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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Hybrid refinery process turns plant material into industrially important chemical

Authors:
Micaela Chacón↗

An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals. An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

NVMOS: Non-Verbal Vocalization Quality Assessment in Speech

Authors:
Jialong Mai↗Jinxin Ji↗Xiaofen Xing↗Wencui Liu↗Xiangmin Xu↗

arXiv:2606.15888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-verbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter, sighs, and coughs, are important acoustic cues for emotion and intent. Existing speech quality assessment methods typically focus on overall naturalness, while non-verbal TTS evaluations mainly examine whether a target NV appears with the correct type and position. However, the perceptual quality of NV events themselves remains underexplored. To address this gap, we construct an NV-MOS dataset containing outputs from multiple NV-TTS systems and naturally occurring NV samples, with ratings collected from three acoustic experts on a perceptual quality scale. We further analyze audio-capable multimodal large language models such as Gemini and find clear inconsistencies between their scores and expert ratings. These results suggest that general-purpose multimodal models cannot reliably replace human judgments for NV quality assessment. We then propose NVMOS, to our knowledge the first model that can reliably predict the perceptual quality of NV events in speech. Experimental results show that, with a local NV-event focusing module, NVMOS reaches expert-level or stronger agreement with human MOS.

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

Models That Know How Evaluations Are Designed Score Safer

Authors:
Katharina Deckenbach↗Haritz Puerto↗Jonas Geiping↗Sahar Abdelnabi↗

The validity of AI safety evaluations depends on models behaving consistently across controlled and deployment settings. Prior work has identified test-time contextual cues, such as hypothetical scenarios, as a source of verbalized evaluation awareness and subsequent behavioral shift. In this paper, we investigate a potential explanation of this phenomenon: evaluation meta-knowledge, defined as parametric knowledge about the structural traits that characterize evaluations. Similar to dataset contamination, where benchmark exposure leads to higher performance through memorization, we hypothesize that models trained on texts describing evaluation practices may implicitly learn to recognize and respond to evaluation-like contexts, for instance, through exposure to scientific articles or social media posts about AI benchmarking. To test this, we fine-tune models on synthetic documents describing evaluation traits such as verifiable structures or moral dilemmas. Evaluating this fine-tuned model on six safety benchmarks, we find that it is significantly safer than the base model and control model. This behavioral shift persists even when restricting the analysis to responses lacking explicit verbalization of evaluation awareness. Our results demonstrate that evaluation meta-knowledge may inflate safety benchmark performance, introducing a novel confounder that is independent of explicit memorization or verbalized evaluation awareness, thus, challenging to detect. These findings have important implications for the design and interpretation of AI safety evaluations. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/compass-group-tue/arxiv2026_evaluation_meta_knowledge.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Recognizing and Reconstructing a Multi-Unit Floor Plan

Authors:
Lukas Kratochvila↗Gijs de Jong↗Monique Arkesteijn↗Simon Bilik↗Tomas Zemcik↗Karel Horak↗Jan S. Rellermeyer↗

Digital twins have a major potential to form a significant part of urban management in emergency planning, as they allow more efficient designing of the escape routes, better orientation in exceptional situations, and faster rescue intervention. Nevertheless, creating the twins still remains a largely manual effort, due to a lack of 3D-representations, which are available only in limited amounts for some new buildings. Thus, in this paper we aim to synthesize 3D information from commonly available 2D architectural floor plans. We propose two novel pixel-wise segmentation methods based on the MDA-Unet and MACU-Net architectures with improved skip connections, an attention mechanism, and a training objective together with a reconstruction part of the pipeline, which vectorizes the segmented plans to create a 3D model. The proposed methods are compared with two other state-of-the-art techniques and several benchmark datasets. On the commonly used CubiCasa benchmark dataset, our methods have achieved the mean F1 score of 0.86 over five examined classes, outperforming the other pixel-wise approaches tested. We have also made our code publicly available to support research in the field.

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

Decision-Weighted Flow Matching for Contextual Stochastic Optimization

Authors:
Jize Xie↗Haomiao Wu↗Qiang Chen↗Xiu Su↗Yi Chen↗

arXiv:2606.16790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conditional generative models are increasingly used as scenario generators for stochastic optimization, but standard training objectives emphasize uniform distributional fit rather than the downstream decisions induced by generated scenarios. This creates an objective mismatch: errors in statistically common regions may have little effect on decision regret, whereas errors in decision-sensitive regions can substantially change the optimal action. We propose Decision-Weighted Flow Matching (DW-FM), a regret-aligned training framework that preserves the simplicity of standard flow matching while reweighting its velocity-regression objective using decision-sensitive endpoint information. Theoretically, we connect downstream regret to pathwise velocity mismatch through a loss-induced decision discrepancy and an adjoint transport argument, yielding an ideal regret-aligned surrogate and practical endpoint-weighted objectives with regret guarantees. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of DW-FM on three CVaR-based contextual stochastic optimization benchmarks spanning synthetic portfolio, semi-real financial, and traffic-CVaR tasks, where DW-FM improves downstream regret over standard baselines.

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

ZeSTA: Zero-Shot TTS Augmentation with Domain-Conditioned Training for Data-Efficient Personalized Speech Synthesis

Authors:
Youngwon Choi↗Jinwoo Oh↗Hwayeon Kim↗Hyeonyu Kim↗

arXiv:2603.04219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the use of zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) as a data augmentation source for low-resource personalized speech synthesis. While synthetic augmentation can provide linguistically rich and phonetically diverse speech, naively mixing large amounts of synthetic speech with limited real recordings often leads to speaker similarity degradation during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose ZeSTA, a simple domain-conditioned training framework that distinguishes real and synthetic speech via a lightweight domain embedding, combined with real-data oversampling to stabilize adaptation under extremely limited target data, without modifying the base architecture. Experiments on LibriTTS and an in-house dataset with two ZS-TTS sources demonstrate that our approach improves speaker similarity over naive synthetic augmentation while preserving intelligibility and perceptual quality. Audio samples are available on our web page.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Skills for the future software profession: beyond agentic AI!

Authors:
Sungmin Kang↗Baishakhi Ray↗Abhik Roychoudhury↗

arXiv:2606.21894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As coding agents are rapidly changing software engineering, a natural question is: what are the core skills needed by future software engineers? To identify where software engineering is headed and thus what skills will be needed, we summarize the results of two round-tables with researchers and industrial practitioners, held in 2026 in New York and Singapore. One key finding is that verification and validation is increasing in importance as agents handle implementation, as highlighted by anecdotes from the events. From our observations, we identify the skills developers need in the agentic era of development, with implications for training and educating future software engineers in coming years.

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

Bridging Mechanistic Interpretability and Prompt Engineering with Gradient Ascent for Interpretable Persona Control

Authors:
Harshvardhan Saini↗Yiming Tang↗Dianbo Liu↗

arXiv:2601.02896v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Controlling emergent behavioral personas (e.g., sycophancy, hallucination) in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for AI safety, yet remains a persistent challenge. Existing solutions face a dilemma: manual prompt engineering is intuitive but unscalable and imprecise, while automatic optimization methods are effective but operate as "black boxes" with no interpretable connection to model internals. We propose a novel framework that adapts gradient ascent to LLMs, enabling targeted prompt discovery. In specific, we propose two methods, RESGA and SAEGA, that both optimize randomly initialized prompts to achieve better aligned representation with an identified persona direction. We introduce fluent gradient ascent to control the fluency of discovered persona steering prompts. We demonstrate RESGA and SAEGA's effectiveness across Llama 3.1, Qwen 2.5, and Gemma 3 for steering three different personas, sycophancy, hallucination, and myopic reward. Crucially, on sycophancy, our automatically discovered prompts achieve significant improvement (49.90% compared with 79.24%). By grounding prompt discovery in mechanistically meaningful features, our method offers a new paradigm for controllable and interpretable behavior modification. We release our scripts for RESGA and SAEGA in this github repo: https://github.com/HarshSaini10/RESGA_SAEGA.

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

Probing Semantic Alignment, Lexical Invariance, and Syntactic Influence in LLM Metaphor Processing

Authors:
Fengying Ye↗Shanshan Wang↗Lidia S. Chao↗Derek F. Wong↗

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on metaphor detection and interpretation tasks, yet it remains unclear what such behavioral success reveals about metaphor processing. We present a diagnostic analysis that examines the limits of behavioral evidence by probing three complementary dimensions: semantic attribute alignment, lexical invariance, and syntactic sensitivity. Using geometric probing, we assess whether model-generated interpretations align with reference semantic attributes; through context-varying substitution, we analyze the stability of lexical associations between metaphorical and literal expressions; and via controlled syntactic perturbations, we examine sensitivity in metaphor detection. Our analysis reveals that LLM-generated interpretations can exhibit semantic drift relative to reference attributes; stable lexical anchors persist across contextual conditions, potentially supporting conventional metaphors while biasing novel metaphors requiring contextual integration; and detection performance is sensitive to syntactic irregularities. These findings suggest that strong behavioral performance may reflect heterogeneous underlying signals, highlighting the need for caution when interpreting metaphor benchmarks as evidence of robust, integrated semantic understanding.

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10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sub-Riemannian spectral distance

Authors:
Yuzuru Inahama↗

arXiv:2606.12804v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the ``div-grad type" sub-Laplacian with respect to Popp's volume on a compact equiregular sub-Riemannian manifold $M$. Since Popp's volume is canonically determined by the sub-Riemannian structure of $M$, the spetra of the sub-Laplacian carry geometric meanings. In this paper, we first embed $M$ into the Hilbert space of square-summable sequences using eigenfunctions and then define a spectral distance between two compact equiregular sub-Riemannian manifolds. Our result is a sub-Riemannian analogue of Berard-Besson-Gallot's classical work in the Riemannian case.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Enhancing Underwater Light Field Images via Global Geometry-aware Diffusion Process

Authors:
Yuji Lin↗Qian Zhao↗Zongsheng Yue↗Junhui Hou↗Deyu Meng↗

This work studies the challenging problem of acquiring high-quality underwater images via 4-D light field (LF) imaging. To this end, we propose GeoDiff-LF, a novel diffusion-based framework built upon SD-Turbo to enhance underwater 4-D LF imaging by leveraging its spatial-angular structure. GeoDiff-LF consists of three key adaptations: (1) a modified U-Net architecture with convolutional and attention adapters to model geometric cues, (2) a geometry-guided loss function using tensor decomposition and progressive weighting to regularize global structure, and (3) an optimized sampling strategy with noise prediction to improve efficiency. By integrating diffusion priors and LF geometry, GeoDiff-LF effectively mitigates color distortion in underwater scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods across both visual fidelity and quantitative performance, advancing the state-of-the-art in enhancing underwater imaging. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/linlos1234/GeoDiff-LF.

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

Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions

Authors:
Fleur V. J. van Tellingen↗Gautam Ranka↗Dora \v{Z}ug\v{c}i\'c↗Joyce van der Wal↗Andrea Camasta↗Livio Guerra↗Alina Karakanta↗

As MT quality increases, interest in enhanced post-editing features such as QE-derived error highlights is growing, yet evidence for their usefulness remains limited. In this work, we explore the usefulness of LLM-derived error highlights and correction suggestions based on automatic post-editing (APE). We conduct a study where professional translators (En-Nl) post-edit translations using APE error highlights and correction suggestions and compare productivity, quality and user experience to regular PE and PE with QE-derived highlights. While no condition yielded productivity or quality gains compared to regular PE, APE highlights were better received than QE-derived highlights, and correction suggestions improved overall user experience.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Phase Transitions in Attention: A Bayesian Theory of Copy Head Emergence

Authors:
Itay Lavie↗Kirsten Fischer↗Andrey Lekov↗Frederic Van Maele↗Zohar Ringel↗Moritz Helias↗

arXiv:2606.12058v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention is the key mechanism underlying in-context learning in transformers, and attention patterns have been observed empirically to emerge abruptly during training. We present a Bayesian theory of feature learning in attention; we then focus on how the copy subcircuit in the first layer of an induction head is learned by analyzing a single-layer softmax attention network trained on a copy task. We derive a closed-form posterior over the attention matrix and reduce it to a low-dimensional order parameter space. This reduction reveals a phase transition in the amount of training data, which we verify using both Bayesian sampling and standard training with Adam. We contrast our results with linear attention and find that softmax attention exhibits a first-order phase transition while in linear attention an initial second-order phase transition is followed by a smooth, continuous evolution toward the structured attention pattern (crossover). Our work provides a first-principles theoretical account of the abrupt emergence of the copy subcircuit, reminiscent of the one observed in training large language models.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Tuning without Peeking: Provable Generalization Bounds and Robust LLM Post-Training

Authors:
Ismail Labiad↗Mathurin Videau↗Matthieu Kowalski↗Marc Schoenauer↗Alessandro Leite↗Julia Kempe↗Olivier Teytaud↗

Gradient-based optimization is the workhorse of deep learning, offering efficient and scalable training via backpropagation. However, exposing gradients during training can leak sensitive information about the underlying data, raising privacy and security concerns such as susceptibility to data poisoning attacks. In contrast, black-box optimization methods, which treat the model as an opaque function, relying solely on function evaluations to guide optimization, offer a promising alternative in scenarios where data access is restricted, adversarial risks are high, or overfitting is a concern. This paper introduces BBoxER, an evolutionary black-box method for LLM post-training that induces an information bottleneck via implicit compression of the training data. Leveraging the tractability of information flow, we provide non-vacuous generalization bounds and strong theoretical guarantees for robustness to data poisoning attacks and extraction attacks, while ensuring privacy by design. In experiments with LLMs, we demonstrate empirically that black-box optimization methods-despite the scalability and computational challenges inherent to black-box approaches-are able to learn, showing how a few iterations of BBoxER improve performance, generalize well on a benchmark of reasoning datasets, and are robust to membership inference attacks. This positions BBoxER as an attractive add-on on top of gradient-based optimization, offering suitability for deployment in restricted environments while also providing non-vacuous generalization guarantees.

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

LLM-MINE: Large Language Model based Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias Phenotypes Mining from Clinical Notes

Authors:
Mingchen Shao↗Yuzhang Xie↗Carl Yang↗Jiaying Lu↗

arXiv:2603.13673v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate extraction of Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) phenotypes from electronic health records (EHR) is critical for early-stage detection and disease staging. However, this information is usually embedded in unstructured textual data rather than tabular data, making it difficult to be extracted accurately. We therefore propose LLM-MINE, a Large Language Model-based phenotype mining framework for automatic extraction of ADRD phenotypes from clinical notes. Using two expert-defined phenotype lists, we evaluate the extracted phenotypes by examining their statistical significance across cohorts and their utility for unsupervised disease staging. Chi-square analyses confirm statistically significant phenotype differences across cohorts, with memory impairment being the strongest discriminator. Few-shot prompting with the combined phenotype lists achieves the best clustering performance (ARI=0.290, NMI=0.232), substantially outperforming biomedical NER and dictionary-based baselines. Our results demonstrate that LLM-based phenotype extraction is a promising tool for discovering clinically meaningful ADRD signals from unstructured notes.

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

Hybrid Uncertainty Sensitivity Analysis Based on the HSIC for High-Dimensional Responses with Aleatory–Epistemic Separation

Authors:
Shijie Zhong↗Jiangfeng Fu↗Pengfei Wei↗

arXiv:2606.14053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantifying the influence of hybrid aleatory and epistemic uncertainties on high-dimensional system responses remains a major challenge in global sensitivity analysis (GSA). Existing Hilbert–Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC)-based approaches are primarily restricted to single-output settings and lack a rigorous decomposition of heterogeneous uncertainty sources and their interactions. To address this limitation, a novel double-space tensor-product RKHS framework is proposed for sensitivity analysis under hybrid uncertainty. By constructing factorized kernels over both the latent input space and the multidimensional output space, a concurrent double Möbius inversion is derived to orthogonally decompose the global dependence measure into pure aleatory effects, pure epistemic effects, and their interaction contributions. The resulting dimension-wise sensitivity indices preserve the uncertainty attribution structure across all output dimensions. To satisfy the independence assumptions required by the decomposition, an auxiliary-variable representation based on the inverse probability integral transform is introduced, enabling the treatment of hierarchical uncertainties and Copula-induced correlations within a unified latent space. A fully vectorized single-loop implementation is further developed to avoid the computational burden of nested Monte Carlo simulation. Statistical significance and estimation uncertainty are quantified through permutation testing and Bootstrap confidence intervals. Numerical studies on a modified multi-output Ishigami function and an aerodynamic pressure-field problem demonstrate the accuracy, scalability, and practical applicability of the proposed framework.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

RASST: Retrieval-Augmented Simultaneous Speech Translation

Authors:
Jiaxuan Luo↗Siqi Ouyang↗Jiaxing Xu↗Lei Li↗

Simultaneous speech translation produces target text incrementally from partial speech input. Recent speech large language models have markedly improved SST quality but still struggle with rare and domain-specific terminology. Retrieval augmentation has helped in automatic speech recognition and neural machine translation, but extending it to SST is non-trivial: retrieval must be fast and accurate under partial speech, and the model must decide whether and when to apply retrieved terms during incremental generation. We propose Retrieval-Augmented Simultaneous Speech Translation (RASST), which addresses both challenges. For accurate cross-modal retrieval under partial input, RASST trains a lightweight speech-text retriever that produces chunkwise terminology hints for the Speech LLM via multi-scale retrieval. To use these hints correctly, we synthesize training data that teaches the Speech LLM to decide whether and when to apply each retrieved term. Experiments on ACL 60/60 dev set and the ESO test set show that RASST improves terminology accuracy by nearly 40% and overall translation quality by up to 3 BLEU points, with negligible computational overhead.

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18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Sociodemographic and health correlates of reimbursement authorizations for cannabis for medical purposes in Canadian veterans: A cross-sectional study linking the Life After Services Studies 2019 and Health Administrative Databases

Authors:
Kendzerska↗Reyes↗Poirier↗Cull↗Murkar↗Saymeh↗Belanger↗Williams↗Shlik↗Jetly↗Robillard↗

Background Evidence on factors associated with cannabis for medical purposes (CMP) authorizations among Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) clients remains limited and inconsistent, particularly concerning mental health and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a leading indication for use. We investigated demographic, clinical and service characteristics associated with VAC authorizations for CMP reimbursement. Method We linked VAC administrative CMP program data with responses from the 2019 Life After Services Studies cross-sectional survey of Regular Force veterans released between 1998 and 2018. Multivariable logistic regressions examined associations between CMP reimbursement (yes/no) and demographic, clinical and well-being factors, with analyses stratified by PTSD status. Results Among 1,289 respondents (weighted n=33,131), 18.4% were authorized for CMP reimbursement. Younger age (

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

One Step Closer to Ground Truth: A Multi-Scale Residual-Aware Representation Learning Pipeline for Predicting Time Series Data

Authors:
Amrijit Biswas↗Mustafa Kamal↗Robin Krambroeckers↗M. M. Lutfe Elahi↗Sifat Momen↗Nabeel Mohammed↗Shafin Rahman↗

arXiv:2606.10678v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformer-based models have emerged as leading paradigms in time-series forecasting in recent years, employing self-attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies. Despite their success, these single-stage forecasting architectures exhibit persistent systematic residual biases arising from structural discrepancies, unmodeled stochastic components, or inadequate multi-scale temporal representations. This limitation persists when residuals are treated as irreducible noise, precluding adaptive correction of structured error patterns. To address this limitation, we introduce a two-stage, model-agnostic framework that explicitly decouples forecasting and residual learning into distinct stages of representation learning. A base transformer first generates the initial predictions. Subsequently, a dedicated meta-corrector dynamically models structured error patterns across multivariate channels, preserves cross-variable dependencies, and iteratively refines the residual bias of the base transformer. By formalizing this pipeline as a hypothesis space expansion, our framework addresses approximation limitations inherent in single-stage architectures, removes reliance on restrictive assumptions, and enables end-to-end learning of complex error dynamics. Evaluated on eight popular benchmark datasets using established protocols, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in standard metrics (MSE, MAE). The results demonstrate the framework's ability to mitigate systematic biases and enhance robustness to complex temporal dynamics, advancing the practical applicability of transformer-based forecasting models.

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

Chroma-gated, differentiable OKLCH interpolation: Continuous Oklab fallback for color-cast reduction

Authors:
Naoyuki Uchida↗

OKLCH – the cylindrical (lightness, chroma, hue) form of Ottosson's Oklab color space – is the interpolation space recommended by CSS Color 4 for gradients and color-mix(), and it is now broadly deployed. Its polar parameterization, however, casts color near the neutral axis in two ways: (1) an inter-hue detour between two chromatic endpoints that sweeps through an unintended hue (blue to yellow visibly passing through green), and (2) an off-line bow when one endpoint is achromatic. Existing remedies are uniformly two-valued – a threshold switch that fires only at an achromatic endpoint – so they address only (2); on chromatic pairs every one of them reduces to raw OKLCH, leaving the (1) inter-hue cast untreated. We introduce Continuous Oklab fallback (COFb), a one-parameter, differentiable chroma gate $w(C)=C^n/(C^n+\sigma^n)$ that continuously blends the OKLCH path toward the linear Oklab path as chroma falls. A single gate reduces the (1) cast that the two-valued family leaves untreated and unifies the handling of (1) and (2) without any endpoint test. We characterize a cast-hue trade-off frontier, adopt a default ($n=1$, the rational Michaelis-Menten form; $\sigma\approx0.19$ for a typical sRGB palette, from a normalization-independent cast-half criterion), and verify the gate's properties symbolically. At the default, COFb halves the inter-hue path detour (mean lateral deviation -49.5%, chroma-weighted hue excursion -35.5%). We also state the method's limits: on (2) alone the two-valued switch remains better, and like any Cartesian blend COFb does not preserve chroma. In deployment, COFb runs entirely in plain Oklab (a,b) to sRGB, so it serves as a fallback that delivers the same cast-reduced gradients where modern CSS color interpolation (color-mix(in oklch) and the like) is unavailable – older engines, image and video pipelines, or GPU shaders.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ReFoCUS: Reinforcement-guided Frame Optimization for Contextual Understanding

Authors:
Hosu Lee↗Junho Kim↗Hyunjun Kim↗Yong Man Ro↗

Recent progress in Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) has enabled effective vision-language reasoning, yet the ability to video understanding remains constrained by suboptimal frame selection strategies, albeit with the rapid development of video-specialized LMMs. Prior works attempted to solve this with static heuristics or external retrieval modules to feed frame-level information, but these approaches often fail to capture visual cues grounded to the given user queries conflating raw visual dynamics with true semantic relevance. In this paper, we introduce ReFoCUS (Reinforcement-guided Frame Optimization for Contextual UnderStanding), the first framework to integrate online policy-gradient reinforcement learning into frame-level optimization for video-LLMs. ReFoCUS aims to learn a frame selection policy, leveraging reward signals derived from reference models to capture their underlying scoring behavior over frame combinations that best support temporally grounded responses. To efficiently explore the large combinatorial frame space, we employ an autoregressive and query-conditional selection architecture that ensures contextual consistency while reducing complexity. Our policy learning removes the need for explicit frame-level supervision, as it implicitly discovers optimal and semantically consistent frame compositions. ReFoCUS consistently improves reasoning accuracy across multiple video QA benchmarks, demonstrating the advantage of aligning frame selection with model-internal utility.

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

The Effectiveness of aromatherapy and its supportive Interventions on anxiety and pain among breast cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Authors:
Estervil↗N. O↗Carmichael↗C. L↗Feyissa↗G. T↗

Introduction: Breast cancer treatments are often associated with pain and anxiety, which can hinder physical functioning and overall quality of life, even after treatment. Complementary therapies, such as aromatherapy, can be used to alleviate pain and reduce anxiety in breast cancer patients. This project aimed to synthesize current global evidence on the effectiveness of aromatherapy. Method: This systematic review followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, with a comprehensive, systematic search conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and SCOPUS for randomized controlled trials (RCTS) published from 2015 to 2025. Eligible studies included adult women breast cancer surgery patients who received aromatherapy during various periods of breast cancer. Where possible, data from the included studies were pooled using meta-analysis. GRADE approach was used to assess certainty of findings. Results: The search yielded 84 studies. Out of these, six were included in this review. On average, aromatherapy reduces pain and anxiety scores by 0.79 (standard mean difference (SMD)=-0.79, 95% CI -1.42, -0.16) and 0.53 (SMD=-0.53, 95 CI=-0.90, -0.16) units, respectively, compared to control condition [Low-quality of evidence]. The combination of aromatherapy with music reduces pain and anxiety by 1.26 (SMD= -1.26, 95 CI=-1.65, -0.87) and 1.08 (SMD = -1.08, 95 % CI: -1.45, -0.70) units respectively compared to standard care [Low-quality of evidence]. Conclusion: There is a potential role for the use of aromatherapy and music therapy, to alleviate anxiety and pain, especially for non-preoperative anxiety and pain. Further research is needed to inform the integration of aromatherapy into the management of anxiety and pain.

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

Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM): Agent-Based Finite Element Modeling of Concrete Bridge Barriers

Authors:
Quankai Wang↗Yulin Xie↗Tongfei Yang↗Minghui Cheng↗Ran Cao↗

arXiv:2606.12025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finite element (FE) modeling of safety-critical infrastructure such as bridge barriers requires high-fidelity nonlinear dynamic analysis, yet the current FE modeling process remains labor-intensive and lacks automation. This paper presents the Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM) framework, a collaborative human-agent protocol that decomposes long-sequence finite element modeling into discrete, visually verifiable checkpoints across geometry generation, boundary condition definition, and material assignment. The framework is demonstrated through a 20-case matrix of reinforced concrete bridge barriers under MASH TL-4 and TL-5 lateral loading conditions, interfacing specialized agents with two widely used commercial FE softwares, i.e., ANSYS and LS-PrePost. Experimental results show that HELM improves the baseline autonomous modeling success rate from 20% to 75%, with agent-level pass rates for geometry and boundary condition tasks approximately doubling. Error analysis reveals that spatial reasoning and algebraic logic limitations constitute the primary failure modes, underscoring the value of structured human-in-the-loop intervention for modeling automation. The complete agent design code and prompts are open-sourced and can be accessed at: https://github.com/SimAgentDev/Ansys-LSPP-AgentKit.

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

TriAdReview: Triangular Adversarial Review Architecture for Multi-Model Technical Document Generation

Authors:
Zhiqiang Zhou↗Junliang Dai↗Xu Ling↗

arXiv:2606.15074v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for technical document generation, yet single-model outputs often suffer from over-engineering, security blind spots, and incomplete coverage. We propose TriAdReview, a triangular adversarial review architecture that employs two independent reviewer models (engineering and boundary perspectives) and a triangular judging mechanism to iteratively improve a generator model's output. We evaluate TriAdReview across five benchmark tasks - architecture design, code generation, proposal review, security audit, and requirements analysis - using three configurations: single model (baseline), dual model (single review), and triple model (full system). Results across 75 experiments (n=5 per cell) show that the triple model configuration achieves a 10.1% overall improvement over the single model baseline (26.2 vs. 23.8 out of 50; p

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