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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Europe must seize the moment to lead on free and open science

Authors: Unknown Author

An under-appreciated research powerhouse, Europe has a responsibility to champion democratic science that is accessible to all the world’s research talent. An under-appreciated research powerhouse, Europe has a responsibility to champion democratic science that is accessible to all the world’s research talent.

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

The Answer Lies Within: Self-Derived Rewards Enable Explainable Relation Extraction

Authors:
Xinyu Guo↗Zhengliang Shi↗Minglai Yang↗Mihai Surdeanu↗

Despite the remarkable reasoning capabilities of large language models, they still struggle with one-shot relation extraction without predefined relation labels. We identify two pitfalls: models are often misled by irrelevant tokens instead of relation-conveying semantics, and they often fail to align with the abstraction level human annotators expect. We introduce a novel framework that closes this gap with two components: (1) COGRE, a cognitively-inspired reasoning framework that structures RE into a series of processes mimicking human text-processing; and (2) HIT@DICT, a reinforcement learning intermediate reward strategy that encourages reasoning to align with relational labels by rewarding relation-relevant phrases in reasoning. The reward is derived on a credit dictionary automatically extracted from correct predictions. Our experiments show that our framework improves both accuracy and explanation quality by addressing these two pitfalls. For example, COGRE with Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on One-shot NYT29 achieves 24.65% F1, surpassing prior reasoning-based designs. Optimizing this approach with RL using HIT@DICT further improves performance by +23.46% points. Finally, human evaluation shows that our best model generates relational phrases closely aligned with gold labels, increasing human explanation quality ratings by 54% (relative).

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

LastAct: Trajectory-Guided Latest-Activity Localization for Real-Time Smart-Home Activity Recognition

Authors:
Zishuai Liu↗Ruili Fang↗Jin Lu↗Fei Dou↗

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) from ambient sensors enables smart-home applications such as health monitoring and assisted living. In realistic deployments, however, sensor events arrive as a continuous stream and activity boundaries are unknown. Sliding-window inference therefore produces many windows that straddle transitions and contain mixed activities, creating boundary contamination that violates the pre-segmented instance assumption used by most benchmarks and models. Moreover, many pipelines under-use spatial context by treating sensor IDs as independent tokens. We present LastAct, a trajectory-centric framework for streaming smart-home HAR that targets the most recent activity under mixed windows while explicitly modeling spatial structure. LastAct projects sensor events onto the home floorplan to form a layout-aligned trajectory image sequence that preserves spatial continuity. A lightweight gate identifies contaminated windows, and a boundary localizer estimates the last transition to enable boundary-guided masking that emphasizes post-boundary evidence and suppresses stale context. For efficiency, we reuse a precomputed layout-aligned template cache to avoid repeated rendering. Empirically, across four public smart-home datasets under near-realistic mixed-activity protocols, LastAct achieves competitive or superior performance on pure windows and yields substantial Macro-F1 gains on cross/mixed windows, demonstrating improved robustness under near-realistic sliding-window regimes.

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

Technical Report for ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge: Leveraging DINOv3 for Robust Outdoor Scene Understanding in Field Robotics

Authors:
Jaeil Park↗Hyobin Choi↗Sangjin Lee↗Hyungtae Lim↗Sung-Hoon Yoon↗

The GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge at the ICRA 2026 Workshop on Field Robotics evaluates dense semantic segmentation of off-road imagery over a fine-grained taxonomy of 64 classes and 11 evaluated non-void coarse categories. We present the first-place solution to this challenge. Our solution comprises two complementary improvements: (a) a network-level design that combines a self-supervised DINOv3 ViT-L/16 backbone, a ViT-Adapter, and a Mask2Former mask-classification decoder, together with a coarse-category auxiliary loss on the global [CLS] token; and (b) an inference-time aggregation strategy based on multi-scale and horizontal-flip test-time augmentation and an ensemble of the top three checkpoints selected using Codabench scores. Our method achieves an official composite score of 76.57%, consisting of 69.32% fine-class mIoU and 83.81% category-level mIoU, and ranks first on the final phase leaderboard: www.codabench.org/competitions/14257/#/results-tab.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Trainable Photonic Measurement for Physics-Informed PDE Learning

Authors:
Jiale Linghu↗Hao Dong↗Yangshuai Wang↗

arXiv:2606.18713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photonic quantum machine learning offers a route to trainable physical representations built from phase, interference and measurement. However, its role in scientific machine learning remains largely unexplored. Physics-informed neural fields provide a natural setting, because differential equations require trial spaces that preserve phase, frequency and derivative structure. Here we introduce a photonic quantum neural field in which coordinates become trainable optical phases, are mixed by multi-photon Fock-space interference and are decoded from photon-number measurements. The photonic circuit is optimized as the neural-field representation itself, not as a fixed feature map or hardware accelerator. Photonic measurement is therefore a trainable representation on which the physics-informed residual is minimized. Across seven elliptic, wave, nonlinear dispersive and inverse PDE benchmarks, we observe a phase-complexity transition: classical coordinate and Fourier-feature networks suffice in smooth regimes, whereas the photonic field is most accurate when residual derivatives amplify phase mismatch. In the hardest regimes it gives the lowest errors, with margins reaching an order of magnitude and about one quarter of the trainable parameters of classical baselines. Frozen and shuffled controls, together with noise stress tests, attribute this gain to learned interference and stable Fock-probability readout under compound perturbations. These results identify photonic quantum measurement as a representation-learning principle for scientific machine learning.

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

SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning

Authors:
Seokju Cho↗Ryo Hachiuma↗Abhishek Badki↗Hang Su↗Byung-Kwan Lee↗Chan Hee Song↗Sifei Liu↗Subhashree Radhakrishnan↗Seungryong Kim↗Yu-Chiang Frank Wang↗Min-Hung Chen↗

Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). Tool-augmented agents attempt to address this by augmenting VLMs with specialist perception modules, yet their effectiveness is bounded by the action interface through which those tools are invoked. In this work, we study how the design of this interface shapes the agent's capacity for open-ended spatial reasoning. Existing spatial agents either employ single-pass code execution, which commits to a full analysis strategy before any intermediate result is observed, or rely on a structured tool-call interface that often offers less flexibility for freely composing operations or tailoring the analysis to each task. Both designs offer limited flexibility for open-ended, complex 3D/4D spatial reasoning. We therefore propose SpatialClaw, a training-free framework for spatial reasoning that adopts code as the action interface. SpatialClaw maintains a stateful Python kernel pre-loaded with input frames and a suite of perception and geometry primitives, letting a VLM-backed agent write one executable cell per step conditioned on all prior outputs, enabling the agent to flexibly compose and manipulate perception results and adapt its analysis to both intermediate text and visual observations and the demands of each problem. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks spanning a broad range of static and dynamic 3D/4D spatial reasoning tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the recent spatial agent by +11.2 points, with consistent gains across six VLM backbones from two model families without any benchmark- or model-specific adaptation.

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

Are Neuro-Inspired Multi-Modal Vision-Language Models Resilient to Membership Inference Privacy Leakage?

Authors:
David Amebley↗Sayanton Dibbo↗

In the age of agentic AI, the growing deployment of multi-modal models (MMs) has introduced new attack vectors that can leak sensitive training data in MMs, causing privacy leakage. This paper investigates a black-box privacy attack, i.e., membership inference attack (MIA) on multi-modal vision-language models (VLMs). State-of-the-art research analyzes privacy attacks primarily to unimodal AI-ML systems, while recent studies indicate MMs can also be vulnerable to privacy attacks. While researchers have demonstrated that biologically inspired neural network representations can improve unimodal model resilience against adversarial attacks, it remains unexplored whether neuro-inspired MMs are resilient against privacy attacks. In this work, we introduce a systematic neuroscience-inspired topological regularization (tau) framework to analyze MM VLMs resilience against image-text-based inference privacy attacks. We examine this phenomenon using three VLMs: BLIP, PaliGemma 2, and ViT-GPT2, across three benchmark datasets: COCO, CC3M, and NoCaps. Our experiments compare the resilience of baseline and neuro VLMs (with topological regularization), where the tau > 0 configuration defines the NEURO variant of VLM. Our results on the BLIP model using the COCO dataset illustrate that MIA attack success in NEURO VLMs drops by 24% mean ROC-AUC, while achieving similar model utility (similarities between generated and reference captions) in terms of MPNet and ROUGE-2 metrics. This shows neuro VLMs are comparatively more resilient against privacy attacks, while not significantly compromising model utility. Our extensive evaluation with PaliGemma 2 and ViT-GPT2 models, on two additional datasets: CC3M and NoCaps, further validates the consistency of the findings. This work contributes to the growing understanding of privacy risks in MMs and provides evidence on neuro VLMs privacy threat resilience.

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08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Complex-valued representations of time-series gene expression profiles for network analysis

Authors:
Sun↗Cao↗Ikumi↗Shimizu↗K. K↗Sese↗

Time-series RNA sequencing provides a powerful framework for studying dynamic gene regulation, yet conventional analyses usually represent gene expression profiles as real-valued vectors in Euclidean space and quantify similarity using correlation or distance. Inspired by quantum information theory, we present a framework for encoding time-series gene expression profiles as complex-valued vectors comprising amplitude and phase components in Hilbert space. We designed multiple encoding models to represent gene expression in the amplitude of complex-valued vectors, encode temporal differences in the phase, and extend the phase representation to incorporate the direction of local expression changes. Gene-gene similarity was then quantified using fidelity, which measures the overlap between two encoded vectors. Evaluation using time-series RNA-seq datasets across diverse species and biological contexts showed that different encoding models produced distinct fidelity distributions that were related to, but distinct from, conventional correlation measures. We then constructed gene-gene networks using pairwise fidelity values and detected communities containing genes with similar temporal profiles. Although fidelity distributions differed across encoding models, the resulting communities captured major temporal expression programs, and functional annotations based on gene ontology and Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes pathway analyses provided exploratory biological context. The detected communities were comparable to those obtained using conventional methods, including weighted correlation network analysis and fuzzy c-means clustering. Furthermore, as a proof-of-concept, we performed SWAP-test circuit simulations to mimic fidelity computation on a quantum computer; under noise-aware conditions, these simulations produced less accurate fidelity estimates with higher computational cost than classical computation. As a proof-of-concept, this study provides a complementary view of temporal transcriptome organization, rather than a uniformly superior alternative to conventional methods.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Entanglement Degree, Mean Positronium Lifetime, and the $3\gamma$/$2\gamma$ Annihilation-Rate Ratio as Novel PET Biomarkers for Hypoxia – Concept, Challenges, and Predictions

Authors:
Pawel Moskal↗

arXiv:2605.00021v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This manuscript introduces a novel method to assess tissue oxygen concentration via the quantum entanglement (QE) of photons originating from positronium which is produced within the patient's body during positron emission tomography. We also investigate the possibility of assessing hypoxia by simultaneously detecting positronium lifetime and the positronium decay rate ratio. We introduce two distinct quantum sensing approaches. Method 1 utilizes the correlation between oxygen concentration and ortho-positronium (o-Ps) decay rates, relying on the simultaneous measurement of the mean o-Ps lifetime ($\tau_{\mathrm{oPs}}$) and the $3\gamma$-to-$2\gamma$ annihilation rate ratio of o-Ps ($R_{\mathrm{oPs-3\gamma/2\gamma}}$). Method 2 introduces a novel hypothesis: that the degree of QE is sensitive to the relative contribution of annihilation mechanisms (pick-off vs. conversion), which in turn depends on oxygen concentration. We derive a formula for partial pressure of oxygen ($p\mathrm{O}_2$) as a function of $R_{\mathrm{oPs-3\gamma/2\gamma}}$ and $\tau_{\mathrm{oPs}}$ and estimate the measurement accuracy required for these parameters - and for the degree of QE - to sense in-vivo oxygen pressure in the range between hypoxic and physoxic conditions. Theoretical models and quantitative estimates for $R_{\mathrm{oPs-3\gamma/2\gamma}}$, $\tau_{\mathrm{oPs}}$ and for the degree of QE ($C_{\mathrm{QE}}$ ) as a function of $p\mathrm{O}_2$ are provided for water, isopropanol, cyclohexane, isooctane, and adipose tissue. In particular, applying the formulas derived under the working hypothesis that in pick-off process the photons are not entangled, we estimated that for $p\mathrm{O}_2 = 0$, the degree of quantum entanglement $C_{\mathrm{QE}}$ is equal to 0.890 for adipose, 0.886 for isopropanol, 0.867 for water, 0.818 for cyclohexane, and 0.784 for isooctane.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Deep Sleep Classification via EEG Signal Criticality: A Passive BCI Approach for Sleep-Improvement Neurofeedback

Authors:
Stanis{\l}aw Nar\k{e}bski↗Tomasz Komendzi\'nski↗Tomasz M. Rutkowski↗

arXiv:2606.13017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated sleep staging is a fundamental application of passive Brain-Computer Interfaces (pBCI), decoding spontaneous neural states to enable closed-loop interventions independent of user intent. This study evaluates criticality features derived from Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) for the specific identification of deep sleep (N3). We analyzed $347,232$ EEG epochs from $290$ older women using UMAP manifold learning to visualize state transitions. Subsequently, six classifiers were benchmarked via 10-fold cross-validation, using balanced accuracy to determine the optimal "state-sensing" engine for neurofeedback.Naive Bayes achieved the highest mean balanced accuracy ($87.17\% \pm 0.24\%$), significantly outperforming a fully connected deep neural network (FNN: $81.58\%$) and Random Forest ($80.97\%$). Linear models (LDA: $57.21\%$; SVM: $51.01\%$) performed poorly, indicating that DFA-derived criticality features reside on a distinct, non-linear manifold. Probabilistic decoding of EEG criticality provides a high-accuracy sensing mechanism for pBCIs. This robust classification pipeline supports the development of state-dependent neurofeedback, such as targeted auditory stimulation, to enhance cognitive recovery.

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11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

On the convex hull of a planar Brownian bridge with a random Gaussian endpoint

Authors:
Nikola Sandri\'c↗Stjepan \v{S}ebek↗Luka \v{S}imek↗

arXiv:2606.24485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider a one-parameter family of isotropic planar Gaussian processes \[ X_\sigma(t) =B_t+\sigma t Z,\qquad 0\le t\le 1,\quad 0\le \sigma\le 1, \] where $B$ is a standard ($0$-to-$0$) planar Brownian bridge on $[0,1]$, and $Z\sim \mathrm N(0,I)$ is a standard Gaussian random vector independent of $B$. The family interpolates between standard planar Brownian bridge ($\sigma=0$) and standard planar Brownian motion ($\sigma=1$). As the main result of the paper we compute the expected perimeter and area of the convex hull of the random set $\left\{X_\sigma(t) \colon 0\le t\le 1\right\}$ as closed formulas in terms of $\sigma$, and recover the classical Brownian bridge and Brownian motion values at $\sigma=0$ and $\sigma=1$. We also consider the convex hull spanned by multiple independent processes of this type and the possibilities for closed formulas in special cases. The key observation in our argument is that the isotropy property reduces the expected perimeter and area to one-dimensional quantities through the support function and Cauchy's formulas.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Uncertainty Quality of VGGT: An Analysis on the DTU Benchmark Dataset

Authors:
Markus Hillemann↗Robert Langend\"orfer↗Steven Landgraf↗Markus Ulrich↗

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) has already attracted a great deal of attention in a short period of time, not least due to the Best Paper Award at CVPR-2025. Similar to DUSt3R and MASt3R, VGGT aims to bring about a paradigm shift by replacing established methods like bundle adjustment and feature matching with a simple, unified, feed-forward neural network that predicts camera poses, depth maps, and dense 3D structure directly from multiple images of a scene in a few seconds. A key aspect is its ability to process an arbitrary number of views consistently in a single forward pass without any post-processing or iterative optimization. For photogrammetry, this opens new possibilities for real-time, scalable, and accessible 3D reconstruction. In this context, not only high reconstruction accuracy but also high-quality uncertainty estimates are crucial, as they foster trust and enable robust quality assurance. This paper therefore investigates the quality of VGGT's uncertainty predictions. The analysis identifies an effective confidence threshold for filtering VGGT's raw output and demonstrates that enhancing uncertainty quality holds strong potential for improving the accuracy of its 3D reconstructions.

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

Enhanced Evolutionary Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning for Reliable and Efficient Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks

Authors:
Bowei Tong↗Hui Kang↗Jiahui Li↗Geng Sun↗Jiacheng Wang↗Yaoqi Yang↗Bo Xu↗Dusit Niyato↗

arXiv:2510.21127v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite rapid advancements in sensor networks, conventional battery-powered sensor networks suffer from limited operational lifespans and frequent maintenance requirements that severely constrain their deployment in remote and inaccessible environments. As such, wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) with mobile charging capabilities offer a promising solution to extend network lifetime. However, WRSNs face critical challenges from the inherent trade-off between maximizing the node survival rates and maximizing charging energy efficiency under dynamic operational conditions. In this paper, we investigate a typical scenario where mobile chargers move and charge the sensor, thereby maintaining the network connectivity while minimizing the energy waste. Specifically, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem that simultaneously maximizes the network node survival rate and mobile charger energy usage efficiency across multiple time slots, which presents NP-hard computational complexity with long-term temporal dependencies that make traditional optimization approaches ineffective. To address these challenges, we propose an enhanced evolutionary multi-objective deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which integrates a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based policy network for temporal pattern recognition, a multilayer perceptron-based prospective increment model for future state prediction, and a time-varying Pareto policy evaluation method for dynamic preference adaptation. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms existing approaches in balancing node survival rate and energy efficiency while generating diverse Pareto-optimal solutions. Moreover, the LSTM-enhanced policy network converges 25% faster than conventional networks, with the time-varying evaluation method effectively adapting to dynamic conditions.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Active Inference for Adaptive Traffic Signal Control in Noisy Nonstationary IoT Environments

Authors:
D\'enes Toth↗George Ambroladze↗Edwin Sundberg↗Ali Beikmohammadi↗Alfreds Lapkovskis↗

arXiv:2606.13698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban traffic signal control at IoT-instrumented intersections must remain effective under sensor occlusion, weather attenuation, and nonstationary demand. Conventional controllers degrade under these conditions, and learned policies remain difficult to audit. To address these challenges, we propose an active inference controller for a four-arm signalized intersection that dynamically selects phases by minimizing expected free energy (EFE) over Gaussian beliefs about per-direction congestion levels, yielding a fully traceable decision pipeline. We benchmark the controller in a SUMO traffic simulator against a rule-based heuristic and a deep Q-network (DQN) across four scenarios that progressively increase noise and nonstationarity, spanning sensor occlusion, adverse weather, and stochastic accidents. Across 100 independent random evaluations per scenario, active inference attains the lowest idle times and CO2 emissions in the noisiest scenarios (56,977 s and 29.12 kg vs. 71,741 s and 30.56 kg for DQN). These gains come at a modest cost in bus priority service rate and phase switch frequency.

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

MSPL: Multi-Step Pseudo-Labeling for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Authors:
Hojun Choi↗Youngsun Lim↗Jaeyo Shin↗Hyunjung Shim↗

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) aims to recognize and localize object categories beyond the training set. Recent approaches leverage vision-language models to generate pseudo-labels using image-text alignment, allowing detectors to generalize to unseen classes without explicit supervision. However, these methods depend heavily on single-step image-text matching, neglecting the intermediate reasoning steps crucial for interpreting semantically complex visual contexts, such as crowding or occlusion. In this paper, we introduce MSPL, a framework that incorporates multi-step visual reasoning into the pseudo-labeling process for OVD. It decomposes complex scene understanding into three interpretable steps-object localization, category recognition, and background grounding-where these intermediate reasoning states serve as rich supervision sources. Extensive experiments on standard OVD evaluation protocols demonstrate that MSPL achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior pseudo-labeling efficiency, outperforming the strong baseline by 9.4 AP50 for novel classes on OV-COCO and improving box and mask APr by 3.2 and 2.2, respectively, on OV-LVIS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hchoi256/mspl.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Allure of Craquelure: A Variational-Generative Approach to Crack Detection in Paintings

Authors:
Laura Paul↗Holger Rauhut↗Martin Burger↗Samira Kabri↗Tim Roith↗

Recent advances in imaging technologies, deep learning and numerical performance have enabled non-invasive detailed analysis of artworks, supporting their documentation and conservation. In particular, automated detection of craquelure in digitized paintings is crucial for assessing degradation and guiding restoration, yet remains challenging due to the possibly complex scenery and the visual similarity between cracks and crack-like artistic features such as brush strokes or hair. We propose a hybrid approach that models crack detection as an inverse problem, decomposing an observed image into a crack-free painting and a crack component. A deep generative model is employed as powerful prior for the underlying artwork, while crack structures are captured using a Mumford–Shah-type variational functional together with a crack prior. Joint optimization yields a pixel-level map of crack localizations in the painting.

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17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Detection of anisotropic cosmic structures on a gigaparsec scale

Authors:
Francesco Sylos Labini↗

Galaxy redshift surveys map the cosmic web and provide a key observational test of whether the Universe becomes statistically homogeneous and isotropic on sufficiently large scales, as assumed by the cosmological principle underpinning the standard cosmological model1. In this framework, beyond the nonlinear regime of structure formation, inhomogeneous and anisotropic features are expected to fade rapidly, reflecting the near-isotropic primordial density field and its subsequent gravitational evolution. Although supported by the small amplitude of cosmic microwave background anisotropies2, this view is increasingly challenged by the complex network of large-scale structures and voids in the galaxy distribution3–6, as well as by independent probes reporting possible large-scale deviations from statistical homogeneity7 and isotropy8,9. Here we show that the galaxy distribution exhibits persistent anisotropic structures extending to scales on the order of one gigaparsec. Using the Angular Distribution of Pairwise Distances (ADPD)10, a parameter-free statistic that measures directional correlations, we detect anisotropy signals exceeding those in isotropic controls and geometry-matched ΛCDM mock catalogues with conservative significance greater than 3σ. These results provide direct evidence that directional coherence persists to larger scales than predicted in the standard framework, challenging the assumption of large-scale isotropy. They call for a reassessment of how homogeneity and isotropy are realized in the observed Universe and motivate new tests of cosmological models based on directional statistics. Using the parameter-free Angular Distribution of Pairwise Distances for measuring directional correlations, evidence is found for coherent anisotropic structures extending over gigaparsec scales, challenging the assumption that the Universe becomes statistically isotropic on sufficiently large scales.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Pitch Spelling Jazz Lead Sheets, Solo Transcriptions, Classical Piano and Monophonic Scores

Authors:
Augustin Bouquillard↗Florent Jacquemard↗

We present an algorithm for pitch spelling and key estimation. Given an input in MIDI-like format, containing information on note pitches (expressed in semitones relative to the lowest reference note) and bar boundaries, it estimates the appropriate note names, a global Key Signature, and a local scale for each bar. This related information elements are evaluated jointly during two stages of optimisation. During an initial 'modal' stage, a probable scale is proposed for each bar, minimising the number of accidentals to be printed in the printed score with a shortest-path search. Then, during a second stage called 'tonal', these local scales are used to estimate the Key Signature and note names that would result in the best musical notation for the entire piece. We present evaluations conducted on datasets comprising a variety of digital musical scores: jazz lead sheets taken from the Real Book, transcriptions of recordings of jazz soli and bass lines, traditional tunes, as well as classical scores for piano and monophonic instruments. Our procedure was originally designed for use in music transcription, specifically for building digital collections of jazz solos transcribed from audio recordings, for the purposes of music analysis, teaching and the preservation of cultural heritage. This method should also prove useful for other tasks related to the processing of musical notation. Furthermore, to this end, we have defined new distances between various common jazz scales, which may be of some interest to musicological studies.

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

Implementation of Licensed Plate Detection and Noise Removal in Image Processing

Authors:
Yiquan Gao↗

Car license plate recognition system is an image processing technology used to identify vehicles by capturing their Car License Plates. The car license plate recognition technology is also known as automatic number-plate recognition, automatic vehicle identification, car license plate recognition or optical character recognition for cars. In Malaysia, as the number of vehicle is increasing rapidly nowadays, a pretty great number of vehicle on the road has brought about the considerable demands of car license plate recognition system. Car license plate recognition system can be implemented in electronic parking payment system, highway toll-fee system, traffic surveillance system and as police enforcement tools. Additionally, car license plate recognition system technology also has potential to be combined with various techniques in other different fields like biology, aerospace and so on to achieve the goal of solving some specialized problems.

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

Best Arm Identification with Minimal Regret

Authors:
Junwen Yang↗Vincent Y. F. Tan↗Tianyuan Jin↗

arXiv:2409.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly amalgamates two of its most ubiquitous objectives: regret minimization and BAI. More precisely, the agent's goal is to identify the best arm with a prescribed confidence level $\delta$, while minimizing the cumulative regret up to the stopping time. Focusing on single-parameter exponential families of distributions, we leverage information-theoretic techniques to establish an instance-dependent lower bound on the expected cumulative regret. Moreover, we present an impossibility result that underscores the tension between cumulative regret and sample complexity in fixed-confidence BAI. Complementarily, we design and analyze the Double KL-UCB algorithm, which achieves asymptotic optimality as the confidence level tends to zero. Notably, this algorithm employs two distinct confidence bounds to guide arm selection in a randomized manner. Our findings elucidate a fresh perspective on the inherent connections between regret minimization and BAI.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Does Traversal Order Matter? A Systematic Study of Tree Traversal Methods in Transformer Grammars

Authors:
Zongru Liu↗Pengyu Ji↗Pengcheng Wang↗Kewei Tu↗

Transformer Grammars (TGs) enhance language modeling by incorporating syntactic tree structures. Despite the potentially significant impact on model performance of how syntactic trees are linearized in TGs, existing studies rely solely on Depth-First Traversal (DFT) for linearization. In this paper, we expand the traversal design space by exploring Breadth-First Traversal (BFT) and a novel hybrid traversal strategy, Production-Rule Traversal (PRT), which combines the structural lookahead of BFT with the early lexical generation of DFT. We integrate these traversal methods with varying tree configurations and masking strategies, and empirically evaluate their performance on language modeling, syntactic generalization and summarization. We reveal the inherent trade-offs between nested composition and global lookahead, providing actionable recommendations for designing task-aware Transformer Grammars.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On the Geometry and Optimization of Polynomial Convolutional Networks

Authors:
Vahid Shahverdi↗Giovanni Luca Marchetti↗Kathl\'en Kohn↗

arXiv:2410.00722v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study convolutional neural networks with monomial activation functions. Specifically, we prove that their parameterization map is regular and is an isomorphism almost everywhere, up to rescaling the filters. By leveraging on tools from algebraic geometry, we explore the geometric properties of the image in function space of this map - typically referred to as neuromanifold. In particular, we compute the dimension and the degree of the neuromanifold, which measure the expressivity of the model, and describe its singularities. Moreover, for a generic large dataset, we derive an explicit formula that quantifies the number of critical points arising in the optimization of a regression loss.

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

More with LESS – Local Scene Representations for Tactile Imaging

Authors:
Zohar Rimon↗Elisei Shafer↗Tal Tepper↗Daniel Kozin↗Alon Malka↗Roy Holland↗Aviv Tamar↗

arXiv:2606.14344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile imaging seeks to reconstruct the internal structure of soft objects through touch sensing, with applications in medical diagnosis and robotic manipulation. Recent self-supervised learning approaches have shown promising results, but rely on global, unstructured representations and robot-controlled sensing, limiting generalization and practical use. We propose Local Encoder for Spatial Sensing (LESS), an object-centric tactile representation that exploits the local nature of touch. The tactile scene is modeled as a grid of recurrent encoders with local receptive fields, whose states are fused to reconstruct 2D or 3D images of internal structure. This compositional design enables strong generalization: models trained on single-inclusion phantoms accurately image objects with multiple inclusions and varying sizes. The local structure further supports spatial uncertainty estimation. In addition, we enable hand-held tactile imaging via external pose tracking and human-like palpation data, and extend tactile imaging to full 3D reconstruction.

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

Confidence-Aware Automated Assessment of Student-Drawn Scientific Models

Authors:
Luyang Fang↗Yingchuan Zhang↗Jongchan Park↗Zhaoji Wang↗Ping Ma↗Xiaoming Zhai↗

arXiv:2606.20264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Student-generated drawings are widely used in science education to assess learners' conceptual understanding in modeling-based tasks aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). However, scoring such drawings requires expert human judgment to interpret complex visual representations, making large-scale assessment costly to implement and sustain in classroom settings. In this work, we study automated scoring of student-generated scientific drawings using a vision-based model. We evaluate a Vision Transformer (ViT) with parameter-efficient adaptation and propose a confidence-aware scoring framework that derives response-level confidence from test-time predictive distributions. This confidence signal enables selective automation by scoring high-confidence responses automatically while deferring uncertain cases for human review. Experiments on six NGSS-aligned middle school assessment items show that the proposed approach improves scoring reliability while supporting a practical trade-off between automated coverage and scoring risk, highlighting the value of confidence-aware methods for trustworthy educational assessment.

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

An Empirical Investigation of Pre-Trained Deep Learning Model Reuse in the Scientific Process

Authors:
Nicholas M. Synovic↗Karolina Ryzka↗Alessandra V. Vellucci Solari↗Kenny Lyons↗James C. Davis↗George K. Thiruvathukal↗

arXiv:2603.13584v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has achieved recognition for its impact within natural sciences, yet the prohibitive financial and technical cost of training models from scratch inhibit adoption. Following software engineering community guidance, natural scientists are reusing pre-trained deep learning models (PTMs) to amortize these costs. While prior works recommend PTM reuse patterns, we present the first empirical study of PTM reuse patterns in the natural sciences, quantifying the utilization and impact of PTM reuse within the scientific process across 17,718 peer reviewed, open access papers. Our results show that "Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology" has outpaced other natural scientific fields in PTM reuse, "adaptation" reuse is the most prevalent PTM reuse pattern identified across all natural science fields, and the "testing" stage of the scientific process has been most impacted by PTM integration.

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