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

VIA-SD: Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding

Authors:
Yuchen Xian↗Yang He↗Yunqiu Xu↗Yi Yang↗

Speculative decoding (SD) addresses the high inference costs of LLMs by having lightweight drafters generate candidates for large verifiers to validate in parallel. Existing draft-verify methods use binary decisions: accept or fully recompute. Yet we find that many rejected tokens can be verified correctly by a slim submodel derived from the full verifier via intra-model routing, instead of the full verifier. This motivates our slim-verifier to handle tokens requiring moderate verification resources, reducing expensive large-model calls. We propose Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding (VIA-SD), a multi-tier framework using a routed slim-verifier. Draft tokens are processed hierarchically: direct acceptance for high-confidence cases, slim-verifier regeneration for medium-confidence cases, and full-model verification for uncertain cases. Across four representative tasks and multiple model families, VIA-SD reduces rejection rates by 0.10-0.22 and delivers 10-20% speedups over strong SD baselines, while achieving 2.5-3x acceleration over non-drafting decoding. Moreover, VIA-SD is compatible with existing SD frameworks without modifying their training procedures. Our results suggest multi-tier SD as a general paradigm for scalable and efficient LLM inference. Project page: https://zju-xyc.github.io/VIA-SD-Project-Page/

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

Pointwise is Pointless? A Multimodal Ablation Study for Precipitation Nowcasting with Graph Neural Networks

Authors:
Oph\'elia Miralles↗M\'at\'e Mile↗Christoffer Artturi↗Thomas Nipen↗Ivar Seierstad↗

arXiv:2606.18436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse point observations are increasingly available for precipitation nowcasting, but it is unclear how much they improve dense radar-field forecasts. We partially address this question with a multimodal graph neural network nowcasting system over the Nordic radar domain. The model predicts rain rate every five minutes up to two hours ahead and is trained with different combinations of radar history, MEPS numerical weather prediction, Netatmo surface observations, MSG satellite channels, stochastic noise, and CRPS-based ensemble losses. The study is designed as an ablation of operationally relevant information sources and training objectives. We compare radar-only, NWP-informed, station-informed, satellite-informed, noise-augmented, and CRPS-based configurations using complementary diagnostics on the radar grid, at station locations, for rain onset, and through oracle, displacement, and amplitude scores. The results show that each source improves a different part of the forecast problem. MEPS stabilises radar-only extrapolation, Netatmo observations improve local station and onset diagnostics, and satellite predictors reduce some station-level biases but may activate rain too early when used deterministically. CRPS-based configurations provide the most consistent radar-grid gains, while the combined satellite and CRPS setup gives the best overall oracle/DAS score. These results do not support the conclusion that point observations are uninformative for nowcasting, but they show that local observational skill and spatially coherent radar-field skill are distinct targets. The practical implication is that sparse observations can provide useful local constraints, but their benefit for radar-like fields depends on the training loss, uncertainty representation, and how observation support is encoded in the model.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Exploring Academic Influence of Algorithms by Co-occurrence Network Based on Full-text of Academic Papers

Authors:
Yuzhuo Wang↗Chengzhi Zhang↗Min Song↗Seong Deok Kim↗Youngsoo Ko↗Juhee Lee↗

Algorithms have become central to scientific research in the era of artificial intelligence (AI). Although algorithm mentions in papers are often used to indicate popularity and influence, existing studies usually evaluate individual algorithms in isolation and pay limited attention to the collective influence formed through their interconnections. This study constructs large-scale algorithm co-occurrence networks in natural language processing (NLP) based on the full text of academic papers and investigates algorithm influence from a network perspective. Using deep learning models, we extract algorithm entities and build overall, cumulative, and annual co-occurrence networks. We analyze their structural characteristics and apply multiple centrality measures to assess the group influence of algorithms across the whole field and over time. The results show that algorithm networks display typical features of complex networks, with increasingly dense connections developing over approximately two decades. Classic, high-performing algorithms and those located at the intersections of different research periods tend to have high popularity, control, centrality, and balanced influence. When the influence of an algorithm declines, it usually loses its core network position first, followed by weaker associations with other algorithms. This study is the first large-scale analysis of algorithm co-occurrence networks. Covering more than four decades of academic publications, it provides a temporal and structural view of algorithm influence and offers a foundation for future research on networks linking algorithms, scholars, and tasks.

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04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

ANCHOR: haplotype-aware allelic and isoform inference from single-cell long-read RNA sequencing with de novo variant calling

Authors:
Fu↗Z.-C↗Zhang↗Yan↗Xu↗Yin↗Tao↗Lu↗Liang↗Wu↗Cui↗Hou↗…

Long-read RNA sequencing enables haplotype- and isoform-resolved allelic analysis of transcriptomes, yet extending this capability to single cells and distinct cell types remains computationally challenging due to sparse coverage, sequencing errors, incomplete variant information, and reference-biased transcript assignment. Here we present ANCHOR, a haplotype-aware framework for single-cell long-read RNA sequencing that performs de novo expressed-variant discovery, molecule-level haplotype assignment and isoform-resolved allelic quantification. ANCHOR combines a signed-graph variant caller, pair hidden Markov modelling and beta-binomial UMI aggregation to infer parental allele counts for genes and splice-resolved isoforms, without requiring a pre-existing phased genotype or deep learning. In human single-cell long-read RNA benchmarks, ANCHOR improved variant-calling performance over tested long-read RNA callers at single-cell and low-to-moderate coverage, and its beta-binomial model reduced depth-driven false positives in allele-specific expression testing. Applied to newly generated single-cell long-read RNA-seq data from reciprocal mouse crosses during gastrulation, ANCHOR resolved cell-type- and isoform-specific parent-of-origin imprinting and identified an antagonistic maternally biased Sgce isoform. ANCHOR provides a general framework for allele- and isoform-resolved analysis of diploid single-cell long-read transcriptomes.

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

BRITE: A Benchmark for Reliable and Interpretable T2V Evaluation on Implausible Scenarios

Authors:
Advait Tilak↗Jiwon Choi↗Nazifa Mouli↗Wei Le↗

The rapid advancement of photorealistic Text-to-Video (T2V) generation brings in an urgent need for up-to-date evaluation methods. Existing benchmarks largely overlooked implausible scenarios and do not measure audio-visual alignment. We introduce BRITE, the first framework that unifies (1) implausible prompting, (2) fine-grained assessment of audio-visual consistency, and (3) QA-based interpretable evaluation into a comprehensive T2V benchmark. Unlike fully automated Multimodal LLM-based pipelines, which are prone to hallucination and prompt ambiguity, BRITE guarantees reliability through a rigorous human-in-the-loop protocol for benchmark creation. Evaluating five state-of-the-art models (Sora 2, Veo 3.1, Runway Gen4.5, Pixverse V5.5, and Qwen3Max), we reveal a critical performance gap: while models excel at static object composition, they exhibit significant degradation in object-action binding and audio-visual synchronization. Our framework offers the community a reliable, interpretable benchmark and evaluation framework that can detect and locate limitations in the next generation of T2V models, especially for off-manifold prompts

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Comparative Evaluation of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models for Early Prediction of Severe Acute Pancreatitis: A Multi-Model Study Using the 2012 Revised Atlanta Classification

Authors:
stern↗

**Background:** Acute pancreatitis (AP) is a common gastrointestinal emergency with a subset of patients progressing to severe acute pancreatitis (SAP), which carries substantial morbidity and mortality. Current clinical severity scores such as BISAP, APACHE II, Ranson, and the Modified CT Severity Index require upon 48 hours of observation before reliable assessment is possible, limiting early triage. Machine learning (ML) approaches using routine admission laboratory values may enable earlier, more accurate prediction. **Methods:** We evaluated 11 models spanning three architectural families classical ML (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting), feedforward deep learning (MLP, Residual MLP, Attention MLP), and recurrent deep learning (LSTM, Stacked LSTM, Bidirectional LSTM, LSTM+Attention, CNN-LSTM) on a Chinese AP cohort of 722 patients (585 severe, 137 mild) labelled according to the 2012 Revised Atlanta Classification. Performance was assessed via 5-fold stratified cross-validation using AUC-ROC, F1 score, sensitivity, specificity, and PPV, with decision thresholds optimised for maximal F1. **Results:** Random Forest achieved the highest AUC of 0.877 (F1=0.917, sensitivity=96.8%, PPV=87.1%), followed closely by Gradient Boosting (AUC=0.874, F1=0.918). Classical ML models consistently outperformed deep learning counterparts. CNN-LSTM was the best recurrent model (AUC=0.777) but remained inferior to all classical approaches. LSTM-family models produced AUC values of 0.684-0.777, reflecting the cross-sectional tabular nature of the data. **Conclusions:** Random Forest provides robust, high-sensitivity early prediction of SAP severity using routine admission data. External prospective validation is required before clinical deployment. **Keywords:** acute pancreatitis; severity prediction; machine learning; random forest; deep learning; LSTM; Revised Atlanta Classification; early triage

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07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DDI_single: Single-Sequence-Based Protein Domain Assembly

Authors:
Shengyi↗

Domains are the basic units of protein structure and function. Appropriate inter-domain organization is critical to enable cooperative execution of multiple related functions. It is thus a crucial step to determine the full-length structure of multi-domain proteins for the purpose of elucidating their functions and designing new drugs to regulate these functions. Existing structure prediction algorithms are generally better at solving the internal conformation of domains, rather than modeling the relative positions between domains. To address the challenge of accurately determining multi-domain protein conformations, we develop a single-sequence-based domain assembly algorithm called DDI_single. DDI_single directly extracts features from the amino acid sequence using the protein language model ESM-1b, and accurately predicts the interactions between residue pairs of structural domains through a novel gated cross-attention module, thus achieving the correct assembly of structural domains. With the knowledge of domain definition, DDI_single achieves more than 20% higher accuracy in the task of predicting the relative distances of residue pairs between domains than that of the single-sequence-based structure prediction algorithm trRosettaX_single. When assembling domains with known spatial conformations, DDI_single correctly assembles 74.4% of the samples in the test set (TM-score>0.5). When assembling domains with unknown spatial conformations, in cases where the internal spatial conformations of domains are correctly modeled, DDI_single correctly assembles 73.9% of the samples.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Weight-Space Geometry of Offline Reasoning Training

Authors:
Aleksandr Nikolich↗Igor Kiselev↗Vladimir Platonov↗Karina Romanova↗

arXiv:2606.23740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement-learning losses (RFT, RIFT, DFT, Offline GRPO, DPO) are widely used to distill reasoning from large teachers into smaller students, and are typically compared on downstream accuracy alone. We ask whether they are mechanistically distinct or converge to a similar weight update. Training six methods (SFT, RFT, DFT, RIFT, Offline GRPO, DPO) on identical math rollouts from a single base model (Qwen3-4B) with attention-only LoRA, we analyze the resulting deltas via cosine similarity, principal-angle subspace analysis, linear mode connectivity, and CKA. We observe: (i) SFT, RFT, and RIFT have nearly colinear weight deltas (cosine >= 0.97, top-1 principal angle ~7 deg median over 144 modules) and comparable GSM8K accuracy (87-88%, n=1319; pairwise McNemar p >= 0.15); (ii) DFT diverges further in direction than any reward-weighted method despite using the same data; (iii) Offline GRPO adds a substantial component orthogonal to the SFT direction (~67% globally, up to ~86% in late layers) while staying in the SFT loss basin; (iv) DPO sits in a near-orthogonal subspace, shows a mode-connectivity barrier, and collapses late-layer CKA to ~0.46. DPO also reaches the highest accuracy in our protocol on both GSM8K (93.5%, McNemar p < 10^-9 vs. each other method) and AIME26 (30.0% vs. 3.3-10.0%); its training uses a 10x smaller learning rate than the others (the standard convention), so the update-norm and accuracy gaps reflect loss-function and optimizer choices jointly, and a learning-rate-matched DPO comparison is left for future work.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Clusters are All You Need: Pre-Training the Tsetlin Machine with Semantic Clusters from Language Models for Interpretability

Authors:
Jiechao Gao↗Rohan Kumar Yadav↗Yuangang Li↗Yuandong Pan↗Jie Wang↗Ying Liu↗Michael Lepech↗

Pre-trained language models such as BERT achieve strong text classification performance but lack transparency, limiting their use in high-stakes settings. The Tsetlin Machine (TM) offers fully interpretable, clause-based reasoning but captures little semantic information, and prior attempts to bridge the two rely on static word embeddings that miss contextual meaning. We propose a semantic pre-training framework that transfers knowledge from a pre-trained language model into a TM without using embeddings. Text samples are grouped into semantically coherent clusters with K-means or Top2Vec, and the resulting cluster-sample pairs pre-train a non-negated TM with enhanced Type I feedback. The TM thereby learns interpretable semantic keywords that are fine-tuned on downstream tasks. Across five datasets, our method substantially outperforms vanilla and embedding-based TMs and reaches performance competitive with BERT while remaining interpretable.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Complete entanglement detection using polynomial invariants

Authors:
Thomas C. Fraser↗Vjosa Blakaj↗Roberto Rubboli↗Felix Huber↗Marco Fanizza↗

arXiv:2606.16712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing methods for deciding whether a bipartite quantum state is separable or entangled typically fall into one of two categories: they are either complete but require access to an explicit density matrix followed by numerical optimization, or they can be evaluated directly by measuring the quantum system but are incomplete, in the sense that they cannot detect all forms of entanglement. In this work, we overcome both limitations in a unified framework. First, we bypass numerical optimization by deriving separability criteria in the form of universal bounds on tensor powers of separable states. We prove that these bounds are complete: every entangled state violates them for sufficiently large tensor powers. Second, we explicitly construct a corresponding complete family of nonlinear entanglement witnesses, which can detect all forms of entanglement without requiring an explicit density matrix. The witnesses we construct are moreover basis-independent, in the sense that they are invariant under conjugation by local unitaries. Altogether, our results expand the toolbox for entanglement detection in arbitrary local dimensions in a manifestly invariant way.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

BrainWorld: A Structural-Prior-Conditioned Generative Model for Whole-Brain 4D fMRI Dynamics

Authors:
Junfeng Xia↗Wenhao Ye↗Junxiang Zhang↗Xuanye Pan↗Mo Wang↗Quanying Liu↗

Whole-brain 4D fMRI generation is valuable for modeling functional brain dynamics, yet existing fMRI foundation models mainly target representation learning and downstream prediction rather than conditional predictive generation. We introduce BrainWorld, a structural-prior-conditioned generative model for whole-brain 4D fMRI dynamics. BrainWorld uses sMRI as subject-level anatomical context to guide future fMRI generation, integrating structural information into the denoising process rather than treating it as a parallel modality. Evaluated on 22 datasets spanning diverse cohorts and brain states, BrainWorld generates stable 4D fMRI trajectories up to 400 frames, improves downstream performance through generated-example augmentation, and learns transferable multimodal representations that outperform baselines. Together, these results establish BrainWorld as a condition-aware generative framework for long-horizon brain dynamics modeling and multimodal representation learning.

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

Mask Proposal Voting Based on Geodesic Framework for Robust Image Segmentation

Authors:
Li Liu↗Mingzhu Wang↗Zhenjiang Li↗Da Chen↗Laurent D. Cohen↗

Despite great advances, finding accurate segmentation remains a challenging task, especially in scenarios with cluttered backgrounds, complex intensity variations and topology appearance. Minimal path models have exhibited their strong ability in addressing image segmentation tasks. However, the performance of minimal paths-based segmentation approaches is heavily influenced by model initialization, hence limiting their application scope in practice. In this work, we propose a novel mask proposal voting framework that overcomes the major drawback of classical approaches, allowing robust segmentation even in complicated scenarios. Firstly, we introduce an efficient method for constructing adaptive domain cuts as a constraint for initializing the region-based min-cut evolution, by which diverse and reliable mask proposal candidates can be generated, substantially increasing the possibility of accurately covering the objective region by these proposals. Secondly, we propose a new mask voting scheme to build a voting score map encoding the final segmentation information. In contrast to classical path voting methods, our model allows incorporating priors to assign different importance to each individual mask. As a consequence, the proposed segmentation model is capable of accurately delineating object boundaries under complex scenarios, and is insensitive to initialization. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art minimal path-based approaches in both accuracy and robustness.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

SED:Lightweight Saliency prediction for Event-based data via Distillation

Authors:
Romaric Mazna↗Jean Martinet↗Michele Magno↗

Event-based saliency prediction has gained attention recently, as combining event cameras with saliency estimation can act as an upstream stage that naturally improves the efficiency of downstream eventbased perception at the edge. However, current approaches are either neuromorphic, underperforming on event-based saliency benchmarks, or too heavy for resource-constrained edge applications due to their reliance on transformers or 3D convolutions. Drawing inspiration from efficient convolutional modules, SED and aiming to exploit the temporal information in event data, we propose a lightweight network, trained through knowledge distillation, built on a Depthwise Spatio-Temporal Block (DSTconv) – a factorization of the 3D depthwise separable convolution. Relative to its teacher, our model reduces the model size from 180 MB to 0.32 MB (562x) and the parameter count from 45M to 81k (554x), while matching or outperforming it on the N-DHF1K and N-UCF Sports datasets. Moreover, it generalizes strongly beyond its training distribution, transferring from synthetic to real event data where a model trained from scratch fails.

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

Cognitive Debt: AI as Intellectual Leverage and the Dynamics of Systemic Fragility

Authors:
Shuchen Meng↗

arXiv:2606.15078v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a formal theory of cognitive debt: the stock of unverified reasoning obligations that accumulates when individuals use AI as a substitute rather than a complement for first-principles cognition. The model features two state variables per agent, cognitive capital and cognitive debt, and a multiplicative production technology in which cognitive capital functions as collateral that determines the return to AI adoption. We establish six propositions. Rational agents incur positive cognitive debt because the costs are deferred, partially external, and masked by short-run productivity gains. Tranquil periods lower subjective risk assessments, raise AI substitution intensity, and compound leverage, generating a cognitive Minsky moment in which subjective risk falls while true systemic fragility rises. Expected crisis losses are convex in aggregate leverage. Post-crisis, output-target pressure can produce a false-correction loop in which agents patch AI failures with more AI. The decentralised equilibrium over-adopts substitutive AI relative to the social optimum because of systemic risk, cognitive public goods, and arms-race externalities. In a two-type heterogeneous-agent economy, high-cognitive-capital agents adopt AI more intensively and may eventually erode their unaided cognitive capital below that of initially lower-skilled agents.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset: A Historical Document Dataset for Offline Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition with CRNN-Based Baseline Evaluation

Authors:
Ramza Basharat↗Muhammad Usman Ali↗

Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is inherently a challenging task, and its complexity is further increased when dealing with cursive scripts. Although significant efforts have been made on various cursive scripts, research regarding Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition (UHTR) has been relatively limited. This lag of research is primarily due to the unique challenges posed by its script, and the scarcity and unavailability of benchmark datasets. Therefore, to advance research in UHTR, this study presents a specialized real dataset called the Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset (UKHD). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first offline Urdu handwritten text lines dataset specifically curated from the materials written by Katibs in historical times. It encompasses a diverse range of flat nib writing variations in the Nastalique calligraphic style. Additionally, the effectiveness of different CRNN-based hybrid models has been evaluated to identify the optimal architecture for Urdu Katib Handwriting Recognition (UKHR). Among the analyzed models, the CNN-BGRU-CTC model showed more robust performance, with low Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER). This research work aims to support and encourage the research community in developing a robust recognition system for preserving Urdu handwritten literature.

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

A Prototypical Signature Approach for Writer-Independent Offline Signature Verification

Authors:
Kecia G. de Moura↗Robert Sabourin↗Rafael M. O. Cruz↗

Offline handwritten signature verification aims to distinguish genuine from forged signatures using static images. Since real forgeries are rarely available, negative samples are usually randomly drawn from genuine signatures of other users to create training data. However, this random selection often lacks diversity, increases redundancy, and escalates computational cost, leading to inefficient training. We propose a data-driven strategy to generate diverse, informative negative samples using prototypical signatures, which are compact, non-identifiable summaries of genuine signature features. Based on the experiments results, we conclude that (i) prototypical signatures yield more informative negative samples, improving the detection of skilled forgeries; (ii) the proposed approach is backbone-agnostic, showing robustness across architectures; and (iii) when combined with a primal-form linear SVM, it serves as an alternative to RBF-based models while significantly improving scalability and computational efficiency. Implementation of the method is available at https://github.com/kdmoura/proto_hsv.

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17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A vast whale necropolis has been found

Authors:
Stephen J. Godfrey↗

In the Indian Ocean, a deep-sea area roughly 1,200 kilometres long and 7 kilometres deep was found to harbour an ecological landmark site of whale remains. In the Indian Ocean, a deep-sea area roughly 1,200 kilometres long and 7 kilometres deep was found to harbour an ecological landmark site of whale remains.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

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

Authors:
Michelle Espranita Liman↗\"Ozg\"un Turgut↗Alexander M\"uller↗Eimo Martens↗Daniel Rueckert↗Philip M\"uller↗

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

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19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CoMNeT: A MedNeXt-CorrDiff Framework for Volumetric Brain Tumor Segmentation

Authors:
Michael L. Evans↗MD Fayaz Bin Hossen↗MD Shibly Sadique↗Walia Farzana↗Khan M. Iftekharuddin↗

Accurate brain tumor segmentation from multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is critical for treatment planning, response assessment, and quantitative neuro-oncology research. However, automated segmentation remains a difficult task in computer vision because of variation in tumor appearance and MRI protocols across patient scans. Moreover, clinically important regions such as enhancing tumor (ET) and tumor core (TC) are often small relative to the full brain volume, furthering increasing the difficulty of achieving high voxel-level precision. In this paper, we show that combining a modern 3D convolutional segmentation model with corrective diffusion-based refinement and ensembling improves volumetric glioma segmentation on the UTSW-Glioma dataset. We propose CoMNeT, a MedNeXt-CorrDiff framework that uses four MRI modalities as input and predicts ET, TC, and whole tumor (WT) regions for automated brain tumor segmentation. MedNeXt is used as the primary segmentation model with Global Response Normalization for feature learning, while CorrDiff is trained as a postprocessing residual refinement method to correct errors in the probability maps before final thresholding. Using five-fold cross-validation, CoMNeT achieved the highest Dice score for most tumor regions, with ET, TC, WT, and average Dice scores of 0.7543 +/- 0.0261, 0.6806 +/- 0.0166, 0.9049 +/- 0.0128, and 0.7798 +/- 0.0184, respectively. CoMNeT outperformed two selected baseline models: SegResNet (0.7555 +/- 0.0190 average Dice) and standalone MedNeXt (0.7697 +/- 0.0154 average Dice). Our findings support the use of corrective diffusion and fold-level probability ensembling as practical additions to existing state-of-the-art 3D convolutional models for automated glioma segmentation.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DifFRACT: Diffusion Feature Reconstruction and Attribution for Circuit Tracing

Authors:
Artyom Mazur↗Nina Konovalova↗Aibek Alanov↗

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits. While transcoder-based circuit tracing has recently enabled detailed causal analyses of large language models, multimodal diffusion transformers for image generation remain comparatively opaque. We still lack tools for understanding how semantic information propagates across denoising steps and how text and image representations interact within double-stream MM-DiT architectures. Existing methods provide only partial insight: attention maps expose a limited view of token interactions, while sparse autoencoders can discover interpretable features but do not directly reveal how these features are transformed and composed through nonlinear MLP layers. In this work, we extend transcoder-based circuit tracing to multimodal diffusion transformers. We train timestep-conditioned transcoders that faithfully approximate the input-output behavior of MLP sublayers in FLUX.1[schnell]. By replacing MLPs with transcoders and linearizing the remaining computation, we obtain exact feature-to-feature attribution and recover compact, interpretable circuits. Empirically, our transcoders match or slightly outperform sparse autoencoders on the sparsity-faithfulness tradeoff. The resulting circuits reveal mechanisms underlying attribute binding and cross-stream semantic propagation, and provide causal explanations for systematic generation errors. Moreover, circuit-guided interventions are substantially more precise and effective than standard SAE-based steering. Our results demonstrate that transcoder-based circuit analysis is feasible for state-of-the-art diffusion transformers and provides a powerful framework for understanding and controlling multimodal generative models. The code is available at https://github.com/Artalmaz31/DifFRACT

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SL-S4Wave: Self-Supervised Learning of Physiological Waveforms with Structured State Space Models

Authors:
Feng Wu↗Harsh Deep↗Eric Lehman↗Sanyam Kapoor↗Guoshuai Zhao↗Rahul Krishnan↗Gari Clifford↗Li-wei H Lehman↗

arXiv:2606.19888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling long-sequence medical time series data, such as electrocardiograms (ECG), poses significant challenges due to high sampling rates, multichannel signal complexity, inherent noise, and limited labeled data. While recent self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, based on various encoder architectures such as convolutional neural networks, have been proposed to learn representations from unlabeled data, they often fall short in capturing long-range dependencies and noise-invariant features. Structured state space models (S4) excel at long-sequence modeling, but existing S4 architectures fail to capture the unique characteristics of multichannel physiological waveforms. In this work, we propose SL-S4Wave, a self-supervised learning framework that combines contrastive learning with a tailored encoder built on structured state space models. The encoder incorporates multi-layer global convolution using multiscale subkernels, enabling the capture of both fine-grained local patterns and long-range temporal dependencies in noisy, high-resolution multichannel waveforms. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that SL-S4Wave (1) consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised baselines in a challenging arrhythmia detection task, (2) achieves high performance with significantly fewer labeled examples, showcasing strong label efficiency, and (3) maintains robust performance on long waveform segments, highlighting its capacity to model complex temporal dynamics in long sequences that most existing approaches fail to efficiently model, and (4) transfers effectively to unseen arrhythmia types, underscoring its robust cross-domain generalization. We additionally evaluate SL-S4Wave on multiple EEG tasks, achieving superior performance over strong baselines, demonstrating generalizability of our approach beyond cardiac waveforms.

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

REALM: A Unified Red-Teaming Benchmark for Physical-World VLMs

Authors:
Yifei Zhao↗Qian Lou↗Mengxin Zheng↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as perception-reasoning backbones for embodied intelligence in safety-critical physical systems, where perception or reasoning errors can lead to unsafe decisions or actions. Although many red-teaming methods have been developed to probe VLM vulnerabilities, their evaluation remains fragmented across datasets, metrics, and threat models, making direct comparison difficult and obscuring whether observed differences arise from stronger attacks, more vulnerable models, or incompatible evaluation settings. Existing chatbot-centric red-teaming benchmarks mainly standardize jailbreak and content-safety evaluation, but they do not systematically capture physically grounded functional failures or cover red-teaming methods that target physical-world VLMs. This raises the key challenge of comparing diverse attack methods under a unified protocol while targeting the same scenario-specific failures. We introduce REALM, to our knowledge the first unified red-teaming benchmark for physical-world VLMs. REALM integrates 12 red-teaming methods, 3 model-agnostic defenses, and 13 VLMs under a practical black-box threat model with shared datasets and metrics. To align adversarial objectives across attack families, REALM introduces an agentic target-generation pipeline that constructs shared, scenario-specific, and physically grounded attack objectives for each scene, enabling fair comparison of diverse red-teaming methods under aligned adversarial goals. Our evaluation shows that text and typographic injection attacks induce the most failures, multimodal co-optimization yields the strongest visual-perturbation transfer, single-pass attacks approach iterative methods at much lower cost, and model scale alone does not confer adversarial robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/UCF-ML-Research/REALM.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Pruning via Causal Attribution Preserves Reasoning Performance in Large Language Models

Authors:
Amogh Sheth↗Biruk Assefa↗Yi Wen Huang↗Andrew Lin↗Yuhao Ge↗

Large language models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning but incur substantial inference cost. We introduce Causal Attribution Pruning (CAP), a training-free method that identifies critical attention heads by measuring their causal impact on reasoning tasks and uses these head-level scores to guide fine-grained weight pruning. For each attention head, CAP estimates the expected performance degradation when the head is masked during forward passes on a small calibration set of reasoning problems. These causal scores are then converted into weight-level importance values for the corresponding projection matrices. Unlike magnitude-only or activation-based criteria, CAP's interventional measurement directly captures each head's functional contribution, yielding relative accuracy gains of up to 61% over Wanda on ARC-Challenge at 20% sparsity. We evaluate CAP on GSM8K, StrategyQA, and ARC-Challenge using Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct at 10%, 20%, and 50% sparsity. At moderate sparsity (10-20%), CAP improves over Wanda in most model-benchmark configurations. with especially large gains on ARC-Challenge for Llama-3. Our results suggest that attention-head-level causal attribution can better preserve reasoning performance on downstream benchmarks than correlational pruning criteria at equivalent sparsity, while remaining limited by coarse MLP attribution at 50% sparsity.

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

Cycle-Consistent Neural Explanation of Formal Verification Certificates

Authors:
Andoni Rodriguez↗Alberto Pozanco↗Daniel Borrajo↗

arXiv:2606.24414v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal verification produces machine-checkable certificates that attest to the satisfaction or violation of temporal properties, yet these certificates remain opaque to non-specialist stakeholders. We propose a cycle-consistent neural architecture that generates faithful natural language explanations of verification certificates. A forward network NN1 maps certificates to explanations, and an inverse network NN2 reconstructs certificates from explanations; a symbolic verifier closes the loop, providing a differentiable faithfulness proxy. A pointer-generator mechanism ensures lexical grounding by copying state names directly from the certificate. We evaluate on 420 test certificates spanning six verification methods (bounded proof, k-induction, inductive invariant, lasso, reachability, witness pair) in both YES and NO verdict variants, drawn from a financial compliance domain with 207 named states. Our trained architecture, combined with a hybrid inference-time routing strategy, achieves 90.0% cycle-verified soundness, surpassing a multi- LLM few-shot baseline (76.1% for the best of 16 LLM combinations across four frontier models) by 13.9 percentage points. The neural model wins on 10 of 12 verdict/kind categories, with three categories reaching 100% soundness. The architecture offers 860x faster inference (185 ms vs. 160 s per certificate for the full multi-LLM baseline), offline operation, deterministic outputs, and zero per-inference cost. These results demonstrate that trained specialization outperforms general-purpose LLM prompting for structured certificate explanation, while eliminating the deployment constraints of cloud-based inference.

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

Forced Deferral: Manipulating Routing Decisions in Multimodal LLM Cascades

Authors:
Zhongye Liu↗Yaopei Zeng↗Yurui Chang↗Lu Lin↗

arXiv:2606.15308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong visual reasoning abilities, serving a large model for every query is computationally expensive. MLLM cascades mitigate this cost by first querying a weak but cheaper model and deferring to a strong model when the weak model's output is unconfident. However, since the weak model's confidence directly controls compute allocation, these systems expose a new attack surface: an adversary can manipulate confidence so that their queries are consistently deferred to the strong model. Motivated by this vulnerability, we introduce the Forced Deferral Attack (FDA), an adversarial image attack that lowers the weak model's confidence and causes cascades to route queries to the strong model. FDA learns a universal border trigger by optimizing a temperature-flattened objective. This objective pushes the weak model's token distribution on triggered inputs toward less concentrated targets constructed from its clean responses. Across datasets, model families, and deferral metrics, FDA consistently increases strong-model routing while outperforming image-perturbation and prompt-injection baselines. These results show that MLLM cascades are vulnerable to attacks that manipulate compute allocation, forcing unintended strong-model usage without directly targeting answer correctness.

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