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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Self-Evolving Visual Questioner

Vision-language models (VLMs) are typically trained as passive answerers, while their ability to actively ask diverse, non-trivial, visual-centric and grounded questions remains underexplored. Existing visual questioners' performance is bottlenecked by the availability of high-quality training data or the cost of curating them. We show that a VLM can continuously improve itself as a visual questioner without any external supervision. We propose a self-evolving framework that uses a VLM itself as both a proposer and a filter to produce harder, more informative, and visual-centric questions, while maintaining their exploration diversity to avoid training collapse. These questions are then used to train the VLM in both questioner and answerer modes. To evaluate the questioner, we introduce an agentic protocol that assesses questions along perception, reasoning, and diversity dimensions. Experiments across various backbone VLMs show that our method substantially enhances the quality and substantially expands the difficulty boundary of autonomous question generation. Under the same budget, our self-supervision is more effective than training on the static source data. Moreover, the self-evolving questioner remains a competitive or even better answerer.

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

How Fragile Are Training-Free AI-Generated Image Detectors? A Controlled Audit of Score Direction, Preprocessing, and Compression

Training-free detectors of AI-generated images promise generator-agnostic deployment without classifier training, yet their reported numbers are rarely compared under a single controlled protocol. We audit two representative training-free scores – an autoencoder-reconstruction score (AEROBLADE-style) and a noise-perturbation feature-similarity score (RIGID-style) – plus a naive feature-kNN control, on a common 1,500-image GenImage-derived benchmark spanning seven generators and JPEG compression at quality 70 and 50. The audit yields three cautionary findings. (i) Implementation details masquerade as method differences: replacing the LPIPS backbone (AlexNet -> VGG-16) changes overall AUROC by +0.085, and switching between resize-to-512 and native-resolution preprocessing flips per-generator conclusions by up to 0.38 AUROC. (ii) Score direction is not a property of the method but of its hyperparameters: the RIGID-style score is inverted (AUROC < 0.5) on SD1.5 and Wukong at noise level sigma=0.05, recovers to >0.5 for every generator at sigma=0.01, and collapses to 0.15 at sigma=0.3. (iii) Dataset format bias inflates robustness claims: without unified re-encoding, AUROC under JPEG-50 exceeds the clean condition for the AlexNet-backbone reconstruction score; after bias correction the residual anomaly localizes to a single generator (BigGAN). The audited scores have complementary per-generator failure sets, but naive z-score fusion does not beat the best single score, indicating that exploiting complementarity requires direction-aware combination.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Against probability: A quantum state is more than a list of probability distributions

arXiv:2601.18872v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The state of a quantum system can be represented by listing the outcome probabilities for a tomographically complete set of measurements. Such representations appear throughout physics, for example, in quantum field theory via correlation functions and in quantum foundations within generalized probabilistic frameworks. In this paper, we show a no-go result: To enable useful statements, the probability representation must be topologically robust$\unicode{x2014}$preserving the notion of closeness between states. Yet, a topologically robust probability representation cannot simultaneously retain other essential structure, such as the subsystem structure.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SciOrch: Learning to Orchestrate Expert LLMs for Solving Frontier Multimodal Scientific Reasoning Tasks

Frontier scientific reasoning remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), where even the strongest commercial systems fall short of expert-level performance. A closer look at model behavior reveals substantial complementarity that single-model evaluation hides: different frontier models excel on different question types, and no single model captures the full picture. We present SciOrch, a framework that trains a lightweight 8B model to orchestrate frontier LLMs for scientific reasoning. The orchestrator decomposes each question, delegates sub-problems to selected commercial models through API calls, and synthesizes a final answer. Training such an orchestrator is fundamentally harder than conventional agentic RL: each action triggers an API call that is expensive in both dollar cost and latency, making standard online rollouts infeasible. We address this with MCTS-based approach, producing diverse orchestration trajectories, extracting per-node single-turn samples, and optimizing the orchestrator with GRPO-style training. On a 240-question test set spanning SGI-Reasoning and Scientists' First Exam, SciOrch reaches 56.66% average accuracy, outperforming the strongest single commercial model by 3.74% and the strongest multi-agent baseline by 3.33%. It also attains the best accuracy on both SGI and SFE with less than half the API cost of typical multi-agent methods.

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

Single vs. Multiple Branches in DeepONet and S-DeepONet: Network Architecture Follows Coupling in Multiphysics Systems

arXiv:2507.03660v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: `Real-time prediction of complex physical systems requires surrogate models that learn from data while representing strong multiphysics coupling. Deep Operator Networks have shown success in single-physics problems, yet their effectiveness in capturing nonlinear interactions in coupled systems (such as thermo-mechanical or electro-thermal coupling) remains underexplored. Here we pose a practical question: should the architecture of a neural operator reflect the strength of physical coupling it aims to model? We compare single-branch and multi-branch designs, in both feedforward and sequential recurrent forms, across three representative systems: a reaction–diffusion problem with heterogeneous sources, a nonlinear thermo-electrical problem with temperature-dependent conductivity and Joule heating, and a viscoplastic thermo-mechanical model of steel solidification. Single-branch networks consistently outperform multi-branch variants in tightly coupled regimes by encouraging shared latent representations, whereas multi-branch designs remain favorable for decoupled or single-physics tasks. Once trained, these surrogates deliver full-field predictions up to $1.8 \times 10^4$ times faster than physics-based solvers.

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

Squeezing Enhancement in Lossy Multi-Path Atom Interferometers

arXiv:2409.04091v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper explores the sensitivity gains afforded by spin-squeezed states in atom interferometry, in particular using Bragg diffraction. We introduce a generalised input-output formalism that accurately describes realistic, non-unitary interferometers, including losses due to velocity selectivity and scattering into undesired momentum states. This formalism is applied to evaluate the performance of one-axis twisted spin-squeezed states in improving phase sensitivity. Our results show that by carefully optimising the parameters of the Bragg beam splitters and controlling the degree of squeezing, it is possible to improve the sensitivity of the interferometer by several dB with respect to the standard quantum limit despite realistic levels of losses in light pulse operations. However, the analysis also highlights the challenges associated with achieving these improvements in practice, most notably the impact of finite temperature on the benefits of entanglement. The results suggest ways of optimising interferometric setups to exploit quantum entanglement under realistic conditions, thereby contributing to advances in precision metrology with atom interferometers.

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

Quantifying Prior Dominance in RAG Systems

Authors:

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds Large Language Models in external knowledge, yet current evaluations rely on discrete heuristics that suffer from ''epistemic blindness'' - failing to distinguish genuine contextual information extraction from parametric memory recall. To address this, we introduce the Normalized Context Utilization (NCU) metric, leveraging continuous token log-probabilities across zero-shot, oracle, and adversarial conditions to strictly quantify contextual information gain. Evaluating architectures ranging from 1.5B to 72B parameters alongside a proprietary commercial API reveals that for strict factual extraction (without Chain-of-Thought reasoning), traditional scaling laws exhibit extreme diminishing returns: highly efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) match or outperform high-capacity architectures. Furthermore, we demonstrate that ``Prior Dominance'' correlates with model scale and proprietary alignments. The evaluated commercial API not only overrode explicit external evidence in nearly half of adversarial conflicts, but also frequently suffered from systemic confidence collapse (Negative Transfer) when its parametric priors were contradicted. Our findings highlight the structural epistemic advantage and superior contextual adherence of SLMs in strict extraction workflows.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Multi-Scale Machine Learning for Antibody-Antigen Binding Affinity Prediction Using Deep Mutational Scanning and Structural Features

Authors:

Predicting how mutations alter antibody-antigen binding affinity is essential for antibody engineering and vaccine design, yet current methods generalize poorly to unseen complexes. We present a multi-scale machine learning framework integrating 93 descriptors across four modalities: physicochemical, structural, ESM-2 protein language model, and solvent-accessible surface area (SASA)/{Delta}{Delta}G_fold features. Under leave-one-complex-out deep mutational scanning (LOCO-DMS) cross-validation on AbAgym (36,541 mutations, 68 experiments, 13 pathogens), gradient boosting achieved MCC = 0.206; a confidence-stratified ensemble reached MCC = 0.374 (83.5% accuracy, 25.5% coverage). No single modality exceeds the majority baseline alone; only multi-scale fusion succeeds. Boltzmann ceiling analysis shows 45.9% of mutations are near-neutral (|{Delta}{Delta}G| < k_BT), bounding theoretical maximum MCC at 0.473; our method achieves 79.1% of this limit. Five deep learning architectures benchmarked under LOCO-DMS showed self-attention matching gradient boosting (MCC = 0.200). Cross-pathogen transfer failed systematically (mean 46.7%), confirming universal binding predictors remain an open challenge.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quantitative insights into the role of phages and plasmids in the persistence of nontuberculous mycobacteria in chloraminated drinking water

Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) are opportunistic pathogens that persist in chloraminated drinking water systems, yet the roles of phages and plasmids in their persistence remain largely unexplored. Using genome-resolved and quantitative metagenomics, we characterized NTM, phages, prophages, and plasmids in a chloraminated building plumbing system. Bacterial metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) and viral operational taxonomic units (vOTUs) were quantified at mean concentrations of 8.41 * 10^7 and 8.00 * 10^8 copies/L, respectively, including seven NTM MAGs at a mean total concentration of 4.01 * 10^5 copies/L. NTM concentrations were highest at the site with the lowest bacterial and viral diversity. Predicted NTM-infecting virus concentrations were inversely related to NTM concentrations across sites, suggesting complex phage-host dynamics that warrant direct experimental investigation. NTM, putative phages, prophages, and plasmids encoded functions related to disinfectant tolerance, stress response, metal resistance, and secretion. These findings identify phage interactions, prophages, and plasmids as overlooked genomic and ecological dimensions of NTM persistence in engineered water systems.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ViCoStream: Streaming VideoLLMs Can Run Beyond 100 FPS with Stage-Wise Coordinated Inference

Streaming VideoLLMs must continuously process incoming video while maintaining low query latency, making both video-ingestion throughput and query-time responsiveness critical for real-time deployment. Existing methods largely focus on accelerating individual modules, such as visual encoding, token pruning, or KV-cache compression, but provide limited insight into whether the resulting system can sustain real-time streaming performance. We formulate streaming VideoLLM inference as a coordinated pipeline spanning visual preprocessing, visual encoding, token dropping, and LLM prefilling/decoding. Building on this formulation, we propose ViCoStream (Video Coordinated Streaming), a stage-wise coordinated streaming framework that combines chunk-wise execution, CUDA-stream overlap, visual token control, bounded visual attention, and query-side retrieval to bound per-chunk computation and memory costs. We further provide a systematic study of bottleneck migration, revealing how chunk size, token retention, attention locality, and retrieval scope shape the throughput-accuracy trade-off. Experiments with Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B-Instruct across multiple streaming benchmarks show that ViCoStream achieves 134 FPS video throughput and less than 50 ms TTFT on a single A100 GPU while maintaining accuracy close to full-history baselines.

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

A Unified Framework for Runtime Verification and Model-Based Diagnosis in LOLA

arXiv:2606.23720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an integrated framework that unifies runtime verification and model-based diagnosis within the stream specification language LOLA. By encoding system descriptions, component health states, and observations into a single stream-based formalism, the approach enables continuous, online fault localization directly alongside fault detection, without requiring separate toolchains. The framework supports both time-invariant and transient faults, and naturally accommodates nondeterministic observations.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

The Impact of Pregnant Womens Dietary Behavior on the Physiological Adaptation Paradox and Maternal-Fetal Resource Conflict in Conflict Settings: A Predictive Analytical Study

This scientific study aims to assess the level of awareness, nutritional knowledge, and actual behavioral practices among pregnant women in the Capital District of Sanaa, Republic of Yemen, and to determine their impact on the health and clinical indicators of the mother and fetus under complex conflict conditions. The study employed a descriptive-analytical approach based on a simple random sample of 200 pregnant women attending government-run hospitals and specialized medical centers in the Capital District. Field data were collected during December 2025 using a structured and validated questionnaire consisting of 42 items measuring demographic variables, awareness, practices, barriers, and health outcomes. The results of the statistical analysis using SPSS software showed a high level of nutritional awareness (87%) and healthy dietary practices (80%) among the sample participants. Simple and multiple linear regression tests revealed a statistically significant effect of awareness and practices in explaining 20.2% of the variance in the health status of the mother and fetus (R{superscript 2}= 0.204, p < 0.001). The study demonstrated that actual behavioral practices have greater predictive power ({beta}=0.316, p=0.001) compared to theoretical cognitive awareness ({beta}=0.232, p=0.005) in determining clinical outcomes for the mother and fetus, highlighting the widening gap between knowledge and behavior under structural pressures. "Morning sickness" (80%) and the deterioration of "family economic status" (71%) emerged as the greatest physiological and material barriers to proper nutrition. With their inferential impact established as an extension of the maternal-fetal resource allocation conflict in a physiologically and economically challenging environment, the study also identified significant differences in nutritional behavior and health outcomes in favor of housewives and mothers who are more educated and have higher incomes, while no significant differences were recorded attributable to obstetric variables such as stage or order of pregnancy. The study offers a unique theoretical and practical contribution by formulating an integrated causal model that demonstrates that the fetus acts as a biological drain on the mothers cellular and mineral reserves in a war environment, which necessitates directing antenatal care and support programs toward effective behavioral empowerment and nutritional support to overcome the structural and material barriers faced by pregnant women.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Monotonic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Monotonicity as an Inductive Bias

arXiv:2606.17886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monotonicity has been a long-running architectural inductive bias for neural networks, motivated by tabular, scientific, and economic settings where outputs are known to respond monotonically to certain inputs. Existing approaches are MLP- or flow-based and lack per-edge functional transparency; the only Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) variant with monotonicity, MonoKAN, enforces the constraint only on a restricted parameter subset and requires a projection-style training procedure. We close this gap with MKAN, a KAN with hard monotonicity guaranteed for all parameter values via exponential reparameterization of B-spline coefficients, positive edge weights, and a monotone base activation. Training reduces to standard unconstrained gradient descent. Our headline theoretical contribution is a representation-cost theorem: any $C^K, K >0$ feature extractor inducing a ball-shaped semantic-neighborhood partition admits a monotone realization of the equivalent neighborhood structure at $N' = N^* + k \le 2N^*$, where $k$ is the number of non-monotone coordinates of the original. The bound is architecture-agnostic and gives a principled sizing rule for monotone encoders. Empirically, MKAN is competitive with state-of-the-art monotone NNs on the SMM/ICML-2024 benchmark while being the only method that combines hard unconstrained monotonicity with KAN's per-edge functional transparency; the $2N^*$ prediction is validated in a self-supervised feature-size sweep on four real datasets, and on a controlled monotone-generative dataset MKAN recovers ground-truth factors with substantially higher Spearman alignment than KAN, MLP, and linear baselines.

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

Flood Mapping from RGB imagery using a Vision Foundation Model

Timely, high-resolution maps of flood extent around settlements are essential for emergency response and damage assessment. We consider airborne RGB imagery for flood mapping as it can be collected rapidly at low cost. To produce flood maps, deep learning models for water segmentation are often used. CNN based and small vision transformer models are used. However, they need much data for adaptation to a change of scenery, i.e., another flooding event. Vision foundation models or large vision transformers are known to generalize across domains. Recently, foundation models for Earth observation became available. They are pretrained on satellite data, whose spatial resolution, viewing geometry, and radiometry differ from nadir RGB imagery. Thus, adaptation is required. We investigate how a satellite-pretrained Earth observation foundation model can be adapted to centimeter-scale floodwater mapping from RGB imagery. Specifically, we fine-tune a model we call Prithvi-2.0-UPN consisting of the Prithvi-EO-2.0-600M Vision Transformer combined with a UPerNet decoder for binary water segmentation on two RGB datasets (BlessemFlood21, NeuenahrFlood). In a first experiment we observe that Prithvi-2.0-UPN reaches state-of-the-art results on BlessemFlood21 and NeuenahrFlood, when trained on their datasets. In a second experiment we show that Prithvi-2.0-UPN performs better than state-of-the-art baseline models for transfer to a new flood event (trained on BlessemFlood21, tested on NeuenahrFlood) in a zero-shot setting. However, the performance indicates room for improvement. In this respect, we investigate in a third experiment how performance improves when further fine-tuning the models with small shares of NeuenahrFlood training data: Prithvi-2.0-UPN improves the fastest and reaches almost the performance level when fully trained on NeuenahrFlood, indicating transfer capabilities.

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

A BART-based approach with hierarchical strategy for Vietnamese abstractive multi-document summarization

In this technical report, we focus on solving the challenge of Vietnamese multi-document abstractive summarization, introduced in the International Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP) 2022. We choose to follow the popular hierarchical approach, i.e. condensing each document followed by aggregation and summarization. We propose a novel yet simple strategy to shorten documents that is driven by the golden summary, thus ensuring high correlation between stages of the hierarchical approach. Our method achieves a ROUGE2-F1 score of 0.2468 on the VLSP's public test set, and can produce fluent and concise summaries. Additionally, we utilize external sources for extra data, which greatly enhances the quantity of data for Vietnamese multi-document summarization. The additional data is made available for the community.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Super-Link Fragility in Asymmetric W-Class States under Quantum Noise

arXiv:2606.12307v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The asymmetric three-qubit W-class state $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ defines an isosceles entanglement-network geometry, (a) two vertex-base (VB) links form stronger bipartite connections, (b) while the base-base (BB) link is weaker. This suggests that concentrating entanglement into a super-link may be advantageous for quantum-network tasks. Here, we show that this intuition is incomplete. We analytically compare the bipartite concurrence dynamics of the symmetric |W> state and the asymmetric $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ state, which differ both in entanglement-network geometry and excitation sector under standard noise models. In the absence of noise, the concurrence hierarchy is C_{VB} > C_W > C_{BB}$. Under phase damping, this hierarchy is preserved for all noise strengths and no entanglement sudden death occurs. Under amplitude damping, however, the hierarchy is reordered. The symmetric |W> state becomes the most robust, while the base-base concurrence of $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ vanishes at the finite threshold of parameter $\gamma$. We term this reordering as the Super-Link Fragility Effect. The same structural asymmetry that produces a stronger vertex-base link also makes it more vulnerable to energy dissipation when coupled with multi-excitation amplitudes. Under depolarization, the asymmetry advantage is erased, with $C_W$ and $C_{VB}$ sharing the same sudden-death threshold for some value of the parameter p, while $C_{BB}$ disappears earlier at some other value of the parameter p. The generalized amplitude damping channel continuously connects the damping-dominated regime to the pure-excitation limit, where the initial hierarchy is restored. These results show that entanglement robustness in $W$-class resources is controlled not by initial concurrence alone, but by the joint structure of entanglement-network geometry, excitation sector, and noise symmetry.

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

Central Limit Theorems for Stochastic Gradient Descent Quantile Estimators

arXiv:2503.02178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops asymptotic theory for quantile estimation via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate. The quantile loss function is neither smooth nor strongly convex. Beyond conventional perspectives and techniques, we view quantile SGD iteration as an irreducible, periodic, and positive recurrent Markov chain, which cyclically converges to its unique stationary distribution regardless of the arbitrarily fixed initialization. To derive the exact form of the stationary distribution, we analyze the structure of its characteristic function by exploiting the stationary equation. We also derive tight bounds for its moment generating function (MGF) and tail probabilities. Synthesizing the aforementioned approaches, we prove that the centered and standardized stationary distribution converges to a Gaussian distribution as the learning rate $\eta\rightarrow0$. This finding provides the first central limit theorem (CLT)-type theoretical guarantees for the quantile SGD estimator with constant learning rates. We further propose a recursive algorithm to construct confidence intervals of the estimators with statistical guarantees. Numerical studies demonstrate the effective finite-sample performance of the online estimator and inference procedure. The theoretical tools developed in this study are of independent interest for investigating general SGD algorithms formulated as Markov chains, particularly in non-strongly convex and non-smooth settings.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Infections and suicide and self-harm: a population-based matched cohort study

Background Infections have been associated with adverse mental health outcomes, including suicide, but evidence beyond severe or central nervous system infections is limited. We investigated associations between a range of acute infections and subsequent suicide/self-harm outcomes. Methods We conducted six infection-specific matched cohort studies using English primary care records from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum (2007-2024), linked to hospital admissions and mortality data. Adults ([&ge;]18 years) with a primary care record of infection (gastroenteritis, lower respiratory tract [LRTI], skin/soft-tissue [SSTI], urinary tract [UTI], sepsis, meningitis/encephalitis [positive control]) were matched (age, sex, practice, calendar period) to up to five comparators without infection. We estimated hazard ratios (HRs) for suicide/self-harm outcomes using Cox regression, stratified by matched set and implicitly adjusting for matching factors, with additional adjustment for deprivation, lifestyle factors, and comorbidities. We examined whether associations varied over time, by infection severity, antimicrobial treatment, sex, and prior mental health conditions. Findings Cohorts ranged from 18,192 individuals with meningitis/encephalitis (matched to 90,915 without) to 398,099 with SSTI (matched to 1,743,747). After adjustment, individuals with infection had a higher hazard of suicide/self-harm outcomes than comparators across all cohorts: sepsis (HR 1.79, 95% CI 1.65-1.93), gastroenteritis (1.62, 1.55-1.70), meningitis/encephalitis (1.56, 1.32-1.84), UTI (1.41, 1.33-1.50), SSTI (1.37, 1.31-1.43), and LRTI (1.37, 1.31-1.44). Risk was highest in the year post-infection, attenuating over time, and was higher among severe infections and those without prior mental health conditions. Interpretation Common acute infections recorded in primary care are associated with increased risk of suicide and self-harm, particularly following severe infections and in the year post-infection. Findings support suicide risk monitoring following acute infection, particularly among individuals without prior mental health conditions, and highlight infection prevention as a potentially modifiable strategy in vulnerable populations. Funding Wellcome and La Caixa. Copyright This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

History estimation in random recursive trees: Pointwise approach via iterated Jordan centralities

arXiv:2606.24465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of estimating the arrival times of vertices in a uniform random recursive tree from its unlabeled structure. We adopt a pointwise perspective and analyze the distribution of the relative estimation error, and derive tail bounds that are uniform in both the vertex and the tree size. For the ranking induced by Jordan centrality, the probability that the estimate exceeds the true arrival time by a factor $S$ decays on the order of $1/S$, while the probability of underestimating the arrival time by a factor $1/S$ decays exponentially in $S$. We introduce a refined centrality measure whose overestimation tail decays on the order of $(\log S)/S^{2}$, at the cost of a heavier lower tail of order $1/S^{2}$. These results reveal a tradeoff between upper- and lower-tail performance in arrival-time estimation that is invisible to the previously studied risk functional. Nevertheless, the refined centrality measure attains the optimal order of the risk for all its parameter values.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

arXiv:2606.11901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially reproduced in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success and provide human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several dual-arm imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly in early interaction stages, parallel arm execution, and transfer between simulation and real-world settings. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for diagnosing these failure modes and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io/

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Estimating the effectiveness of syndromic screening at airports for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease

Authors:

We used a stochastic simulation model to estimate the effectiveness of combined exit and entry airport screening for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease (BVD), using natural-history parameters from a Bayesian re-analysis of the 2012 Isiro outbreak. For a 12-hour international flight from DRC or Uganda at 86% screening sensitivity, we estimate 65% of infected travellers would arrive undetected (95% CrI: 38 - 76%). The main driver of this outcome is the relative duration of the the incubation period (approximately 7.7 days) and the onset-to-severe-disease interval (approximately 4 days): most infected travellers board before symptom onset and are undetectable by any syndromic screen, whilst those who are symptomatic progress rapidly to illness severe enough to preclude travel. This is compounded during active epidemic growth, when recently exposed (and therefore pre-symptomatic) cases are overrepresented among travellers. Syndromic airport screening offers limited protection against BVD spread via air travel, and should be complemented by outbreak control at source and strengthened clinical surveillance in receiving countries with high travel connectivity to affected areas.

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

LoMime: Query-Efficient Membership Inference using Model Extraction in Label-Only Settings

arXiv:2602.18934v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Membership inference attacks (MIAs) threaten the privacy of machine learning models by revealing whether a specific data point was used during training. Existing MIAs often rely on impractical assumptions, such as access to public datasets, shadow models, confidence scores, or knowledge of the training data distribution, making them vulnerable to defenses like confidence masking and adversarial regularization. Label-only MIAs, even under strict constraints, suffer from high query requirements per sample. We propose a cost-effective label-only MIA framework based on transferability and model extraction. By querying the target model $M$ using active sampling, perturbation-based selection, and synthetic data, we extract a functionally similar surrogate model $S$ on which membership inference is performed. This shifts the query overhead to a one-time extraction phase, eliminating repeated queries to $M$. Our method matches the performance of state-of-the-art label-only MIAs while significantly reducing query costs and operating under strict black-box constraints. On benchmark tabular datasets, we show that a query budget equivalent to testing the membership of approximately $1%$ of the training samples is sufficient to extract $S$ and achieve membership inference accuracy within $\pm 1%$ of that obtained when attacking $M$ directly. We also evaluate the effectiveness of standard defenses, including DP-SGD and regularization, proposed for label-only MIAs against our attack. Finally, we present preliminary results extending our framework to deep neural networks trained on image datasets, demonstrating promising transferability and membership inference performance under label-only access while highlighting directions for further optimization.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

StereoFactory: A Unified Merging Framework for Robust Stereo Matching

Stereo matching has advanced through foundation models trained on large-scale datasets, yet this paradigm suffers from a scalability bottleneck: incorporating new data requires costly joint retraining. Model merging offers a scalable post-hoc alternative by integrating knowledge from specialized models after source checkpoints are available. However, existing merging methods typically retain all available models or rely on greedy inclusion, which can preserve harmful task-vector interference. We propose StereoFactory, a coarse-to-fine evolutionary framework for adaptive model merging. Stage~1 employs a genetic algorithm to search the combinatorial space of model subsets, determining which models should participate. Stage~2 addresses module-level knowledge specialization (different functional modules exhibit distinct preferences for knowledge sources) through CMA-ES optimization of architecture-adaptive routing over the selected task vectors, with optional module-level scaling. Experiments across two architectures and four benchmarks demonstrate that StereoFactory consistently achieves the best four-benchmark average under the same checkpoint pool, reducing the average error from 3.80 to 3.30 on NMRF and from 2.88 to 2.19 on FoundationStereo relative to the strongest controlled baseline. The post-hoc search requires only 2.7–3.7\% of the corresponding joint-retraining wall-clock time. Analysis reveals that knowledge contributions are inherently module-specific, and selected subsets can transfer across architectures with minimal degradation. Code will be publicly released upon acceptance at: https://github.com/XiandaGuo/StereoFactory.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Usability testing with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT)

Involving end-users in the development of an AI tool is an important facilitator to its implementation. Usability testing was therefore conducted with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT) to capture the perspectives and user experiences of AISaT from 10 staff members across two hospitals working within estates, infection prevention and control, and clinical areas, to inform the development of next iterations of AISaT. The perspectives shared could be grouped under improvements to the understand-ability; content; navigation; visibility; usability; workflow; ownership; and frequency of use of the tool. There were key areas that can and will be easily improved within AISaT, however there were areas that required a deeper level of critical reflection, such as incorporating data on more existing variables in a room (i.e., existing ventilation) and whether all patients should be assumed as infectious and breathing heavily. The research team must consider if the target audience of end users and recommended frequency of AISaT use will be pre-defined by the tool developers, or whether this level of detail should be left to each individual hospital to decide.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Explicit Context-Driven Neural Acoustic Modeling for High-Fidelity RIR Generation

arXiv:2509.15210v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Realistic sound simulation plays a critical role in many applications. A key element in sound simulation is the room impulse response (RIR), which characterizes how sound propagates within a given space. Recent studies have applied neural implicit methods to learn RIR using context information collected from the environment, such as scene images. However, these approaches do not effectively leverage explicit geometric information from the environment. To further exploit neural implicit models with direct geometric features, we present MiNAF, which queries a rough room mesh at given locations and extracts distance distributions as an explicit representation of local context. Our approach demonstrates that incorporating explicit local geometric features can better guide the model in generating more accurate RIR predictions. Through comparisons with conventional and state-of-the-art methods, we show that MiNAF performs competitively across various evaluation metrics.