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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Vines-DB: An RGB image dataset for multi-species ornamental vine segmentation

The Vines-DB dataset contains 1,218 original high-resolution RGB images of seven ornamental vine species collected under field conditions at the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station's Greenville Research Farm in Logan, Utah, USA. The dataset was generated from 168 individual vine plants that were transplanted in 2022 and photographed repeatedly across multiple months during the 2023 and 2024 growing seasons (July-October). Images were captured with an iPhone 16 Pro equipped with a 48 MP camera between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM under daylight. Vines were grown on 1.2m x 2.4m trellises and photographed from a distance of 1m against black or white Styrofoam backdrops to improve contrast and reduce background noise. The dataset includes Akebia quinata, Campsis radicans, Hydrangea anomala petiolaris, Lonicera x heckrottii, Campsis x tagliabuana 'Madame Galen', Parthenocissus quinquefolia, and Wisteria floribunda. All original images were manually annotated in Roboflow by trained annotators to produce polygon-based instance segmentation masks for eight classes, including seven species and background. After preprocessing and data augmentation, the working dataset was expanded to 2,307 images for model development and evaluation. The augmented dataset was divided into 2,019 training images, 192 validation images, and 96 test images using stratified sampling to maintain balanced representation. Vines-DB supports the development and evaluation of deep learning models for multi-class instance segmentation in precision horticulture and urban ecology. The dataset enables applications such as automated canopy cover estimation, species identification, and scalable field phenotyping. In addition, repeated monthly imaging of the plants captures temporal variation in canopy development and plant appearance, increasing the dataset's utility for segmentation benchmarking under realistic field conditions.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Nickel-Driven Dynamics of Urease in Sporosarcina pasteurii: Integrated Computational and Experimental Insights

Urease is a nickel-dependent enzyme that plays an important role in urea hydrolysis and in a process named as microbial-induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP), which is widely used in sustainable environmental biotechnology. Despite its ecological importance, urease powers Biogrout (biocementation), a promising green technology for soil stabilization and infrastructure repair. Yet, the relationship between nickel availability, enzyme activation, and bacterial fitness remains poorly understood. In this study, we reveal a striking dual effect of nickel on Sporosarcina pasteurii: while high Ni2+ concentrations strongly inhibit growth (IC50 {approx} 637.7 {micro}M), they simultaneously boost specific urease activity up to six-fold. This uncoupling between biomass and enzymatic efficiency highlights a previously overlooked adaptive strategy under metal stress. Using structural bioinformatics and molecular docking, we show that Ure1–the catalytic subunit–exhibits the strongest nickel affinity (-4.3 kcal{middle dot}mol-1), supported by highly conserved active-site residues, whereas accessory proteins UreE and UreG display moderate and weak binding, consistent with their roles in metal delivery and GTP-dependent maturation. In addition, microscopic observations confirmed that calcium carbonate precipitation was most pronounced at intermediate nickel concentrations (approximately 400-1000 {micro}M), whereas higher concentrations ([≥]1000-1300 {micro}M) led to reduced mineral formation due to loss viable cells. Taken together, these results indicates that nickel availability controls both urease activation and bacterial fitness, and that an optimal balance is required to maximize biomenerilization efficiency in environmental applications, particularly in biocementation technology.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Influence-solvability: a systematic theory of $(1+1)D$ solvability and its application to brickwork circuits

arXiv:2606.12538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: `Solvable' circuits, such as dual unitaries and its generalisations, have arisen as paradigmatic examples of tractable chaotic non-equilibrium dynamics, both in classical and quantum systems. However, while increasingly more complicated sufficient conditions have been proposed, a systematic theory classifying and understanding general features of solvable circuits is missing. We develop such a theory by introducing influence-solvable circuits, a class of $(1+1)D$ circuits whose influence matrix, which represents the `bath' generated by its own evolution, is given by a uniform MPS with finite bond-dimension $\chi$. This property allows for efficient computation of subsystem dynamics and essentially contains all known examples of solvable circuits. We derive a set of necessary and sufficient local conditions by using a version of the fundamental theorem of MPS for open boundary conditions. Next we apply our theory to brickwork circuits with $\chi=1$ influence-solvability and perform a systematic classification of classical brickwork circuits with local dimension up to $d=3$ and quantum brickwork circuits with $d=2$. Our search reveals new solvable circuits that are not captured by known solvability conditions.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Proactive Conversational Assistant for a Procedural Manual Task based on Audio and IMU

Real-time conversational assistants for procedural manual tasks often depend on video input, which can be computationally expensive and compromise user privacy. For the first time, we propose a real-time conversational assistant that provides comprehensive guidance for procedural manual tasks using only lightweight privacy-preserving modalities such as audio and IMU inputs from a user's wearable device to understand the context. Using a furniture assembly task and a cooking task, we show how this assistant proactively communicates step-by-step instructions to a user performing a procedural task, and answers user questions. We illustrate the data generation method and the system design to achieve such an assistant. On observing that an off-the-shelf language model is a talkative assistant but is not always able to answer questions correctly, we demonstrate how finetuning the model improves its ability to limit unnecessary dialogues with a 50% increase in the precision, while also improving its ability to answer questions correctly, measured by a 150% increase in the recall of answers. We further describe how such an assistant is implemented on an edge device with no dependence on the cloud.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Tackling GNARLy Problems: Graph Neural Algorithmic Reasoning Reimagined through Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2509.18930v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural algorithmic reasoning (NAR) is a paradigm that trains neural networks to execute classic algorithms by supervised learning. Despite its successes, important limitations remain: inability to construct valid solutions without post-processing and to reason about multiple correct ones, poor performance on combinatorial NP-hard problems, and inapplicability to problems for which strong algorithms are not yet known. To address these limitations, we reframe the problem of learning algorithm trajectories as a Markov decision process, which imposes structure on the solution construction procedure and unlocks the powerful tools of imitation and reinforcement learning (RL). We propose the GNARL framework, encompassing the methodology to translate problem formulations from NAR to RL and a learning architecture suitable for a wide range of graph-based problems. We achieve very high graph accuracy results on several CLRS-30 problems, performance matching or exceeding much narrower NAR approaches for NP-hard problems and, remarkably, applicability even when lacking an expert algorithm.

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

Neuron Level Analysis of Large Language Model in Legal Domain Reasoning

We presented a neuron-level analysis of legal-domain reasoning in LLMs, comparing it with other applied domain tasks across seven open-weight models. Using neuron attribution scores to rank and suppress influential neurons, we confirmed that suppressing the identified neurons collapses accuracy on the target task, whereas suppressing the same number of random neurons does not. We further found a small subset of neurons influential across all seven tasks; once these are removed, suppressing the remaining neurons degrades only the task they were identified from, revealing genuinely task-specific neurons in every model studied. Within the legal domain, the three benchmarks exhibit relatively high neuron overlap and tend to be affected jointly, suggesting of legal components neurons that span jurisdictions. The distribution of identified neurons in our experiments suggests that the hypothesis that influential neurons are concentrated in middle MLP layers may depend on the input format and content, rather than being a universal phenomenon.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Dual-Constrained Diffusion Image Compression for Operational Rate-Distortion-Perception Optimization

The rate-distortion-perception (RDP) trade-off extends classical rate–distortion theory by imposing a distributional constraint on reconstructions, providing a unified framework for neural image compression that jointly governs fidelity and perceptual realism. While prior work achieves near-optimal rate–perception trade-offs, practical frameworks explicitly realizing the full RDP surface remain scarce, primarily due to the difficulty of introducing common randomness at the decoder. We propose DCIC (Dual-Constrained Diffusion Image Compression), which integrates a learned codec with a diffusion-based decoder governed by joint distortion and idempotence constraints. The distortion constraint bounds reconstruction fidelity relative to the base codec output; the idempotence constraint – requiring that re-encoding the restored image recovers the base codec reconstruction – serves as a tractable surrogate for the distributional perception requirement. Together, they steer the reverse denoising process via iterative optimization with consistent noise injection, realizing common randomness without additional rate overhead. At fixed rate, dual attenuation factors $(K_D, K_P)$ jointly navigate the Pareto frontier of the distortion-perception plane, enabling continuously adjustable fidelity-realism trade-offs from a single bitstream. DCIC$_{RD}$ ($K_P{=}0$) and DCIC$_{RP}$ ($K_D{=}0$) arise as boundary curves, with DCIC$_{RDP}$ ($K_D = K_P=1$) realizing the optimal interior operating point. Experiments on CelebA-HQ, CLIC2020, and ImageNet-1K across CNN, Transformer, and hybrid architectures confirm that DCIC$_{RDP}$ achieves superior BD-PSNR over all perceptual codecs, while DCIC$_{RP}$ matches dedicated perception-oriented methods in BD-FID, validating the practical value of full RDP surface navigation.

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

Essential Subspace Merging for Multi-Task Learning

arXiv:2606.19164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model. Its core challenge is inter-task interference among task-specific parameter updates. In this paper, we analyze the output shifts induced by task updates and observe that their energy is concentrated in a small number of principal directions. We call the subspace spanned by these directions the essential subspace. In contrast, most remaining directions carry little task-relevant energy, but their accumulation across multiple task updates can cause severe interference during merging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Essential Subspace Decomposition (ESD), which decomposes each task update according to the principal components of its activation shift. Based on ESD, we introduce Essential Subspace Merging (ESM), a training-free static merging method that orthogonalizes and fuses essential components into one compact multi-task model. We further extend ESM to ESM++, a training-free dynamic merging method that decomposes task-specific residuals into low-rank experts and selects the most relevant expert through prototype-based routing during forward inference. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that ESM and ESM++ effectively preserves task knowledge while reducing inter-task interference.

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

Bayesian Anytime Pareto Set Identification for Multi-Objective Multi-Armed Bandits

arXiv:2606.18785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying Pareto optimal solutions is critical to support multi-objective decision-making. We introduce the first anytime Multi-Objective Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm for the Pareto Set Identification problem, taking a Bayesian approach: Top-Two Pareto Front Thompson Sampling (TTPFTS). We benchmark TTPFTS against state-of-the-art fixed-budget Pareto Set Identification algorithms on synthetic environments. Next, we demonstrate its practical utility in a challenging multi-objective molecular discovery setting by efficiently exploring an ultra-large synthesis-on-demand molecular library. Furthermore, we introduce a novel uncertainty quantification metric that estimates our algorithm's confidence in the predicted Pareto set. We demonstrate that this metric effectively proxies true performance, yielding a robust methodology for monitoring learning progress in complex settings. Finally, we complement these empirical findings with a theoretical proof of the algorithm's asymptotic correctness.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Time Series Causal Discovery via Context-Conditioned and Causality-Augmented Pretraining

arXiv:2605.26759v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Causal discovery from time series is critical for many real-world applications, such as tracing the root causes of anomalies. Existing approaches typically rely on dataset-specific optimization, making it difficult to transfer their causal discovery capabilities to new time series governed by diverse causal mechanisms. In this paper, we propose PTCD, a novel Pretraining framework for Time-series Causal Discovery, which improves cross-task generalization through context-conditioned modeling and transferable causal augmentation. To model complex temporal causal dependencies, PTCD employs a dual-scale iterative attention mechanism to capture window-level causal relationships, and a Gaussian mixture with a context-level routing mechanism to handle heterogeneous exogenous distributions. To further address distribution shifts across causal graphs, PTCD adopts a pretraining paradigm on synthetic datasets that integrates intervention-based learning and a causal mixup strategy, promoting stable causal discovery and stronger generalization. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets demonstrate that PTCD excels in both causal discovery and root cause identification.

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

Corpus Augmentation for Sign Language Translation via LLM-Guided Video Stitching

Sign language translation (SLT) converts sign language video into spoken language text and holds significant promise for improving accessibility and enabling communication between signing and non-signing communities. While large weakly-aligned datasets have enabled pre-training at scale and gloss-free methods have reduced reliance on expert annotation, high-quality parallel sign video-text pairs for fine-tuning remain scarce, limiting generalisation on long-tail vocabulary and unseen constructions. We propose a corpus augmentation approach that requires no additional human annotation, external sign-language video corpora, or generative video models, relying only on the existing gloss-annotated training corpus and an LLM for sentence generation: per-gloss clips are extracted from training videos via CTC forced-alignment, novel gloss-sentence pairs are generated by a corpus-anchored LLM, and synthetic sequences are assembled through random sentence sampling and clip assignment. The resulting synthetic RGB video-text pairs are architecture-agnostic at the downstream training stage and can be consumed directly by RGB-based SLT models, or converted into pose or feature representations by pipelines that derive such inputs from video. Sincan et al. re-evaluated five recent gloss-free methods under strictly identical conditions; the largest verified gain over the GFSLT-VLP baseline was only 0.98 BLEU-4. Our augmentation, applied within the same framework, achieves +2.92 BLEU-4 without any change to architecture or training protocol. We further identify that synthetic data harms vision-language pretraining despite improving its objectives, and that optimising clip transitions for visual smoothness is counter-productive under L2-based criteria; we propose that abrupt boundaries may act as a form of implicit regularisation. Code is available at https://github.com/robizso/slt-datagen.

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

Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifiers

arXiv:2606.12507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rubrics have emerged as an alternative to RLVR in open-ended domains where a single ground-truth final answer is not available. Existing rubric-based training methods rely on an LLM verifier that scores each rollout against rubrics. This introduces substantial training-time overhead, exposes optimization to verifier-specific biases, and reduces rubric feedback to a sparse end-of-trajectory signal. We propose Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation (RGSD), a verifier-free training method in which the base policy, conditioned on the rubric, serves as the teacher for the unconditioned student. RGSD distills the rubric-conditioned teacher distribution into the student token-by-token, replacing sparse trajectory-level rewards with dense per-token learning signals and removing the LLM judge from the training loop entirely. Across Qwen-2.5 (3B, 7B) and Qwen3-Thinking (4B, 8B) models on medical and science domains, RGSD achieves rubric satisfaction comparable to judge-based GRPO while using one on-policy rollout per prompt and no training-time verifier calls. Ablations show that raw rubrics provide a stronger teacher enrichment signal than self-generated reference responses, while a stronger GRPO judge can outperform RGSD in some settings, positioning RGSD as a complementary verifier-free alternative when verifier cost or reliability is the bottleneck.

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

ProHiFlo: Hierarchical Flow Matching with Functional Guidance for De Novo Protein Generation

De novo protein generation has transformative potential in therapeutic design, enzyme engineering, and synthetic biology. While diffusion-based and flow matching approaches have achieved progress, they typically operate at single resolution and lack mechanisms for incorporating functional constraints. We introduce ProHiFlo, a hierarchical flow matching framework with three innovations: (1) coarse-to-fine generation that models backbone geometry before refining to all-atom coordinates, reducing computational cost while maintaining accuracy; (2) functional guidance leveraging pretrained predictors to steer generation toward desired properties without retraining; (3) adaptive SE(3)-equivariant architecture for efficient multi-scale processing. Experiments on unconditional generation, motif scaffolding, and functional design demonstrate state-ofthe-art performance while requiring 4 fewer sampling steps. On enzyme active site scaffolding, ProHiFlo achieves 58.9% success rate compared to 41.2% for RFDiffusion.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Bernstein-Schur Kernels: Random Features by Sketched Modulation and Radial Randomization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bernstein–Schur kernels are products of a finite-feature kernel (one with an explicit finite-dimensional feature map) and a completely monotone shift-invariant kernel: nonstationary kernels that fall between the shift-invariant and dot-product templates random features usually exploit, so in general neither Bochner sampling nor polynomial sketching applies to the full kernel directly. We give one random-feature construction for the whole class that randomizes both factors: it sketches the finite modulation and randomizes the completely monotone radial factor, sampling the latter's one-dimensional Bernstein–Widder scale and then applying Gaussian random Fourier features (whose frequency is still $d$-dimensional). The feature dimension is then $Dm$, set by the sketch size $m$ and the radial-draw count $D$, free of the $O(d^2)$ size of the exact modulation feature. Keeping the modulation \emph{exact is the analyzable limit ($m\to\infty$): there we prove unbiasedness, an exact variance for the recommended flat estimator, an expected matrix-Bernstein operator-norm bound (with a matching high-probability tail) controlled by the top eigenvalues of the kernel and modulation Gram matrices together with an intrinsic dimension rather than the crude $N\max_{ij}$ entrywise route, and a deterministic relative-spectral kernel-ridge stability result. By conditioning on the sketch, the doubly-randomized estimator inherits the same intrinsic-dimension operator-norm guarantee plus a single additive sketch term, tunable by $m$ independently of $D$. The motivating instance is the biased $yat$-kernel $k_{yat,b}(w,x)=(w^\top x+b)^2/(\|w-x\|^2+\varepsilon)$, $b\ge0$, whose family span contains the inverse-multiquadric kernel by finite differences in $b$; for it the radial mixture is the IMQ spectral sampler, and one frequency per scale is variance-optimal at a fixed radial-feature budget.

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

LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models

arXiv:2604.17892v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recently, latent reasoning has been introduced into large language models (LLMs) to leverage rich information within a continuous space. However, without stochastic sampling, these methods inevitably collapse to deterministic inference, failing to discover diverse reasoning paths. To bridge the gap, we inject controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs' exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL). Building on this, we propose \underline{L}atent R\underline{e}asoning \underline{P}olicy \underline{O}ptimization~(LEPO), a novel framework that applies RL directly to continuous latent representations. Specifically, in rollout stage, LEPO maintains stochasticity to enable diverse trajectory sampling, while in optimization stage, LEPO constructs a unified gradient estimation for both latent representations and discrete tokens. Extensive experiments show that LEPO significantly outperforms existing RL methods for discrete and latent reasoning.

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

Mask-Proof: An LLM-based Automated Data Curation Pipeline on Mathematical Proofs

arXiv:2606.15258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of mathematical problem solving and can even assist with research-level proofs, yet we still lack a scalable and reproducible way to measure step-level reasoning in long proofs across diverse sources. This evaluation gap limits trustworthy AI assistance in proof-certified scientific progress. Existing evaluations often emphasize final answers or rely on costly expert grading, while end-to-end proof generation remains open-ended and hard to verify automatically. We introduce Mask-Proof, a pipeline that turns real proofs into automatically checkable masked-step tasks. It masks key formula steps, provides the necessary surrounding context, and evaluates model reconstructions with an LLM-based equivalence judge using repeated votes for stability. The resulting Mask-ProofBench contains 292 curated problems across diverse research areas. Experiments with 17 models show that reasoning-enhanced models outperform standard models by 12% to 27%. Our evaluator achieves 96.8% agreement with expert annotators, enabling faithful, reproducible, and comparable measurement of step-level mathematical reasoning. Benchmark, annotations, and code are available at https://github.com/weating/Mask-Proof.

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

Theoretical Grounding of Out-Of-Distribution Detection With Reinforcement Learning Optimizer

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in dynamic open-world environments requires a model to continually adapt to evolving data distributions while generalizing to covariate-shifted inputs and rejecting semantic-shifted OOD examples. Most existing OOD detection methods optimize only the current-step objective and do not explicitly account for how post-deployment environment changes affect future OOD behavior. In this paper, we establish a theoretical grounding for dynamic OOD detection using a reinforcement learning (RL)-guided optimizer that explicitly favors updates that reduce the semantic OOD false positive rate over time. We develop a novel augmented optimizer that uses an RL-guided correction term on top of standard gradient descent (GD) and show its improvement over both future-domain generalization and semantic-OOD rejection. We analyze temporal error decomposition in terms of model-change and environment-change generalization errors and develop a new theoretical framework for comparing the generalization errors under both GD and RL-guided optimizers.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Candidate overtone shear horizontal SAW resonators in thin-film lithium niobate for intermodal acousto-optic modulation

arXiv:2606.12853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The merits of thin-film surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices are pivotal to develop the high-performance intermodal acousto-optic modulators. In this work, we have proposed shear-horizontal (SH) SAW resonators for anticipated intermodal acousto-optic modulation on the thin-film lithium niobate platform. Through optimization of the cut angle of LN films, the SAW wavelength, and the thickness of interdigital transducer (IDT) electrodes, the calculated acousto-optic overlap factors utilizing SH0 modes are improved by more than an order of magnitude compared with those of Rayleigh modes. Furthermore, we have fabricated and characterized three kinds of proof-of-principle SH0 mode devices without/with grating reflectors. The electromechanical coupling coefficients (keff^2) and quality factors (Q) in the overtone resonators with grating reflectors are systematically evaluated, featuring the highest Q of 843 with the compromised keff^2 of 0.96%-4.72%. The results reveal that the temperature coefficients of frequency (TCF) of Rayleigh modes vary across various overtones, whereas the SH0 modes exhibit TCFs in the range of 32.3-68.9 ppm/C. Our fabricated SH0-mode overtone resonators demonstrate the capability of operating at power levels up to 29 dBm without electrode damage, offering a promising paradigm for robust and high-efficiency intermodal acousto-optic modulators with potential applications in integrated optical signal processing, microwave photonics,and quantum information technologies.

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

Adaptive $k$NN graph model

arXiv:2601.16509v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The $k$-nearest neighbors ($k$NN) algorithm is a cornerstone of non-parametric classification in artificial intelligence, yet its deployment in large-scale applications is persistently constrained by the computational trade-off between inference speed and accuracy. Existing approximate nearest neighbor solutions accelerate retrieval but often degrade classification precision and lack adaptability in selecting the optimal neighborhood size ($k$). Here, we present an adaptive graph model that decouples inference latency from computational complexity. By integrating a Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graph with a pre-computed voting mechanism, our framework completely transfers the computational burden of neighbor selection and weighting to the training phase. Within this topological structure, higher graph layers enable rapid navigation, while lower layers encode precise, node-specific decision boundaries with adaptive neighbor counts. Benchmarking against eight state-of-the-art baselines across six diverse datasets, we demonstrate that this architecture significantly accelerates inference speeds, achieving real-time performance, without compromising classification accuracy. These findings offer a scalable, robust solution to the inherent inference bottleneck of $k$NN, laying an adaptive structural foundation for graph-based nonparametric learning.

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

Islamic Large Language Models: From Knowledge Acquisition to Trustworthy and Hallucination-Resistant AI

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for knowledge-intensive question answering, including religious and legal questions. Islamic knowledge is a particularly demanding setting: answers are expected to be grounded in authoritative sources, citations must be exact, Arabic varieties differ substantially from the language of classical sources, and legitimate jurisprudential disagreement must be represented rather than collapsed into a single answer. This survey reviews the emerging field of Islamic LLMs and trustworthy Islamic AI. We organize the literature around Arabic NLP and Arabic-centric LLMs, Islamic NLP resources, Qur'anic question answering, Islamic knowledge benchmarks, retrieval-augmented generation, Islamic legal reasoning, inheritance reasoning, hallucination evaluation, and trustworthiness. We argue that fluency in Arabic is not sufficient for Islamic AI. Reliable systems require curated sources, retrieval and verification modules, citation-aware generation, madhhab-aware reasoning, human expert evaluation, and benchmarks that measure not only answer accuracy but also faithfulness, source validity, and reasoning quality. The survey concludes with a research agenda for hallucination-resistant Islamic AI systems.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Phys4D: Fine-Grained Physics-Consistent 4D Modeling from Video Diffusion

Recent video diffusion models have achieved impressive capabilities as large-scale generative world models. However, these models often struggle with fine-grained physical consistency, exhibiting physically implausible dynamics over time. In this work, we present Phys4D, a pipeline for learning physics-consistent 4D world representations from video diffusion models. Phys4D adopts a three-stage training paradigm that progressively lifts appearance-driven video diffusion models into physics-consistent 4D world representations. We first bootstrap robust geometry and motion representations through large-scale pseudo-supervised pretraining, establishing a foundation for 4D scene modeling. We then perform physics-grounded supervised fine-tuning using simulation-generated data, enforcing temporally consistent 4D dynamics. Finally, we apply simulation-grounded reinforcement learning to correct residual physical violations that are difficult to capture through explicit supervision. To evaluate fine-grained physical consistency beyond appearance-based metrics, we introduce a set of 4D world consistency evaluation that probe geometric coherence, motion stability, and long-horizon physical plausibility. Experimental results demonstrate that Phys4D substantially improves fine-grained spatiotemporal and physical consistency compared to appearance-driven baselines, while maintaining strong generative performance. Our project page is available at https://sensational-brioche-7657e7.netlify.app/

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Determinants of non-utilization of insecticide-treated nets among children under five in Rwanda: analyses of the 2024 Rwanda malaria indicator survey

Background Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) are effective for preventing malaria among children under five years, who bear a disproportionate burden of malaria. This study assessed the prevalence and determinants of ITN non-utilization among children under five in Rwanda using data from the 2024 Rwanda Malaria Indicator Survey (RMIS).Methodology This cross-sectional study utilized nationally representative data from the 2024 RMIS. Analyses were restricted to children under five residing in households that owned at least one ITN. The outcome was non-utilization of ITN, defined as not sleeping under an ITN the night preceding the survey. Survey-weighted descriptive statistics were used to estimate the prevalence of ITN non-utilization. Factors associated with non-utilization were identified using a survey-weighted Poisson regression model. Adjusted prevalence ratios (aPRs), 95% confidence intervals and p-values were reported.Results A total of 1,979 children were included in the study. The weighted prevalence of ITN non-utilization among children under five years was 20.11% (95% CI: 17.81 - 22.63). After adjusting for other factors, children aged 2 - 3 years were associated with an 83% higher prevalence of ITN non-utilization compared with those aged [&le;]1 year (aPR = 1.83, 95% CI: 1.423 - 2.352, p < 0.001). Compared with households that owned only one ITN, children in households with three or more ITNs were associated with a 76% lower prevalence of ITN non-utilization (aPR = 0.24, 95% CI: 0.171 - 0.332, p < 0.001). Children living in households with 5 - 7 members were associated with an 87% higher prevalence of ITN non-utilization compared with those in households with 1 - 4 members (aPR = 1.87, 95% CI: 1.476 - 2.358, p < 0.001).Conclusion The findings suggest that ITN utilization among children is influenced not only by household access to nets but also by household composition and dynamics that shape the allocation and use of available preventive resources.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Temporal Backtracking Search for Test-time Generative Video Reasoning

While test-time scaling has revolutionized reasoning in large language models, generative video reasoning remains bottlenecked by a single-shot paradigm. We demonstrate that searching over denoising steps cannot rescue logically flawed rollouts because spatial trajectories commit early in the diffusion process. Root-level Best-of-N (BoN) sampling is similarly inefficient: reasoning errors cluster early in the temporal axis, and resampling blindly discards verified upstream progress. To unlock effective test-time scaling for video models, we introduce Temporal Backtracking Search (TBS), which shifts the search space to the temporal axis. TBS transforms video generation into an iterative generate-verify-restart loop via three core mechanisms: (1) variable-K conditioning to resume generation from arbitrary clean prefixes; (2) temporal process verification to localize failures and extract valid restart anchors; and (3) prefix-based search to reallocate compute toward extending correct trajectories rather than root resampling. Across algorithmic, navigation, and robotics domains, TBS Pareto-dominates matched-budget BoN. In a strict out-of-distribution setting where one-shot generation collapses (0.7% for BoN), TBS achieves 22.7%, with every solved episode stemming from a restarted branch. Ultimately, TBS reveals that the local reasoning competence of video models far exceeds what single-shot rollouts indicate, providing a scalable test-time framework to unlock it.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

How Does the ReLU Activation Affect the Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent on High-dimensional Neural Network Regression?

arXiv:2603.04895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Overparameterized ML models, including neural networks, typically induce underdetermined training objectives with multiple global minima. The implicit bias refers to the limiting global minimum that is attained by a common optimization algorithm, such as gradient descent (GD). In this paper, we characterize the implicit bias of GD for training a shallow ReLU model with the squared loss on high-dimensional random features. Prior work (Vardi and Shamir, 2021) showed that the implicit bias does not exist in the worst-case, or corresponds exactly to the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm interpolating solution under exactly orthogonal data (Boursier et al., 2022). Our work interpolates between these two extremes and shows that, for sufficiently high-dimensional random data, the implicit bias approximates the minimum-$\ell_2$-norm solution with high probability with a gap on the order $\Theta(\sqrt{n/||\lambda||_1})$, where $n$ is the number of training examples and $\lambda$ denotes the spectrum of the data covariance matrix. Our results are obtained through a novel primal-dual analysis that carefully tracks the evolution of predictions, data-span coefficients, as well as their interactions, and show that the ReLU activation pattern quickly stabilizes with high probability over random data.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Select to Think: Unlocking SLM Potential with Local Sufficiency

Small language models (SLMs) offer efficient deployment, yet they often lag behind their larger counterparts (LLMs) in reasoning. Existing remedies either invoke an LLM at points of reasoning divergence, incurring substantial latency and cost, or rely on standard distillation, which is limited by the SLM's capacity to accurately mimic the LLM's complex generative distribution. We address this dilemma by identifying local sufficiency: at divergence points, the LLM's preferred token often resides within the SLM's top-K next-token predictions, even when failing to emerge as the SLM top-1 choice. We therefore propose Select to Think (S2T), which reframes the LLM's role from open-ended generation to selection among the SLM's proposals, simplifying the supervision signal to discrete candidate rankings. Leveraging this, we introduce S2T-Local, which distills the selection logic into the SLM, empowering it to perform autonomous re-ranking without inference-time LLM dependency. Empirically, a 1.5B SLM's top-8 candidates contain the 32B LLM's choice with a 95% hit rate, and S2T-Local improves the 1.5B SLM's Math Avg. over greedy decoding by 24.1% relative gain, matching the efficacy of 8-path self-consistency with single-trajectory efficiency.