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

An Information Theoretic Framework for Graph Novelty Generation via Latent Mixture Modeling

arXiv:2606.19770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose an information-theoretic framework for graph novelty generation, which aims to generate data that are distinct from existing patterns while preserving global structural consistency. Our approach embeds data into a latent space, models the latent distribution using finite mixture models, and generates novel samples by imposing explicit novelty and reliability conditions formulated in terms of description length. Specifically, novelty is enforced by requiring generated samples to be poorly explained by all existing mixture components, while reliability constrains their impact on the overall mixture structure under the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that, with appropriate threshold choices, the probabilities of misclassifying non-novel or unreliable samples converge to zero with explicit rates. Experiments on synthetic and benchmark graph datasets demonstrate that the proposed method enables principled novelty generation with quantifiable risk.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Locally Acting Grover Mixers for Constraint-Preserving QAOA

arXiv:2606.11530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Grover mixer quantum alternating operator ansatz (GM-QAOA) employs the Grover mixer to confine the quantum evolution to the feasible subspace defined by the problem. Its mixing unitary, however, requires a global multi-controlled phase-shift gate acting on all qubits, resulting in substantial circuit overhead on near-term quantum devices. In this work, we propose locally acting Grover mixers tailored to initial states that admit a product structure over disjoint qubit subsystems, which may be obtained by encoding only a subset of problem constraints into the initial state preparation. The proposed method preserves the search space defined by the initial state while significantly lowering implementation cost, as the global multi-controlled phase-shift gate is replaced with local operations on disjoint subsystems. Numerical simulations on the exact-cover problem and the traveling salesman problem (TSP) demonstrate that the proposed method achieves convergence behavior comparable to that of the original GM-QAOA, while using shallower circuits with fewer gates. We further compare two constraint encoding strategies for the TSP, encoding only a subset of constraints versus all constraints into the initial state preparation, and show that the former combined with the proposed mixer yields markedly more compact circuits at the point where comparable solution quality is achieved.

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

On Defining Erasure Harms for NLP

The deployment of NLP systems has raised concerns about harms they might produce, including representational harms. Recent literature has begun to conceptualize and measure one such harm, the harm of erasure. Nevertheless, the field lacks a clear and cohesive conceptual foundation for identifying and measuring erasure. Existing conceptualizations of erasure are often broad – making it difficult to identify what is needed to establish and measure erasure – or else specific to particular settings – facilitating measurement for those settings but potentially challenging to adapt to other settings. To address this gap, we develop and propose a structured definition of erasure that clarifies what components are necessary for establishing whether erasure has occurred, which practitioners need to explicitly articulate and operationalize in order to measure erasure.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On a class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks

arXiv:2504.14767v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A step-reinforced random walk is a discrete-time stochastic process with long-range dependence. At each step, with a fixed probability $\alpha$, the so-called positively step-reinforced random walk repeats one of its previous steps, chosen randomly and uniformly from its entire history. Alternatively, with probability $1-\alpha$, it makes an independent move. For the so-called negatively step-reinforced random walk, the process is similar, but any repeated step is taken with its direction reversed. These random walks have been introduced respectively by Simon (1955) and Bertoin (2024) and are sometimes refered to the self-confident step-reinforced random walk and the counterbalanced step-reinforced random walk respectively. In this work, we introduce a new class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks for which we prove the strong law of large numbers and the central limit theorem. In particular, our work provides a unified treatment of the elephant random walk introduced by Schutz and Trimper (2004) and the positively and negatively step-reinforced random walks.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

GrowthHacker: Automated Off-Policy Evaluation Optimization Using Code-Modifying LLM Agents

With data-driven development now widely adopted, online A/B testing is an established method for measuring the effects of new technologies. However, deploying online experiments demands resources for design, implementation, and deployment, and may negatively impact users (e.g., unsafe or unethical outcomes) while requiring weeks of data collection. To address this, the growing research area of off-policy evaluation (OPE), or offline A/B testing, assesses new technologies offline using previously collected logged data. OPE is also a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and is important where online testing is expensive or risky, such as healthcare, recommender systems, education, and robotics. Despite advances in code-generation large language models (LLMs) and agentic workflows, little is known about whether and how LLMs and LLM-based agents can automatically optimize OPE implementations. We propose GrowthHacker, a benchmark that evaluates baseline LLMs and LLM-based agents on large-scale public datasets. GrowthHacker autonomously and iteratively modifies code, runs OPE, and uses the metrics to guide subsequent optimization. We evaluate methods on Open Bandit Pipeline (OBP) and Scope-RL, and develop a two_agent framework that addresses limitations of existing frameworks while reducing complexity. Across both libraries, two_agent shows the highest reliability (98.1%-100% success rate) and positive-outcome rate (78%), with a median improvement of 4.4% among positive outcomes; CrewAI achieves the highest average improvement (37.9%) and is the only framework with zero extreme-value failures. AutoGen and Default each reach 65% positive-outcome rates. These results establish the feasibility of using LLM-based agents as automated "growth hackers" to continuously improve OPE systems, with implications for scaling data-driven decision-making where manual optimization is expensive.

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

The Weight Norm Sets the Grokking Timescale: A Causal Delay Law

arXiv:2606.13753v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Grokking is the delayed onset of generalization in neural networks, arising long after they fit the training data. Whether the weight norm causes this delay is disputed: some studies report a critical norm at the transition, others observe grokking with no fixed norm at all. We settle this by intervening on the norm during training rather than only observing it. Under free training with weight decay, networks grok when the weight norm reaches a value Wc that varies little across seeds and learning rates (CV 1 to 2 percent) and grows with the modular base as a power law. When we instead clamp the norm to a fixed multiple rho of Wc and hold it there, the network still groks, but the delay follows T_grok proportional to exp(alpha rho). One exponent, alpha near 7.5, fits this delay across four moduli (R^2 = 0.996). Over the swept ranges the held norm moves the delay by about 19x and the learning rate by only about 2x, and holding the norm above Wc slows grokking rather than preventing it. A final LayerNorm removes the dependence by decoupling weight scale from the network function; without it the exponential law returns. This pinned-norm delay is the exponential counterpart to the logarithmic delay predicted for a freely contracting norm.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Shadow Engineering of Quantum Processes

arXiv:2606.12035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Characterizing quantum processes is essential for hardware benchmarking, error diagnosis, and algorithm verification. While recent work [PRX QUANTUM 4, 040337 (2023)] extended classical shadows from quantum state to quantum process, enabling efficient single-channel $\mathcal{E}$ property prediction, its applicability to composite processes $f(\mathcal{E}_1, \mathcal{E}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{E}_k)$ remains unexplored. We introduce shadow engineering, a framework encoding the classical shadows of processes into sparse transfer matrices to predict $f(\mathcal{E}_1, \mathcal{E}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{E}_k)$ properties with proven polynomial sample complexity, matching single-channel efficiency while exponentially lower than quantum process tomography. Crucially, this approach repurposes existing $\mathcal{E}_m$-shadow data without physical execution of $f(\mathcal{E}_1, \mathcal{E}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{E}_k)$, enabling flexible quantum process characterization with minimal hardware overhead. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness and practicality on a superconducting quantum processor for typical applications such as error mitigation and Hamiltonian dynamical simulation. This framework unlocks new capabilities for predicting complex quantum behaviors without physical re-execution, with immediate applications in near-term device calibration and quantum simulation.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Multi-Modal Hyper-Graph Fusion for Low-Light Crowd Counting

Crowd counting is a fundamental task in computer vision. However, crowd counting in low-light environments remains largely underexplored, despite its practical importance in the real world. Existing methods mainly focus on well-lit scenes or rely on single-modality Red-Green-Blue (RGB) representations, which often become unreliable under extreme darkness and complex non-uniform illumination. To handle this problem, we construct three new low-light crowd counting benchmarks, which consist of two synthetic datasets, SHA\_Dark and SHB\_Dark, and a real-world benchmark LC-Crowd (Low-light Crowd Dataset). Inspired by Retinex-based physical modeling, we introduce depth and Canny edge cues as complementary geometric and structural priors to enhance the intrinsic reflectance representation under low-light conditions. We propose a Multi-Modal Hyper-Graph Fusion module, which formulates RGB appearance, depth geometry, and edge structure cues as nodes in a unified hyper-graph and explicitly captures their high-order complementary relationships via dynamic hyperedge construction and message passing. Furthermore, to adaptively allocate computation in dense prediction, we propose a Deformable Rectangular Sparse Attention (DRSA) module, which concentrates computation on informative regions through anchor-aware estimation and adaptive rectangular window modeling. Based on these designs, we develop a unified Low-Light Counting Network (LCNet) for robust low-light crowd counting. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best overall performance against existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is in the supplementary material. The datasets will be made public upon acceptance.

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

Lesion-DDPM: Lesion-Enhanced 3D Diffusion for MS MRI Synthesis

3D FLAIR MRI is widely recommended as one of the standard MRI sequences for brain imaging in multiple sclerosis (MS), but publicly available MS datasets remain relatively small and vary across scanners, acquisition protocols, and lesion patterns. This scarcity and variability hinder the development of robust neuroimaging machine learning models and are particularly challenging for generative models that aim to synthesize images while preserving small, sparse lesions. We propose Lesion-DDPM, a 3D conditional diffusion framework for lesion-aware FLAIR synthesis that incorporates multi-level anatomical mask injection together with a lesion-weighted reconstruction loss to emphasize lesion voxels while maintaining global brain structure. Using a curated subset of the MSLesSeg dataset, we compare Lesion-DDPM with representative state-of-the-art GAN- and diffusion-based models, assessing both image-generation metrics and downstream 3D U-Net segmentation. In our experiments, Lesion-DDPM achieved the lowest lesion-region reconstruction error among all methods. In a downstream 3D U-Net lesion segmentation task, a model trained only on Lesion-DDPM-generated scans and evaluated on real MRIs reached a Dice score of 0.616 compared with 0.569 for the best competing synthetic dataset. When Lesion-DDPM images were added to the real training set, the Dice score further increased to 0.685.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Understanding, Detecting, and Repairing Real-World In-Context-Learning-Based Text-to-SQL Errors

Large language models (LLMs) have been adopted for text-to-SQL tasks, utilizing their in-context learning (ICL) capability to translate natural language questions into SQL queries. However, such a technique faces correctness problems. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive study of text-to-SQL errors of ICL-based techniques. Our study covers four representative ICL-based techniques, five basic repairing methods, two benchmarks, and two LLM settings. We find that text-to-SQL errors are widespread and summarize 27 error types of 7 categories. We also find that existing repairing attempts have limited correctness improvement while having high computational overhead and many mis-repairs. Based on these findings, we propose MapleDoctor, a novel text-to-SQL error detection and repairing framework. The evaluation demonstrates that MapleDoctor outperforms existing solutions by repairing 13.8% more queries with a negligible number of mis-repairs and reducing 67.4% repair latency. The artifact is publicly available at GitHub.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLM-Aided Joint Secrecy Precoding and Trajectory for RSMA-Based Heterogeneous UAV Networks

arXiv:2507.17188v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper investigates secure communications in rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) enabled heterogeneous UAV networks, where multiple UAVs collaboratively serve ground terminals in the presence of eavesdroppers. By jointly considering secrecy rate maximization and propulsion energy consumption minimization, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem involving UAV trajectory design, service association, power allocation, and secrecy precoding under mobility, collision-avoidance, service-capacity, and communication constraints. The formulated problem is highly non-convex due to the coupling among UAV trajectories, RSMA transmission variables, and secrecy constraints.To address the resulting non-convex and highly coupled optimization problem, we propose a hierarchical optimization framework. The inner layer uses a semidefinite relaxation (SDR)-based S2DC algorithm combining penalty functions and difference-of-convex (D.C.) programming to solve the secrecy precoding problem with fixed UAV positions. The outer layer introduces a Large Language Model (LLM)-guided heuristic multi-agent reinforcement learning approach (LLM-HeMARL) for trajectory optimization. LLM-HeMARL efficiently incorporates LLM-generated expert heuristic policy, enabling UAVs to learn energy-aware, security-driven trajectories without the inference overhead of real-time LLM calls. The simulation results show that our method outperforms existing baselines in secrecy rate and energy efficiency, with consistent robustness across varying UAV swarm sizes and random seeds.

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

Learning What to Remember: A Cognitively Grounded Multi-Factor Value Model for Agentic Memory

arXiv:2606.12945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-running LLM agents accumulate interaction histories far larger than any context window, forcing a standing decision: what to encode deeply, what to forget, and what to retrieve under a fixed memory budget. Production systems answer with semantic similarity or recency – both mis-specified for the forgetting decision, which is made at consolidation time before the future query is known. We propose a multi-factor memory value function V(m)=\sum_i w_i f_i(m) over seven interpretable factors (emotional intensity, goal relevance, value alignment, self/user relevance, task utility, reliability, and usage history) drawn from cognitive psychology, whose weights are learned from a downstream objective by a gradient-free optimiser, and whose single scalar uniformly controls encoding depth, forget risk, and retrieval rank. We make a methodological point: on LongMemEval, scoring goal relevance against the held-out evaluation question saturates gold-evidence retention at \approx 0.98 – this measures retrieval, not forgetting. In the realistic blind regime, a learned multi-factor value retains 0.770 \pm 0.011 of gold evidence across 479 usable cases, versus 0.657 for uniform weights, 0.518 for the best single factor, and 0.368 for recency; every paired gap's 95% bootstrap CI is above zero, and a neural network over the same factors ties the linear model. The learned weights are interpretable – reliability, emotional intensity, and self/user relevance dominate, while query-time goal similarity is correctly down-weighted for the forgetting decision. A controlled synthetic task with planted confounds confirms the learner recovers a separating weighting (1.00 retention) where uniform weighting fails (0.62). The substrate is open-source; all experiments run on a single CPU with no API calls.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Comparative Study of Pretrained Transformer Models for Quranic ASR: Speech Representations, Label Formats, and Dataset Composition

arXiv:2606.19747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quran Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert Quranic recitation into text, enabling applications such as aided memorisation tools and Quranic search engines. However, existing ASR models often exhibit high Word Error Rates (WER) on user-recited verses and lack full coverage of the Quranic corpus. This paper presents a systematic empirical study of domain-specific fine-tuning of pretrained Transformer-based models for Quranic ASR, using advanced speech feature extraction methods: Wav2Vec2.0, HuBERT, and XLS-R. These models apply self-supervised learning by masking portions of input audio and using Transformer architectures to learn context-aware speech features. The pretrained models are fine-tuned on a filtered Quranic dataset exceeding 870 hours of professional and user recitations. Through comprehensive ablation studies across feature extractors, output label formats, training strategies, and clip durations, we identify the key factors that affect transcription accuracy in this domain. Our best-performing configuration achieves a WER of 0.08 on the EveryAyah subset and 0.11 on the combined EveryAyah+Tarteel setting, representing roughly a five-percentage-point gain over the Citrinet baseline (WER = 0.163) while reducing combined-model training time from 140 hours to 40 hours. Arabic text without diacritics yields the best fine-tuning results, and Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 provides the strongest overall representation. Future work includes improving dataset quality and developing phoneme-aware models to extract deeper speech feature representations for Tajweed-sensitive applications.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ProvenanceGuard: Source-Aware Factuality Verification for MCP-Based LLM Agents

Tool-using LLM agents increasingly use the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to answer from heterogeneous evidence sources, including search, APIs, databases, clinical records, and formulary tools. Standard factuality metrics usually test whether an answer is supported by pooled evidence, missing a provenance-sensitive failure mode: a claim may be supported somewhere while being attributed to the wrong source. We call this cross-source conflation. We introduce ProvenanceGuard, a source-aware verifier for MCP-grounded answers. It consumes captured MCP traces with stable tool IDs, source IDs, and raw outputs; decomposes answers into atomic claims; routes claims to source-specific evidence; checks support with NLI and a token-alignment proxy; compares stated attribution with the routed source; and returns per-claim verdicts plus an answer-level allow/block decision. Blocked answers can be repaired with retrieval-augmented answer revision and re-verified. We evaluate on 281 medical-domain MCP-agent traces. A 266-trace adjudicated subset yields 2,325 LLM-assisted claim labels split by trace; 361 held-out labels are human-verified. On the 40-trace held-out split, ProvenanceGuard achieves block F1 0.802 and source accuracy 0.858 over 260 source-eligible claims, outperforming source-blind baselines that do not emit claim-to-source IDs. On a harder multi-source benchmark it reaches block F1 0.846, while source-plus-relation accuracy drops to 0.229, showing that exact source ownership remains difficult with semantically close sources. Repair-and-reverify resolves all blocked answers in the full trace set, often via conservative fallback. In 50 controlled clinical conflation probes, ProvenanceGuard detects all injected attribution swaps with no retained wrong attribution. These results show that source attribution is an independent axis for factuality verification in MCP-based agents.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Augmentation techniques for video surveillance in the visible and thermal spectral range

In intelligent video surveillance, cameras record image sequences during day and night. Commonly, this demands different sensors. To achieve a better performance it is not unusual to combine them. We focus on the case that a long-wave infrared camera records continuously and in addition to this, another camera records in the visible spectral range during daytime and an intelligent algorithm supervises the picked up imagery. More accurate, our task is multispectral CNN-based object detection. At first glance, images originating from the visible spectral range differ between thermal infrared ones in the presence of color and distinct texture information on the one hand and in not containing information about thermal radiation that emits from objects on the other hand. Although color can provide valuable information for classification tasks, effects such as varying illumination and specialties of different sensors still represent significant problems. Anyway, obtaining sufficient and practical thermal infrared datasets for training a deep neural network poses still a challenge. That is the reason why training with the help of data from the visible spectral range could be advantageous, particularly if the data, which has to be evaluated contains both visible and infrared data. However, there is no clear evidence of how strongly variations in thermal radiation, shape, or color information influence classification accuracy. To gain deeper insight into how Convolutional Neural Networks make decisions and what they learn from different sensor input data, we investigate the suitability and robustness of different augmentation techniques...

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

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

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.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Exact Fourier dimensions of dyadic Mandelbrot cascades under minimal integrability

arXiv:2606.08683v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We determine the Fourier dimension of dyadic Mandelbrot cascades under the minimal Kahane-Peyriere integrability condition. The interval theorem is proved in a vector-valued dyadic cascade model in which sibling weights may have arbitrary dependence. For every balanced energy-admissible vector law, almost surely on non-extinction, dim_F(mu)=dim_E(mu)=dim_2(mu)=D_E(X). In the canonical scalar case, under W>=0, E W=1, E[W log_2^+ W]

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

Sovereign Assurance Boundary: Certificate-Bound Admission for Agentic Infrastructure

arXiv:2606.11632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic infrastructure introduces a critical control-plane authorization problem: non-deterministic reasoning systems can propose high-stakes mutations to production resources, yet existing security mechanisms – such as identity and access management (IAM), policy engines, consensus protocols, and audit logs – either enforce static, context-unaware permissions or merely record actions post-execution. This paper introduces the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), a certificate-bound runtime admission layer for autonomous execution authority. SAB intercepts agent proposals at an assurance airlock, compiles them into typed execution contracts $C$, and binds these contracts to cryptographic evidence digests $H(E)$ and policy versions. The contracts are then routed through consequence-aware certification paths. Upon successful admission, the system emits a signed Sovereign Assurance Certificate ($\Omega$) that is strictly scoped to a specific execution identity, revocation epoch, and validity window. Finally, a sovereign execution broker verifies $\Omega$ and performs fresh pre-execution revocation and drift checks before invoking infrastructure APIs. We detail the airlock-broker architecture, formalize its admission and revocation invariants, and report preliminary feasibility measurements from a Go prototype evaluated over 2,500 admission attempts. Ultimately, this broker-enforced model prevents autonomous reasoning from directly mutating state, transforming delegated execution authority into a cryptographically verifiable, evidence-bound, revocable, and replayable runtime artifact.

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

Certifying Nonclassical Proper-Time Histories with a Quantum Clock

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum clocks can acquire relativistic phases from motional or gravitational proper-time differences, but reduced clock dephasing alone does not certify nonclassical proper-time histories. We formulate this distinction as a channel-certification problem. First, we show that any two-level single-time dephasing signal, including one generated by an effective quantum proper-time label, admits a classical random proper-time representation. We then define the convex set of classical mixtures of experimentally specified proper-time histories and prove a Choi-rank separation criterion for conditioned coherent history recombination. A two-branch Ramsey protocol gives explicit bright- and dark-port population witnesses outside this classical set. The certification is operational and relative to the specified history set: it rules out classical mixtures of the same implemented proper-time histories, not arbitrary classical protocols with different histories or controls.

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

MARS: Margin-Adversarial Risk-controlled Stopping for Parallel LLM Test-time Scaling

arXiv:2606.12935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling samples many reasoning traces and majority-votes their answers, improving LLM accuracy but requiring traces to run to completion, incurring substantial computational overhead. We observe that probing partial traces at intermediate checkpoints can extract current answers without disrupting generation, revealing an evolving aggregate vote. Based on this observation, we introduce MARS, a margin-adversarial stopping rule that estimates which active traces are likely to change their answers and stops once the leader remains safe under a conservative bound on future vote movement. The rule separates two sources of uncertainty. It learns the trace-level switch probabilities that determine how much of the current margin is likely to be retained, while handling the harder question of where switching traces land through an adversarial bound calibrated from warmup traces. With true switch probabilities, MARS guarantees with high probability that the early-stopped answer matches the full-budget vote. In practice, a five-feature logistic model closely matches oracle switching behavior. Across three reasoning models and three competition-math benchmarks, MARS saves 25-47% of self-consistency tokens and 14-29% on top of DeepConf Online, a strong confidence-weighted baseline that already filters and truncates weak traces, while matching the accuracy of the corresponding full-budget baselines.

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

Pre-Deployment Robustness Stress Testing for CT Segmentation Systems Using Clinically Motivated Multi-Corruption Augmentation

Deep learning-based CT segmentation systems often achieve high accuracy on clean benchmark images, but their performance may degrade under heterogeneous clinical imaging conditions such as noise, resolution loss, contrast variation, intensity shift, and artifacts. This instability can limit reliable deployment in real-world medical imaging workflows. We propose Robustness via Augmented Multi-corruption Pipeline (RAMP), a robustness-oriented augmentation framework for CT segmentation. RAMP combines anatomically constrained spatial perturbations, CT intensity transformations, and stochastic multi-corruption composition to expose models to clinically plausible image degradation during training. Across two CT segmentation evaluation settings, RAMP achieved the strongest corrupted-image performance and the smallest clean-to-corrupted robustness gap. In the five-organ noisy evaluation benchmark, RAMP improved mean corrupted Dice from 0.610 to 0.753 and reduced the robustness gap from 0.264 to 0.064 compared with the nnU-Net baseline. In Abdomen1K, RAMP improved mean corrupted Dice from 0.633 to 0.789 and reduced the robustness gap from 0.290 to 0.070. Although RAMP did not achieve the highest clean-image Dice, it substantially mitigated worst-case segmentation collapse under severe image degradation. These results suggest that multi-corruption augmentation can serve as a practical pre-deployment strategy for improving the reliability of CT segmentation systems in heterogeneous clinical environments.

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

AgentBeats: Agentifying Agent Assessment for Openness, Standardization, and Reproducibility

arXiv:2606.13608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent systems are advancing quickly across domains, but their evaluation remains fragmented. Most benchmarks rely on fixed, LLM-centric harnesses that require heavy integration, create test-production mismatch, and limit fair comparison across diverse agent designs. The root problem is the lack of an open, agent-agnostic assessment interface. We advocate Agentified Agent Assessment (AAA), where evaluation is performed by judge agents and all participants interact through standardized protocols: A2A for task management and MCP for tool access. Conventional benchmarking defines two separate interfaces, one for the benchmark and one for the agent, while AAA only needs one; this yields a generic, unified framework that separates assessment logic from agent implementation and enables reproducible, interoperable, and multi-agent evaluation. We further introduce AgentBeats as a concrete realization of AAA: we identify five practical operation modes that make standardized assessment compatible with real-world constraints on openness, privacy, and reproducibility. To evaluate our design at scale, we conduct two studies: a five-month open competition that drew 298 judge agents across 12 categories together with 467 subject agents from independent participants, showing that AAA applies across a heterogeneous range of benchmarks; and a case study on coding agents that confirms agentified evaluation preserves fidelity with the public record while surfacing previously missing head-to-head results, yielding research insights about agent design. Combining a community-scale field study and a controlled coding case study, we verify that AAA delivers coverage, practicality, and fidelity across heterogeneous scenarios at scale. Together, AAA and AgentBeats offer a clear path toward open, standardized, and reproducible agent assessment.

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

MamBOA: State-Space Architecture for Video Recognition

Fine-grained action recognition demands temporal reasoning that general-purpose architectures address through different cost-accuracy tradeoffs: 3D dense operators couple computation to the input volume, while difference-based methods approximate motion through rigid, hand-crafted subtraction of uncontextualized features - each reflecting a deliberate design choice with corresponding limitations in expressiveness or flexibility. We present MamBOA, a backbone-agnostic temporal framework built upon a novel interleaved scan structure that recasts the selective state-space recurrence (S6) as a native motion synthesizer. By interleaving consecutive feature representations extracted from a pretrained backbone into a single alternating sequence, the proposed scan structurally drives the recurrence to encode both temporal observations of each position within a shared hidden state, separated by only a single decay step - rendering the inter-frame transition an intrinsic component of the state dynamics rather than an externally computed quantity. A cascade of dedicated alignment and decoding operations then distills this joint encoding into an explicit motion representation, which a dual-path pooling mechanism adaptively aggregates by balancing attention-driven selection with uniform temporal coverage. The framework interfaces seamlessly with CNN, Transformer, and Mamba backbone families, adding only ~2.1 GFLOPs per feature pair. On Diving48, MamBOA achieves 85.02% Top-1 accuracy with an image-pretrained backbone and 86.24% with a video-pretrained backbone processing the entire video in a single forward pass - demonstrating that structurally induced state-space dynamics constitute a principled and general foundation for motion modeling.

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

MLUBench: A Benchmark for Lifelong Unlearning Evaluation in MLLMs

arXiv:2606.12809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are trained on massive multimodal data, making data unlearning increasingly important as data owners may request the removal of specific content. In practice, these requests often arrive sequentially over time, giving rise to the challenging problem of MLLM Lifelong Unlearning. However, most existing benchmarks are limited in scale and scope, failing to capture the complexities of MLLM lifelong unlearning. To fill this gap, we introduce the MLUBench, a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark featuring 127 entities across 9 classes under lifelong unlearning requests. We perform extensive experiments using MLUBench and reveal that existing unlearning methods suffer from severe, cumulative degradation. More critically, we further identify the unique challenge of this problem: unlike in unimodal models, MLLM lifelong unlearning is constrained by the need to preserve multimodal alignment. Continually unlearning from one modality could degrade the entire model. To alleviate this challenge, we propose LUMoE, an effective method. Experiments demonstrate that LUMoE significantly mitigates the degradation problem faced by baselines. The source code and the MLUBench dataset are open-sourced in https://github.com/lihe-maxsize/Lifelong_Unlearning_main.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

National trends and operational drivers of vaccine wastage in Uganda, 2020-2025: a descriptive analysis of four tracer antigens

Background Vaccine wastage reduces immunisation efficiency, increases costs, and complicates supply forecasting. Uganda routinely monitors vaccine use, but national evidence comparing observed wastage with World Health Organization (WHO) and Uganda-specific planning thresholds has been limited. We described national and sub-national trends for four tracer antigens to inform supply-chain planning and forecasting. Methods We conducted a retrospective descriptive analysis of routinely reported immunisation data from Ugandas District Health Information Software 2, 2020-2025. We analysed Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG), measles-rubella (MR), oral polio vaccine (OPV), and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis-containing vaccine (DPT). Vaccine wastage was calculated as the proportion of issued doses not administered. Annual wastage rates were summarised using medians, and temporal trends were assessed using the Mann-Kendall test. Observed wastage was compared with WHO thresholds: BCG[≤]50%, MR[≤]25%, OPV[≤]10%, DPT[≤]15%, and Ugandas planning thresholds: BCG[≤]70%, MR[≤]40%, OPV[≤]15%, DPT[≤]10%. Effective Vaccine Management reports were reviewed to summarise reported reasons for wastage. Results During 2020-2025, median national wastage was 40.6% for BCG, 25.9% for MR, 10.0% for OPV, and 9.2% for DPT. OPV wastage declined from 12.8% in 2020 to 8.0% in 2025, with a significant downward trend ({tau}b=-1.00; p=0.008). OPV and DPT wastage remained largely within their respective Uganda in-country thresholds ([≤]15% and [≤]10%) for most of the study period, while BCG generally remained below the WHO threshold ([≤]50%) and MR frequently exceeded the WHO threshold ([≤]25%) but remained within Uganda's planning threshold ([≤]40%) in most years. The proportion of districts exceeding both WHO and Uganda thresholds declined for OPV from 36.3% to 5.5% (p=0.024) and for DPT from 22.6% to 1.4% (p=0.013). Wastage was consistently higher in lower-level (Health Centre II and III) facilities, compared to hospitals. Among 50 service delivery points, reported reasons included low session attendance (66%), multi-dose vial policy non-compliance (28%), and vaccine expiry (12%). Conclusion Uganda achieved reductions in OPV wastage and district-level improvements in DPT wastage, while BCG and MR remained more variable and frequently had higher wastage. Strengthening adherence to the multi-dose vial policy and improving session planning at lower-level facilities could strengthen vaccine utilisation and forecasting.