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

SPDA-SAM: A Self-prompted Depth-Aware Segment Anything Model for Instance Segmentation

Recently, Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated strong generalizability in various instance segmentation tasks. However, its performance is severely dependent on the quality of manual prompts. In addition, the RGB images that instance segmentation methods normally use inherently lack depth information. As a result, the ability of these methods to perceive spatial structures and delineate object boundaries is hindered. To address these challenges, we propose a Self-prompted Depth-Aware SAM (SPDA-SAM) for instance segmentation. Specifically, we design a Semantic-Spatial Self-prompt Module (SSSPM) which extracts the semantic and spatial prompts from the image encoder and the mask decoder of SAM, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a Coarse-to-Fine RGB-D Fusion Module (C2FFM), in which the features extracted from a monocular RGB image and the depth map estimated from it are fused. In particular, the structural information in the depth map is used to provide coarse-grained guidance to feature fusion, while local variations in depth are encoded in order to fuse fine-grained feature representations. To our knowledge, SAM has not been explored in such self-prompted and depth-aware manners. Experimental results demonstrate that our SPDA-SAM outperforms its state-of-the-art counterparts across twelve different data sets. These promising results should be due to the guidance of the self-prompts and the compensation for the spatial information loss by the coarse-to-fine RGB-D fusion operation.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CATCH-ME if you RAG: a dataset of Contextually Annotated multi-Turn Counterspeech against Hate and Misinformation Exchanges

Online hate speech and misinformation frequently overlap, yet NLP research has mainly treated them in isolation. While LLMs represent a scalable solution for assisting humans in the generation of counterspeech for both threats, zero-shot models frequently generate repetitive and vague responses, underscoring the need for high-quality examples to steer model generation. However, existing counterspeech datasets against the overlap of hate and misinformation are scarce and limited to single-turn English dialogues, while real-life interactions span across multiple turns and languages. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first large-scale, expert-curated, multilingual dataset of dialogues tackling the intersection of hate and misinformation. To ensure factual grounding, the dialogues are also anchored in verified external knowledge (i.e., fact-checking articles and NGO reports) and include document- and chunk-level span annotations, making it directly applicable for RAG systems. Covering five languages and targeting hate directed at seven marginalized groups, this novel resource enables the training and evaluation of more persuasive, factually grounded counterspeech models.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Exponential Convengence of DLRA for SDEs

arXiv:2606.15843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study dynamical orthogonal (DO) approximations of stochastic differential equations and investigate their long-time behaviour. The DO formulation represents the solution by a low-rank decomposition and leads to a coupled system consisting of an evolution equation on the Stiefel manifold and a reduced stochastic process. We establish the well-posedness of the strong DO system and derive quantitative error estimates between the original stochastic differential equation and its low-rank approximation in the Wasserstein distance. Our main contribution is the analysis of invariant probability measures for the DO dynamics. Under suitable dissipativity, Lipschitz continuity, and non-degeneracy assumptions on the coefficients, we prove the existence of an invariant probability measure for the strong DO system. The proof combines uniform moment estimates, a Krylov–Bogoliubov argument for an associated frozen system, and a Kakutani-Fan-Glicksberg fixed-point theorem to recover the self-consistent dynamics. We further show that the induced low-rank process admits an invariant probability measure and discuss the structure of invariant measures through several illustrative examples. These results provide a rigorous foundation for the use of dynamical low-rank approximations in the approximation of long-time statistical properties of stochastic dynamical systems.

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

Wisdom of Committee: Diverse Distillation from Large Foundation Models and Domain Experts

arXiv:2402.14035v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation from foundation models to compact domain models is challenging due to substantial gaps in capacity, architecture, and modality. For example, in our experiments, distilling from a 76M-parameter language model to a 2M-parameter recommender closes less than 40% of the performance gap between the undistilled student and the teacher. We show that introducing domain-specific experts – which share the student's architectural characteristics – alongside the foundation model as a diverse teacher committee significantly improves transfer. However, standard multi-teacher methods fail to exploit this diversity: naively combining heterogeneous teachers can degrade performance below single-teacher distillation. To address this, we propose DiverseDistill, an interactive distillation framework that employs a learnable Question-Answer mechanism to generate teacher-conditioned queries and align heterogeneous teacher outputs into the student's representation space. Unlike methods requiring gradient-based co-optimization or architectural modification of teachers, DiverseDistill operates with frozen teachers using only forward-pass inference through their intermediate layers: no parameter updates, no co-training, and no architectural surgery. A dynamic teacher importance mechanism further reduces training cost by filtering low-relevance teachers per sample (e.g., ~30% fewer forward passes with no quality loss for recommendation tasks), while the entire Distillation Module is discarded after training, adding zero inference overhead. Evaluations on recommendation (38x compression) and vision (3.6x compression) tasks demonstrate that DiverseDistill recovers 73-114% of the teacher-student performance gap, consistently outperforming all single- and multi-teacher baselines.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Diffusion Offline Reinforcement Learning for Fair and Energy-Efficient UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks

arXiv:2606.16331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of generative artificial intelligence with wireless communication and signal processing systems has opened new avenues for intelligent, data-driven decision-making in future 6G networks. This work proposes a diffusion soft actor-critic (Diffusion-SAC) approach that leverages offline reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced by denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) to optimize trajectory and scheduling control in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. While offline RL methods, such as conservative Q-learning (CQL), can learn from static datasets, they often struggle to generalize in low-data or dynamic conditions. To address this, we combine the robustness of CQL with the generative power of diffusion models, enabling expressive and signal-aware policy learning that generalizes beyond behavior policies. Applied to a UAV-assisted wireless network, the proposed framework minimizes transmission energy and improves fairness among devices. Simulations show that Diffusion-SAC outperforms standard offline RL baselines, achieving more stable convergence and higher rewards even with limited datasets. The method enhances data efficiency, reduces energy consumption, and increases throughput by more than 35 % compared to existing algorithms, demonstrating its potential for robust policy learning in next-generation wireless control systems.

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

Quantization Robustness of Monotone Operator Equilibrium Networks

arXiv:2603.10562v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Monotone operator equilibrium networks are implicit-layer models whose output is the unique equilibrium of a monotone operator, guaranteeing existence, uniqueness, and convergence. When deployed on low-precision hardware, weights are quantized, potentially destroying these guarantees. We analyze weight quantization as a spectral perturbation of the underlying monotone inclusion. Convergence of the quantized solver is guaranteed whenever the spectral-norm weight perturbation is smaller than the monotonicity margin; the displacement between quantized and full-precision equilibria is bounded in terms of the perturbation size and margin; and a condition number characterizing the ratio of the operator norm to the margin links quantization precision to forward error. MNIST experiments confirm a phase transition at the predicted threshold: three- and four-bit post-training quantization diverge, while five-bit and above converge. The backward-pass guarantee enables quantization-aware training, which recovers provable convergence at four bits.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models

arXiv:2604.03208v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World models are a promising path to zero-shot embodied control through planning. However, existing world model planners struggle on long-horizon, multi-stage tasks: prediction errors compound and naive search is exponential in the planning horizon. Hierarchy mitigates both by decomposing tasks into shorter, tractable subproblems; yet prior hierarchical approaches either amortize control into task-specific policies (hierarchical RL) or assume low-dimensional states and known dynamics (classical hierarchical MPC). We present Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models (HWM), an architecture and planning paradigm for hierarchical model predictive control (MPC) directly on visual world models trained solely via next-latent prediction. HWM learns world models at multiple temporal scales within a shared latent space, so predictions from the long-horizon model serve as subgoals for the short-horizon model via latent matching, without task-specific rewards, skill learning, or hierarchical policies. To keep long-horizon search tractable, HWM learns an action encoder that compresses primitive action chunks into latent macro-actions. On real-world Franka manipulation, HWM solves pick-and-place from a single goal image at 70% success vs. 0% for single-level planning. Across simulated push manipulation and maze navigation, HWM consistently improves performance on long-horizon tasks while requiring up to 3x less planning compute.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Select to Think: Unlocking SLM Potential with Local Sufficiency

Small language models (SLMs) offer efficient deployment, yet they often lag behind their larger counterparts (LLMs) in reasoning. Existing remedies either invoke an LLM at points of reasoning divergence, incurring substantial latency and cost, or rely on standard distillation, which is limited by the SLM's capacity to accurately mimic the LLM's complex generative distribution. We address this dilemma by identifying local sufficiency: at divergence points, the LLM's preferred token often resides within the SLM's top-K next-token predictions, even when failing to emerge as the SLM top-1 choice. We therefore propose Select to Think (S2T), which reframes the LLM's role from open-ended generation to selection among the SLM's proposals, simplifying the supervision signal to discrete candidate rankings. Leveraging this, we introduce S2T-Local, which distills the selection logic into the SLM, empowering it to perform autonomous re-ranking without inference-time LLM dependency. Empirically, a 1.5B SLM's top-8 candidates contain the 32B LLM's choice with a 95% hit rate, and S2T-Local improves the 1.5B SLM's Math Avg. over greedy decoding by 24.1% relative gain, matching the efficacy of 8-path self-consistency with single-trajectory efficiency.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Extracting Semantics: LLM-Guided Automatic Population of Robot Ontology from URDF

arXiv:2606.17073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While commonsense knowledge may suffice for virtual agents, embodied robots interacting with humans require grounded and semantically rich representations of both their environment and their own physical embodiment. In cognitive robotics, ontologies are effective for integrating such heterogeneous knowledge to enable explainable reasoning, even during continuous knowledge updates. Yet, their manual construction remains a bottleneck. We present a preliminary approach for the automatic generation of robot semantic abstractions by transforming Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) models into populated ontologies. Although URDF files provide structural and kinematic descriptions, their identifiers often require commonsense interpretation to recover meaningful semantics, a task at which Large Language Models (LLMs) excel. Our pipeline leverages LLMs to infer semantic relationships by prompting them with concepts from an existing ontology, ensuring the final classification remains aligned with the formal model. To improve reliability, the pipeline combines majority voting across multiple LLM queries along with syntactic and schema-level validation to ensure that generated outputs conform to the expected representation format and ontology constraints. We evaluate the approach on multiple robot descriptions and discuss the generated abstractions. Initial results indicate that the proposed method can effectively bridge the gap between low-level robot descriptions and the structured, grounded knowledge representations required for human-robot interaction.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Toward quantum-noise-limited interferometric measurements of optical nonlinearity in vacuum

arXiv:2602.10896v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum Electrodynamics predicts that the vacuum must behave as a nonlinear optical medium: the vacuum optical index should increase when it is stressed by intense electromagnetic fields. The DeLLight (Deflection of Light by Light) project aims to measure it by using intense and ultra-short laser pulses. The experiment uses a Sagnac interferometer to amplify the tiny deflection signal of a low-intensity probe pulse crossing the vacuum refractive-index gradient produced by an external high-intensity pump pulse. The measurement of the amplified signal by a CCD camera requires a high spatial resolution, which is limited by the ultimate quantum noise of the CCD. However, interferometric phase noise induced by the mechanical vibrations of the interferometer is also amplified and degrades spatial resolution. To overcome this, we propose a new method named High-Frequency Phase Noise Suppression (HFPNS), based on the addition of a delayed replica (5 ns) of the probe pulse. The delayed pulse, which is not affected by the pump but is subject to the same vibration noise, enables offline subtraction of correlated phase noise. In this work, we present an experimental proof-of-concept on a prototype interferometer operating with a limited amplification factor ($\mathcal{A}\simeq25$), about 10 times smaller than the required value of the final experiment. We have succeeded in reducing phase noise by a factor of 40, resulting in a residual noise level 2.3 times higher than the expected quantum noise. The residual noise is linked to delay-line instabilities and incident beam pointing fluctuations present during these tests. This result validates HFPNS as a robust method for future quantum-noise-limited interferometric measurements of vacuum optical nonlinearity, though additional stabilization and higher interferometric amplification are still needed.

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

Rational Sparse Autoencoder

arXiv:2606.14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Post-Selection Probability and Fidelity of Bidirectional Teleportation

arXiv:2606.17251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the scrambling of quantum information is central to many areas of quantum physics, including quantum thermalization, entanglement growth, and quantum information processing. Insights from these studies have, in turn, inspired the development of novel quantum protocols and algorithms. Recently, a bidirectional teleportation protocol was proposed to implement a digital SWAP operation between qubits by leveraging chaotic Hamiltonian evolution combined with measurement and post-selection. In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of two central quantities that characterize the protocol, the post-selection probability and the fidelity, taking into account possible errors in time-reversed dynamics. We show that these quantities can be expressed in terms of standard diagnostics in quantum dynamics, including the Loschmidt echo and its subsystem variant. The results unveil (1) the initial-state dependence of the fidelity and (2) the stability of the post-selection probability in integrable models. Our findings offer practical guidance for the implementation of the protocol on realistic quantum devices.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Orchestra-o1: Omnimodal Agent Orchestration

The recent success of agent swarms has shifted the paradigm of large language model (LLM)-based agents from single-agent workflows to multi-agent systems, highlighting the importance of agent orchestration for task decomposition and collaboration. However, existing orchestration frameworks are limited to a narrow set of modalities and struggle to generalize to more complex settings where heterogeneous modalities coexist and interact. This limitation becomes particularly pronounced in omnimodal scenarios, where tasks require the unified understanding and coordination of diverse inputs such as text, image, audio, and video. In this work, we propose Orchestra-o1, an omnimodal agent orchestration framework designed to support efficient agent collaboration across multiple modalities. Orchestra-o1 introduces a unified orchestration mechanism that enables modality-aware task decomposition, online sub-agent specialization, and parallel sub-task execution. This scalable design allows agent systems to effectively tackle complex real-world tasks involving heterogeneous information sources, surpassing the second-best approach by 10.3% accuracy on the OmniGAIA benchmark. Furthermore, we introduce decision-aligned group relative policy optimization (DA-GRPO), an efficient agentic reinforcement learning approach for training Orchestra-o1-8B, which also achieves state-of-the-art performance against all existing open-source omnimodal agents.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

FOCUS on Contamination: Hydrology-Informed Noise-Aware Learning for Geospatial PFAS Mapping

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent environmental contaminants with significant public health impacts, yet large-scale monitoring remains severely limited due to the high cost and logistical challenges of field sampling. The lack of samples leads to difficulty simulating their spread with physical models and limited scientific understanding of PFAS transport in surface waters. Yet, rich geospatial and satellite-derived data describing land cover, hydrology, and industrial activity are widely available. We introduce FOCUS, a geospatial deep learning framework for PFAS contamination mapping that integrates sparse PFAS observations with large-scale environmental context, including priors derived from hydrological connectivity, land cover, source proximity, and sampling distance. These priors are integrated into a principled, noise-aware loss, yielding a robust training objective under sparse labels. Across extensive ablations, robustness analyses, and real-world validation, FOCUS consistently outperforms baselines including sparse segmentation, Kriging, and pollutant transport simulations, while preserving spatial coherence and scalability over large regions. Our results demonstrate how AI can support environmental science by providing screening-level risk maps that prioritize follow-up sampling and help connect potential sources to surface-water contamination patterns in the absence of complete physical models.

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

When Language Overwrites Vision: Over-Alignment and Geometric Debiasing in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2605.08245v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly power high-stakes applications, from medical imaging to autonomous systems, yet they routinely hallucinate, confidently describing content not present in the input. We investigate the root causes of these failure modes with a mechanistic analysis focusing on the decoder-based VLMs. We trace these failure modes to a geometric over-alignment: to bridge the modality gap required by attention mechanisms, decoder-based VLMs over-align visual embeddings with the text manifold, injecting a statistical linguistic bias that systematically overshadows fine-grained visual evidence. While prior work either aggressively closes this gap or suppresses hallucinations through expensive black-box decoding strategies, none addresses the underlying geometric cause. We provide the first quantitative characterization of this over-alignment, demonstrating that linguistic bias concentrates in the top principal components of a universal, dataset-agnostic text subspace. Building on this insight, we propose two complementary remedies: a training-free inference strategy and a bias-aware fine-tuning paradigm, both of which explicitly project out this subspace from visual representations. Our methods significantly reduce hallucinations across POPE, CHAIR, and AMBER benchmarks, and improve CLAIR scores on long-form captioning tasks, with the training-free variant adding no computational overhead over the base model.

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

Beyond Monolingual Deep Research: Evaluating Agents and Retrievers with Cross-Lingual BrowseComp-Plus

Deep research agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to search for evidence, reason over retrieved sources, and produce grounded answers. Existing browsing benchmarks, however, largely assume that the user's query and the supporting evidence are written in the same language, leaving open whether agentic search systems can operate when relevant evidence appears in another language. We introduce XBCP (Cross-lingual BrowseComp-Plus), a controlled benchmark that preserves the English question-and-answer space of BrowseComp-Plus but varies the languages of the supporting documents. XBCP instantiates two complementary settings: in the cross-lingual setting, each query is paired with evidence in a single assigned language. In the multilingual setting, the full evidence corpus is distributed equally and randomly across 12 languages spanning high-resource and low-resource regimes. We evaluate four deep research agents using sparse and dense multilingual retrievers, measuring answer accuracy, evidence recall, search behavior, calibration, citation fidelity, and oracle retrieval. Results reveal substantial degradation when evidence is translated. Even strong, dense retrievers lose evidence recall, and agents become less calibrated and cite evidence less reliably. Notably, accuracy remains lower even when all gold evidence is supplied directly. These findings suggest that cross-lingual deep research exposes both retrieval failures and an independent, agent-side difficulty in integrating language-mismatched evidence.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift

arXiv:2606.13817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models in robot learning predict future states from visual observations and actions, enabling agents to reason about the consequences of their controls. However, many action-conditioned models are evaluated in settings where motion is dominated by immediate control, whereas aquatic surface vehicles and other real-world objects continue moving under inertia and are displaced by hidden ambient drift, such as water currents or wind. We propose FlowMo-WM, an end-to-end trainable visual world model that infers object-centric motion state and a predictive long-history context associated with hidden drift from image-action histories without direct supervision of flow fields. FlowMo-WM factorizes image-action history into a short-history latent state, trained to summarize object-centric motion, and a longer-history context, trained to summarize slowly varying exogenous influences. A zero-context residual transition separates action-conditioned base dynamics from context-dependent drift effects during latent rollout. In simulated aquatic surface-vehicle environments with diverse hidden flows, disturbances, and randomized vehicle dynamics, FlowMo-WM improves long-horizon rollout accuracy over representative action-conditioned latent world models. Prediction-time context ablations, in which the inferred context is zeroed or shuffled during rollout, show that the ambient context is important for stable prediction under hidden drift, while frozen linear probes characterize information encoded in the learned factors.

18.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Prevalence and epidemiological patterns of <i>Neisseria gonorrhoeae</i> infection in sub-Saharan Africa, 1964–2025: Systematic review, meta-analyses, and meta-regressions

作者:

by Aisha Osman, Hina Akram, Bayan Alemrayat, Sumaya Al-Maraghi, Manale Harfouche, Laith J. Abu-Raddad Background Neisseria gonorrhoeae (NG) infection is a global health concern because of its morbidity and increasing antimicrobial resistance. Sub-Saharan Africa is believed to carry a disproportionately high burden of NG infection, but the epidemiology of NG infection in this region has not been comprehensively synthesized. This study systematically reviewed and analyzed NG prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa to characterize prevalence patterns and identify populations at risk. Methods and findings A systematic review was conducted and reported following PRISMA guidelines. Embase, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science were searched from inception to June 4, 2025. Eligible studies reported NG prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa. Random-effects meta-analyses generated pooled prevalence estimates, and random-effects meta-regression analyses identified associations and sources of heterogeneity.Nine hundred fifty publications contributed 1,604 prevalence measures spanning 1964–2025. In the general population, pooled urogenital prevalence was 3.2% (95% confidence interval (CI): 2.9–3.5), with substantial between-study heterogeneity and a wide prediction interval, indicating considerable variation in prevalence across settings. Prevalence was high in key populations: among female sex workers, 11.5% (95% CI: 9.9–13.2) for urogenital and 2.0% (95% CI: 0.4–4.5) for anorectal infection; and among men who have sex with men, 2.8% (95% CI: 2.4–3.3) for urogenital, 8.3% (95% CI: 5.8–11.0) for anorectal, and 5.7% (95% CI: 3.6–8.3) for oropharyngeal infection. Symptomatic men exhibited high urogenital prevalence (51.5%; 95% CI: 47.5–55.5), and symptomatic women showed 9.0% (95% CI: 7.7–10.4). Among women with adverse pregnancy or birth outcomes, urogenital prevalence was 8.6% (95% CI: 5.3–12.6). Meta-regression analyses explained over half of the variability in prevalence, showing a long-term decline of 1% per year, a clear population type gradient, subregional differences, and decreasing prevalence with increasing age, but no variation by sex. These findings may be affected by variability in data availability across countries, anatomical sites, and population groups, as well as heterogeneity across included studies. Conclusions NG prevalence remains markedly high in this region but has declined over time. These findings highlight the need for strengthened surveillance, expanded prevention and diagnostic strategies, and continued monitoring of gonococcal antimicrobial resistance to support effective control efforts in sub-Saharan Africa.

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

High-Fidelity Synthetic Transmission Electron Microscopy Image Generation Using Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Data-Limited Semiconductor Metrology

Advanced semiconductor nodes drastically increased demand for Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), yet destructive sample preparation, slow imaging and high costs severely limit the availability of diverse datasets needed for downstream machine learning (ML). Synthetic data generation is becoming essential, but current generative models often miss TEM-specific noise, structural detail, and stochastic variability crucial for evaluation. We present a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) framework for synthetic TEM image generation under extreme data scarcity. A progressive patch-based training strategy scales from low-resolution patches to full images, enabling from-scratch training with only 15 samples. We integrate a custom TrivialAugment adaptation, cross-process domain transfer, classifier guidance, and RePaint-style inpainting, culminating in full-image generation that preserves global structural and spatial relationships in compliance with FAB metrology requirements. Beyond synthesis, we repurpose DDPM feature representations for segmentation, partitioning encoder feature maps to obtain coherent region masks. Our synthetic images achieve up to MS-SSIM > 0.98 and qualitative expert assessment consistent with structural similarity results, facilitating downstream ML training for defect detection, segmentation, and metrology while preserving statistical and physical realism.

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

From Noise to Order: Learning to Rank via Denoising Diffusion

arXiv:2602.11453v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning-to-rank (LTR) methods have traditionally been limited to discriminative machine learning approaches that model the probability of the document being relevant to the query given some feature representation of the query-document pair. We propose an alternative denoising diffusion-based generative approach to LTR that instead models the full joint distribution over features and relevance labels. While in discriminative LTR, an over-parameterized ranking model may find different ways to fit the training data, we posit that candidate solutions that can explain the full data distribution under the generative setting maybe better at estimating relevance. Thus, we propose DiffusionRank that extends TabDiff, an existing diffusion model for tabular datasets, to create generative alternatives to classical discriminative pointwise and pairwise LTR objectives. Our work demonstrates improvements from DiffusionRank over discriminative counterparts on four standard LTR datasets and points to a rich space for future exploration to leverage ongoing advancements in deep generative models for LTR. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sadjadeb/DiffusionRank.

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

CoVEBench: Can Video Editing Models Handle Complex Instructions?

While recent text-guided video editing models excel at elementary tasks (e.g., style transfer, object insertion), real-world user requests are highly compositional. A single prompt often demands multiple coupled edits, such as modifying subjects, actions, and camera views, while strictly preserving unrelated spatiotemporal content. Existing benchmarks, heavily constrained by isolated edits and coarse global metrics, fail to diagnose how models handle such complex workflows. To address this gap, we introduce CoVEBench, a compositional video editing benchmark comprising 416 curated source videos, 626 multi-point editing instructions, and 9,990 fine-grained checklist items. Covering diverse editing dimensions, CoVEBench evaluates models via MLLM-judged instruction compliance and video fidelity, alongside automated metrics for video quality. Extensive experiments reveal that compositional editing remains a profound challenge: current models frequently omit edits, violate preservation constraints, or introduce artifacts when handling multiple operations simultaneously. CoVEBench provides a challenging, diagnostic testbed to advance video editing toward realistic user workflows.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Estimating COVID-19 Cumulative Incidence from Seroprevalence Surveys accounting for Time-Varying Seroreversion: A Fully Bayesian Methodology

Seroprevalence surveys reveal the extent of humoral immunity against pathogens such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and under some circumstances represent cumulative incidence of prior infection. However, antibody waning - or seroreversion - biases these estimates by reducing assay sensitivity in a time-varying manner. Because assay sensitivity decays over time, naively using serosurveys can substantially bias estimates of SARS-CoV-2 cumulative incidence and fatality rates. The Bayesian assay-specific, time-varying sensitivity adjustment developed in this paper can reliably correct for this bias and account for the delay between infection and serosurvey. In seroprevalence studies conducted in the United States in 2020, adjusting for time-varying sensitivity increased cumulative incidence by up to 1.4-fold, with an adjustment of 1.08 for a national study. Our estimates contrast with a previously published 2-fold adjustment that did not account for assay design. This suggests that previous analyses overestimated cumulative incidence by applying seroreversion corrections that did not account for assay-specific effects, or underestimated cumulative incidence by not applying seroreversion corrections. These biases imply fatality rate underestimation and overestimation, respectively. Our model provides a framework for design-specific time-varying sensitivity corrections in seroprevalence surveys for other pathogens.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Entanglement in the Dicke subspace

arXiv:2602.15800v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide a complete mathematical theory for the entanglement of mixtures of Dicke states. These quantum states form an important subclass of bosonic states arising in the study of indistinguishable particles. We introduce a tensor-based parametrization where the diagonal entries of these states are encoded as a symmetric tensor, enabling a direct translation between entanglement properties and well-studied convex cones of tensors. Our results bridge multipartite entanglement theory with semialgebraic geometry and the theory of completely positive and copositive tensors. This dictionary maps separability to completely positive tensors, the PPT property to moment tensors, entanglement witnesses to copositive tensors, and decomposable witnesses to sum of squares tensors. Using this framework, we construct explicit PPT entangled states in three or more qutrits, disproving a recent conjecture. We establish that PPT entanglement exists for all multipartite systems with local dimension d >= 3 and n >= 3 parties. We also show that, for mixtures of Dicke states, the PPT condition with respect to the most balanced bipartition implies all other PPT conditions. We further connect bosonic extendibility of mixtures of Dicke states to the duals of known hierarchies for non-negative polynomials, such as the ones by Reznick and Polya. We thus provide semidefinite programming relaxations for separability and entanglement testing in the Dicke subspace.

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

The AI Legal Specialist: A Juridically Autonomous Professional Profile for AI Governance

arXiv:2606.12415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid global expansion of artificial intelligence regulation has generated, across multiple jurisdictions, a demand for legal expertise dedicated to AI that the market has addressed in a fragmented manner. Data protection officers extend their remit beyond data protection law; privacy lawyers reposition themselves toward AI; compliance officers add AI chapters to their existing manuals. This paper argues that none of these adaptive responses adequately covers the professional space opened by the emerging global AI regulatory landscape, of which the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) is the most comprehensive instance, alongside the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, the United States executive and sectoral framework, and analogous initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, China, Japan, Singapore, and beyond. A distinct professional profile is required: the AI Legal Specialist, conceived as a jurist – understood broadly to encompass any professional with advanced legal training – operating at the intersection of legal interpretation and AI governance. The profile is juridically autonomous: it derives its existence from the structure of regulatory obligations generated wherever AI is subject to substantive regulation, rather than from any technical standard or the extension of adjacent roles. The paper provides a juridically grounded definition of the profile, argues for its autonomy from adjacent figures and international standards, proposes a reference competence architecture aligned with the European e-Competence Framework (e-CF, EN 16234-1) as a methodological choice, and articulates the conditions for its operational measurement through key performance indicators. The contribution is intended as a foundation for international standardization of the profile and as a reference for practice, curricula, and adoption across jurisdictions.

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

PETRA: Transforming Web Text for Petroleum-Engineering Domain Adaptation

Petroleum-engineering search exposes a supervision gap for strong general retrievers: relevant evidence exists in public web text, but domain relevance labels are scarce. To address this gap, we propose PETRA, a large-scale Petroleum Engineering Text for Retrieval Adaptation dataset and pipeline that converts noisy public web data into a curated domain corpus and synthetic supervision for dense retrieval and reranking. PETRA contains 1.36M curated chunks, approximately 2B token equivalents, $\approx$859k, embedding training rows from $\approx$224k anchors, and roughly 400k teacher-scored reranker candidate rows. Its construction combines high-recall energy-domain curation, an energy-domain classifier with 98.4% test accuracy, chunk-grounded query generation, LLM-written hard negatives, and retrieval-mined candidate lists. PETRA improves first-stage in-domain Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) from 0.703 to 0.763 through score fusion. Reranker adaptation improves the public Earth Science benchmark by 44% relative and a six-task reasoning-intensive panel by 23%. Failed training recipes show that high train-holdout accuracy on synthetic labels does not predict retrieval gains; retrieval-mined data helps only after being repackaged as teacher-scored candidate lists sampled from the inference-time candidate distribution.