence. Agreement between the two annotators was high (Gwet's AC1: 0.782) and our pipeline achieved high accuracy in identifying element-level reporting evidence (F1: 0.822, Gwet's AC1: 0.796). Ablation studies indicate that chain-of-thought reasoning and the inclusion of illustrative in-context examples modestly improve LLM performance on the machine reading comprehension task. SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM provides a benchmark for evaluating reporting guideline completeness at the element level, enabling assessment of RCT transparency beyond the simple presence or absence of checklist items and is publicly available at https://osf.io/kznx4/. The automated pipeline establishes a robust baseline for assessing RCT reporting and demonstrates potential as a practical aid for authors, reviewers, and editors to identify and address gaps in completeness and transparency of RCT reports.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

Expanding the GUSome: Structure-guided identification and characterization of gut microbial β-glucuronidases

The gut microbiome-encoded {beta}-glucuronidase (GUS) enzymes have a significant effect on human physiology through their deglucuronidation activity on endogenous and exogenous glucuronides. GUS activity also significantly influences the pharmacokinetics, efficacy and toxicity of various drugs including chemotherapeutic drugs. Given their crucial role in drug metabolism, GUS enzymes have emerged as promising targets for therapeutic intervention. Here, we have identified and characterized 79 unique GUS enzymes through a structure-guided approach. Structural modelling of these GUS enzymes revealed a conserved core and active-site residues with significant variations in the number and nature of the C-terminal domains. A new classification system based on the number and type of additional C-terminal domains is presented for the GUS proteins. Further, GUS enzymes have been categorized into different loop categories linked to their substrate preferences. The relationship between domain architecture and loop-type is explored by sequence similarity network analysis. We could successfully express, purify and validate GUS processing capability of a panel of identified GUS proteins. The nature of oligomer organization has been deciphered by SEC and DLS studies. Further, we have identified additional GUS enzymes capable of processing SN-38G, glucuronidated form of anticancer drug, irinotecan. These newly identified GUS enzymes will offer valuable insights into gut microbial GUS diversity and their role in understanding the population-specific drug-induced adverse effects on human health.

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

EverydayGPT: Confidence-Gated Routing for Efficient and Safe Hybrid GPT-RAG Conversational QA

Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines route every query through retrieval and generation unconditionally, incurring unnecessary computation and propagating low-quality context to the generator. We introduce EverydayGPT, a lightweight conversational QA system built around a Confidence-Gated Routing (CGR) mechanism that formalises the routing decision as a joint policy over retrieval distance and extraction adequacy. The backbone is a 205M-parameter GPT trained from scratch on 10B tokens of FineWeb-Edu. CGR avoids invoking the costly GPT pathway (~5.9s) for 85 percent of queries by resolving them via fast RAG extraction (~45 ms), yielding over 120x latency reduction on the majority of queries while maintaining answer quality. On a 500-question in-domain benchmark, the system achieves F1 = 0.226 +/- 0.004 compared to 0.171 for GPT-only and 0.210 for unconditional RAG. Gains over strong baselines are modest but consistent, while efficiency improvements are substantial (6.3x mean latency reduction). A structured grounding audit finds no unsupported claims in the sampled set, with explicit scope limitations. We position this work as a study of routing strategies under resource constraints rather than a claim of state-of-the-art performance.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Perceptions of aging well among older adults with heart failure: insights from a qualitative study

Background: Heart failure (HF) is a prevalent and often debilitating cardiovascular condition among older adults, frequently accompanied by multimorbidity, functional limitations, and the need to age in place. Traditional models of successful aging emphasize disease absence and preserved function, yet most individuals with HF live with ongoing symptoms and chronic health challenges. How older adults with HF define aging well, particularly across different socioeconomic contexts, remains underexplored. Objectives: To explore how older adults with HF conceptualize aging well and to identify perceived facilitators and barriers across more and less resourced New York City neighborhoods. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 adults diagnosed with HF residing in Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods classified by 2019 United States Census data. Interviews were guided by Rowe and Kahn's model. Transcripts were analyzed using an inductive-deductive thematic approach and interpreted in alignment with the Healthy People 2030 framework. Results: Participants had a mean age of 69 years; 50% identified as Black and 50% were women. Despite functional limitations, 65% reported aging well. Five themes emerged: maintaining physical function, maintaining cognitive function, sustaining social relationships, avoiding pain, and promoting overall well-being. Avoiding pain and promoting well-being extended beyond traditional models. Neighborhood context shaped priorities, with financial stability emphasized in more affluent areas and social cohesion prioritized in less affluent communities. Conclusions: Older adults with HF frequently perceive themselves as aging well despite chronic illness, reframing successful aging beyond disease avoidance. These findings support a patient-centered, place-informed model of aging well with implications for healthcare delivery and policy.

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

LoComposition: Terrain-Adaptive Energy-Efficient Quadruped Locomotion without Gait Priors

arXiv:2606.15896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning-based quadrupedal locomotion typically relies on complex reward formulations that entangle task specification, operational limits, gait preference, and terrain adaptation within a single optimization objective. We instead treat these functions through distinct mechanisms: rewards for task specification, constraints for operational limits, energy minimization for gait preference, and exteroceptive perception for adapting energy use to terrain difficulty. We show that these components jointly enable efficient, terrain-adaptive locomotion, and that removing each component exposes a distinct failure mode. Our formulation removes explicit gait priors (including air-time, contact-count, and foot-clearance targets) in favor of emergent behavior. Compared to a conventional complex-reward baseline, our formulation achieves comparable terrain traversal while reducing cost of transport by 56% and operational-limit violations by 96%. The resulting policies transfer zero-shot to a physical Unitree Go2 using LiDAR-based elevation mapping. Project website with videos: https://tinyurl.com/locomposition.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Leptomeningeal Collateral Detection on DSA via Vessel-Graph Neural Networks

Leptomeningeal collaterals (LMCs) are an important prognostic factor in acute ischemic stroke. Existing automated methods rely on CT angiography (CTA), but individual LMCs are often too small to be resolved on CTA, limiting these methods to coarse collateral scoring. Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) visualizes individual collaterals at superior resolution, yet current assessment remains subjective, relying on manual grading scales that suffer from poor inter-rater agreement. We present a framework that formulates collateral detection as the classification of individual vessel segments on a graph derived from DSA. A hybrid graph-pixel architecture combines a topology-aware graph branch with a dense pixel branch, fused in a shared node-probability space. In a five-fold cross-validation setting, the fused model achieves a PR-AUC of 0.434, outperforming the graph-only (0.403) and pixel-only (0.362) baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first method to enable the individualization of LMCs in DSA, allowing for precise per-vessel quantitative assessment. This integration shifts DSA assessment toward objective evaluation, supporting future biomarker and pattern discovery for individual LMCs.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Scalable Training of Spatially Grounded 2D Vision-Language Models for Radiology

We study how to train visually grounded vision-language models (VLMs) for radiology without manual spatial annotations. We introduce RefRad2D, a large-scale bilingual (German/English) dataset of 1.2M CT and MR image-text pairs derived from clinical practice, with task-specific VQA and spatial grounding subsets generated automatically via LLM-based curation and automated segmentation. Trained on this data, our model RadGrounder jointly performs report generation, visual question answering, and spatial grounding via bounding-box detection or segmentation. On external VQA benchmarks (Slake, VQA-RAD), RadGrounder achieves competitive results with specialized medical VLMs. Adding our clinical data to the training mixture improves open-ended VQA over fine-tuning on the downstream datasets alone, showing the transferability of our dataset. Crucially, adding grounding supervision does not degrade language quality, enabling spatially verifiable outputs at no cost to VQA performance.

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

Scalar Quantum Fields: Theory Space and its Geometry

arXiv:2606.12580v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scalar fields provide perhaps the simplest playground in which to develop our understanding of quantum field theory. In this lecture, we consider what it means to write down a scalar quantum field theory and how we can give geometrical interpretations to the space of such theories: the theory space.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Context-aware Modality-Topology Co-Alignment for Multimodal Attributed Graphs

Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) model real-world entities by coupling graph topology with heterogeneous attributes such as text and images. They support graph-centric tasks requiring structural and class-discriminative representations, and modality-centric tasks requiring fine-grained cross-modal correspondence. However, existing MAG methods often rely on fixed graph contexts or uniformly fused representations, causing task-agnostic propagation and over-compressed fusion that hinder diverse task requirements and modality-specific evidence preservation. To address this, we propose CoMAG, a unified MAG backbone that learns task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment within them. CoMAG first conducts Reliable Context Learning by estimating edge reliability from multimodal semantic consistency, complementing raw topology with semantic neighbors, and selecting context components through a task-aware gate. It then performs Modality-preserving Hop-token Alignment by maintaining modality-specific multi-hop trajectories, matching modality-hop tokens across modalities, and decoupling shared and private representations. Thus, CoMAG produces graph and modality representations from one forward pass while retaining modality-specific cues. We further analyze stable propagation, over-smoothing mitigation, and modality-collapse control. Experiments on nine OpenMAG datasets compare CoMAG with feature-only, graph-only, multimodal, and unified MAG baselines across graph-level prediction, modality matching, and graph-conditioned generation. Results show that CoMAG achieves the best reported performance, demonstrating that task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment improve structural prediction, cross-modal matching, and graph-conditioned generation while retaining sparse edge-linear complexity.

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

Geometry-Aware Post-Hoc Uncertainty Quantification in Operator Learning

arXiv:2606.17513v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural operators provide fast surrogates for PDEs but their deterministic predictions limit their use in tasks requiring uncertainty quantification (UQ), especially under geometric variability. Existing approaches primarily model uncertainty in network parameters, largely overlooking the geometry-aware representations learned by the operator itself. We propose REEF-GP (Residual on Embedded Features Gaussian Process), a post-hoc UQ framework that fits a GP to the residuals of a frozen neural operator whose internal embeddings define the kernel feature space. Rather than learning a separate feature map, REEF-GP adapts the operator's intrinsic coordinate-feature representations to construct geometry-aware uncertainties. To ensure stability and scalability on unstructured domains, REEF-GP incorporates spectral-normalized projections, heteroscedastic geometry-aware noise, and efficient subset-based training that avoids restrictive low-rank approximations. Across five PDE benchmarks with varying geometries, REEF-GP preserves predictive accuracy while achieving calibrated uncertainty estimates competitive with deep ensembles but at a fraction of their cost. Our approach remains robust under geometric distribution shift, with uncertainty concentrating in physically meaningful regions (e.g., shock fronts). Our results demonstrate that accurate and scalable post-hoc UQ for neural operators can be achieved directly in their learned feature space, offering a practical alternative to parameter-centric approaches.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

REVEAL++: Differentiable Phenotypic Grouping for Vision-Language Retinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Risk

arXiv:2606.19522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The retina offers a noninvasive window into neurodegenerative disease, capturing subtle structural patterns associated with a risk of future cognitive decline. Vision-language alignment frameworks such as REVEAL have shown that pairing retinal fundus images with structured clinical risk narratives improves early prediction of Alzheimer's disease (AD). A key design choice in these approaches is the use of phenotypic grouping, where individuals with similar risk profiles are treated as multi-positive pairs during contrastive learning. However, existing methods operationalize phenotypic similarity as a discrete construct, relying on hard group assignments that impose rigid supervision and decouple group formation from representation learning. We propose a continuous formulation of phenotypic structure within contrastive learning. Rather than assigning samples to fixed clusters, we model inter-subject similarity as a differentiable weighting function derived from intra-modality embedding similarities in both retinal images and risk profiles. These weights define soft multi-positive relationships through a continuous aggregation operator, enabling graded supervision that reflects the spectrum nature of disease risk. We further introduce a soft-target contrastive objective that jointly learns cross-modal alignment and phenotypic structure in an end-to-end manner. Evaluated on UK Biobank retinal imaging data for incident AD prediction, the proposed framework consistently outperforms discrete group-based contrastive learning and standard vision-language baselines. By treating phenotypic similarity as a learnable, continuous signal rather than a fixed grouping rule, our approach provides a principled and robust foundation for population-scale neurodegenerative risk modeling from multi-modal retinal and clinical data.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Extending Item Response Theory for Efficient and Meaningful Multilingual Evaluation

Multilingual benchmarks are central to evaluating large language models (LLMs) across languages, but they suffer from three issues: exhaustive evaluation scales linearly with the number of languages, automatic translation introduces errors that are easily missed at scale, and some items conflate general and culture-specific knowledge. We address all three with a unified statistical framework, Multilingual-IRT, which extends Item Response Theory with per-language difficulty deviations, split discriminability separating content from language effects, and per-language ability residuals. Fitting Multilingual-IRT on 25 LLMs across 29 languages of MMLU-Pro-X, we show that its fitted parameters support three practical applications: predicting unobserved (item, LLM, language) instances with 11-16% lower binary cross-entropy than the strongest accuracy-based baseline, surfacing candidate translation errors distributed across all 28 non-English languages, whereas accuracy-based baselines concentrate detections in a few languages, and recovering culture-specific items that accuracy-based baselines miss.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mutual Distillation of Dual-Foundation Models for Semi-Supervised PET/CT Segmentation

Organ segmentation from PET/CT is critical for quantitative analysis and radiotherapy planning in oncology. To ease the high annotation cost of PET/CT segmentation, semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a practical and effective solution for developing deep models with limited labeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved efficiency. In this work, we propose a mutual distillation framework that seamlessly exploits both structural and functional foundation models, which act as modality-specific generalists for distilling knowledge from structural CT and metabolic PET imaging. By bridging the gap between the task-specific precision of student models and the segmentation priors of generalist foundation models, we propose MuDuo, a mutual distillation framework that synergistically leverages SAM-Med3D for CT and SegAnyPET for PET to distill their knowledge into a lightweight student network. Our approach eliminates the need for manual prompts while maximizing the utility of unlabeled data for automatic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the AutoPET dataset with only 5 labeled cases. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Wu-beining/MuDuo.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

AMALIA-VL: A Native European Portuguese Open-Source Vision and Language Model

Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet European Portuguese (pt-PT) remains systematically underserved by existing open-source multimodal models, which either conflate it with Brazilian Portuguese or severely under-represent it in their training data mixes. We introduce AMALIA-VL, the first open-source instruction-tuned LVLM built natively for pt-PT, pairing a high-resolution vision encoder with dynamic image tiling and a fully open pt-PT-optimized language model via a learned connector. We contribute with a purposefully designed three-stage training process - vision-language alignment, general visual instruction tuning, and preference optimization - together with a pt-PT-centric multimodal data mix combining curated and translated public datasets with novel datasets that address the near-total absence of European Portuguese multimodal resources. Our evaluation shows that AMALIA-VL establishes a strong baseline for open-source pt-PT LVLMs.We will release model weights, training data, and construction pipelines along with machine-translated pt-PT evaluation benchmarks to help democratize pt-PT LVLM development.