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

The Complexity of Min-Max Optimization for Quadratic Polynomials

arXiv:2606.17000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove that computing approximate stationary points of min-max optimization over the hypercube is PPAD-hard for quadratic polynomials. This holds even when the polynomials are multilinear, each variable appears in at most three monomials, and the approximation factor is inverse polynomial. As a direct consequence, we obtain the first PPAD-hardness results for two-team zero-sum polymatrix games.

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

Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models

Processing video in vision-language models is expensive: each frame occupies hundreds of tokens, and inference cost scales with every frame and every repeated query. We introduce Frames2LoRA, a method for parametric video internalization. A perceiver hypernetwork reads the intermediate representations produced layer-by-layer as a frozen VLM encodes a video, and generates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter in a single forward pass. Unlike standard LoRA fine-tuning, which requires iterative gradient updates, Frames2LoRA predicts these weights directly from the video. Trained for SmolVLM2 500M and 2.2B on video summarization and captioning, Frames2LoRA enables the same frozen VLM to answer queries from the adapter alone, with zero visual tokens in its context at query time. Frames2LoRA is statistically non-inferior and equivalent to direct video-in-context inference across all five captioning benchmarks at both model scales, and across seven of eight video question answering benchmark-scale pairings. Although trained only on 12 frames at 384px, it remains stable up to 1,024 frames and 1024px, where direct video-in-context inference often degenerates. Across this sweep, it reduces answer-time visual-token load by up to 1,500x and query TTFT by 6-80x, while preserving video-faithful outputs. We also find that independently generated adapters for non-overlapping video segments can compose in rank space, suggesting a path toward chunked long-video internalization.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Language fMRI lateralization success and head motion in pediatric epilepsy patients with ADHD, and improvements based on fMRI task training

Introduction Language functional MRI (fMRI) is a valuable tool for presurgical planning in epilepsy. Functional MRI can be challenging in children, and head motion can compromise its utility. The candidacy of patients with ADHD for fMRI is sometimes queried regarding concerns about possible head motion. In 2020, we implemented an fMRI task training program, via telehealth and/or mock MRI. We aimed to determine whether training increased language lateralisation success and/or reduced head motion in all patients, and in those with ADHD. We also aimed to determine whether patients with ADHD exhibited more head motion during fMRI than those without ADHD. Methods We retrospectively identified 223 epilepsy (85%) and other neurosurgery patients, (241 scans including repeats) with language fMRI at Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia, 2016-2024. There were 24 individuals with ADHD listed in the Electronic Medical Record, five of whom had diagnoses of both ADHD and autism; and nine with autism. Language lateralisation success was determined by clinician description recorded as left/right/bilateral in the medical record. 99 patients were provided the training including fMRI task practise. Head motion was quantified by maximum Framewise Displacement (FDmax; mm). Results ADHD was associated with lower language lateralisation success. Training was associated with greater language lateralisation success, across all patients, and in those with ADHD. Regarding ADHD and head motion, outliers in FDmax were seen in 5 young patients with ADHD. Data were trimmed to allow separate investigation of FDmax for the sample with and without extremes of head motion. In untrimmed data, FDmax was significantly higher in patients with ADHD than in those without. In trimmed data, FDmax was on average lower in patients with ADHD than those without, however this was not statistically supported. Regarding training and head motion, across all patients, FDmax was significantly lower for scans with training than without. In patients with ADHD, FDmax was on average lower for scans with training, however training was not associated with FDmax. Conclusions Language fMRI training was associated with higher language lateralization success, particularly in patients with ADHD. Training was associated with reduced head motion across all patients. Although some young patients with ADHD had substantial head motion, most in our sample did not move more than those without ADHD. We conclude that the training program increases success of language fMRI, and that an ADHD diagnosis should not be a contraindication to language fMRI.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

CellOS: Learning a World Model of Cellular State through Joint Embedding Prediction

Foundation models learned from single-cell transcriptomes are central to the prospect of AI virtual cell that can represent, query and predict cellular state. However, most current single-cell foundation models learn from a single view of gene expression and are optimized primarily through reconstruction or next-token prediction. As a result, they capture expression abundance but can-not explicitly reconcile complementary views of cellular state. Here we present CellOS, a multi-view foundation model that learns cellular representations from paired expression and perception views. CellOS integrates complementary views through a scalable three-stage training strategy that combines causal cell-sentence language modelling, function-preserving dense-to-mixture-of-experts expansion and latent-space alignment via an LLM-JEPA objective. Using this framework, we trained a 12-billion-parameter model on 390.5 million single-cell transcriptomes. Across diverse benchmarks spanning cell-state annotation, batch integration and perturbation-response prediction, CellOS consistently outperformed state-of-the-art single-cell foundation models in cell-state annotation and perturbation-response prediction while preserving robust batch integration. Together, these results suggest that predictive alignment between complementary cellular views provides a scalable path toward representation-centric cellular world models and transferable AI virtual cells.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Overcoming Labelled Data Scarcity for Defect Classification in Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

arXiv:2506.01678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) is a powerful technique for imaging surfaces with atomic resolution, providing insight into physical and chemical processes at the level of single atoms and molecules. A regular task of STM image analysis is the identification and labelling of features of interest against a uniform background. Performing this manually is a labour-intensive task, requiring significant human effort. To reduce this burden, we propose an automated approach to the segmentation of STM images that uses both few-shot learning and unsupervised learning. Our technique offers greater flexibility compared to previous supervised methods; it removes the requirement for large manually annotated datasets and is thus easier to adapt to an unseen surface while still maintaining a high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using it to recognise atomic features on three distinct surfaces: Si(001), Ge(001), and TiO$_2$(110), including adsorbed AsH$_3$ molecules on the silicon and germanium surfaces. Our model exhibits strong generalisation capabilities, and following initial training, can be adapted to unseen surfaces with as few as one additional labelled data point. This work is a significant step towards efficient and material-agnostic, automatic segmentation of STM images.

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

A Lindbladian for holographic Brownian motion

arXiv:2606.17909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We derive a Lindbladian description of holographic Brownian motion in the high-temperature regime. Starting from the influence functional for a trailing string endpoint, we identify the corresponding quantum master equation and prove that it is completely positive and trace-preserving. We determine the coefficients of the Lindbladian explicitly for two holographic backgrounds: the BTZ black hole and the AdS$_5$ black brane, restricting in the latter case to the endpoint fluctuation along the $x^1$-direction. We then analyze the time evolution of phase-space moments, energy relaxation, and steady states.

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

Variational autoencoders with latent high-dimensional steady geometric flows for dynamics

arXiv:2410.10137v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop Riemannian approaches to variational autoencoders (VAEs) for PDE-type ambient data with regularizing geometric latent dynamics, which we refer to as VAE-DLM, or VAEs with dynamical latent manifolds. We redevelop the VAE framework such that manifold geometries, subject to our geometric flow, embedded in Euclidean space are learned in the intermediary latent space developed by encoders and decoders. By tailoring the geometric flow in which the latent space evolves, we induce latent geometric properties of our choosing, which are reflected in empirical performance. We reformulate the traditional evidence lower bound (ELBO) loss with a considerate choice of prior. We develop a linear geometric flow with a steady-state regularizing term. This flow requires only automatic differentiation of one time derivative, and can be solved in moderately high dimensions in a physics-informed approach, allowing more expressive latent representations. We discuss how this flow can be formulated as a gradient flow, and maintains entropy away from metric singularity. This, along with an eigenvalue penalization condition, helps ensure the manifold is sufficiently large in measure, nondegenerate, and a canonical geometry, which contribute to a robust representation. Our methods focus on the modified multi-layer perceptron architecture with tanh activations for the manifold encoder-decoder. We demonstrate, on our datasets of interest, our methods perform at least as well as the traditional VAE, and oftentimes better. Our methods can outperform this and a VAE endowed with our proposed architecture, frequently reducing out-of-distribution (OOD) error between 15% to 35% on select datasets. We highlight our method on ambient PDEs whose solutions maintain minimal variation in late times. We provide empirical justification towards how we can improve robust learning for external dynamics with VAEs.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Spectro-Temporal Interference Confounds Phase Encoding in Spatial Audio Foundation Models

Recent spatial self supervised audio models achieve high performance on localization tasks, raising questions about their encoding of microsecond interaural phase fine structures. We propose a psychoacoustic benchmark based on the binaural masking level difference to evaluate this. Using an equalization cancellation baseline and a GCC PHAT positive control we evaluate nine frozen audio models spanning binaural SSL, monaural SSL, and neural audio codecs. Four monaural negative controls yield zero BMLD confirming binaural specificity. Two general purpose binaural SSL models exhibit minimal phase sensitivity while dedicated binaural spatial SSL models achieve BMLD comparable to the analytical baseline. Progressive physical ablations show that general purpose binaural SSL models rely on spectro temporal interference textures rather than cross channel phase computation. High detection rates in speech reflect a confounding reliance on broadband envelopes rather than genuine phase encoding.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Neural-Parameterized Cellular Automata for Wildfire Spread

arXiv:2606.11676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional wildfire models rely on rigid, low-dimensional parameters and static fuel maps, frequently underpredicting fire spread. To address this weakness, we introduce a hybrid deep-learning parameterized Probabilistic Cellular Automata (CA) framework implemented in JAX. Our approach employs a Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network to dynamically generate spatially varying parameters that govern fire-spread probability, wind alignment, and slope influence. This hybrid design captures complex, nonlinear environmental interactions while preserving the physical interpretability of the underlying three-state CA. The JAX implementation enables hardware acceleration and gradient-based parameter calibration. Evaluated on six large-scale wildfires in the western United States, the model maintains IoU > 0.6 over 72-hour forecast horizons after a 10-day data assimilation window during which the model is fitted incrementally to observed perimeters; the resulting forecast is a conditional projection of fire growth under the suppression regime already ncoded in those observations.

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

PRISM: Prosody-Integrated Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Spoken Dialogue

Empathetic spoken dialogue systems require not only semantically appropriate responses but also emotionally aligned prosodic expression. However, cascade pipelines often discard acoustic cues during speech-to-text conversion, while end-to-end speech models lack interpretable control over emotion and knowledge integration. To address these challenges, we propose PRISM, a multi-agent framework for empathetic spoken dialogue that decouples speech perception, response generation, and speech synthesis into coordinated components. PRISM introduces a prosody-to-language translation mechanism to stabilize large language model reasoning and enables on-demand invocation of external knowledge tools for empathetic dialogue generation. Experimental results demonstrate that PRISM achieves consistent improvements in empathy, prosodic appropriateness, and text response generation quality across objective and subjective metrics. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Bxzfrm/PRISM.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Partial Ring Scan: Revisiting Scan Order in Vision State Space Models

State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as efficient alternatives to attention for vision tasks, offering lineartime sequence processing with competitive accuracy. Vision SSMs, however, require serializing 2D images into 1D token sequences along a predefined scan order, a factor often overlooked. We show that scan order critically affects performance by altering spatial adjacency, fracturing object continuity, and amplifying degradation under geometric transformations such as rotation. We present Partial RIng Scan Mamba (PRISMamba), a rotation-robust traversal that partitions an image into concentric rings, performs order-agnostic aggregation within each ring, and propagates context across rings through a set of short radial SSMs. Efficiency is further improved via partial channel filtering, which routes only the most informative channels through the recurrent ring pathway while keeping the rest on a lightweight residual branch. On ImageNet-1K, PRISMamba achieves 84.5% Top-1 with 3.9G FLOPs and 3,054 img/s on A100, outperforming VMamba in both accuracy and throughput while requiring fewer FLOPs. It also maintains performance under rotation, whereas fixed-path scans drop by 1~2%. These results highlight scan-order design, together with channel filtering, as a crucial, underexplored factor for accuracy, efficiency, and rotation robustness in Vision SSMs. Code will be released upon acceptance.

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

Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models for Image Quality Assessment via Voting and Ranking

Improving vision-language models (VLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, methods that necessitate costly, human-annotated data. While self-supervised techniques have proven effective for enhancing reasoning capabilities, their application to perceptual domains such as image quality assessment (IQA) remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce EvoQuality, a novel framework that enables a VLM to autonomously refine its quality perception capabilities without any ground-truth labels. EvoQuality adapts the principle of self-consistency to the ranking-based nature of IQA. It generates pseudo-labels by performing pairwise majority voting on the VLM's own outputs to establish a consensus on relative quality. These pseudo-rankings are then formulated into a fidelity reward that guides the model's iterative evolution through group relative policy optimization (GRPO). By iteratively leveraging its own predictions, EvoQuality progressively refines the VLM's perceptual capability. Extensive experiments show that EvoQuality boosts the base VLM's zero-shot performance by 31.8% on PLCC across diverse IQA benchmarks. Remarkably, despite being entirely self-supervised, EvoQuality achieves performance that is competitive with, or even surpasses, state-of-the-art supervised VLM-based IQA models, outperforming these models on 5 out of 7 IQA benchmarks. Furthermore, the framework demonstrates significant flexibility, allowing it to be stacked with pre-trained IQA models to bolster generalization on unseen datasets. Codes and checkpoints will be available at https://github.com/bytedance/EvoQuality.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Finite-Time Convergence of Distributionally Robust Q-Learning with Linear Function Approximation

arXiv:2510.01721v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) seeks policies that perform well when the deployment transition model differs from the nominal model generating the data. Most finite-sample guarantees for DRRL are tabular, model-based, rely on generative access, or obtain function-approximation guarantees only under additional structure, such as linear-transition models or restrictive discount-factor conditions. We study discounted model-free robust Q-learning under an $(s,a)$-rectangular chi-square uncertainty set, with linear approximation of the robust Q-function, using only a single Markovian trajectory from an unknown nominal model. Our algorithm combines a target-network outer loop with a dual function-approximation scheme for the chi-square robust Bellman update. The dual procedure uses moment-tracking critics, suffix averaging, a fresh-evaluation stage for the variance-like moment, and a tunable smoothing parameter to have a Lipschitz-continuous chi-square dual gradient. We prove a finite-time convergence bound to the optimal robust Q-function up to approximation error, without imposing a small-discount-factor assumption. Our results help close a gap between the empirical use of robust RL algorithms and the non-asymptotic guarantees available for their non-robust counterparts.

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

Sensorimotor World Models: Perception for Action via Inverse Dynamics

arXiv:2606.20104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perception for action suggests that representations of the world should be shaped not by visual fidelity alone, but by their relevance for actions. At the same time, latent JEPA-style world models advocate learning compact predictive states from high-dimensional observations to facilitate the prediction of future states, but end-to-end training of these models is nontrivial because representations may collapse if our only goal is to construct a latent state that is easy to predict. We introduce a sensorimotor world model (SMWM): a latent world model trained end-to-end with inverse dynamics regularization. This single regularizer addresses both issues: it prevents representation collapse and induces action-aligned representations. By forcing latent states to preserve information about the action underlying a transition, it biases the model toward the controllable degrees of freedom of the environment while discarding uncontrollable distractors. This yields stable latent world models trained from offline, reward-free trajectories, without frozen encoders, exponential moving averages, or complex latent regularizers. Empirically, SMWM learns compact, interpretable latent spaces and enables competitive planning performance across simple 2D and 3D control tasks.

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

Optimizing the Cost-Quality Tradeoff of Agentic Theorem Provers in Lean

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in workflows for generating formal proofs in Lean. These workflows often decompose problems into smaller lemmas, sample many proof attempts, and use compiler feedback to guide search. However, they can be prohibitively expensive, often spending substantial compute on attempts that ultimately fail. In this work, we address this problem with an action routing agent that consists of a data plane and a control plane. The data plane generates natural-language lemma decompositions, formalizes them in Lean, and samples proof attempts for the resulting theorem and lemma targets. The control plane observes previous failed Lean attempts, estimates both the likelihood of success and cost of another attempt, and decides whether to continue proving the current target or restart from a new breakdown. On a subset of PutnamBench, our agent decreases the cost by $28.9\%$ over a fixed-step baseline on average, preserving performance while using substantially less compute. These results suggest that failed Lean trajectories provide actionable signals for cost-aware resource allocation in agentic theorem proving.

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

Auteur: Language-Driven Cinematographic Framing for Human-Centric Video Generation

Generative video models have achieved remarkable visual fidelity and temporal coherence, yet intentional camera control remains elusive. Existing frameworks treat camera motion as a byproduct of pixel synthesis, producing trajectories that are stochastic, spatially inconsistent, and indifferent to the human subject driving the scene. In this work, we present Auteur, a method for language-driven, human-centric camera framing in generative video. Our core insight is that professional filmmakers conceive shots not as world-space trajectories but as framings defined relative to the actor, encoding shot size, angle, and composition as functions of human pose and motion. We formalize this intuition as a human-centric camera parameterization and introduce a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that is convertible to standard 6-DoF camera parameters. A fine-tuned multimodal large language model then acts as a virtual director, mapping natural language descriptions and coarse human motion to sparse DSL keyframes that are deterministically interpolated into continuous camera trajectories, which are then provided as input to video generators. We train and evaluate Auteur on a new dataset of 34K aligned text, human motion, and DSL-annotated camera trajectories drawn from procedural synthesis and real-world movie footage from the CondensedMovies dataset. Auteur enables cinematographic framing of human-centered scenes, a capability largely absent in prior generative models. To assess this behavior, we propose new framing-focused metrics, and our experiments show that Auteur consistently outperforms existing methods. Project page is https://cyberiada.github.io/Auteur/

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Diffusion-based Cumulative Adversarial Purification for Vision Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, yet their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations poses a significant threat to their reliability in real-world applications. Despite often being imperceptible to humans, these perturbations can drastically alter model outputs, leading to erroneous interpretations and decisions. This paper introduces DiffCAP, a novel diffusion-based purification strategy that can effectively neutralize adversarial corruptions in VLMs. We theoretically establish a provable recovery region in the forward diffusion process and meanwhile quantify the convergence rate of semantic variation with respect to VLMs. These findings manifest that adversarial effects monotonically fade as diffusion unfolds. Guided by this principle, DiffCAP leverages noise injection with a similarity threshold of VLM embeddings as an adaptive criterion, before reverse diffusion restores a clean and reliable representation for VLM inference. Through extensive experiments across six datasets with three VLMs under varying attack strengths in three task scenarios, we show that DiffCAP outperforms existing defense techniques by a substantial margin. Notably, DiffCAP significantly reduces both hyperparameter tuning complexity and the required diffusion time, thereby accelerating the denoising process. Equipped with theorems and empirical support, DiffCAP provides a robust and practical solution for securely deploying VLMs in adversarial environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/JasonFu1998/DiffCAP.

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

A Prototypical Signature Approach for Writer-Independent Offline Signature Verification

Offline handwritten signature verification aims to distinguish genuine from forged signatures using static images. Since real forgeries are rarely available, negative samples are usually randomly drawn from genuine signatures of other users to create training data. However, this random selection often lacks diversity, increases redundancy, and escalates computational cost, leading to inefficient training. We propose a data-driven strategy to generate diverse, informative negative samples using prototypical signatures, which are compact, non-identifiable summaries of genuine signature features. Based on the experiments results, we conclude that (i) prototypical signatures yield more informative negative samples, improving the detection of skilled forgeries; (ii) the proposed approach is backbone-agnostic, showing robustness across architectures; and (iii) when combined with a primal-form linear SVM, it serves as an alternative to RBF-based models while significantly improving scalability and computational efficiency. Implementation of the method is available at https://github.com/kdmoura/proto_hsv.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

AnchorEdit: Maintaining Temporal Consistency in Multi-turn Image Editing via Causal Memory

Multi-turn image editing is essential for iterative design, yet current models often struggle with identity drift and error accumulation over successive steps. While existing research leverages video priors for consistency, their reliance on bidirectional attention is fundamentally misaligned with the causal, sequential nature of interactive editing. In this paper, we propose AnchorEdit, the first autoregressive (AR) diffusion-based framework designed specifically for high-resolution, long-term multi-turn editing. AnchorEdit bridges the gap between video priors and causal inference through a three-stage training curriculum: identity-preserving sing-turn pretraining, causal AR forcing fine-tuning with a novel self-rollout strategy to mitigate exposure bias, and consistency distillation for efficient 4-step generation. During inference, we introduce a memory mechanism to anchor the initial subject identity and ensure stable extrapolation across extended editing trajectories. To evaluate performance, we provide a new high-resolution multi-turn editing benchmark designed to stress-test long-horizon stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnchorEdit achieves state-of-the-art results, maintaining exceptional subject fidelity and instruction following even over 10+ interaction rounds.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

YeasierAgent: Agentic Social Sandbox as a Canvas for Intent-Driven Creation of Platform-Agnostic Symbiotic Agent-Native Applications

作者:

arXiv:2606.13722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces YeasierAgent, an application-building paradigm based on symbiotic agents, narrative worlds, and scene-aware interaction. It challenges the conventional device-coupled model of software by redefining applications as collaborative spaces among users, agents, and worlds. We present a system architecture that achieves two primary contributions: (1) enabling the rapid, cross-platform construction of agent-native applications by utilizing platform-agnostic interactive units (agents, scenes, dialogue) rather than fixed graphical layouts; and (2) unifying the emotional companionship and practical tool execution attributes of intelligent agents within a single experiential sandbox. By integrating automated generation, user-created worlds, and spatial multi-agent collaboration, YeasierAgent formalizes the category of Symbiotic Agent-Native Applications, demonstrating a shift from isolated, tool-specific chatbots toward cohesive, socially embedded computational environments.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Engineering Robustness into Personal Agents with the AI Workflow Store

arXiv:2605.10907v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The dominant paradigm for AI agents is an "on-the-fly" loop in which agents synthesize plans and execute actions within seconds or minutes in response to user prompts. We argue that this paradigm short-circuits disciplined software engineering (SE) processes – iterative design, rigorous testing, adversarial evaluation, staged deployment, and more – that have delivered the (relatively) reliable and secure systems we use today. By focusing on rapid, real-time synthesis, are AI agents effectively delivering users improvised prototypes rather than systems fit for high-stakes scenarios in which users may unwittingly apply them? This paper argues for the need to integrate rigorous SE processes into the agentic loop to produce production-grade, hardened, and deterministically-constrained agent *workflows* that substantially outperform the potentially brittle and vulnerable results of on-the-fly synthesis. Doing so may require extra compute and time, and if so, we must amortize the cost of rigor through reuse across a broad user community. We envision an *AI Workflow Store* that consists of hardened and reusable workflows that agents can invoke with far greater reliability and security than improvised tool chains. We outline the research challenges of this vision, which stem from a broader flexibility-robustness tension that we argue requires moving beyond the ``on-the-fly'' paradigm to navigate effectively.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Multilevel Stochastic Plug-and-Play for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view computed tomography (SVCT) reduces radiation exposure and acquisition time, but the limited number of projection views makes the reconstruction problem severely ill-posed and leads to streak artifacts when analytical methods are used. Plug-and-Play (PnP) methods provide an effective way to combine data fidelity with learned image priors, while stochastic PnP methods further improve robustness by matching the denoiser input distribution through re-noising. However, these methods often require many iterations to converge, which limits their practical efficiency. In this work, we propose a multilevel (ML) stochastic PnP method for SVCT that accelerates stochastic PnP reconstruction. We highlight that, in the stochastic setting, directly enforcing prior coherence across levels would require accurately estimating fine-level prior gradients through multiple denoiser function evaluations, which substantially increases the computational cost. Motivated by this observation, we perform the multilevel steps in multiresolution analysis (MRA) approximation spaces. This choice is supported by the structure of the wavelet decomposition, which causes the prior-coherence correction to vanish in expectation, thereby avoiding costly estimation of fine-level stochastic prior gradients for the coarse-level corrections. Experiments on SVCT reconstruction show that our method, called Multilevel Stochastic Plug-and-Play (ML-SPnP), achieves reconstruction quality comparable to state-of-the-art methods while substantially reducing runtime.

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

Composed Object Retrieval: Object-level Retrieval via Composed Expressions

Retrieving fine-grained visual content based on user intent remains a challenge in multimodal systems. Although current Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) methods combine reference images with retrieval texts, they are constrained to image-level matching and cannot localize specific objects. To this end, we propose Composed Object Retrieval (COR), a new object-level retrieval task that retrieves target object(s) from candidate objects in a target image and grounds the retrieved result with pixel-level masks. Given a reference object, its mask, a target image, and a retrieval text describing the desired modification, COR requires models to perform composed visual-textual reasoning rather than relying on explicit category names. This setting introduces several challenges, including fine-grained compositional matching, negative-object filtering under visually similar distractors, and flexible single- or multi-object retrieval. We construct COR125K, the first large-scale COR benchmark, containing 125,541 retrieval triplets across 408 categories with base/novel splits for evaluating category-level generalization. We also present CORE, a unified end-to-end model that integrates reference region encoding, adaptive vision-text interaction, and region-level contrastive learning to align composed representations with target objects while suppressing background and distractors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CORE significantly outperforms existing CIR-based pipelines and strong baselines in both base and novel categories, establishing a simple and effective foundation for fine-grained object-level multimodal retrieval. Code will be released publicly at https://github.com/wangtong627/COR.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Project Ariadne: Prompt-Conditioned Route Generation for Synthesis Planning

arXiv:2606.24184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrosynthetic planning seeks to connect a target molecule to commercially available starting materials through a multistep route. Classical planners construct such routes by iteratively applying single-step reaction models within a search procedure; constrained variants often require specialized algorithms or architectural changes. Direct route generation reframes retrosynthesis as sequence generation, but existing direct-generation methods still train separate models for different planning specifications. We introduce Ariadne, a decoder-only route generator that represents the target, optional constraints, and route in one prompt-completion sequence. On the RetroCast/PaRoutes mkt-cnv-160 benchmark family, one 24-layer checkpoint follows route-depth and required-starting-material prompts: adding the corresponding prompt fields raises Solv-0 by 13.7 points for depth constraints and 31.2 points for required-leaf constraints. Ariadne also improves over DESP, a bidirectional search planner, on required-leaf Top-10 and Solv-0 in 24 GPU-minutes versus 6.8 GPU-hours. On standard reconstruction, Ariadne is comparable to DMS Explorer XL at about half the reported inference time. Across additional target-only benchmarks, Ariadne's clearest gains are on route-holdout reconstruction, whereas AiZynthFinder MCTS remains stronger on several Solv-0 comparisons. These results extend sequence generation from specialist retrosynthesis models to prompt-conditioned structural route generation. We release the codebase and training scripts to support further work, but do not introduce Tier-1–3 route checkers; those remain the main bottleneck before models of this kind can become useful to experimental chemists.