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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Optimization of Secret Key Rate for BB84 under Collective Rotation Noise

arXiv:2605.21140v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Practical quantum key distribution (QKD) systems operate under noise, but security of most protocols have been analyzed under ideal noiseless scenarios. In this work, we investigated security performance of BB84 protocol under effect of collective rotation noise. Using theoretical quantum information frameworks, we analyzed key security parameters including quantum bit error rate (QBER), mutual information and secret key rate (SKR). Security of protocol is studied under various eavesdropping scenarios based on intercept and resend attacks. Our results show that collective rotation noise has a significant impact on the information shared between the two parties. Particularly, we extended prior treatments by suggesting a noise engineering strategy where we identified a non-zero noise range where information accessed by Eve is minimized while corresponding SKR degradation remains relatively small. This analysis provide insights into robustness of BB84 protocol under realistic noisy channels and may contribute towards development of more resilient QKD systems.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Are LLMs Bad at Moral Reasoning?

arXiv:2606.11635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For highly capable AI systems to operate safely in dynamic, open-ended environments, they must be able to identify, understand, and respond to moral reasons for action, and constrain their behaviour accordingly. A growing body of research aims to evaluate this capacity – moral competence – in today's most capable AI systems, recently reaching broadly pessimistic conclusions. One of the most ambitious such papers collects gold-standard human-authored rubrics for evaluating moral reasoning in 1,000 cases, and benchmarks frontier AI models against those rubrics, with underwhelming results. In this paper, we argue that the MoReBench dataset can be redeployed to give a much more optimistic picture of LLMs' moral reasoning (an essential part of moral competence). We show that if, instead of scoring LLMs' responses to these cases against these rubrics, we instead give the LLMs the same task given to humans – to generate scoring rubrics for the moral analysis of particular cases – the rubrics they generate are both better calibrated to the human rubrics than their open-ended responses, and, where they differ, plausibly reflect nothing more than the vast dimensionality of most moral problems, as well as highlighting some human departures from the "rubric for creating rubrics". Taking these points into consideration, the MoReBench dataset suggests that LLMs are significantly more capable at moral reasoning than was previously believed.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

TabKD: Tabular Knowledge Distillation through Interaction Diversity of Learned Feature Bins

arXiv:2603.15481v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data-free knowledge distillation enables model compression without original training data, critical for privacy-sensitive tabular domains. However, existing methods does not perform well on tabular data because they do not explicitly address feature interactions, the fundamental way tabular models encode predictive knowledge. We identify interaction diversity, systematic coverage of feature combinations, as an essential requirement for effective tabular distillation. To operationalize this insight, we propose TabKD, which learns adaptive feature bins aligned with teacher decision boundaries, then generates synthetic queries that maximize pairwise interaction coverage. Across 4 benchmark datasets and 4 teacher architectures, TabKD achieves highest student-teacher agreement in 14 out of 16 configurations, outperforming 5 state-of-the-art baselines. We further show that interaction coverage strongly correlates with distillation quality, validating our core hypothesis. Our work establishes interaction-focused exploration as a principled framework for tabular model extraction.

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

SCALE: Self-uncertainty Conditioned Adaptive Looking and Execution for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2602.04208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic control, with test-time scaling (TTS) gaining attention to enhance robustness beyond training. However, existing TTS methods for VLAs require additional training, verifiers, and multiple forward passes, making them impractical for deployment. Moreover, they intervene only at action decoding while keeping visual representations fixed-insufficient under perceptual ambiguity, where reconsidering how to perceive is as important as deciding what to do. To address these limitations, we propose SCALE, a simple inference strategy that jointly modulates visual perception and action based on 'self-uncertainty', inspired by uncertainty-driven exploration in Active Inference theory-requiring no additional training, no verifier, and only a single forward pass. SCALE broadens exploration in both perception and action under high uncertainty, while focusing on exploitation when confident-enabling adaptive execution across varying conditions. Experiments on simulated and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SCALE improves state-of-the-art VLAs and outperforms existing TTS methods while maintaining single-pass efficiency.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

SEMFA: A General Framework for Inferring Statistical Significance of Mahalanobis Similarity between Multi-Omics Profiled Samples Built on Multiple Factor Analysis

Motivation: With rapid advances in sequencing technologies, many heterogeneous omics datasets have been generated, as seen in the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) and many single-cell multi-omics sequencing projects, bringing substantial challenges to existing integrative methods. In this article, we report a novel multi-omics fusion and analysis software SEMFA which performs general parametric tests for the Mahalanobis Similarity of samples based on the factor scores generated by an Extended version of conventional Multiple Factor Analysis. Results: Our developed method is effective and robust under both Gaussian and non-Gaussian assumptions. The mean F1 scores are over 0.8 when the column similarity level is 0.9 and the noise level ranges between 0.1 and 0.2, using simulation studies based on ENCODE count data. It was also efficient and effective at handling large-scale single-cell multi-omics data, as demonstrated in colon cancer cases as it unveiled signature network organization patterns of cells for stages III and IV.

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

Automated Residual Plot Assessment With the R Package autovi and the Shiny Application autovi.web

Visual assessment of residual plots is a common approach for diagnosing linear models, but it relies on manual evaluation, which does not scale well and can lead to inconsistent decisions across analysts. The lineup protocol, which embeds the observed plot among null plots, can reduce subjectivity but requires even more human effort. In today's data-driven world, such tasks are well suited for automation. We present a new R package that uses a computer vision model to automate the evaluation of residual plots. An accompanying Shiny application is provided for ease of use. Given a sample of residuals, the model predicts a visual signal strength (VSS) and offers supporting information to help analysts assess model fit.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

A Quantitative Analysis of Multimodal Biomarkers in Alzheimer's Disease

Despite increasing adoption of multimodal approaches in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) research – aimed at integrating molecular, structural, clinical, and genetic biomarkers to enhance disease characterization – the relationships among these modalities remain poorly understood. A systematic analysis of their dynamic interaction is essential for improving disease modeling, identifying redundant assessments, and reducing patient burden and acquisition costs. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of multimodal AD biomarkers by integrating tau-PET, structural MRI, cognitive scores (MMSE and CDR), and APOE4 data from 789 subjects drawn from the ADNI dataset. In our analyses, we (A) quantify cross-modal mutual information and explained variance to assess redundancy and predictive dependencies; (B) examine associations between tau topologies and structural atrophy across brain regions to select informative ROIs; (C) perform a statistical decomposition of the tau-cognition association into atrophy-related and atrophy-independent components; (D) and identify a dominant neurodegenerative trajectory that aligns with cognitive decline. This study provides a systematic characterization of cross-modal relationships, improving the interpretability and selection of biomarkers in AD. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/antonioscardace/Multimodal-AD.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation via Geometry Decoupling and Momentum-Aware Gradient Regulation

Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation (HKD) aims to transfer knowledge across varying architectures (e.g., from Transformer to CNN) but inherently suffers from severe training instability. We reveal that this instability stems from two highly coupled challenges: massive feature norm discrepancies that cause optimization drag, and severe gradient conflicts between the primary and distillation objectives arising from distinct inductive biases. To achieve stable distillation, we propose SPOFA, a framework built upon a novel Feature and Gradient Dual Stabilization mechanism. Specifically, at the feature level, we introduce a LayerNorm-based decoupling projector that explicitly decouples feature magnitude from direction, creating a bounded and stable space for semantic alignment. At the gradient level, we propose a momentum-driven Exponential Moving Average (MEMA) dynamic scaler. By establishing a robust historical baseline of the optimization trajectory, MEMA actively evaluates instantaneous gradient conflicts and adaptively penalizes harmful distillation signals, guaranteeing stable convergence. Importantly, SPOFA achieves this dual stabilization with an extremely lightweight parameter footprint. Extensive experiments on two mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that SPOFA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, significantly outperforming computationally expensive methods while introducing only minimal computational overhead compared to standard baselines.

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

Holo-World: Unified Camera, Object and Weather Control for Video World Model

Video world models are moving toward preserving an observed world under controllable camera and object motion while allowing its environmental state to change. Yet these controls remain isolated, and weather generation typically relies on a source video or reconstructed scene that already specifies future structure. We study a first-frame-anchored source-to-state setting, where the model starts from a single image and follows explicit camera and object controls and an optional weather instruction, then generates a video that either preserves the source world or transfers it to a target weather state. To address these challenges, we first build HoloStateData, a state video dataset that turns diverse videos into unified control samples for camera, object, and weather supervision. Second, we introduce Holo-World, a unified controllable video world model that jointly controls scene from a single image. Its Unified Scene Adapter factorizes world preservation and weather transfer into distinct parameter subspaces, using rendered background, geometry buffers, and object controls to maintain controlled scene structure while modeling weather-dependent appearance and particle effects. Additionally, Scene-Weather Decomposed CFG guides scene and weather residuals separately, strengthening target weather effects without over-amplifying the full condition. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Holo-World maintains precise camera and object control with consistent scene structure while transferring scenes into diverse target weather state, outperforming video-to-video weather editing baselines on weather-state generation. Our project page is available at \url{https://xiangchenyin.github.io/Holo-World/}.

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

Sentence-Level Contextual Entrainment in Large Language Models

Contextual entrainment, which is a newly discovered phenomenon in large language models (LLMs), refers to the tendency of a model to assign higher probabilities to tokens that appear in its context. In this work, we extend this phenomenon from the token level to the sentence level by examining the per-token mean log-probability of a sentence instead of the probabilities of individual tokens. We investigate sentence-level contextual entrainment across 26 LLMs from seven families and two datasets, which cover both subjective and objective tasks. We find that sentence-level contextual entrainment exists. This means that the sentences in the prompt (even if they are counterfactual statements) can significantly increase their probability during model inference time. As the model size increases, contextual entrainment gradually decreases. We also find that contextual entrainment is controlled by 2% to 4% of the attention heads. Turning off these attention heads can effectively mitigate contextual entrainment without hurting the model's performance.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimizing Wigner Negativity in Scattering Processes Using Energetic Cost Functions

arXiv:2606.15101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wigner negativities (WNs) are key signatures of non-Gaussian bosonic states and essential resources for quantum technologies. We study their generation in the scattering of coherent pulses by a two-level atom coupled to a one-dimensional reservoir, a unitary and energy-preserving platform. Optimization in this multimode setting is hindered by the complexity of evaluating Wigner functions. We overcome this challenge by introducing energetic cost functions that identify output modes most likely to host large negativities. First using incoherent energy and then isolating a genuinely non-Gaussian contribution, we demonstrate a strong correlation between these quantities and WNs. This correlation extends beyond short, intense pulses to encompass pulses of finite energy, where photons are scattered while the two-level atom is driven. Focusing on the energy-efficiency of the process, we show that maximally efficient generation takes place for one input photon, on average, spectrally mode-matched with the atom.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A graph neural network surrogate model for mesh-based crashworthiness prediction of vehicle panel components

arXiv:2503.17386v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Crashworthiness is a key performance measure in the design of safety-critical vehicle panel components such as B-pillars. Finite element (FE) simulations are widely used to evaluate crash responses but remain computationally expensive for large-scale, nonlinear impact scenarios, particularly when integrated into iterative design and optimisation processes. Although machine learning-based surrogate models have been developed for rapid crashworthiness analysis, they exhibit limitations in detailed representation of complex 3-dimensional components. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising solution for processing data with complex structures. However, existing GNN models often lack sufficient accuracy and computational efficiency to meet industrial demands. This paper proposes Recurrent Graph U-Net (ReGUNet), a graph-based surrogate model for crashworthiness analysis of vehicle panel components. By representing FE meshes in graph form, the model naturally accommodates complex irregular structural geometries. Its hierarchical architecture improves computational efficiency and accuracy, while the introduction of recurrence enhances stability of temporal predictions over multiple time steps. A side-impact case study of hot-stamped steel B-pillars with varying geometries is used to generate training dataset. The trained model demonstrates high accuracy in predicting the dynamic deformation behaviour and crashworthiness indicators of previously unseen component designs. ReGUNet achieves over a 52% reduction in the average deformation prediction error relative to baseline methods, together with markedly improved computational efficiency. ReGUNet provides rapid and reliable crashworthiness assessments, which in turn accelerates the design cycle of vehicle panel components.

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

HK-LegiCoST: Leveraging Non-Verbatim Transcripts for Speech Translation

We introduce HK-LegiCoST, a new three-way parallel corpus of Cantonese-English translations, containing 600+ hours of Cantonese audio, its standard traditional Chinese transcript, and English translation, segmented and aligned at the sentence level. We describe the notable challenges in corpus preparation: segmentation, alignment of long audio recordings, and sentence-level alignment with non-verbatim transcripts. Such transcripts make the corpus suitable for speech translation research when there are significant differences between the spoken and written forms of the source language. Due to its large size, we are able to demonstrate competitive speech translation baselines on HK-LegiCoST and extend them to promising cross-corpus results on the FLEURS Cantonese subset. These results deliver insights into speech recognition and translation research in languages for which non-verbatim or ``noisy'' transcription is common due to various factors, including vernacular and dialectal speech.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

A Self Consistency Based Reranking for Narrative Question Answering

Narrative question answering (NQA) is a challenging task in natural language processing that requires models to understand long textual contexts, capture relationships across events, and generate coherent responses. Despite recent advances in pretrained language models, most existing approaches rely on a single decoding output during inference, making them sensitive to generation variability and often resulting in incomplete or inconsistent answers .To address this limitation, we propose a self-ensemble Self-Consistency-Based reranking framework for narrative question answering. The proposed method generates multiple candidate answers for each story-question pair and selects the final answer based on semantic agreement among the generated responses. This allows the model to explore diverse answer formulations while improving robustness through consensus-based selection without requiring modifications to the underlying architecture .The framework combines pretrained and fine-tuned language generation with multi-answer inference and similarity-based reranking. We evaluate the proposed approach on the NarrativeQA dataset using multiple models, including FLAN-T5 (Base and Small) and Pegasus-Large, under both baseline and fine-tuned settings .Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves performance across all models. In particular, FLAN-T5-Base achieves the best overall performance, improving from 82.32% to 86.66% (+4.34%) when combined with self-ensemble inference. Additionally, the largest improvement is observed with Pegasus-Large, which increases from 72.50% to 87.07% (+14.57%), highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Upper tails for irregular graphs beyond the mean-field regime

arXiv:2606.14564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $G_{n,p}$ be the binomial random graph of density $p$ and let $X_H$ be the number of copies of a fixed graph $H$ in $G_{n,p}$. We prove asymptotically tight bounds on the logarithmic upper-tail probability of $X_H$ whenever $H$ is a connected, irregular graph with maximum degree $\Delta \ge 2$ and $p \ge n^{-1/\Delta - \varepsilon_H} (\log n)^{\omega(1)}$ for an explicit $\varepsilon_H >0$. These bounds are expressed in terms of a new variational problem that generalises the combinatorial optimisation problem arising from the naïve mean-field approximation. This new variational problem includes an entropy term that corresponds to the large number of embeddings of certain highly structured graphs in $K_n$. For a certain class of irregular graphs $H$ that we call stable, we show that this description of the upper-tail probability is valid in a range of densities that is optimal up to a poly($\log\log n$) factor. For a further subclass of stable graphs, which includes all irregular complete bipartite graphs, we show that this range of densities is optimal up to a multiplicative constant.

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

LLM-Assisted Stance Detection in Scientific Discourse: A Test Case in Bayesian Cognitive Science

Qualitative coding is central to social science, but expert annotation is difficult to scale. LLMs offer a possible extension, yet require careful validation when the target construct is interpretive, theoretically loaded, and only indirectly expressed. We study this problem in a difficult case: detecting whether authors treat Bayesian models as descriptions of mental and neural mechanisms (realism) or as useful mathematical tools (instrumentalism). Our method combines a theory-driven codebook, expert-coded reference annotations, a diagnostic-gated prompt-optimization search yielding a shared zero-shot prompt for three frontier LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro Preview), and multi-rater reliability analysis. The final prompt achieved a held-out combined reliability score of 0.76 (harmonic mean of ICC = 0.79 and $\alpha$ = 0.74), with all diagnostics satisfied. Deployed on 6,858 quotes from 210 articles, the three LLMs reached substantial quote-level agreement (ICC = 0.80; $\alpha$ = 0.76; combined = 0.78) and near-perfect article-level rank stability ($r$ = 0.96-0.97 across rater pairs). The corpus was predominantly weakly realist, but article-level stances were rarely uniform: only 1.4% of articles used a single band, while 59.5% spanned four or more. Low-level perception/motor articles scored 8.8 Realism points higher than high-level cognition articles ($p < .001$, $d = 0.60$), quantifying a long-held qualitative intuition. We present this as an expert-led case study; the framework is intended to generalize to similar theoretically demanding tasks, not to all qualitative analysis.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Locally Gentle State Certification for High Dimensional Quantum Systems

arXiv:2602.04550v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard approaches to quantum statistical inference rely on measurements that induce a collapse of the wave function, effectively consuming the quantum state to extract information. In this work, we investigate the fundamental limits of locally-gentle quantum state certification, where the learning algorithm is constrained to perturb the state by at most $\alpha$ in trace norm, thereby allowing for the reuse of samples. We analyze the hypothesis testing problem of distinguishing whether an unknown state $\rho$ is equal to a reference $\rho_0$ or $\epsilon$-far from it. We derive the minimax sample complexity for this problem, quantifying the information-theoretic price of non-destructive measurements. Specifically, by constructing explicit measurement operators, we show that the constraint of $\alpha$-gentleness imposes a sample size penalty of $\frac{d}{\alpha^2}$, yielding a total sample complexity of $n = \Theta(\frac{d^3}{\epsilon^2 \alpha^2})$. Our results clarify the trade-off between information extraction and state disturbance, and highlight deep connections between physical measurement constraints and privacy mechanisms in quantum learning. Crucially, we find that the sample size penalty incurred by enforcing $\alpha$-gentleness scales linearly with the Hilbert-space dimension $d$ rather than the number of parameters $d^2-1$ typical for high-dimensional private estimation.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Metrics for Evaluating Biological AI Model Predictive Accuracy at the Data-Substrate Level

作者:

Reports in the biological literature disagree on whether a given model can predict a biological outcome from a given data sample — one study finding a model capable, another, on the same kind of data, finding it is not. This is particularly a challenge in relation to LLMs–where the models are large and opaque, with weights and training data inaccessible.textbf{ }Such disagreements cannot be settled by directly inspecting the model. To address this challenge, we considertextbf{ }an alternative approach: assessing whether the data sample is adequate to support the prediction asserted. For a given dataset, its substrate — the underlying structure of the data — determines what any model can recover, independent of architecture or capacity. At the same time, predicting the present state of a biological process and predicting the direction of its future change are different tasks; the second is supportable among AI models only where the data encode direction as determinable from the state — a property we call encoding — and is unsupportable where the same observed state precedes change in opposite directions — a property we call non-identifiability, in the informational rather than the statistical sense. We introduce two generic metrics, Predictive Blindness Risk (PBR) and Prediction Indeterminacy Measure (PIM), that evaluate a data substrate for predictive accuracy directly — without access to model weights, architecture, or training data — and locate the regions of a data substrate where a predictive claim can be supported and where it cannot. Using human biological subjects, we employ the Yale Brain Metastases Longitudinal Data (1,430 human subjects; 11,892 MRI studies; four sequences) and show that direction of change was non-identifiable across regions encompassing the majority of transitions; a nonlinear AI model gained essentially nothing over majority-direction prediction there while recovering direction near-perfectly where the state encoded it; and model accuracy tracked data-substrate resolvability continuously (Spearman {rho} = -0.95 to -1.00). The metrics adjudicate, before any model is trusted and from the data alone, where claims of predictive accuracy — of state, or of the law of change — can be supported.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Histologically validated diffusion MRI signatures of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in Alzheimer disease

Noninvasive neuroinflammation measurement remains a major barrier for Alzheimer disease (AD) therapeutics. We present generalized diffusion basis spectrum imaging (g-DBSI), a diffusion MRI framework that decomposes the tissue signal into biologically interpretable microstructural compartments. In postmortem Knight ADRC brains, g-DBSI-derived restricted isotropic fraction (RIF) and restricted anisotropic fraction (RAF) mapped cellularity and neurofilament density, while their ratio (RIF/RAF) tracked inflammatory cell density and peri-plaque amyloid-beta with higher specificity and regional consistency than RIF alone. In 112 living Knight ADRC participants stratified by PET amyloid, g-DBSI metrics showed amyloid-dependent trajectories: in low-amyloid individuals, RIF and RAF rose together with amyloid, consistent with early neuropil expansion and glial elaboration, whereas in high-amyloid individuals, RIF/RAF increased, and RAF declined, indicating established neuroinflammatory remodeling and neurofilament loss. CSF proteomics linked RIF/RAF to glia-enriched immune and vascular pathways, supporting g-DBSI as a clinically compatible MRI biomarker of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in AD.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Triangular-Reference Schrödinger Bridges for Time Series Generation

arXiv:2605.27478v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Schrödinger bridges for time series (SBTS) generate synthetic paths by projecting, in relative entropy, a Brownian reference onto the path laws that match the joint distribution of the data on the observation grid. The Brownian reference, however, fixes the quadratic variation of the generated paths, which is restrictive when stochastic volatility, correlated noise, or rank-deficient covariance structures must be reproduced. We introduce "Triangular-Reference Schrödinger Bridges for Time Series" (TR-SBTS), which keeps the entropy-projection backbone of SBTS but replaces the Brownian reference by a triangular, volatility-informed, intervalwise frozen reference on a state augmented with latent covariance descriptors. The construction remains a single entropy projection on the augmented state: the minimiser is the \(h\)-transform of the reference, and on each frozen interval the optimal drift has the logarithmic-gradient form \(b^\star(t,x)=A\,\nabla\log H(t,x)\), intrinsic to the active covariance directions when the frozen covariance \(A\) is degenerate. We prove stability of the frozen approximation and consistency of the associated regularised kernel estimators, describe a reference-aware Nadaraya–Watson implementation of the conditional next-increment law, and evaluate the construction on numerical experiments.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Decoding Insect Song: A Multitask Semisupervised Orthoptera Bioacoustic Classifier

arXiv:2606.13236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Passive acoustic monitoring holds great promise for ecological inference, yet existing automated tools are typically narrowly trained and non-transferable. We address these limitations with PULSE, a semi-supervised, multi-task framework for Orthoptera bioacoustics, combining weakly-supervised species classification, self-supervised learning on unlabelled field audio, and knowledge distillation from a general-purpose bioacoustic model. Our domain-adapted specialist model outperforms a state-of-the-art general model across all metrics (macro F1: 0.21 vs. 0.07; AUC: 0.74 vs. 0.45; AP: 0.32 vs. 0.19), with active learning further raising F1 to 0.34 and AUC to 0.84. Beyond classification, the learned embeddings encode ecologically meaningful structure, exposed through an interactive visualisation tool for ecological discovery.

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

Beyond Perplexity: UTF-8 Validity in Byte-aware Language Models

Byte-level tokenization enables language models to handle any Unicode input, but models can generate invalid UTF-8 sequences when encountering rare or unseen characters. We investigate the relationship between training scale and UTF-8 generation reliability with a 355M parameter model trained on 80B tokens from a balanced multilingual corpus of English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. We introduce multiple evaluation protocols that isolate UTF-8 structural validity from language modeling. UTF-8 validity convergence lags perplexity by a roughly a factor of two: perplexity stabilizes after 2.1B tokens, but UTF-8 validity requires 4.2B tokens. In context-free generation, rare characters achieve higher structural validity than common characters, suggesting over-specialization of frequent character representations. Through experiments, we observed that reliable UTF-8 generation is a distinct capability requiring evaluation beyond perplexity.

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

The FID Lottery: Quantifying Hidden Randomness in Generative-Model Evaluation

The Frechet Inception Distance (FID) is the de facto arbiter of image generation, yet most papers report just a single number from a single trained model using a single sampling seed. How reproducible is that number if we retrain the model, or merely resample from it? In this paper, we treat FID as a random variable on a two-axis panel of training and generation seeds, and measure its variance directly on several hundred SiT networks trained on class-conditional ImageNet 256x256. We report surprising findings: (a) Retraining the model using the same recipe with a different seed moves FID 3.2x more (in Inception feature space) than redrawing samples from a fixed network. (b) That gap is driven by three factors: random initialisation, data ordering, and the per-step Gaussian noise of the flow-matching loss. (c) Increasing compute or model size barely tightens the spread, holding the FID coefficient of variation (CoV) inside a 1-2% band. (d) Per-cell classifier-free-guidance tuning halves the spread but reshuffles which seeds work best, and a lucky training seed reaches the same FID with up to 2x less compute than an unlucky one. Based on these findings, we recommend a new FID evaluation protocol: evaluate under per-cell optimal guidance, treat any FID gap below the empirically measured ~1.3% CoV as inconclusive, and report an error bar over several training seeds rather than a single FID number.

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

SceneCraft: Interactive System for Image Editing via Scene Graph

Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity.