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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Towards Functional Correctness of Large Code Models with Selective Generation

arXiv:2505.13553v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The hallucination of code generation models hinders their applicability to systems requiring higher safety standards. One critical bottleneck in addressing code hallucination is the difficulty of identifying the functional correctness of generated code, due to its unnatural form. We address this core bottleneck by automatically generating unit tests using dynamic code analysis tools, leveraging the executable nature of code. Accordingly, we propose a selective code generator that abstains from uncertain generations – based on the functional correctness evaluated by generated unit tests – to theoretically control the correctness among non-abstained answers, \ie the false discovery rate. Finally, we propose to use generated unit tests in evaluation as well as in learning for precise code evaluation, calling this paradigm FuzzEval. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method along with the controllability of code hallucination and reasonable selection efficiency.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MagPlus: Bridging Micro-to-Regular Facial Expressions through Learnable Magnification

Facial micro-expressions are subtle and short-lived facial movements that provide important cues about genuine human emotions. However, modeling and generating them remains difficult because annotated micro-expression data is limited and the underlying facial motions are extremely weak. Existing micro-expression generation methods therefore often suffer from limited quality, weak robustness, and poor generalization. We propose MagPlus, a transferable micro-expression processing pipeline that connects micro-expression analysis with standard facial animation models. Instead of training a dedicated generator from scratch, MagPlus learns to magnify subtle facial motions into the range of regular facial expressions, transforming micro-expressions into signals that are compatible with existing facial expression processing models. The magnified sequence is then used by a standard facial expression model for tasks such as transfer and synthesis. A complementary DeMagPlus module then restores the generated motion back to realistic micro-expression intensity levels while preserving the synthesized dynamics. We evaluate the framework using four facial animation models: FOMM, FSRT, MetaPortrait, and EmoPortraits. None of these models are trained on micro-expression data. Experiments show that MagPlus-DeMagPlus enables pretrained macro-expression models to generate more realistic micro-expression motion without retraining the backbones.

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

From Correspondence to Actions: Human-Like Multi-Image Spatial Reasoning in Multi-modal Large Language Models

While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made substantial progress in single-image spatial reasoning, multi-image spatial reasoning, which requires integration of information from multiple viewpoints, remains challenging. Cognitive studies suggest that humans address such tasks through two mechanisms: cross-view correspondence, which identifies regions across different views that correspond to the same physical locations, and stepwise viewpoint transformation, which composes relative viewpoint changes sequentially. However, existing studies incorporate these mechanisms only partially and often implicitly, without explicit supervision for both. We propose Human-Aware Training for Cross-view correspondence and viewpoint cHange (HATCH), a training framework with two complementary objectives: (1) Patch-Level Spatial Alignment, which encourages patch representations to align across views for spatially corresponding regions, and (2) Action-then-Answer Reasoning, which requires the model to generate explicit viewpoint transition actions before predicting the final answer. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that HATCH consistently outperforms baselines of comparable size by a clear margin and achieves competitive results against much larger models, while preserving single-image reasoning capabilities.

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

Quantum ring all-reduce: communication and privacy advantages for distributed learning

arXiv:2606.20344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning models have scaled to unprecedented sizes, making training across distributed devices the de facto standard in the field. In this work, we explore how quantum communications can make distributed training both more communication-efficient and information-theoretically private, for both classical and quantum learning models. Ring all-reduce is the foundational communication primitive for large-scale distributed training. We present a quantum version that reduces per-link online communication by a provably optimal factor of two using pre-shared entanglement and superdense coding, without requiring the learning model or gradient computation to change. Beyond bandwidth, the primitive enables privacy guarantees that are information-theoretically impossible for any classical protocol, achieving composable {\epsilon}-secure aggregation, via verified entanglement, at a 2x overhead in GHZ copies. Our hybrid quantum-classical communication architecture yields simultaneous communication and security advantages for large scale distributed training, regardless of whether the learning itself is quantum or classical. Finally, we characterise quantum advantages in gradient conflict detection for server-to-client communication under bandwidth constraints, a setting that arises after ring all-reduce is completed, when full gradient broadcast to external clients is infeasible. Two variants of the problem admit different separations. For margin-based alignment testing (\textsc{GapIP}_{\tau}), the quantum advantage is quadratic in the margin parameter: \widetilde{O}({\tau}^{-1}\log P) qubits versus \widetilde{O}(\min(\{\tau}^{-2},P)) bits. For sign-consistency auditing against a private parameter matching (\textsc{TieAudit}_{\epsilon}), the advantage represents an exponential separation in communication complexity: \Omega(\sqrt{P}) bits whereas O({\epsilon}^{-2}\log P) qubits suffice.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Acceleration-induced spectral blind spots in stimulated atomic transitions

arXiv:2606.17396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stimulated transitions are among the most fundamental processes in light-matter interaction, underlying resonant absorption and emission in atomic systems. Here we show that uniform acceleration can convert this familiar response into a frequency-selective absence of response. Specifically, when an incident photon has a nonzero momentum component transverse to the acceleration, the stimulated transition probability vanishes at a discrete set of frequencies fixed by the acceleration, the atomic transition frequency, and the photon propagation angle. At these spectral blind spots, both ordinary stimulated absorption and acceleration-induced excitation are simultaneously suppressed, rendering the atom effectively unresponsive to the incident radiation. The effect arises from the nontrivial response of accelerated atoms to quantum vacuum fluctuations and provides a distinctive signature of the Unruh effect through the absence, rather than the enhancement, of stimulated transitions. We further provide an order-of-magnitude estimate showing that an electron-based implementation with spin splitting in combined electric and magnetic fields could access the required parameter regime. These results reveal an unexplored form of acceleration-modified light-matter interaction and identify spectral blind spots as a new manifestation of the Unruh effect.

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

Towards Verifiable Agentic Data Science: Solving Irregular TSQA Via Tool-Grounded Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series data in real-world deployments is overwhelmingly irregular. Observations are asynchronous, missing values are informative rather than random, and sampling frequencies vary across sensors and operational windows. However, existing Time Series Question Answering (TSQA) benchmarks mostly assume regularly sampled inputs, leaving a fundamental gap in understanding how large language models (LLMs) and AI agents perform under irregular conditions. To bridge this gap, we introduce IRTS-ToolBench, a benchmark of 1,700 questions spanning 10 task types across 13 domains. IRTS-ToolBench is designed to be used independently by any researcher working on LLM-based irregular time series analysis, providing standardized inputs and a reproducible evaluation protocol. Code can be found in https://github.com/SanhornC/IRTS-ToolBench.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Amortized mean-shift interacting particles

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bayesian inference for inverse problems is run to evaluate integrals – posterior expectations, tail probabilities, and risks – across a stream of observations. The standard estimate averages the integrand over posterior samples, a Monte-Carlo average whose error decays only as the square root of the sample size, so accuracy demands many samples – prohibitive when each one calls a partial-differential-equation forward model. Mean-shift interacting particles need far fewer: they return a small set of signed-weight nodes – a deterministic quadrature whose weighted averages estimate those integrals. Finding the nodes, however, is a per-observation optimization that, in its most accurate form, reads the posterior score at every step – returning the cost it meant to save. We introduce amortized mean-shift interacting particles, a learned map that emits the weighted nodes from an observation and a few posterior samples in a single forward pass. Training asks only for joint parameter-observation samples and a posterior to draw from – a conditional normalizing flow, an empirical conditional, or any reference the user can sample – and the map learns to integrate that posterior from samples alone, evaluating neither its density nor its score. Once trained, it generalizes to unseen observations and integrands at any node budget and improves on independent samples in two ways: by reweighting them, provably no worse than the equal weights of Monte-Carlo; and by moving them, which empirically lowers it further. Across closed-form, sampled, learned, and physics-based posteriors – up to a thousand-coefficient groundwater field – it integrates more accurately than the same number of samples at every budget, and a posterior-whitened, dimension-aware kernel removes the high-dimensional wall. The result is a Pareto improvement on Monte-Carlo integration, not a competitor to drawing more samples.

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

Wasserstein Policy Learning for Distributional Outcomes

arXiv:2606.19117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline policy learning has received growing attention in causal inference. The primary objective is to learn a policy (individualized treatment rule) as a mapping from covariates to treatment that maximizes the empirical welfare defined as the mean of scalar-valued potential outcomes. In this paper, we study offline policy learning with distribution-valued outcomes, where each potential outcome is a probability measure on $\mathbb{R}$ and the reward is defined through a utility functional applied to the Wasserstein barycenter of induced outcome distributions. We establish statistical guarantees for the policy learning framework based on both Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Doubly Robust (DR) estimators. By handling the challenging uniform deviation over the product of the combinatorial policy class and the infinite-dimensional quantile domain, we prove that the finite-sample regret has leading dependence $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{\mathrm{N-dim}(\Pi)/N})$. In the one-dimensional Wasserstein setting and under the stated regularity conditions, the leading regret rate is still governed by the policy-class complexity. Moreover, we provide a minimax lower bound establishing the sharpness of the leading dependence on $N$ and $\mathrm{N-dim}(\Pi)$.

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

Interactive Pareto navigation for deep multi-task learning

arXiv:2606.19521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In multi-task learning, handling an increasing number of objectives can quickly become challenging, both in terms of the computational resources and the decision maker's capacity to choose appropriate trade-offs. A widely used approach is thus to aggregate the individual losses in a single loss function by a weighted sum. This often fails to capture either the decision maker's preferences as a result of the shape of the Pareto front, or requires multiple adjustments and computations which becomes prohibitively expensive in deep learning applications. To address these issues, we introduce a novel framework, Preference Pareto Exploration (PPE), which enforces the decision maker's preferences while accounting for the geometry of the Pareto set in an interactive exploration process. PPE is based on a predictor-corrector method that performs predictor steps tangential to the manifold of Pareto-optimal solutions, following the decision maker's preference. The subsequent corrector step results in a new trade-off reflecting this preference. To avoid explicit Hessian computations when characterizing the tangent space of the manifold, we employ a Krylov subspace method that relies solely on matrix-vector products. These products can be efficiently obtained via automatic differentiation, ensuring both efficiency and robustness throughout the optimization process. The method's functionality and performance are demonstrated using both toy problems and examples from deep learning.

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

Fine-Tuning a 7B Advisor on Free-Tier GPUs: An Adapter-Handoff Recipe and a Synthetic-Data Reliability Caution

arXiv:2504.15610v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning a 7B language model for specialized advising is attractive in resource-constrained settings, but multi-epoch runs routinely exceed the wall-clock limits of the free-tier GPUs (Kaggle, Colab) such users rely on. We report two things. First, a practical recipe: a three-epoch QLoRA fine-tune of Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 (4-bit NF4, LoRA rank 16, via Unsloth) completed across two free-tier 16 GB GPUs (Tesla P100 then T4) by checkpointing only the small LoRA adapter (41.9M parameters) and resuming on the second machine. Adapter-only handoff is sufficient – optimizer and scheduler state need not be transferred – so the binding constraint is per-step VRAM and per-session wall-clock, not aggregate compute. Second, and more importantly, an honest evaluation that returns a cautionary result. On a blind held-out comparison against the un-fine-tuned base model, the fine-tuned model scored higher on similarity to the synthetic training distribution (BERTScore F1 +0.063, a fidelity not quality signal) but lower on advising quality: a blind LLM-as-judge preferred the base model on 46% of prompts versus 18%, and a source-verified factuality audit found four confident errors from the fine-tuned model on policy-sensitive topics against zero for the base. Auditing the training data with the same method, we find this is not a fine-tuning artifact: each audited error is already present in the Gemini-generated training answers, and a random-sample audit finds verifiable errors in a sizable fraction of responses (28-40%; single-judge, n=40). The data is therefore sufficient to account for the errors, which we attribute to the synthetic-data pipeline rather than the adapter-handoff method. We release the dataset, adapter, cross-GPU notebooks, and full evaluation harness so every result reproduces on a single 16 GB GPU.

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

CottonLeafVision: An Explainable and Robust Deep Learning Framework for Cotton Leaf Disease Classification

Globally, cotton is a highly economically beneficial crop, as the textile industry heavily depends on it. So, the precise identification and detection of cotton leaf disease is crucial for economic stability. The development goal of "CottonLeafVision" is to accurately classify and detect cotton leaf disease. With this goal, we have evaluated multiple pretrained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, including DenseNet201, InceptionV3, and VGG19 on a publicly available cotton leaf disease image dataset. This image dataset includes seven classes, six disease classes, and one healthy class, collected under various field conditions reflecting real-world challenges. Among these pretrained models, with DenseNet201, we have achieved the highest classification accuracy of 98%. To enhance the model reliability and interpretability, we have implemented different techniques and methods such as Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), occlusion sensitivity analysis and adversarial training to increase the noise resistance of the model. Finally, we have developed a prototype in order to utilize the model's capabilities on real life agriculture. This paper shows the deep learning model's capabilities to classify the disease in real-life cotton disease management situations.

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

Surrogate Benchmarks for Model Merging Optimization

arXiv:2509.02555v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model merging techniques aim to integrate the abilities of multiple models into a single model. Most model merging techniques have hyperparameters, and their setting affects the performance of the merged model. Because several existing works show that tuning hyperparameters in model merging can enhance the merging outcome, developing hyperparameter optimization algorithms for model merging is a promising direction. However, its optimization process is computationally expensive, particularly in merging LLMs. In this work, we develop surrogate benchmarks for optimization of the merging hyperparameters to realize algorithm development and performance comparison at low cost. We define two search spaces and collect data samples to construct surrogate models to predict the performance of a merged model from a hyperparameter. We demonstrate that our benchmarks can predict the performance of merged models well and simulate optimization algorithm behaviors.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Hierarchical Random Measures without Tables

arXiv:2505.02653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The hierarchical Dirichlet process is the cornerstone of Bayesian nonparametric multilevel models. Its generative model can be described through a set of latent variables, commonly referred to as tables within the popular restaurant franchise metaphor. The latent tables simplify the expression of the posterior and allow for the implementation of Gibbs sampling algorithms to approximately draw posterior samples. However, managing their assignments can become computationally expensive, especially as the size of the dataset and the number of levels increase. In this work, we identify a prior for the concentration parameter of the hierarchical Dirichlet process that (i) induces a quasi-conjugate posterior distribution, and (ii) removes the need for tables, leading to more interpretable expressions for the posterior, with both a scalable and an exact algorithm to sample from it. Remarkably, this construction extends beyond the Dirichlet process, leading to a new framework for defining normalized hierarchical random measures and a new class of algorithms to sample from their posteriors. The key analytical tool is the independence of multivariate increments, that is, their representation as completely random vectors.

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

S1-DeepResearch: Beyond Search, Toward Real-World Long-Horizon Research Agents

Deep research agents aim to solve complex knowledge-intensive tasks through long-horizon planning, evidence gathering, reasoning, and report generation. While recent progress in search agents has demonstrated strong capabilities in information retrieval and answer verification, most existing training datasets remain search-centric, focusing primarily on closed-ended question answering and information localization. As a result, they mainly train information-seeking behavior while providing limited coverage of key deep research capabilities, including evidence integration, knowledge synthesis, planning, file understanding, and structured report generation. In this work, we propose a unified trajectory construction paradigm for deep research agents that combines closed-ended QA and open-ended exploration. The proposed framework consists of graph-grounded task formulation, agentic trajectory rollout, and multi-dimensional trajectory verification, enabling scalable synthesis of high-quality agentic trajectories spanning long-chain complex reasoning, deep research instruction following, report writing, file understanding and generation, and skills usage. Compared with existing search-oriented datasets, our synthesized trajectories place greater emphasis on knowledge synthesis, complex reasoning, and planning. S1-DeepResearch-32B achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable scale across 20 benchmarks spanning five capability dimensions, including complex reasoning, instruction following, report generation, file understanding, and skills usage. On several challenging deep research benchmarks, it approaches the performance of leading proprietary frontier models. These results highlight the importance of jointly modeling information acquisition, knowledge synthesis, and planning-oriented agent behaviors for building effective deep research agents.

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

Connections Between Pairs of Filters Improve the Accuracy of Convolutional Neural Networks

While researchers continue to find new and improved network structures for CNNs, most of the newly invented architectures still rely on the traditional pattern of stacking convolutional blocks and separating them with pointwise activation functions. However, there are drawbacks to a network purely building on pointwise nonlinearities. One alternative is to introduce a pairwise connection between two filters of a network. Typical connection functions use multiplications or the minimum operation to realize logical AND connections. In this paper, we go one step further by demonstrating that CNNs can benefit from more general connections, which include parameters that are learned. With such parameters, the network is able to implement different connections in different network layers and better adapt the connection function to the task at hand.

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

Bridging Data Gaps in Structural Fragility Modeling through Transfer Learning: Methodology and Case Studies

arXiv:2606.18567v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a methodology-centered transfer learning framework for fragility adaptation under domain shift, class imbalance, and scarce target labels while preserving engineering interpretability and supporting decision-making under uncertainty. Four transfer learning strategies (instance-based, parameter-based, hierarchical Bayesian, and multi-source) are demonstrated through three complementary case studies: (i) instance-based transfer learning via importance weighting, demonstrated on coastal bridge fragility using Hurricane Katrina observations; (ii) parameter-based transfer learning together with hierarchical Bayesian transfer learning, enabling partial pooling across strata and posterior uncertainty quantification, demonstrated on residential building fragility using Hurricane Ian observations; and (iii) multi-source transfer learning that fuses multiple analytical fragility models with learned source weights and regularized target-domain adaptation, demonstrated on seismic bridge fragility using observations from the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. Across these case studies, direct transfer of source models (i.e. using existing state-of-the-art models) fails under domain shift and severe class imbalance, while targeted adaptation substantially improves failure detection and predictive stability in low-data regimes. These findings highlight the need for systematic guidance on diagnostics, strategy selection, and uncertainty reporting when developing and adapting fragility models.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Impact of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain: a representative interrupted time-series study 2022-2026

Objective: To examine changes in vaping and smoking trends following the announcement and implementation of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain. Design: Interrupted time-series analysis of representative monthly cross-sectional data from the Smoking Toolkit Study. Setting: Great Britain. Participants: 118,946 adults ([≥]16y), including 12,042 young adults (16-24y), surveyed between Jan-2022 and Feb-2026. Main outcome measures: Changes in trends in disposable vape use among vapers, and current vaping and smoking prevalence, using seasonally-adjusted generalised additive models with comparisons against a no-ban counterfactual in which pre-announcement trends continued unchanged. Results: The proportion of vapers mainly using disposable devices began to decline following the announcement of the ban in Jan-2024, with the fall accelerating after implementation in June-2025. By Feb-2026, 5.6% (95%CI 4.6-6.9) of adult vapers and 7.1% (5.1-10.1) of young adult vapers mainly used disposables, compared with 62.0% (53.6-71.8) and 63.6% (52.7-76.7), respectively, under a no-ban counterfactual. Increases in vaping prevalence slowed post-announcement and plateaued post-implementation; by Feb-2026, prevalence was lower than the no-ban counterfactual in adults (13.6% v 18.8%; difference -5.2 percentage points, 95%CI -7.1 to -3.3) and young adults (27.8% v 39.1%; -11.3, -18.6 to -4.1). Declines in smoking prevalence stalled among adults and reversed among young adults post-announcement, before shifting downward again post-implementation; by Feb-2026, smoking prevalence was similar to the no-ban counterfactual in adults (difference +0.9 percentage points, -0.5 to +2.2) but possibly higher in young adults (+3.3, -0.5 to +7.1). Conclusions: The disposable vape ban in Great Britain was associated with substantial changes after both announcement and implementation, including a marked reduction in disposable vape use and a slowing then plateauing of growth in overall vaping prevalence. However, declines in smoking also temporarily slowed–and among young adults, reversed–after the announcement, before downward trends resumed after implementation.

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

Training-free sparse attention based on cumulative energy filtering

Sparse attention accelerates Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for video generation by computing only the important tokens while skipping the rest. The token selection strategy is key to balancing sparsity and accuracy. We formulate the token filtering process as a dual-goal optimization problem: maximizing sparsity and minimizing accuracy degradation. Existing algorithms cannot fulfill both objectives simultaneously. For example, Top-p only considers the accuracy constraint, while Top-k maintains a fixed computational budget but loosens the accuracy constraint. This paper demonstrates that maintaining a fixed recall rate is sufficient for ensuring accuracy, whereas a fixed threshold is suboptimal for reducing computational cost. Therefore, we propose a dynamic thresholding scheme to improve sparsity while maintaining the same level of accuracy. Furthermore, our algorithm is deeply integrated with Flash Attention (FA), eliminating the need for any additional masking computation overhead. Experimental results on Wan 2.2 validate that, compared to the BLASST algorithm which is also integrated with FA, our dynamic thresholding strategy enhances sparsity from 61.42\% to 82\% with a VBench metric drop of less than 5\%. This results in an approximate 15\% in attention computation and a $1.61\times$ increase in computational efficiency, which is 1.18x higher than that of BLASST.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

ECMME: an atlas of selection pressures on the mammalian extracellular matrix reveals contrasting evolutionary dynamics

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a fundamental metazoan innovation that provides structural support and regulatory cues essential for multicellular life. While core matrisome components are subject to strong functional constraints, their evolutionary dynamics at the molecular level remain incompletely characterized. Here, we present a comprehensive per-residue analysis of selection pressures across 272 human core matrisome proteins using high-quality orthologous sequences from up to 228 placental mammal species. We developed an automated pipeline integrating ortholog identification, codon-aware alignments, and site-specific selection analyses with the MEME and FUBAR methods from the HyPhy suite. Results reveal pervasive strong purifying selection across the matrisome, consistent with its structural and functional indispensability. This is accompanied by episodic positive selection and rarer pervasive positive selection, with collagens exhibiting significantly elevated episodic positive selection compared to glycoproteins and proteoglycans. To facilitate community access, we developed ECMME (ECM Molecular Evolution) browser, an intuitive open-access web resource that visualizes selection metrics plotted directly onto protein topologies. ECMME allows researchers to seamlessly browse and investigate the data, providing a powerful framework for interpreting functional sites. It is available online and requires no local installation or set-up (https://izzilab-ecmme.share.connect.posit.cloud/).

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

Anatomically Conditioned Recurrent Refinement for Topology-Aware Circle of Willis Segmentation

Segmenting the Circle of Willis (CoW) from Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) is challenging due to complex topology and thin vascular structures that are prone to fragmentation. Standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) often fail to capture these topological constraints, resulting in "broken vessel" artifacts. To address this, we propose the Anatomically Conditioned Recurrent Refinement U-Net (AC2RUNet). Our architecture decouples segmentation into two streams: a Static Stream that extracts invariant anatomical features and a lightweight Dynamic Stream that iteratively refines topological errors over time. We further introduce a dynamic curriculum learning strategy that transitions from high-recall geometric supervision to topology-aware constraints. Validated on the TopCoW dataset, AC2RUNet substantially reduces Hausdorff Distance (4.72 mm vs 9.17 mm) and Betti number errors (0.19 vs 0.40), improving topological connectivity over the nnU-Net baseline while maintaining comparable volumetric Dice.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Multi-domain AD risk burden and plasma biomarkers in cognitively unimpaired adults

Introduction: Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology accumulates decades before symptom onset, yet how the cumulative effect of genetic, familial, and modifiable lifestyle risk burden jointly affects plasma biomarker levels and trajectories in cognitively unimpaired older adults remains unknown. Methods: We analyzed data from 261 participants in the PREVENT-AD cohort. A composite risk score integrating APOE e4 status, polygenic score, family history, and modifiable/lifestyle risk was examined against six plasma biomarkers using linear regression and linear mixed-effects models. Results: APOE e4 was the strongest predictor of plasma biomarker levels. Higher composite risk burden was associated with elevated ptau181, ptau217, ptau217/Ab42, and GFAP levels, and lower Ab42/40 levels. A higher risk burden was predictive of accelerated ptau181 accumulation. Discussion: Cumulative AD risk burden is broadly associated with plasma biomarker levels and specifically predicts accelerated ptau181 accumulation in cognitively unimpaired older adults, supporting structured composite risk profiling as a framework for AD risk stratification.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Taming I2V models for Image HOI Editing: A Cognitive Benchmark and Agentic Self-Correcting Framework

Current image editing methods excel at static attributes but fail at complex Human-Object Interactions (HOI), a critical challenge unaddressed by existing benchmarks that conflate HOI with static attributes, relying on global metrics incapable of simultaneously assessing dynamic interaction validity and entangled human-object pair preservation. Thus, we first introduce HOI-Edit, a comprehensive benchmark with three progressive cognitive levels, which features an automated metric HOI-Eval that reliably evaluates instance-level interaction by letting VLM Q&A after thinking with images containing grounded Human-Object pairs. Considering the task's essence of remodeling dynamic relationships, we benchmark Image-to-Video (I2V) models, finding them inherently suited for dynamic editing due to their temporal generation capabilities. Crucially, beyond superior performance, this capability provides a "replay of the failure process," offering unique diagnosability into why errors occur. We thus propose SCPE (Self-Correcting Process Editing), a novel, agentic self-correcting framework that constrains the generation of I2V models through iteratively refined prompts, enabling the generated videos to more accurately present the target HOI. Extracted frames from these videos are the final editing results. On HOI-Edit, SCPE achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art (SOTA) editing models like Nano Banana on interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/HOI-Edit.

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

Surveying GenAI-based Automation in Printed Circuit Board Design and Test

arXiv:2606.17074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used for applications in the hardware and software domains. It purports to reduce the manual effort involved in the development and testing of complex systems before release. Within the hardware space, most tasks have focused on design automation of integrated circuits, particularly with hardware description languages. However, other types of hardware also exist! In this survey, we instead examine how GenAI has been and is being across the printed circuit board (PCB) design life cycle. This includes everything from supply chains, system specification, circuit design, layout and optimisation, validation and test, and PCB assembly and distribution. Through this lens we present a taxonomy of discovered works, categorising them according to their intent and contributions. This survey also identifies key technical challenges that GenAI faces in this space, such as domain-specific data scarcity and limited support for integration with existing PCB tools. Finally, future research directions are discussed: our survey shows that there are many opportunities remaining when considering how GenAI may be integrated into various tasks in PCB design and test.

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

Bidirectional Tutoring for Developmental Motor Learning in Robots: Co-Developed Interaction Dynamics Support Stable Learning

arXiv:2606.19728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Infants are well known to develop their motor skills through dense interaction with caregivers. Although such social interaction is crucial for human development, motor-skill learning in robots is often treated as a unidirectional process in which robots passively receive demonstrations from tutors. This overlooks a key property of social interaction: it is inherently bidirectional, with tutor and learner dynamically adapting to each other. In such interactions, the robot's past experiences may function as prior constraints that shape the dynamics of their co-developed trajectories. We hypothesize that bidirectional tutoring allows such constraints to guide the formation of consistent behavioral patterns that preserve behavioral coherence and support generalization, whereas unidirectional interaction lacks such constraints and leads to broader, less consistent behavioral patterns. To examine this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments with a physical humanoid robot performing an object manipulation task: one involving human-robot interaction and another employing an AI tutor interacting with the real robot through an adaptive intervention mechanism designed to examine whether similar effects would emerge under more controlled conditions. We implement the developmental learning framework using a free-energy-principle-based neural network extended with generative replay, which supports stable sequence-by-sequence learning from single tutored episodes. Across both settings, bidirectional tutoring fostered consistent behaviors and stage-wise generalization, while the robot gradually required less tutor guidance. These results suggest that bidirectional tutoring, as an embodied and socially grounded approach, provides an effective scaffold for developmental motor learning in robots.

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

Learning What to Remember: A Cognitively Grounded Multi-Factor Value Model for Agentic Memory

arXiv:2606.12945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-running LLM agents accumulate interaction histories far larger than any context window, forcing a standing decision: what to encode deeply, what to forget, and what to retrieve under a fixed memory budget. Production systems answer with semantic similarity or recency – both mis-specified for the forgetting decision, which is made at consolidation time before the future query is known. We propose a multi-factor memory value function V(m)=\sum_i w_i f_i(m) over seven interpretable factors (emotional intensity, goal relevance, value alignment, self/user relevance, task utility, reliability, and usage history) drawn from cognitive psychology, whose weights are learned from a downstream objective by a gradient-free optimiser, and whose single scalar uniformly controls encoding depth, forget risk, and retrieval rank. We make a methodological point: on LongMemEval, scoring goal relevance against the held-out evaluation question saturates gold-evidence retention at \approx 0.98 – this measures retrieval, not forgetting. In the realistic blind regime, a learned multi-factor value retains 0.770 \pm 0.011 of gold evidence across 479 usable cases, versus 0.657 for uniform weights, 0.518 for the best single factor, and 0.368 for recency; every paired gap's 95% bootstrap CI is above zero, and a neural network over the same factors ties the linear model. The learned weights are interpretable – reliability, emotional intensity, and self/user relevance dominate, while query-time goal similarity is correctly down-weighted for the forgetting decision. A controlled synthetic task with planted confounds confirms the learner recovers a separating weighting (1.00 retention) where uniform weighting fails (0.62). The substrate is open-source; all experiments run on a single CPU with no API calls.