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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Spectrally Corrected Polynomial Approximation for Quantum Singular Value Transformation

arXiv:2603.03998v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT) provides a unified framework for applying polynomial functions to the singular values of a block-encoded matrix. QSVT prepares a state proportional to $\bA^{-1}\bb$ with circuit depth $O(d\cdot\mathrm{polylog}(N))$, where $d$ is the polynomial degree of the $1/x$ approximation and $N$ is the size of $\bA$. Current polynomial approximation methods are over the continuous interval $[a,1]$, giving $d = O(\sqrt{\kap}\log(1/\varepsilon))$, and make no use of any properties of $\bA$. We observe here that QSVT solution accuracy depends only on the polynomial accuracy at the eigenvalues of $\bA$. When all $N$ eigenvalues are known exactly, a pure spectral polynomial $p_{S}$ can interpolate $1/x$ at these eigenvalues and achieve unit fidelity at reduced degree. But its practical applicability is limited. To address this, we propose a spectral correction that exploits prior knowledge of $K$ eigenvalues of $\bA$. Given any base polynomial $p_0$, such as Remez, of degree $d_0$, a $K\times K$ linear system enforces exact interpolation of $1/x$ only at these $K$ eigenvalues without increasing $d_0$. The spectrally corrected polynomial $p_{SC}$ preserves the continuous error profile between eigenvalues and inherits the parity of $p_0$. QSVT experiments on the 1D Poisson equation demonstrate up to a $5\times$ reduction in circuit depth relative to the base polynomial, at unit fidelity and improved compliance error. The correction is agnostic to the choice of base polynomial and robust to eigenvalue perturbations up to $10\%$ relative error. Extension to the 2D Poisson equation suggests that correcting a small fraction of the spectrum may suffice to achieve fidelity above $0.999$.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Hamiltonian description of nonreciprocal interactions

arXiv:2505.05246v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In a vast class of systems, which includes members as diverse as sedimenting particles and bird flocks, interactions do not stem from a potential, and are in general nonreciprocal. Thus, it is not possible to define a conventional energy function, nor to use analytical or numerical tools that rely on it. Here, we overcome these limitations by constructing a Hamiltonian that includes auxiliary degrees of freedom; when subject to a constraint, this Hamiltonian yields the original nonreciprocal dynamics. We show that Glauber dynamics based on the constrained Hamiltonian reproduce both stationary and nonstationary states of the original Langevin dynamics, as we explicitly illustrate for dissipative XY spins with vision-cone interactions. Further, the symplectic structure inherent to our construction enables us to apply the well-developed notions of Hamiltonian engineering, which we demonstrate by varying the amplitude of a periodic drive to tune the spin interactions between those of a square and a chain lattice geometry. Overall, our framework for generic nonreciprocal pairwise interactions paves the way for bringing to bear the full conceptual and methodological power of conventional statistical mechanics and Hamiltonian dynamics to nonreciprocal systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

LARE: Low-Attention Region Encoding for Text-Image Retrieval

Image retrieval in crowded scenes is particularly challenging due to the salience bias of conventional visual encoders, which tend to focus on dominant objects while neglecting low-attention regions that are often crucial for fine-grained retrieval. We propose LARE (Low-Attention Region Encoding), a framework that explicitly models these overlooked regions. LARE adopts a dual-encoding strategy that encodes low-attention regions of an image and the full image in parallel, leading to more diverse and informative image embeddings. To evaluate image retrieval performance in challenging crowded scenes, we introduce Dense-Set, a challenging subset derived from COCO and Flickr30K. In this subset, images are re-captioned to provide richer descriptions of low-attention or previously overlooked regions. This dataset highlights the limitations of existing retrieval models and enables a more rigorous evaluation under densely crowded scene conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework improves retrieval performance by preserving subtle, non-dominant visual cues within the shared latent space.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Contrast-Informed Augmentation and Domain-Adversarial Training for Adult-to-Neonatal MR Reconstruction Generalization

Purpose: To investigate whether contrast-informed data augmentation and domain-adversarial training improve the adult-to-neonatal generalization of the E2E-VarNet. Methods: Three training regimes were investigated: (1) adult-only training with unaugmented adult data, (2) mixed training with paired unaugmented and neonatal-informed augmented adult data, and (3) mixed training with a domain-adversarial objective. Models were trained on retrospectively undersampled multi-coil adult T2-weighted brain MR data and evaluated on neonatal and adult test data at acceleration factors $R=4$ and $R=8$ using quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluation. Feature analyses assessed whether domain-adversarial training altered the latent representations of unaugmented adult, augmented adult, and neonatal test samples. Results: Mixed training (Mixed) and mixed domain-adversarial training (Mixed-DAT) outperformed unaugmented adult-only training (Unaug-Only) when evaluated on neonatal data. At R=4, Mixed-DAT achieved the best performance (SSIM = 0.924 +/- 0.027, PSNR = 33.98 +/- 1.15 dB). At R=8, Mixed-DAT performed best when measured using SSIM (0.848 +/- 0.031 vs. 0.766 +/- 0.037 for Unaug-Only and 0.814 +/- 0.035 for Mixed) and Mixed performed best when measured using PSNR (29.56 +/- 0.83 dB vs. 26.26 +/- 0.78 dB for Unaug-Only and 29.43 +/- 0.83 dB for Mixed-DAT). Qualitative assessment of t-SNE plots suggested that Mixed-DAT increased the overlap among the latent representations of the unaugmented adult, augmented adult, and neonatal test data. Conclusion: Contrast-informed augmentation and domain-adversarial training improved adult-to-neonatal generalization of deep learning-based MR reconstruction. These findings suggest that contrast-informed data augmentation combined with adversarial training may improve robustness to domain shift in undersampled neonatal MR reconstruction.

05.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-16

Evolution and the ultimatum game: An agent-based model with interbirth intervals and population structure

by Jeffrey C. Schank, Matt L. Miller The ultimatum game (UG) is widely used to study mutually beneficial exchanges, fairness, and prosocial behavior across different societies. However, human behavior in UG experiments does not align with the game-theoretical prediction that proposers should offer the least positive amount and responders should accept such offers. Instead, proposers make generous offers that are greater than the minimum responders are willing to accept, resulting in generous offers with wide offer-acceptance gaps. Numerous evolutionary models of the UG have been created and studied to explain human behavior, particularly generous offers made in UG experiments. These models have recently faced criticism for lacking biological realism and not adequately explaining the data. Here, we present an agent-based model inspired by our hunter-gatherer ancestors and with a biologically more realistic selection process. We assume that (1) agents exist in group-structured and group-clustered populations, where reproduction (2) depends on resource accumulation, but (3) is limited by interbirth intervals. We ran simulations to assess whether this biologically more realistic model evolves patterns of behavior consistent with patterns in the data from meta-analyses of human behavior in the UG. For the proposed model, we show that generous offers robustly evolve, as well as the difficult-to-explain offer-acceptance gaps, only in group-structured populations with interbirth intervals. We demonstrate that these results are robust and may help explain variation in data across societies. We discuss how interbirth intervals interact with group structure to modulate offer and rejection costs, favoring the evolution of generous offers, offer-acceptance gaps, and other patterns in the data on human behavior in the UG. We also discuss why weak selection and/or high mutation rate models cannot explain all the patterns in UG experimental data. We discuss biological realism and conclude that group structure and interbirth intervals may be essential for explaining prosocial behavior across societies.

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

Visualizing "We the People": Bridging the Perception Gap through Pluralistic Data Storytelling

arXiv:2606.24635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional visual data storytelling relies on binary graphics that depict two simplified groups in conflict. This can increase political polarization by oversimplifying intra-group disagreements and erasing ambiguity and shared ideas or values. This can inadvertently foster "us versus them" thinking. Intentional, pluralistic design choices for AI-enabled digital platforms can produce visualizations that emphasize nuance, opinion distribution, and intergroup commonalities. To demonstrate this potential, we examine deliberative technologies that map high-dimensional opinion spaces and highlight areas of both consensus and dissensus. The paper highlights the We the People deliberation conducted by Jigsaw and the Napolitan Institute in September 2025, which engaged over 2,400 Americans across all 435 congressional districts in an AI-supported, asynchronous dialogue regarding freedom and equality. By utilizing AI to synthesize long-form, text-based participant inputs into interactive "opinion landscapes," the initiative provided an alternative format for pluralistic data storytelling that humanized diverse viewpoints and revealed hidden areas of substantial broad consensus. The paper concludes that shifting from divisive, contrast-heavy visual frameworks to distribution-focused, interactive models represents a highly scalable, low-cost intervention capable of bridging perceptual gaps and cultivating a more resilient, collaborative democratic culture.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Zero-Shot Active Feature Acquisition via LLM-Elicitation

arXiv:2606.18933v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active feature acquisition (AFA) sequentially selects which features to observe to reach a classification or ranking decision. Its central limitation is reliance on large amount of labeled data to fit probabilistic models guiding acquisition. Large language models (LLMs) supply unsupervised domain knowledge, but are poor sequential planners. Asking one to both know and decide conflates capabilities best kept separate. Here, we develop a framework for zero-shot AFA through disciplined elicitation: asking the LLM only for what it can be trusted to return, the unary deviations and pairwise co-variations that are the sufficient statistics of a Markov random field (MRF). We apply our framework to two settings: binary classification and top-$k$ identification. In practice, the LLM reliably returns only discriminative statistics, what distinguishes the classes rather than each class in isolation, which precludes classical AFA. We apply a maximum-entropy closure that resolves this gauge ambiguity. We evaluate on a cohort of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) patients, an active clinical setting where diagnostic ambiguity and patient heterogeneity obstruct stable treatment strategies. Our framework outperforms the LLM both on real labels and on its own extracted beliefs. Where it matters most, on the hardest patients, our top-$k$ acquisition policy markedly outperforms all existing methods.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Doctors, Wellness Influencers, and Probiotic Gummies: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Gut Health Claims and Financial Conflicts on TikTok

TikTok has emerged as a major source of health information, yet concerns persist regarding the accuracy of content and influence of financial conflicts. Gut health content is particularly vulnerable to misinformation. This study examined the relationship between creator profession ("medical" versus "non-medical") and the quality of gut health claims and the presence of financial conflicts on TikTok. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 412 TikTok creator accounts identified using the search terms "guthealth," "gutcleansing," and "digestion." One video per creator was analyzed. Creator profession was categorized as medical or non-medical. Health claim quality was coded as high, moderate, or poor. Financial conflicts (Showcase, Subscription, external links) were assessed. Modified Poisson regression was used to estimate prevalence ratios (PRs) of health claim quality (high versus poor- or moderate-quality) and financial conflicts between medical and non-medical creators, and negative binomial regression was used to evaluate associations between claim quality and number of video likes. Non-medical creators were more likely than medical creators to present poor- or moderate-quality health claims (adjusted PR: 2.33; 95% CI: 1.50-3.62). Most creators (92%) exhibited at least one financial conflict, and Showcase use was greater among non-medical creators (adjusted PR: 1.57; 95% CI: 1.02-2.42). Videos containing moderate- and poor-quality health claims received three times as many likes as videos containing high-quality claims. Non-medical creators disproportionately produced lower-quality gut health content on TikTok, and misleading claims received greater engagement. These findings highlight a misalignment between information quality and visibility, emphasizing the need for interventions promoting evidence-based health communication.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MamBOA: State-Space Architecture for Video Recognition

Fine-grained action recognition demands temporal reasoning that general-purpose architectures address through different cost-accuracy tradeoffs: 3D dense operators couple computation to the input volume, while difference-based methods approximate motion through rigid, hand-crafted subtraction of uncontextualized features - each reflecting a deliberate design choice with corresponding limitations in expressiveness or flexibility. We present MamBOA, a backbone-agnostic temporal framework built upon a novel interleaved scan structure that recasts the selective state-space recurrence (S6) as a native motion synthesizer. By interleaving consecutive feature representations extracted from a pretrained backbone into a single alternating sequence, the proposed scan structurally drives the recurrence to encode both temporal observations of each position within a shared hidden state, separated by only a single decay step - rendering the inter-frame transition an intrinsic component of the state dynamics rather than an externally computed quantity. A cascade of dedicated alignment and decoding operations then distills this joint encoding into an explicit motion representation, which a dual-path pooling mechanism adaptively aggregates by balancing attention-driven selection with uniform temporal coverage. The framework interfaces seamlessly with CNN, Transformer, and Mamba backbone families, adding only ~2.1 GFLOPs per feature pair. On Diving48, MamBOA achieves 85.02% Top-1 accuracy with an image-pretrained backbone and 86.24% with a video-pretrained backbone processing the entire video in a single forward pass - demonstrating that structurally induced state-space dynamics constitute a principled and general foundation for motion modeling.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

A Hybrid CNN-LSTM Intrusion Detection Framework for Cybersecurity in Smart Renewable Energy Grids

arXiv:2606.25200v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The accelerated digitalization of renewable energy smart grids through IoT sensors, AMI, and SCADA systems has significantly expanded the attack surface for sophisticated cyberattacks, FDI attacks that stealthily distort state estimation and DoS/DDoS attacks that flood communication channels. Current IDS, however, exhibit three inherent limitations: inadequate modeling of the temporal progression of multi-step attacks, degraded scalability under extremely skewed class distributions of standard benchmark datasets, and restricted generalization across heterogeneous network environments. In this study, we present a Hybrid CNN-LSTM IDS that jointly exploits CNN-based spatial feature extraction and LSTM-based temporal sequence modeling, enabling the detection of instantaneous volumetric anomalies and gradually evolving low and slow-attack campaigns in real time. The model was trained using a seven-step preprocessing workflow comprising missing-value imputation, min-max normalization, one-hot encoding, SMOTE class balancing, mutual-information feature selection, causal temporal sequence construction (T=10), and stratified partitioning. LSTM (96.1%), Random Forest (93.5%), SVM (91.2%) and KNN (89.7%); in NSL-KDD, it reaches 98.2% precision versus 96.4% (LSTM), 95.2% (CNN), 92.7% (Random Forest) and 90.8% (SVM), with margins of 2-9 percentage points in all measures. An ablation analysis identified SMOTE balancing as the most influential design choice (-3.7~pp F1 without it). The model achieves a real-time inference throughput of 27,800 flows/s on GPU and 0.082 ms/sample CPU latency in FP32,, with INT8 quantization providing an additional 3.1 x speedup at 0.3% accuracy loss, confirming deployment feasibility on resource-constrained IEDs with

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

From ASR to ASP: Evaluating Prompt Attack Vulnerabilities Against Open-Source LLMs

Recent studies demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks that generate harmful or sensitive outputs. As open-source LLMs are increasingly adopted in high-impact applications such as finance, law, and healthcare, systematically investigating their security risks is becoming increasingly important towards trustworthy LLM era. This paper comprehensively studies effective prompt injection attacks against 14 widely used open-source and three closed-source LLMs on five attack benchmarks. Moreover, existing evaluation metrics mostly only consider the attack success rate, overlooking uncertainty in model responses. Our proposed Attack Success Probability (ASP) additionally captures uncertain behaviors for evaluation, where the model may initially refuse a harmful request but subsequently provide harmful guidance or vice versa, reflecting inconsistency and ambiguity in attack feasibility. By systematically analyzing the effectiveness of prompt injection attacks, we propose a straightforward and effective hypnotism attack; results show that this attack causes aligned language models, including Stablelm2, Mistral, Openchat, and Vicuna, to generate objectionable behaviors, achieving around 90% ASP. They also indicate that ignore prefix attacks can break all 14 open-source LLMs, achieving over 60% ASP on a multi-categorical dataset. We find that moderately well-known LLMs exhibit higher vulnerability to prompt injection attacks, highlighting the need to raise public awareness and prioritize efficient mitigation strategies.

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

StepGuard: Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration

arXiv:2606.17871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web navigation requires agents to follow natural language goals, interact with web pages, and produce accurate answers. While recent advances leverage vision-language models and reinforcement learning, existing methods still suffer from single-step fragility due to reward misalignment and error propagation. To tackle the reward entanglement, we design Dynamic Dual-Policy Optimization (DDPO), which dynamically switches between a navigation-first mode for exploration and an answer-first mode for question-answering to mitigate reward conflict. To calibrate the single-step error, we propose Confidence-Guided Adaptive Navigation Reflection (CANR), a mechanism that estimates per-step confidence, triggers reflection only when necessary, and uses contrastive rewards to encourage self-correction to calibrate the single-step inaccuracy. With the above as the main components, we finally develop our StepGuard, a new framework of Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves navigation and answer accuracy, setting new state-of-the-art performance on standard web navigation benchmarks.

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

What Semantics Survive the Connector? Diagnosing VLM-to-DiT Alignment in Video Editing

Flow matching based video generative models have been increasingly relying on prepended Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to handle complex, instruction-based video editing. The prevailing assumption underlying this paradigm is that a connector module can seamlessly align the VLM's rich multi-modal reasoning with the original text embedding space of DiTs. However, we hypothesize that this alignment acts as a severe semantic bottleneck, degrading fine-grained structural variables. Verifying this is challenging, as end-to-end evaluations conflate alignment failures with generation errors, and natural datasets lack disentangled annotations. To rigorously investigate this, we propose a controlled data processing pipeline based on video composition that results in TRACE-Edit, a diagnostic dataset focusing on relation-based editing. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a comprehensive diagnostic protocol to analyze two important designs of meta-query and connector in the existing video editing models. Systematic evaluation of four representative model cases reveals that fine-grained structural semantics can be severely degraded during alignment. Our findings overturn the assumption of lossless semantic transfer, identifying the VLM-to-DiT alignment as a major bottleneck and providing a new diagnostic foundation for future multi-modal alignment architectures.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Experimental probe of quantum coherence in top-quark pair production

arXiv:2602.21069v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate quantum coherence in top–antitop spin states produced at the LHC using the $l_1$-norm of coherence applied to the reconstructed spin density matrix. Combining Standard Model predictions with recent CMS measurements of spin-correlation coefficients, we study the dependence of coherence on the invariant mass $M_{t\bar t}$ and the scattering angle. We find that coherence is large both near the production threshold and in boosted central events, whereas an intermediate-mass region exhibits reduced interference strength and enhanced sensitivity to radiative effects. This non-monotonic kinematic behavior originates from the helicity-interference structure of the underlying QCD production amplitudes. Recasting the CMS measurements in terms of quantum coherence yields values that are broadly consistent with Standard Model expectations. Our results establish quantum coherence as an experimentally accessible probe of spin dynamics in top-quark pair production and demonstrate its potential as a precision observable for studies of the top-quark spin-density matrix at hadron colliders.

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

Sarashina2.2-TTS: Tackling Kanji Polyphony in Japanese Speech Generation via Data Scaling and Targeted Data Synthesis

While large language model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have achieved high-quality speech synthesis, most existing systems focus on English and Chinese. Japanese, however, remains under-explored, and its unique linguistic challenges, such as widespread context-dependent kanji polyphony, have yet to be adequately tackled. Here we introduce Sarashina2.2-TTS (https://github.com/sbintuitions/sarashina2.2-tts), a Japanese-centric LLM-TTS system that tackles these challenges through a dual approach: data strategy and evaluation methodology. First, we scale training to approximately 361k hours of speech, incorporating a balanced mix of Japanese and English data. Furthermore, we design a targeted data augmentation pipeline covering all 2,136 Joyo (regular-use) kanji designated by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs to efficiently address kanji polyphony disambiguation. Second, we introduce the Joyo Kanji Yomi Benchmark (https://github.com/sbintuitions/JoyoKanji-Yomi-Benchmark), covering all 2,136 Joyo kanji and their 4,378 readings. Alongside this benchmark, we propose Kana-CER, a metric that compares synthesized speech against reference readings in the kana space, eliminating orthographic variations to directly measure pronunciation correctness. Experiments demonstrate that our targeted data augmentation significantly improves reading accuracy. Overall, Sarashina2.2-TTS achieves state-of-the-art kanji-level reading accuracy and matches top baselines on general sentence-level pronunciation, while delivering the highest speaker similarity in zero-shot Japanese speech synthesis. Furthermore, cross-lingual evaluation reveals that Sarashina2.2-TTS is the only system that maintains stable Japanese pronunciation regardless of the prompt language, confirming that our balanced training approach improves cross-lingual robustness.

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

Theorem-Grounded Execution Ontologies for Interpretable Machine Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models have achieved impressive performance on reasoning tasks spanning mathematics, science, programming, and commonsense inference. Despite these advances, their reasoning processes remain largely latent, making them difficult to interpret, verify, replay, debug, and transfer across domains. Existing approaches such as chain-of-thought, tree-of-thoughts, graph-of-thoughts, and tool-augmented reasoning expose intermediate reasoning artifacts but typically lack explicit execution semantics, formal state representations, and verifiable reasoning structures. We introduce Theorem-Grounded Execution Ontologies (TGEO), a framework that models reasoning as an executable state-transition process rather than a sequence of generated tokens. Given an input problem, TGEO identifies relevant theorem families, binds the problem to a domain ontology, discovers semantic objects, instantiates states and operators, constructs predicates and contracts, and synthesizes an executable reasoning graph. The resulting graph provides an interpretable, replayable, and auditable representation of reasoning in which every state transition, operator application, and validation step is explicitly represented. TGEO integrates five architectural components: (1) theorem-grounded reasoning priors, (2) executable ontologies, (3) operator-mediated state transitions, (4) predicate and contract-based execution validation, and (5) architectural auditing and failure localization. We evaluate TGEO on theorem-intensive reasoning tasks derived from mathematical benchmark domains and a curated Golden Execution Suite. Our findings demonstrate the value of executable reasoning representations for interpretable, verifiable, and reproducible AI reasoning systems.

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

Trustworthy Image Authentication using Forensic Knowledge Graphs

Advances in generative AI have made image falsification highly realistic, demanding trustworthy authentication systems. Existing forensic detectors can target certain forgery types but lack interpretability, while vision-language models (VLMs) provide explanations but cannot exploit forensic traces for reliable detection. We propose Forensic Knowledge Graphs (FKGs), a unified framework that integrates forensic evidence extraction, structured reasoning, and human-interpretable explanation. Our FKG structure encodes forensic traces along with their causal dependencies and links to scene content. To generate accurate FKGs, we introduce a novel forensic authentication network and an Iterative Context Refinement strategy that guides VLMs to produce faithful, grounded explanations. We also present FKG-50K, a dataset of 50,000 realistic forgeries with ground-truth FKGs. Experiments demonstrate that FKG outperforms both forensic detectors and VLMs in detection, forgery identification and localization, and forensic justification.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

HERO: Hindsight-Enhanced Reflection from Environment Observations for Agentic Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.11559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning typically improves multi-turn agent capabilities through the terminal outcome of the trajectories, which makes it difficult to determine credit assignments for each intermediate turns. Recent on-policy self-distillation methods offer a promising alternative by converting privileged feedback into dense token-level supervision through a self-teacher. Our study is motivated by the unexpected performance degradation observed when naively extending this paradigm to multi-turn settings, which we attribute to a lack of alignment between privileged feedback, such as successful trajectories or terminal outcomes, and the student's current decision context. We introduce HERO, a hindsight-enhanced self-distillation framework that uses next environment observations as locally aligned feedback. After each rollout, HERO reflects on the completed interaction to convert each observation into a compact turn-level diagnosis, that captures actionable feedback about the original action such as its necessity, validity or failure cause. On TauBench and WebShop, HERO improves task success and reduces unnecessary turns over environment-feedback-only self-distillation and GRPO. It is especially effective under limited training turn budgets, where successful rollouts are rare and GRPO provides weak reward-contrast signals.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Better data, better trees: GenBank-GISAID deduplication and source-specific artifact masking in viral genomics

GenBank and GISAID are the primary repositories for viral genomic data, but integrating records across them remains a challenge. The same sequence could be made available in both databases without any cross-reference linking the two entries. Consequently, there is no systematic way to identify this redundancy, which compromises the compilation of representative, non-redundant large-scale datasets. In parallel, the growth of viral genomic data has increased the risk of systematic technical artifacts introduced during sequencing or assembly. These artifacts can inflate substitution rate estimates and degrade temporal signal, biasing evolutionary rate estimates. To address both challenges, here we present a formal, reproducible workflow integrating two newly developed complementary tools: G2G matcher for cross-repository harmonization and Lab-Specific Bias FILTer (LSBFILT) for masking of laboratory-specific artifacts. Using the Eastern/Central/South African (ECSA) chikungunya virus lineage as a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate that our integrated workflow restores temporal signal and provides a robust, curated dataset for downstream phylodynamic analyses. Critically, restricting masking of homoplastic sites to specific sequences reduces the substitution rate estimate from an inflated 8.517 x 10e-4; to 5.078 x 10e-4; substitutions/site/year and increases the coefficient of determination (R2) of the root-to-tip regression analysis from 0.353 to 0.677. By enabling systematic cross-repository harmonization and source-specific artifact masking, we provide the molecular epidemiological community with scalable tools to reconcile fragmented genomic data and reduce technical biases, fostering more accurate and reproducible phylogenetic analysis. G2G matcher is available at https://github.com/andrezaleite/G2G-Matcher, and LSBFILT at https://github.com/khourious/LSBFILT.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

IPO Finance Agent: Evaluation of LLM Financial Analysts beyond Finance Agent v2, with Automated Rubric Generation – the Case of the SpaceX (SPCX) IPO

arXiv:2606.23032v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Finance Agent v2 (by Vals AI) has emerged as the reference benchmark for evaluating both Anthropic Claude and OpenAI ChatGPT frontier language models on financial tasks. However, it narrowly deals with periodic reporting from publicly traded companies (SEC 10-K and 10-Q filings), and its agentic harness relies on naive, unenriched chunk retrieval. Neither the task design nor the retrieval approach addresses the distinct challenges of IPO due diligence. SEC S-1 filings combine historical financial statements, governance structures, pro forma and common-control accounting treatments, capital-formation narratives, and underwriting-sensitive risk disclosures within substantially longer documents than typical periodic filings. That is why we introduce IPO Finance Agent, which extends the Finance Agent v2 framework along two directions: task domain and retrieval architecture. During our experiments, the original Finance Agent v2 harness basically failed to deliver any output related to the SpaceX S-1 filing, due to document length. We therefore had to improve the agentic harness with contextual retrieval, a more realistic and industry-standard approach for long documents. We also built a dataset of 1,000 IPO-diligence questions, and publicly release 70 questions on the SpaceX (SPCX) S-1 filing to support reproducibility, while the remainder are held private to guard against benchmark contamination. In addition, we introduce an evaluator-optimizer pipeline to automatically generate evaluation rubrics for the benchmark: candidate facts are extracted from model answers, consolidated into draft criteria, then automatically audited for omissions, hallucinations, mistiered items, and redundancy, with LLM feedback driving iterative repair, targeted enrichment, and deduplication. Human experts only review final rubrics before deployment. Results show that the best-performing evaluated model, Alibaba Qwen 3.7 Max, reaches 79.4% accuracy at 0.30 USD per query, and the most cost-efficient model on the resulting Pareto frontier, Xiaomi MiMo-2.5 Pro, reaches slightly lower accuracy (76.8%) at 0.05 USD per query. Both exceed the current Finance Agent v2 leaderboard ceiling-Google Gemini 3.5 Flash at 57.9% for 2.51 USD per querywhile undercutting even FABv2's cheapest entry (MiniMax M3: 48.3% at 0.32 USD) on cost-efficiency. Code and data are released on GitHub: https://github.com/benstaf/ipoagent

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Follow Your Track: Precise Skeleton Animation Controlled by 3D Trajectories

4D generation aims to animate 3D objects with realistic motion, holding great promise for applications. Existing methods typically decouple 3D asset generation from motion synthesis: acquire a 3D asset, prepare a structural representation like mesh and Gaussians, and synthesize motion from text or video control signals. However, dense mesh and Gaussian representations incur high computational costs and are prone to temporal artifacts, limiting animation quality and duration to only short clips. Meanwhile, text lacks fine-grained spatial and temporal details such as timing and coordination, while video entangles motion with appearance and background. Together, these limitations result in 4D animations that suffer from poor temporal consistency, wrong identification, and limited controllability. We address these issues with \texttt{ACT}, a trajectory-conditioned framework for topology-general skeletal animation. ACT uses skeletons as a compact structured and compute-efficient representation and 3D point trajectories from monocular video as explicit motion guidance which provide detailed motion patterns without appearance entanglement. At the core of ACT is a Routed Trajectory Injector, which achieves accurate and robust trajectory-to-joint transfer through three complementary designs: prior-guided hard routing establishes precise skeleton-to-mesh correspondences, global routing enables holistic joint-track interaction for full-body motion awareness, and local windowed cross-attention enforces fine-grained temporal alignment, improving micro-timing and reducing motion misalignment across varying motion rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \texttt{ACT} significantly outperforms existing methods in fidelity and temporal consistency.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

MIMFlow: Integrating Masked Image Modeling with Normalizing Flows for End-to-End Image Generation

Normalizing Flows (NFs) are powerful generative models capable of exact density estimation and sampling. However, their strict invertibility often forces the model to exhaust its capacity on low-level pixel details, hindering the capture of high-level semantic structures. While Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has excelled in representation learning, its integration into generative pipelines has remained largely modular and disjointed. In this paper, we propose MIMFlow, a unified end-to-end framework that jointly optimizes latent semantics, pixel reconstruction, and generative flow. By employing a VAE encoder to infer semantic latent from masked images, MIMFlow achieves a principled decoupling of the generative task: the Normalizing Flow focuses on modeling a simplified, low-frequency semantic manifold, while a specialized decoder handles high-frequency synthesis. This design effectively resolves the inherent capacity bottleneck of NFs, allowing the model to prioritize global structural coherence over redundant noise. Empirical results on ImageNet 256$\times$256 show that MIMFlow-L reaches 71.3\% linear probing accuracy and an FID of 2.50. Despite using only 128 tokens (50\% fewer than standard models), it yields a 32.8\% performance gain over similar-scale NF baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MIMFlow.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

EcoBin: A Two-Stage Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Contamination-Aware Waste Classification

Waste classification models have become highly accurate at sorting waste, often exceeding 95% on benchmark datasets. However, these models fail to account for contamination in recyclable waste. We present EcoBin, a two-stage deep convolutional neural network that classifies household waste by its disposal pathway and that explicitly accounts for contamination. The first stage is a base waste classifier built on an EfficientNetV2-S backbone that assigns each of the thirty waste categories in our dataset to one of four disposal pathways. The second stage is a contamination classifier that inspects any item routed toward recycling and overrides the decision to garbage when contamination is detected. Because no public dataset of contaminated recyclables exists, we synthesize one by segmenting images of clean recyclable objects with a U2-Net model and compositing realistic contamination textures onto their surfaces. The first stage achieves 87.42% test accuracy and a 96.13% pathway-adjusted accuracy. Meanwhile, the contamination stage distinguishes clean from contaminated items with a 0.99 ROC-AUC. On a test set of contaminated recyclables, the complete pipeline routes 24 of 25 items correctly, compared with only 1 of 25 for the base classifier alone. A McNemar's test confirms that the improvement contributed by the contamination stage is statistically significant (p < 0.001).

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

Non-Autoregressive Minimum Bayes' Risk Decoding for Fast Speech Recognition

Non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding generates output tokens in parallel, making speech recognition faster than autoregressive decoding, which generates them sequentially from left to right. However, the recognition performance is degraded because NAR decoding cannot resolve uncertainty by conditioning on previously generated tokens. To address this issue, we propose a novel NAR decoding framework based on minimum Bayes' risk (MBR) decoding, termed NAR-MBR decoding, that maximizes the expected utility calculated from samples drawn from the output probability of an NAR model rather than maximizing the output probability. Notably, by leveraging the nature of NAR models, multiple samples are obtained efficiently with a single forward computation. Our experiments across LibriSpeech, Switchboard, AMI, and web presentation corpus demonstrated that our NAR-MBR decoding outperformed previous NAR decoding and ran faster than AR decoding.