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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Minim: Privacy-Aware Minimal View for Agents via Trusted Local Sanitization

arXiv:2606.13949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern LLM-powered autonomous agents increasingly rely on rich user interface (UI) state observations to achieve reliable action grounding in complex digital environments. However, many deployments transmit the full UI state to remote inference servers even when most elements are irrelevant to the current task, which can leak sensitive but unnecessary context such as authentication codes, private notifications, and background application states. We propose MINIM, a trusted local broker that performs privacy-aware minimization on the client side before any observation leaves the device. Grounded in Contextual Integrity (CI), MINIM learns a dual-score representation for each UI element by predicting an inherent sensitivity score (s) and a task-conditioned necessity score (n). These scores drive a ternary disclosure policy that keeps essential elements, abstracts sensitive attributes when needed, and removes task-irrelevant content. We optimize a CI-aware objective that penalizes necessity errors more strongly on high-risk content, enabling aggressive pruning while preserving task-critical information. Experiments on real-world UI observations derived from WebArena show that MINIM substantially reduces task-irrelevant sensitive leakage while preserving task-critical semantic context and the interactive affordances required for reliable agent actions.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learn Temporal Consistency For Robust Satellite Video Detector

Satellite video object detection (SVOD) for oriented and fine-grained objects plays an important role in satellite applications. Most existing SVOD methods only focus on one or a few coarse-grained categories of moving objects and represent objects with horizontal bounding boxes. They have difficulty extracting complete, accurate, and consistent information about objects in whole satellite videos. In this paper, we propose a satellite video object detection framework based on Temporal Consistency Learning (TCL). TCL adeptly detects oriented and fine-grained objects by leveraging the rich temporal contexts within satellite videos. The framework integrates three key modules: temporal and fine-grained feature aggregation (TFA), structure encoding (SE), and temporal consistency constraint (TCC). TFA and TCC modules facilitate consistent representation learning across frames, while the SE module encodes both appearance and structural information for precise fine-grained recognition. Experimental results on the SAT-MTB benchmark dataset demonstrate TCL's superior performance, achieving a new state-of-the-art oriented and fine-grained detection accuracy of 47.7% mAP–a 4.8% improvement over the baseline. Furthermore, our TCL framework readily accommodates existing image-based detectors, leading to enhanced detection accuracies.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Hierarchical Graph Learning for Calendar Spread Strategies in Commodity Futures Markets

arXiv:2606.25811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Commodity futures can be represented hierarchically, with underlying assets at the upper level and individual futures contracts at the lower level. Entities at each level can be connected by edges reflecting inherent correlations, with cross-level edges capturing contract-to-underlying asset connections. Building on our observations of these structures, we propose a hierarchical graph learning approach for calendar spread (CS) strategies in commodity futures markets, addressing two significant gaps in the machine-learning literature: (i) the absence of learning-based methods for CS strategies in futures markets, and (ii) the lack of consideration of maturity-dependent interrelationships across commodity futures. We first establish the efficacy of CS strategies by analytically showing that CS strategies can possess higher risk-adjusted returns, measured by the information ratio, and lower risk, measured by variance and delta, than long-only strategies. We then introduce a method to convert learning-based predictions into CS positions. Next, we develop a hierarchical graph learning method that predicts futures price movements by utilizing the maturity-dependent interrelationships, thereby yielding a CS trading algorithm. Empirical results on commodity futures markets traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group demonstrate that our method outperforms benchmark models in both prediction and trading performance. We find that maturity-dependent interrelationships across commodity futures are instrumental in prediction and that CS trading based on hierarchical graph learning is effective for statistical arbitrage.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Steady-State Approximation Error of Heterogeneous Mean-Field Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.09022v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper studies heterogeneous mean-field models in which agent parameters are sampled from a population distribution. We establish an $O(1/M)$ bound on the steady-state mean-square error between the occupancy measure of the $M$-agent system and the corresponding annealed mean-field equilibrium. The analysis extends Stein's method for homogeneous mean-field models and reveals a fundamental difference between homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. While stability of the mean-field dynamics is sufficient in the homogeneous setting, heterogeneous systems further require uniform robustness of the occupancy dynamics with respect to perturbations of the initial condition. The results are illustrated through a heterogeneous SIS epidemic model.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Uplift Modeling under Structural Biases: Insights into Metric Stability and Model Robustness

arXiv:2603.20775v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In personalized marketing, uplift models estimate the incremental effect of an intervention by modeling how customer behavior would change under alternative treatments using counterfactual analysis. However, real-world marketing data often exhibit various biases, such as selection bias, spillover effects, measurement error, and unobserved confounding. These biases can adversely affect both the accuracy of uplift estimation and the validity of evaluation metrics. Despite the importance of bias-aware assessment, there remains a lack of systematic studies evaluating how different models and metrics perform under such biased conditions. To bridge this gap, we design a systematic benchmarking framework. Unlike standard predictive tasks, real-world uplift datasets inherently lack counterfactual ground truth. This limitation renders the direct validation of evaluation metrics infeasible and prevents the precise quantification of biases. Therefore, a semi-synthetic approach serves as a critical enabler for systematic benchmarking. This approach effectively bridges the gap by retaining real-world feature dependencies while providing the ground truth needed to isolate structural biases. Our investigations reveal that (i) uplift targeting and prediction can manifest as distinct objectives, where proficiency in one does not ensure efficacy in the other; (ii) while many models exhibit inconsistent performance under diverse biases, TARNet shows notable robustness, providing insights for subsequent model design; (iii) the stability of evaluation metrics is linked to their mathematical alignment with the ATE, suggesting that ATE-approximating metrics yield more consistent model rankings under structural data imperfections. These findings suggest the need for more robust uplift models and evaluation metrics under real-world data imperfections.

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

Revealing Training Data Exposure in Vision Language Large Models via Parameter Gradients

Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) trained on massive crawled corpora raise pressing copyright and data-provenance concerns. These concerns are particularly acute in healthcare, where patient medical images paired with clinical reports demand rigorous privacy safeguards. However, existing training data detection methods either fail in cross-modal scenarios or rely on superficial output signals with insufficient discriminative power. We introduce GradAudit, a gradient-based auditing framework that examines internal optimization dynamics rather than treating VLLMs as black boxes. Our approach builds on a key observation: model parameters converge to regions where gradients on training samples become stable and well-aligned, whereas gradients on non-training samples remain noisy and inconsistent. By analyzing these gradient signatures, GradAudit achieves strong separability and detects genuine image-text associations learned during training, not merely individual modality membership. Empirically, across both medical and general-domain datasets, GradAudit substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both pretraining and fine-tuning VLLMs. In a case study employing copyrighted content, we show that existing training data detection methods not only underestimate the extent of unauthorized data usage, but that this underestimation becomes more pronounced as models become more recent and more advanced.

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

BrainG3N: A Dual-Purpose Tokenizer for Controllable 3D Brain MRI Generation

arXiv:2606.19651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three-dimensional (3D) brain MRI is central to clinical neurology and neuro-oncology, where generative models could augment under-represented cohorts, simulate disease trajectories, and support privacy-preserving data sharing. Latent diffusion has been the go-to solution for modeling imaging data, but it places two competing demands on the tokenizer: encoder embeddings must retain the clinical information that downstream tasks act on, and the decoder must reconstruct anatomically faithful volumes. Existing reconstruction-driven tokenizers achieve the second at the expense of the first. To address this, we introduce a fully volumetric masked-autoencoder (MAE) based tokenizer for 3D brain MRI latent diffusion, decoupling encoder and decoder: a frozen 3D MAE encoder produces clinically informative embeddings, while a dedicated CNN decoder reconstructs voxels from a linear projection of those embeddings. We pretrain the encoder on 35,309 volumes from 18 public cohorts spanning four modalities, ten disease categories, and 200+ acquisition sites, and demonstrate its dual utility in two settings. First, on a 23-task linear-probing benchmark, the encoder outperforms or matches SOTA models (i.e., BrainIAC, BrainSegFounder, and MedicalNet) on 21 of 23 tasks. Second, a conditional diffusion transformer (DiT) trained on these clinically informative embeddings supports both conditional generation across six variables and patient-specific longitudinal forecasting. Together these results establish a single 3D brain-MRI embedding space capable of both downstream clinical tasks and controllable generation.

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

Rewrite to Translate, Translate to Reward: Reinforcement Learning for Source Rewriting in Machine Translation

Rewriting source text with large language models (LLMs) before translation has been shown to improve machine translation (MT) quality. However, we find that prompt-based rewriting can degrade translation quality rather than improve it, particularly when smaller LLMs, such as 4B-parameter models, are used. We argue that this limitation stems from the difficulty of controlling rewriting behavior through natural-language prompts alone: a rewrite is useful only if it improves downstream translation, yet existing prompt-based methods do not explicitly optimize for this signal. To address this issue, we propose RLSR (Reinforcement Learning for Source Rewriting), a reinforcement learning framework that trains the rewriting model with a reward based on the downstream translation-quality improvement produced by each rewrite. Experiments across six MT systems and 16 language pairs show that our 4B RLSR-trained rewriting models significantly outperform both the no-rewriting baseline and prompt-based rewriting baselines at the same model scale, while remaining competitive with baselines that use a 235B LLM.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

Posterior-calibrated multimodal motor states reveal longitudinal and imaging-associated heterogeneity in Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) motor heterogeneity is commonly summarized by hard subtype labels, although clinical states vary longitudinally, severity can dominate unsupervised structure, and model uncertainty is rarely calibrated. We developed a posterior and refit-stability calibrated multimodal motor state framework that assigns probabilistic MDS-UPDRS-III motor states, aggregates them at the patient level, separates global burden from residual tremor-axial profile, and tests whether imaging can recover the resulting posterior distribution. In 29,366 aligned PPMI motor-posterior visits spanning 4,773 participant identifiers, patient-level state families were stable on average (modal-family fraction 0.925; 95% CI 0.921 - 0.930), but 25.5% of patients transitioned state over follow-up (95% CI 24.1 - 26.7%). PD-only cohort definitions produced smaller denominators and are reported as sensitivity cohorts with rerun calibration and imaging-posterior checks. Severity and covariates explained substantial motor-domain variance, especially bradykinesia (rsecond=0.850), but residual profile modeling retained five active components across total-severity, principal-component, leave-one-domain, non-target-burden, and clinical-only severity axes. Refit-stability calibration with 250 patient-blocked bootstrap refits showed high nominal posterior confidence (0.989) but lower empirical label consistency (0.849), quantifying overconfidence rather than hiding it. Patient-held-out temporal modeling predicted future axial burden (best XGBoost rsecond=0.605) and future state transition (XGBoost AUC=0.830; 95% CI 0.822 - 0.837). DaTSCAN plus FreeSurfer ROI features predicted patient-level soft motor posterior vectors (RF jsd=0.209; 95% CI 0.199 - 0.220; macro-AUROC=0.692), while severity/demographic-adjusted imaging features further improved soft posterior recovery (jsd=0.188). BioFIND transfer reproduced clinically meaningful endpoint gradients after state assignment in 225 external patients, supporting external face validity rather than definitive transportability. These results support PD motor phenotypic states as calibrated, dynamic, clinically interpretable profiles with convergent imaging associations, not as definitive biological subtypes.

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

Low-Burden LLM-Based Preference Learning: Personalizing Assistive Robots from Natural Language Feedback for Users with Paralysis

arXiv:2604.01463v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Physically Assistive Robots require personalized behaviors to ensure user safety and comfort. However, traditional preference learning methods, like exhaustive pairwise comparisons, cause substantial physical and cognitive fatigue for users with severe motor impairments. To solve this, we propose a low-burden, offline framework that translates unstructured natural language feedback directly into deterministic robotic control policies. To safely bridge the gap between ambiguous human speech and robotic code, our pipeline uses Large Language Models (LLMs) grounded in the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework. This clinical reasoning decodes subjective user reactions into explicit physical and psychological needs, which are then mapped into transparent decision trees. Before deployment, an automated "LLM-as-a-Judge" verifies the code's structural safety. We validated this system in a simulated meal preparation study with 10 adults with paralysis. Results show our natural language approach significantly reduces user workload compared to traditional baselines. Additionally, occupational therapists confirmed the generated policies are safe and accurately reflect user preferences.

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

The Slop Paradox: How Synthetic Standardization Erodes Clinical Uncertainty and Cross-Modal Alignment in AI-Rewritten Radiology Reports

Authors:

AI-assisted clinical documentation tools increasingly summarize, standardize, and reformat radiology reports using large language models (LLMs). We present a controlled measurement of the resulting information degradation. Using 450 chest X-ray reports from the Indiana University dataset, we generate synthetic versions via three realistic LLM rewriting tasks: EHR summarization, standardized rewriting, and teaching case preparation. We measure entity erosion (via medical NER), hedging collapse (loss of clinical uncertainty language), and cross-modal alignment degradation (via BiomedCLIP image-text similarity). Our central finding is a dissociation between information loss and cross-modal fidelity. EHR summarization is the most destructive at the content level, eroding 51.4% of clinical entities and 43.7% of hedging language, yet it preserves image-text alignment almost entirely (a 2.5% drop). The two tasks meant to produce cleaner training data, standardized rewriting and teaching case preparation, do the reverse: they preserve more entities (26.8% and 29.3% eroded) but cause 14.9-16.5% alignment drops, six to seven times those of EHR summarization. We term this the slop paradox: rewriting that makes clinical text look cleaner for multimodal training is precisely what pulls it away from the image. Contrary to our pre-specified hypothesis, rare pathologies were not preferentially degraded: across nine rare-versus-common comparisons, no difference survived multiple-comparison correction, and nominal differences ran in the opposite direction (common > rare), so contamination is invisible to condition-specific monitoring. The dominant determinant of degradation is the type of AI rewriting task, not the clinical content. These findings bear on multimodal medical AI dataset construction and the governance of AI-assisted clinical documentation.

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

Low-Complexity Policy Tessellations in Structured Markov Decision Processes

Authors:

arXiv:2606.25593v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study optimal-policy geometry in structured Markov decision processes. While approximate dynamic programming and reinforcement learning typically approximate high-dimensional value functions, we show that optimal policies induce simpler decision tessellations. We propose boundary-based policy approximations that learn policy regions directly. A policy-loss decomposition links performance degradation to action margins and explains why errors concentrate near indifference boundaries. Inventory control and queue admission experiments show lower policy error, smaller value gaps, faster error decay, and stability than reinforcement learning baselines.

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

Small LLMs for Biomedical Claim Verification: Cost-Effective Fine-Tuning, Structural Dataset Shortcuts, and Cross-Domain Generalization

Authors:

Large Language Models such as GPT-4o and GPT-5 achieve strong zero-shot performance on biomedical claim verification, but cost and opacity limit scalable use. We fine-tune three small LLMs: Phi-3-mini (3.8B), Qwen2.5-3B, and Mistral-7B, via QLoRA on SciFact and HealthVer, providing the first study of QLoRA models against GPT-4o and fine-tuned BioLinkBERT encoders. Mistral-7B QLoRA surpasses both GPT-4o and GPT-5 (up to 12% F1 gain) at a fractional cost using just 1,008 training examples. We conduct extensive in-domain and cross-domain evaluation: models trained on SciFact tested on HealthVer and vice versa, at matched sizes to isolate dataset structure from data quantity. We identify a previously unreported structural artifact in SciFact that inflates in-domain scores, and show through bidirectional out-of-domain evaluation that training on structurally sound data enables robust cross-domain transfer. We plan to release all code and adapter checkpoints.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

UniTranslator: A Unified Multi-modal Framework for End-to-end In-Image Machine Translation

In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to translate scene text in an image and render the translated text back into the original regions while preserving the overall visual appearance. Recent unified multimodal models provide a promising solution by combining visual-text understanding and image generation within a single framework. However, directly adapting such models to IIMT remains challenging. In particular, they often suffer from understanding-generation conflicts, where the translation inferred during understanding is inconsistent with the text supervision used in generation, and spatial position misalignment, where the rendered text does not accurately match the target text regions. To address these issues, we present UniTranslator, a unified multimodal framework for IIMT that tightly couples translation understanding and text editing. Specifically, we introduce an Understand-Generation Alignment Module (UGAM) to bridge the representation gap between understanding and generation, encouraging semantic consistency between translated content prediction and text rendering. We further propose a Spatial Mask Decoder (SMD) with pixel-level supervision over text regions to improve spatial grounding, geometric alignment, and layout controllability during generation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UniTranslator achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse language directions and complex real-world layouts. Moreover, our results reveal a strong mutual reinforcement effect between translation understanding and image generation, highlighting the advantage of unified translation multimodal learning. Code is available at https://github.com/SeerRay-Lab/Unitranslator.

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

Computing noise-canceling observables via Pauli propagation

arXiv:2606.20441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The pursuit of quantum advantage is driving the co-evolution of quantum processors and classical simulation methods. Despite advances in scale and quality, the accuracy of quantum simulation is ultimately limited by error rates and sampling overheads. Similarly, while classical simulation methods such as Pauli propagation have made remarkable progress, their accuracy is ultimately limited by the exponential growth of operator paths and the truncations needed to control memory and runtime. Here we show that these complementary limitations can be mitigated by embedding Pauli propagation within a hybrid error-mitigation framework that reduces quantum sampling overhead while achieving lower truncation errors with fewer classical resources than traditional Pauli propagation alone. In this framework, a target observable is classically propagated through noise-canceling inverse channels, producing a modified observable that is measured directly on a quantum processor. We prototype two implementations and benchmark their performance numerically on canonical models that challenge traditional Pauli propagation. We also perform experiments on a quantum processor using 56 superconducting qubits, revealing the tradeoffs of their respective truncation strategies. These results illustrate how classical and quantum resources can be orchestrated to extend observable estimation beyond the limits of either approach alone, providing a foundation for quantum-centric supercomputing and future demonstrations of quantum advantage.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Augmenting Imaginary-Time Evolution with Local Geometric Information

arXiv:2606.23934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imaginary-time evolution (ITE) underpins a broad family of algorithms for ground-state preparation in quantum simulation and quantum many-body physics. In these methods, convergence is governed by the energy variance of the instantaneous state, causing the flow to approach the ground state only asymptotically. We introduce an augmented imaginary-time evolution (AITE) framework that replaces the standard gradient flow on the energy landscape with a geometrically informed descent along locally optimal directions, which are identified by exploiting the higher-order statistical structure of the instantaneous energy distribution. The resulting flow strictly outperforms standard ITE throughout the entire evolution and exhibits two qualitatively distinct regimes: a superlinear convergence regime, followed by an extinction regime in which the energy error vanishes exactly at a finite imaginary time, in sharp contrast to the asymptotic exponential decay of ITE. Standard ITE is recovered in the zero-skewness limit of AITE, implying that the acceleration extends naturally across the broader ITE algorithmic family.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DeFAb: A Verifiable Benchmark for Defeasible Abduction in Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.18557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A rule-based logic solver resolves every instance in our benchmark in under 50 microseconds with 100% accuracy; the best frontier language model reaches 65% at best and drops to 23.5% under rendering-robust evaluation (worst case over four surface renderings). We introduce DeFAb (Defeasible Abduction Benchmark), a dataset and generation pipeline that converts four decades of publicly funded knowledge bases into formally grounded instances for defeasible abduction: constructing hypotheses that explain anomalies by overriding defaults while preserving unrelated expectations. Because every hypothesis must pass polynomial-time checks for valid derivation, conservativity, and minimality, DeFAb makes logical rigor the instrument for measuring creativity and theoretical reasoning, scoring the disciplined construction of theory revisions rather than fluent but theory-destroying prose. The pipeline pairs taxonomic hierarchies (OpenCyc, YAGO, Wikidata) with behavioral property graphs (ConceptNet, UMLS) to produce 372,648+ instances across 33.75M materialized rules from 18 sources, in three levels with polynomial-time verifiable gold standards. Four frontier models do not reliably internalize defeasible reasoning: rendering-robust Level 2 accuracy is 7.8-23.5%; chain-of-thought variance (~36 pp) exceeds any inter-model gap; and a matched contamination control isolates a +19.4 pp Level 3 gap. We further release DeFAb-Hard (a 235-instance Level 3 difficulty variant; best model 53.3% vs 100% symbolic) and CONJURE (a kernel-verified transformative-creativity variant of 560 Lean 4/Mathlib instances whose gold answers are definitions the proof kernel did not previously contain, judge-free verifier; a pilot finds zero novel concepts). The same verifier doubles as an exact reward for preference optimization (DPO, RLVR/GRPO). Released under MIT at https://huggingface.co/datasets/PatrickAllenCooper/DeFAb.

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

Auto-Configured Explainable Graph Neural Networks for Multi-Site Pollution Prediction

arXiv:2606.24978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate particulate matter (PM) prediction is crucial for mitigating air pollution. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) effectively model spatiotemporal dependencies, but predefined graphs limit adaptability, and some datasets complicate learning. This study introduces a graph construction method based on a confusion matrix from a supervised learning process to dynamically capture inter-class relationships. Additionally, a hybrid loss function that combines energy distance and Huber loss is applied to address the vanishing gradient problem and improve learning stability. The approach is evaluated using air pollution data from the University of Utah AirU Pollution Monitoring Network in Salt Lake City, UT, with five GNN models: Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), Simple Graph Convolutional Networks (SGConv), Graph Isomorphism Networks (GINs), Graph Attention Networks (GATs), and GraphSage. The experimental results of single- and multistep predictions confirm that GraphSage achieves the highest accuracy in predicting the concentrations of PM${1}$, PM${10}$, and PM$_{2.5}$ over different time horizons. Furthermore, {\color{black} GNNExplainer (Graph Neural Network Explainer) and PGExplainer (Probabilistic Graph Explainer)} are applied to interpret feature importance and graph structure, ensuring model transparency. Results show improved prediction accuracy, with GNN models outperforming traditional machine learning \textcolor{black}{and deep learning models (i.e., Prophet, Long short-term memory, Gated recurrent units} in air pollution forecasting.

19.
Science (Express) 2026-06-11

Laser phase plate improves structure determination of small proteins by cryo-EM | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Phase plates can in principle overcome the poor image contrast in electron cryo–microscopy (cryo-EM) and the resulting limits on the structural reconstruction of small proteins. However, previous designs have been unstable and compromised the high-resolution signal. They have thus been unable to surpass results achieved by standard cryo-EM. Here, we show that the laser phase plate (LPP), installed in a custom, modern Titan Krios microscope, enhances the resolution in single-particle reconstruction of small proteins by improving specimen-motion correction, recovery of information from the early frames, as well as particle visualization, 3D classification, and alignment. These advances use standard defocus ranges and reconstruction procedures, but open the door to LPP-tailored protocols offering further improvements by leveraging the LPP demonstrated here.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Beyond Algorithms: Conceptual Innovation in Medical Imaging AI

arXiv:2606.19270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence has driven rapid progress in medical imaging research, producing increasingly sophisticated algorithms and steady improvements on benchmark tasks. However, this algorithm-centric trajectory has also revealed a growing imbalance: while computational methods advance rapidly, the conceptual foundations that define imaging tasks, evaluation metrics, and clinical meaning sometimes remain underexamined. In this Perspective, we distinguish algorithmic innovation, which focuses on improving computational implementations and performance within a fixed problem definition, from conceptual innovation, which reframes what problems are posed, how success is measured, and why an approach is clinically relevant. We argue that prevailing incentive structures, training pathways, and publication norms disproportionately reward algorithmic novelty, particularly for early-career researchers, while at times undervaluing conceptual contributions that are essential for scientific maturation and clinical translation. Through representative examples from medical imaging AI, we show how insufficient conceptual grounding can lead to misaligned objectives, fragile generalization, and limited real-world impact. We conclude with actionable recommendations for researchers, mentors, reviewers, and journals to better recognize, support, and integrate conceptual innovation alongside algorithmic advances.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genomic wastewater surveillance of seasonal and zoonotic influenza A viruses in California during the 2024-2025 flu season

Wastewater genomic surveillance provides an opportunity to detect human and animal influenza A virus (IAV). We aimed to implement an IAV genomic surveillance framework agnostic to subtype, which enables recovery of IAV from multiple hosts and estimation of proportions across subtypes. We conducted IAV genomic surveillance in wastewater during the 2024-2025 flu season at multiple sites in California and compared these data with available human clinical IAV sequences and test positivity. We applied a custom whole-genome, multi-host IAV probe enrichment panel and adapted our custom expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to deconvolute IAV mixtures in wastewater and infer subtype relative abundances. Absolute IAV concentrations were quantified using RT-PCR-based assays. H5N1 wastewater and clinical sequences were further characterized by constructing a whole-genome maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree. Finally, we performed variant analysis to examine amino acid substitutions detected in wastewater. Our IAV probe enrichment method and EM algorithm successfully enriched all eight segments of three circulating IAV subtypes and accurately estimated subclade relative abundances for mixed IAV samples. Seasonal human H1N1pdm09 and H3N2 were detected throughout the study period from both wastewater and clinical sequencing data, with H1N1 subclades 6B.1A.5a.2a.1 and 6B.1A.5a.2a co-circulating, and H3N2 dominated by subclade 3C.2a1b.2a.2a.3a.1. Wastewater surveillance consistently detected H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b across three monitored wastewater sites, while clinical H5N1 detections, from anywhere in CA, were sporadic and rare. Whole-genome phylogenetic analysis revealed that wastewater H5N1 sequences clustered with reference sequences associated with dairy cow and avian infections, while all human clinical H5N1 sequences clustered exclusively with reference sequences associated with dairy cow infections. Amino acid substitutions were identified across viral segments, and no mutations associated with mammalian adaptation were observed from wastewater samples.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Towards Scalable Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Large Decision Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24962v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent progress in large-scale sequence modeling has shown that a single model can learn useful representations across highly diverse data distributions. Inspired by these advances, we investigate whether a unified transformer policy can be trained across large collections of heterogeneous reinforcement learning environments. We introduce LDM-v0, a Large Decision Model trained offline on trajectories collected from thousands of environments spanning multiple domains and modalities. LDM-v0 is a multi-task, multi-modal transformer policy conditioned on histories of observations, actions, rewards, and termination signals, and trained through supervised next-action prediction over offline trajectories. We describe the environment infrastructure, automated data generation pipeline, model architecture, and training methodology used to build LDM-v0, and evaluate its performance across diverse environments. We show that a single pretrained model matches the performance of independently trained task-specific reference policies on approximately 1,000 environments including robotics, autonomous driving, inventory management, cybersecurity, trading, and video games. These results demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale offline pretraining across heterogeneous reinforcement learning environments using a single transformer policy.

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

FinAcumen: Financial Multimodal Reasoning via Self-Evolving Experience Memory Harness

arXiv:2606.17642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial multimodal reasoning requires agents to coordinate numerical computation, retrieval, visual interpretation, and temporal grounding across heterogeneous evidence sources. Existing tool-augmented agents improve execution fidelity, yet remain largely stateless across episodes, repeatedly rediscovering reasoning strategies and failure patterns. In high-stakes financial settings, this leads to unreliable tool routing, noisy retrieval, and hallucination-prone reasoning. We present FinAcumen, a financial reasoning agent framework centered on selective experience memory for tool-augmented multimodal reasoning. FinAcumen accumulates financially grounded reasoning experience from prior trajectories, distilling successful strategies and failure-derived cautionary rules into a persistent memory bank. During inference, retrieved experiences condition reasoning only when semantic relevance exceeds a calibrated threshold, while irrelevant memory is explicitly suppressed through a fallback mechanism. A deterministic financial tool environment further grounds numerical computation, retrieval, visual decoding, and answer verification.Across four financial multimodal reasoning benchmarks, FinAcumen consistently improves a frozen 8B vision-language model over finance-specialized models and approaches leading proprietary general-purpose models. Further analysis shows that selective experience activation improves reasoning reliability under retrieval uncertainty. Our code is anonymously available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FinAcumen

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

FM-Agent: Scaling Formal Methods to Large Systems via LLM-Based Hoare-Style Reasoning

arXiv:2604.11556v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-assisted software development has become increasingly prevalent, and can generate large-scale systems, such as compilers. It becomes crucial to strengthen the correctness of the generated code. However, automated reasoning for large-scale systems remains challenging due to code complexity. Hoare logic offers an approach to decomposing a large system into smaller components and reasoning about them separately (i.e., compositional reasoning). However, existing works still struggle to scale, because Hoare logic requires writing formal specifications for each function, imposing a heavy human burden. The problem is exacerbated when code is generated by LLMs, as developers lack a deep understanding of each function's expected behavior. This paper presents FM-Agent, the first framework that realizes automated compositional reasoning for large-scale systems. Leveraging LLMs, FM-Agent introduces a top-down paradigm to automatically generate function-level specifications. Specifically, FM-Agent derives the specification of a function from how its callers expect the function to behave, so the generated specifications can reflect the developer's intent of a function even if the implementation is buggy. Developers' intent is usually expressed in natural language, while existing verifiers only support formulas. Therefore, FM-Agent generalizes Hoare-style inference to reason about functions against natural-language specifications. Finally, to confirm bug existence and explain bug causes, FM-Agent automatically generates test cases to trigger potential bugs. In our evaluation, FM-Agent successfully reasons about large-scale systems within 2 days, each of which has up to 143k LoC. These systems have already been tested by their developers, but FM-Agent still finds 522 newly discovered bugs. These bugs can cause serious consequences, including system crashes and incorrect execution results.

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

Leaking Circuit Secrets: Gradient Leakage Attacks on Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.25589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As graph neural networks (GNNs) become standard tools for critical tasks in circuit design and analysis, their security and privacy risks require careful attention. Here, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of gradient leakage attacks (GLAs) on GNNs in circuit-design and hardware-security tasks, a practical threat that has been largely overlooked. We assess state-of-the-art (SOTA) GNNs, including GraphSAGE, GCN, GIN, and GAT, trained on standard netlist benchmarks (ISCAS'85, EPFL, and TrustHub), for their fundamental vulnerability to GLAs. We find that GLAs can expose sensitive information, such as gate types and distinctive properties of hardware Trojans, which may assist adversaries in analyzing logic locking schemes or evading Trojan detection mechanisms. Our analysis shows that these risks are influenced by architectural features, with attention mechanisms (GAT) exacerbating leakage, while injective aggregation (GIN) provides comparatively stronger resilience. We further evaluate several SOTA defense techniques, including differential privacy, gradient clipping, secure aggregation, model compression with quantization, and adversarial training. We find that these techniques improve resilience only in specific settings and can also compromise model performance. Overall, our work provides key insights toward privacy-preserving GNNs and highlights the need for more robust and efficient defenses. We release our full methodology and artifacts.