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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Towards Multi-Agent-Simulation-Based Community Note Evaluation

arXiv:2606.18268v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Community-based fact-checking that relies on cross-consensus is expanding rapidly on social media platforms. However, the delay and low-ratio of cross-consensus community fact-checks rated by human contributors remains a significant challenge. To address this, we first created ComRate, a large-scale dataset comprising 2.5 million community notes and over 209 million ratings sourced from $\mathbb{X}$. We then propose MultiCom, a persona-guided multi-agent rating framework for community note evaluation. MultiCom simulates diverse rater population by clustering contributors in a matrix-factorized rater space and prompting persona agents to generate structured assessments based on the official community notes rating schema. These agents output structured and explainable judgments, such as confidence, agreement signals and reasons. An out-of-fold calibrated aggregation algorithm combines features such as raw votes and diagnostic reason signals for reliable prediction. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MultiCom outperforms alternative methods, achieving an average accuracy of 84.7% (balanced accuracy 68.3%, macro-F1 60.1%) on the evaluation set.

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

The Tone of Awareness: Topic, Sentiment, and Toxicity Maps During Mental Health Month on TikTok

Despite raising concerns about the mental health effects associated with the usage of TikTok, little is known about how related content is framed by creators and received by audiences. We collect the content of 28,341 TikTok videos and 80,130 comments from Mental Health Awareness Month (May) in 2023 and 2024 via the TikTok Research API, and study how the tone of awareness varies across topics and years. We characterize "tone" as the emotional and interpersonal framing of mental health discourse, operationalized through sentiment and toxicity measures. We extract topics from video text using BERTopic and log-odds keywords, then quantify topic-conditioned sentiment (XLM-T) and toxicity (Detoxify) separately for video transcriptions and comments. Sentiment captures the affective valence of content, while toxicity reflects the presence of harmful or abusive language. We find a stable set of recurring themes across years, spanning clinical conditions, emotional disclosure, self-care, and campaign-oriented content, with engagement highly skewed toward a small subset of topics. All sentiment and toxicity analyses are computed separately for video content and comments, allowing us to distinguish between content production and audience reception. Sentiment in videos is often negative for emotionally charged topics, while comments tend to shift toward more mixed or positive polarity, especially for suicide prevention. Toxicity is low in median overall, but exhibits longer-tailed outliers in comments than in videos that are more pronounced in comments and concentrated in specific topics (e.g., "Duet", "Suicide Prevention", and "Psychisch"). Overall, our results provide a topic-level decomposition of mental health discourse on TikTok during awareness-month campaigns.

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

Priors Persist Through Suppression: A Stroop Paradigm for Lexical Override

作者:

Glossaries, technical specifications, and system prompts routinely ask language models to use familiar words in unfamiliar ways. When this works, the local rule does not install the new meaning on top of the old one; the pretrained prior keeps operating underneath, and its strength still shows through. We test this with a Stroop-style paradigm: a remapping rule (doctor means forest) pitted against the query word's lexical-prior distractor (hospital), with matched neutral controls. Across 11 open-weight models spanning four families and 1B-9B parameters, lexical-prior strength predicts interference even after item-level controls for answer prior, frequency, tokenization, and prompt wording. Activation patching on five aligned models locates a source-position triplet (definition subject, definition target, query word) that nearly fully recovers the conflict effect (aggregate $R \in [0.92, 1.06]$); a definition-target swap shows the triplet performs binding rather than identity matching. Dissociation experiments isolate target preservation as the binding-specific signature: distractor suppression occurs under matched, swap, and item-mismatched conditions alike, whereas target logit collapse occurs only when the definition-target position is corrupted. Behavior and mechanism converge on the same channel: the prior's strength both predicts which overrides fail and marks where the causal repair lands.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

SANA: What Matters for QA Agents over Massive Data Lakes?

Exploratory question answering (EQA) over data lakes requires an LLM agent to discover relevant sources, analyze retrieved data, and adapt its actions based on intermediate results. End-to-end accuracy alone cannot distinguish failures in search, planning, data analysis, or the agent's Action Policy: its decisions about what to do next and when to submit an answer. We present SANA (Search Agent Navigation Ablation framework), a diagnostic ablation framework that transforms EQA tasks into runtime profiles containing gold source sequence, sanitized subquestions, and execution records. SANA uses these profiles to construct idealized search, planning, and data-analysis tools, allowing each component to be ablated; the residual gap is diagnostic evidence for policy failures. To illustrate SANA as a reusable evaluation framework, we adapted two recent EQA benchmarks, LakeQA and KramaBench, and evaluated lightweight and mid-sized agents under fixed prompts, budgets, data lakes, and runtimes. Across both benchmarks, data analysis is a consistent bottleneck while planning is less so. Search is a major limitation in LakeQA's large data-lake setting, but less so for the smaller-scale KramaBench. SANA thus deconstructs end-to-end task accuracies into a diagnosis of where data-lake agents fail, and allows for systematic comparisons of progress in search, planning, data analysis, and agent design.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

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

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.

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

A Temporal Planning Framework for Disruption Aware Dynamic Route Optimization in Heterogeneous Railway Systems

arXiv:2606.14582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient route optimization play a vital role in ensuring both safety and punctuality in railway operations. It is very crucial particularly in heterogeneous multi-gauge railway networks with varying train speed, stopping pattern, infrastructure compatibility constraints increase coordination complexity. In single-track systems these challenges are further intensify due to all trains to share the same track and requires frequent track switching.Stochastic disruptions events including blocked tracks, blocked trains, engine failure and speed slowdowns introduces additional unpredictability in operations and deviate the timetable. However, existing studies predominantly focuses on high-level timetabling, omitting operational details such as track switching coordination. As a result leaving decision to human operators, increasing safety risks into railway operations. This study proposes a framework based on temporal planning for dynamic route optimization and disruption management in heterogeneous railway systems. The framework formulates railway operations as a temporal planning problem using PDDL 2.1 with explicitly modeling gauge compatibility constraints and diverse disruption scenarios. It generates conflict-free timestamped operational plans specifying both optimized schedules and executable action sequences. To evaluate the proposed framework, we developed a benchmark problem set with 200 instances using up to 1,000 track points and 120 trains. Two state-of-the-art temporal planners and a plan validator were employed to assessed the framework. The experimental results demonstrate that the framework effectively generates temporal operational plans for heterogeneous railway systems and handles multi-gauge constraints, disruptions, and reduces dependence on manual decision making.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ProvenanceGuard: Source-Aware Factuality Verification for MCP-Based LLM Agents

Tool-using LLM agents increasingly use the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to answer from heterogeneous evidence sources, including search, APIs, databases, clinical records, and formulary tools. Standard factuality metrics usually test whether an answer is supported by pooled evidence, missing a provenance-sensitive failure mode: a claim may be supported somewhere while being attributed to the wrong source. We call this cross-source conflation. We introduce ProvenanceGuard, a source-aware verifier for MCP-grounded answers. It consumes captured MCP traces with stable tool IDs, source IDs, and raw outputs; decomposes answers into atomic claims; routes claims to source-specific evidence; checks support with NLI and a token-alignment proxy; compares stated attribution with the routed source; and returns per-claim verdicts plus an answer-level allow/block decision. Blocked answers can be repaired with retrieval-augmented answer revision and re-verified. We evaluate on 281 medical-domain MCP-agent traces. A 266-trace adjudicated subset yields 2,325 LLM-assisted claim labels split by trace; 361 held-out labels are human-verified. On the 40-trace held-out split, ProvenanceGuard achieves block F1 0.802 and source accuracy 0.858 over 260 source-eligible claims, outperforming source-blind baselines that do not emit claim-to-source IDs. On a harder multi-source benchmark it reaches block F1 0.846, while source-plus-relation accuracy drops to 0.229, showing that exact source ownership remains difficult with semantically close sources. Repair-and-reverify resolves all blocked answers in the full trace set, often via conservative fallback. In 50 controlled clinical conflation probes, ProvenanceGuard detects all injected attribution swaps with no retained wrong attribution. These results show that source attribution is an independent axis for factuality verification in MCP-based agents.

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

Trainable Photonic Measurement for Physics-Informed PDE Learning

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.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Domain Generalizable Adaptation of 3D Vision-Language Models via Regularized Fine-Tuning

Domain adaptation remains a central challenge in 3D vision, especially for multimodal foundation models that align 3D point clouds with visual and textual data. While these models demonstrate strong general capabilities, adapting them to downstream domains with limited data often leads to overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we introduce ReFine3D, a regularized fine-tuning framework designed for domain-generalizable tuning of 3D large multimodal models (LMMs). ReFine3D combines selective layer tuning with two targeted regularization strategies: multi-view consistency across augmented point clouds and text diversity through synonym-based prompts generated by large language models. Additionally, we incorporate point-rendered vision supervision and a test-time augmentation mechanism with confidence-based aggregation to further enhance robustness. Extensive experiments across different 3D domain generalization benchmarks show that ReFine3D improves base-to-novel class generalization by 1.36%, cross-dataset transfer by 2.43%, robustness to corruption by 1.80%, and few-shot accuracy by up to 3.11%, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods with minimal added computational overhead.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier for Phase Detection in Strongly Correlated Matter

arXiv:2606.14489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The characterisation of quantum phases in strongly correlated systems is a crucial milestone for the deployment of quantum sensors. In this work, we present a Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) designed to detect the topological phase transition between the Fermi polaron quasiparticle and the molecular bound state. Unlike conventional Machine Learning approaches, our quantum architecture is constructed via the Trotterised time-evolution of an effective Hamiltonian, ensuring that the learnable parameters correspond to interpretable physical quantities. We show that the VQC efficiently discovers the optimal interferometric protocol, specifically the evolution time and effective bath interactions required to maximise the visibility of Ramsey fringes, thereby clearly distinguishing the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) and Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) regimes. Furthermore, we report the validation of this classifier on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS). Despite the intrinsic hardware noise and decoherence, the VQC preserves the relative ordering of the topological phases. We demonstrate that the physics-informed architecture achieves a linear gate complexity $\mathcal{O}(N)$, bypassing the exponential memory wall of classical simulation and ensuring scalability to many-body regimes.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Sharp Favard length of random Cantor sets

arXiv:2512.17753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that for a large class of planar $1$-dimensional random fractals $S$, the Favard length $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))$ of the neighborhood $S(r)$ is comparable to $\log^{-1}(1/r)$, matching a universal lower bound; up to now, this was only known in expectation for a few concrete models. In particular, we show that there exist $1$-Ahlfors regular sets with the fastest possible Favard length decay. For a wide class of planar one-dimensional "grid random fractals", including fractal percolation and its Ahlfors-regular variants, we further show that $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))/\log(1/r)$ converges almost surely, and we identify the limit explicitly. Furthermore, we prove that for some $1$-dimensional Ahlfors-regular random fractals $S$, the Favard length of $S(r)$ decays instead like $\log\log(1/r)/\log(1/r)$, showing that the $1/\log(1/r)$ decay is not universal among random fractals, as might be expected from previous results.

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

Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning: Self-Aware Policy Execution for VLA Models

arXiv:2606.14375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models are powerful action generators for robot manipulation, but they are typically executed with fixed inference and replanning schedules. This rigidity ignores the uneven difficulty of robot control: contact-rich or uncertain states may need more computation and fresher feedback, while easier states can often be handled with fewer inference steps and longer open-loop execution. We propose Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning (EQRL), a framework that makes each VLA policy query elastic. A lightweight latent-schedule adaptor jointly selects the latent input, denoising budget, and action chunk length, without fine-tuning the underlying VLA model. To make scheduling difficulty-aware, EQRL trains a critic over the joint latent-schedule action and derives a state difficulty signal from critic ensemble disagreement. This signal guides compute toward difficult states, while a learned residual allows task-driven correction. We formulate variable chunk execution as query-level macro-action RL with chunk-dependent discounting and an amortized number-of-function-evaluations (NFE) budget. Across simulation and real-robot manipulation, EQRL reduces amortized inference cost while preserving or improving task success.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The central heat trace on large compact classical groups

arXiv:2511.08288v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the large-$N$ asymptotics of the central trace of the heat kernel on compact classical groups. For every classical family $G_N\subset \mathrm{GL}_N(\C)$, we prove a full large-$N$ asymptotic expansion, using a highest weights/partitions correspondence adapted to the large-rank regime, under which the eigenvalues of the Laplace–Beltrami operator stabilize as observables in the algebra of shifted symmetric functions. Then, we prove a random surface representation of the trace in terms of ramified coverings of the torus. We provide two independent applications: an explicit large-rank counting law for the Casimir spectrum, with exponential Hardy–Ramanujan-type growth in contrast with the polynomial behavior of Weyl's law at fixed rank, and a rigorous probabilistic formulation of the Yang–Mills/Hurwitz duality on a two-dimensional torus initiated by Gross and Taylor, completing a previous work of the authors. We also extend this duality to a Yang–Mills/Gromov–Witten duality by expressing the coefficients of the central heat trace as explicit functionals of the generating function of Gromov–Witten invariants.

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

Text-Driven Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images: Achieving Image Scene Adaptation on Hyperbolic Space

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary modalities, while existing Euclidean methods impose rigid distance metrics that distort multi-modal interactions and parent-to-child semantic hierarchies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a text-driven fusion framework empowered by hyperbolic manifold learning. During training, BLIP-extracted text prompts serve as topological anchors within the hyperbolic space, guiding vision-attribute alignment through hyperbolic embeddings that naturally accommodate varying semantic granularities. By exploiting the exponential volume growth dictated by the Poincaré ball's negative curvature, this approach seamlessly embeds hierarchical trees to encode coarse-to-fine semantics without metric saturation, while the vast peripheral space prevents texture distortion during cross-modal fusion. At inference, the fusion process autonomously adapts to input content using the learned text-attribute priors, completely eliminating the need for textual input. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets, with code available at https://github.com/Shaoyun2023/TEDFusion.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Stimulus Motion Perception Studies Imply Specific Neural Computations in Human Visual Stabilization

Even during fixation the human eye is constantly in low amplitude motion, jittering over small angles in random directions at up to 100Hz. This motion results in all features of the image on the retina constantly traversing a number of cones, yet objects which are stable in the world are perceived to be stable, and any object which is moving in the world is perceived to be moving. A series of experiments carried out over a dozen years revealed the psychophysics of visual stabilization to be more nuanced than might be assumed, say, from the mechanics of stabilization of camera images, or what might be assumed to be the simplest solution from an evolutionary perspective. The psychophysics revealed by the experiments strongly implies a specific set of operations on retinal signals resulting in the observed stabilization behavior. The presentation is in two levels. First is a functional description of the action of the mechanism that is very likely responsible for the experimentally observed behavior. Second is a more speculative proposal of circuit-level neural elements that might implement the functional behavior.

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

RePAIR: Predictive Self-Supervised Representation Learning in Chess

arXiv:2606.11860v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Representation Prediction via Autoencoding using Iterative Refinement (RePAIR) - a novel self-supervised representation learning architecture that synthesizes Masked Autoencoders (MAE), Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA), and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). We demonstrate how it can be used to encode objects in sequential data like consecutive chess positions into compact yet meaningful representations. The basic principle of the architecture is to mask large portions of a sequence of latent states, similar to BERT and MAE. Then, we apply a lightweight Predictor to the latent representations that repairs gaps in the sequence in a lower-dimensional embedding space akin to JEPA. Our experiments in the domain of chess show that the Encoder refines the board representations such that meaningful chess concepts emerge clustered in the latent space. Furthermore, reconstructions of the masked board states show that the model is able to reason about the piece movements without relying on costly reinforcement learning methods. Lastly, we find that the resulting representation space allows for quick and intuitive dissections of chess games by observing the game path trajectories in this semantically rich space.

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

Differentiable Thermodynamic Phase-Equilibria for Machine Learning

arXiv:2603.11249v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate prediction of phase equilibria remains a central challenge in chemical engineering. Physics-consistent machine learning methods that incorporate thermodynamic structure into neural networks have recently shown strong performance for activity-coefficient modeling. However, extending such approaches to equilibrium data arising from an extremum principle, such as liquid-liquid equilibria, remains difficult. Here we present DISCOMAX, a differentiable algorithm for phase-equilibrium calculation that guarantees thermodynamic consistency at both training and inference, only subject to a user-specified discretization. The method combines discrete enumeration of feasible phase states with masked softmax aggregation in the backward pass, with the propagation of the true equilibrium state in the forward pass, using a straight-through gradient estimator to enable physics-consistent end-to-end learning of neural \gls{gE}-models. We show that this approach bears analogy to statistical thermodynamics, and we evaluate it on binary liquid-liquid equilibrium data where it outperforms existing surrogate-based methods, while offering a general framework for learning from different kinds of equilibrium data.

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

The Emergence of Autonomous Penetration Capabilities in Large Language Model-Powered AI Systems

arXiv:2606.13079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nowadays, the autonomous execution of cyberattacks capable of causing substantial real-world harm is widely regarded as one of the critical red lines that frontier AI systems must not cross. Within this broader red-line scenario, autonomous penetration represents a core enabling capability and subtask: the ability of LLM-powered AI systems to independently conduct adversarial operations against a target server without human intervention, identify and exploit vulnerabilities, and obtain unauthorized access or control. A growing body of work has sought to assess the autonomous penetration capabilities of AI systems. However, existing evaluations often employ opaque methodologies, rely on unrealistic or overly simplified penetration-testing scenarios, or provide LLMs with excessive prior knowledge and task-specific guidance, and cannot accurately capture the extent to which modern AI systems can autonomously perform this core capability within broader high-impact cyberattack scenarios. To address these limitations, we construct a new autonomous penetration evaluation framework consisting of two components: target servers and agent scaffolding. Specifically, on the target-server side, we design two levels of target environments based on the number of secure services without known vulnerabilities deployed alongside a vulnerable service: Tier~1 (one secure service) and Tier~2 (three secure services), resulting in a total of 300 target servers. Meanwhile, the agent scaffolding adopts a general-purpose agent architecture equipped with a set of general-purpose cybersecurity tools, without any target-specific prior knowledge. We evaluate 19 open-weight and proprietary LLMs, and find that current models achieve penetration success rates ranging from 10.7% to 69.3%. Moreover, we observe that autonomous penetration capability continues to improve alongside advances in overall model capability.

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

Mask-Morph Graph U-Net: A Generalisable Mesh-Based Surrogate for Crashworthiness Field Prediction under Large Geometric Variation

arXiv:2605.15231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlinear finite element crash simulations are accurate but computationally expensive, limiting their use in iterative design optimisation. Machine-learning surrogate models based on graph neural networks (GNNs) offer a faster alternative. Message-passing GNNs are widely used for mesh simulation, and their shared node and edge update functions are relatively generalisable across varying graph structures. By contrast, non-shareable edge-specific aggregation layers can capture nonlinear relationships more accurately but usually require fixed graph connectivity, which limits generalisability. This paper presents Mask-Morph Graph U-Net (MMGUNet), a practical approach to addressing the limitation of hierarchical Graph U-Net architectures that use edge-specific downsampling and upsampling layers. Fixed coarse graph connectivity is required for edge-specific layers. To retain this while improving spatial correspondence, the proposed method morphs the coarsened graph hierarchy to each input mesh using feature-aligned barycentric parameterisation before constructing cross-graph edges. It further applies node masking during supervised pretraining, followed by parameter-efficient fine-tuning in which high-parameter edge-specific layers are frozen. The proposed approach is evaluated in in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and cross-component transfer settings using mean Euclidean distance and maximum intrusion percentage error. Results show that coarse-graph morphing improves test accuracy relative to a fixed-coarse-graph baseline, while masked supervised pretraining reduces the train-test discrepancy and improves data efficiency during transfer. The proposed model also achieves lower prediction error compared with external baselines. These results demonstrate a practical route toward reusable, data-efficient mesh-based surrogate modelling for crashworthiness design exploration.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Silhouette-Guided Animal Art

Generative AI has advanced the ability to render photorealistic or artistic images, yet it remains limited in a key aspect of human creativity: interpreting ambiguous shapes. This phenomenon, rooted in pareidolia, allows humans to perceive meaningful forms in random patterns such as clouds, stones, or leaves. To computationally replicate this imaginative process, we introduce Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Visual-RAG), a framework that generates animal art directly from natural silhouettes. Our method retrieves structurally similar animal shapes from a curated corpus of 28,586 high-quality silhouettes and uses them as reference exemplars to guide diffusion-based generation with ControlNet and IP-Adapter. Ablation studies confirm that shape Context with RANSAC provides the most accurate alignment, while removing shape standardization reduces the inlier ratio to just 13.4\%, underscoring the importance of structural fidelity in Visual-RAG. A user study with 12 participants evaluated the outputs in terms of aesthetics, silhouette fidelity, and overall impression. Results reveal that while Visual-RAG provides plausible interpretations, challenges remain in achieving high perceptual impact. This work lays the foundation for computational pareidolia, showing how machines can contribute to the early stages of imaginative discovery.

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

MultiMolecule: a modular ecosystem for biomolecular sequence-model workflows

作者:

arXiv:2606.16540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biomolecular sequence models are increasingly reused outside the studies in which they were introduced, but public checkpoints rarely preserve the execution context needed to inspect source-defined behavior, adapt models to new assays, compare models under shared task definitions or deploy biological predictions. MultiMolecule is an open-source Python ecosystem that turns heterogeneous RNA, DNA and protein sequence-model releases into complete, source-checked model-family implementations with shared loading, workflow and prediction interfaces. The Resource state reported here includes 53 complete model-family implementations with 112 standardized model checkpoints, together with 16 curated dataset resources released through 39 public dataset repositories and 10 user-facing prediction pipelines. Standardized components are linked to source provenance, conversion or preparation code, source-reference checks, Extended Data summaries and public documentation, allowing users to inspect what was standardized, what behavior was checked and how each component enters training, evaluation, inference or deployment. By shifting reuse from repository-specific checkpoints to executable implementations connected to standardized checkpoints, curated datasets, Runner workflows and biological prediction pipelines, MultiMolecule provides common infrastructure for preserving source-defined model behavior, adapting models to new assays, enabling controlled evaluation and deploying biomolecular predictions.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Federated Bilevel Performative Prediction

arXiv:2606.19734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated bilevel optimization is widely used for nested learning problems across distributed clients, such as federated hyperparameter tuning and meta-learning under privacy and communication constraints. Most existing formulations assume fixed client data distributions, which can be violated by performativity, where deployed decisions reshape client behavior and data collection, inducing client-specific, decision-dependent distribution shift. We study federated bilevel performative prediction, where both upper-level (UL) and lower-level (LL) objectives are evaluated under client-dependent, decision-dependent distributions. We formalize the federated bilevel performatively stable (FBPS) point under a decoupled-risk perspective and provide sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. We then develop two federated methods to compute the FBPS solution: FBi-RRM, which converges linearly under a contraction condition, and FBi-SGD, a communication-efficient stochastic method based on federated hypergradient estimation with convergence guarantees under diminishing step sizes when sensitivities are sufficiently small. Experiments on strategic regression and meta strategic classification validate the predicted stability thresholds and demonstrate improved meta-generalization over non-performative baselines, and CNN-based classification further demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods in nonconvex neural network settings.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Visual enhancement and 3D representation for underwater scenes: a review

Underwater visual enhancement (UVE) and underwater 3D reconstruction pose significant challenges in computer vision and AI-based tasks due to complex imaging conditions in aquatic environments. Despite the development of numerous enhancement algorithms, a comprehensive and systematic review covering both UVE and underwater 3D reconstruction remains absent. To advance research in these areas, we present an in-depth review from multiple perspectives. First, we introduce the fundamental physical models, highlighting the peculiarities that challenge conventional techniques. We survey advanced methods for visual enhancement and 3D reconstruction specifically designed for underwater scenarios. The paper assesses various approaches from non-learning methods to advanced data-driven techniques, including Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting, discussing their effectiveness in handling underwater distortions. Finally, we conduct both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of state-of-the-art UVE and underwater 3D reconstruction algorithms across multiple benchmark datasets. Finally, we highlight key research directions for future advancements in underwater vision.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

NOVA: NOise-aware Verbal Confidence CAlibration for Robust Large Language Models in RAG Systems

Accurately assessing model confidence is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in mission-critical factual domains. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely adopted to improve grounding, confidence calibration in RAG settings remains poorly understood. We conduct a systematic study across four benchmarks, revealing that LLMs exhibit poor calibration performance especially when noisy contexts are retrieved. Specifically, contradictory or irrelevant evidence tends to exacerbate the model's overconfidence issue. To address this, we propose NOVA Rules (NOise-Aware Verbal Confidence CAlibration Rules) to provide a principled foundation for resolving overconfidence under noise. We further design NOVA, a noise-aware calibration framework that synthesizes supervision from ~2K HotpotQA examples guided by these rules. By performing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with this data, NOVA equips models with intrinsic noise awareness without relying on stronger teacher models. Empirical results show that NOVA yields substantial gains, improving ECE scores by 10.9% in-domain and 8.0% out-of-domain. By bridging the gap between retrieval noise and verbal calibration, NOVA paves the way for both accurate and epistemically reliable LLMs.

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

Looking Is Not Picking: An Attention-Segment Account of Tool-Selection Failures in LLM Agents

作者:

arXiv:2606.16364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents mis-call tools, and the natural guess is that the model failed to see the right tool in a crowded harness. We show the opposite through a lens concurrent work sets aside – the model's attention to labeled tool-definition segments. On real BFCL failures, by per-candidate attention argmax the model attends most to the correct tool 80% of the time (vs. 21% chance), and the gold is the under-attended segment on only 10%: it looks at the right tool and still picks wrong. This directly refutes the intuitive "crowded-harness / lost-in-the-middle" explanation: the failure is at the decision readout, not the harness, and we pin it there three ways. (1) Input vs. readout: repairing the prompt (reordering or duplicating the gold tool) recovers