Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18728

LegalWorld: A Life-Cycle Interactive Environment for Legal Agents

Authors:

Songhan Zuo↗Shengbin Yue↗Tao Chiang↗Guanying Li↗Yun Song↗Xuanjing Huang↗Zhongyu Wei↗

Civil litigation is inherently a life-cycle process: what a lawyer drafts on day one constrains what unfolds at trial months later. Yet existing legal benchmarks evaluate isolated subtasks, and prior legal-agent simulators reinitialize each scenario from shared ground truth, leaving cross-stage causal dependencies unmodeled. We present LegalWorld, a life-cycle interactive environment that models Chinese civil litigation as a causally connected state chain of five stages (seven sub-scenarios), grounded in 75,309 paired Chinese civil judgments. We pair it with reusable infrastructure (local memory, global case memory, a Skill/Tool library) that keeps each dispute consistent across its full life cycle. Building on this environment, we construct LongJud-Bench to evaluate agent capability across all five connected stages. 18,992 ratings from 217 legal-background evaluators confirm that LegalWorld trajectories are procedurally faithful and role-consistent; and a capability-level cross-model evaluation reveals sharp divergences that aggregate scores cannot expose, with no single backbone leading across consultation, drafting, and courtroom advocacy. Detailed resources will be released publicly.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2603.20750

Subjective-Graph LLM Agents for Simulating Uncertainty in Classroom Social Perception

Authors:

Jinming Yang↗Xinyu Jiang↗Xinshan Jiao↗Xinping Zhang↗

arXiv:2603.20750v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Social actors do not observe a common social world: each individual forms judgments from a partial and potentially distorted view of the surrounding network. We study whether graph-local evidence and credibility-weighted communication can generate persistent distortions in perceived academic standing, even when agents repeatedly receive objective performance signals. We introduce a data-constrained multi-agent framework in which LLM agents operate through individualized subjective graphs that determine peer visibility, evidence access, and interaction opportunities. Agents exchange uncertainty-annotated assessments, evaluate message credibility, and maintain explicit Gaussian belief states updated through Bayesian fusion. We evaluate the framework on 12 middle-school classrooms comprising 482 students, using questionnaire-derived social information and six consecutive examinations. On the Social-Observed subset (n=419), collective ranking error increases from 0.066 \pm 0.008 to 0.124 \pm 0.009 across six epochs despite repeated exam-based anchoring. Ablations associate individualized visibility and LLM-based trust gating with more stable long-horizon behavior, while constrained retrieval primarily safeguards against global-information leakage. Compared with evaluated DeGroot configurations, the proposed framework achieves lower final ranking error; those DeGroot configurations exhibit near-zero terminal opinion diversity. These findings establish subjective-graph LLM agents as a mechanism-oriented framework for data-constrained simulated social perception. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Rashomonomon-0126.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18884

Performance Gap Analysis between Latin and Arabic Scripts HTR

Authors:

Sana Al-azzawi↗Elisa Barney↗Marcus Liwicki↗

Recent studies have shown that handwritten text recognition (HTR) systems perform worse on Arabic-script datasets than on Latin-script data. However, the reasons for this gap are still not well understood due to the lack of controlled comparisons. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of Arabic and Latin scripts HTR using a unified CRNN model for line-level HTR across nine datasets (including KHATT (Arabic), Muharaf (Arabic), NUST-UHWR (Urdu), PHTD (Persian), IAM (English), READ-2016 (German), and others) and di ferent training sizes (K in {100, 500, 1000, 2000, ..., Kfull}). Our results show the performance gap remains: it is large in low-resource settings, decreases with more data, but remains even at full scale, with a consistent difference of 5-7 CER points. We show that annotation quality matters, as many datasets contain labeling errors. Cleaning reduces error rates and narrows the gap, but does not eliminate it. In addition, we find that a fixed number of training samples provides less effective coverage in Arabic due to higher visual variability, requiring more data to learn similar representations. We compare recognition across datasets in terms of the number of text lines and the number of characters, showing an equivalence trade-off. We compare character frequency distributions across scripts and show that Arabic is significantly more heavy-tailed than Latin. Our error analysis reveals that around 30 percent of substitution errors in Arabic datasets (e.g., KHATT) are caused by confusion between visually similar characters, compared to about 15 percent in Latin-script datasets such as IAM.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19565

Mix-QVLA: Task-Evidence-Aware Mixed-Precision Quantization of Vision-Language-Action Models

Authors:

Navin Ranjan↗Andreas Savakis↗

We propose Mix-QVLA, a task-evidence-aware mixed-precision PTQ framework for VLA models. Mix-QVLA anchors each quantized variant to the full-precision action-token reference decision and evaluates whether quantization preserves task-relevant evidence across key VLA functional boundaries. It computes normalized gradient-weighted task-evidence maps from boundary activations and compares full-precision and quantized maps using evidence-mass and attribution-distribution distortion, capturing changes in both the strength and allocation of decision-supporting evidence. A soft-bottleneck objective aggregates boundary-level degradation into layer-wise sensitivity scores. Mix-QVLA further models sensitivity throughout task execution, capturing phase-dependent shifts in layer importance rather than assuming a fixed sensitivity profile. The resulting evidence- and time-aware scores guide mixed-precision bit allocation under model-size and BitOps budgets. Extensive evaluations on OpenVLA-style policies show that Mix-QVLA improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off of low-bit VLA deployment. On LIBERO, Mix-QVLA reduces OpenVLA-OFT memory from 15.4 GB to 4.1 GB, retains 96.3 average success compared with 97.1 for the BF16 model, and achieves a 1.52x inference speedup.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18069

Blended Chart Surfaces: A Seamless Explicit Representation for Smooth Surface Fitting

Authors:

Romy Williamson↗Niloy Mitra↗

A surface representation suitable for geometry processing should be compact and explicit, provide global smoothness guarantees, support a wide range of surface topologies, and offer reliable access to differential quantities such as normals and surface energies, while remaining compatible with modern differentiable optimization. Existing neural representations typically sacrifice one or more of these properties: implicit fields typically require iso-surfacing for downstream use, while explicit neural maps are constrained by canonical-domain parametrizations or exhibit seam artifacts between local charts. We introduce Blended Chart Surfaces, a compact, network-free, explicit representation that is smooth by construction and anchored to user-provided topology. Given a coarse proxy mesh encoding the intended surface topology and approximate geometry, Blended Chart Surfaces jointly optimize for a polynomial map at each proxy vertex using an off-the-shelf optimizer to fit to an implicit target shape, avoiding the need for an input parametrization. Neighboring maps are fused using a smooth 'one-ring coordinate' blending scheme, decoupling topology and coarse geometry (carried by the proxy) from geometric details (carried by the local patches). The surface is globally smooth, fully differentiable, and enables stable evaluation of derivatives, making differential quantities and surface energies directly accessible. Additionally, our construction is equivariant to rigid motions and scaling of the proxy mesh. We evaluate Blended Chart Surfaces on various topologies and geometric complexity, and compare against explicit alternatives including interpolating-function baselines and mesh-displacement MLPs. Across these, Blended Chart Surfaces achieve a favorable trade-off among compactness, simplicity, access to differential quantities, and expressivity while remaining smooth across patch boundaries.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24282

UniRED: Unified RGB-D Video Frame Interpolation with Event Guidance

Authors:

Yinuo Zhang↗Guangshun Wei↗Yuanfeng Zhou↗Yiran Shen↗

High frame-rate RGB-D videos are crucial for a variety of downstream tasks, including motion analysis, dynamic scene understanding, and 3D reconstruction. However, due to hardware and sensing constraints, practical RGB-D cameras are typically limited to low frame rates, making it difficult to capture rapid scene dynamics. Existing video interpolation methods have achieved strong performance on RGB data, but they are not readily applicable to RGB-D scenarios, where they often yield blurry boundaries, visible artifacts, and degraded geometric consistency. Furthermore, motion estimation from only two boundary frames is inherently under-constrained in complex dynamic scenes. Event cameras, by contrast, provide asynchronous measurements with ultra-high temporal resolution, offering dense motion cues. In this paper, we propose a unified multimodal framework for RGB-D video interpolation that jointly exploits RGB appearance, depth geometry, and event-based temporal cues. Specifically, it first extracts and fuses RGB, depth and event cues, then estimates bidirectional flow with motion basis refinement for RGB and Z-axial refinement for depth, and finally synthesizes the target RGB-D frame via bidirectional warping and soft blending. In addition, we construct a new RGB-D-Event dataset to alleviate the scarcity of tri-modal training data. Extensive experiments on a public benchmark and the proposed dataset demonstrate that our method achieves superior photometric fidelity for RGB interpolation and stronger geometric accuracy for depth interpolation than existing approaches.

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07.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:313b5ce551727fb832313f98d597ee11

Beyond External Load: Integrative Immune Monitoring Reveals Injury-Predictive Signals in the Athlete's Internal State

Authors:

Heyn↗Perron↗Rodas↗Mendizabal Sasieta↗Grzelak↗Soto↗Capelli↗Martin-Garcia↗Mallol↗Pruna↗Gomez-Chereguini↗

Abstract (already in the PDF; paste if a box is required): Injury risk prediction in elite football relies almost exclusively on external load metrics derived from GPS tracking, overlooking the molecular state of the athlete. We monitored 26 male players from FC Barcelona's first team across the 2025 calendar year, integrating GPS-derived training load with longitudinal blood-based immune monitoring (systemic inflammation and TCR-derived immune age). Immune age acceleration and inflammation were elevated in the 14 days preceding musculoskeletal injuries. A logistic regression model combining external load, inflammation, immune age acceleration, and career injury history reached an overall AUC of 0.678 and a mean per-player AUC of 0.754 (SD 0.146), improving on a GPS-only baseline of 0.541. Applied to 2026 data, the frozen model ranked players who later sustained non-contact musculoskeletal injuries high in the risk distribution. Together, our data suggest multimodal immune monitoring in elite football to reveal the athlete's internal physiological state, which carries injury-relevant information that external load alone does not capture.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23933

Flow-Corrected Thompson Sampling for Non-Stationary Contextual Bandits

Authors:

AmirHossein Naghdi↗Ali Baheri↗

arXiv:2606.23933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study non-stationary linear contextual bandits where the reward model drifts over time, rendering classical contextual bandit algorithms brittle because historical data becomes systematically biased. We propose Flow-Corrected Thompson Sampling (fcTS), a Bayesian method that reuses experience by transporting past rewards to the present using an explicit drift model and incorporating each transported observation with a confidence weight that reflects transport reliability. This yields a unified template that specializes in (i) linear parameter drift via online slope estimation and reward correction, (ii) periodic variation via phase-aware reuse across cycles, and (iii) recurring regime switches via changepoint detection and regime-specific posterior memory. The resulting posterior updates remain closed-form under a linear Gaussian model and can be implemented efficiently with truncated, incrementally updated sufficient statistics. Across five controlled case studies and a semi-synthetic portfolio-selection benchmark with multiple overlapping non-stationarities, fcTS outperforms standard forgetting-based baselines (discounting, sliding windows, and periodic restarts), with the largest gains in settings exhibiting recurring temporal structure. These results demonstrate that when non-stationarity is structured, correcting and reweighting historical observations can be substantially more sample-efficient than uniformly discarding them.

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09.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.28153

Arbitrarily Configurable Wavefunctions via Imaginary Gauge Phase Imprint in Non-Hermitian Lattices

Authors:

Ji-Long Dong↗Shi-Liang Zhu↗Dan-Wei Zhang↗

arXiv:2603.28153v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a general framework, termed the imaginary gauge phase imprint (IGPI), which enables engineering arbitrarily configurable wavefunctions with exact solutions and self-organization dynamics in any-dimensional non-Hermitian lattices under imaginary gauge fields. Using this method, we uncover a novel phase with exact critical wavefunctions, dubbed the skin critical phase (SCP), which is marked by unconventional localization, topological-skin, and dynamical characteristics. Furthermore, we validate the IGPI by imprinting and visualizing complex fractal states with Sierpinski-carpet and Koch-snowflake profiles, as well as exotic super-moire and 3D-moire states in regular lattices. Our work not only offers fresh insights into non-Hermitian critical and fractal physics, but also provides a rigorous paradigm for controlling and visualizing wavefunction patterns using the IGPI in engineered non-Hermitian systems.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17649

A Risk Decomposition Framework for Pre-Hoc Fine-Tuning Prediction

Authors:

Yuxiang Luo↗Chen Wang↗Nan Tang↗

arXiv:2606.17649v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The high cost of fine-tuning LLMs poses a significant economic barrier; pre-hoc performance prediction offers a critical solution to substantially reduce this expense. However, the theoretical limits of pre-hoc performance prediction remain unexplored. We formulate it as a stochastic estimation problem under information constraints, decomposing prediction risk into two components: an intrinsic limit (static data-model compatibility) and a reducible optimization variance. We prove that optimization variance admits a necessary lower bound on its decay rate, implying fundamental constraints on how quickly uncertainty dissipates, regardless of the predictor used. Based on these dynamics, we derive a budget-optimal probing principle and introduce a predictability phase diagram that organizes tasks into three distinct regimes: Static-Sufficient, Dynamic-Critical, and Noise-Dominant. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks validate these theoretical regimes and demonstrate the efficiency of our probing strategy.

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11.

Nature Medicine 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:c74fef73248ceb35532e1704f305e5bf

General-purpose chatbots outperform clinical AI tools on physicians’ real-world questions

Authors: Unknown Author

Specialized clinical AI tools are entering medical practice with little independent testing. In a head-to-head evaluation across two public benchmarks and real questions from physicians, three general-purpose frontier large language models outperformed two leading clinical AI tools, which performed no better than Google search AI overview.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15479

Bayesian 3D Steerable CNNs: Enabling Equivariance and Uncertainty Quantification Simultaneously

Authors:

Abhishek Keripale↗Ponkrshnan Thiagarajan↗Susanta Ghosh↗

arXiv:2606.15479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Steerable convolutional neural networks (Steerable-CNNs) guarantee SE(3)-equivariance by parameterizing kernels as linear combinations of steerable basis functions, but their deterministic nature precludes uncertainty quantification - limiting their use in settings where confidence estimates are essential. We propose a Bayesian Steerable-CNN that places posterior distributions over the basis coefficients, yielding stochastic kernels while preserving equivariance exactly. The loss function of the model is obtained via variational inference and minimized by Bayes-by-Backpropagation. The framework admits a decomposition of predictive uncertainty into epistemic and aleatoric components. Empirically, the model attains competitive classification accuracy alongside an expected calibration error of 0.0263 and outperforms its deterministic counterpart by up to 6.17% under distributional shift induced by additive Gaussian noise. Furthermore, we leverage the model's uncertainty estimates to enhance its performance significantly, achieving a notable gain - approximately 4% higher accuracy across 84% of the test dataset. A statistically significant negative correlation between epistemic uncertainty and prediction error confirms that the learned posterior variance is semantically meaningful. The framework unifies Bayesian uncertainty quantification with the inductive bias of equivariant CNNs.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.02028

Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories

Authors:

Ya Gao↗Kalle Kujanp\"a\"a↗Pekka Marttinen↗Harri Valpola↗Alexander Ilin↗

arXiv:2602.02028v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

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14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16489

BRICKS-WM: Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models

Authors:

Shaowei Zhang↗Jiahan Cao↗Xunlan Zhou↗Shenghua Wan↗De-Chuan Zhan↗

arXiv:2606.16489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has achieved remarkable success in continuous control by leveraging latent world models. However, prevailing approaches typically rely on monolithic latent dynamics, entangling environment dynamics into a coupled process. This coupling severely limits reusability: altering the agent necessitates retraining the entire world from scratch, even if the environment remains constant. To address this, we introduce BRICKS-WM (Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models), a framework for the modular assembly of structured world models. Driven by the insight that the physical world is composed of independent entities, we posit that global dynamics can be modeled as a composition of distinct dynamical modules interacting via latent interfaces. As a minimal instantiation, we factorize the latent state space into an actuated Agent module and an external Background module, bridged by a learned latent interface. Unlike prior object-centric methods that prioritize visual segmentation, BRICKS-WM enforces a functional separation in transition dynamics, ensuring that background dynamics remains agnostic to the agent's dynamics. Empirically, BRICKS-WM achieves control performance comparable to strong monolithic baselines when trained from scratch, and enables the reuse of frozen background dynamics across agents.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2508.04266

ShoppingBench: A Real-World Intent-Grounded Shopping Benchmark for LLM-based Agents

Authors:

Jiangyuan Wang↗Kejun Xiao↗Qi Sun↗Huaipeng Zhao↗Tao Luo↗Jian Dong Zhang↗Xiaoyi Zeng↗

Existing benchmarks in e-commerce primarily focus on basic user intents, such as finding or purchasing products. However, real-world users often pursue more complex goals, such as applying vouchers, managing budgets, and finding multi-products seller. To bridge this gap, we propose ShoppingBench, a novel end-to-end shopping benchmark designed to encompass increasingly challenging levels of grounded intent. Specifically, we propose a scalable framework to simulate user instructions based on various intents derived from sampled real-world products. To facilitate consistent and reliable evaluations, we provide a large-scale shopping sandbox that serves as an interactive simulated environment, incorporating over 2.5 million real-world products. Experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art language agents (such as GPT-4.1) achieve absolute success rates under 50% on our benchmark tasks, highlighting the significant challenges posed by our ShoppingBench. In addition, we propose a trajectory distillation strategy and leverage supervised fine-tuning, along with reinforcement learning on synthetic trajectories, to distill the capabilities of a large language agent into a smaller one. As a result, our trained agent achieves competitive performance compared to GPT-4.1.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2512.03818

Improving Alignment Between Human and Machine Codes: An Empirical Assessment of Prompt Engineering for Construct Identification in Psychology

Authors:

Kylie L. Anglin↗Stephanie Milan↗Brittney Hernandez↗Claudia Ventura↗

Due to their architecture and vast pre-training data, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text classification performance. However, LLM output - here, the category assigned to a text - depends heavily on the wording of the prompt. While literature on prompt engineering is expanding, few studies focus on classification tasks, and even fewer address domains like psychology, where constructs have precise, theory-driven definitions that may not be well represented in pre-training data. We present an empirical framework for optimizing LLM performance for identifying constructs in texts via prompt engineering. We experimentally evaluate five prompting strategies – codebook-guided empirical prompt selection, automatic prompt engineering, persona prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, and explanatory prompting - with zero-shot and few-shot classification. We find that persona, chain-of-thought, and explanations do not fully address performance loss accompanying a badly worded prompt. Instead, the most influential features of a prompt are the construct definition, task framing, and, to a lesser extent, the examples provided. Across three constructs and two models, the classifications most aligned with expert judgments resulted from a few-shot prompt combining codebook-guided empirical prompt selection with automatic prompt engineering. Based on our findings, we recommend that researchers generate and evaluate as many prompt variants as feasible, whether human-crafted, automatically generated, or ideally both, and select prompts and examples based on empirical performance in a training dataset, validating the final approach in a holdout set. This procedure offers a practical, systematic, and theory-driven method for optimizing LLM prompts in settings where alignment with expert judgment is critical.

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2406.06855

Design and Scheduling of an AI-based Queueing System

Authors:

Jiung Lee↗Hongseok Namkoong↗Yibo Zeng↗

arXiv:2406.06855v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: To leverage prediction models to make optimal scheduling decisions in service systems, we must understand how predictive errors impact congestion due to externalities on the delay of other jobs. Motivated by applications where prediction models interact with human servers (e.g., content moderation), we consider a large queueing system comprising of many single server queues where the class of a job is estimated using a prediction model. By characterizing the impact of mispredictions on congestion cost in heavy traffic, we design an index-based policy that incorporates the predicted class information in a near-optimal manner. Our theoretical results guide the design of predictive models by providing a simple model selection procedure with downstream queueing performance as a central concern, and offer novel insights on how to design queueing systems with AI-based triage. We illustrate our framework on a content moderation task based on real online comments, where we construct toxicity classifiers by finetuning large language models.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13780

Conformal calibration and look-elsewhere effect in anomaly detection for new-physics searches

Authors:

Jack Y. Araz↗Michael Spannowsky↗

arXiv:2606.13780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine-learned anomaly detection is reshaping searches for new physics, but it has outrun the statistics used to interpret it. A raw anomaly score has no calibrated meaning, a model that scans many regions inflates the look-elsewhere effect, and the asymptotic significances the field relies on are blind to the background mismodelling that anomaly detectors are especially prone to. We propose a calibration layer, built on conformal prediction, that turns any anomaly score into a defensible significance with distribution-free, finite-sample guarantees. Conformal prediction converts scores into valid local p-values, weighted and Mondrian variants repair the sideband-to-signal-region exchangeability failures that resonant searches suffer, and a Gross-Vitells step carries the result through to a look-elsewhere-aware global significance. The layer does two things at once. It exposes miscalibration that the standard pipeline cannot see, and it corrects it without retraining the detector. On public LHC Olympics data, a classifier develops a substructure-mass correlation that makes sideband-calibrated background p-values anti-conservative. Taken at face value, this manufactures a $\sim 46\sigma$ excess from background sculpting alone, which the label-free weighted correction removes, restoring an honest null. When run as a blind wide-mass bump hunt, the standard asymptotic and unweighted procedures fabricate $\gtrsim10\sigma$ excesses and $\approx5\sigma$ excesses even in signal-free windows, while the conformal layer raises no false alarms and its global false-positive rate is verified on background-only pseudoexperiments. The result is an auditable, detector-agnostic path from an uncalibrated score to a trials-factor-aware significance, ready to be folded into experimental anomaly searches.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2603.28251

DiffAttn: Diffusion-Based Drivers' Visual Attention Prediction with LLM-Enhanced Semantic Reasoning

Authors:

Weimin Liu↗Qingkun Li↗Jiyuan Qiu↗Wenjun Wang↗Joshua H. Meng↗

Drivers' visual attention provides critical cues for anticipating latent hazards and directly shapes decision-making and control maneuvers, where its absence can compromise traffic safety. To emulate drivers' perception patterns and advance visual attention prediction for intelligent vehicles, we propose DiffAttn, a diffusion-based framework that formulates this task as a conditional diffusion-denoising process, enabling more accurate modeling of drivers' attention. To capture both local and global scene features, we adopt Swin Transformer as encoder and design a decoder that combines a Feature Fusion Pyramid for cross-layer interaction with dense, multi-scale conditional diffusion to jointly enhance denoising learning and model fine-grained local and global scene contexts. Additionally, a large language model (LLM) layer is incorporated to enhance top-down semantic reasoning and improve sensitivity to safety-critical cues. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that DiffAttn achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance, surpassing most video-based, top-down-feature-driven, and LLM-enhanced baselines. Our framework further supports interpretable driver-centric scene understanding and has the potential to improve in-cabin human-machine interaction, risk perception, and drivers' state measurement in intelligent vehicles.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17281

Are you speaking my languages? On spoken language adherence in multimodal LLMs

Authors:

Hyungwon Kim↗Kandarp Joshi↗Lillian Zhou↗Pavel Golik↗Petar Aleksic↗

While Large Language Model (LLM) based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) enables seamless multilingual use, models often misidentify the output language, compromising transcription fidelity and downstream application quality. To preserve flexibility and code-switching capabilities, we propose a soft prompting approach that hints at potential spoken languages without strictly constraining the output. We formally define this challenge as a lack of language adherence, introduce a novel metric to quantify violations, and evaluate three mitigation strategies: (1) zero-shot prompting for robust guidance under uncertainty, (2) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to improve prompt adherence, and (3) Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to enforce adherence during decoding. We present a comparative analysis of these methods across multiple languages, evaluating effectiveness in reducing the language violation while maintaining overall ASR performance. Finally, we discuss trade-offs to guide strategy selection under various compute constraints.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2604.25371

PhyloSDF: Phylogenetically-Conditioned Neural Generation of 3D Skull Morphology via Residual Flow Matching

Authors:

Kaikwan Lau↗Gary P. T. Choi↗

Generating novel, biologically plausible three-dimensional morphological structures is a fundamental challenge in computational evolutionary biology, hampered by extreme data scarcity and the requirement that generated shapes respect phylogenetic relationships among species. In this work, we present PhyloSDF, a phylogenetically-conditioned neural generative model for 3D biological morphology that integrates two innovations: (1) a DeepSDF auto-decoder regularized by a novel Phylogenetic Consistency Loss that structures the latent space to correlate with evolutionary distances (Pearson r=0.993); (2) a Residual Conditional Flow Matching (Residual CFM) architecture that factorizes generation into analytic species-centroid lookup and learned residual prediction, enabling generation from as few as ~4 specimens per species. We evaluate PhyloSDF on 100 micro-CT-scanned skulls of Darwin's Finches and their relatives across 24 species. The model generates novel meshes achieving 88-129% of real intra-species variation at the code level, with all 180 generated meshes verified as non-memorized. Residual CFM surpasses denoising diffusion (which fails entirely at this scale), standard flow matching (which mode-collapses to 3-6% variation), and a Gaussian mixture baseline in both fidelity (Chamfer Distance 0.00181 vs. 0.00190) and morphometric Fr\'{e}chet distance (10,641 vs. 13,322). Leave-one-species-out experiments across 18 species demonstrate phylogenetic extrapolation capability, and smooth latent interpolations produce biologically plausible ancestral skull reconstructions.

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22.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:7e012ed048276f9225c0f87771fdc98e

Identification of environmental factors and growth stages in the prediction of fibre yield and fibre quality traits in rain-grown cotton

Authors:

Feng↗Rafter↗Wilson↗Li↗Conaty↗

Context Understanding how and when environmental conditions influence overall crop performance is crucial for optimising the development of genotypes to a specific breeding target environment. We focused on economically important traits of Australian rain-grown cotton including fibre yield and quality traits, which have not been investigated comprehensively. The aim of the study was to identify relevant environmental factors, and the timing and extent of their impact on rain-grown cotton production. Methods We used a data driven approach to analyse the relationship between ten climate related environmental factors across various plant growth stages and eight fibre yield and quality traits, using a large-scale field dataset of 9,283 records collected over 23 years at 4 locations, with 53 unique year-location combinations. We applied eight complementary statistical models including stepwise, penalised and Bayesian linear regression, regression-tree based ensemble methods and deep learning frameworks to (1) select the most essential environmental covariates affecting rain-grown cotton production, and (2) evaluate the predictive performance of these models. Results The environmental impacts on rain-grown cotton production were trait and growth-stage specific. Number of rainy days and solar radiation were identified as the most influential environmental factors for fibre yield traits, vapour pressure deficit at maximum daily temperature was the most influential factor for majority of fibre quality traits. However, each analysed trait was influenced by multiple environmental factors across multiple growth stages (rather than a single factor or a single growth stage). These influential covariates explained a wide range of variation in the traits, accounting for 5.8% to 68.2%. Using the best-fit random forest model, our findings revealed non-linear relationships between key environmental covariates and the traits. Conclusions Environmental factors at different rain-grown cotton growth stages are key determinants for the performance of end-of-season fibre yield and fibre quality parameters. These findings highlight the need to account for environment conditions when developing cotton varieties optimised for rain-grown production systems. Potential strategies are proposed whereby these key environmental factors can be used to increase the rate of genetic gain in rain-grown cotton production systems. Implications The results of this study will be crucial for future genetic evaluations and analyses of genotype-by-environment interaction effects in rain-grown cotton, which must account for the influence of the environment on plant performance. Furthermore, these methods can be applied to other species to identify critical growth stages and environmental factors which most influence crop performance.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11437

The Power of Test-Time Training for Approximate Sampling

Authors:

Noah Golowich↗Ankur Moitra↗Dhruv Rohatgi↗

arXiv:2606.11437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently sampling from a complex probability distribution is a fundamental problem which has become increasingly pertinent in recent years with the rise of generative AI, as sophisticated sampling procedures from LLMs have been proposed to solve challenging reasoning problems. The efficacy of such sampling algorithms is limited, however, by the relationship between the LLM and the particular sampling task at hand, which has motivated the framework of test-time training (TTT). TTT works by updating a model's weights in response to partial generations and reward feedback received at inference time, thus adapting to the particular problem. In this work, we propose a formalization for TTT as the problem of producing a sample from a given probability measure $\mu^\star$ belonging to a known class ${F}$ of distributions, given an oracle $\hat \mu$ which yields approximate density estimates for $\mu^\star$. This is closely related to the problem of reducing sampling to approximate counting studied in seminal works of Jerrum, Valiant & Vazirani (1986) and Jerrum & Sinclair (1989): namely, when ${F}$ is the class of all distributions, it coincides exactly with the aforementioned counting-to-sampling reduction. In this paper, we first show a quadratic lower bound on the query complexity of sampling from $\mu^\star$ given query access to $\hat \mu$ (for sufficiently large classes ${F}$), thus showing that the random walk approach proposed by Jerrum & Sinclair (1989) and refined by Hayes & Sinclair (2010), is optimal. This answers an open question posed by Hayes & Sinclair. We then show that this lower bound can be circumvented if the size of ${F}$ is bounded appropriately. As we discuss, this latter result can be viewed as an abstraction of TTT, and thus represents a starting point for the development of a principled theoretical framework for TTT.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24786

Counting Trees from Satellite Imagery with Noisy Supervision

Authors:

Dimitri Gominski↗Maurice Mugabowindekwe↗Qiue Xu↗Xiaowei Tong↗Martin Brandt↗Hieu Le↗Rasmus Fensholt↗Dimitris Samaras↗Loic Landrieu↗

Counting individual trees is a fundamental task for environmental monitoring, yet remains largely unexplored with satellite imagery. At these resolutions, isolated trees may still be identifiable, but crown boundaries become ambiguous in dense forests, making the notion of an individual tree inherently ill-defined. Moreover, large-scale manual annotations of individual trees are prohibitively expensive. While scalable supervision can be derived from airborne LiDAR, the resulting annotations are noisy and difficult to exploit effectively. We address these challenges by formulating tree counting as a spatial density matching problem supervised through Unbalanced Optimal Transport. This formulation naturally accommodates both precise localization of isolate trees and robust density estimation in dense forests. We further introduce a self-correction mechanism that leverages transport residuals to progressively refine noisy supervision during training. We evaluate our approach on TinyTrees, a new benchmark spanning three continents and three satellite sensors, comprising over 215 million tree annotations (including 773K manually verified instances) across 23,000 sq.km. Our method consistently outperforms detection-based, regression-based, and transport-based distribution-matching baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of unbalanced transport and reliability-aware supervision for large-scale tree counting from satellite imagery. Code, data and models are available at https://github.com/dgominski/treematch.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16863

HawkesNest: A Multi-Axis Synthetic Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Pattern Complexity

Authors:

Yahya Aalaila↗Sumantrak Mukherjee↗Gerrit Gro{\ss}mann↗Sebastian Vollmer↗

arXiv:2606.16863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation of spatiotemporal point process (STPP) models relies heavily on opaque real-world datasets, where latent generative structure is unknown and model failures are difficult to attribute. We introduce HawkesNest, a generator-aligned benchmark for controlled spatiotemporal pattern complexity built on a multivariate Hawkes backbone. HawkesNest defines four complexity axes: space–time entanglement, background heterogeneity, cross-type interaction, and domain topology. Each axis is associated with a deterministic index computed from the latent data-generating mechanism. By varying these axes while holding global rate, stability, and simulation budget fixed, HawkesNest enables diagnostic stress tests of STPP models under known structural difficulty. We verify that the indices are monotone and nearly orthogonal under controlled sweeps. We illustrate its use by showing that Hawkes-family baselines degrade under joint heterogeneity–entanglement complexity, even though they are structurally aligned with the Hawkes data-generating backbone. We further show that HawkesNest exposes neural-model sensitivity: AutoSTPP remains vulnerable under isolated increases in space–time entanglement. Code. Available at https://github.com/YahyaAalaila/HawkesNest

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