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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Ouroboros-Spatial: Closing the Data-Model Loop for Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning remains a persistent challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Existing approaches largely rely on large-scale, statically curated datasets, where all training samples are treated uniformly regardless of the model's evolving capabilities. This static paradigm is inherently data-inefficient: training capacity is often spent on samples that are either trivial or overly difficult for the model at its current stage. To address this limitation, we propose Ouroboros-Spatial, a self-evolving training framework in which the model plays dual roles as a proposer and a solver. In each iteration, a frozen proposer generates spatial question-answer (QA) pairs from 3D scene metadata and raw video frames, together with executable code for deriving reliable ground truth. A learnable solver is then fine-tuned on the accepted samples, and its per-sample prediction confidence is used as a difficulty signal. This signal is fed back to the proposer in the next iteration, guiding it to generate questions better matched to the solver's current capabilities. Through this closed-loop design, the training distribution co-evolves with model ability, reducing redundant trivial examples while filtering out ambiguous or uninformative samples with limited learning value. Across six spatial reasoning benchmarks, Ouroboros-Spatial substantially improves Qwen3-VL-4B and Qwen3-VL-8B while using an order of magnitude fewer training examples than recent large-scale curated datasets. On VSI-Bench, it yields absolute gains of 9.9 and 6.8 points for the 4B and 8B models, respectively, enabling both to outperform a wide range of strong open-source and proprietary baselines.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Stochastic control with dividend payments and capital injections for Markov additive processes

Authors:

arXiv:2604.00190v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by de Finetti's optimal dividend problem with capital injections, we study a stochastic control problem for the additive component of a Markov additive process (MAP). In contrast to previous studies, the modulating component is allowed to be a general right process on a Radon space, so the model is not restricted to finite-state regime switching and cannot in general be reduced to a finite collection of Lévy process control problems. Capital injections are allowed at arbitrary times. We first consider the case in which dividend payments are allowed only at prescribed discrete times and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of a strategy. These conditions then yield the optimality of a class of Markov-modulated periodic–classical barrier strategies. Combining this optimality result with an approximation argument, we obtain insight into the possible form of optimal strategies in the case where dividend payments, like capital injections, may be made at arbitrary times. Because of the generality of the MAPs considered here, the proof techniques used in previous studies of similar problems are not directly applicable. We therefore develop an alternative argument based on the additive structure of MAPs and dynamic programming between dividend opportunities. The argument also suggests a possible approach to other stochastic control problems involving general MAPs.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Echo2ECG: Enhancing ECG Representations with Cardiac Morphology from Multi-View Echos

arXiv:2603.08505v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is a low-cost, widely used modality for diagnosing electrical abnormalities like atrial fibrillation by capturing the heart's electrical activity. However, it cannot directly measure cardiac morphological phenotypes, such as left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), which typically require echocardiography (Echo). Predicting these phenotypes from ECG would enable early, accessible health screening. Existing self-supervised methods suffer from a representational mismatch by aligning ECGs to single-view Echos, which only capture local, spatially restricted anatomical snapshots. To address this, we propose Echo2ECG, a multimodal self-supervised learning framework that enriches ECG representations with the heart's morphological structure captured in multi-view Echos. We evaluate Echo2ECG as an ECG feature extractor on two clinically relevant tasks that fundamentally require morphological information: (1) classification of structural cardiac phenotypes across three datasets, and (2) retrieval of Echo studies with similar morphological characteristics using ECG queries. Our extracted ECG representations consistently outperform those of state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal baselines across both tasks, despite being 18x smaller than the largest baseline. These results demonstrate that Echo2ECG is a robust, powerful ECG feature extractor. Our code is accessible at https://github.com/michelleespranita/Echo2ECG.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

APPO: Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.12384v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) have substantially improved the multi-turn tool-use capabilities of large language model agents. However, most existing methods assign credit over coarse heuristic units, such as tool-call boundaries or fixed workflows, making it difficult to identify which intermediate decisions influence downstream outcomes. In this work, we study agentic RL from two perspectives: where to branch and how to assign credit after branching. Our pilot analysis shows that influential decision points are broadly distributed throughout the generated sequence rather than concentrated at tool calls, while token entropy alone does not reliably reflect their impact on final outcomes. Motivated by these observations, we propose Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization (APPO), which shifts branching and credit assignment from coarse interaction units to fine-grained decision points in the sequence. APPO selects branching locations using a Branching Score that combines token uncertainty with policy-induced likelihood gains of subsequent continuations, enabling more targeted exploration while filtering out spurious high-entropy positions. It further introduces procedure-level advantage scaling to better distribute credit across branched rollouts. Experiments on 13 benchmarks show that APPO consistently improves strong agentic RL baselines by nearly 4 points, while keeping efficient tool-calls and maintaining behavior interpretability.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Characterizing metric-space-valued processes: separating classes and weak invariance principles for measure-theoretic inference

arXiv:2606.13084v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This article investigates stochastic processes taking values in metric spaces that lack a topological vector space structure, a regime characterized by intricate interplay between topological, geometric, and temporal dependence structures. It is formally established that spaces admitting an isometric Hilbertian embedding constitute a strict subclass within the much broader class of metric spaces possessing the ball property. While traditional kernel methods are susceptible to geometric distortion when the underlying space cannot be isometrically embedded into a Hilbert space, we bypass such limitations by exploiting a fundamental structural property inherent to this broader class; namely, that Borel probability measures are uniquely determined by their values on balls. These separating classes provide the foundation for the subsequently introduced measure-theoretic inference methodology. We derive uniform convergence of a family of time-dependent random measures, alongside weak invariance principles for the corresponding nonstationary random fields. This framework explicitly exposes how dependence and geometric complexity influence sample path regularity. Furthermore, because the rapid decay of small-ball probabilities can prohibit the existence of limiting distributions for supremum-based discrepancy measures, we develop $L^p$-based alternatives. By directly leveraging the introduced convergence results, this approach circumvents the need for higher-order $U$-process formulations. Finally, for spaces that do admit an isometric Hilbertian embedding, and where $U$-processes naturally arise, we establish limit theory for both degenerate and nondegenerate multi-parameter $U$-processes, and demonstrate that local discrepancy tests maintain asymptotic stability under dynamic parameter regimes.

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

INDEQS: Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS

arXiv:2606.19138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Controlled Differential Equations (NCDE) provide a powerful continuous-time framework for forecasting time series, but standard graph-based extensions typically learn spatial structure purely from data, even in settings where a directed graph structure is known a priori. We introduce Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS (INDEQS), a graph-based NCDE forecasting method that incorporates prior knowledge of a directed graph at distinct architectural positions. INDEQS separates inner mixing of hidden states across graph nodes from outer mixing between vector field and control, and offers both a lightweight graph-constrained variant and a more expressive variant, learning additional graph connections from data via adaptive graph convolutions. To systematically study when graph informedness is beneficial in forecasting, we devise a continuous advection simulation on directed graphs, yielding synthetic spatio-temporal datasets with known ground-truth flow structure. We then evaluate INDEQS on two real-world tasks: river discharge forecasting on a hydrological network and traffic flow prediction on PeMS08. Across these synthetic and real-world benchmarks, outer informedness consistently improves mean absolute error over an uninformed NCDE with comparable parameter count, particularly on larger graphs, while inner informedness offers a more parameter-efficient alternative when strict adherence to a known adjacency is desired. A comparison of discrete convolutional and continuous-time decoders further shows that continuous decoders yield better accuracy and greater temporal flexibility on real-world tasks. An implementation of INDEQS and the advection simulation is available at https://github.com/Mitchi1/indeqs.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Dense Coordinate-List Fine-Tuning Induces a Controllable Interference Surface in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.14507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning vision-language models to emit dense coordinate lists improves visual grounding but also changes how models serialize, repeat, and terminate structured outputs. We study this behavior as a generation and control surface. In Gemma 4 12B, high-capacity q/k/v/o LoRA raises class-aware F1@0.3 from 0.007 to 0.448 while inducing repeated-tail pressure (duplicate rate 0.080, max repeat 23). A q/v rank sweep keeps max repeat at 21-22 across ranks 4-64, showing capacity persistence. The target signal is separable: object-level repeat-stop removes exact repeated records (duplicate rate 0.000, max repeat 1) while preserving F1 (0.494 to 0.490) and stricter F1@0.5 (0.381 to 0.385). Structure-axis probes localize the effect to bbox-coordinate object lists; dense non-bbox and spatial/count JSON remain repeat-clean, including under high-capacity adapters. Qwen3-VL-8B reproduces a clean controlled endpoint (F1@0.3 0.318, duplicate rate 0.000), and COCO 2017 reproduces acquisition plus duplicate pressure. Dense coordinate-list adaptation therefore creates a structure-bound, cross-family interference surface that can be measured and controlled.

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

Real-Time Neural Hair Denoising

We propose a lightweight real-time method for reconstructing strand-based hair G-Buffers from severely undersampled rasterized inputs. Our pipeline first applies neural spatial reconstruction and temporal accumulation to recover hair coverage, i.e., fractional hair visibility within a pixel, and tangent. It then uses a tangent-guided reconstruction step to complete the position, which is subsequently used for physically based deferred hair shading. We evaluate our method across a diverse set of hairstyles, including straight, wavy, afro, and ponytail styles, under both static and dynamic scenarios. Our method achieves higher hair reconstruction quality than existing hair-specific denoising techniques and general industrial neural reconstruction solutions such as DLSS and FSR.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Wild3R: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unconstrained Sparse Photo Collection

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) removes the need for time-consuming per-scene optimization required by traditional 3DGS. However, existing feed-forward approaches struggle with real-world photo collections that include diverse lighting conditions and transient objects. In this paper, we present Wild3R, a feed-forward approach for unconstrained sparse photo collections. The main bottleneck is the lack of training data that provides multiple viewpoints, a variety of illuminations, and transient variations necessary for learning robust scene representations. To address this, we introduce the WildCity dataset, which comprises 200 scenes, 170 lighting conditions, and transient objects, resulting in 337,500 images in total. By leveraging the dataset, our model learns appearance consistency across viewpoints conditioned on reference views, while removing transient content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing feed-forward approaches and achieves results competitive with prior per-scene optimization-based methods.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tunneling Dynamics and Time Delay in Electron Transport through Time-Dependent Barriers with Finite-Bandwidth Reservoirs

arXiv:2507.20649v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a model system consisting of a tunneling barrier driven by an external harmonic field and coupled to two leads with finite bandwidth. Avoiding Floquet expansions, we derive simple expressions for the time-dependent tunneling current in the adiabatic regime. Our approach relates the barrier modulation to a measurable time delay in the steady-state periodic current. It provides a physically consistent definition of the tunneling time inside the barrier by subtracting the time delay associated with the leads from the total time delay. We find that the tunneling time always vanishes for wide/high barriers. Remarkably, the time delay persists even when the barrier becomes static, i.e., in the limit where the modulation frequency vanishes. This indicates that the time delay obtained through the introduction of an external periodic perturbation actually reflects an intrinsic property of the tunneling dynamics, rather than an effect of the external drive or of a particular system. We apply our results to the analysis of tunneling times in optical experiments and find good agreement with the experimental data.

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

Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines

arXiv:2606.19134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines (PQLRM), a multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm for tasks whose reward structure is specified by a set of reward machines (RMs). PQLRM combines Pareto Q-Learning (PQL), which maintains sets of vector-valued Q-estimates to approximate the Pareto front, with enhancements from Q-Learning with Reward Machines (QRM), which exploits the factored automaton structure of the reward signal. This yields a multi-policy algorithm that remains sample-efficient under non-Markovian, RM-encoded rewards. Experimental trials show that PQLRM converges faster than a naive PQL baseline applied to the cross-product MDP and can synthesize Pareto-optimal policies that QRM cannot.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Explainable deep learning improves human mental models of self-driving cars

arXiv:2411.18714v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-driving cars increasingly rely on deep neural networks to achieve human-like driving. The opacity of such black-box planners makes it challenging to accurately anticipate when they will fail, with potentially catastrophic consequences. While research into interpreting these systems has surged, most of it is confined to simulations or toy setups due to the difficulty of real-world deployment, leaving the practical utility of such techniques unknown. Here, we introduce the Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net), a method for faithfully explaining the behavior of machine-learning-based planners that causally grounds their reasoning in human-interpretable concepts without sacrificing performance. We deploy CW-Net on a real self-driving car and show that the resulting explanations improve the human driver's mental model of the vehicle, allowing them to better predict its behavior, particularly in surprising situations. This demonstrates that explainable deep learning integrated into self-driving cars can be both understandable and useful in a realistic deployment setting. We anticipate our method could be applied to other safety-critical systems, such as autonomous drones and robotic surgeons, as well as to other architectures, such as end-to-end learning systems and vision-language-action models. Overall, our study establishes a deployment-validated pathway to interpretability for autonomous agents, which could help make them more transparent and safe.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

On-Demand Coherent Mapping of Telecom Optical States onto Erbium Hyperfine Spins

arXiv:2606.15009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optical quantum memories operating directly at telecom wavelengths are a key enabling technology for long-distance quantum networks, yet on-demand storage onto long-lived ground-state spins in this spectral region has remained elusive due to the challenge of coherently transferring optical excitations to hyperfine spin states. Here we demonstrate spin-wave storage in $^{167}$Er$^{3+}$:Y$_2$SiO$_5$ at 0.8 K and 1.1 T, establishing the core operational primitive required for on-demand telecom quantum memories. Using classical optical control pulses, we coherently transfer collective optical excitations to erbium hyperfine states with transfer efficiency exceeding 12%, enabling on-demand retrieval. We measure a hyperfine population lifetime of 25 s and demonstrate spin-wave storage for up to 25 $\mu$s. By identifying hyperfine inhomogeneous broadening as the dominant present limitation, our measurements define a clear pathway toward second-scale storage through improved spectral tailoring and dynamical decoupling. The results highlight the application of erbium-based solid-state memories for scalable fiber-compatible quantum repeater architectures.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Right or Wrong, Models Comply: Directional Blindness in LLM Moral Judgment

As language models take integrated roles across many domains, the response of LLMs to user pushback becomes a critical alignment property. Yet many existing evaluations treat compliance as unidirectional, measuring whether models resist pressure but not whether they resist it selectively. We introduce Compliance Asymmetry (A = BCR/HCR), a bidirectional diagnostic that compares beneficial output change under helpful nudges with harmful change under misleading nudges. Across 9 models and 972,000 nudge-condition responses, we find that this selectivity differs in factual and moral judgments: models follow helpful nudges more than harmful ones on factual questions (A = 1.58), but follow both directions at nearly identical rates on moral questions (A = 1.04). This phenomenon persists across model families, capability levels, and nudging types. Interestingly, we also find that chain-of-thought prompting amplifies helpful and harmful compliance together, while identity-based prompting suppresses both by nearly identical margins. These results identify direction-blind moral compliance as a distinct failure mode in current LLMs and suggest that alignment should target directionally calibrated updating rather than lower compliance alone.

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

BioArtlas: Computational Clustering of Multi-Dimensional Complexity in Bioart

Authors:

arXiv:2511.19162v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bioart brings living material into artistic practice, where a single work can be at once an aesthetic object, a scientific instrument, and an ethical provocation. Traditional categories sort such works along one axis at a time, which flattens the very hybridity that defines the field and leaves curators no way to compare works across many dimensions together. I introduce BioArtlas, a computational atlas that represents each bioartwork along many curated dimensions at once and organizes the field by conceptual similarity rather than by medium or chronology. My method embeds the keywords of all 81 works on each of thirteen interpretive axes, groups related concepts into a shared codebook that tames inconsistent terminology, and then searches systematically for a clustering that is both statistically clean and interpretable. Among the methods that place every work on the map, agglomerative clustering separates the field far more cleanly than the usual k-means baseline (silhouette 0.664 versus 0.483), whereas density-based methods reach higher scores only by discarding most of the corpus as noise. By separating rigorous analysis from public storytelling, BioArtlas turns the tangled complexity of bioart into a navigable landscape, openly available as an interactive interface (https://www.bioartlas.com) and dataset (https://github.com/joonhyungbae/BioArtlas).

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

LLM-based Visual Code Completion for Aerospace Geometric Design

Recent advances in both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have seen a step change in their ability to perform visual code completion, but the aerospace industry, which prioritizes safety and explainabilty over rapid LLM adoption, currently has no publicly announced LLM-based geometric design copilot systems in commercial use by aerospace Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). This paper presents a LLM-based visual programming copilot application for aerospace engineering design tasks, using a visual programming variant of the ReAct methodology and GPT 5.4. In addition to the copilot, we describe Wingbuilder, a new Grasshopper plugin library with custom components for aerospace-specific geometry abstraction, and an associated Aerospace Visual Programming Dataset (AVPD) with 18 aerospace expert designed tasks at different levels of difficulty alongside ground truth solutions. We evaluate our copilot application with a user trial involving two experienced aerospace engineers from a large aircraft manufacturing company. We find our copilot visual programming ReAct methodology was successful in generating suggestions that participants found helpful, but slow ReAct inference times limit its usefulness to more complex time-consuming tasks where waiting for good copilot solution suggestion was worthwhile. Participants reported they liked the tool and would be willing to use it in the future.

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

TaFD: Threat-Aware Frequency Decoupling for Adversarial Robustness against Heterogeneous Attacks

Multi-threat robustness remains a fundamental challenge in deep learning. Although joint adversarial training (JAT) is widely adopted, it suffers from negative transfer under heterogeneous threats, particularly between $\ell_p$-bounded and semantic attacks. Through first-order gradient analysis, we formalize this as gradient incompatibility and theoretically establish the necessity of decoupled optimization. We further reveal that these conflicting threats exhibit separable spectral characteristics in the frequency domain. Motivated by this observation, we propose Threat-aware Frequency Decoupling (TaFD), a two-stage defense framework that reformulates JAT as a frequency-domain divide-and-conquer paradigm. TaFD first discovers latent threat domains via unsupervised clustering of attack spectral prototypes and trains a lightweight classifier for inference-time threat domain identification. Conditioned on the prediction, TaFD employs a Frequency-Conditional Convolution that learns threat-domain-specific spectral masks and routes each sample to the corresponding expert, enforcing structural parameter separation and alleviating optimization conflicts. We validate TaFD on three representative image-classification benchmarks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet) and on two representative architectures (the convolutional ResNet and the hybrid-transformer MobileViT). Extensive results demonstrate that TaFD achieves more balanced robustness against heterogeneous attacks than existing JAT and frequency-domain baselines, improving average robust accuracy by approximately 11\% over the strongest baseline while maintaining leading clean accuracy.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Emergent Alignment

arXiv:2606.19527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) discern when their own outputs are misaligned with human ethics? And can they self-correct? We endow an LLM with a conscience step that reviews its own reasoning and outputs, and we extend the training loss with an alignment component using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to steer the model away from non-ethical outputs. The result is an online technique to align models in a wide range of applications: training, fine-tuning, adversarial prompting, and zero-shot learning. It does not require a weaker or stronger judge, relying instead on a frozen copy of itself. In previous work, the Emergent Misalignment scenario showed a range of emergent unethical behaviors from fine-tuning the model to hack code. Instead, we empirically show how to achieve Emergent Alignment: a single high-level introspective question steers training toward an ethical model under the same code hacking scenario.

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

M4FC: a Multimodal, Multilingual, Multicultural, Multitask Real-World Fact-Checking Dataset

Existing real-world datasets for multimodal fact-checking have multiple limitations: they contain few instances, cover on only one or two languages, focus only on one task, or rely on external news article sets for sourcing true claims. To address these shortcomings, we introduce M4FC, a new real-world dataset comprising 4,982 images paired with 6,980 claims. The images, verified by professional fact-checkers from 22 organizations, represent a diverse range of cultural and geographic contexts. Each claim is available in one or two out of ten languages. M4FC spans six multimodal fact-checking tasks: visual claim extraction, claimant intent prediction, fake image detection, image contextualization, location verification, and verdict prediction. We provide baseline results for all tasks and analyze how combining intermediate tasks affects verdict prediction performance. We make our dataset and code publicly available.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Validating Field-Feasible Measures of Recent Khat Use: A Diagnostic Accuracy Study Comparing Amphetamine Immunoassay and Assisted Self-Report Against HPLC in an Ethiopian Male Cohort

Background: Khat (Catha edulis) is a widely consumed natural amphetamine-analog used across East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Accurate field-feasible measurement of recent khat use is a prerequisite for large-scale epidemiological research; yet no validated alternatives to laboratory reference methods have been identified in the scientific literature. This nested validation study evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of two point-of-care measures, a commercial amphetamine immunoassay and a Timeline Followback (TLFB) Assisted Self-Report (ASR), against high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) quantification of urinary norephedrine (NE), while additionally assessing agreement between the two field measures. Methods: A prospective, random sub-sample of 119 male participants aged 18-40 years from the Gilgel Gibe Field Research Center (GGFRC) longitudinal cohort, Ethiopia (validation timepoint T2, 2015), was used. Three index-reference comparisons were conducted: (1) amphetamine immunoassay (nal von minden, Drug-Screen AMP test, 300 ng/mL cutoff) vs. HPLC; (2) binary ASR (past-week use) vs. HPLC; and (3) binary ASR vs. immunoassay. Sensitivity (positive percent agreement, PPA), specificity (negative percent agreement, NPA), positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), overall accuracy (overall percent agreement, OPA), and Cohen's kappa were calculated with 95% confidence intervals. Pre-specified secondary analyses applied three pharmacokinetically-informed recall windows (0-2, 3-5, and 6-7 days prior to interview) to ASR. Results: Against HPLC (77 positive, 42 negative), the immunoassay showed perfect specificity (1.0 [0.916-1.0]) and PPV (1.0 [0.91-1.0]) but low sensitivity (0.52 [0.40-0.64]), NPV (0.53 [0.42-0.65]), overall accuracy (0.69 [0.60-0.77]), and weak kappa (0.43 [0.34-0.52]). Binary ASR showed high sensitivity (0.96 [0.89-0.99]), specificity of 0.60 [0.433-0.74], PPV (0.81 [0.72-0.89]), NPV (0.89 [0.72-0.98]), with overall accuracy 0.83 [0.75-0.89] and moderate kappa (0.60 [0.51,0.69]). Restricting ASR to use within 0-2 days improved specificity to 0.69 [0.52-0.84], PPV to 0.86 [0.77-0.93], overall accuracy to 0.87 [0.79-0.93], and kappa to 0.69 [0.61-0.78] (moderate), while sensitivity (0.96 [0.89-0.99]) and NPV (0.89 [0.72-0.98]) remained stable. Against the immunoassay, ASR achieved high PPA of (1.0 [0.91-1.0]), NPA of 0.35 [0.25-0.47], OPA of 0.57 [0.48-0.66], and minimal kappa (0.27 [0.19-0.35]). Conclusions: Time-stratified ASR (0-2 days) is a valid, scalable alternative to biological testing for recent khat use in resource-limited settings. The immunoassay's 300 ng/mL cutoff functions as a marker of heavy or recent high-dose khat use rather than any-use detection. Its perfect specificity and PPV make it valuable as a confirmatory test for substantial exposure, while its lower sensitivity reflects calibration to amphetamine rather than to khat-derived cathinone metabolite. Keywords: khat; Catha edulis; diagnostic accuracy; STARD; self-report; immunoassay; HPLC; Ethiopia; substance use measurement

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

Learning Fine-Grained Correspondence with Cross-Perspective Perception for Open-Vocabulary 6D Object Pose Estimation

Open-vocabulary 6D object pose estimation empowers robots to manipulate arbitrary unseen objects guided solely by natural language. However, a critical limitation of existing approaches is their reliance on unconstrained global matching strategies. In open-world scenarios, trying to match anchor features against the entire query image space introduces excessive ambiguity, as target features are easily confused with background distractors. To resolve this, we propose Fine-grained Correspondence Pose Estimation (FiCoP), a framework that transitions from noise-prone global matching to spatially-constrained patch-level correspondence. To systematically eliminate background interference, FiCoP first employs an object-centric disentanglement step to isolate the target from macro-level environmental noise. Building upon this localized region, our core methodological innovations are twofold. Firstly, a Cross-Perspective Global Perception (CPGP) module is proposed to fuse dual-view features, establishing structural consensus through explicit context reasoning and text-guided semantic injection. Secondly, we design a Patch Correlation Predictor (PCP) that leverages a patch-to-patch correlation matrix as a structural prior. This generates a precise block-wise association map, acting as a spatial filter to enforce fine-grained, noise-resilient matching. Experiments on the REAL275 and Toyota-Light datasets demonstrate that FiCoP improves Average Recall by 8.0% and 6.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art method, highlighting its capability to deliver robust and generalized perception for robotic agents operating in complex, unconstrained open-world environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zjjqinyu/FiCoP.

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

Toward the Whole Picture: Accumulative Fingerprint Mapping and Reconstruction for Small-Area Mobile Sensors

Small-area fingerprint sensing on mobile devices creates a fundamental mismatch between acquisition and recognition: each touch captures only a tiny, pose-varying local patch, while reliable biometric matching ultimately requires a stable and sufficiently complete fingerprint representation. Existing pipelines largely cope with this mismatch by treating repeated touches as independent partial templates, which leads to repeated registration, repeated matching, and no guarantee of adequate global coverage. In this paper, we advocate a different formulation, namely accumulative fingerprint mapping and reconstruction for small-area mobile sensing. Rather than matching every partial patch separately, the proposed perspective converts a sequence of local observations into a unified fingerprint state that is progressively refined as new touches arrive and can be matched only once after consolidation. As a concrete baseline, we present a classical pipeline that performs patch-wise structural feature extraction, feature-level registration and fusion, fingerprint map construction, and phase-based ridge reconstruction. More importantly, we position this baseline within a broader mobile fingerprint framework that integrates structured token learning, two-stage pose reasoning, and diffusion-based generative reconstruction. This viewpoint reframes mobile fingerprint recognition from multi-capture multi-match processing to accumulative map building, state refinement, and one-shot matching, offering a principled route toward efficient, pose-robust, and deployment-friendly biometrics for small-area mobile platforms. The baseline implementation has been publicly released at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/FpReconstruction.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Reliable quantification of renal function from frozen blood samples

BACKGROUND: Differences in renal function may affect Alzheimer disease (AD) blood biomarker levels independent of AD pathology. Although renal function was unaccounted for in foundational AD blood biomarker studies, there is potential to address this through quantification of estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) from frozen serum and plasma samples. However, the validity of eGFR evaluation from long-term frozen blood samples is unknown. METHODS: Adults aged 50-85 with at least 2 vascular risk factors were recruited from vascular surgery or cardiology clinics in Tucson, Arizona from 2022-2025. Individuals with creatinine assessments in point-of-care whole blood (POC-WB) and frozen serum and plasma samples using the iSTAT (Abbott) were included. eGFR was calculated using the 2021 CKD-EPI creatinine equation without race. Agreement between POC-WB and frozen blood samples was assessed using Cohen's kappa with linear weights. RESULTS: 134 participants (mean [SD] age: 72.6 [7.5] years, 39.6% female, 23.1% chronic kidney disease) had POC-WB eGFR available. Frozen serum and plasma samples had strong agreement with POC-WB for eGFR (Kw= 0.90-0.95, P

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.11627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. Although this approach successfully improves the student's no-context performance, we identify an interesting and previously unstudied phenomenon: in many settings, reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student actually degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization demands not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the context is reintroduced, a property we call context removability. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight consistency regularizer that first anchors the student's no-context output via stop-gradient, then penalizes the context-conditioned output for deviating from it via forward KL divergence. This simple addition requires only one extra forward pass per training step, yet it effectively mitigates context-induced degradation and, in many cases, even improves no-context performance. Across 12 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, our method improves context-conditioned accuracy in the majority of settings, reduces context-induced harm in 11 out of 12 settings, and effectively eliminates response-length inflation. A mechanistic case study further confirms that context removability is achieved at the representation level, with hidden states remaining nearly identical regardless of whether the context is present.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

UXBench: Measuring the Actionability of LLM-Generated UX Critiques

arXiv:2606.16262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as UX judges that inspect interfaces, diagnose usability problems, and propose repairs. Yet no controlled benchmark measures whether the resulting critiques are reliable and actionable across heterogeneous product surfaces. We introduce UXBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs as interaction-grounded UX judges. UXBench comprises local-first runnable web fixtures spanning ten product-surface families, paired with coverage-gated browser exploration that forces models to collect interaction evidence before reporting. Each judge model produces a structured UX report over seven rubric dimensions; report quality is measured by whether a fixed downstream repair agent can improve the interface based on the critique. We evaluate eight frontier models under both an automated repair-lift protocol and a blind human validation study. Results show that UX judging is neither saturated nor one dimensional: models differ meaningfully in report actionability, exhibit distinct rubric-level repair signatures, vary in fixture-level reliability, and trade leadership across surface categories