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

A Reproducible Log-Driven AutoML Framework for Interpretable Pipeline Optimization in Healthcare Risk Prediction

arXiv:2605.21528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate disease risk prediction is challenged by heterogeneous features, limited data, and class imbalance. This study presents yvsoucom-iterkit, a deterministic AutoML framework that models pipeline optimization as a configuration-level system with full reproducibility and traceable execution logs, enabling systematic analysis of component attribution, interactions, similarity, and cross-seed robustness. Experiments on the Pima Indians Diabetes and Stroke datasets across more than 18,000 pipeline configurations reveal a structured yet partially redundant search space, where performance is dominated by a small subset of interacting components. Ensemble models achieve stable performance, reaching a Weighted-F1 of 0.89 on Pima and 0.94 on Stroke. Macro-F1 reaches approximately 0.88 on Pima but drops to 0.6560 on Stroke due to severe imbalance. Cross-seed experiments show that ensembles reduce variance compared to single models. Friedman testing ($p < 0.05$) confirms significant ranking differences across configurations. Based on analysis of component attribution, interaction, and similarity, optimal configuration design reveals dataset-dependent behavior. For the Pima dataset, computational efficiency benefits from simplified search spaces where redundant components can be removed, with split ratio playing a key role. In contrast, the Stroke dataset requires enhanced imbalance-aware strategies, where RandomOverSampler improves Macro-F1 from 0.6560 to 0.6766. These findings demonstrate that effective AutoML optimization is achieved through optimal configuration design, where carefully constraining the search space to high-impact components can improve performance, stability, and interpretability while reducing unnecessary search complexity.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Seeing Before Reasoning: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Shortcut-Resilient Multimodal On-Policy Self-Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a model on its own rollouts and uses a frozen copy to provide dense token-level targets conditioned on a reference target. This works well for LLM reasoning, but a direct extension to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can create a shortcut: the privileged target may guide tokens mainly based on the text reference target rather than the image. We propose ViGOS, a visually grounded OPSD framework for MLLM post-training. The student first writes a visual description and then reasons toward the final answer. For valid rollouts, an image-only perception teacher supervises the description, while a privileged reasoning teacher supervises the reasoning and final answer on the same student prefix. A reference teacher is used only for invalid rollouts to recover the output format. Across general vision-language, expert reasoning, visual math, spatial grounding, and visual-language-prior benchmarks, ViGOS keeps the main benefits of OPSD and improves image-grounded behavior in shortcut-prone settings.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reinforcing Dual-Path Reasoning in Spatial Vision Language Models

Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging. Moreover, different spatial queries call for fundamentally different strategies: some are best addressed through purely linguistic, step-by-step deduction, while others require explicit 3D grounding before quantitative inference. We present Dual-Path Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Spatial VLMs (SR-REAL), a unified framework that equips a spatial VLM with two complementary reasoning paths: Language-Only Reasoning (LOR), which performs step-by-step linguistic deduction, and Detect-Then-Reason (DTR), which detects 3D geometric cues (e.g., centers or bounding boxes) via region tokens before explicit geometric inference. SR-REAL begins with a cold-start supervised fine-tuning stage that constructs LOR and DTR chain-of-thought supervision and exposes a region-to-3D interface, followed by RL that optimizes the policy model with accuracy and format rewards; for DTR, a discrete center-based detection reward further refines geometric alignment. Across diverse spatial benchmarks, SR-REAL significantly outperforms spatial VLM baselines: (i) a single RL-trained model supports both reasoning paths, with DTR excelling in region-aware tasks through precise 3D localization and LOR enhancing general spatial reasoning; (ii) jointly training both paths fosters mutual reinforcement; (iii) high-quality, blended cold-start data is crucial for stable RL optimization; and (iv) the model generalizes across datasets and domains without per-task tuning, demonstrating positive transfer between LOR and DTR.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Occupational Prompting Reveals Cultural Bias in Large Language Models

Social roles shape expectations, priorities, and judgments, yet it remains unclear how large language models (LLMs) associate occupational identities with broader cultural value patterns. Prior work used nationality-based cultural prompting to study how LLM responses to value-survey questions align with human cultural benchmarks. In this paper, we extend that framework by replacing cultural prompting with occupational prompting to examine how professional-role cues influence value-survey responses in open-weight LLMs. Using a survey-grounded evaluation pipeline based on questions from the Integrated Values Surveys, we project model responses into the two-dimensional Inglehart–Welzel cultural space. We prompt open-weight LLMs to answer questions under occupational identities such as accountant, teacher, engineer, and nurse, and then analyze how these occupation-conditioned responses are positioned on the cultural map. Our results show that when open-weight LLMs are prompted with occupations rather than national identities, their responses remain within a broadly Western-leaning region of the cultural map. However, different occupations introduce shifts within this region, producing distinct occupational skews. This indicates that occupational prompts are not treated as neutral role labels, but instead elicit structured value patterns. These findings extend survey-based evaluation of cultural bias beyond nationality-based prompting and provide a framework for studying how occupational personas shape value expression in LLMs.

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

A Water Efficiency Dataset for African Data Centers

arXiv:2412.03716v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) computing and data centers consume large amounts of freshwater, both directly for cooling and indirectly for electricity generation. While most attention has been paid to developed countries such as the U.S., this paper presents the first-of-its-kind dataset that combines nation-level weather and electricity generation data to estimate water usage effectiveness for data centers in 41 African countries across five different climate regions. We also use our dataset to evaluate and estimate the water consumption of inference on two large language models (i.e., Llama-3-70B and GPT-4) in 11 selected African countries. Our estimates suggest that writing a 10-page report using Llama-3-70B could consume as much as {0.66 liters} of water, while the water consumption by GPT-4 for the same task may go up to about {59 liters}. For writing a medium-length email of 120-200 words, Llama-3-70B and GPT-4 could consume about {0.13 liters} and {2.9 liters} of water, respectively. All the numbers for generative model inference tasks are based on public information available in 2024, when we initially prepared the analysis. Since then, AI inference systems have improved substantially. For example, recent disclosures suggest that energy efficiency improved by more than 30x between May 2024 and May 2025. Accordingly, our 2024 estimates should be interpreted as historical reference values rather than as representative of current performance. Interestingly, given the same AI model, 9 of the 11 selected African countries consume less water than the global average, mainly because of lower water intensities for electricity generation.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Beyond Dark Knowledge: Mixup-Based Distillation for Reliable Predictions

Knowledge Distillation (KD) and mixup have proven effective at inducing smoothness in class boundaries; KD captures inherent class relationships in probability distributions, and mixup enforces them through convex combinations of inputs. Their interaction, however, remains poorly understood, particularly when mixup is applied only during student training. In this setting, the teacher is queried on inputs drawn from a vicinal distribution it never saw during training, a controlled mismatch whose effect on knowledge transfer has not been characterised. We show that this mismatch causes the teacher's supervisory signal to be dominated by distributional confusion rather than inter-class structure. Despite it, the student does not merely imitate the teacher: it independently acquires greater linearity in the vicinal region, a structural property that the teacher lacks, and goes beyond dark-knowledge transfer. KD with mixup consistently improves student accuracy and reduces overconfidence by an order of magnitude relative to the baseline, across CIFAR and ImageNet with varying-capacity teachers. Crucially, calibration propagates from teacher to student independently of accuracy transfer, and temperature scaling governs a measurable accuracy-calibration trade-off that becomes more pronounced under vicinal training. These results reframe mixup distillation not as a degraded version of standard KD, but as a richer transfer channel that simultaneously shapes discriminative performance, uncertainty estimation, and representational geometry.

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

Exploring Adaptive Masked Reconstruction for Self-Supervised Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Recently, masked skeleton reconstruction models have emerged as strong action representation learners, driving significant progress in self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. However, existing state-of-the-art methods must predict an exceedingly large number of spatiotemporal patches, significantly prolonging training time. Besides, by treating all spatiotemporal regions equally during reconstruction, these models are distracted from learning the critical motion patterns that underlie action semantics. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Masked Reconstruction (AMR), a faster and stronger pre-training framework. We first decouple the decoder from the encoder, enabling flexible prediction of larger spatiotemporal patches and dramatically reducing reconstruction complexity. Given that larger patches contain more complex information, which is challenging to predict and consequently degrades performance, we accordingly introduce an adaptive guidance module. This module identifies regions of high motion informativeness, guiding the model to focus on the most discriminative parts of each patch and alleviating reconstruction difficulty. Experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD datasets demonstrate that AMR not only accelerates pre-training substantially but also improves downstream recognition accuracy, surpassing current state-of-the-art approaches.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

YOLO-AMC: An Improved YOLO Architecture with Attention Mechanisms for Building Crack Detection

Crack detection plays an important role in infrastructure inspection and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). However, cracks typically appear as thin, low-contrast structures and are easily affected by background noise, posing challenges for existing object detection models. This study proposes an improved YOLO-based architecture with integrated attention mechanisms, termed YOLO-AMC (YOLO with Attention Mechanisms for Crack Detection), to enhance automated crack detection performance. Based on YOLOv11, the original C2PSA module is removed, and multiple attention mechanisms, including Global Attention Mechanism (GAM), Residual Convolutional Block Attention Module (Res-CBAM), and Shuffle Attention (SA), are introduced into the multi-scale feature fusion layers of the Neck to strengthen cross-scale feature integration. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLO-AMC consistently outperforms baseline models YOLOv11n and YOLOv8n across multiple evaluation metrics. Among the evaluated attention modules, GAM achieves the best detection performance, obtaining mAP@0.5 = 0.9917 and mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.9506 on the test dataset, which are higher than those of YOLOv11 (0.9833 / 0.9112) and YOLOv8 (0.9707 / 0.8921). Furthermore, while maintaining a computational complexity of 7.6 GFLOPs, the proposed model achieves 110.95 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 4090 platform and approximately 5 FPS on a Raspberry Pi 5 edge device, demonstrating a favorable trade-off between accuracy and deployment efficiency. The implementation code for this study is available on GitHub at https://github.com/CY-Tsai24/YOLO-AMC.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

AmchiBias: Measuring Stereotypical Bias in Goan Identity Groups with a Minimal Pair Dataset in English and Konkani

Socio-cultural stereotypical bias is an important consideration in the development and deployment of NLP systems. It is however often considered only at the national level, despite rich subnational socio-cultural structures. We present AmchiBias, the first benchmark for measuring socio-cultural stereotypical bias for the Indian state of Goa with its unique historically multicultural setting. It covers various Goan identity groups and comprises 313 minimal pairs across eight sociodemographic dimensions in both English and Devanagari Konkani. We then evaluate stereotypical bias in five multilingual encoder models on this benchmark. We find near-chance scores in Konkani, reflecting language incompetence for general multilingual models and a lack of Goan cultural competence for Indian language models. Queried in English, models with a stronger Indian language coverage show higher bias for pan-Indian groups than hyperlocal Goan groups. This suggests the English signal reflects pan-Indian pretraining associations rather than genuine Goan cultural knowledge. Our findings highlight a critical gap in low-resource multilingual NLP evaluation for hyperlocal community identities.

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

Graph Instance Landscapes: When Structural Similarity Does (Not) Reflect Shortest-Path Performance

arXiv:2606.18267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarking shortest-path algorithms is commonly based on aggregate performance over heterogeneous graph sets, which limits insight into how different search paradigms react to instance structure. We adopt an instance-landscape view of graph benchmarking by embedding graphs into a low-cost structural feature space and clustering them into regions of similar structure. Three benchmark suites are studied: weighted Erdős–Rényi graphs, random geometric (wireless) graphs, and real-world road networks. We evaluate four representative shortest-path solvers spanning uninformed exact search (Dijkstra), bidirectional exact search (bidirectional Dijkstra), heuristic-guided exact search (A$^{*}$), and deque-based strategies (DEQ). Clustering robustness is analyzed under multiple feature-selection schemes, and runtime distributions are compared across landscape regions using non-parametric tests. While generator parameters induce stable structural regions, we find that feature-space similarity does not necessarily imply performance similarity: significant runtime shifts are frequently observed even within the same landscape region. A merged-suite analysis further shows that different benchmark families occupy largely disjoint regions. These results highlight both the potential and the limits of structural landscapes for the structure-aware benchmarking of shortest-path algorithms.

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

SCC-Loc: A Unified Semantic Cascade Consensus Framework for UAV Thermal Geo-Localization

Cross-modal Thermal Geo-localization (TG) provides a robust, all-weather solution for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. However, profound thermal-visible modality gaps introduce severe feature ambiguity, systematically corrupting conventional coarse-to-fine registration. To dismantle this bottleneck, we propose SCC-Loc, a unified Semantic-Cascade-Consensus localization framework. By sharing a single DINOv2 backbone across global retrieval and MINIMA$_{RoMa}$ matching, it minimizes memory footprint and achieves zero-shot, highly accurate absolute position estimation. Specifically, we tackle modality ambiguity by introducing three cohesive components. First, we design the Semantic-Guided Viewport Alignment (SGVA) module to adaptively optimize satellite crop regions, effectively correcting initial spatial deviations. Second, we develop the Cascaded Spatial-Adaptive Texture-Structure Filtering (C-SATSF) mechanism to explicitly enforce geometric consistency, thereby eradicating dense cross-modal outliers. Finally, we propose the Consensus-Driven Reliability-Aware Position Selection (CD-RAPS) strategy to derive the optimal solution through a synergy of physically constrained pose optimization. To address data scarcity, we construct Thermal-UAV, a comprehensive dataset providing 11,890 diverse thermal queries referenced against a large-scale satellite ortho-photo and corresponding spatially aligned Digital Surface Model (DSM). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCC-Loc establishes a new state-of-the-art, suppressing the mean localization error to 9.37 m and providing a 7.6-fold accuracy improvement within a strict 5-m threshold over the strongest baseline. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/FloralHercules/SCC-Loc.

13.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-24

Variable selection-combined causal mediation analysis for continuous treatments with application to large-dimensional biomedical data

Authors:

by Yajing Zhou, Kecheng Wei, Yahang Liu, Zhaoyang Li, Chen Huang, Guoyou Qin, Yongfu Yu Substantial progress has been made in the area of causal inference utilizing large-scale data, among which the estimation of causal mediation effects has attracted a lot of attention. However, existing large-dimensional causal inference primarily focuses on total effects or typical causal mediation effects under binary variable settings, placing less emphasis on large-scale covariate selection with continuous treatment and mediator. To address this, we propose a weighted semiparametric estimation framework that integrates the generalized outcome-adaptive LASSO method into generalized propensity score modeling to achieve estimation of causal mediation effects under continuous variable settings. Simulation results show that our proposed method outperforms other regularization-based methods in selection accuracy and estimation efficiency, which is achieved by incorporating outcome-related key variables and excluding noise covariates. From the perspective of achieving a stable balance between efficiency and bias, as well as high-dimensional information filtering, our method may serve as a compelling alternative that balances estimation efficiency with model interpretability and inferential robustness. We further conduct a real-world application based on the UK Biobank database, quantifying the causal mediation effects of apolipoprotein B levels within the association between potential diabetes risk and cancer incidence using large-scale healthcare and medical data.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Taylor-Calibrate: Principled Initialization for Hybrid Linear Attention Distillation

Hybrid linear attention models offer an appealing path to faster long-context inference: they reduce the quadratic cost and KV-cache burden of full softmax attention while retaining much of the quality of Transformer models. A practical way to obtain such models is to convert a pretrained Transformer instead of pretraining a new architecture from scratch, but this conversion is still brittle. Simply copying the teacher attention projections into a Gated DeltaNet (GDN) student does not specify the new recurrent decay, write, and output-gating dynamics. As a result, the converted model often starts in a poor dynamical regime and must spend many distillation tokens repairing initialization rather than learning the remaining teacher behavior. We propose Taylor-Calibrate, a lightweight initialization method for hybrid GDN students. The method uses Taylor-guided teacher attention statistics to set the value projection, memory timescale, write gates, and output gate, then applies a short per-layer alignment step to match each converted layer to the teacher output. Across four teacher settings and three retained-layer policies, Taylor-Calibrate gives substantially stronger zero-shot students, with up to an 88x improvement in a representative ablation, and reaches matched recovery targets with 4.9x–9.2x fewer training tokens than naive conversion.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Face versus Body Tracking for Human-Robot Interaction: An Egocentric Dataset

Meaningful human-robot interaction (HRI) requires a robot to continuously assess user engagement through persistent user tracking. However, state-of-the-art Multi-Object Tracking models are heavily optimized for surveillance or autonomous driving. A social robot faces distinct egocentric challenges, such as humans moving in unpredictable nonlinear patterns, obstructing each other, or leaving and reentering the scene. These dynamics trigger frequent identity switches (IDSW), causing the robot to lose its footing mid-conversation. To address this, we introduce a focused, custom-annotated egocentric dataset collected via the Furhat robot. We present a systematic evaluation isolating detection errors from tracking logic, comparing face versus body tracking, and assessing the impact of extended memory and appearance re-identification (ReID). Results indicate that increasing temporal memory mitigates prolonged occlusions but fails on complex dynamic events. Integrating ReID resolves complex switches but exhibits opposing effects: it substantially improves body tracking stability, yet causes facial IDSW to spike due to profile angle sensitivity. Ultimately, our optimized pipeline reduces IDSW by 49% compared to a standard tracking-by-detection baseline, effectively mitigating interaction breakdowns. As standard benchmarks lack dense, close-quarter occlusions, this work highlights the critical need for natively captured social dynamics to truly validate HRI perception models.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Foundation model-based tool for automated ulcerative colitis histology scoring demonstrates non-inferiority to pathologists across multiple scoring indices

In clinical trials for ulcerative colitis (UC), pathologists assess disease severity through standardized histological indices, including the Geboes Score, Robarts Histopathology Index (RHI), and Nancy Histologic Index (NHI). Despite strong associations with clinical outcomes, histologic scoring suffers from inter- and intra-reader variability, and consensus criteria for histologic remission remain uncertain. Through a consortium approach, we developed an artificial intelligence-based measurement (AIM) tool for scoring histology in UC mucosal biopsies (AIM-HI UC). This model, trained on a large dataset of UC biopsies (N=10,230), utilizes additive multiple instance learning models leveraging PLUTO, a pathology foundation model, that predict each of the Geboes subgrades, from which the Geboes grade-level score, RHI, and NHI can be calculated. Evaluation of this model on a standalone verification set including clinical trial specimens established algorithm non-inferiority and/or superiority relative to standard qualified pathologists through comparison of algorithm-consensus and pathologist-consensus agreement metrics (non-inferior if difference >-0.1, superior if difference >0, inclusive of confidence intervals). AIM-HI UC was determined to be non-inferior to pathologists (N=3) for the prediction of all seven Geboes subgrades, grade-level Geboes, RHI, NHI, histologic improvement (GS

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

3D Masked Autoencoders are Robust Learners of Volumetric and Multimodal Cellular Representations for Microscopy

Self-supervised learning in fluorescence microscopy often relies on 2D projections, despite the inherently three-dimensional nature of cells. We present a systematic comparison of 2D and 3D masked autoencoders (MAE-2D vs. MAE-3D) on volumetric microscopy data. Under matched architectures and training protocols, MAE-3D consistently outperforms 2D max-projection and slice-based variants on downstream single-cell tasks. We further align visual representations with a pretrained protein language model (ESM2) and show that cross-modal supervision yields larger gains for volumetric models. Channel cross-attention and frequency-domain regularization are critical for leveraging 3D spatial context. On a protein–protein interaction task, MAE-3D achieves a ROC–AUC of 0.865, outperforming prior methods by up to +0.025. For protein localization, our best 3D model attains state-of-the-art AUC$_{micro}$ (0.952) and F1$_{micro}$ (0.742), improving over previous approaches by +0.003 and +0.010 absolute, respectively. Overall, these results demonstrate the advantages of native 3D modeling and multimodal alignment for representation learning in single-cell microscopy.

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

Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer for Spacecraft 6D Pose Estimation

Vision sensors provide a lightweight solution for spacecraft proximity operations, but monocular spacecraft 6D pose estimation remains difficult under illumination variation, specular reflection, shadowing, weak texture, and background interference. These factors make local visual evidence spatially unreliable and can destabilize pose regression. This article proposes a Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer (PAID-ViT) for robust spacecraft pose estimation.The proposed model separates pose-relevant structure tokens from illumination-sensitive appearance tokens, estimates patch reliability before pose aggregation, and uses foreground mask supervision to preserve silhouette cues. A parameter-free geometric recovery module converts normalized crop coordinates, log-depth, and a continuous 6D rotation representation into camera-frame rotation and translation. Experiments on SPEED+ V2, the SPEED+ validation/lightbox/sunlamp evaluation configuration used in this study, suggest that PAID-ViT reduces translation error and improves robustness in the challenging sunlamp domain, while ablation studies support the complementary roles of illumination disentanglement, reliability-aware token aggregation, mask supervision, and training-side regularization.

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

Speeding up the annotation process in semantic segmentation industrial applications

arXiv:2606.19934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current machine learning models commonly require large and well-annotated datasets. However, the annotation process often becomes a bottleneck, with increased complexity leading to higher chances of human errors. Within this context, our goal in this paper is to leverage unsupervised algorithms to improve data annotation efficiency for complex semantic segmentation problems in industrial materials science. Previous research has quantified labeling time and others explored unsupervised methods. However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to quantify how much unsupervised algorithms accelerate the labeling process. We aim to validate the extent to which this laborious process can be accelerated, focusing on semantic segmentation tasks that involve annotating each pixel of high-resolution images, such as the microstructure characterization challenge in materials science. Specifically, we demonstrate that by using unsupervised computer vision algorithms, the time required for the labeling process can be reduced from 170 hours to 37 hours, achieving an approximate reduction of 78\%. The dataset we work with includes large images of dimensions 1280x959 and 960x703, which further increases the complexity of the annotation task. Despite these challenges, we create and share the largest public steel microstructure segmentation dataset to date, available under MIT License with permanent DOI, contributing a fully annotated, high-resolution dataset to the field. Additionally, this is the first work to compare the labeling time from scratch (a common approach in previous studies) to the labeling time when using these unsupervised algorithms as a pre-annotation step. Furthermore, we provide a Deep Learning model trained on this dataset, validated by field experts, and deployed in an industrial setting, serving as an initial benchmark for this public dataset.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Conflict-Aware Retriever Editing for Knowledge Injection Attacks on LLM-Based RAG Systems

arXiv:2606.18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Injecting malicious knowledge into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can manipulate retrieved evidence and mislead downstream generation, posing a serious security threat for AI applications. Existing RAG injection attacks mainly rely on manipulating external knowledge bases, such as crafting malicious corpus. However, the synthetic text crafted by such data-centric methods could be detectable, leading to the failure of attacks. Beyond corpus manipulation, open-source retrievers are increasingly exposing RAG systems to model-centric attacks. In this paper, we propose conflict-aware retriever editing, i.e., CAREATTACK, a model-centric retriever attack framework for malicious knowledge injection in RAG. Specifically, CAREATTACK consists two stages of conflict-aware retriever editing and attack-preserving anchor repair. Conflict-aware retriever editing adapts efficient closed-form parameter editing to the dense retrieval model, promoting malicious knowledge above benign competing passages and resolving potential parameter conflicts through graph-based conflict detection and parameter editing projection. Then, attack-preserving anchor repair performs lightweight calibration on the edited retriever to further eliminate the impact on non-target prompts while preserving the attack effectiveness for target prompts. We instantiate CAREATTACK on Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B and BGE-M3, and conduct evaluation on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate our method substantially promote malicious passages into the retrieved knowledge of RAG systems and can perform attacks for batches of target prompts and passages, given the access of retrieval model parameters. Since most RAG systems are built upon open-source retrieval models, this work reveals a practical attack surface in RAG systems. Codes are public accessible at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CareAttack-3F1C.

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

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

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

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Hybrid Event Frame Sensors: Modeling, Calibration, and Simulation

Hybrid event-frame sensors integrate an Event Vision Sensor (EVS) and an Active Pixel Sensor (APS) within a single chip, combining the high dynamic range and low latency of the EVS with the rich spatial intensity information from the APS. While this tight integration offers compact and temporally precise imaging, the complex circuit architecture introduces nontrivial noise patterns that remain poorly understood and unmodeled. In this work, we present the first unified statistics-based imaging noise model that jointly describes the noise behavior of APS and EVS pixels. Our formulation explicitly incorporates photon shot noise, dark current noise, fixed-pattern noise, and quantization noise, and links EVS noise to illumination level and dark current. Based on this formulation, we further develop a calibration pipeline to estimate noise parameters from real data and provide a detailed analysis of both APS and EVS noise behaviors. Finally, we propose H-ESIM, a statistically grounded simulator that generates RAW frames and events under realistic jointly calibrated noise statistics. Experiments on two hybrid sensors validate our model across multiple imaging tasks, including video frame interpolation and deblurring, demonstrating strong transfer from simulation to real data.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Modelling magnetic material properties with uncertainty-aware neural networks

arXiv:2606.11870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning is increasingly applied to accelerate the discovery of novel materials by exploring large compositional and structural design spaces. Yet, the scarcity of high-quality data and the frequent need for out-of-distribution prediction introduce substantial uncertainty, making the assessment of model reliability essential. In this work, we investigate uncertainty quantification as a means to evaluate model confidence in the context of permanent magnet research. In a first study, we benchmark classical and modern machine learning models for predicting intrinsic magnetic properties, focusing on the quality of their uncertainty estimates. We apply Gaussian negative log-likelihood loss and dropout-based Bayesian approximation as practical strategies for estimating predictive uncertainty. In a second study, we transfer these architectural features for uncertainty estimation to a more complex task: predicting coercivity from microstructural information using a graph neural network. Together, these studies demonstrate that uncertainty quantification not only enhances the trustworthiness of predictions but is also transferable across different modeling tasks.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Multi-Task Bayesian In-Context Learning

arXiv:2606.20538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bayesian predictive inference provides a principled framework for uncertainty quantification, data efficiency, and robust generalization. However, exact inference is often intractable, and scalable approximations may remain computationally expensive or require restrictive modeling assumptions that degrade predictive performance. Prior-Data Fitted and in-context models have recently emerged as an amortized alternative by learning to map datasets directly to predictive distributions, but existing approaches are tightly coupled to the support of the training prior and lack explicit mechanisms for adapting to new priors at test time, resulting in limited robustness under distribution shift. We introduce a multi-task in-context learning framework for amortized hierarchical Bayesian predictive inference that explicitly represents prior information as a prefix of in-context datasets. A transformer trained on sequences of prior and target tasks learns to adapt its predictions across families of priors. On a suite of evaluations with increasing difficulty, including out-of-meta-distribution priors and priors with high-dimensional latent structures, our method matches oracle Bayesian predictors while being orders of magnitude faster. We further demonstrate its practical relevance on a real-world spatiotemporal temperature prediction benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/martianmartina/multi-task-bayesian-icl/.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Statistical and Machine Learning Framework for Operational Threshold Detection and Deployable Dispatch Controller Development in Hydrogen Multi-Energy Systems

arXiv:2606.14601v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study presents a statistical and machine learning framework for characterizing a hydrogen-based multi-energy system (H-MES) using one year of high-resolution operational data. Statistical analysis revealed a binary operation driven by renewable surplus, with solar irradiance explaining 45.7% of rank-based variance in hydrogen production, a large effect by conventional standards. Only high-irradiance periods triggered meaningful electrolyzer engagement, while electricity demand exerted a weaker inverse suppression effect ($\epsilon^2 = 0.126$). Multiple regression confirmed electrolyzer power as the dominant linear predictor, with a synergistic solar-wind interaction. Notably, Random Forest analysis ranked wind output first in predictive importance despite its weak bivariate correlation (r = 0.167), revealing non-linear dynamics invisible to parametric methods. A sequence model exploited strong 24-hour autocorrelation (r = 0.845) for operational forecasting, while a reinforcement learning agent optimized hydrogen revenue dispatch. The core contribution is demonstrating that statistical and machine learning approaches are complementary for H-MES modeling and control.