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

Prior-guided Fusion of Multimodal Features for Change Detection from Optical-SAR Images

Multimodal change detection (MMCD) identifies changed areas in multimodal remote sensing data, demonstrating significant application value in land use monitoring and urban sustainable development. However, literature MMCD approaches exhibit limitations in both cross-modal interaction and exploiting modality-specific characteristics. This leads to insufficient modeling of fine-grained change information, thus hindering the precise detection of semantic changes. To address these problems, we propose STSF-Net, a framework designed for MMCD between optical and SAR images. STSF-Net jointly models modality-specific and spatio-temporal common features to enhance change representations. Specifically, modality-specific features are exploited to capture genuine semantic change signals, while spatio-temporal common features are embedded to suppress pseudo-changes caused by differences in imaging mechanisms. Furthermore, we introduce an optical and SAR feature fusion strategy that adaptively adjusts multimodal feature importance based on semantic priors obtained from visual foundation models. Finally, we introduce the novel Delta-SN6 dataset, the first openly-accessible multiclass MMCD benchmark consisting of very-high-resolution fully polarimetric SAR and optical images. Experimental results on Delta-SN6, BRIGHT, and Wuhan datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 3.21%, 0.87%, and 1.32% in mIoU, respectively.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Decoupled Latent Optimization of Diffusion Models for Full Waveform Inversion

arXiv:2606.14139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) recovers subsurface velocity from seismic recordings by solving a severely ill-posed, nonconvex PDE-constrained optimization. Classical regularizers stabilize the inversion but fail to reproduce realistic geological structures; recent diffusion-prior methods improve realism at the cost of a fragile trade-off between data fidelity and prior consistency. We propose Decoupled Latent Optimization (DLO), which relaxes the standard latent-optimization formulation into a quadratic-penalty objective over an auxiliary physical variable and a latent variable. The data-fidelity gradient acts in physical space, the diffusion sampler contributes only through a decoded prior sample, and the standard smoothed-velocity initialization of classical FWI is preserved. On the OpenFWI benchmark, DLO outperforms classical regularizers and existing diffusion-based methods under clean, noisy, and missing-trace acquisitions. The prior, trained on 70*70 OpenFWI models, transfers directly to the Marmousi and Overthrust benchmarks, where DLO recovers intricate fault structures and remains robust to initialization smoothing and measurement noise.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Ricci flow for the Bures–Helstrom qubit metric

arXiv:2606.19493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Bures–Helstrom metric is the minimal monotone Riemannian metric on the state space of a qubit. With the quantum Fisher normalization used here, it identifies the Bloch ball with a geodesic hemisphere of the unit round three–sphere. We describe its Ricci flow explicitly. In a general rotationally symmetric gauge the flow is a coupled system for the radial lapse and warping factor; a single scalar equation appears only after a Hamilton–DeTurck gauge choice. In the corresponding moving DeTurck frame the squared warping function $\Psi=\Phi^2$ satisfies the linear forced heat equation \begin{equation*} D_t\Psi=\Psi_{ss}-2, \end{equation*} while the fixed-lapse coordinate form contains the associated transport term. Since the Bures–Helstrom metric is Einstein, the geometric flow itself is the homothetic shrinker \begin{equation*} g(t)=(1-4t)g_{\mathrm{BH}}, \end{equation*} with scalar curvature $6/(1-4t)$ and extinction time $T=1/4$. Thus the metric remains inside the monotone cone for all $t

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

Price of metric universality in vector quantization is at most 0.11 bit

arXiv:2602.05790v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fast computation of a matrix product $W^\top X$ is a workhorse of modern LLMs. To make their deployment more efficient, a popular approach is that of using a low-precision approximation $\widehat W$ in place of true $W$ (``weight-only quantization''). Information theory demonstrates that an optimal algorithm for reducing precision of $W$ depends on the (second order) statistics of $X$ and requires a careful alignment of vector quantization codebook with PCA directions of $X$ (a process known as ``waterfilling allocation''). Dependence of the codebook on statistics of $X$, however, is highly impractical. This paper proves that there exist a universal codebook that is simultaneously near-optimal for all possible statistics of $X$, in the sense of being at least as good as an $X$-adapted waterfilling codebook with rate reduced by 0.11 bit per dimension in the case when $W$ is Gaussian. Such universal codebook would be an ideal candidate for the low-precision storage format, a topic of active modern research, but alas the existence proof is non-constructive. Equivalently, our result shows existence of a net in $\mathbb{R}^n$ that is a nearly-optimal covering of a sphere simultaneously with respect to all Hilbert norms.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

EFIQA: Explainable Fundus Image Quality Assessment via Anatomical Priors

arXiv:2606.20108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image quality control is vital for a wide range of downstream applications. Deep learning-based image quality assessment methods typically train classifiers on dataset-specific quality labels, inheriting two limitations: (1) generalization is tied to the labeling criteria of the training set and (2) these methods cannot provide spatial feedback on where the quality is degraded, lacking explainability. In this work, we propose EFIQA, a framework that requires no quality-related supervision and produces spatial quality maps by design. Rather than learning ``what is degradation" from human-annotated labels, EFIQA learns ``what should be there" by leveraging anatomical priors. For fundus photography, we instantiate this as a two-stage approach, by first training an unsupervised anomaly detector via masked anatomical inpainting to identify regions of missing vasculature, and then distilling this prior knowledge into a shallow adapter mapping features of a frozen foundation model to precise quality maps. External-dataset evaluation demonstrates that this label-free approach with minimal adaptation achieves better performance and explainability compared with supervised methods across benchmarks with different quality criteria, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

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

A tree-free approach to 3D Yang-Mills Langevin dynamic. Analytic estimates and the existence of a model for a regularity structure

arXiv:2605.14616v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using the multi-index approach to regularity structures due to F. Otto et al., we construct a regularity structure and a model for it associated to the stochastic Langevin equation for the 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills functional. For the model we also obtain global stochastic and global pointwise weighted Besov type estimates which hold almost surely. The model is defined as a limit of a sequence of smooth models introduced with the help of a mollified noise. When the mollification is removed the sequence converges in a certain topology defined with the help of the stochastic estimates. To obtain these results we develop the multi-index approach for systems of equations with vector-valued white noises. This project is motivated by the problem for constructing 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills measure and by the earlier results of the author on the related problem of canonical quantization of the Yang-Mills field on the Minkowski space.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Genome-wide colocalization of body fat distribution GWAS and subcutaneous adipose eQTLs identifies SNX10, DGKQ, and CBX3 as candidate causal genes for cardiometabolic disease

Authors:

Background: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified hundreds of loci associated with body fat distribution, yet the causal genes and regulatory mechanisms through which these variants exert their effects remain largely unknown. Expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) colocalization provides a powerful framework for identifying genes whose expression is genetically coregulated with complex traits. Methods: We performed a genome-wide colocalization analysis integrating waist-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (WHRadjBMI) GWAS summary statistics from 694,649 individuals (Pulit et al., 2019) with subcutaneous adipose tissue eQTLs from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Project v8 (N = 581 donors). GWAS coordinates were lifted from GRCh37 to GRCh38 to enable direct alignment with GTEx data. We incorporated CAVIAR fine-mapping results to overcome the limitation of FDR-significant eQTL filtering. Colocalization was assessed using the approximate Bayes factor framework (coloc.abf) across 335 independent genome-wide significant loci. Results: Of 2,897 locus-gene pairs tested, 489 (16.9%) showed strong colocalization (PP.H4 > 0.8) and 618 (21.3%) showed moderate evidence (PP.H4 > 0.5). The strongest colocalization was observed for SNX10 (sorting nexin 10; PP.H4 = 1.000), a recently characterized regulator of adipocyte differentiation and female-specific diet-induced obesity. Other top hits included DGKQ (diacylglycerol kinase theta; PP.H4 = 0.9999999), an emerging pharmacological target for insulin resistance, and CBX3 (chromobox 3; PP.H4 = 0.9999974), an epigenetic regulator linked to cardiovascular disease. Established adiposity genes including GRB14 (PP.H4 = 0.681) and KLF14 (PP.H4 = 0.590) were recovered, validating our approach. Several loci exhibited extensive allelic heterogeneity, with 50 genes colocalizing at a single chromosome 3 locus. Conclusions: Our analysis provides a comprehensive map of adipose tissue gene regulatory mechanisms underlying genetic risk for body fat distribution. The identification of SNX10, DGKQ, and CBX3 as high-confidence candidate causal genes advances the translation of GWAS associations into mechanistic understanding and therapeutic targets for obesity-related cardiometabolic disease.

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

Low-Rank Tensor Completion Based on Fractional Regularization with Ky Fan p-k Norm

This paper addresses low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) by proposing a novel nonconvex surrogate, namely the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Ky Fan p-k norm (TNPK), to accurately approximate the tensor tubal rank. The TNPK possesses appealing properties, including scale invariance, parameter flexibility, and the existence of closed-form solutions under specific choices of p and k. With specific parameter settings of p and k, it reduces to the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Ky Fan k norm (TNK) or the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Frobenius norm (TNF). We construct a LRTC model and, under the tensor null space property (NSP), prove that low-rank tensors are local minimizers of the proposed model. Moreover, we derive the proximal operator of the Ky Fan p-k inverse-norm and further develop an efficient alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm with guaranteed subsequential convergence under mild conditions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the superior performance of our method against state-of-the-art competitors.

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

From Digital to Physical: Digital Agents as Autonomous Coaches for Physical Intelligence

arXiv:2601.21570v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The field of Embodied AI is witnessing a rapid evolution toward general-purpose robotic systems, fueled by high-fidelity simulation and large-scale data collection. However, this scaling capability remains severely bottlenecked by a reliance on labor-intensive manual oversight from intricate reward shaping to hyperparameter tuning across heterogeneous backends. Inspired by LLMs' success in software automation and science discovery, we introduce \textsc{EmboCoach-Bench}, a benchmark evaluating the capacity of LLM agents to autonomously engineer embodied policies. Spanning 32 expert-curated RL and IL tasks, our framework posits executable code as the universal interface. We move beyond static generation to assess a dynamic closed-loop workflow, where agents leverage environment feedback to iteratively draft, debug, and optimize solutions, spanning improvements from physics-informed reward design to policy architectures such as diffusion policies. Extensive evaluations yield three critical insights: (1) autonomous agents can qualitatively surpass human-engineered baselines by 26.5\% in average success rate; (2) agentic workflow with environment feedback effectively strengthens policy development and substantially narrows the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models; and (3) agents exhibit self-correction capabilities for pathological engineering cases, successfully resurrecting task performance from near-total failures through iterative simulation-in-the-loop debugging. Ultimately, this work establishes a foundation for self-evolving embodied intelligence, accelerating the paradigm shift from labor-intensive manual tuning to scalable, autonomous engineering in embodied AI field.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-20

EpiLink: a simulation-based compatibility model for genomic transmission clustering in infectious disease surveillance

Identifying recently linked infections from pathogen genome sequences is central to infectious disease surveillance, yet many clustering approaches rely on fixed genetic distance thresholds whose relationship to transmission is often unclear. This limitation is especially important in rapidly growing outbreaks and superspreading events, where many cases may be sampled close together in time and share little genetic variation, making true transmission links difficult to distinguish from other closely related infections. Supervised models can improve discrimination, but they require labelled transmission data that are rarely available during outbreak response. We developed EpiLink, a threshold-free method that estimates whether two cases are compatible with recent transmission. Here, compatibility means how well the observed genetic distance and sampling-time difference between two cases fit what would be expected if they were linked by defined recent transmission scenarios. EpiLink simulates plausible recent transmission histories while accounting for uncertainty in infection timing, testing delay, and mutation accumulation, then assigns higher scores to pairs whose observed differences are typical of those simulations. EpiLink was evaluated using both synthetic and empirical SARS-CoV-2 outbreak data from the 2020 Boston epidemic. Two EpiLink variants were compared to a logistic regression model trained on labelled transmission data. One EpiLink variant assumed deterministic mutation accumulation, with genetic differences proportional to elapsed evolutionary time; the other accounted for stochasticity by sampling mutation counts from a Poisson distribution. The logistic regression model performed better at distinguishing linked from unlinked pairs, but EpiLink achieved comparable clustering accuracy. In the Boston data, EpiLink recovered clusters enriched for documented conference and skilled nursing facility outbreaks. EpiLink thus provides an interpretable, simulation-based approach for identifying recent transmission clusters when fixed thresholds are difficult to justify and labelled transmission data are unavailable.

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

Possible or Definite? A Benchmark for Evaluating Diagnostic Uncertainty Preservation in Clinical Text

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for clinical text tasks such as summarization and revision. While most studies evaluate the fluency and coherence of LLM-generated text, whether LLMs correctly preserve diagnostic uncertainty remains underexplored. In clinical practice, phrases such as ``possible pneumonia'' communicate the strength of available evidence and directly guide decisions about follow-up testing and treatment. Altering these uncertainty expressions can change the clinical meaning entirely. In this paper, we systematically evaluated this problem in two steps. First, we constructed a benchmark of 1,200 clinical documents with 9,184 uncertainty annotations across five levels. Second, we evaluated three LLMs on this benchmark. Our results show that (1) LLMs preserve the original uncertainty cues poorly, often less than half the time; (2) LLMs struggle with nuanced distinctions between adjacent levels. This work reveals a failure mode not captured by standard evaluation metrics and provides implications for the safe deployment of LLMs in clinical workflows.

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

Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits

arXiv:2602.17315v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits (FMAB) to model sequential decision-making in environments with changing action availability, where accessibility of the next action is restricted to a subset dependent on the agent's current choice. We formalize these constraints through stochastically evolving graphs where actions are limited to local neighborhoods. This mobility-constrained structure imposes a dual challenge: the statistical requirement of information acquisition and the physical overhead of navigation. We analyze FMAB under i.i.d. Erdős–R'enyi and Edge-Markovian process, proposing a two-phase lazy random walk algorithm for robust exploration. We establish high-probability sublinear regret bounds and prove near-optimality via a matching information-theoretic lower bound. Our results characterize the intrinsic cost of learning under local-move constraints, complemented by a robotic disaster-response simulation.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

InnoEval: On Research Idea Evaluation as a Knowledge-Grounded, Multi-Perspective Reasoning Problem

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models has catalyzed a surge in scientific idea production, yet this leap has not been accompanied by a matching advance in idea evaluation. The fundamental nature of scientific evaluation needs knowledgeable grounding, collective deliberation, and multi-criteria decision-making. However, existing idea evaluation methods often suffer from narrow knowledge horizons, flattened evaluation dimensions, and the inherent bias in LLM-as-a-Judge. To address these, we regard idea evaluation as a knowledge-grounded, multi-perspective reasoning problem and introduce InnoEval, a deep innovation evaluation framework designed to emulate human-level idea assessment. We apply a heterogeneous deep knowledge search engine that retrieves and grounds dynamic evidence from diverse online sources. We further achieve review consensus with an innovation review board containing reviewers with distinct academic backgrounds, enabling a multi-dimensional decoupled evaluation across multiple metrics. We construct comprehensive datasets derived from authoritative peer-reviewed submissions to benchmark InnoEval. Experiments demonstrate that InnoEval can consistently outperform baselines in point-wise, pair-wise, and group-wise evaluation tasks, exhibiting judgment patterns and consensus highly aligned with human experts.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum sensing through bosonic-fermionic Bell-state transitions in two-photon interference

arXiv:2606.14408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference has become a central resource for quantum sensing and metrology owing to its sensitivity to temporal delay and photon indistinguishability. However, existing HOM-based sensing schemes generally rely on inserting a sample into one arm of the interferometer, making the measurement vulnerable to optical loss, alignment instability, and bandwidth-dependent distortion of the interference profile. Here, we demonstrate a symmetry-controlled quantum sensing scheme based on continuous transitions between symmetric (bosonic-like) and antisymmetric (fermionic-like) Bell states in two-photon interference. By imprinting a geometric phase onto the classical pump beam and transferring it to polarization-entangled photons generated via spontaneous parametric down-conversion, we coherently tune the exchange symmetry of the entangled state without altering the temporal or spectral indistinguishability of the photons. The HOM response evolves continuously from bunching to antibunching with a sine square phase dependence, producing a coincidence modulation of approximately 10 * 10^4 counts s^-1 counts/s. In contrast to conventional HOM sensing, the phase-modulation linewidth remains fixed at pi/2, independent of photon bandwidth. Using a birefringent crystal placed directly in the pump beam, we measure thermo-dispersive birefringence with a resolution of the order of 10^{-6} over a broad temperature range. Our results establish exchange symmetry as a controllable resource for robust quantum sensing and symmetry-engineered photonic quantum information processing.

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

From Sorting Algorithms to Scalable Kernels: Bayesian Optimization in High-Dimensional Permutation Spaces

arXiv:2507.13263v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a powerful tool for black-box optimization, but its application to high-dimensional permutation spaces is severely limited by the challenge of defining scalable representations. The current state-of-the-art BO approach for permutation spaces relies on an exhaustive $\Omega(n^2)$ pairwise comparison, inducing a dense representation that is impractical for large-scale permutations. To break this barrier, we introduce a novel framework for generating efficient permutation representations via kernel functions derived from sorting algorithms. Within this framework, the Mallows kernel can be viewed as a special instance derived from enumeration sort. Further, we introduce the Merge Kernel , which leverages the divide-and-conquer structure of merge sort to produce a compact, $\Theta(n\log n)$ to achieve the lowest possible complexity with no information loss and effectively capture permutation structure. Our central thesis is that the Merge Kernel performs competitively with the Mallows kernel in low-dimensional settings, but significantly outperforms it in both optimization performance and computational efficiency as the dimension $n$ grows. Extensive evaluations on various permutation optimization benchmarks confirm our hypothesis, demonstrating that the Merge Kernel provides a scalable and more effective solution for Bayesian optimization in high-dimensional permutation spaces, thereby unlocking the potential for tackling previously intractable problems such as large-scale feature ordering and combinatorial neural architecture search.

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

Information Leakage Detection through Approximate Bayes-optimal Prediction

arXiv:2401.14283v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In today's data-driven world, the proliferation of publicly available information raises security concerns due to the information leakage (IL) problem. IL involves unintentionally exposing sensitive information to unauthorized parties via observable system information. Conventional statistical approaches rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between observable and secret information for detecting ILs, face challenges of the curse of dimensionality, convergence, computational complexity, and MI misestimation. Though effective, emerging supervised machine learning based approaches to detect ILs are limited to binary system sensitive information and lack a comprehensive framework. To address these limitations, we establish a theoretical framework using statistical learning theory and information theory to quantify and detect IL accurately. Using automated machine learning, we demonstrate that MI can be accurately estimated by approximating the typically unknown Bayes predictor's log-loss and accuracy. Based on this, we show how MI can effectively be estimated to detect ILs. Our method performs superior to state-of-the-art baselines in an empirical study considering synthetic and real-world OpenSSL TLS server datasets.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Actionable Interpretability Must Be Defined in Terms of Symmetries

arXiv:2601.12913v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper argues that interpretability research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamentally ill-posed as existing definitions of interpretability fail to describe how interpretability can be formally tested or designed for. We posit that actionable definitions of interpretability must be formulated in terms of *symmetries* that inform model design and lead to testable conditions. Under a probabilistic view, we hypothesise that four symmetries (inference equivariance, information invariance, concept-closure invariance, and structural invariance) suffice to (i) formalise interpretable models as a subclass of probabilistic models, (ii) yield a unified formulation of interpretable inference (e.g., alignment, interventions, and counterfactuals) as a form of Bayesian inversion, and (iii) provide a formal framework to verify compliance with safety standards and regulations.

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

Where Computation Lives Inside TabPFN: Causal Localisation of Attention Head Function

arXiv:2606.12917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the first causal mechanistic analysis of a tabular foundation model, investigating how TabPFN 2.5's feature wise attention heads distribute computation across layers. Using activation patching, ablation, and attention entropy across two synthetic regression datasets, we find clear temporal specialisation: one head's causal necessity dominates that of the others by 2 to 5 times at peak layer, with its dominant layer shifting across tasks of different complexity, while the remaining heads exhibit symmetric late layer profiles. Attention entropy and patching provide convergent evidence for the computationally active layers of the dominant head. We additionally investigate inference time steerability via contrastive activation steering, which fails to transfer across samples. We attribute this result to TabPFN's in context learning mechanism, which encodes task structure through context dependent attention rather than the stable parametric directions that make steering tractable in language models.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning from almost nothing: How neural networks survive heavy input corruption

arXiv:2606.11319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from imperfect data is a central theme in machine learning, connecting practical questions of robustness to fundamental questions of learnability. Here we examine attribute noise: learning from corrupted inputs while keeping the labels intact, a setting that has received considerably less analytical attention than its label-noise counterpart. We consider two types of corruption models: additive noise and replacement noise. Through experiments with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) on corrupted classification datasets, we find that neural networks remain robust, maintaining well-above-chance accuracy even when inputs are >90% corrupted – far beyond human recognition. To understand this robustness, we analyze infinite-width networks in the heavy-corruption regime using a mean-field-inspired approach and derive a leading-order decision rule for the classification outcome: the network implements a prototype rule, the nearest-class-mean, assigning each test point to the class whose training-set average it most closely resembles. This leading-order decision rule is universal across a broad range of MLP architectures, holding for any depth, as well as a wide class of activation functions and noise distributions. The same centroid mechanism closely matches finite-width network behavior in our experiments and provides an interpretable and analytically tractable account of why learning can succeed even when individual training examples carry almost no signal.

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

Tool-IQA: Augmenting Image Quality Assessment with Simple Tools

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been increasingly adopted for Image Quality Assessment (IQA). However, current methods typically employ a static one-shot scoring paradigm, despite the fact that humans assess image quality through dynamic visual inspection, e.g., selectively adjusting views to verify details and subtle artifacts. Specifically, relying solely on a single-pass observation introduces two primary limitations: first, perceiving the image only at a global scale restricts the assessment of finer local details; second, the original intensity distribution of the image may overwhelm the visibility, leading to insufficient inspection of image quality. To address these issues, we propose Tool-IQA, shifting the assessment mechanism from passive scoring to a tool-augmented workflow. In particular, we equip VLMs with simple yet effective view tools: a Magnifier to inspect local details, and a Gamma Corrector to uncover visibility and hidden artifacts. The assessment follows a structured pipeline that consists of an initial observation with rubric notes, a tool-augmented in-depth inspection, and a final quantification for calibrated quality score. Furthermore, to ensure efficient and purposeful tool callings, we introduce a batch-aware training strategy to reward tool interactions that can yield positive contributions rather than simply encouraging usage. Experiments on a variety of IQA benchmarks demonstrate that, with effective tool calling and calibrated assessment, our proposed Tool-IQA significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, e.g., it achieves a PLCC of 0.854 on the challenging CLIVE dataset.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RaLMPH: Reliability-aware Learning for Multi-Pathologist Harmonization in Whole-Slide Image Classification

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a standard paradigm for Whole-Slide Image (WSI) analysis and has achieved strong results in computational pathology. However, most MIL pipelines assume a single "gold" label per slide, which conflicts with clinical practice where substantial inter-pathologist variability is common. Existing multi-annotator learning and label-refinement methods typically estimate global annotator reliability or rely on single-instance assumptions, making them poorly suited to MIL and to localized diagnostic contexts where experts disagree. We propose RaLMPH (Reliability-aware Learning for Multi-Pathologist Harmonization), a MIL-based label reconciliation framework for WSIs annotated by multiple pathologists. RaLMPH introduces a reliability field that jointly models (i) local neighborhood structure in WSI feature space and (ii) expert uncertainty (entropy), enabling per-sample identification of trustworthy reference neighborhoods. Leveraging this field, RaLMPH performs sample-wise local annotator ranking to select reliable opinions per slide and applies an adaptive gating mechanism to fuse labels conditioned on local reliability. Experiments on a clinical WSI dataset with labels from six pathologists, as well as controlled simulated benchmarks, show that RaLMPH consistently outperforms existing approaches. Further analyses clarify how our reliability-aware mechanism improves label reconciliation and downstream MIL performance.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

KATANA: A Fast, Low-Power Mapping of Kalman Filters onto Edge NPUs for Real-Time Tracking

arXiv:2606.14992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State estimation is the closed-loop core of every real-time tracking system, from radar surveillance and counter-UAV defense to autonomous driving and robotics. These deployments run on edge platforms, where defense systems mount on vehicles and drones, and civilian pipelines live on cars and handheld devices. Here, every additional watt of compute erodes mission duration or operational range. Two hard constraints follow: each new measurement must be fused before the next control cycle, and the total compute must fit within a strict battery and thermal power envelope. The Linear and Extended Kalman Filters (LKF, EKF) are dominant estimators on these systems, but today they execute almost exclusively on CPUs, which serialize multi-object tracking (MOT) updates, or on custom FPGA/ASIC accelerators that lengthen design cycles. Contemporary AI-PC SoCs, like the Intel Core Ultra Series 1 and 2, integrate a low-power, data-parallel Neural Processing Unit (NPU). We therefore ask whether the Kalman filter can be mapped onto this existing matrix engine to meet real-time and low-power budgets simultaneously, avoiding a dedicated accelerator and keeping the CPU and GPU free for primary workloads. We present KATANA, an NPU-aware optimization framework delivering the first end-to-end mapping of the LKF and EKF onto a commercial NPU, alongside a cross-platform characterization on shipping AI-PC silicon. KATANA applies three algebraic graph rewrites: subtract-to-add reformulation via a precomputed negative-projection matrix H_neg, static-shape tensor fusion, and block-diagonal batched parallelization, ensuring 100% of operations execute on the DPU matrix engine. On the Series 2, the optimized batched EKF reaches 223.35 FPS at 13.43 W active power, and the LKF reaches 408.73 FPS at 14.05 W, delivering up to a 97.9% reduction in dynamic energy versus the CPU implementation.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Testing For Distribution Shifts with Conditional Conformal Test Martingales

arXiv:2602.13848v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a sequential test for detecting arbitrary distribution shifts that allows conformal test martingales (CTMs) to work under a fixed, reference-conditional setting. Existing CTM detectors construct test martingales by continually growing a reference set with each incoming sample, using it to assess how atypical the new sample is relative to past observations. While this design yields anytime-valid type-I error control, it suffers from test-time contamination: after a change, post-shift observations enter the reference set and dilute the evidence for distribution shift, increasing detection delay and reducing power. In contrast, our method avoids contamination by design by comparing each new sample to a fixed null reference dataset. Our main technical contribution is a robust martingale construction that remains valid conditional on the null reference data, achieved by explicitly accounting for the estimation error in the reference distribution induced by the finite reference set. This yields anytime-valid type-I error control together with guarantees of asymptotic power one and bounded expected detection delay. Empirically, our method detects shifts faster than standard CTMs, providing a powerful and reliable distribution-shift detector.

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

Contrastive Geometric Learning Unlocks Unified Structure- and Ligand-Based Drug Design

arXiv:2601.09693v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Structure-based and ligand-based computational drug design have traditionally relied on disjoint data sources and modeling assumptions, limiting their joint use at scale. In this work, we introduce Contrastive Geometric Learning for Unified Computational Drug Design (ConGLUDe), a single contrastive geometric model that unifies structure- and ligand-based training. ConGLUDe couples a geometric protein encoder that produces whole-protein representations and implicit embeddings of predicted binding sites with a fast ligand encoder, removing the need for predefined pockets. By aligning ligands with both global protein representations and multiple candidate binding sites through contrastive learning, ConGLUDe supports ligand-conditioned pocket prediction in addition to virtual screening and target fishing, while being trained jointly on protein-ligand complexes and large-scale bioactivity data. Across diverse benchmarks, ConGLUDe achieves competitive zero-shot virtual screening performance, substantially outperforms existing methods on a challenging target fishing task, and demonstrates state-of-the-art ligand-conditioned pocket selection. These results highlight the advantages of unified structure-ligand training and position ConGLUDe as a step toward general-purpose foundation models for drug discovery.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Geometry-Aware Superpixel Graph Transformer with Metadata for Skin Lesion Classification

Automated skin cancer classification from dermoscopic images remains challenging due to heterogeneous lesion structure, strong intra-class variability, and subtle visual differences between benign and malignant cases. Existing CNN/ViT pipelines typically rely on global or patch-level features and often combine patient metadata via late fusion, which limits spatially grounded multimodal reasoning. We present a novel region-based graph learning framework that explicitly models lesions as graphs of spatially coherent superpixel regions represented as frozen CNN features. To capture fine-grained lesion arrangements, we encode inter-regional geometry as edge attributes and introduce a dedicated metadata context node connected to all regions, providing structured integration of demographic/clinical variables within the same relational space. Node representations are updated using our edge-aware graph transformer followed by attention-driven propagation, and a final graph-level embedding for benign-malignant classification. Experiments on four public benchmarks demonstrate that explicit region-level relational modeling and graph-native multimodal fusion yield consistent gains over the state-of-the-art. Consequently, we establish a new graph-centric perspective in which CNN features are modeled as relational nodes and improved through contextual integration, yielding more expressive and robust classifications.