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

P-K-GCN: Physics-augmented Koopman-enhanced Graph Convolutional Network for Deep Spatiotemporal Super-resolution

arXiv:2606.19303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-fidelity simulation of spatiotemporal dynamics is computationally prohibitive, necessitating efficient super-resolution techniques to reconstruct high-resolution data from coarse-grained inputs. Traditional data-driven methods often lack physical constraints, and simple physics-informed learning struggles with irregular spatial geometries and intricately evolving temporal dynamics. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Physics-augmented Koopman-enhanced Graph Convolutional Network (P-K-GCN) for spatiotemporal super-resolution on irregular geometries. Specifically, a continuous spline-based GCN is first designed to extract spatial dependencies directly from coarse graph, and Koopman operator theory is incorporated to project the nonlinear dynamics into a compact latent space where temporal progression is linearized. Second, we augment the optimization objective with a physics-based loss to force the data-driven reconstructions to adhere to physical laws for improving predictive fidelity and robustness. Finally, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis, establishing that the physics augmentation and Koopman regularization mathematically guarantees a reduction in super-resolution error by diminishing Rademacher complexity and tightening generalization bounds. We evaluate our framework on reconstructing spatially high-resolution cardiac electrodynamics across a 3D heart geometry from sparse low-resolution measurements. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy compared to baseline models.

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

SDVDiag: Multimodal Causal Discovery for Online Diagnosis in Software-defined Vehicles

arXiv:2606.15559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The transition toward software-defined vehicles concentrates an increasing share of vehicle functionality into distributed software services, where failures propagate through service dependencies and the surface symptom is often several causal hops away from the underlying defect. Existing approaches to causal root-cause analysis in such systems address this only partially: they typically reason over a single observability modality and operate in an offline, operator-driven mode that does not match the demands of continuous vehicle operation. This paper presents SDVDiag, a multimodal causal-discovery pipeline that fuses log-based and metric-based service representations into a shared embedding space before graph construction, coupled with an anomaly-driven trigger that converts the diagnostic platform from a manually operated batch tool into a continuously running online system. Evaluation on an Autonomous Valet Parking testbed shows that the multimodal pipeline produces sparser causal graphs than a metrics-only baseline (134 vs. 182 edges on average) and consistently outperforms it in edge-weighted reward against an expert knowledge graph at every stage of human-feedback refinement, showing a 2.4-fold improvement over the baseline after 60 feedback queries. An end-to-end fault-injection scenario further demonstrates that the integrated trigger correctly recovers a true root cause located two causal hops upstream of the observable symptom.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Deployment-readiness audit of calibration, clinical utility, and fairness in perioperative infection prediction

Objective: Clinical risk scores intended to guide patient-level decisions can show strong average performance. However, predicted probabilities can be systematically too high or too low in specific subgroups even when overall performance is strong. We audited deployment readiness of a strong end-of-surgery postoperative infection model across clinically relevant subgroups and tested mitigation strategies in miscalibrated subgroups. Materials and Methods: We analyzed out-of-fold predictions for 10,719 surgical procedures at a Swiss tertiary hospital, with 504 postoperative bacterial infection events. Prespecified axes were recorded sex, age stratum, and an EHR-derived physiological-reserve proxy. Within subgroups and pairwise intersections, we evaluated discrimination, calibration, threshold-specific errors, and decision-curve net benefit at the prespecified operating threshold. We compared group-specific isotonic recalibration with Wasserstein-barycenter postprocessing and demonstrated portability in SUPPORT2. Results: Overall AUROC was 0.876. While sex-marginal discrimination was similar in women and men (0.878 vs 0.875), age and reserve stratification revealed deployment-readiness failures. Calibration-in-the-large ranged from -0.86 in frail patients to -2.47 in non-frail patients. At the 0.10 operating threshold, decision-curve net benefit was positive in frail patients but negative in pre-frail and non-frail patients. Isotonic recalibration corrected average physiological-reserve-stratified calibration without worsening Brier scores, whereas Wasserstein postprocessing worsened calibration in most procedure clusters. Discussion: Discrimination-only or sex-marginal evaluation would have missed subgroup failures with clinical-utility implications. Conclusion: Subgroup fairness audits for clinical deployment should jointly evaluate discrimination, calibration, and utility. We implemented the audit as the open-source isitfair framework for identifying deployment-relevant subgroup failures, comparing mitigation strategies, and generating structured reports.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SmartFont: Dynamic Condition Allocation for Few-Shot Font Generation

Few-shot font generation simultaneously requires global structural completeness and fine-grained local style fidelity. Existing methods usually either rely on global content-style modeling, which is robust but imperfectly disentangled, or emphasize component/local modeling, which captures fine details but relies heavily on local priors and reference coverage. We argue that the key challenge is not merely to learn purer conditions, but to organize complementary yet biased global and local conditions through multi-level allocation during generation. To this end, we propose SmartFont, a diffusion-based few-shot font generation framework that combines global content-style generation with weakly supervised local corrective experts. The local branch performs semantic-spatial allocation by learning expert-wise local concepts and semantically meaningful spatial maps under weak component supervision, enabling fine-grained correction without requiring explicit component-conditioned inference. On top of this, a denoising-state condition allocation module adaptively weights global content, global style, and local corrective feature across timesteps and injection blocks. Extensive experiments show that SmartFont achieves better global-local balance, improves glyph quality and local detail fidelity.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Gradient boosting for extremes: sampling theory and application to insurance

arXiv:2606.14268v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a statistical learning theory for gradient boosting applied to the estimation of covariate-dependent Generalized Pareto (GP) distributions in the context of Peaks-over-Threshold modeling. After an orthogonal reparametrization of the GP likelihood that diagonalizes its Fisher information matrix, we cast the estimation problem within the Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) framework and derive non-asymptotic error bounds for the boosting estimator. Our analysis accounts for three distinct sources of error in the process: statistical fluctuations, the approximation bias inherent to the asymptotic nature of the GP model-controlled under second-order regular variation-and the approximation error associated with the finite number of boosting iterates, making explicit the resulting bias-variance trade-off. We illustrate the practical benefits of the reparametrization through simulations, showing that it significantly reduces gradient correlation during training and improves convergence stability. The methodology is applied to a medical malpractice insurance dataset from the Texas Department of Insurance, comprising over 18 000 closed claims. The gradient boosting approach yields a good fit for the tail of settlement cost distributions and reveals that the number of days to settlement is the dominant predictor of tail heaviness, consistent with earlier findings in the reserving literature.

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

Abstraction in Style: Beyond Texture and Color

Artistic styles often embed abstraction beyond surface appearance, involving deliberate reinterpretation of structure rather than mere changes in texture or color. Conventional style transfer methods typically preserve the input geometry and therefore struggle to capture this deeper abstraction behavior, especially for illustrative and nonphotorealistic styles. In this work, we introduce Abstraction in Style (AiS), a generative framework that separates structural abstraction from visual stylization. Given a target image and a small set of style exemplars, AiS first derives an intermediate abstraction proxy that reinterprets the target's structure in accordance with the abstraction logic exhibited by the style. The proxy captures semantic structure while relaxing geometric fidelity, enabling subsequent stylization to operate on an abstracted representation rather than the original image. In a second stage, the abstraction proxy is rendered to produce the final stylized output, preserving visual coherence with the reference style. Both stages are implemented using a shared image space analogy, enabling transformations to be learned from visual exemplars without explicit geometric supervision. By decoupling abstraction from appearance and treating abstraction as an explicit, transferable process, AiS supports a wider range of stylistic transformations, improves controllability, and enables more expressive stylization.

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

SAFE-Cascade: Cost-Adaptive Vision-Language Routing for Chart Question Answering

Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful for chart question answering, but invoking a VLM for every query can be unnecessarily expensive when many questions are answerable from OCR text and lightweight language reasoning. We demonstrate SAFE-Cascade, an interactive system for cost-adaptive chart question answering. Given a chart image and a natural-language question, SAFE-Cascade first extracts chart text with OCR, obtains a provisional answer from a text-only language model, and then uses a learned router to decide whether to accept the text answer or escalate to a VLM. The demo exposes this decision process to users: OCR evidence, text-only answer, routing probability, escalation decision, final answer, estimated cost, and estimated latency are shown side by side. SAFE-Cascade is designed as a transparent interface for understanding when visual grounding is actually needed. Users can upload or select charts, ask questions, inspect the evidence used by each pathway, compare text-only and VLM answers, and adjust the escalation threshold to explore the accuracy-cost frontier. The system is implemented with Azure Document Intelligence for OCR, gpt-5-mini as the text-only model, gemini-2.5-flash-image as the VLM, and a Random Forest router trained on inference-time features. On a held-out ChartQA test split of 375 examples from a 2,500-example experiment, SAFE-Cascade achieves 69.1% unified accuracy with 73.1% VLM invocation, compared with 67.7% accuracy and 100% VLM invocation for the full-VLM baseline. The observed +1.4 percentage-point difference is statistically uncertain, so we interpret SAFE-Cascade as matching full-VLM performance while reducing VLM calls by 26.9% and estimated cost by 9.3%. The demonstration shows how selective modality routing can make multimodal knowledge systems more transparent, tunable, and cost-aware.

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

Brick: Spatial Capability Routing for the Mixture-of-Models (MoM) Paradigm

arXiv:2606.13241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Defining query difficulty is one of the hardest problems in deployment engineering. Existing LLM routers rely on surface features such as domain labels, keywords, and token count, ignoring the within-domain variance that actually determines model success. Frontier models cost ten to one hundred times more than local open-weight models, so at production scale even small per-request savings become a direct cloud-bill lever. We present Brick, a multimodal router that scores each model on six capability dimensions, combines this with a per-query difficulty estimate, and dispatches via a cost-penalized geometric rule. A continuous preference knob lets operators slide between max-quality and max-saving profiles at deploy time. On a benchmark of 5,504 queries, Brick at max-quality reaches 76.98% accuracy, beating the best single model (75.02%) and all tested routers. At a neutral cost-quality profile, Brick achieves 74.11% accuracy at 4.71x lower cost than always using the strongest model. At min-cost, it cuts cost 22.15x with 11.85 points accuracy loss. Median latency drops from 51.2s to 22.8s.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Unified Theory of Sinusoidal Activation Families for Implicit Neural Representations

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) model continuous signals with compact neural networks and have become a standard tool in vision, graphics, and signal processing. A central challenge is accurately capturing fine detail without heavy hand-crafted encodings or brittle training heuristics. Across the literature, periodic activations have emerged as a compelling remedy: from SIREN, which uses a single sinusoid with a fixed global frequency, to more recent architectures employing multiple sinusoids and, in some cases, trainable frequencies and phases. We study this family of sinusoidal activations and develop a principled theoretical and practical framework for trainable sinusoidal activations in INRs. Concretely, we instantiate this framework with Sinusoidal Trainable Activation Functions (STAF), a Fourier-like activation whose amplitudes, frequencies, and phases are learned. Our analysis (i) establishes a Kronecker-equivalence construction that expresses trainable sinusoidal activations with standard sine networks and quantifies expressive growth, (ii) characterizes how the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) spectrum changes under trainable sinusoidal parameterization, and (iii) provides an initialization that yields standard normal post-activations without asymptotic central limit theorem (CLT) arguments. Empirically, on images, audio, shapes, inverse problems (super-resolution, denoising) and NeRF, STAF is competitive and often stronger on distortion-oriented reconstruction metrics such as PSNR/SSIM across the evaluated INR tasks, with favorable parameter efficiency under layer-wise sharing. While periodic activations can alleviate practical manifestations of spectral bias, our results indicate they do not eliminate it; instead, trainable sinusoids can improve the observed capacity-optimization trade-off in the evaluated settings.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FlowFake: Liquid Networks for Audio Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2606.19579v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio deepfakes generated by neural text-to-speech and voice-cloning systems threaten speaker verification and public discourse at scale. The core challenge is cross-dataset generalization: detectors trained on one synthesis pipeline collapse on unseen forgeries. We argue that this failure is primarily because of structural synthetic speech artifacts which are multi-timescale trajectory anomalies. Though every existing detector aggregates a fixed-window frame statistics, this misaligns the architecture with the signal. We propose FlowFake, a Liquid Time-Constant (LTC) architecture whose hidden state evolves via a learned ODE, with per-neuron adaptive time constants simultaneously resolving spectral (10ms) and prosodic (2s) cues. At only 34K parameters FlowFake achieves formal BIBO stability and O(dt^4) integration error. On a four-dataset cross domain benchmark (ASVspoof2019-LA, FakeOrReal, InTheWild, MLAAD), FlowFake reaches 75.29% on ASVspoof2019 trained only on FakeOrReal and 79.97% trained only on MLAAD. It outperforms RawGAT-ST and Whisper-DF on every evaluated pair and matching SSL Wav2vec2 (300x larger) at 0.01% of its parameter count. The source code is available on : https://github.com/GhostRider2023/FlowFake

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

Concept Flow Models: Anchoring Concept-Based Reasoning with Hierarchical Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance interpretability by projecting learned features into a human-understandable concept space. Recent approaches leverage vision-language models to generate concept embeddings, reducing the need for manual concept annotations. However, these models suffer from a critical limitation: as the number of concepts approaches the embedding dimension, information leakage increases, enabling the model to exploit spurious or semantically irrelevant correlations and undermining interpretability. In this work, we propose Concept Flow Models (CFMs), which replace the flat bottleneck with a hierarchical, concept-driven decision tree. Each internal node in the hierarchy focuses on a localized subset of discriminative concepts, progressively narrowing the prediction scope. Our framework constructs decision hierarchies from visual embeddings, distributes semantic concepts at each hierarchy level, and trains differentiable concept weights through probabilistic tree traversal. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that CFMs match the predictive performance of flat CBMs, while substantially mitigating information leakage by reducing effective concept usage. Furthermore, CFMs yield stepwise decision flows that enable transparent and auditable model reasoning with hierarchical class structures.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

TextMesh4D: Zero-shot Text-to-4D Mesh Generation

Large-scale, high-quality dynamic 3D (4D) assets are essential for learning physically grounded representations, but remain costly to capture and annotate at scale. This limits the viability of supervised 4D learning and motivates zero-shot text-to-4D generation leveraging pretrained diffusion priors. To model complex dynamics, prior methods typically adopt implicit 3D representations (e.g., NeRFs or 3DGS) for their deformation capacity. However, their implicit nature provides limited control over surface topology, which hinders high-fidelity geometry and makes temporally coherent surface reconstruction challenging. To address these limitations, we explore zero-shot text-to-4D mesh generation. However, a structural mismatch arises when combining diffusion-based guidance with topology-constrained meshes: the guidance is noisy and spatially inconsistent, while meshes impose severe topological constraints, making direct vertex-level deformation unstable. In this paper, we introduce TextMesh4D, the first zero-shot framework for text-to-4D that directly generates dynamic meshes by addressing the above challenge at two complementary levels. Geometrically, we shift deformation modeling from vertices to faces via a Jacobian Deformation Field (JDF), enabling topology-aware surface reconstruction through an integrability-enforcing integration formulation. Semantically, we propose a Local-Global Semantic Regularizer (LGSR) that preserves identity over time by jointly constraining local deformation plausibility and global shape consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art temporal consistency, structural fidelity, and visual quality, while remaining efficient on a single 24GB GPU.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Menopausal symptoms in peri- and postmenopausal women: systematic review and meta-analysis of prevalence, incidence, comorbidities, and clinical outcomes

Introduction: The global epidemiology of menopausal symptoms among middle-aged and elderly women remains unclear. Methods: Data on prevalence, comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms published up until March 1st 2019 were searched in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane databases. We used a random-effects model to compute point estimates of prevalence for 24 types of menopausal symptoms. We narratively summarized the patterns of the comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms due to limited data. Results: A total of 239 studies (n{approx}2.5 million middle-aged and elderly women) from 56 countries and regions were included in the analysis. The global pooled prevalence analysis revealed that hot flashes (48%) and night sweats (30%) were highly prevalent, alongside psychological symptoms like insomnia (47%), irritability (46%), anxiety (39%), and depression (30%). Physical symptoms including joint aches/pain (50%), backache (47%), and tiredness (61%) were also commonly reported. Heat intolerance showed the highest prevalence (76%), while symptoms like urinary incontinence (24%) and poor appetite (8%) were less frequent. These findings highlight the diverse and widespread impact of menopause on women globally, with significant variations across symptom types. Africa showed the highest pooled prevalence across a series of symptoms, compared with other continents. We observed high prevalence in developing countries, especially for psychological and physical symptoms; significant intra-Asian variation in vasomotor symptoms; hypertension and obesity as the most common comorbidities; joint pain, urinary incontinence, and vasomotor symptoms as the most incident complaints; and positive associations with cardiovascular disease in the psychological (depression and insomnia) and physical (joint pain) domains. Conclusion: This study highlights the global burden of menopausal symptoms, with significant differences across continents. The findings call for more inclusive research on underrepresented groups (particularly in Africa) and further investigation into drivers of this marked global heterogeneity in prevalence of menopausal symptoms and their comorbidities, incidence and outcomes.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Digital self-efficacy as a potential intermediary between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults: A cross-sectional analysis of HINTS 2024

Background: Older adults with vision impairment often experience barriers to using digital technology. The indirect associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills via digital self-efficacy and frustration among older adults remain largely unknown. Objective: This study aimed to 1) explore factors associated with digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults with vision impairment; 2) examine associations between vision impairment and digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults; and 3) examine whether digital self-efficacy and frustration may help explain associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills among older adults. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study using nationally representative data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) 2024. Respondents aged 60 and older were included. Vision impairment was assessed using a self-reported item. Outcomes included self-reported digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration. Survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression and generalized structural equation modeling were conducted, adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and the number of comorbidities. Results: Among 3,149 older adults (mean [SD] age, 70.7 [10.0] years; 45.6% female), 7.1% (n=223) reported vision impairment. Among older adults with vision impairment, 65.6% (95% CI, 53.5% to 75.9%) used the internet daily, and 79.5% (95% CI, 66.8% to 88.2%) used a smartphone in the past 12 months. In multivariable logistic regression analyses among older adults with vision impairment, older age was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.90), smartphone use (OR, 0.85; 95% CI, 0.75 to 0.97), wearable device use (OR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.97), and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80 to 0.93). Older adults who self-identified as racial and ethnic minority groups (e.g., Black/African American, Hispanic) had lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.15; 95% CI, 0.05 to 0.50) and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.17; 95% CI, 0.04 to 0.73) compared with Non-Hispanic White older adults. Vision impairment was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.37 to 0.99) and digital self-efficacy (OR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.32 to 0.86). Digital self-efficacy was associated with higher odds of daily internet use (OR, 2.95; 95% CI, 2.04 to 4.26). Generalized structural equation modeling identified an indirect association between vision impairment and daily internet use via digital self-efficacy (coefficient, -0.68; 95% CI, -1.24 to -0.12). Conclusions: Findings suggest that reduced digital self-efficacy may help explain the observed association between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults. Interventions targeting digital self-efficacy, including accessible interface designs, personalized coaching, and peer support, may help bridge the digital divide among older adults with vision impairment.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Numerical simulations of the spread from the mean of the SLE and Multiple SLE dynamics

arXiv:2606.11254v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Schramm-Loewner Evolution (SLE) describes a family of fractal curves that arise in the study of the scaling limits of many planar Statistical Physics models. These curves are modeled using the Loewner Differential Equation for the conformal maps $g_t(z)$ with a Brownian motion driver. Using Euler's Method, in the current work we performed numerical experiments to study at a fixed time the quantities $|g_t(z) - \overline{g_t(z)}|$ and $Re(g_t(z)) - Re(\overline{g_t(z)})$, where $Re$ denotes the real part and $\overline{g_t(z)}$ refers to the sample average. These random variables measure the 'spread' of the dynamics from the average behavior at fixed time. One of the scopes of this work is to give numerical predictions for future theoretical investigations on these quantities. When investigating these quantities in the SLE case our experiments predict that the distribution is bimodal when the dynamics started close to the origin, and it can become bell-shaped if the dynamics is started further from the origin. In the second part, we performed experiments for a Multiple SLE model whose driver is Dyson Brownian Motion. Due to singularity in the dynamics of the drivers and the many data points needed, this part is challenging from a computational perspective. In the multiple SLE case, our experiments predict that the distribution is bell-shaped in all cases. In addition, we check the changes in the distributions as we vary the parameter $\kappa$ in the SLE case and $\beta$ in the Multiple SLE case.

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

On the Limits of LLM-as-Judge for Scientific Novelty Assessment

arXiv:2606.12071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used to generate and judge scientific ideas. This makes novelty evaluation a central problem. Full idea evaluation is difficult because it often requires judging a method, its feasibility, and its empirical promise. We therefore study a cleaner upstream object: the research question (RQ). RQ generation is a prerequisite for scientific ideation, and RQs can be compared against questions pursued in real papers. We introduce RQ-Bench, a benchmark built from recent arXiv papers. For each paper, we reconstruct author-anchored RQs from its cited background, gaps, and contributions. These RQs are not the only valid questions for the same background. They are author-anchored reference points for testing novelty judgments. We evaluate model-generated RQs with standalone LLM judging, comparative LLM judging, and human expert evaluation. LLM judges consistently rate model-generated RQs as highly novel, producing a novelty mirage; in comparative evaluations, this preference becomes even stronger. Domain experts, however, reach the opposite conclusion and prefer the author-anchored reference questions. We further find that many generated RQs are narrow or source-bound, a dimension that LLM judges often miss unless explicitly tested. Overall, the contradictory novelty evaluations between LLM judges and human experts raise a serious concern about the reliability of using LLMs to assess the scientific novelty of research questions.

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

WorkBench Revisited: Workplace Agents Two Years On

Authors:

The best agent on WorkBench in March 2024, GPT-4, completed 43% of tasks and took an unintended harmful action, such as emailing the wrong person, on 26% of them. We re-visit the benchmark in June 2026 and find that the best agent to date, Claude Opus 4.8, completes 89% and takes an unintended harmful action on 2.5%. Aside from this considerable progress in frontier agent performance, three things stand out. First, capability and safety go together on WorkBench rather than trade off, so the models that finish the most tasks also do the least unintended damage. Second, while several classes of error have been totally eliminated, frontier models still make some basic mistakes that occasionally result in irreversible harm, such as sending an email to the wrong person. Third, the rise of open-weight models has drastically lowered costs for a performance level that was previously only accessible to proprietary models, while frontier costs have stayed relatively stable. We release an updated version of the benchmark with data and code quality improvements, new model scores, and analysis of agent progress on WorkBench since 2024.

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

Mind the Heads: Topological Representation Alignment for Multimodal LLMs

Representation alignment has emerged as an effective approach to improve Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by regularizing their internal representations toward those of an external vision encoder. However, existing methods typically align a fixed layer of the language backbone, overlooking the fine-grained structure of Transformer models. In this work, we propose Head-Wise Representation Alignment (HeRA), a method that enforces cross-modal alignment at the level of individual attention heads. Our approach is grounded in the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, focusing on preserving the topological structure of representations (i.e., their local neighborhood relationships) across modalities. Following the Mutual K-Nearest Neighbor (MKNN) alignment metric, we introduce a contrastive objective that acts as a differentiable proxy for matching local structures. HeRA applies this objective during multimodal training to specific attention heads in the LLM, selected by their alignment score according to the MKNN metric. Counterintuitively, we find that aligning the least aligned heads yields the largest gains. Extensive evaluations across multiple MLLMs and 18 benchmarks demonstrate that HeRA consistently improves performance on challenging vision-centric tasks and serves as an effective regularizer against visual hallucinations by naturally curbing the over-reliance on linguistic priors. Our code is publicly released.

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

FlexiBrain: Resolution-Agnostic Voxel-Level Encoding for Native fMRI

arXiv:2606.11500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The success of large-scale deep learning models in neuroscience is fundamentally constrained by severe data heterogeneity. Native fMRI data aggregated from diverse sources exhibit substantial variation in both spatial and temporal resolutions. Consequently, most existing frameworks rely on lengthy, rigid preprocessing pipelines that enforce uniformity across datasets. This practice introduces two critical limitations: (1) potential degradation of subject-specific anatomical information; (2) significant computational overhead, often requiring hours of processing per subject. Here, we propose FlexiBrain, a resolution-agnostic voxel-level encoding framework for native fMRI based on Mamba-JEPA. FlexiBrain defines patch sizes in real-world physical units and employs a dynamic patch resizing, thereby bypassing destructive spatial standardization while enabling direct ingestion of data in native space. We instantiate the framework using an efficient Mamba-JEPA backbone to model high-dimensional 4D fMRI signals. Across five diverse downstream neuroscience tasks, FlexiBrain consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving gains of up to 12 percentage points without external data augmentation. Importantly, FlexiBrain functions as a seamless plug-in module, substantially reducing preprocessing costs and accelerating the development of robust voxel-level fMRI foundation models. Code is available at https://github.com/OneMore1/FlexiBrain.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A Turbo-Inference Strategy for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation

Object detection and instance segmentation tasks are closely related. Existing top-down instance segmentation methods usually follow a detect-then-segment paradigm, where an initial detector is used to recognize and localize objects with bounding boxes, followed by the segmentation of an instance mask within each bounding box. In such methods, the detection accuracy directly influences the subsequent segmentation performance. However, previous research has seldom explored the impact of the instance segmentation task on object detection. In this paper, we present a turbo-inference strategy for the top-down methods that leverages the complementary information between detection and segmentation tasks iteratively. Specifically we design two modules: turbo-detection head and turbo-segmentation head, which facilitate communication between the tasks. The two modules form a closed loop that interlaces the detection and segmentation results without retraining the model. Comprehensive experiments on the COCO, iFLYTEK, and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that our method substantially enhances both detection and segmentation accuracies with a certain increase in computational cost. The proposed method represents a tradeoff between prediction accuracy and inference speed. Codes are available at https://github.com/zhaozhen2333/Turbo-Learning.git.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Supporting people to access social security payments through the Special Rules for End of Life: a qualitative study of the perspectives of patients, carers and health care professionals

Background: People living with terminal illness face a double financial burden from additional costs and loss of earning for themselves and their carers. Social security benefits are intended to help alleviate some of this financial pressure, and in the UK and other countries people are eligible for fast-tracked access to financial support via the Special Rules for End of Life. One in 3 people who are eligible miss out on this support, yet there is limited evidence on the reasons for this take-up deficit. Objectives: The aim of this study is to understand the barriers and facilitators to claiming benefits for terminally ill people from the perspectives of patients, carers, and health care professionals. Methods: This is a qualitative study combining i) focus groups with healthcare professionals recruited via professional networks and social media, and ii) interviews with patients and carers recruited in hospital and hospice settings. We analysed the data using Practical Thematic Analysis Results: Fifty-five multidisciplinary healthcare professionals participated in 11 focus groups, and we interviewed 10 patients and carers. We constructed five descriptive themes to summarise the data: Navigating priorities and uncertainty; positive impacts alongside a sense of shame and stigma; talking about money, difficulties and dividends; everybodys, yet nobodys, responsibility; and sticking points in the system. Conclusion: The themes reveal several challenges that may contribute to people not taking up this financial support. However, discussions about access to benefits were also seen as a core part of holistic care, a positive way to offer support and a gateway to other discussions about end-of-life care preferences and decisions. Recommendations for policy and practice include evaluating the adoption of a diagnostic rather than a prognostic eligibility criteria, integrating discussions about benefits into existing processes such as advance care planning, and improving education and support for clinicians.

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

DVD: Discrete Voxel Diffusion for 3D Generation and Editing

We introduce Discrete Voxel Diffusion (DVD), a discrete diffusion framework to generate, assess, and edit sparse voxels for SLat (Structured LATent) based 3D generative pipelines. Although discrete diffusion has not generally displaced continuous diffusion in image-like generation, we show that it can be an effective first-stage prior for sparse voxel scaffolds. By treating voxel occupancy as a native discrete variable, DVD avoids continuous-to-discrete thresholding and provides a simple framework for voxel generation, uncertainty estimation, and editing. Beyond quality gains, DVD provides more interpretable generation dynamics through explicit categorical modeling. Furthermore, we leverage the predictive entropy as a robust uncertainty metric to identify ambiguous voxel regions and complicated samples, facilitating tasks such as data filtering and quality assessment. Finally, we propose a lightweight fine-tuning strategy using block-structured perturbation patterns. This approach empowers the model to inpaint and edit voxels within a single sampling round, requiring negligible auxiliary computation and no additional model evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/TeCai/DVD.

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

Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

arXiv:2606.13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences. This makes them vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, in which seemingly benign content embeds adversarial instructions that manipulate agent behaviour. Existing security benchmarks adopt an attack-centric perspective, focusing on the technical feasibility of injections while overlooking the nuanced distribution of resulting harms. In practice, however, prompt-injection risk is victim-dependent: a single exploit can produce asymmetric consequences for different stakeholders, and the same attack pattern may exhibit substantially different effectiveness depending on whom it targets. To capture these properties, we introduce \sysname, a stakeholder-centric benchmark to systematically categorize and attribute harm in real-world web agent systems. It distinguishes between affected entities (e.g., user, seller, platform), decomposes the attacks into concrete objectives, and evaluates each case with complementary outcome- and process-level metrics. Our results reveal substantial and heterogeneous vulnerabilities: not a single attack objective is reliably resisted by current agents, and failures distribute across qualitatively distinct modes ranging from stealthy parasitism (attack succeeds without disrupting the user's delegated task) to misaligned disruption (task disrupted without attack success) and compounded failure (both adversarial objective and task integrity simultaneously violated). These patterns are missed by conventional evaluation, highlighting the need for stakeholder-aware assessment of LLM-based agents in real-world deployments. Benchmark is available at https://github.com/StakeBench/SBC.

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arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fundamental Limitations of QAOA on Constrained Problems and a Route to Exponential Enhancement

arXiv:2511.17259v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study fundamental limitations of the generic Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on constrained problems where valid solutions form a low dimensional manifold inside the Boolean hypercube, and we present a provable route to exponential improvements via constraint embedding. Focusing on permutation constrained objectives, we show that the standard generic QAOA ansatz, with a transverse field mixer and diagonal r local cost, faces an intrinsic feasibility bottleneck: even after angle optimization, circuits whose depth grows at most sublinearly with n cannot raise the total probability mass on the feasible manifold much above the uniform baseline suppressed by the size of the full Hilber space. Against this envelope we introduce a minimal constraint enhanced kernel (CE QAOA) that operates directly inside a product one hot subspace and mixes with a block local XY Hamiltonian. For permutation constrained problems, we prove an angle robust, depth matched exponential enhancement where the ratio between the feasible mass from CE QAOA and generic QAOA grows exponentially in $n^2$ for all depths up to a linear fraction of n, under a mild polynomial growth condition on the interaction hypergraph. Thanks to the problem algorithm co design in the kernel construction, the techniques and guarantees extend beyond permutations to a broad class of NP-Hard constrained optimization problems.