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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Hybrid NARX-LLM for Greenland Iceberg Discharge: Prompt-Driven Residual Correction

arXiv:2606.15288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Greenland iceberg discharge exhibits complex nonlinear dynamics with limited observability, challenging traditional predictive models. We present a Hybrid NARX-LLM framework that combines a nonlinear autoregressive model with exogenous inputs (NARX) and a large language model (LLM) for residual correction. We further propose a Physics-Informed Prompt (PIP) method that transforms unstructured physical knowledge into structured prompts for zero-shot in-context reasoning. The primary objective is to explore the corrective potential of this framework for modeling Greenland iceberg discharge, rather than merely optimizing predictive accuracy. The NARX component captures intrinsic temporal dependencies, while the LLM, guided by PIP, encodes glacier dynamics and environmental drivers and perceives key trend patterns to correct systematic prediction errors. This integration allows the model to reason about unmodeled factors and produce interpretable residuals, enhancing overall predictive accuracy. Applied to Greenland iceberg discharge time series, our approach addresses extreme events that are difficult to predict due to rare variations and nonstationary trends, a limitation often overlooked by traditional methods. By fusing structured time-series modeling with knowledge-driven foundation AI, the framework offers a scalable and interpretable pathway to bridge data-limited climate forecasting with physics-informed LLM reasoning. The code is available.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.18356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents introduce security failures that go beyond unsafe text: they can disclose protected objects, write persistent memory, send messages, modify databases, or trigger harmful code and tool effects. Existing evaluations often collapse these stages into a single attack success rate, making it difficult to tell whether a model merely agreed with an attacker or actually produced observable harm. We introduce SafeClawBench, a staged benchmark for tool-using agent security with 600 controlled adversarial tasks across six attack families: direct and indirect prompt injection, tool-return injection, memory poisoning, memory extraction, and ambiguity-driven unsafe inference. SafeClawBench reports three separate endpoints: semantic attack acceptance, audit-visible harm evidence, and sandbox-observed tool/state harm. Evaluating five agent endpoints under four prompt-level policies, we find that these endpoints capture different failure modes. Without additional prompt protection, semantic failure rates vary widely across models, from 9.0% to 44.2%. Audited harm evidence is narrower than semantic failure, and under a separate executable protocol some matched task identities produce sandbox harm despite passing the Semantic Core call: in a 12,000-row matched analysis, 291 of 347 observed sandbox harms occur in rows that pass the semantic check. Prompt policies change endpoint outcomes, but their effects depend on both model and protocol. SafeClawBench provides a reproducible framework for comparing agent models and prompt-policy conditions without conflating textual compliance, evidence-supported harm, and executable state changes. The open-source dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/sairights/safeclawbench.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Composing Linear Layers from Irreducibles

arXiv:2507.11688v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contemporary large models often exhibit behaviors suggesting the presence of low-level primitives that compose into modules with richer functionality, but these fundamental building blocks remain poorly understood. We investigate this compositional structure in linear layers by asking: can we identify/synthesize linear transformations from a minimal set of geometric primitives? Using Clifford algebra, we show that linear layers can be expressed as compositions of bivectors – geometric objects encoding oriented planes – and introduce a differentiable algorithm that decomposes them into products of rotors. This construction uses only O(log^2 d) parameters, versus O(d^2) required by dense matrices. Applied to the key, query, and value projections in LLM attention layers, our rotor-based layers match the performance of strong baselines such as block-Hadamard and low-rank approximations. Our findings provide an algebraic perspective on how these geometric primitives can compose into higher-level functions within deep models.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

How Should World Models Be Evaluated? A Decision-Making-Centric Position

arXiv:2606.15032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models have rapidly become one of the central abstractions in modern AI. Yet the term now refers to several different objects: action-conditioned environment models, latent imagination models, future-video predictors, interactive neural simulators, latent predictive representations, and synthetic-data engines. Evaluation has broadened with the term. Recent papers measure video realism, perceptual similarity, instruction following, physical plausibility, policy ranking, executability, planning success, and downstream policy improvement. The result is not only metric diversity but also a recurring problem of claim/evidence mismatch: papers frequently make a stronger claim about what their model is useful for than their evaluation can actually establish. This paper surveys the recent literature and argues that the central question is use-dependent. When a model is presented as a world model for embodied decision-making, a more decisive issue is not whether it generates visually compelling videos, but whether it supports reliable counterfactual reasoning, policy evaluation, planning, and policy optimization under intervention, policy-induced distribution shift, and long-horizon rollout. We organize the literature using an L0–L7 ladder that ranges from visual plausibility to policy optimization utility. In our interpretation, L0–L3 are most naturally read as diagnostics of generated artifacts, L4 is often the first genuinely interventional test, and L5–L7 provide the most direct evidence of decision usefulness. Based on this diagnosis, we propose a decision-making-centric evaluation framework and a benchmark protocol that foreground counterfactual action fidelity, closed-loop rollout validity, reward/value prediction, policy-ranking agreement, optimization lift, model exploitability, and uncertainty calibration.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Enhancing Physics-Informed Neural Networks Through Feature Engineering

arXiv:2502.07209v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) seek to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) with deep learning. Mainstream approaches that deploy fully-connected multi-layer deep learning architectures require prolonged training to achieve even moderate accuracy, while recent work on feature engineering allows higher accuracy and faster convergence. This paper introduces SAFE-NET, a Single-layered Adaptive Feature Engineering NETwork that achieves orders-of-magnitude lower errors with far fewer parameters than baseline feature engineering methods. SAFE-NET returns to basic ideas in machine learning, using Fourier features, a simplified single hidden layer network architecture, and an effective optimizer that improves the conditioning of the PINN optimization problem. Numerical results show that SAFE-NET converges faster and typically outperforms deeper networks and more complex architectures. It consistently uses fewer parameters – on average, 65% fewer than the competing feature engineering methods – while achieving comparable accuracy in less than 30% of the training epochs. Moreover, each SAFE-NET epoch is 95% faster than those of competing feature engineering approaches. These findings challenge the prevailing belief that modern PINNs effectively learn features in these scientific applications and highlight the efficiency gains possible through feature engineering.

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

Too long; didn't solve

arXiv:2604.07593v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mathematical benchmarks consisting of a range of mathematics problems are widely used to evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet little is known about how their structural properties influence model behaviour. In this work, we investigate two structural length variables, prompt length and solution length, and analyse how they relate to model performance on a newly constructed adversarial dataset of expert-authored mathematics problems. We find that both prompt and solution lengths correlate positively with increased model failure across models. We also include a secondary, exploratory analysis of cross-model disagreement. Under a difficulty-adjusted normalised analysis, both variables retain weak negative associations with realised model separation, slightly stronger for prompt length. Overall, our main robust finding is that structural length is linked to empirical difficulty in this dataset.

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

Charting the Future of Scholarly Knowledge with AI: A Community Perspective

arXiv:2509.02581v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the growing availability of tools designed to support scholarly knowledge extraction and organization, many researchers still rely on manual methods, sometimes due to unfamiliarity with existing technologies or limited access to domain-adapted solutions. Meanwhile, the rapid increase in scholarly publications across disciplines has made it increasingly difficult to stay current, further underscoring the need for scalable, AI-enabled approaches to structuring and synthesizing scholarly knowledge. Various research communities have begun addressing this challenge independently, developing tools and frameworks aimed at building reliable, dynamic, and queryable scholarly knowledge bases. However, limited interaction across these communities has hindered the exchange of methods, models, and best practices, slowing progress toward more integrated solutions. This manuscript identifies ways to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue, identify shared challenges, categorize new collaboration and shape future research directions in scholarly knowledge and organization.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Bridging Single Distortion Artifacts and Mmultifactorial Clinical Quality: Few-shot Biparametric MRI Quality Assessment via Distortion-trained Prototypical Networks

Clinical prostate multi-parametric MRI relies heavily on high-quality diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), yet reading DWI is frequently compromised by geometric distortion, often caused by rectal air. Assessing quality via the PI-QUAL scoring system is an emerging clinical standard, but it is subjective, time-consuming and suffers from a class imbalance where low-quality cases are diverse and relatively scarce. Using the PRIME clinical trial as an example, there are $6\%$ images with PI-QUAL scores lower than 4, $87\%$ of DWI issues are due to distortion. Many of the other clinical quality issues are under-represented. To address this common dual-scarcity of annotated clinical data, we propose a few-shot biparametric prototypical network for automated image quality assessment (IQA). Our framework utilizes a dual-branch 3D ResNet to fuse T2-weighted and DWI features, providing anatomical context to distinguish true morphology from distortion. To handle real-world heterogeneity, we introduce feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) and a gradient reversal layer (GRL) to align feature distributions conditioned on varying b-values while suppressing acquisition-related biases. We demonstrate that a model meta-trained solely on comparatively objective, readily obtainable distortion labels can effectively adapt to predicting complex, multi-factorial clinical quality scores such as PI-QUAL using only five representative samples. Experimental results on two datasets show that our method significantly outperforms few-shot learning baselines for this challenging IQA task, offering a practically feasible and data-efficient solution for standardizing prostate MRI quality control in clinical workflows.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DN-Hypo-Pipeline: An AI-Driven Workflow for Hypothesis Generation via Large Language Models and Scientific Explanations

arXiv:2606.08532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A scientific hypothesis is the first step in research and undergoes experimental validation, yet it also reflects a deep understanding of and reasoning about scientific phenomena. We introduce DN-Hypo-Pipeline, an AI-powered workflow based on large language models, designed to support structured scientific thinking and hypothesis generation by leveraging scientific explanations as prior knowledge. This pipeline assists researchers in deriving novel hypotheses from existing literature. Given the explanandum (i.e., the conclusion) of a research paper, it identifies underlying laws, theories, and principles, and reconstructs a new, yet-to-be-verified explanation for the observed phenomenon. We evaluated DN-Hypo-Pipeline in the field of data science modeling using three highly cited papers. Statistical inference, supported by both LLM-as-judge assessment and human expert evaluation, demonstrates that our pipeline is more effective than direct generation methods. Additionally, we validated the two highest-scoring generated hypotheses by developing corresponding novel algorithms, which outperformed the baseline models presented in the original papers. Beyond application in data science, DN-Hypo-Pipeline provides a theoretical framework that not only encompasses theory-guided data science modeling methods but also reveals a more fundamental structure of the modeling process. Moreover, this approach is essentially a generalization of theory-guided modeling, offering potential for extension to other domains and across a broader range of scientific disciplines.

10.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-12

Placenta accreta spectrum in the 21st century: Challenging dogma and redefining disorder

Authors:

by Eric Jauniaux, Helena C. Bartels, Yalda Afshar Placenta accreta spectrum (PAS) is a serious pregnancy complication caused by abnormal placental attachment to the uterus. In this Perspective, Eric Jauniaux and colleagues discuss emerging evidence that challenges our long-held pathophysiological understanding of PAS, and argue that a critical reassessment of definition, diagnosis, and management is overdue. In this Perspective, Jonathan Evans and colleagues discuss why restricting access to joint replacement surgery based on BMI alone is not supported by evidence, and highlight how such rest rictions risk exacerbating stigma, inequity and avoidable harm to those who would benefit from surgery.

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

When Confidence Lacks Concepts: Interpretable OOD Detection via Representation Perturbations

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance across medical imaging tasks, yet their tendency to overgeneralize under distributional shifts poses a major obstacle to safe clinical deployment. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection methods aim to mitigate this risk, but most existing approaches rely on opaque internal signals with poorly understood semantic meaning, limiting trust in safety-critical settings. In this work, we propose an interpretable OOD detection framework that probes the stability of model predictions under class-conditioned semantic perturbations. Leveraging sparse autoencoders (SAEs), we learn class-specific concept vectors from in-distribution data that disentangle dense intermediate representations into sparse, semantically meaningful components. At inference, we perturb deeper-layer representations using the concept vectors associated with the model's predicted class and measure the class logits stability. We hypothesize that in-distribution samples exhibit low sensitivity to such perturbations, as their representations align with class-specific semantic directions, whereas OOD samples show amplified deviations due to representational misalignment. By framing OOD detection as a concept conditioned stability analysis, our approach provides both a discriminative OOD signal and an interpretable lens into the internal mechanisms driving model uncertainty, making it particularly suitable for high stakes medical applications.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Rigidity of infinite exchangeable sequences with Gaussian marginals

arXiv:2606.18654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study infinite exchangeable sequences with Gaussian one-dimensional marginals. We formulate the conjecture that joint Gaussianity of a single pair of coordinates forces the entire sequence to be a Gaussian process. Although this conjecture remains open, we prove that joint Gaussianity of the first four coordinates is sufficient. We also establish the corresponding two-point criterion under the additional assumption that the directing measure is almost surely infinitely divisible.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Simple Domain Generalization Methods are Strong Baselines for Open Domain Generalization

In real-world applications, a machine learning model is required to handle an open-set recognition (OSR), where unknown classes appear during the inference, in addition to a domain shift, where the data distribution differs between the training and inference phases. Domain generalization (DG) aims to handle the domain shift situation where the target domain of the inference phase is inaccessible during the model training. Open domain generalization (ODG) considers DG and OSR. Domain-augmented meta-learning (DAML) is a method targeting ODG; however, it has a complicated learning process. By contrast, although various DG methods have been proposed, they have not been evaluated in ODG situations. In this study, we comprehensively evaluate the existing DG methods in ODG and show that the two simple DG methods, CORrelation ALignment (CORAL) and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), are competitive with DAML in several cases. In addition, we propose simple extensions of CORAL and MMD by introducing the techniques used in DAML, such as ensemble learning and Dirichlet mixup data augmentation. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the extended CORAL and MMD can perform comparably to DAML with lower computational costs. This suggests that the simple DG methods and their simple extensions are strong baselines for ODG.

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

When Errors Become Narratives: A Longitudinal Taxonomy of Silent Failures in a Production LLM Agent Runtime

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agent systems increasingly run as long-lived autonomous runtimes: scheduling jobs, calling tools, maintaining memory, and pushing results to humans. We present a longitudinal study of silent failures in one such system: a personal-assistant agent runtime in continuous production since March 2026, with roughly 40 scheduled jobs, 8 LLM providers, a tool-governance proxy, and a knowledge-base memory plane, defended by 4,286 unit tests and 827 governance checks. Over eight weeks we documented 22 incidents with full root-cause postmortems, in which one meta-pattern – a failure whose error signal never reaches a human in actionable form – manifested at least 28 times. We derive a five-class, mechanism-oriented taxonomy: (A) environment and platform quirks, (B) design-assumption mismatches, (C) error swallowing and dilution, (D) chained hallucination and fabrication, (E) operational omission and forensic blind spots. Class D is unique to LLM systems and the most dangerous: the system does not merely fail to report an error – the LLM transforms it into fluent, plausible narrative delivered to the user. We term this fail-plausible: gray failure's differential observability escalated – the observer is not just blind, it is convincingly lied to by the failure itself. Three findings: about 70% of silent failures were caught by human user-view observation, not tests or audits; a retrospective audit of 15 incidents found 0% ex-ante prevention but 87% regression blocking – audits are regression engines, not prediction engines; incident latency (13 hours to 60 days) tracks failure mechanism, not code complexity – the longest-lived failures lived in the seams between components, where no test runs. We describe the resulting defense framework and distill design principles for agent systems whose failures are loud, attributable, and boring. All postmortems and artifacts are public.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

HumanScale: Egocentric Human Video Can Outperform Real-Robot Data for Embodied Pretraining

Embodied foundation models are expected to benefit from data scaling like large language models, but face a much tighter data bottleneck. Teleoperated real-robot trajectories remain the dominant pretraining source due to their precise action supervision and embodiment alignment, yet their scalability is limited by high collection cost, acquisition difficulty, and low behavioral and environmental diversity. These limitations have sparked interest in egocentric human video as a scalable, substantially lower-cost, and more diverse alternative for embodied model pretraining. However, its effectiveness compared to teleoperated real-robot data remains underexplored. To address this question, we conduct a systematic study comparing egocentric human video and teleoperated real-robot trajectories as pretraining data sources for embodied foundation models, under fixed post-training and validation protocols. Surprisingly, we find that egocentric data, when processed through a carefully designed filtering and labeling pipeline, is not merely a viable substitute for model pretraining but can lead to superior performance. With the same amount of pretraining data, models pretrained on egocentric data achieve a 24% lower validation loss on real-robot action prediction, as well as 52.5% and 90% higher success rates on in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-robot task execution, respectively. This finding verifies a scalable paradigm for embodied foundation models: pretrain on egocentric human video to learn diverse world representations, then adapt with a small amount of labeled real-robot data for action-space alignment. We hope this study encourages broader exploration of egocentric data and offers guidance for data quality assessment before costly robot data collection.

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

Privacy from Symmetry: Orthogonally Equivariant Transformers for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.16461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running large language models locally is often impractical, pushing inference on sensitive text to third-party providers. Split inference partially mitigates this by keeping tokens on the client and sending only hidden representations, but these representations can still be recovered via nearest-neighbor search against the public embedding table. We propose an orthogonal obfuscation procedure in which the client multiplies embeddings by a secret orthogonal matrix before transmission. To enable correct inference under arbitrary rotations, we introduce ConjFormer, a transformer variant that is exactly $\mathrm{O}(d)$-equivariant via a lightweight normalization change (scalar RMSNorm) together with blockwise orthogonal conjugation of all linear weights. As a result, the server performs the full forward pass entirely in the rotated basis and never observes unrotated hidden states. Experiments on GPT-2 and Llama 3.2 1B models fine-tuned on PubMed show that orthogonal obfuscation eliminates direct cosine nearest-neighbor inversion and reduces token recovery from over 35% top-10 to at most 1.3%, while increasing perplexity by only 0.4% after fine-tuning. These results indicate that enforcing symmetry at the architectural level can provide a practical defense for privacy-preserving LLM inference without noise injection or heavy cryptographic machinery.

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

Biomazon: A Multimodal Dataset for 3D Forest Structure and Biomass Modeling in the Amazon Basin

Accurate, spatially explicit characterization of tropical forest structure is essential for carbon accounting and ecosystem monitoring, yet most ML pipelines predict canopy-top height proxies (e.g., RH95/RH98) or AGBD as separate scalar targets, rather than learning the forest vertical structure as an ordered profile. The community lacks a ML-ready multimodal benchmark for predicting the entire GEDI RH profile jointly with AGBD, or for evaluating methods that enforce physically consistent ordering across RH percentiles. We address this with Biomazon, a 20 m multimodal benchmark dataset over the Amazon Basin that pairs GEDI RH and AGBD targets with multi-sensor predictors (Sentinel-1/2, ALOS-2 PALSAR-2, Copernicus DEM, Dynamic World LULC, and AlphaEarth embeddings) under standardized spatial splits and evaluation protocols. Using a shared encoder-decoder with task-specific heads as a baseline framework, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study of (i) backbone/model scale, (ii) modality contributions, and (iii) the use of auxiliary embeddings under standalone and fusion settings, and we report both single-target and joint-target results to quantify tradeoffs under a unified training protocol. Finally, we contextualize baseline performance through regionally aligned comparisons against existing gridded products, including GEDI L4D RH10-RH98 and AGBD, at matching temporal scale. Biomazon, together with the accompanying protocols and baseline results, establishes a reference benchmark for future work on structurally consistent RH-profile prediction and structure-biomass modeling in tropical forests.

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

Grids Often Outperform Implicit Neural Representations at Compressing Dense Signals

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have recently shown impressive results, but their fundamental capacity, implicit biases, and scaling behavior remain poorly understood. We investigate the performance of diverse INRs across a suite of 2D and 3D real and synthetic signals with varying effective bandwidth, as well as both overfitting and generalization tasks including tomography, super-resolution, and denoising. By stratifying performance according to model size as well as signal type and bandwidth, our results shed light on how different INR and grid representations allocate their capacity. We find that, for many tasks involving dense signals, a simple regularized grid with interpolation trains faster and to higher or comparable quality than any INR with the same number of parameters. We also find limited settings – namely fitting binary signals such as shape contours – where INRs outperform grids, to guide future development and use of INRs towards the most advantageous applications.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MPMWorlds: Material-Point-Method Simulations for Inferring and Extrapolating Physical Dynamics

To study the ability to infer physical dynamics from videos and extrapolate them forward in time, we assemble a dataset of 2D Material Point Method (MPM) physical simulations covering rich physical phenomena such as deformable objects, fluids, kinetic objects, and emitters. We study code generation and video diffusion approaches on this dataset, identifying their strengths and weaknesses by varying the amount of physically relevant side information. The code generation model, beyond giving a working demonstration of automatic synthesis of MPM simulations, reveals that such an approach struggles with inferring physical parameters from visual input, but relative to video diffusion, produces physically and temporally stable extrapolations forward in time, while the video diffusion model more strongly identifies geometric properties from visual input but produces physically implausible extrapolations.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Impact of Out-Migration and Remittances on Food Consumption Outcomes among Rural Households in Tigray, Ethiopia

Authors:

This study examines the effects of rural out-migration and remittance inflows on food consumption outcomes among rural households in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. Utilizing household survey data collected from 521 rural households across three distinct Weredas (districts) (Tahtay Maichew, Kola Tembien, and Kilte-awlaelo). A Binary Probit model was employed to identify factors influencing migration decisions, while an Endogenous Switching Regression (ESR) model was used to estimate the impact of migration on food consumption outcomes while controlling for selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity. Food security was measured using the Food Consumption Score (FCS) and dietary diversity indicators. The empirical results reveal that severe food insecurity is widespread, with over 60% of all surveyed households falling into the "Poor" food consumption category. Descriptive baseline comparisons show that migration and remittance transfers marginally shift the raw average FCS upward from 23.86 to 25.48. However, this impact is profoundly nuanced: remittances serve as an immediate consumption-smoothing safety net but run parallel to a "labor-lost" constraint that reduces own-production capacities, forcing households to rely increasingly on market purchases for staple foods. The findings reveal that migration creates short-term labor shortages in agricultural production; however, remittance inflows substantially improve household food consumption frequencies, particularly for pulses, vegetables, and other nutrient-rich foods. After accounting for self-selection bias and unobserved traits, the rigorous ESR estimates indicate that migration increases the Food Consumption Score of participating households by an average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATT) of 10.75 points, shifting them into more secure dietary tiers. Moreover, remittances help households mitigate the adverse effects of drought and other shocks by relaxing liquidity constraints and supporting both food purchases and agricultural investments. The study recommends establishing target food security safety nets for non-remittance households, promoting scale-appropriate labor-saving agricultural technologies, expanding traditional communal labor-sharing innovations, and boosting irrigation and agricultural input support programs to enhance rural food security and livelihood resilience.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Beyond Nearest Neighbor Interpolation in Data Augmentation

Avoiding the risk of undefined categorical labels using nearest neighbor interpolation overlooks the risk of exacerbating pixel level annotation errors in augmented training data. Additionally, the inherent low pass filtering effects of interpolation algorithms exacerbate the risk of degrading high frequency structural details within annotated regions of interest. To avoid these risks, the author modified convolutional neural networks data transformation functions by incorporating a modified geometric transformation function, removing reliance on nearest neighbor interpolation, and integrating a mean-based class filtering mechanism to handle undefined categorical labels with alternative interpolation algorithms. The author also implemented an offline data augmentation pipeline to generate interpolation specific augmented training data, enabling quantitative assessment of interpolation specific low pass filtering effects on augmented training data. Experimental evaluation on three medical image segmentation datasets and the XBAT+ datasets demonstrated performance gains across multiple quantitative metrics.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

OTCHA: Optimal Transport-driven Confidence-aware Latent Hub Alignment for Multi-View Medical Image Classification

Multi-view imaging, such as mammography and chest radiography, is a standard component of clinical practice. However, medical images are often unregistered and contain view-specific artifacts or irrelevant background cues that can obscure diagnostically relevant findings. Many existing methods directly fuse per-view representations, allowing such irrelevant content to contaminate the fused embedding and reducing robustness under varying view configurations. We propose OTCHA, a confidence-aware latent hub token alignment module based on optimal transport (OT) that refines patch tokens before fusion for multi-view classification. OTCHA introduces a set of learnable latent hub tokens shared across views. For each view, we compute an OT plan between patch tokens and hub tokens that jointly considers feature similarity and geometry, and augment the OT formulation with token-conditional dustbins to enable partial matching and discard irrelevant tokens. The resulting transport plan provides token-wise matching confidence, which gates hub-mediated message passing and weights a novel optimal-transport-based representation alignment loss to stabilize refinement. Experiments on three multi-view medical image datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over competing baselines across diverse anatomies and view configurations. Our code is available at https://github.com/labhai/OTCHA.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

LearnOpt: Recovering the Latent Cognitive Structure of Standardized Examinations via Knowledge Graphs and Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2606.15349v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standardized examinations are typically treated as uniform syllabus coverage problems. We argue they are better understood as adversarial systems with stable latent cognitive structures diverging systematically from official syllabi. We introduce LearnOpt, which recovers this structure from historical question papers and generates personalized, time-bounded study plans. Applied to nine years of NEET questions (2016-2024, n=1,496), LearnOpt builds an exam knowledge graph from LLM-tagged questions, extracts a five-category latent skill distribution, and formulates study planning as a knapsack-variant optimization over prerequisite-aware subgraphs with Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. Central finding: NEET's latent skill distribution is stable within a syllabus regime (consecutive-year KL divergence 0.004-0.032 for 2016-2021, non-significant under permutation testing) but shifts significantly with NCERT's 2023 syllabus rationalization: pooling 2016-2021 (n=1,072) vs 2023-2024 (n=392) gives KL=0.040 (p=0.0005), with Elimination/Negation questions rising from ~20-29% to ~31-35%. Latent structure, while not permanently stationary, is piecewise stable, with shifts detectable and attributable to curricular events. Within either regime, subject predicts skill profile more strongly than year. An optimization evaluation, using one real and two synthetic mastery profiles, shows the skill-weighted objective produces a modest but real reordering of recommended topics over a mastery-conditioned frequency baseline. Applying the pipeline to JEE Advanced reveals a profile dominated by Multi-concept Integration (80.9% vs. 33.3% for NEET), with a JEE-vs-NEET divergence (KL=0.505) exceeding NEET's largest cross-subject divergence: exam tier shapes latent cognitive structure more than subject, which shapes it more than time within a regime. Code, knowledge graph, and annotated dataset are released publicly.

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

DeceptionX: Explainable Deception Detection with Multimodal Large Language Models

Deception detection is a critical and highly challenging task within affective computing and behavioral analysis. Existing deep learning methods typically treat this task as a straightforward classification problem; however, this black-box approach lacks interpretability and fails to capture the complex logical deduction processes utilized by human experts when identifying lies. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown potential, applying them effectively requires a bridge between low-level audiovisual cues and high-level logical reasoning. In this paper, we propose DeceptionX, a novel MLLM framework that shifts the paradigm of deception detection from black-box classification to an interpretable Observe-Think-Summarize reasoning process. To address the scarcity of high-quality reasoning data, we first constructed DeceptChain, a high-quality dataset developed through a human-in-the-loop process. This dataset synthesizes fine-grained visual and auditory evidence (such as micro-expressions and vocal tremors) into structured chain-of-thought reasoning data. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage training pipeline and a Discrepancy-Aware Redundancy Elimination~(DARE) strategy for DeceptionX to further enhance the model's generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeceptionX not only outperforms existing MLLM baselines and state-of-the-art methods on standard real-world benchmarks but also provides transparent, expert-level reasoning paths, bridging the critical gap between accuracy and interpretability in multimodal deception detection.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Primary care practitioners preconception health literacy and information-seeking: A cross-sectional survey.

Background Parental health before pregnancy influences maternal and child outcomes. Primary care professionals, including general practitioners [GPs], midwives, and naturopaths, can provide preconception care, yet many report limited knowledge and difficulty accessing relevant information. This study described Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths preconception health literacy, including knowledge and ability to access information. Methods Between July and September 2022, Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths completed a 32-item online cross-sectional survey. Participants were recruited through professional associations, and data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics Results Participants (N=373) included naturopaths (40.7%), GPs (32.4%), and midwives (26.8%). Reported barriers to clinician health literacy including lack of preconception care resources (25.5%), and limited clinician knowledge (23.6%). The proportion identifying limited clinician knowledge differed significantly between professions (GP: 31.4%; midwives: 23.0%; naturopaths: 17.8%; p=0.030). The highest level of accurate knowledge regarding preconception exposures was for pre-pregnancy obesity (82.7%), while low birth weight was the most accurately identified preconception outcomes (83.7%). Incorrect responses were most common for maternal multivitamin use as an exposure (28.3%) and childhood leukaemia as an outcome (26.3%). Differences between professions were strongest for infant outcomes, with moderate associations observed for shoulder dystocia (V=.2355), precipitous labour (V=.2173), macrosomia (V=.2060), labour dystocia (V=.2018) and cryptorchidism (V=.2018). Discussion Preconception health literacy varies across primary care professions. Clinicians require greater access to targeted resources and education tailored to their differing scopes of practice and experience. Improving clinician preconception health literacy may strengthen consistent evidence-based care and support better maternal, child, and long-term family health outcomes.