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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum mechanics in configuration space in context

Authors:
Arwa Bukhari↗Margherita Moro↗Max Davies↗Alastair Wilson↗Almut Beige↗

arXiv:2606.17622v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To enhance the way in which wave-particle duality is implemented in the modelling of quantum mechanical systems, Bukhari et al. [New J. Phys. 27, 084501 (2025)] recently introduced an alternative approach to quantum mechanics, namely quantum mechanics in configuration space. This formalism is based on a physically motivated quantisation of Newtonian mechanics and promotes the classical position-velocity states (x,v) to pairwise distinguishable quantum states. The resulting |x,v> states form the basis of the Hilbert space of individual quantum mechanical particles and evolve along classical trajectories. In this paper, we consider the modelling of a mechanical particle in free space and put quantum mechanics in configuration space into context. It is shown that this formalism increases the continuity between quantum and classical mechanics by avoiding a conceptual inconsistency associated with the definition of momentum in canonical quantisation. In addition, we emphasise that standard quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics in configuration space are based on two distinct formulations of classical mechanics.

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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Estimating COVID-19 Cumulative Incidence from Seroprevalence Surveys accounting for Time-Varying Seroreversion: A Fully Bayesian Methodology

Authors:
Owusu-Boaitey↗Meyer↗M. J↗Herrera-Esposito↗Bottcher↗Lukz↗Cook↗Stoto↗M. A↗Kraemer↗J. D↗

Seroprevalence surveys reveal the extent of humoral immunity against pathogens such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and under some circumstances represent cumulative incidence of prior infection. However, antibody waning - or seroreversion - biases these estimates by reducing assay sensitivity in a time-varying manner. Because assay sensitivity decays over time, naively using serosurveys can substantially bias estimates of SARS-CoV-2 cumulative incidence and fatality rates. The Bayesian assay-specific, time-varying sensitivity adjustment developed in this paper can reliably correct for this bias and account for the delay between infection and serosurvey. In seroprevalence studies conducted in the United States in 2020, adjusting for time-varying sensitivity increased cumulative incidence by up to 1.4-fold, with an adjustment of 1.08 for a national study. Our estimates contrast with a previously published 2-fold adjustment that did not account for assay design. This suggests that previous analyses overestimated cumulative incidence by applying seroreversion corrections that did not account for assay-specific effects, or underestimated cumulative incidence by not applying seroreversion corrections. These biases imply fatality rate underestimation and overestimation, respectively. Our model provides a framework for design-specific time-varying sensitivity corrections in seroprevalence surveys for other pathogens.

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

Structural Energy Guidance for View-Consistent Text-to-3D Generation

Authors:
Qing Zhang↗Jinguang Tong↗Jing Zhang↗Jie Hong↗Xuesong Li↗

Text-to-3D generation based on diffusion models often suffers from the Janus problem, leading to inconsistent geometry across viewpoints. This work identifies viewpoint bias in 2D diffusion priors as the main cause and proposes Structural Energy-Guided Sampling (SEGS), a training-free and plug-and-play framework to improve multi-view consistency. SEGS constructs a structural energy in the PCA subspace of U-Net features and injects its gradient into the denoising process. It can be easily integrated into SDS/VSD pipelines without retraining. Experiments show that SEGS reduces the Janus Rate by about 10% on average and improves View-CS scores across multiple baselines, including DreamFusion, Magic3D, and LucidDreamer. This method effectively alleviates viewpoint artifacts while preserving appearance fidelity, providing a flexible solution for high-quality text-to-3D content generation.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

When Language Overwrites Vision: Over-Alignment and Geometric Debiasing in Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Harshvardhan Saini↗Samyak Jha↗Yiming Tang↗Dianbo Liu↗

arXiv:2605.08245v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly power high-stakes applications, from medical imaging to autonomous systems, yet they routinely hallucinate, confidently describing content not present in the input. We investigate the root causes of these failure modes with a mechanistic analysis focusing on the decoder-based VLMs. We trace these failure modes to a geometric over-alignment: to bridge the modality gap required by attention mechanisms, decoder-based VLMs over-align visual embeddings with the text manifold, injecting a statistical linguistic bias that systematically overshadows fine-grained visual evidence. While prior work either aggressively closes this gap or suppresses hallucinations through expensive black-box decoding strategies, none addresses the underlying geometric cause. We provide the first quantitative characterization of this over-alignment, demonstrating that linguistic bias concentrates in the top principal components of a universal, dataset-agnostic text subspace. Building on this insight, we propose two complementary remedies: a training-free inference strategy and a bias-aware fine-tuning paradigm, both of which explicitly project out this subspace from visual representations. Our methods significantly reduce hallucinations across POPE, CHAIR, and AMBER benchmarks, and improve CLAIR scores on long-form captioning tasks, with the training-free variant adding no computational overhead over the base model.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

The Degeneracy Distillery

Authors:
T. Lucas Makinen↗Deaglan J. Bartlett↗Niall Jeffrey↗Benjamin D. Wandelt↗

arXiv:2606.23838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When two or more parameters or labels produce similar data, they are degenerate, or hard to distinguish. Degeneracies render both label prediction and inverse problems difficult, since both machine learning algorithms and probabilistic samplers rely on the distinguishability of data and its gradients with respect to parameters. However, identifying degeneracies in physical models or real-world datasets can be elucidating about the choice of model or the underlying process that produces the data. We present the degeneracy distillery, a method that (1) detects and (2) resolves degenerate parameter combinations (a) automatically and (b) symbolically, from parameter-data (or parameter-simulation) pairs alone, through estimation and flattening of the Fisher information matrix. By exploring the information geometry of the likelihood, we characterize degeneracies as an intrinsic property of the physical model, requiring no realised data observation. We demonstrate our approach on a range of synthetic and real-world problems, discovering symbolic coordinate transformations that identify the combinations of parameters of a model which yield independent effects on the data. The resulting coordinates flatten the Fisher information in expectation globally, in contrast to posterior-based methods that flatten only at a single point, and substantially reduce the simulation budget required for downstream neural posterior estimation. In test cases we require up to $10\times$ fewer simulations for posterior estimation at matched validation calibration whilst simultaneously gaining physical insight on the system.

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

From Nominal Intensity to Equivalent Rainfall: A Path-Based Credibility Evaluation Framework for Simulated Rainfall in Autonomous-Driving Perception Tests

Authors:
Tian Xia↗Xin Zhao↗Shaolingfeng Ye↗Junyi Chen↗

Credible simulated-rainfall conditions are essential for identifying perception-system boundaries and supporting SOTIF-oriented risk assessment in automated driving. However, closed-field tests are often described only by nominal rainfall intensity or single-point measurements, making it difficult to align simulated rain fields with real rainfall and map test results to real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a path-based credibility evaluation method for simulated rainfall in autonomous-driving perception tests. Using the drop size and velocity joint distribution of real rainfall as the reference, each candidate path is represented by path-equivalent rainfall intensity, an uncertainty band, and a path-averaged Realism of Raindrop Distribution (RRD) score. Lidar target point-cloud count and mean reflectivity are further used for perception-consistency correction, quantifying the proxy capability of each simulated-rainfall path for real-rainfall perception effects. Experiments are conducted using about 10,000 real-rainfall raindrop-spectrum samples, 728 RainSense perception samples, and 45 spatial sampling points in a 2.4 m x 7.2 m simulated-rainfall area. Results show that spatial non-uniformity remains under the same nominal condition, confirming the need for path-based evaluation. The method identifies Path IV and Path VI as preferable candidates, with results of 11.54 +/- 0.31 mm/h, RRD = 0.43, and 8.28 +/- 0.34 mm/h, RRD = 0.46, respectively. These paths show more balanced performance in rainfall-intensity stability, raindrop-spectrum realism, and perception consistency. The proposed method supports path selection, condition description, and credible interpretation of autonomous-driving perception tests under rainfall.

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

Latent Action Pretraining Through World Modeling

Authors:
Bahey Tharwat↗Yara Nasser↗Ali Abouzeid↗Ian Reid↗

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have gained popularity for learning robotic manipulation tasks that follow language instructions. State-of-the-art VLAs, such as OpenVLA and $\pi_{0}$, were trained on large-scale, manually labeled action datasets collected through teleoperation. More recent approaches, including LAPA and villa-X, introduce latent action representations that enable unsupervised pretraining on unlabeled datasets by modeling abstract visual changes between frames. Although these methods have shown strong results, their large model sizes make deployment in real-world settings challenging. In this work, we propose LAWM, a model-agnostic framework to pretrain imitation learning models in a self-supervised way, by learning latent action representations from unlabeled video data through world modeling. These videos can be sourced from robot recordings or videos of humans performing actions with everyday objects. Our framework is able to transfer learned knowledge across tasks, environments, and embodiments. It outperforms models pretrained with ground-truth robot actions and other similar pretraining methods on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world setup, while being efficient and practical for real-world settings.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Competition and Diversity in Generative AI

Authors:
Manish Raghavan↗

arXiv:2412.08610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent evidence, both in the lab and in the wild, suggests that the use of generative artificial intelligence reduces the diversity of content produced. The use of the same or similar AI models appears to lead to more homogeneous behavior. Our work begins with the observation that there is a force pushing in the opposite direction: competition. When producers compete with one another (e.g., for customers or attention), they are incentivized to create novel or unique content. We explore the impact competition has on both content diversity and overall social welfare. Through a formal game-theoretic model, we show that competitive markets select for diverse AI models, mitigating monoculture. We further show that a generative AI model that performs well in isolation (i.e., according to a benchmark) may fail to provide value in a competitive market. Our results highlight the importance of evaluating generative AI models across the breadth of their output distributions, particularly when they will be deployed in competitive environments. We validate our results empirically by using language models to play Scattergories, a word game in which players are rewarded for answers that are both correct and unique. Overall, our results suggest that homogenization due to generative AI is unlikely to persist in competitive markets, and instead, competition in downstream markets may drive diversification in AI model development.

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

Towards Provably Fair Machine Learning: Bayesian Approaches For Consistent and Transparent Predictions

Authors:
Owen O'Neill↗Fintan Costello↗

arXiv:2606.12615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: ML classifiers deployed in high-stakes domains produce predictions whose quality varies systematically across subgroups. For granular subgroups defined by intersections of multiple features, predictions are often inconsistent with the observed data: the model's outputs contradict the evidence available for that subgroup. This problem is exacerbated by regularisation, which improves aggregate performance by collapsing small subgroups into larger groups, disproportionately affecting demographic minorities. We define two requirements for consistent prediction: determinism (identical individuals receive identical predictions) and statistical consistency (we cannot reject, at significance level alpha, the hypothesis that the predictions for a subgroup were drawn from the Bayesian optimal target distribution inferred for that subgroup). From these requirements we derive the Fair Bayesian classifier, which enforces both across every group and subgroup simultaneously and abstains whenever no consistent deterministic prediction is possible. On three benchmark datasets (Adult, COMPAS, and Bank Marketing), standard classifiers produce statistically inconsistent predictions for a substantial proportion of subgroups. Our classifier achieves zero consistency error by construction while exceeding baseline accuracy and multicalibration on every dataset tested. Statistical consistency provides a principled foundation for prediction quality with direct implications for algorithmic fairness. Minority demographics are disproportionately concentrated in small subgroups, precisely where frequentist inference is least reliable; addressing this inference problem is therefore a necessary step toward fair ML. By enforcing Bayesian consistency at the finest resolution the data supports, the our classifier demonstrates that exhaustive subgroup fairness with principled abstention is achievable in practice.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Characterizing Cultural Localization in AI-Generated Stories

Authors:
Shaily Bhatt↗Supriti Vijay↗Jeremiah Milbauer↗Fernando Diaz↗

The global use of artificial intelligence has increased interest in assessing the ability to generate culturally localized content, including stories. Cultural localization in stories often occurs through either templated localization – the use of cultural markers (e.g., names, locations) in a generic narrative – or holistic localization – the variation of plots, values, and themes, in addition to cultural markers. We propose a method to measure the degree to which content was generated through templated localization. Specifically, we identify the lexical tokens that distinguish stories across nationalities and measure the similarity of the narratives that remain after removing them. In stories generated by five models on 125 topics for 193 nationalities, our method is able to detect that only a small subset (9-17%) of the vocabulary accounts for the variation across nationalities and that the narratives that remain after removing them contain repeated multi-word sequences, suggesting the presence of a shared culturally-agnostic narrative template. Finally, we characterize the cultural markers for their stereotypicality and offensiveness, finding that markers from 19 countries, mostly located in the Global South, are on average offensive.

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

Recursive Learning Without Collapse: A Weighting-Based Stabilization Framework

Authors:
Hengzhi He↗Shirong Xu↗Guang Cheng↗

arXiv:2502.18049v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent studies identified an intriguing phenomenon in recursive generative model training known as model collapse, where models trained on data generated by previous models exhibit severe performance degradation. Addressing this issue and developing more effective training strategies have become central challenges in generative model research. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon within a novel framework, where generative models are iteratively trained on a combination of newly collected real data and synthetic data from the previous training step. To develop an optimal training strategy for integrating real and synthetic data, we evaluate the performance of a weighted training scheme in various scenarios, including Gaussian distribution estimation, generalized linear models, and nonparametric estimation. We theoretically characterize the impact of the mixing proportion and weighting scheme of synthetic data on the final model's performance. Our key finding is that, across different settings, the optimal weighting scheme under different proportions of synthetic data asymptotically follows a unified expression, revealing a fundamental trade-off between leveraging synthetic data and model performance. In some cases, the optimal weight assigned to real data corresponds to the reciprocal of the golden ratio. Finally, we validate our theoretical results on extensive simulated datasets and a real tabular dataset.

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

Camera and LiDAR BEV Fusion for Cooperative 3D Object Detection on TUMTraf V2X

Authors:
Muhammad Shahbaz↗Shaurya Agarwal↗

We describe a Camera and LiDAR fusion detector developed for the TUMTraf V2X cooperative 3D object detection track of the DriveX 2026 challenge. The detector fuses three roadside cameras with a fused infrastructure-plus-vehicle point cloud in a shared bird's-eye-view space and predicts boxes through a CenterPoint-style head with a generalized IoU regression loss and an IoU quality re-ranking head. Trained on the provided train and validation splits, the model reaches a 3D mAP of 0.85 on the public Codabench test split. While iterating on the system, we observed that 44 of the 50 test frames are also present in the released train (40) and validation (4) splits with their labels. We therefore conducted two additional studies to quantify how this overlap affects the final score: (1) a finetuning run that oversamples the 44 overlapping frames, reaching 0.89 mAP, and (2) a post-processing run that replaces predictions on those frames with the released ground truth, reaching 0.99 mAP (uploaded to our Codabench account for testing but not published on the leaderboard). All three configurations and their per-class results are reported.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Giving AI a Headache: Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Computer Vision Applications

Authors:
Nicole Villavicencio-Gardu\~no↗Maksim Ekin Eren↗Milo Prisbrey↗Ben Migliori↗Michael Teti↗

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to automate a variety of real-world computer vision (CV) applications, such as autonomous vehicle control, facial recognition, and security cameras. Recent research has shown that acoustic vibration can induce real physical motion in cameras, interfering with their internal stabilization mechanisms. Because the motion falls outside the conditions the stabilization system was designed to handle, the system introduces artifacts into the frame, causing AI-based CV models to misclassify, miss targets, or hallucinate objects. Previous work used ultrasonic frequencies (>20 kHz) to perform short-range attacks, which limits them to short distances due to the attenuation exhibited by high frequencies. In this work, we investigate acoustic attacks using lower frequencies in the audible range (

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Causal Inference with Generative Artificial Intelligence: Application to Texts as Treatments

Authors:
Kosuke Imai↗Kentaro Nakamura↗

In this paper, we demonstrate how to enhance the validity of causal inference with unstructured high-dimensional treatments like texts, by leveraging the power of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Specifically, we propose to use a deep generative model such as large language models (LLMs) to efficiently generate treatments and use their internal representation for subsequent causal effect estimation. We show that the knowledge of this true internal representation helps disentangle the treatment features of interest, such as specific sentiments and certain topics, from other possibly unknown confounding features. Unlike existing methods, the proposed GenAI-Powered Inference (GPI) methodology eliminates the need to learn causal representation from the data, and hence produces more accurate and efficient estimates. We formally establish the conditions required for the nonparametric identification of the average treatment effect, propose an estimation strategy that avoids the violation of the overlap assumption, and derive the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator through the application of double machine learning. Finally, using an instrumental variables approach, we extend the proposed GPI methodology to the settings in which the treatment feature is based on human perception. The GPI is also applicable to text reuse where an LLM is used to regenerate existing texts. We conduct simulation and empirical studies, using the generated text data from an open-source LLM, Llama 3, to illustrate the advantages of our estimator over state-of-the-art causal representation learning algorithms.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

From Argument Components to Graphs: A Multi-Agent Debate with Confidence Gating for Argument Relations

Authors:
Jakub B\k{a}ba↗Jaros{\l}aw A. Chudziak↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly assessed and utilized in the field of Argument Mining (AM), thanks to their strong general reasoning capabilities. However, standard training-free models often miss sophisticated details, specifically in contexts where two parts of the text have to be analyzed together. Furthermore, self-correction mechanisms tend to reinforce initial hallucinations in reasoning. Overcoming these limitations typically requires expensive, domain-specific supervised fine-tuning. Recent work has shown that a multi-agent paradigm can address such weaknesses for the component classification task through dialectical refinement with a Proponent-Opponent-Judge architecture, setting a promising direction for training-free approaches in the field. In this paper, we extend and evaluate this framework on the Argument Relation Identification and Classification (ARIC) task, reformulating it as a debate over component pairs. Besides that, we introduce a confidence gating mechanism that enables debating only on the uncertain cases and accepting the initial prediction when confidence is high. On the UKP Argument Annotated Essays v2 corpus, we demonstrate that the selective debate achieves the highest Macro F1 among all training-free methods, while debate over all samples degrades performance below that of one of the baselines. All generative approaches also outperform fine-tuned RoBERTa models on Macro F1, suggesting that the under-representation of the Attack class was more damaging to supervised fine-tuning than to inference-only models. Additionally, our framework produces human-readable debate transcripts, offering interpretability absent from both single-agent and supervised classifiers.

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

Geometry-Instructed Video Editing

Authors:
Chirui Chang↗Xiaoyang Lyu↗Yi-Hua Huang↗Haoru Tan↗Shizhen Zhao↗Yikang Ding↗Jianmin Bao↗Xin Tao↗Pengfei Wan↗Xiaojuan Qi↗

Object-level geometric edits, including translating, rotating, scaling, duplicating, or removing an object, are routine operations in digital content creation (DCC) workflows, yet they remain unreliable in generative video editing. The key challenge lies in specifying the target object's 3D state change unambiguously across viewpoint and time, while consistently updating geometry-dependent secondary effects such as shadows and reflections. We introduce GIVE, a geometry-instructed video editing framework that represents edits through a unified object-state formulation. Two video-aligned geometry streams describe the target object before and after editing: a depth-box encoding coarse 3D placement and extent, and an orientation-box providing an appearance-agnostic orientation cue. Together, these streams provide a compact pre/post geometric specification for object-state transitions. To provide paired supervision for learning these edits, we build a scalable graphics-engine pipeline that executes object-level edit programs and renders controlled before/after pairs, isolating the intended geometric edit while keeping secondary effects consistent with the transformation. Experimental results demonstrate that GIVE produces faithful geometric edits with temporal coherence and consistent secondary effects across operators in a unified framework, and shows promising transfer to in-the-wild videos. Project page: https://geometry-instructed-video-editing.github.io/give/

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

Natural-Language Temporal Grounding in Hour-Long Videos is a Search Problem: A Benchmark and Empirical Decomposition

Authors:
Sukmin Seo↗Geewook Kim↗

Temporal grounding–returning the interval $[t_s, t_e]$ for a natural-language query over a video–is the language interface to long-form video, yet has been studied on short videos; the dynamics of hour-scale natural-language grounding remain underexplored. We take the position that at hour-scale, the binding constraint is search, not recognition: Video-LLMs are bottlenecked not by localizing a nearby event, but–given a natural-language query–by searching for the relevant region of a long video. To test this, we release ExtremeWhenBench, the first open hour-scale grounding benchmark (2,273 queries over 194 videos, mean 75.7 min, max 9 hr) with an open-form query distribution. Every open Video-LLM collapses while a frame-level retrieval baseline outperforms them; a failure taxonomy attributes 85% of failures to search; and a retrieve-then-ground hybrid recovers 6.7x over the monolithic Video-LLM–mirroring retrieve-then-read in open-domain QA.

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

Evaluating LLM Usage for Efficient and Explainable Numerical and Classified Implicit Sentiment Analysis of Product Desirability

Authors:
Sherri Weitl-Harms↗John Hastings↗

Qualitative product feedback can reveal nuanced user experiences, but its implicit sentiment is difficult to measure. This paper presents a scalable and interpretable framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to quantify product desirability from such data. Using two Product Desirability Toolkit (PDT) datasets from ZORQ and CARMA comprising 106 respondent term groupings with gold-standard human annotation, zero-shot continuous numerical sentiment scoring and categorical sentiment classification are evaluated without relying on explicit review scores. Across the datasets, LLMs generated numerical sentiment scores directly from qualitative responses and closely matched expert labels, achieving Pearson correlations up to 0.97 and classification accuracy up to 94%. LLMs maintained robustness even when handling data presented in multiple forms and consistently expressed high confidence. In contrast, lexicon-based and transformer baselines did not produce statistically significant results. Among the models tested, GPT-4o-mini achieved performance comparable to larger models at 94% lower cost, supporting scalable deployment. The framework also incorporates model confidence ratings and human-readable rationale explanations (xAI), improving interpretability, transparency, and trust while supporting practical use in product satisfaction assessment. In general, using the PDT tool as a survey method along with a cost efficient LLM for sentiment analysis has the potential to provide for product evaluation with results that are rich in terms of sentiment scores (both numerical and classified sentiment) and in terms of the high-level user impressions of the product that can be used to identify ideas for product development and improvement, as well as marketing ideas for target audiences.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MedPCFM: Improving Medical Point Cloud Completion by Integrating Point Transformers and Flow Matching

Authors:
Kamil Kwarciak↗Marek Wodzinski↗

arXiv:2606.24433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical point cloud completion is important for anatomical reconstruction and downstream clinical workflows, yet generative modeling in this setting remains insufficiently studied. We investigate completion through continuous-time generative modeling and introduce PCFM, a PTv3-backed flow matching approach for medical point cloud completion. We evaluate on SkullFix and SkullBreak, and additionally on the more recent Mandibular Defect dataset. We build strong baselines by adapting PTv3 to a deterministic encoder-decoder completion model and by instantiating diffusion completion (PCDiff) with both PVCNN and PTv3 denoisers. PCFM with PTv3 is competitive with the deterministic PTv3 baseline and achieves state-of-the-art generative performance across datasets, while requiring substantially fewer sampling steps than diffusion. At the best operating points, PTv3 also yields clear throughput gains, providing up to a 7$\times$ speed-up for PCFM compared to a PVCNN backbone. Finally, we study empirical scaling trends by varying model size and point cardinality, showing consistent gains with higher point resolution and informative trade-offs across model scales.

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

Forecasting Is Not Attribution: Localizing Decoder Bypass in Graph-Based Neural Marketing Mix Models

Authors:
Yunbo Wang↗Bolbi Liu↗

arXiv:2606.12687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Marketing mix models are used to forecast business outcomes and to attribute those outcomes to marketing channels, but these goals are not equivalent. We study a failure mode in graph-based neural MMM called attribution bypass: a high-capacity decoder can obtain low forecasting error through target autoregression, dense communication, co-movement, context, or latent memory while failing to route counterfactual sensitivity through the graph used as the attribution object. We introduce DICE-MMM as a bounded diagnostic and training framework. We do not claim that observational neural MMM identifies causal effects. Instead, DICE separates three questions often conflated in graph-based MMM: graph recovery, forecasting accuracy, and whether the trained decoder's perturbation-induced influence is graph aligned. Stage 1 trains a graph encoder with a restricted graph-mediated decoder. Stage 2 freezes the selected encoder and trains a graph-safe latent decoder whose cross-node communication must pass through the supplied graph. Decoder use is evaluated with CIG, AR-CIG, and graph-swap tests. Across controlled R/d/T swaps and an external multi-graph rawlog stress test, DICE improves stable graph recovery over CausalMMM. The experiments show that forecasting accuracy is not an attribution certificate: in a sparse-target benchmark, no-graph and full-graph decoders achieve MSE@7 around 0.004 while AR-CIG nAUPRC remains near or below zero, whereas an oracle graph reaches 0.807 +/- 0.129 at comparable MSE. Frozen graph-swap localizes the bottleneck: the same DICE-hard-trained decoder moves from nAUPRC -0.044 +/- 0.006 under learned graph inputs to 0.894 +/- 0.027 with the oracle graph. The contribution is a stress test and failure-localization framework showing that low MSE can hide attribution bypass and that the unresolved bottleneck is graph-support selection, not forecasting or decoder capacity.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

More Skills, Worse Agents? Skill Shadowing Degrades Performance When Expanding Skill Libraries

Authors:
Hongwen Song↗Song Wei↗

arXiv:2605.24050v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Skill libraries allow LLM agents to load task-specific instructions on demand, letting non-expert users solve domain-specific tasks through natural language without knowing which skills exist or how they work. However, performance degrades as libraries grow – by up to 21\% when scaling from a small set of helpful skills to a 202-skill library. In this work, we formulate this performance degradation as the pass rate drop between loading a library of known-helpful skills and the full library. Moreover, we propose to decompose the pass rate drop by conditioning on the skill(s) invocation – which skills the agent selects during a trajectory – into two effects: skill shadowing, where the agent selects wrong skills more often as the library expands, and context overhead, where the enlarged context degrades execution even when selection is correct. We derive upper bounds on both effects to characterize their magnitudes of impacts to the pass rate drop. Our empirical estimates of the effects and their upper bounds both show that the skill shadowing effect grows with library size and significantly contributes to the performance degradation, whereas the context overhead effect remains small and indistinguishable from zero. This observed asymmetry establishes that the skill selection failure, not the enlarged context, is the primary bottleneck when expanding the skill libraries.

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22.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-26

Requiring code sharing to strengthen transparency and trust in research

Authors:
Helen Lumbard↗

by Helen Lumbard, Lauren Cadwallader, Devin Soper, on behalf of the PLOS Medicine Staff Editors PLOS Medicine has always championed open science and data transparency. Now, recognizing that code is as essential a research artifact as the data it analyzes, we are strengthening our code sharing policy to further ensure reproducibility and trust in the scientific record. Recognizing that code is as essential a research artifact as the data it analyzes, this Editorial outlines how PLOS Medicine is strengthening its code sharing policy to further ensure reproducibility and trust in the scientific record.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Latent Geometric Chords for Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks

Authors:
Ei Hmue Khine↗Yao Li↗Jiebao Sun↗Shengzhu Shi↗Zhichang Guo↗Boying Wu↗

While decision-based black-box adversarial attacks present a severe security threat, current methodologies suffer from fundamental limitations. Pixel-wise attacks frequently introduce unnatural, high-frequency visual artifacts, while latent-space frameworks are confined by the limited search space of low-dimensional manifolds and inherent reconstruction flaws. To resolve these limitations, we propose Latent Geometric Chords (LGC) for Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks alongside a variant, LGC-H. At its core, LGC navigates decision boundaries by executing a curvature-aware geometric search within a compressed semantic manifold. To guarantee high visual fidelity and circumvent dimensionality bottlenecks, we introduce a Residual-based Adversarial Generation (RAG) mechanism. RAG isolates semantic perturbations as geometric chords and superimposes them directly onto the original source image. RAG substantially resolves baseline reconstruction flaws and effectively doubles the permissible search space dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that LGC achieves robust cross-dataset transferability and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, our method, LGC, minimizes perturbation magnitudes while achieving state-of-the-art visual fidelity–with a Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) exceeding 0.99 and a Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) below 0.01 at 5000 queries–and sustaining high attack success rates under stringent perceptual constraints, successfully compromising adversarially trained robust models. The source code is available at: https://github.com/eihmuekhine/Latent-Geometric-Chords.

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

Look Again Before You Abstain:Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition for Reliable Vision-Language Model

Authors:
Jian Xu↗Delu Zeng↗John Paisley↗Qibin Zhao↗

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) hallucinate: they assert visual details that the image does not support. A principled remedy is selective prediction with a distribution-free guarantee-verify each claim and abstain when the claim is not grounded, so that the hallucination rate among asserted claims is provably bounded. We show, however, that this guarantee is bought at a brutal price: to keep the hallucination rate below $5\%$ on a balanced object-existence benchmark, a state-of-the-art conformal filter must abstain on more than $80\%$ of claims. We argue that abstention is wasteful when more visual evidence is cheaply available, and introduce Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition (BCEA), which replaces the binary answer/abstain decision with a three-way choice: answer, abstain, or acquire additional visual evidence by re-examining the image (zooming, cropping, or applying a claim-specific intervention) under a bounded compute budget. We make two observations. First, acquisition that is plugged naively into a calibrated filter breaks the statistical guarantee – realized risk overshoots the target by up to $17$ points – because the acquisition step destroys the exchangeability that conformal calibration relies on. Second, folding the entire acquisition policy into the score function and re-calibrating on post-acquisition scores restores the finite-sample guarantee while still recovering coverage. BCEA further uses structured, claim-type-specific interventions. Across the POPE benchmark and COCO-constructed existence and spatial-relation claims, on four open VLMs, BCEA controls the hallucination rate at the target level and consistently improves coverage over a guaranteed-abstention baseline.

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

Anti-causal domain generalization: Leveraging unlabeled data

Authors:
Sorawit Saengkyongam↗Juan L. Gamella↗Andrew C. Miller↗Jonas Peters↗Nicolai Meinshausen↗Christina Heinze-Deml↗

arXiv:2602.17187v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The problem of domain generalization concerns learning predictive models that are robust to distribution shifts when deployed in new, previously unseen environments. Existing methods typically require labeled data from multiple training environments, limiting their applicability when labeled data are scarce. In this work, we study domain generalization in an anti-causal setting, where the outcome causes the observed covariates. Under this structure, environment perturbations that affect the covariates do not propagate to the outcome, which motivates regularizing the model's sensitivity to these perturbations. Crucially, estimating these perturbation directions does not require labels, enabling us to leverage unlabeled data from multiple environments. We propose two methods that penalize the model's sensitivity to variations in the mean and covariance of the covariates across environments, respectively, and prove that these methods have worst-case optimality guarantees under certain classes of environments. Finally, we demonstrate the empirical performance of our approach on a controlled physical system and a physiological signal dataset.

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