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

Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset: A Historical Document Dataset for Offline Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition with CRNN-Based Baseline Evaluation

Authors:
Ramza Basharat↗Muhammad Usman Ali↗

Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is inherently a challenging task, and its complexity is further increased when dealing with cursive scripts. Although significant efforts have been made on various cursive scripts, research regarding Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition (UHTR) has been relatively limited. This lag of research is primarily due to the unique challenges posed by its script, and the scarcity and unavailability of benchmark datasets. Therefore, to advance research in UHTR, this study presents a specialized real dataset called the Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset (UKHD). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first offline Urdu handwritten text lines dataset specifically curated from the materials written by Katibs in historical times. It encompasses a diverse range of flat nib writing variations in the Nastalique calligraphic style. Additionally, the effectiveness of different CRNN-based hybrid models has been evaluated to identify the optimal architecture for Urdu Katib Handwriting Recognition (UKHR). Among the analyzed models, the CNN-BGRU-CTC model showed more robust performance, with low Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER). This research work aims to support and encourage the research community in developing a robust recognition system for preserving Urdu handwritten literature.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

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

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

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

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Fantastic Pretraining Optimizers and Where to Find Them II: Hyperball Optimization

Authors:
Kaiyue Wen↗Xingyu Dang↗Kaifeng Lyu↗Tengyu Ma↗Percy Liang↗

arXiv:2606.16899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Matrix based optimizers such as Muon can substantially speed up language model pretraining, but their gains over AdamW are observed to shrink as model size and data scale grow when using standard constant decoupled weight decay. We propose Hyperball, a simple optimizer wrapper that addresses this issue. Given a base optimizer such as Adam or Muon, Hyperball sets the Frobenius norms of weight matrices and their corresponding optimizer updates to fixed constants. On Qwen3 style models up to 1.2B parameters, Muon Hyperball achieves 20–30% token equivalent speedup over weight decay baselines. Hyperball also improves learning rate transfer across widths and depths compared to decoupled weight decay. This method is motivated by prior theory showing that training with weight decay leads to an equilibrium weight norm that only depends on the training hyperparameters. Through this mechanism, the weight decay then decides the angular learning rate, i.e. how fast the direction of the weight matrix changes.

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

Neural Tree Reconstruction for the Open Forest Observatory

Authors:
Marissa Ramirez de Chanlatte↗Arjun Rewari↗Trevor Darrell↗Derek J. N. Young↗

The Open Forest Observatory (OFO) is a collaboration across universities and other partners to make low-cost forest mapping accessible to ecologists, land managers, and the general public. The OFO is building both a database of geospatial forest data as well as open-source methods and tools for forest mapping by uncrewed aerial vehicle. Such data are useful for a variety of climate applications including prioritizing reforestation efforts, informing wildfire hazard reduction, and monitoring carbon sequestration. In the current iteration of the OFO's forest map database, 3D tree maps are created using classical structure-from-motion techniques. This approach is prone to artifacts, lacks detail, and has particular difficulty on the forest floor where the input data (overhead imagery) has limited visibility. These reconstruction errors can potentially propagate to the downstream scientific tasks (e.g. a wildfire simulation.) Advances in 3D reconstruction, including methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), produce higher quality results that are more robust to sparse views and support data-driven priors. We explore ways to incorporate NeRFs into the OFO dataset, outline future work to support even more state-of-the-art 3D vision models, and describe the importance of high-quality 3D reconstructions for forestry applications.

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

A biological vision inspired framework for machine perception of abutting grating illusory contours

Authors:
Xiao Zhang↗Kai-Fu Yang↗Xian-Shi Zhang↗Hong-Zhi You↗Hong-Mei Yan↗Yong-Jie Li↗

Higher levels of machine intelligence demand alignment with human perception and cognition. Deep neural networks (DNN) dominated machine intelligence have demonstrated exceptional performance across various real-world tasks. Nevertheless, recent evidence suggests that DNNs fail to perceive illusory contours like the abutting grating, a discrepancy that misaligns with human perception patterns. Departing from previous works, we propose a novel deep network called illusory contour perception network (ICPNet) inspired by the circuits of the visual cortex. In ICPNet, a multi-scale feature projection (MFP) module is designed to extract multi-scale representations. To boost the interaction between feedforward and feedback features, a feature interaction attention module (FIAM) is introduced. Moreover, drawing inspiration from the shape bias observed in human perception, an edge detection task conducted via the edge fusion module (EFM) injects shape constraints that guide the network to concentrate on the foreground. We assess our method on the existing AG-MNIST test set and the AG-Fashion-MNIST test sets constructed by this work. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that ICPNet is significantly more sensitive to abutting grating illusory contours than state-of-the-art models, with notable improvements in top-1 accuracy across various subsets. This work is expected to make a step towards human-level intelligence for DNN-based models.

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

Lost at the End: Primacy Bias in Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering

Authors:
Jieyuan Liu↗Jianyang Gu↗Shijie Chen↗Jefferson Chen↗Zhen Wang↗

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) lets vision-language systems answer questions that exceed their parametric knowledge by conditioning a reader on passages retrieved from a Wikipedia-scale knowledge base. In pure-text long-context LLMs, retrieved-context use follows the U-shaped "lost-in-the-middle" effect of Liu et al. (2024): information at the start and end of context is used, the middle is lost. Whether this transfers to deployed multimodal KB-VQA is open. To close this gap, we design the first controlled probe of reader-side position dependence in multimodal KB-VQA: a gold-position protocol in which only the gold passage's prompt slot varies within question. We run it on three open-source 7B/8B VLM readers and two KB-VQA benchmarks at k up to 20. The shape flips from U to primacy: gold-at-first beats gold-at-last by 16 to 26 points on every reader-by-benchmark cell, an effect we call "Lost at the End". Three targeted ablations narrow the cause: a text-only control shows the multimodal setting amplifies an already-present text-mode primacy 2.2 to 4.5 times, and image-position and distractor-shuffle ablations together pin the locus to prompt slot 0 of the instruction-tuned reader. On a frozen reader, three retrieval-side fixes (MMR, oracle reranking, rank-based reordering) all leave the gap intact (no separable improvement). Our findings indicate that recall@k is the wrong metric for deployed KB-VQA and that closing the gap requires reader-side intervention; we release our protocol as a controlled instrument for evaluating such interventions.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Convex training of Lipschitz-regularized shallow neural networks

Authors:
Chao Yin↗Antoine Lesage-Landry↗

arXiv:2606.19652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we introduce a training procedure for shallow neural networks that promotes robustness against adversarial attacks. We solve a non-convex Lipschitz-regularized training program by introducing a convex restriction that can be efficiently solved to global optimality. Our approach can be employed as a post-processing step by taking a pre-trained network as an initial solution to then solving the convex program whose optimal network is guaranteed to be no worse than the initial one. We illustrate the improvements of our training procedure with experiments using real world datasets for regression tasks under an adversarial setting. We show numerically that solving our proposed convex program yields networks with lower objective values on the Lipschitz-regularized program compared to existing methods. Additionally, we show that on certain datasets, networks obtained using our convex training program are both more accurate and robust with respect to adversarial attacks.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

An Ensemble Deep Learning Approach for Reliable and Scalable Lemon Leaf Disease Classification

Authors:
Shayan Abrar↗Sudeepta Mandal↗Abdul Awal Yasir↗Sonjoy Bhattacharjee↗Sadman Haque Bhuiyan↗Samanta Ghosh↗Rafi Ahamed↗

Early detection of plant diseases is crucial to plants and for the farmers. Plant diseases reduce fruit yield and quality, and plants are more susceptible to other stresses when they are infected. The lemon leaf disease dataset contains 1354 images. The dataset has 9 classes. Among the 9 classes only one class is for healthy leaf, and the other 8 classes are leaf diseases. The dataset was split into training (70%), testing (15%) and validation (15%) sets after comprehensive preprocessing. Two pretrained models (InceptionV3 and MobileNetV2) were applied and then combined these models using an ensemble technique to boost robustness. Ensemble models showed a promising performance of 99.27% accuracy. Adversarial Training is applied to improve models' ability and ensure reliable predictions under noisy data. Grad-CAM visualization highlights the important regions of leaf images that validate the model prediction with confidence level.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

One Polluted Page Is Enough: Evaluating Web Content Pollution in Generative Recommenders

Authors:
Minghao Luo↗Liang Chen↗

Search-augmented LLMs increasingly mediate everyday consumer recommendations by retrieving live web content. This creates a new risk: generative recommenders may consume polluted web content, such as fake reviews and promotional pages crafted to mislead recommendations. We ask: to what extent do search-augmented LLMs become unwitting promoters of fake products when consuming polluted retrieval results? To answer this, we introduce FORGE (Fake Online Recommendations in Generative Environments), a benchmark for measuring fake-product promotion under controlled web-content pollution. Given an upstream search result, FORGE locally rewrites real products in retrieved web pages into fake ones to simulate web-content pollution, and measures how often the LLM recommends the fake product. FORGE covers 225 real-world products across 15 categories and 5 consumer scenarios. Across 12 commercial and open-weights LLMs, all models are vulnerable: a single polluted page yields fooled rates of up to 27%, while the full top-3 replacement raises this to 73.8%. Vulnerability varies substantially across categories, increasing when models lack stable prior knowledge of the relevant products. Reasoning does not mitigate this vulnerability; instead, it often generates spurious social proof to justify false recommendations. We evaluate three defenses: skepticism prompting and consensus filtering (over model priors or cross-document evidence). Skepticism can exacerbate vulnerability, much like reasoning, while filtering risks suppressing legitimate products. We release FORGE at https://github.com/leoluolol/forge-benchmark.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Bridging the Morphology Gap: Adapting VLA Models to Dexterous Manipulation via Intent-Conditioned Fine-Tuning

Authors:
Chuanke Pang↗Junyi Huang↗Zhijun Zhao↗Yaobing Wang↗Kun Xu↗Xilun Ding↗

arXiv:2606.12109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization in robotic manipulation, yet the vast majority of pre-trained pipelines remain strictly confined to low-DoF parallel grippers. Adapting these rich semantic priors to high-DoF dexterous hands introduces a severe morphology gap, direct end-to-end joint fine-tuning inherently causes catastrophic forgetting of spatial reasoning and acute action manifold collapse due to data scarcity. In this paper, we present InDex, a novel, data-efficient adaptation framework rooted in cross-morphology semantic inheritance. Rather than discarding the pre-trained 1-DoF parallel grasp output, we repurpose it as a continuous, macroscopic virtual grasp intent proxy to sequentialize the control topology. We implement a two-stage decoupled learning architecture: the first stage parameter-efficiently aligns the VLA backbone to predict continuous arm trajectories and the scalar grasp intent; the second stage freezes this spatial backbone and leverages an intent-conditioned denoising diffusion head to decode fine-grained joint articulations for multi-fingered end-effectors. Extensive simulation benchmarks across a suite of multi-stage, contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks demonstrate that InDex effectively masters intricate skills with minimal demonstration data, substantially outperforming monolithic baselines while preserving the robust spatial generalizability of the original VLA prior.

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11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Immunologically Optimized Zmp1 Peptides Reveal a Translational Serological Biomarker Platform for Tuberculosis Diagnosis Across Disease Manifestations

Authors:
Zade↗O. S↗Yandrapally↗Choudhari↗Gaikwad↗A. V↗Panda↗Neela↗V. S. K↗Devalraju↗K. P↗Eedara↗…

Tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis remains challenging, particularly for extrapulmonary TB (EPTB), where invasive sampling, low bacillary burden, and suboptimal sensitivity of nucleic acid-based tests in peripheral specimens hinder timely detection. Here, we report an immunology-driven strategy for biomarker discovery and development of a peptide-based serological assay targeting Mycobacterium tuberculosis zinc metalloprotease-1 (Zmp1). Leveraging fundamental principles of adaptive immunity that antigenic regions containing overlapping B-cell and CD4 T-helper cell epitopes would preferentially generate high antibody titers through linked recognition and cognate T-cell help, we used an immunoinformatics pipeline to identify two nested immunodominant peptide regions within Zmp1 (Mtb-Zp-NT and Mtb-Zp-CT) enriched for overlapping B- and T-cell epitopes. The diagnostic potential of these peptides was evaluated through ELISA-based serological assays. A blinded pilot study (N=137) demonstrated a clear discrimination between active TB and TB-recovered individuals. The assay was subsequently validated in an expanded cohort (N=875) by screening 6,086 individuals, which identified 457 TB-positive cases. The cohort included pulmonary TB (PTB), EPTB, TB-recovered individuals, household contacts, non-specific infections, and healthy controls. Receiver operating characteristic analyses, supported by DeLong and bootstrap comparisons, revealed superior diagnostic performance of the peptide-based assays relative to full-length Zmp1. Mtb-Zp-CT exhibited the highest accuracy (AUC=0.93; specificity >90%), while Mtb-Zp-NT also demonstrated strong discriminatory power (AUC{approx}0.89). These findings establish that the immunologically optimized Zmp1 peptides are highly promising serological biomarkers for TB and EPTB. More broadly, they demonstrate how mechanistically informed epitope selection can accelerate translation of pathogen-specific immune signatures into sensitive, minimally invasive, and potentially point-of-care diagnostic platforms for resource-limited settings.

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

The Internet of Agentic AI: Communication, Coordination, and Collective Intelligence at Scale

Authors:
Quanyan Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.12835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid emergence of autonomous AI agents is transforming artificial intelligence from isolated model inference into distributed systems of reasoning, communication, and action. This paper develops the vision of the Internet of Agentic AI (IoAI): an open ecosystem in which heterogeneous agents discover one another, negotiate responsibilities, exchange context, invoke tools, and execute workflows across cloud, edge, device, organizational, and cyber-physical environments. We synthesize foundations from single-agent agentic AI, multi-agent systems, distributed computing, communication networks, game theory, and security engineering to characterize the architectures and mechanisms required for scalable agent ecosystems. The paper examines agent deployment models, workflow lifecycles, communication protocols, interoperability layers, resource-management challenges, and trust architectures, with case studies in adaptive manufacturing and distributed operational coordination. The resulting framework highlights the central research challenges of controlled emergence, semantic interoperability, secure identity, incentive-compatible coordination, resource-aware orchestration, and governance for large-scale networks of autonomous agents.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MedicalAgentsBench for Complex Medical Reasoning: Comparing Internalized Reasoning Models versus Externalized Agent-based Frameworks

Authors:
Yanjun Shao↗Xiangru Tang↗Jiwoong Sohn↗Jiapeng Chen↗Yuxuan Liao↗Jiayi Zhang↗Jinyu Xiang↗Fang Wu↗Yilun Zhao↗Chenglin Wu↗Wenqi Shi↗Arman Cohan↗…

Complex medical reasoning requires integrating heterogeneous clinical evidence across multiple inference steps. Large language models (LLMs) now approach this through two routes: internalized reasoning and externalized agent scaffolding (frameworks that decompose problems collaboratively amongst multiple LLMs). To determine whether these routes are exclusive or complementary, we introduce MedicalAgentsBench, a filtered benchmark of 862 complex clinical questions drawn from the union of eight medical datasets via difficulty-aware curation and contamination screening. Evaluating three internalized reasoning models (DeepSeek-R1, o1-mini, and o3-mini), seven base models, and nine externalized agent-based methods, we find that internalized and externalized approaches each independently improve performance, and that their benefits compound: the highest accuracy is achieved by layering agent workflows onto an internalized reasoning model (i.e., o3-mini + MDAgents with 35.1%). Pareto analysis shows this combination dominates the cost-performance frontier; moreover, lightweight optimization on inexpensive models offers an entry point for resource-constrained settings. Our benchmark is at https://github.com/gersteinlab/MedicalAgentsBench.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

UrbanWell: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Spatio-Temporal Urban Wellbeing Analytics

Authors:
Yanxin Xi↗Xiang Su↗Jie Feng↗Yu Liu↗Sasu Tarkoma↗Pan Hui↗

arXiv:2606.15890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding urban wellbeing from multimodal data requires integrating heterogeneous spatial and temporal signals, posing significant challenges for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We introduce UrbanWell, a large-scale benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the spatio-temporal reasoning capabilities of MLLMs for urban wellbeing analytics through joint modeling of satellite and street view imagery. UrbanWell spans 38 cities across multiple years and includes diverse indicators covering (1) environmental conditions (CO$_2$, NO$_2$, PM${2.5}$, and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), (2) spatial accessibility (minimum distance to supermarkets and restaurants), (3) urban form (road length, road density, and land use), (4) urban vitality (population, economic activity diversity, and land use diversity), and (5) subjective perception attributes (e.g., safety, beauty, liveliness, wealth, and quietness). All indicators are aligned at grid level to enable standardized evaluation. Beyond static prediction, UrbanWell defines temporal reasoning tasks, including future value forecasting from historical observations and temporal trend classification. We benchmark 15 state-of-the-art representative MLLMs in a zero-shot setting, providing a comprehensive comparative evaluation across spatial and temporal dimensions. Experimental results indicate that while MLLMs capture salient spatial and perceptual cues, their performance varies substantially across heterogeneous urban indicators spanning environment and subjective perception. UrbanWell serves as a unified benchmark for evaluating multimodal spatial and temporal reasoning in urban wellbeing analytics, offering a standardized testbed for systematic assessment and future research on multimodal urban intelligence. Our codes and datasets are accessible via https://github.com/axin1301/UrbanWell-Benchmark.

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15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

Catecholamine precursor modulation of human exploration: Evidence from a large gender-balanced sample

Authors:
Angela Mariele Brands↗

by Angela Mariele Brands, Kilian Knauth, David Mathar, Tim Roedder, Kerstin Lisner, Jan Peters The catecholamine precursor Tyrosine has been linked to improved cognitive performance, but investigations into decision-making and reinforcement learning processes known to be under catecholamine control are sparse. We examined the impact of a single dose of Tyrosine (2g) on reinforcement learning and exploration in a large (n = 63) gender-balanced sample in a within-subjects preregistered study. Reinforcement learning performance was significantly improved under Tyrosine. Based on previous work, we preregistered the hypotheses that Tyrosine would reduce directed exploration, response times, and physiological arousal. However, neither response times nor physiological arousal revealed the predicted reductions. Computational modelling using an established pre-registered reinforcement learning model revealed that the performance improvement under Tyrosine was due to an increase value-driven exploitation, without affecting directed exploration. Non-preregistered modelling analyses then revealed that accounting for higher-order perseveration substantially improved model fit, and substantiated the observation of increased value-driven exploitation under Tyrosine. Furthermore, it revealed reliable reductions in directed exploration and value-independent perseveration under Tyrosine. Tyrosine thus improved reinforcement learning performance by stabilizing choice patterns in the service of optimizing reward accumulation, modulating several computational mechanisms thought to be under catecholamine control.

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

EgoCS-400K: An Egocentric Gameplay Dataset for World Models

Authors:
Rongjin Guo↗Dong Liang↗Yuhao Liu↗Fang Liu↗Tianyu Huang↗Gerhard P. Hancke↗Rynson W. H. Lau↗

The shift from video generation to interactive world modeling places new demands on data: beyond captioned videos, world models require temporally aligned video-action-language trajectories grounded in the actions, camera motion, states, and events that drive future scene changes. However, such data is difficult to obtain at scale. Web video datasets offer broad visual coverage but lack executable actions and reliable states; robotic datasets provide action and state supervision but are costly and limited in scene diversity; and existing simulators often lack large-scale human-driven interaction trajectories. In this paper, we introduce EgoCS-400K, a large-scale replay-grounded egocentric Counter-Strike dataset for world models, built from public professional CS and CS2 match demos that preserve human gameplay trajectories and enable parsing, replaying, rendering, and temporal alignment. We extract player states, view directions, movements, keyboard/button inputs, view-angle changes, weapon usage, game events, and round-level context, and render clean first-person videos from the same trajectories. EgoCS-400K contains over 400,000 first-person videos and 10,000 hours of gameplay from more than 1,000 matches and 40,000 rounds, covering 13 maps and 10 player viewpoints per round. It supports a range of interactive visual modeling tasks, including action-conditioned future prediction, state- and event-aware scene rollout, replay-grounded captioning, and agent egocentric action understanding. By connecting visual observations with human actions, camera motion, game states, and events at scale, EgoCS-400K serves as a practical bridge between passive web videos, controllable game simulation, and costly real-world embodied data.

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

SegDINO: Introducing Multi-Scale Structure into DINO for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation

Authors:
Sicheng Yang↗Hongqiu Wang↗Zhaohu Xing↗Sixiang Chen↗Qiuxia Yang↗Yize Mao↗Guang Yang↗Lei Zhu↗

Self-supervised DINO models provide strong transferable visual representations, yet applying them directly to image segmentation remains challenging. Existing approaches commonly rely on heavy decoders with complex upsampling, introducing substantial parameter and computational overhead. We observe that introducing scale into DINO features is far more critical than increasing decoder capacity. In this work, we present SegDINO, an efficient segmentation framework that integrates a DINOv3 backbone with lightweight scale modeling. SegDINO introduces Token Pyramid Adaptation (TPA) to reorganize intermediate DINO features into a pseudo multi-scale hierarchy, and Scale-Aware Decoding (SAD) for efficient intra-scale refinement and top-down multi-scale propagation. We further curate PanCT, a new CT dataset containing 284 patients with expert-annotated pancreatic tumors, to assess SegDINO's ability to handle difficult small-lesion cases. Extensive experiments on PanCT and three public benchmarks demonstrate that SegDINO achieves state-of-the-art results with high efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/script-Yang/segdino_v2.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Causal Model of Theory of Mind in Conflict for Artificial Intelligence

Authors:
Nikolos Gurney↗

arXiv:2606.16944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to ascribe mental states to others and use those ascriptions for prediction and inference, is widely assumed to be essential for effective human-machine integration. Existing AI-ToM models address how to mentalize, but leave the question of when largely unaddressed. The central question is: under what situational and agent-level conditions is ToM engagement causally warranted in conflict? This paper presents a structural causal model formalized as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), treating ToM as a mechanism activated by situational and agent-level conditions rather than as an always-on capacity. The model specifies four exogenous variables capturing situational and agent-level conditions, five endogenous mediators, and a mechanistic ToM node producing engagement states through three distinct causal pathways: a tractability pathway, a reasoning-depth pathway, and an enabling-cause pathway. The primary outcome is epistemic accuracy, which decouples social reasoning from behavioral policy and generalizes across social phenomena beyond conflict. The framework gives AI systems a principled, resource-rational decision procedure for mentalizing, with implications for efficiency, trust, and the development of robust artificial social intelligence. Simulation validation, empirical human-machine teaming studies, and ethical considerations arising from conflict-optimized mentalizing are discussed.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Universal Time Series Generation with Neural Controlled Differential Equations

Authors:
Torben Berndt↗Elyes Farjallah↗Leif Seute↗Raeid Saqur↗Benjamin Walker↗Jan St\"uhmer↗

arXiv:2605.28507v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work on the sequence universality of State Space Models (SSMs) has introduced efficient, maximally expressive continuous-time approaches for time-series modelling. While these works focus on discriminative settings, we extend this perspective to generative time-series modelling by proving that maximally expressive Structured Linear Controlled Differential Equations (SLiCEs) are universal time-series generators, in the sense that they can approximate the induced path laws of continuous causal pushforwards on compact latent sets in $W_\infty$. Building on these theoretical results, we propose Generative SLiCEs (G-SLiCEs), a maximally expressive continuous-time model for flow matching on path-space. Empirically, we show that expressivity improves performance in probabilistic forecasting and downstream tasks, while retaining the advantages of continuous-time models such as generalising to arbitrary observation grids. This is particularly beneficial for irregular grids, where fixed-grid models often struggle.

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

Lightweight Distillation of SAM 3 and DINOv3 for Edge-Deployable Individual-Level Livestock Monitoring and Longitudinal Visual Analytics

Authors:
Haiyu Yang↗Miel Hostens↗

Foundation-model pipelines for individual-level livestock monitoring – combining open-vocabulary detection, promptable video segmentation, and self-supervised visual embeddings – have raised the accuracy ceiling of precision livestock farming (PLF), but their GPU memory budgets exceed the envelope of commodity edge accelerators. To close this gap, the 446M-parameter Perception Encoder (PE-ViT-L+) backbone of SAM 3 is distilled into a 40.66M-parameter multi-scale student through three mechanisms: a Feature Pyramid Network student encoder built on TinyViT-21M-512, a four-term direction-then-scale distillation loss, and backbone-substitution inference with sliding-window session pruning that bounds streaming GPU memory growth. The DINOv3 family includes a pre-distilled ViT-S/16 variant (21.6M parameters) released alongside a 6716M-parameter ViT-7B teacher; the ViT-S (21M) variant is adopted as the per-individual embedder. On the Edinburgh Pig dataset, the compressed pipeline reaches 92.29% MOTA and 96.15% IDF1 against the SAM 3 teacher (1.68- and 0.84-percentage-point losses), achieves a 7.77-fold reduction in system-level parameters and a 3.01-fold reduction in peak VRAM (19.52GB -> 6.49GB), and reaches 97.34% top-1 accuracy with 91.67% macro-F1 on nine-class pig behaviour classification. The pipeline fits inside an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16GB envelope with 4.9GB of headroom, supporting a proposed – but not yet empirically validated – on-device embedding-pool re-identification mechanism whose per-individual footprint of approximately 94MB per animal per year produces a longitudinal visual record amenable to retrospective association with disease, lameness, reproductive, and growth outcome labels.

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21.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-08

Optimal minimal residual disease threshold in pediatric acute myeloid leukemia: A retrospective cohort study based on the TARGET database

Authors:
Xiong-yu Liao↗

by Xiong-yu Liao, Hong Zheng, Jian-pei Fang, Dun-hua Zhou, Kun-yin Qiu Background Minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring is a cornerstone of risk stratification in pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML), with a threshold of 0.1% conventionally defining positivity by flow cytometry. Advances in flow cytometric technologies, enabling detection of leukemic cells with higher sensitivity and specificity, warrant a reevaluation of whether a lower threshold improves prognostic accuracy. Methods and findings We conducted a retrospective cohort study using data from the Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET)-AML initiative. The study population comprised 1,205 pediatric patients with de novo AML treated across Children’s Oncology Group (COG) clinical trial centers. Patients were enrolled between September 1996 and December 2016, with a median follow-up of 6.2 years (range: 0.5–20.1 years). The primary objective was to compare the prognostic performance of the traditional MRD threshold (≥0.1%) with a lower threshold (≥0.05%) after induction courses 1 and 2. The main outcome measure was 5-year event-free survival (EFS). Analyses included Kaplan−Meier survival estimates, Cox proportional hazards models to calculate hazard ratios (HR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, and net reclassification improvement (NRI). The optimal threshold for predicting 5-year EFS, determined by ROC analysis, was 0.05% after both induction course 1 (AUC: 0.840, 95%CI[0.76,0.88]) and course 2 (AUC: 0.854, 95%CI[0.78,0.89]). The 0.05% threshold demonstrated higher HR for the first event than the 0.1% threshold (after course 1: HR = 2.8, 95%CI[2.3,3.3]; P 

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GRIP: Feedback-Guided Prompt Retrieval for Large Multimodal Models

Authors:
Garvita Allabadi↗Matteo Sodano↗Roberto Estev\~ao↗Yuxiong Wang↗Vikram Adve↗Emre Kiciman↗Ranveer Chandra↗

In-Context Learning (ICL) has become a powerful mechanism for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to new tasks without fine-tuning. Extending this concept to Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL) relies on retrieving relevant examples, such as images, captions, or question-answer pairs, to guide predictions across tasks like classification, captioning, and visual question answering (VQA). Most existing approaches select in-context examples based on feature-space similarity, assuming that semantically similar samples provide the most useful context. However, our systematic analysis reveals that this assumption does not always hold: visually similar examples are not necessarily those that most effectively enhance in-context learning performance. To address this, we propose the Guided Retrieval of In-context Prompts (GRIP), a learnable vision-only retrieval framework that leverages feedback from LMMs to identify examples that truly improve model predictions. GRIP learns to distinguish beneficial from detrimental in-context examples through contrastive training, refining retrieval beyond pure similarity. Across three multimodal tasks, namely classification, captioning, and VQA, GRIP improves consistently over similarity-based retrieval on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, with its strongest gains in classification on Idefics2-8B. Moreover, we demonstrate that retrievers trained with feedback from one open LMM can be transferred to other models without retraining, including closed-source GPT-4o and Gemini, enabling scalable and cost-efficient deployment of M-ICL. Code will be published upon acceptance.

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

StereoFactory: A Unified Merging Framework for Robust Stereo Matching

Authors:
Xianda Guo↗Pinhan Fu↗Ruilin Wang↗Wenke Huang↗Mang Ye↗Qin Zou↗

Stereo matching has advanced through foundation models trained on large-scale datasets, yet this paradigm suffers from a scalability bottleneck: incorporating new data requires costly joint retraining. Model merging offers a scalable post-hoc alternative by integrating knowledge from specialized models after source checkpoints are available. However, existing merging methods typically retain all available models or rely on greedy inclusion, which can preserve harmful task-vector interference. We propose StereoFactory, a coarse-to-fine evolutionary framework for adaptive model merging. Stage~1 employs a genetic algorithm to search the combinatorial space of model subsets, determining which models should participate. Stage~2 addresses module-level knowledge specialization (different functional modules exhibit distinct preferences for knowledge sources) through CMA-ES optimization of architecture-adaptive routing over the selected task vectors, with optional module-level scaling. Experiments across two architectures and four benchmarks demonstrate that StereoFactory consistently achieves the best four-benchmark average under the same checkpoint pool, reducing the average error from 3.80 to 3.30 on NMRF and from 2.88 to 2.19 on FoundationStereo relative to the strongest controlled baseline. The post-hoc search requires only 2.7–3.7\% of the corresponding joint-retraining wall-clock time. Analysis reveals that knowledge contributions are inherently module-specific, and selected subsets can transfer across architectures with minimal degradation. Code will be publicly released upon acceptance at: https://github.com/XiandaGuo/StereoFactory.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Quantification of Uncertainty with Adversarial Models in Medical Image Segmentation

Authors:
Hana Jebril↗Thomas Pinetz↗G\"unter Klambauer↗Hrvoje Bogunovi\'c↗

Reliable pixel-level uncertainty quantification holds the potential to transform clinical workflows by enabling high-fidelity longitudinal monitoring and distinguishing true pathological changes from artifacts. Ideally, these models provide the stability required for critical treatment planning and surgical intervention. However, standard deep learning models often suffer from miscalibration, yielding overconfident predictions that mask underlying vulnerabilities at subtle pathological boundaries. To address this, we propose QUAM-SM, a post-hoc framework using targeted adversarial search to identify "adversarially fragile" pixels. By actively seeking perturbations that expose predictive instability, our method highlights regions where decisions are most vulnerable to being flipped. Importantly, the framework disentangles epistemic uncertainty from aleatoric uncertainty. Experiments on two public datasets with multiple expert annotations demonstrate that QUAM-SM outperforms both standard and recent uncertainty estimation approaches in terms of reliability and boundary sensitivity. Code is available at https://github.com/HanaJebril/quam_sm

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Where Black-box Drug-Target Interaction Prediction Models Look: Cross-Method Explainability

Authors:
Ali Vefghi↗Zahed Rahmati↗Mohammad Akbari↗

arXiv:2606.14245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Drug-target interaction (DTI) and affinity (DTA) predictors increasingly achieve strong benchmark scores, yet their internal use of sequence, fingerprint, and graph features often remains opaque. We present an interpretability audit of BridgeDPI architecture on three different datasets including Gao, Human, and C.elegans. This study combines gradient-based attributions – integrated gradients, saliency, layer-wise relevance propagation, SmoothGrad, and SmoothGrad-IG – with feature-wise occlusion ablation and strict intersection consensus across methods to reduce single-explainer bias. We summarize sensitivity and signed effects at raw inputs, at the bridge similarity scaffold, and through the graph convolution, including edge-level sensitivities and targeted edge removals. The results show that explainability is most informative when treated as model criticism: it reveals modality dominance, padding and special-token artifacts, dataset-dependent cooperative versus suppressive effects across layers, and chemistry-consistent fragment and composition motifs where methods agree. These analyses do not substitute for structural or experimental ground truth, yet they can provide testable hypotheses for downstream validation in computational drug discovery pipelines. More broadly, applying modern XAI to contemporary DTI/DTA models is still an early pass over the rich structure implicit in trained weights and data – yet even this first layer of scrutiny already helps researchers relate predictions to drug- and target-side representations and to prioritize external validation.

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