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

FireRed-Image-Edit-1.0 Technical Report

We present FireRed-Image-Edit, a diffusion transformer for instruction-based image editing that achieves state-of-the-art performance through systematic optimization of data curation, training methodology, and evaluation design. We construct a 1.6B-sample training corpus, comprising 900M text-to-image and 700M image editing pairs from diverse sources. After rigorous cleaning, stratification, auto-labeling, and two-stage filtering, we retain over 100M high-quality samples balanced between generation and editing, ensuring strong semantic coverage and instruction alignment. Our multi-stage training pipeline progressively builds editing capability via pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. To improve data efficiency, we introduce a Multi-Condition Aware Bucket Sampler for variable-resolution batching and Stochastic Instruction Alignment with dynamic prompt re-indexing. To stabilize optimization and enhance controllability, we propose Asymmetric Gradient Optimization for DPO, DiffusionNFT with layout-aware OCR rewards for text editing, and a differentiable Consistency Loss for identity preservation. We further establish REDEdit-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning 15 editing categories, including newly introduced beautification and low-level enhancement tasks. Extensive experiments on REDEdit-Bench and public benchmarks (ImgEdit and GEdit) demonstrate competitive or superior performance against both open-source and proprietary systems. To support future research, our code, models, and benchmark suite are publicly available at https://github.com/FireRedTeam/FireRed-Image-Edit/ .

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Optimal scenario design for climate emulation

arXiv:2606.19302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As deep learning for physical systems continues to grow in popularity, efforts to improve generalizability have primarily focused on designing architectures that embed physical constraints. However, for machine-learning surrogate climate models (emulators), we show that the low structural diversity in existing scenarios commonly used to generate training data places a ceiling on predictive skill. Here, we examine whether training datasets themselves can be optimized to improve generalization. We introduce a method to create datasets that produce emulators capable of generalizing to new, structurally different scenarios absent from the training data. We use a differentiable Simple Climate Model (SCM) to calculate the sensitivity of emulator loss to perturbations in the training data, iteratively updating the training data to maximize emulator skill. For an SCM, training on one scenario optimized in this fashion outperforms an emulator trained on six standard ScenarioMIP pathways. We achieve this higher predictive skill despite training on a smaller dataset, finding that our emulator successfully isolates distinct physical behaviors of different climate forcing agents (e.g., greenhouse gases vs. aerosols) without single-forcing runs. We then demonstrate that scenarios optimized using an SCM, when used to drive an intermediate-complexity climate model, produce a training dataset that yields a more skillful emulator than training on ScenarioMIP outputs. Our results suggest that, in the compute-constrained environment of running full-scale climate models, generating a small number of dynamically rich scenarios provides greater marginal value for emulation and characterizing system responses than expanding the suite of traditional emissions pathways.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ERQA-Plus: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Reasoning in Embodied AI

Generalist embodied agents require more than object recognition: they must reason about spatial relations, actions, procedures, human intentions, environmental constraints, and commonsense consequences from situated visual observations. Yet existing visual and embodied question answering benchmarks often provide limited control over the reasoning dependencies being tested, making it difficult to distinguish grounded embodied reasoning from shortcut-driven visual or linguistic pattern matching. We present ERQA-Plus, a diagnostic benchmark for reasoning in embodied AI. ERQA-Plus contains 1,766 question-answer instances grounded in 711 robot-centric images and organized according to a structured taxonomy spanning perceptual, action-centric, social-interaction, navigation-environmental, and contextual commonsense reasoning. The dataset is constructed using a multi-stage generation and validation pipeline that combines taxonomy-guided question generation, automatic quality judging, iterative revision, and human assessment to improve visual grounding, answer validity, and reasoning quality. We benchmark representative general-purpose vision-language models and embodied models, including LLaVA-NeXT-8B, Prismatic-7B, MiniCPM-V-4.5-8B, Qwen3-VL, RoboRefer-8B, and RoboBrain2.5-8B. Although the strongest model, Qwen3-VL-32B, achieves 83.4% overall accuracy and 61.4 SBERT score, category-level results reveal persistent weaknesses in spatial reasoning, procedural reasoning, event prediction, and intention inference. ERQA-Plus therefore provides a fine-grained evaluation framework for measuring not only whether embodied agents answer correctly, but also which forms of embodied reasoning they can and cannot perform reliably. The dataset is available https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingdas/erqa-plus and the project page at https://github.com/LUNAProject22/erqa-plus.

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

HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) 2025: Benchmark of Segmentation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis in Multimodal PET/CT

Head and neck cancers (HNC) represent a significant global health burden, with accurate tumor delineation being essential for effective radiotherapy planning. The complexity of the oropharyngeal anatomy, combined with the heterogeneous appearance of tumors on imaging, makes manual segmentation time-intensive and subject to inter-observer variability. Beyond segmentation, predicting long-term clinical outcomes, such as recurrence-free survival (RFS), and determining human papillomavirus (HPV) status from noninvasive imaging, remain challenging yet clinically valuable goals. The HECKTOR 2025 challenge addresses these needs by establishing a comprehensive benchmark for automated HNC analysis using multimodal PET/CT imaging and electronic health records. Building on previous editions (2020-2022), this challenge features an expanded multi-institutional dataset comprising over 1,100 patients from 10 centers worldwide. Participants were tasked with three complementary objectives: (1) segmenting primary gross tumor volumes (GTVp) and metastatic lymph nodes (GTVn), (2) predicting recurrence-free survival, and (3) classifying HPV status. The challenge attracted 35 registered teams, with 15 final submissions evaluated on a held-out test set. Top-performing algorithms achieved a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.75 for segmentation, a concordance index of 0.66 for survival prediction, and a balanced accuracy of 0.56 for HPV classification. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the submitted methodologies, evaluates their performance across different lesion characteristics, and discusses their implications for clinical translation in automated oncology workflows and decision support systems.

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

TS-Fault: Benchmarking Time Series Forecasters Against Structural Faults

arXiv:2606.18539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting (TSF) underpins consequential decisions in energy, transportation, finance, and healthcare, yet TSF models are almost universally ranked by a single number (e.g., average error) on clean held-out data, under the implicit assumption that it predicts deployed reliability. However, real faults are not i.i.d noise but structured events with temporal shape, broken cross-variable dependencies, regime change coupled with missingness, and causal propagation across a sensing pipeline. Treating TSF robustness as a data-quality problem, we present TS-Fault, a benchmark that evaluates forecasting models under explicit, parameterized fault scenarios with controllable semantic difficulty. TS-Fault organizes recurring failures into four modes along two orthogonal axes (observation- vs mechanism-level; univariate vs multivariate) and injects each fault into the most prediction-critical window via a unified importance score. This design enables robustness to be tested against the structures models actually rely on, rather than reduced to generic noise sensitivity. We evaluate 21 models across 6 datasets, 4 modes, and 5 difficulty levels under a paired clean/corrupt protocol. The results reveal three findings that contradict common leaderboard intuition: (i) clean-data accuracy anti-correlates with robustness; (ii) clean rankings are preserved under observation-level faults but reshuffled under mechanism-level faults; and (iii) all catastrophic failures occur under mechanism-level faults, with foundation models achieving the highest clean-data accuracy yet exhibiting the greatest fragility. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ray-zyy/TS-Fault.

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

Trimodal Glioma Representation Alignment via Volumetric Contrastive Learning

Glioma grading and survival prediction require the integration of heterogeneous information collected at different spatial and biological scales. Histopathology describes tissue morphology, mRNA expression captures molecular activity, and magnetic resonance imaging provides a non-invasive view of tumor extent and radiological heterogeneity. Existing glioma prognosis models often combine only two of these sources, while their alignment objectives remain mostly pairwise. This paper introduces GLORIA, a novel trimodal framework for GLioma Omics - Radiology - hIstopathology Alignment. GLORIA processes whole-slide image regions, gene-expression profiles, and 3D MRI volumes through modality-specific encoders, projects them into a shared latent space, and aligns them with a Gramian contrastive loss that measures the volume spanned by the three modality embeddings. The aligned representations are fused through a cross-modal gating module and optimized jointly for three-class glioma grading and overall survival prediction. We evaluate GLORIA on a matched TCGA-GBM/LGG and BraTS21 cohort, comprising 132 patients with all three modalities. On the shared trimodal test set, GLORIA improves over the bimodal WSI-mRNA baseline in all the metrics considered.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Did Models Learn Sufficiently? Attribution-Guided Training via Subset-Selected Counterfactual Augmentation

In current visual model training, models often rely on only limited sufficient causes for their predictions, which makes them sensitive to distribution shifts or the absence of key features. Attribution methods can accurately identify a model's critical regions. However, masking these areas to create counterfactuals often causes the model to misclassify the target, while humans can still easily recognize it. This divergence highlights that the model's learned dependencies may not be sufficiently causal. To address this issue, we propose Subset-Selected Counterfactual Augmentation (SS-CA), which integrates counterfactual explanations directly into the training process for targeted intervention. Building on the subset-selection-based LIMA attribution method, we develop Counterfactual LIMA to identify minimal spatial region sets whose removal can selectively alter model predictions. Leveraging these attributions, we introduce a data augmentation strategy that replaces the identified regions with natural background, and we train the model jointly on both augmented and original samples to mitigate incomplete causal learning. Extensive experiments across multiple ImageNet variants show that SS-CA improves generalization on in-distribution (ID) test data and achieves superior performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks such as ImageNet-R and ImageNet-S. Under perturbations including noise, models trained with SS-CA also exhibit enhanced generalization, demonstrating that our approach effectively uses interpretability insights to correct model deficiencies and improve both performance and robustness.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Quality Over Clicks: Iterative Reinforcement Learning for Early-Stage E-Commerce Query Suggestion

Existing dialogue systems rely on query suggestion to enhance user engagement. Recent approaches mainly optimize generative models using click-through rate (CTR) models to align with user preferences. However, these methods are less effective in early-stage deployment scenarios, where click feedback is sparse and insufficient for training a reliable CTR model. To bridge this gap, we propose QualEQS, a quality-first iterative reinforcement learning framework for e-commerce query suggestion. We formalize actionable suggestion quality along three dimensions that directly affect downstream usability: answerability, factuality, and information gain. To continuously improve from online traffic without click supervision, we further propose group-level disagreement among candidate suggestions to identify ambiguous query contexts and mine hard training cases for iterative refinement. We also introduce EQS-Benchmark, a dataset of 16,949 real-world e-commerce queries for offline training and evaluation. Experiments show that our quality-based offline metrics correlate strongly with online performance, providing a practical evaluation recipe for sparse-feedback deployment. In both offline and online settings, QualEQS consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding a 6.81% improvement in online ChatPV in a real-world enterprise-level conversational shopping assistant system.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

The Effectiveness of aromatherapy and its supportive Interventions on anxiety and pain among breast cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction: Breast cancer treatments are often associated with pain and anxiety, which can hinder physical functioning and overall quality of life, even after treatment. Complementary therapies, such as aromatherapy, can be used to alleviate pain and reduce anxiety in breast cancer patients. This project aimed to synthesize current global evidence on the effectiveness of aromatherapy. Method: This systematic review followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, with a comprehensive, systematic search conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and SCOPUS for randomized controlled trials (RCTS) published from 2015 to 2025. Eligible studies included adult women breast cancer surgery patients who received aromatherapy during various periods of breast cancer. Where possible, data from the included studies were pooled using meta-analysis. GRADE approach was used to assess certainty of findings. Results: The search yielded 84 studies. Out of these, six were included in this review. On average, aromatherapy reduces pain and anxiety scores by 0.79 (standard mean difference (SMD)=-0.79, 95% CI -1.42, -0.16) and 0.53 (SMD=-0.53, 95 CI=-0.90, -0.16) units, respectively, compared to control condition [Low-quality of evidence]. The combination of aromatherapy with music reduces pain and anxiety by 1.26 (SMD= -1.26, 95 CI=-1.65, -0.87) and 1.08 (SMD = -1.08, 95 % CI: -1.45, -0.70) units respectively compared to standard care [Low-quality of evidence]. Conclusion: There is a potential role for the use of aromatherapy and music therapy, to alleviate anxiety and pain, especially for non-preoperative anxiety and pain. Further research is needed to inform the integration of aromatherapy into the management of anxiety and pain.

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

Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.14941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting models often benefit from historical patterns. Inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), recent research explored retrieving relevant historical time series segments to enhance forecasting. However, relying solely on time series similarity is often insufficient for retrieval under non-stationarity. To address this, we propose a multimodal approach: a Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting framework, SERAF. Unlike mainstream approaches that depend only on time series similarity, SERAF conducts dual retrieval over the time series and their self-generated textual descriptions. It retrieves two complementary sets of historical patterns and corresponding futures, which are selectively and jointly used to guide future predictions. Experiments across seven real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SERAF in bridging numerical and semantic views of time series compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

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

Target-Aware Linear Regression Under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.22775v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distribution shift between training and deployment is a pervasive challenge for modern AI systems. In many cases, the target marginals of covariates and response are known or specified through population-level observations, boundary conditions, properties of simulator configurations, or alignment-time distributional constraints. Such knowledge may provide valuable side information for regression estimation. We study this problem in the multivariate linear regression setting with a stable conditional mean $E[Y\mid X]$ across source and target, and identify the hybrid-loss estimator, which jointly incorporates both target marginals, as a benchmark target-aware estimator. Its direct computation, however, requires solving a coupled nonlinear optimization that is expensive at scale. Our main contribution is to develop and evaluate two computationally tractable alternatives: a constrained moment-matching estimator and a two-stage estimator that augments ordinary least squares with a calibration step. For all three estimators, we derive and compare closed-form asymptotic mean squared errors, yielding conditions under which the tractable alternatives match or closely approximate the hybrid benchmark, and regimes in which they do not. Monte Carlo experiments across three controlled shift regimes validate the theoretical results, investigate the accuracy-runtime tradeoffs among the three estimators, and translate into guidance on estimator choice. In particular, the two-stage estimator nearly matches the hybrid benchmark in the high signal-to-noise regime at essentially no additional cost, providing theoretical grounding for empirical observations in nonlinear settings.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MVAD: A Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal AI-Generated Video-Audio Detection

The rapid advancement of AI-generated multimodal video-audio content has raised significant concerns regarding information security and content authenticity. Existing synthetic video datasets predominantly focus on the visual modality alone, while the few incorporating audio are largely confined to facial deepfakes–a limitation that fails to address the expanding landscape of general multimodal AI-generated content and substantially impedes the development of trustworthy detection systems. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce the Multimodal Video-Audio Dataset (MVAD), the first comprehensive dataset specifically designed for detecting AI-generated multimodal video-audio content. Our dataset exhibits three key characteristics: (1) genuine multimodality with samples generated according to three realistic video-audio forgery patterns; (2) high perceptual quality achieved through diverse state-of-the-art generative models; and (3) comprehensive diversity spanning realistic and anime visual styles, four content categories (humans, animals, objects, and scenes), and four video-audio multimodal data types. Our dataset will be available at https://github.com/HuMengXue0104/MVAD.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Surrogate Benchmarks for Model Merging Optimization

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

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

An Approach to Simultaneous Acquisition of Real-Time MRI Video, EEG, and Surface EMG for Articulatory, Brain, and Muscle Activity During Speech Production

Speech production is a complex process spanning neural planning, motor control, muscle activation, and articulatory kinematics. While the acoustic speech signal is the most accessible product of the speech production act, it does not directly reveal its causal neurophysiological substrates. We present the first simultaneous acquisition of real-time (dynamic) MRI, EEG, and surface EMG, capturing several key aspects of the speech production chain: brain signals, muscle activations, and articulatory movements. This multimodal acquisition paradigm presents substantial technical challenges, including MRI-induced electromagnetic interference and myogenic artifacts. To mitigate these, we introduce an artifact suppression pipeline tailored to this tri-modal setting. Once fully developed, this framework is poised to offer an unprecedented window into speech neuroscience and insights leading to brain-computer interface advances. The source code and data are available.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

C2RM-Seg: Causal Counterfactual Reasoning with Structural-Semantic Priors for Weakly Supervised Histopathological Tissue Segmentation

Histopathological tissue segmentation is essential for computer-aided diagnosis, yet weakly supervised methods often suffer from noisy pseudo-labels generated by Class Activation Mapping (CAM). Existing CAM approaches tend to focus on staining-driven appearance cues rather than true causal tissue morphology, resulting in spurious localization and poor structural consistency. To address this issue, we propose C$^2$RM-Seg, a two-stage framework that integrates causal pseudo-label refinement with structure-aware semantic enhancement. For classification, we introduce a Causal Counterfactual Reasoning Module (C$^2$RM) that decomposes features into latent factors and performs counterfactual intervention via a learned causal structure matrix, suppressing confounding context and producing morphology-aligned CAMs. For segmentation, we design a Dual-Path Structural-Semantic Architecture that combines fine-grained structural features from ResNeSt with global semantic priors from a frozen DINOV3 foundation model. A cross-path gating mechanism adaptively regulates semantic injection using local structural cues to preserve boundary fidelity. To further mitigate residual pseudo-label noise, we propose an Uncertainty-Gated Margin (UGM) loss, which dynamically balances margin enforcement and confidence learning based on prediction uncertainty. Extensive experiments on two public histopathological tissue datasets show that C$^2$RM-Seg achieves state-of-the-art performance.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Perron–Frobenius theorem for a general tree-valued growth-fragmentation-isolation process

arXiv:2606.24599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A general tree-valued dynamics is considered in continuous time: new vertices are added, and the percolation happens on the links, and the connected components can be frozen. The model is an infinite-type branching process. The main result establishes the Perron–Frobenius type theorem on this model, which extends the previous work [Ann. Appl. Probab. 33 (6B) 5233 - 5278]. The proof does not rely on any property of the uniform random recursive tree.

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

BusterX++: Towards Unified Cross-Modal AI-Generated Content Detection and Explanation with MLLM

The rapid advancement of generative AI has substantially improved image and video synthesis, amplifying the risk of multimodal visual misinformation. Recent MLLMs have shown promise for transparent AI-generated content detection through reasoning and explanation, yet existing approaches largely treat image and video forensics as isolated tasks, leaving cross-modal synergies underexplored. To address this, we present BusterX++, a unified MLLM for joint image and video detection with interpretable reasoning. We also introduce GenBuster-Bench++, a meticulously curated, difficulty-aligned benchmark containing balanced image and video samples spanning recent generation models and diverse real-world scenarios. Using this controlled setting, we revisit the widely adopted $SFT \rightarrow RL$ post-training paradigm. Notably, our findings demonstrate that a single-stage, pure RL strategy driven strictly by sparse outcome rewards consistently matches or surpasses a strong SFT+RL baseline across both unified and single-modality settings. Our key insight reveals that SFT imposes lower policy entropy, which restricts the policy search space and dampens exploratory freedom. In contrast, single-stage pure RL maintains higher policy entropy throughout training, effectively unlocking the spontaneous emergence of cross-modal capability transfer between image and video forensics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BusterX++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the powerful potential of RL for unified cross-modal visual reasoning.

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

AI Economist Agent: An Agentic Framework for Model-Grounded Economic Analysis with RAG, Knowledge Graphs, and Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.20041v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a model-grounded RAG-based AI economist with an agentic framework for economic scenario analysis using large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs. While LLMs can generate fluent economic narratives, economists are often required to make economic claims grounded by economic theory and real-world data. Based on this motivation, this study proposes an RAG-based AI economist, which utilizes knowledge graphs including economic data and theory and LLM-based agents to plan the analysis, retrieve relevant evidence, select appropriate models, and generate reports. In our framework, we do not produce quantitative claims directly with the language model alone; instead, we generate narratives grounded in explicit model-based computations and linked to the retrieved evidence via AI agents. We refer to our framework as an AI economist agent. We evaluate the AI economist agent in two applications: economist report generation for U.S. inflation persistence and Federal Reserve policy, and bank stress-test narrative generation for U.S. commercial real estate refinancing stress. The results illustrate how grounding the generated reports improves their economic coherence and traceability.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

When to Skip Syndrome Extraction in Surface-GKP Codes

arXiv:2606.24469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum error correction requires repeated syndrome extraction to address errors induced by the syndrome-extraction circuit itself. However, repeated syndrome extraction incurs significant overhead in terms of gate count and ancilla consumption (e.g., Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states). Moreover, noisy syndrome extraction can itself inject additional errors into the data qubits. To address these issues, we propose a concrete adaptive skipping scheme for the surface-GKP code, a representative GKP-concatenated architecture, that uses analog information naturally generated during inner GKP correction. At each round, the scheme selects one of four actions: measuring both Z-type and X-type surface-code stabilizers, measuring only one type, or skipping both types and reusing previous syndromes. The decision is based on a reliability comparison between reusing the previous syndrome value and performing a new noisy syndrome extraction. Using circuit-level simulations, we show that the adaptive skipping scheme can reduce the number of surface-code stabilizer measurements while maintaining logical error rates comparable to or lower than those of the full-measurement baseline. The improvement is most pronounced when gate and measurement noise are larger than idle noise, so that avoiding unnecessary syndrome extraction reduces the noise injected into the code. These results indicate that analog information from inner GKP correction can be used not only to improve decoding but also to reduce the measurement overhead of outer-code syndrome extraction.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Incremental costs of transitioning from four to eight WHO-recommended antenatal care visits in Uganda: A costing analysis from a societal perspective

Background In 2016, the World Health Organization revised its antenatal care (ANC) recommendation from four to eight visits. For low- and middle-income countries like Uganda, where achieving even four visits remains a challenge, this transition has significant cost implications for both the health system and households. This study estimated the incremental costs of adopting the eight-visit model from a societal perspective. Methods The study was conducted in six government health facilities in southwestern Uganda. A micro-costing approach estimated health facility costs (personnel, equipment, consumables, and overhead). Costs incurred at patients end (transport, ultrasound, medical expenses, and time) were collected from 785 women using a questionnaire, with all costs in 2025 USD. Results For an average of 4.3 visits, total cost per woman was $100.1: facility costs $43.7 (43.7%), and patient costs $56.4 (56.3%). Transitioning to eight visits would increase total cost by $57.8 (57.8%), of which $36.4 (63.0%) would fall on households, equivalent to 68.8% of average monthly household income. Total costs would rise by 55.4% ($115.5 to $179.5) at Health Center IVs and 64.3% ($102.3 to $168.1) at Health Center IIIs, with facility costs up 43.4% and 62.9% and patient costs up 61.2% and 65.7%, respectively. Conclusion Transitioning to eight ANC visits would impose a large financial burden on households, with the incremental patient cost equivalent to more than two-thirds of average monthly household income. Equitable implementation requires improving availability of medicines and diagnostics, subsidizing transport, exploring telemedicine or community-based models, and improving efficiency at lower-tier health centers.

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

Modeling Complex Behaviors: Multi-Personality Composition and Dynamic Switching in Vision-Language Models

With the widespread deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in social interaction, understanding and controlling their behavior under complex personality conditions is essential. This paper introduces explicit personality conditioning and establishes a systematic evaluation framework encompassing single-personality induction, multi-personality induction, and personality switching. Experiments show that personality induction improves image captioning performance but can impair performance on tasks requiring precise reasoning, such as visual question answering (VQA). Balancing and residual effects are observed during multi-trait composition and dynamic switching, indicating that model behavior is co-modulated by both previous and current personality constraints. Existing prompt-based personality induction methods show limited transferability to multimodal settings. Our work reveals the dynamic and complex nature of personality modeling in MLLMs and underscores the need for robust, tailored methods for personality induction and evaluation. The code will be released when the paper is accepted.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Semi-Supervised Speech Confidence Detection using Pseudo-Labelling and Whisper Embeddings

arXiv:2606.16505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding speaker confidence is crucial in educational settings, as it can enhance personalised feedback and improve learning outcomes. This study introduces a novel framework for detecting speaker confidence by integrating human-engineered features with embeddings from the Whisper encoder. To address data limitations, a pseudo-labelling technique is employed to expand the labelled dataset, allowing the model to learn from both human-annotated and model-generated labels. The framework combines traditional speech features including pitch, volume, rate of speech, and the presence of disfluencies and stress, with Whisper embeddings, and uses a co-attention mechanism to fuse these representations and achieve an overall accuracy of 75%. This study contributes to advancing speech analysis, enabling applications that support personalised learning and speaking skill development.

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

Structuring Sparsity: Block-Sparse Featurizers Capture Visual Concept Manifolds

What is the geometry of a visual percept? The most widely used protocols for decomposing neural network representations into interpretable parts treat concepts as isolated directions, yet recent work shows that concepts are often realized as geometric structures in low dimensional regions of activation space. We turn to the literature of Structured sparsity to close this gap, and show that block sparsity, which groups directions into blocks, is the prior matched to a generative model in which a representation is a sparse sum of low-dimensional manifolds: the modern, learned form of a classical idea in visual neuroscience, where a visual feature is carried by a coordinated group of neurons rather than a single tuned one. We implement three variants of block-sparse featurizers (BSFs) and, through a minimum-description-length analysis, show that all three describe activations more compactly than direction-based featurizers, with the recovered concepts typically two- to four-dimensional. We then use BSFs to (i) recontextualize prior work, showing that curve detectors in InceptionV1 actually read from a single continuous curve manifold, (ii) discover novel manifolds including shadows and lighting in DINOv3, and (iii) support interpretable control of image generation in diffusion models (SDXL) via manifold steering.

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

ChartFI: Benchmarking Faithfulness and Insightfulness of Chart Descriptions from Multimodal Large Language Models

Chart descriptions are essential for accessibility, cross-modal retrieval, and assisting readers in extracting insights from complex visualizations. As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly adopted for automated chart description generation, a critical question arises: how faithfully and insightfully do these models actually describe charts? Current benchmarks fall short on two fronts: existing datasets consist of simple, homogeneous charts paired with shallow, fact-enumerating descriptions; and prevailing metrics fail to capture the multi-faceted nature of description quality. To address these gaps, we present the Chart Faithfulness and Insightfulness Benchmark (ChartFI-Bench). We first summarize four dimensions that characterize high-quality chart descriptions: factual accuracy, salient feature emphasis, domain-informed guidance, and chart-text complementarity. Guided by these dimensions, we construct a high-quality benchmark comprising 896 chart-description pairs, which feature visually complex charts and semantically rich descriptions. Furthermore, we design four aligned evaluation metrics – Faithfulness, Coverage, Informativeness, and Acuity – to systematically assess the quality of descriptions across these dimensions. Experiments conducted on mainstream MLLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and reveal common weaknesses among existing models.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Architectural Bias in Face Presentation Attack Detection: A Comparative Study of Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks

Face Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) systems constitute a critical security layer in biometric authentication; however, existing approaches exhibit systematic performance disparities across demographic groups, disproportionately affecting individuals with darker skin tones. This paper presents a comparative empirical investigation of whether Vision Transformer architectures reduce demographic bias in face PAD systems relative to convolutional baselines. Experiments are conducted on the CASIA-SURF Cross-Ethnicity Face Anti-Spoofing (CeFA) dataset. Three architectures are evaluated: a Multimodal ViT-Tiny trained from scratch, a ResNet18 CNN baseline, and a pretrained DeiT-S fine-tuned on CeFA across African, East Asian, and zero-shot Central Asian demographic groups. DeiT-S achieves the highest overall accuracy of 97.27% and the lowest EER of 0.86%, outperforming ResNet18 at 90.15% accuracy. In terms of fairness, DeiT-S reduces the inter-ethnic ACER gap between African and East Asian subjects to 0.13%, compared to 0.75% reported in an LBP-based work [6], representing an 83% reduction. Most notably, while ResNet18 records a BPCER of 10.44% on zero-shot Central Asian subjects, DeiT-S maintains 2.89% on the same unseen group, demonstrating a 3.6x generalization advantage. These results suggest that pretrained Vision Transformers achieve superior PAD accuracy, produce smaller demographic performance gaps, and generalize more equitably across unseen demographic groups, indicating that cross-demographic fairness in PAD may partly be influenced by architectural design.