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

OpenVTON-Bench: A Large-Scale High-Resolution Benchmark for Controllable Virtual Try-On Evaluation

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly elevated the visual fidelity of Virtual Try-On (VTON) systems, yet reliable evaluation remains a persistent bottleneck. Traditional metrics struggle to quantify fine-grained texture details and semantic consistency, while existing datasets fail to meet commercial standards in scale and diversity. We present OpenVTON-Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising approximately 100K high-resolution image pairs (up to $1536 \times 1536$). The dataset is constructed using DINOv3-based hierarchical clustering for semantically balanced sampling and Gemini-powered dense captioning, ensuring a uniform distribution across 20 fine-grained garment categories. To support reliable evaluation, we propose a multi-modal protocol that measures VTON quality along five interpretable dimensions: background consistency, identity fidelity, texture fidelity, shape plausibility, and overall realism. The protocol integrates VLM-based semantic reasoning with a novel Multi-Scale Representation Metric based on SAM3 segmentation and morphological erosion, enabling the separation of boundary alignment errors from internal texture artifacts. Experimental results show strong agreement with human judgments (Kendall's $\tau$ of 0.833 vs. 0.611 for SSIM), establishing a robust benchmark for VTON evaluation.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NAMESAKES: Probing Identity Memorization in Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image (T2I) models generate realistic likenesses of some individuals when prompted with their names, raising privacy concerns. However, distinguishing whether a generated face is memorized or fabricated currently requires ground-truth photos, access to training data, or white-box access to model internals, limiting applicability. We introduce a fully black-box behavioral probe that distinguishes between these regimes while requiring no reference photos or prior knowledge of training data. To benchmark this task, we present the NAMESAKES dataset of over one thousand names and faces of public figures spanning a wide range of fame levels, along with perturbed, less famous names. Experiments on state-of-the-art T2I models show that our probe substantially predicts identity memorization and separates memorized from unrecognized names, with further insights into differences across model families.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

YeasierAgent: Agentic Social Sandbox as a Canvas for Intent-Driven Creation of Platform-Agnostic Symbiotic Agent-Native Applications

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces YeasierAgent, an application-building paradigm based on symbiotic agents, narrative worlds, and scene-aware interaction. It challenges the conventional device-coupled model of software by redefining applications as collaborative spaces among users, agents, and worlds. We present a system architecture that achieves two primary contributions: (1) enabling the rapid, cross-platform construction of agent-native applications by utilizing platform-agnostic interactive units (agents, scenes, dialogue) rather than fixed graphical layouts; and (2) unifying the emotional companionship and practical tool execution attributes of intelligent agents within a single experiential sandbox. By integrating automated generation, user-created worlds, and spatial multi-agent collaboration, YeasierAgent formalizes the category of Symbiotic Agent-Native Applications, demonstrating a shift from isolated, tool-specific chatbots toward cohesive, socially embedded computational environments.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

The Coin Flip Judge? Reliability and Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

Authors:

LLM-as-a-Judge is now widely used to rank model outputs, train reward models, and populate public leaderboards, but its run-to-run reliability remains under-characterized. We study repeated identical evaluations on 29 tasks spanning 10 categories using two OpenAI judge models (GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini), with 50 pairwise trials and 50 pointwise trials per question, supplemented by temperature and prompt-sensitivity ablations. Across judges, pairwise preferences flip on average 13.6% of the time, with 28% of questions exceeding a 20% flip rate and one question reaching 56%. GPT-4o-mini also exhibits a significant first-position bias (72% A-majority, p = 0.024). At the same time, mean pointwise score gaps are small (0.19–0.36 on a 10-point scale) and not statistically significant in aggregate, producing a pairwise–pointwise gap: judges frequently choose a winner even when their own scalar scores provide little evidence of a meaningful quality difference. Beyond within-judge instability, cross-judge agreement is only 76% ($\kappa = 0.51$), semantically equivalent prompt templates change majority outcomes in 25% of tested cases, and deterministic decoding reduces but does not eliminate inconsistency. A reliability curve analysis shows that, in our dataset, 11 repeated trials are needed for a majority vote to recover the 50-trial reference verdict with 95% probability on average, rising to 15 for high-variance questions. These findings suggest that single-trial LLM judging is often too noisy for high-stakes evaluation, and that multi-trial aggregation, position randomization, and explicit uncertainty reporting should be standard practice. Because both judges are from a single provider, cross-provider replication remains an important next step.

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

Think-at-Hard: Selective Latent Iterations to Improve Reasoning Language Models

Improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially under parameter constraints, is crucial for real-world applications. Looped transformers address this by performing multiple latent iterations to refine each token beyond a single forward pass. However, we identify a latent overthinking phenomenon: most token predictions are already correct after the first pass, but are sometimes revised into errors in later iterations. We ask whether selectively skipping latent iterations can improve accuracy, and reveal significant potential with an oracle iteration policy that boosts performance by up to 7.3%. Motivated by this, we propose Think-at-Hard (TaH), a looped transformer optimized for selective iteration. TaH employs a lightweight neural decider to trigger latent iteration, only at tokens likely to be incorrect after the standard forward pass. During latent iterations, depth-aware Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules shift the objective from general next-token prediction to focused hard-token refinement. A duo-causal attention mechanism extends attention from the token sequence dimension to an additional iteration depth dimension, enabling cross-iteration information flow with full sequential parallelism. Experiments on nine benchmarks show consistent gains across math, QA, and coding tasks. With identical parameter counts, TaH outperforms always-iterate baselines by 3.8-4.4% while skipping iterations on 93% of tokens, and exceeds single-iteration Qwen3 baselines by 3.0-3.8%. When allowing

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

The censored stochastic six-vertex model and parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials

arXiv:2606.12670v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a censored version of the stochastic six-vertex model. We show that for parameters $b_1 < b_2$, this model started from the initial condition ${1}_{x>0}$ is stochastically dominated at any time by the blocking measure. This is a partial analog of the censoring inequality for monotone spin systems. In particular, this result allows us to control the behavior of second-class particles. The proof uses parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials, whose appearance is explained using a connection between the stochastic six-vertex model and the Iwahori–Hecke algebras of symmetric groups. Furthermore, we find an intertwining relation for this process using normalized parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials as an intertwining kernel.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Low-resource Language Discrimination Towards Chinese Dialects with Transfer learning and Data Augmentation

Chinese dialects discrimination is a challenging natural language processing task due to scarce annotation resource. In this article, we develop a novel Chinese dialects discrimination framework with transfer learning and data augmentation (CDDTLDA) in order to overcome the shortage of resources. To be more specific, we first use a relatively larger Chinese dialects corpus to train a source-side automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. Then, we adopt a simple but effective data augmentation method (i.e., speed, pitch, and noise disturbance) to augment the target-side low-resource Chinese dialects, and fine-tune another target ASR model based on the previous source-side ASR model. Meanwhile, the potential common semantic features between source-side and target-side ASR models can be captured by using self-attention mechanism. Finally, we extract the hidden semantic representation in the target ASR model to conduct Chinese dialects discrimination. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark Chinese dialects corpora.

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

ProductConsistency: Improving Product Identity Preservation in Instruction-Based Image Editing via SFT and RL

Recent advances in instruction-based image editing have enabled models to perform complex visual edits from natural language instructions. However, in product-centric scenarios where preserving product features, branding, and textual elements are critical, current open and closed source models often struggle to maintain this fine-grained object identity. This issue is further compounded by the lack of datasets for instruction-based product image editing with text fidelity constraints, leaving it largely treated as an implicit capability of instruction-based image editing models. In this work, we introduce the ProductConsistency dataset which is designed to improve product-centric image editing. Our approach includes a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset of 87k samples for product editing, a reinforcement learning (RL) dataset with 869 unique product images, and a new benchmark dataset, the ProductConsistency Benchmark, to allow rigorous and standardized evaluation of editing models. To guide RL training, we propose a Cyclic Consistency reward that enforces semantic preservation of product identity by using caption similarity between the original product description and captions generated from the edited image. We fine-tune both Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and Flux.1-Kontext-dev using our dataset and demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline models in OCR and Perceptual metrics, and MLLM-based evaluations as well, indicating stronger product consistency, text rendering, and overall visual quality; with the Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 model achieving a 5x reduction in the character error rate. The code and pipeline is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProductConsistency-6FCC/README.md

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

TRACEY: an updated resource for SNARE protein domain annotation with improved HMMs and expanded sequence coverage

Motivation: SNARE proteins catalyse membrane fusion across the eukaryotic endomembrane system, from synaptic vesicle exocytosis to intracellular trafficking, endosomal and vacuolar transport, and autophagy, and their accurate domain annotation depends on the quality of profile models and the sequence diversity behind them. The original SNARE domain classification predates the recent expansion of eukaryotic sequence data, leaving its HMM profiles and subgroup coverage unable to resolve divergent and lineage-specific paralogs. Results: We present an updated release of TRACEY built on a resynchronized, non-redundant collection of 18,915 curated SNARE proteins spanning 1,188 species, together with a consolidated set of 83 HMM profiles, including 43 models for newly defined subgroups, reconstructed through an iterative, mixture-model-driven procedure. In direct comparison with the legacy models, at least ~75% of sequences in every overlapping group scored better with the new HMMs, indicating systematic gains in domain detection. A redesigned web interface adds multiparameter querying, FASTA download, and direct scanning of user-submitted sequences against the curated profiles. Availability and implementation: TRACEY is freely available at https://tracey.unil.ch.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

AfriSUD: A Dependency Treebank Collection for Evaluating Models on African Languages

Despite their linguistic diversity and global significance, African languages remain underrepresented in research and resources to support NLP. We aim to bridge this gap by introducing AfriSUD, the first large-scale collection of syntactically annotated treebanks for nine diverse African languages spanning major language families and regions across Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies (SUD) framework, our community-led effort provides high-quality, native-speaker verified data that capture typological key features such as agglutination and tone. We evaluate a range of models on AfriSUD for part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing including non-transformer baselines, multilingual pretrained encoders, and LLMs. Our results reveal a significant syntax gap, where models still show clear limitations across the nine languages, suggesting that existing architectures may not fully capture the structural diversity of African-language syntax.

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

Graph Learning Should Move Beyond Restrictive Views of Spectral and Message-Passing GNNs

arXiv:2602.10031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly divided into message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) and spectral GNNs, reflecting two largely separate research traditions in machine learning and signal processing. While MPNNs have a precise definition, there is no widely accepted criterion for what makes a mapping a spectral GNN. Most existing work restricts spectral GNNs to layered architectures based on linear spectral filters. Under this restriction, we show that spectral and spatial GNNs have largely equivalent expressive power. To promote progress in the field, we propose a precise definition of spectral GNNs based on eigenbasis symmetries, in contrast to the definition of MPNNs via neighborhood permutation symmetries. We further argue that the two perspectives offer complementary strengths. MPNNs provide a natural language for discrete structure and expressivity analysis through tools from logic and graph isomorphism, while the spectral perspective offers principled tools for understanding smoothing, bottlenecks, stability, and community structure. Overall, we argue that progress in graph learning will be accelerated by clarifying the similarities and differences between these perspectives and by moving toward a unified theoretical framework.

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

FireRed-Image-Edit-1.0 Technical Report

We present FireRed-Image-Edit, a diffusion transformer for instruction-based image editing that achieves state-of-the-art performance through systematic optimization of data curation, training methodology, and evaluation design. We construct a 1.6B-sample training corpus, comprising 900M text-to-image and 700M image editing pairs from diverse sources. After rigorous cleaning, stratification, auto-labeling, and two-stage filtering, we retain over 100M high-quality samples balanced between generation and editing, ensuring strong semantic coverage and instruction alignment. Our multi-stage training pipeline progressively builds editing capability via pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. To improve data efficiency, we introduce a Multi-Condition Aware Bucket Sampler for variable-resolution batching and Stochastic Instruction Alignment with dynamic prompt re-indexing. To stabilize optimization and enhance controllability, we propose Asymmetric Gradient Optimization for DPO, DiffusionNFT with layout-aware OCR rewards for text editing, and a differentiable Consistency Loss for identity preservation. We further establish REDEdit-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning 15 editing categories, including newly introduced beautification and low-level enhancement tasks. Extensive experiments on REDEdit-Bench and public benchmarks (ImgEdit and GEdit) demonstrate competitive or superior performance against both open-source and proprietary systems. To support future research, our code, models, and benchmark suite are publicly available at https://github.com/FireRedTeam/FireRed-Image-Edit/ .

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Security Analysis of Long-Horizon Agentic AI Systems: Threats, Evaluation, and Framework Development

arXiv:2606.14816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a structured analysis of security challenges in long-horizon agentic AI systems. The study reviews existing threats, evaluation approaches, attack propagation mechanisms, and security frameworks. A taxonomy of security threats and a framework for analyzing attack propagation are proposed to support future research in agentic AI security

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Quantitative Oppenheim Conjecture for Random Quadratic Forms and Optimal Variance Bounds in Function Fields

arXiv:2606.16699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove a quantitative version of Oppenheim's conjecture in the function field setting. In order to do so, we compute the higher moments of the Siegel transform. In particular, we find an optimal bound on the variance of the number of lattice points in a set. Moreover, we compute the exact variance of the number of lattice points in a ball, which is of independent interest.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Analytic Torsion and Spectral Gap Capture Persistent-Laplacian Performance

arXiv:2606.16990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While persistent Laplacians (PL) offer a richer geometric representation of data than persistent homology, utilizing their full eigenspectrum for learning tasks is often hampered by high dimensionality and the ``varying length'' problem across different filtration scales. We propose a compact spectral representation that distills the persistent Laplacian into three mathematically grounded invariants: Betti numbers, the spectral gap, and analytic torsion. Across benchmark datasets including MNIST, QM-3D, and SKEMPI WT, we demonstrate that this reduced feature space captures the essential predictive signal of the full spectrum, and in some cases outperforms it, while significantly reducing computational overhead and preventing the noise introduced by higher-frequency eigenvalues. Our results suggest that these invariants provide a principled, fixed-length interface between spectral geometry and topological learning.

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

Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agents

Turn-taking in multi-party spoken conversations remains a fundamental challenge for voice-based agents, particularly under dynamic floor competition and varying user expectations. We propose ModeratorLM, a role-playing voice agent that conditions turn-taking behavior on an explicitly assigned role in multi-party settings. The system is built on a speech large language model operating in chunk-wise streaming manner. We further introduce a reasoning-augmented variant that incorporates chain-of-thought reasoning over conversational context and the assigned role. We construct RolePlayConv, a large-scale synthetic dataset of spoken multi-party conversations with diverse assistant roles. Experiments on real-world meeting data and RolePlayConv show improved turn-taking precision by over 40% and recall by more than 70%, while substantially reducing false-positive interruptions compared to non-role-conditioned baselines.

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

SAE Interventions are Unreliable: Post-Intervention Recovery of Suppressed Behavior

arXiv:2606.18322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) decompose residual-stream activations into interpretable features. Recent latent-space defenses increasingly rely on these decompositions, assuming that identified "unsafe" SAE features serve as actionable handles for monitoring and intervention. In this paradigm, clamping a specific harmful feature is expected to reliably prevent model misbehavior. However, we show that this success may hide a recoverable failure mode: the clamp may block one visible route to a behavior without eliminating the behavior itself. We formulate this vulnerability as post-intervention recovery, a constrained residual-space optimization problem. Starting from the post-intervention residual state, we optimize residual perturbations to recover the pre-intervention behavior while preserving the post-intervention values of the targeted SAE features. Even under a strong threat model where the intervention remains active throughout optimization and generation, recovery remains possible. To rule out that recovery simply undoes the intervention, we use encoder-orthogonal updates for single-layer interventions and the corresponding feature-map Jacobian in the cross-layer setting. Across TPP, unlearning, IOI, and refusal steering experiments, this stress test reveals recoverable behavior despite successful feature-level intervention. Especially in the safety-critical refusal-steering setting, we achieve a 95.8% recovery rate on valid samples while keeping defended-feature relative drift to 0.131, substantially below suffix-based baselines. A recovery-path attribution analysis further localizes this recovery to the SAE reconstruction residual, the component left unexplained by the SAE. These results expose a gap between feature-level control and behavioral completeness: SAE features can support causal intervention, but controlling them does not guarantee control over the underlying behavior.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks in AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Evaluation Framework

arXiv:2604.22119v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As reasoning capacity and deployment scope grow in tandem, large language models (LLMs) gain the capacity to engage in behaviors that serve their own objectives, a class of risks we term Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks (ESRRs). These include, but are not limited to, deception (intentionally misleading users or evaluators), evaluation gaming (strategically manipulating performance during safety testing), and reward hacking (exploiting misspecified objectives). Systematically understanding and benchmarking these risks remains an open challenge. To address this gap, we introduce ESRRSim, a taxonomy-driven agentic framework for automated behavioral risk evaluation. We construct an extensible risk taxonomy of 7 categories, which is decomposed into 20 subcategories. ESRRSim generates evaluation scenarios designed to elicit faithful reasoning, paired with dual rubrics assessing both model responses and reasoning traces, in a judge-agnostic and scalable architecture. Evaluation across 11 reasoning LLMs reveals substantial variation in risk profiles (detection rates ranging 14.45%-72.72%), with dramatic generational improvements suggesting models may increasingly recognize and adapt to evaluation contexts.

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

ChronoID: Infusing Explicit Temporal Signals into Semantic IDs for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2606.14260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic IDs are crucial in generative recommendation, but with a fundamental limitation: temporal information is not well incorporated into semantic IDs. Instead, time influences recommendation only implicitly (e.g., through session construction heuristics, preference alignment, or sequence order), while existing semantic ID learning remains entirely time-agnostic. This design conflates interactions occurring under distinct temporal contexts into identical semantic representations, implicitly assuming that item semantics and user intent are temporally stationary. Such an assumption is misaligned with real-world recommendation scenarios, where evolving interaction rhythms play a central role. In this work, we investigate where and how the explicit time should be incorporated into semantic ID for generative recommendation. First, we systematically characterize the design space along three orthogonal dimensions of temporal signals and present a unified framework, ChronoID, for time-aware semantic ID learning. Then, by contributing a new time-explicit generation recommendation benchmark, ChronoID answers the questions: what is the effective way of infusing time, how to design the architecture, and where does the gain come from.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Data augmented bootstrap: Unifying confidence interval construction by approximate invariance

arXiv:2606.09049v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose the data augmented bootstrap (DAB), a framework for constructing confidence intervals from approximately invariant transformations of the data. As special cases, DAB recovers popular methods that rely on exact group symmetries, such as conformal prediction, wild bootstrap for Maximum Mean Discrepancy U-statistics and the recently proposed SymmPI. Meanwhile, DAB also recovers the classical bootstrap method, which exploits the dataset's approximate invariance under uniform sampling of data indices as the dataset size grows. For all DAB methods, we establish theoretical coverage results that interpolate between finite-sample and asymptotic guarantees according to the strength of the invariance, and without assuming a group structure. The approximate invariance is measured in the Kolmogorov distance and, for statistics that satisfy Gaussian universality, reduces to conditional mean and variance matching. This allows us to incorporate data augmentation (DA), a widely used machine learning heuristic based on approximate invariances, into known statistical methods. We empirically test the performance of incorporating DA into bootstrap, wild bootstrap and conformal prediction for simulated settings as well as for image, language and scientific data.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

IntElicit: Eliciting and Assessing Contextualized Creativity via Dialogue Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.12086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextualized assessment offers high ecological validity for evaluating creativity but introduces a critical challenge: observed performance may be confounded with cognitive proficiency (domain knowledge) and agency (willingness to engage). Meanwhile, in the age of generative AI, creative problem solving increasingly occurs in tool-mediated and human–AI interactive environments, making fully static assessment less aligned with contemporary creative practice. To address these issues, this paper proposes IntElicit, a framework for eliciting and assessing contextualized creativity via dialogue policy optimization. IntElicit functions as a constrained adaptive AI Interviewer: it provides non-directive knowledge and agency scaffolds in multi-turn interaction to reduce non-creative confounders, while preserving participants' responsibility for generating the creative content being evaluated. Specifically, to tackle sparse rewards and potential reward hacking (e.g., answer dictation) in open-ended educational dialogue, IntElicit introduces a decomposed process reward mechanism. This mechanism aligns the policy with pedagogical elicitation, rewarding prompts that draw out participant reasoning rather than producing optimal answers on their behalf. Extensive experiments, including participant simulation and a human subject study (N=64), show that IntElicit improves elicited creative outcomes over expert-designed baselines. Together, the results suggest that interactive elicitation can reveal creative potential that static FPSP-style assessment may miss, providing a formative and diagnostic lens for contextualized creativity assessment in AI-mediated learning contexts.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Trajectory Geometry of Transformer Representations Across Layers

arXiv:2606.09287v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how transformer representations evolve across layers, not merely what they encode, remains an open problem in mechanistic interpretability. We recast the transformer forward pass as a discrete population trajectory through a high-dimensional representation manifold, drawing on geometric tools from computational neuroscience. Rather than probing for pre-specified features, we characterize trajectory geometry using five metrics computed directly in the ambient space: trajectory length, curvature, a semantic convergence index, layerwise cosine similarity, and representational stability. Across three model families (GPT-2, TinyLlama, Qwen2.5) and five controlled prompt families, we report four findings. First, semantically related prompts converge significantly in middle-to-late layers (peak CI 0.41–0.58, p

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

CREST: Deployment-Realistic Hardware-in-the-Loop NAS for Embedded Sensing Systems

arXiv:2606.15004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying neural networks on low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) requires selecting model architectures under tight memory, latency, and energy constraints. Existing workflows often simplify this process along one or more axes: static proxy costs such as FLOPs or parameters, treating one MCU as representative, and continuous-inference tests instead of deployed sensing schedules. These assumptions can mis-rank Pareto-front candidates, miss infeasible deployments, and obscure schedule-dependent energy. We present CREST (Cross-platform Runtime Evaluation and Search Tool), a deployment-realistic hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) neural architecture search (NAS) framework for MCU sensing systems. CREST keeps the optimizer, HIL measurement boundary, logging, and replay workflow fixed while exposing workload, model family, target backend, schedule, quantization, and scoring policy as configurable axes. This makes deployment effects experimentally separable within one reusable workflow. We evaluate CREST on inertial odometry and audio classification across three Arm Cortex-M targets. For inertial odometry, measured-energy HIL search reduces median per-inference energy by 41.7% versus FLOPs-based selection and 40.8% versus memory-traffic-based selection at similar error. FLOPs-based selection also chooses infeasible deployments on memory-constrained targets. On the STM32 N657 target, continuous-inference and duty-cycled searches produce different Pareto frontiers. For audio classification, the same application-level policy selects different DS-CNN architectures on different boards, and cross-board replay changes deployment cost substantially. Overall, CREST shows that deployment-realistic MCU NAS must jointly optimize model architecture, target platform, runtime schedule, and deployment policy rather than relying only on static proxy costs or continuous-inference measurements.

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

Multi-Field Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Maritime Accident Root Cause Analysis

arXiv:2606.13249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Maritime accident adjudication reports contain critical tribunal findings for root cause analysis (RCA), yet retrieving relevant precedents and drafting consistent reports from decades of records remains labor-intensive. This paper proposes a multi-field hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for automated maritime RCA, utilizing a comprehensive dataset of 13,329 Korea Maritime Safety Tribunal (KMST) reports (1971-2025). We transform raw adjudications into a structured knowledge base of "incident cards", indexing three distinct fields-Summary, Causes, and Disposition-alongside a hierarchical L1/L2 cause taxonomy. Our retrieval strategy employs a field-aware hybrid approach, fusing sparse and dense rankings via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). Given the lack of large-scale expert relevance labels, we evaluate retrieval performance using ceiling-normalized recall and nDCG based on a metadata-derived proxy relevance score. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed retrieval significantly outperforms baseline methods, improving NormRecall@100 from 0.18 to 0.55. Furthermore, grounding the generator on the retrieved precedents enhances RCA generation quality over an LLM-only baseline, increasing the LLM-as-a-judge score from 3.34 to 3.72. These findings suggest that field-aware RAG can substantially streamline maritime safety investigation workflows by enabling faster precedent search and more consistent, evidence-based RCA drafting.

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

RefGC-SR$^2$: Reference-guided Generated Content Super-Resolution and Refinement

Reference-guided generation (e.g., object compositing, customization) has progressed rapidly, yet current pipelines share a fundamental limitation: the object-centric high-resolution reference image (HRRI) provided by users is downsampled to a fixed low-resolution (LR) before being fed into the model, so the fine-grained details are discarded before the output is even produced. In addition, the generation step then introduces its own artifacts (e.g., identity distortion) on top of this loss. Existing reference-guided generated content refinement (RefGCR) methods can correct some of these artifacts but still operate in the LR domain; reference-guided super-resolution (RefSR) methods recover resolution but assume natural-image degradations and ignore the artifact distribution of generative pipelines. To address both gaps in a single formulation, we introduce a new task: reference-guided generated content super-resolution-refinement (RefGC-SR$^2$), where the original HRRI is reused at the post-processing stage to recover lost details, refine generative artifacts, and upscale the output simultaneously. We construct the first real-world triplet data generation pipeline for this RefGC-SR$^2$ task, training a diptych-conditioned generator to synthesize paired low-quality anchors that public pretrained models cannot provide. We further present a frequency-aware diffusion transformer model for RefGC-SR$^2$ that selectively injects fine details from the HRRI while removing generative artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RefGC-SR$^2$ model successfully (i) refines the object identity faithfully with respect to the reference, and (ii) recovers high-resolution details, so that the final result is significantly higher quality and practically more usable compared to existing RefGCR and RefSR baselines.