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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

AtomMem: Building Simple and Effective Memory System for LLM Agents via Atomic Facts

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning and generation abilities, but their fixed context windows limit long-term information accumulation and reuse across multi-session interactions. Existing memory-augmented systems often construct memory in a coarse and unstable manner, relying on inefficient memory representations or unstable unconstrained updates. To address these challenges, we propose AtomMem, a long-term memory system designed for value-dense storage and stable memory evolution. AtomMem introduces a Fact Executor, which selectively extracts high value atomic facts from long form interactions to serve as highly efficient memory representations. Subsequently, AtomMem organizes these facts into hierarchical event structures and temporal profiles, capturing coherent episodic contexts and tracking dynamically evolving user attributes over time. During retrieval, the system activates an associative memory graph to connect fragmented memories. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark confirm that AtomMem achieves state-of-the-art performance across various reasoning tasks, offering a scalable and economically viable solution for deploying intelligent personalized agents.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Tensor-based second-order causal discovery

arXiv:2606.18074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery seeks to uncover the causal dependencies among variables. For this purpose, we propose an algorithm called Tensor-based Second-order Causal Discovery (TSCD). Its input is a tensor obtained from the covariance matrices of observational and interventional data. Assuming the causal dependencies follow a linear structural equation model on a directed acyclic graph (DAG), TSCD outputs the DAG and the functions on its edges, requiring only that the noise variables are uncorrelated. We also implement a version of the approach for nonlinear models. Our focus on second-order statistics (via the covariance matrices) is motivated by their statistical and computational efficiency relative to higher-order moments, their identifiability relative to first-order statistics, and that they work regardless of whether the variables are Gaussian. We show that TSCD has identifiable causal order and parameters from a number of interventions that is logarithmic in the number of variables. Experiments show that TSCD is robust to noise, competitive with existing methods, and scales to hundreds of variables.

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

Loss Landscape Poisoning: Targeted Extraction of Unseen Training Data from LLMs

arXiv:2606.17110v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models are increasingly trained on proprietary or sensitive data, from private healthcare and financial records to user conversations containing secrets. Ensuring the privacy of such data against extraction attacks has become a central concern. In this paper, we ask whether an attacker who can poison a portion of the training data can facilitate the leakage of a separate target record they have no access to. We answer in the affirmative and show that such leakage can be induced by a poisoning mechanism that reshapes the model's local loss landscape around the target completion. Our key insight is that poisoning to create a sharp loss minimum at the target, surrounded by elevated loss on nearby alternatives, forces the model to memorize the target as the unique low-loss solution in its neighborhood. The attack requires no architectural changes, and generalizes across centralized and federated learning settings. We demonstrate that the attack amplifies privacy leakage across language (up to 100% successful extraction), and vision-language models (up 90% successful extraction). We show that the attack is thwarted when the model is trained to be differentially private. However, we introduce a new attack that directly probes the loss landscape bypassing even differential privacy defenses.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

FLiP: Towards understanding and interpreting multimodal multilingual sentence embeddings

This paper presents factorized linear projection (FLiP) models for understanding pretrained sentence embedding spaces. We train FLiP models to recover the lexical content from multilingual (LaBSE), multimodal (SONAR) and API-based (Gemini) sentence embedding spaces in several high- and mid-resource languages. We show that FLiP can recall more than 75% of lexical content from the embeddings, significantly outperforming existing non-factorized baselines. Using this as a diagnostic tool, we uncover the modality and language biases across the selected sentence encoders and provide practitioners with intrinsic insights about the encoders without relying on conventional downstream evaluation tasks. Our implementation is public https://github.com/BUTSpeechFIT/FLiP.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Population-scale genomics reveals divergent pathogenicity of variant classes across paralogous collagen IV genes

Monoallelic pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants in COL4A3 and COL4A4 occur in approximately 1 in 106 individuals, yet whether these paralogous genes confer equivalent pathogenicity for the same variant classes has not been tested at population scale. Using whole-genome sequencing data from the UK Biobank (UKB; n = 500,000), with replication in the All of Us Research Program (n = 414,000), we performed per-variant association testing, gene-based collapsing analyses and phenome-wide association studies (PheWAS) across haematuria, proteinuria and chronic kidney disease. We identified 64 COL4A3 and 92 COL4A4 rare variants significantly associated with haematuria or proteinuria, generating a quantitative allelic series for clinical variant interpretation. Glycine substitutions within collagenous domains conferred similar risks in both genes. In contrast, truncating and non-collagenous domain (NC1) missense variants were strongly associated with haematuria and proteinuria in COL4A4 carriers but showed substantially attenuated or absent associations in COL4A3 carriers despite comparable carrier frequencies and predicted pathogenicity scores. These findings were independently replicated in All of Us. Genome-wide association analysis identified the COL4A3/COL4A4 locus as the dominant genetic determinant of haematuria, with the signal attributable to the aggregate effects of rare coding variants and no evidence of independent common variant or trans-acting modifier effects. These findings demonstrate substantial gene-specific differences in tolerance to truncating and NC1 variants between COL4A3 and COL4A4, challenging assumptions of equivalent pathogenicity across paralogous collagen IV genes. Gene identity and not variant class alone, should inform risk stratification, variant interpretation and genetic counselling in individuals carrying collagen IV risk genotypes.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

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

Authors:

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

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SafeLLM: Extraction as a Hallucination-Resistant Alternative to Rewriting in Safety-Critical Settings

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to access organisational documentation, including standard operating procedures (SOPs), HR policies and institutional guidelines. However, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that rely on free-form rewriting can introduce hallucinations and unstable trade-offs between completeness and conciseness, particularly in safety- and compliance-critical settings. Objectives: To evaluate extraction as a hallucination-resistant alternative to rewriting-based RAG and compare strategies that balance precision, recall and safety across document types and model scales. Methods: We compare multiple prompting strategies, including line-number-based source selection, extraction of relevant guideline sentences with explicit safety annotations, and a multi-stage pipeline that refines draft answers using supporting evidence from source guidelines. Experiments are conducted on documents of varying length and structure, including local NHS acute care and oncology guidelines and UK-wide NICE guidelines, using both frontier-scale and locally deployable models. Performance is assessed using automatic metrics and human expert evaluation of relevance and completeness. Results: Line-number selection achieves the strongest results, outperforming direct copying and safety-focused strategies across both large and small models while maintaining high term recall (up to 95%) and close alignment with source text. Safety-oriented approaches improve precision but introduce systematic omissions, while multi-stage filtering further amplifies this trade-off. Performance varies with document structure: line-based extraction excels in protocol-like content, whereas alternative strategies perform better on more verbose documents (up to 97% term recall).

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Probabilistic Contrastive Pretraining for Multi-task ADME Property Prediction

arXiv:2606.11508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties is critical to drug discovery, but remains challenging because ADME endpoints are noisy, interdependent, and often data-limited. We propose a molecular graph-transformer pretraining framework that combines chemistry-specific self-supervision with contrastive mutual information machine learning (cMIM). Our method encodes molecular graphs into latent variables, reconstructs SMILES strings from the graph-derived latent codes, and augments the contrastive objective with domain-specific self-supervised chemistry tasks. Rather than treating these tasks as auxiliary regularizers with separately tuned loss weights, we formulate reconstruction, contrastive discrimination, and chemistry-specific supervision as unit-weighted log-probability factors in a single probabilistic latent-variable objective. For fine-tuning, we propose a multi-task GNN readout architecture with task-specific multilayer perceptron heads, preserving shared representation learning while mitigating negative transfer and improving the modeling of heterogeneous, nonlinear task relationships. Across Biogen, ExpansionRX, and ChEMBL-MT, the resulting Contrastive KERMT pretraining improves over the KERMT baseline by 7.6%, 9.9%, and 9.5% respectively (averaged over significantly-improved endpoints). Adding ADME-adjacent molecules to the pretraining corpus further improves transfer, and the contrastive component sharpens chemically meaningful latent neighborhoods.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Integrative Transfer Network: Deep Transfer Learning Across Populations and Prediction Targets

Authors:

Large-scale clinical and biomedical datasets increasingly contain both diverse subgroup attributes (e.g., demographic or clinical subgroups) and multiple prediction targets. Although various machine learning approaches can address subgroup differences or multi-target prediction, they often consider these aspects independently rather than jointly. To more effectively capture the shared and subgroup-specific information in such complex datasets, we propose the Integrative Transfer Network (ITN), a deep neural network designed to leverage data across subgroups and multiple related outcomes simultaneously. In extensive experiments, including time-to-event and classification tasks where demographic subgroups and multiple disease endpoints are prevalent, ITN demonstrates consistent improvements in subgroup-specific prediction by borrowing strength from other subgroups and outcomes. We envision ITN as a unified framework for learning from heterogeneous datasets where subgroup-specific insights are critical.

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

Are LLMs Bad at Moral Reasoning?

arXiv:2606.11635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For highly capable AI systems to operate safely in dynamic, open-ended environments, they must be able to identify, understand, and respond to moral reasons for action, and constrain their behaviour accordingly. A growing body of research aims to evaluate this capacity – moral competence – in today's most capable AI systems, recently reaching broadly pessimistic conclusions. One of the most ambitious such papers collects gold-standard human-authored rubrics for evaluating moral reasoning in 1,000 cases, and benchmarks frontier AI models against those rubrics, with underwhelming results. In this paper, we argue that the MoReBench dataset can be redeployed to give a much more optimistic picture of LLMs' moral reasoning (an essential part of moral competence). We show that if, instead of scoring LLMs' responses to these cases against these rubrics, we instead give the LLMs the same task given to humans – to generate scoring rubrics for the moral analysis of particular cases – the rubrics they generate are both better calibrated to the human rubrics than their open-ended responses, and, where they differ, plausibly reflect nothing more than the vast dimensionality of most moral problems, as well as highlighting some human departures from the "rubric for creating rubrics". Taking these points into consideration, the MoReBench dataset suggests that LLMs are significantly more capable at moral reasoning than was previously believed.

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

SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistants

Image-based AI assistants are now deployed at production scale on e-commerce platforms, where a single uploaded image can trigger fundamentally different user intents: product search, style recommendation, visual encyclopedia, or utility tool calls, each demanding its own response format, tool invocation, and domain knowledge. Without per-intent behavioral constraints, LLM-based systems conflate these heterogeneous modes and fall short of domain quality standards, while the breadth and dynamism of the intent space render manual engineering infeasible. To address this, we present SkillChain, which closes the production feedback loop on Skill evolution, automating the lifecycle of Skills through three stages: Skill Creator for bootstrapping from task specs and trajectories, Route Optimizer for routing alignment, and Body Refiner for iterative Skill Body refinement via dual-path LLM-Judge evaluation. Deployed on a production-scale e-commerce image assistant, SkillChain substantially improves aggregate response quality, with the strongest gains on structural compliance and content quality; a one-week online A/B experiment further confirms significant gains in user engagement, content consumption, and long-term retention.

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

TextResNet: Decoupling and Routing Optimization Signals in Compound AI Systems via Deep Residual Tuning

arXiv:2602.08306v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Textual Gradient-style optimizers (TextGrad) enable gradient-like feedback propagation through compound AI systems. However, they do not work well for deep chains. The root cause of this limitation stems from the Semantic Entanglement problem in these extended workflows. In standard textual backpropagation, feedback signals mix local critiques with upstream contexts, leading to Attribution Ambiguity. To address this challenge, we propose TextResNet, a framework that reformulates the optimization process to achieve precise signal routing via four key innovations. Firstly, in the forward pass, it enforces Additive Semantic Deltas to preserve an Identity Highway for gradient flow. Secondly, in the backward pass, it introduces Semantic Gradient Decomposition via a Semantic Projector to disentangle feedback into causally independent subspaces. Thirdly, it implements Causal Routing, which routes projected signals to their specific components. Finally, it performs Density-Aware Optimization Scheduling to leverage the disentangled signals to dynamically allocate resources to key system bottlenecks. Our results show that TextResNet not only achieves superior performance compared to TextGrad, but also exhibits remarkable stability for agentic tasks in compound AI systems where baselines collapse. Code is available at https://github.com/JeanDiable/TextResNet.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpreting Neural Combinatorial Optimization via Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) achieves strong performance, yet its black-box nature remains a key roadblock to deployment and scientific diagnosis. Standard interpretability tools, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are ill-equipped for NCO, whose decisions are dynamic, state-dependent, and lack proper concept vocabulary definition. To close this gap, we introduce Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks (EPB), to our knowledge, the first framework for interpreting NCO policies by distilling black-box NCO models into human-readable program portfolios. EPB employs an LLM to autonomously evolve a bank of programs, where each program's per-step action distribution serves as the bottleneck. EPB works through an iterative framework: Block I fixes program bank capacity and introduces a hybrid textual-numerical gradient descent scheme that couples numerical gradients for student router updates and textual gradients for LLM-based program revision; Block II dynamically adapts bank capacity via fault-targeted expansion and redundancy pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate EPB's effectiveness and broad applicability, where the distilled program portfolios largely match original performance. EPB also reveals that NCO behavior shifts across optimization stages and can be approximated as a composition of classic heuristic variants. Our work advances interpretable NCO and establishes EPB as a promising tool for interpreting sequential decision-making models.

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

The Coin Flip Judge? Reliability and Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

Authors:

LLM-as-a-Judge is now widely used to rank model outputs, train reward models, and populate public leaderboards, but its run-to-run reliability remains under-characterized. We study repeated identical evaluations on 29 tasks spanning 10 categories using two OpenAI judge models (GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini), with 50 pairwise trials and 50 pointwise trials per question, supplemented by temperature and prompt-sensitivity ablations. Across judges, pairwise preferences flip on average 13.6% of the time, with 28% of questions exceeding a 20% flip rate and one question reaching 56%. GPT-4o-mini also exhibits a significant first-position bias (72% A-majority, p = 0.024). At the same time, mean pointwise score gaps are small (0.19–0.36 on a 10-point scale) and not statistically significant in aggregate, producing a pairwise–pointwise gap: judges frequently choose a winner even when their own scalar scores provide little evidence of a meaningful quality difference. Beyond within-judge instability, cross-judge agreement is only 76% ($\kappa = 0.51$), semantically equivalent prompt templates change majority outcomes in 25% of tested cases, and deterministic decoding reduces but does not eliminate inconsistency. A reliability curve analysis shows that, in our dataset, 11 repeated trials are needed for a majority vote to recover the 50-trial reference verdict with 95% probability on average, rising to 15 for high-variance questions. These findings suggest that single-trial LLM judging is often too noisy for high-stakes evaluation, and that multi-trial aggregation, position randomization, and explicit uncertainty reporting should be standard practice. Because both judges are from a single provider, cross-provider replication remains an important next step.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

DeMix: Debugging Training Data with Mixed Data Error Types by Investigating Influence Vectors

arXiv:2606.11616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality training data is essential for the success of machine learning models. However, real-world datasets often contain mixed types of errors arising from systematic flaws in data preparation pipelines, including label errors, feature errors, and spurious correlations. Effective debugging of training data requires both detecting erroneous samples and identifying their specific error types to enable targeted repair, yet existing data cleaning and attribution methods fail to adequately address this dual requirement. In this paper, we propose DeMix, a novel framework that simultaneously diagnoses erroneous samples and their error types. Our key insight is that different error types produce distinct patterns on model behavior. DeMix captures such error-specific patterns by influence vectors that characterize how each training sample affects model predictions across all validation samples. We formulate training data debugging as a multi-label classification problem where a classifier is developed to predict error types directly from influence vectors. We further introduce an intervention-based learning strategy that guides the classifier to capture invariant rationales specific to each error type, ensuring the learned classifier generalizes effectively. Empirical evaluations on 11 tasks across tabular data prediction, recommendation systems, and LLM alignment demonstrate that DeMix significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a 22.61% improvement in data debugging F1-score and a 9.32% gain in task model performance after data repair. Code is available at: https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/DeMix.

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

Beyond Static Endpoints: Tool Programs as an Interface for Flexible Agentic Web Services

arXiv:2606.19992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the agentic web era, LLM-based agents increasingly invoke web services as tools, yet most interfaces remain static endpoints that poorly express long-horizon workflows with loops, conditionals, joins, and retries. We present ToolPro, which represents an agent's tool intent as an executable tool program that compactly encodes multi-step service interactions with explicit effect types. ToolPro combines constraint-guided program construction, effect-aware replay for exactly-once state-modifying calls, and a profile-driven policy that decides when program execution outperforms stepwise calling. We instantiate ToolPro over MCP-style services with WebAssembly sandboxing and evaluate it on diverse workflows of real-world applications. ToolPro reduces end-to-end latency by up to 53.4\% and client-side traffic by up to 96.1\%, with larger gains under higher network latency and workflow complexity.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Quantitative Oppenheim Conjecture for Random Quadratic Forms and Optimal Variance Bounds in Function Fields

arXiv:2606.16699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove a quantitative version of Oppenheim's conjecture in the function field setting. In order to do so, we compute the higher moments of the Siegel transform. In particular, we find an optimal bound on the variance of the number of lattice points in a set. Moreover, we compute the exact variance of the number of lattice points in a ball, which is of independent interest.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

New Identity for Cayley's First Hyperdeterminant with Applications to Symmetric Tensors and Entanglement

Authors:

arXiv:2512.03093v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article, a new formula for computing Cayley's first hyperdeterminant in terms of the Levi-Civita symbol is given. It is then shown that this formula can be used to compute the hyperdeterminant of symmetric tensors in polynomial time with respect to their order (assuming fixed side length). Applications to quantifying the entanglement of states of bosonic quantum systems are then discussed. Additionally, in order to obtain the fast calculation of the hyperdeterminant on symmetric tensors, generalized elimination and duplication matrices are defined and their explicit formulas are derived.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Efficient and Sound Probabilistic Verification for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.20510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Securing AI agents that operate in complex digital environments has become a critical need, and runtime monitoring approaches that formulate and enforce policies expressed in a formal language like Datalog offer a promising solution. However, existing approaches are restricted to deterministic policies. In many practical applications of AI agents, there is a need to enforce security policies in the face of ambiguity, leading to probabilistic predicates or state transitions (for example, a declassifier or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) detector that has some failure probability on each invocation). Furthermore, in many such applications, one cannot easily make the independence assumptions necessary to invoke prior work on probabilistic inference in Datalog. We address this by introducing a sound and efficient framework for such verification based on distributionally robust optimization, computing sound upper bounds on the probability of policy violation regardless of possible correlations between predicates. On standard benchmarks for terminal and tool calling agents, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior art and improves the security-utility trade-off while ensuring rigorous bounds on the probability of policy violation.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Scalable quantum circuit knitting using a weak-coupling approximation

arXiv:2606.19035v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a method for performing distributed quantum computing with controlled approximations. Exact distributed quantum computing requires exponential classical information to reconstruct the quantum process. However, we show how the classical cost is reduced to polynomial if the quantum procedure can be partitioned between a qubit that is weakly coupled the other qubits. We demonstrate our method for a layered circuit based on the circuits used for the quantum approximate optimization algorithm.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Vision-language models for chest radiography do not always need the image

Medical vision-language models report strong chest radiograph accuracy, and this is increasingly read as evidence that they use the image. That inference is unsafe: a model exploiting finding-name priors scores like one that reads the scan, and no standard benchmark separates them. We introduce a causal audit that intervenes on the image, occluding the relevant region, occluding an irrelevant one, and swapping in another patient's same-label scan, and combines three behavioral metrics to test whether a correct answer depends on the image. Across nine systems, a text-only model with no image access reaches within 5.7 accuracy points of the best multimodal one, and a 119-billion-parameter multimodal model is statistically indistinguishable from a 7-billion text-only baseline. The audit splits the cohort into three models that ignore the image, one that is unstable, and five that use it selectively, for a subset of findings; the categories hold across a second dataset, resolution, and prompt phrasing. Against board-certified radiologists, a text-only model is statistically indistinguishable from a radiologist's accuracy while grounding at zero, whereas the image-using models ground at radiologist-comparable rates. Reported confidence flags ungrounded answers only when a model uses the image. Grounding audits, not accuracy, should gate clinical deployment.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Reliability of Probabilistic Emulation of Physical Systems

arXiv:2606.12997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two dominant approaches have emerged for generating probabilistic forecasts of physical systems: generative models, such as diffusion or flow matching; and ensembles of deterministic models with stochasticity injected, trained using the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) loss. While both approaches have demonstrated strong predictive accuracy, the reliability of their uncertainties has not been systematically assessed. We address this gap by developing a framework to evaluate both approaches across diverse 2D spatiotemporal physical systems, under matched model size and computational budget. We assess the reliability of probabilistic emulation by inspecting the empirical coverage of predictive intervals, while also considering accuracy and computational efficiency metrics. CRPS-trained ensembles typically achieve more reliable uncertainties on both single-step prediction and autoregressive rollouts, demonstrating better coverage than the standard alternative of training generative models in a latent space. Moreover, the CRPS approach offers significantly faster inference. When generative models are trained in ambient rather than a compressed latent space, which is often infeasible for high-dimensional problems, they exhibit comparable coverage to CRPS-trained ensembles, though with substantially larger inference latency. In contrast, when CRPS-trained ensembles are trained in latent space they do not show a marked degradation in coverage with respect to ambient space. Both generative models and CRPS-trained ensembles demonstrate good predictive accuracy. To facilitate future research and application, we release AutoCast, a modular framework implementing both generative models and CRPS-trained ensembles, alongside AutoSim, a flexible dataset generation package for rapid prototyping.

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

LLM Features Can Hurt GNNs: Concatenation Interference on Homophilous Graph Benchmarks

Adding LLM-generated node features to graph neural networks (GNNs) is widely reported to improve accuracy on standard benchmarks. We document a contrasting observation: when LLM features are introduced through pure input concatenation (rather than joint training, distillation, or prompt-conditioning), they can systematically degrade accuracy on the same homophilous benchmarks where end-to-end LLM pipelines succeed. With an MLP backbone on the Planetoid public split and bag-of-words original features, concatenating SBERT-encoded GPT-4o-mini TAPE features reduces PubMed test accuracy by -17.0 +/- 0.3 pp and Cora by -4.3 +/- 0.6 pp (CiteSeer -0.6 +/- 0.8 pp, within seed noise). The drop attenuates as we relax each condition (GCN / GCNII / GAT backbones, random splits, smaller encoders) and reverses on medium-homophily WikiCS (+4.4 pp) and ogbn-arxiv (+11.7 pp). To predict when concatenation helps versus hurts, we report a simple measure of LLM-alone discriminability, Delta_sig. Across 9 datasets Delta_sig correlates with the concatenation cost more strongly than homophily at point estimate (r^2 = 0.38 vs. 0.06; N=9, bootstrap CIs overlap). The bootstrap-best change-point is tau = 13.8 pp, and the rule "Delta_sig

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

Zero-Shot Captioning for Cultural Heritage: Automated Image Analysis of Traditional Indonesian Clothing

This paper presents Custom ZeroCLIP, a retrieval-augmented vision-language framework for zero-shot captioning of Indonesian traditional garments. The dataset contains 3,800 expert-annotated images from all 38 Indonesian provinces. Using a province-level inductive zero-shot protocol, the model is trained on 24 seen provinces, validated on 6 seen provinces, and evaluated on 8 unseen provinces. The framework combines a frozen CLIP ViT-B/32 image encoder, a CLIP text encoder, a BERT text encoder, and an LSTM caption decoder. During inference, unseen-province labels and captions are unavailable, and retrieval uses only captions from training provinces. No unseen-province image, label, or caption is used during training, validation, or retrieval-bank construction. Custom ZeroCLIP achieves a CLIPScore of 0.8536, BLEU-4 of 0.3342, and METEOR of 0.4859, outperforming existing baselines. Ablation results show that retrieval improves cultural vocabulary recovery with a 19.3\% METEOR gain, while human evaluation confirms stronger cultural accuracy and fluency. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented domain adaptation for culturally grounded caption generation in low-resource heritage settings. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/AnugrahAidinYotolembah/Traditional-Indonesian-Clothing-Captioning-Dataset.