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

Integrating Multi-Label Classification and Generative AI for Scalable Analysis of User Feedback

arXiv:2601.23018v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In highly competitive software markets, user experience (UX) evaluation is crucial for ensuring software quality and fostering long-term product success. Such UX evaluations typically combine quantitative metrics from standardized questionnaires with qualitative feedback collected through open-ended questions. While open-ended feedback offers valuable insights for improvement and helps explain quantitative results, analyzing large volumes of user comments is challenging and time-consuming. In this paper, we present techniques developed during a long-term UX measurement project at a major software company to efficiently process and interpret extensive volumes of user comments. To provide a high-level overview of the collected comments, we employ a supervised machine learning approach that assigns meaningful, pre-defined topic labels to each comment. Additionally, we demonstrate how generative AI (GenAI) can be leveraged to create concise and informative summaries of user feedback, facilitating effective communication of findings to the organization and especially upper management. Finally, we investigate whether the sentiment expressed in user comments can serve as an indicator for overall product satisfaction. Our results show that sentiment analysis alone does not reliably reflect user satisfaction. Instead, product satisfaction needs to be assessed explicitly in surveys to measure the user's perception of the product.

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

Geometric bias in eigenspace perturbation under random heterogeneous noise

arXiv:2606.11263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spectral methods rely fundamentally on the stability of principal eigenspaces under random perturbations. Classically, this stability is quantified by the Davis-Kahan and Wedin theorems, which bound the eigenspace error using the operator norm of the noise and the relevant spectral gaps. While these worst-case bounds are sharp for arbitrary deterministic perturbations, they can be wasteful in the low-rank signal-plus-random-noise setting, as they fail to capture the fine-grained interaction between the signal geometry and the noise distribution. In this paper, we study the spectral perturbation of signal-plus-noise matrices corrupted by sparse, random noise with an arbitrary, inhomogeneous variance profile. We demonstrate that under heterogeneous noise variances, the empirical eigenvectors suffer a systematic, deterministic geometric bias that is entirely invisible to classical perturbation bounds. By leveraging the Quadratic Vector Equation (QVE) and establishing fine-grained isotropic local laws, we derive near-optimal, non-asymptotic perturbation bounds for the leading eigenspaces in the operator and $2\to\infty$ norms. The bounds separate the usual signal-to-noise contribution, stochastic fluctuations, and structured geometric bias terms determined by the alignment between the signal eigenspaces and the row-wise variance profile.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Narrative Theory-Driven LLM Methods for Automatic Story Generation and Understanding: A Survey

Applications of narrative theories using large language models (LLMs) deliver promising methods in automatic story generation and understanding tasks. Our survey examines how natural language processing (NLP) research uses LLM methods to engage with diverse concepts from narrative studies. We use established distinctions from narratology to categorise ongoing efforts and discover the following: \redtext{(a) narrative texts come from diverse sources beyond just literature, (b) theoretical synthesis and validation are potential outcomes, (c) generation tasks lag behind understanding in several ways: theoretical application, post-training methods, exploring non-fiction narratives and addressing narrative levels beyond fabula and discourse.} For future directions, instead of the pursuit of a single, generalised benchmark for `narrative quality', we believe that progress can benefit from efforts that focus on the following: defining and improving theory-based metrics for individual narrative attributes; continue conducting large-scale, theory-driven literary/social/cultural analysis; generating narratives in situated contexts; and continuing experiments where outputs can be used to validate or refine narrative theories. This work provides a contextual foundation for more systematic and theoretically informed narrative research in NLP by providing an overview to ongoing research efforts and the broader narrative studies landscape.

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

Value-order Decomposition for Generalist Anomaly Detection

Industrial anomaly detection suffers from limited data, making cross-domain generalization particularly challenging. Generalist Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to train a unified model on a source domain that can effectively detect anomalies in unseen target domains. In the initial semantic feature space, strong entanglement between anomalies and object categories or defect types hinders effective generalization across domains. Recent works address this issue by projecting features into a residual space; however, such methods primarily increase cross-domain overlap for normal features, while anomalous features remain specific to object categories, defect types and data domains, leading to poor alignment and generalization. To address this limitation, we propose Value-order Decomposition (VOD), a simple yet effective technique that bridges three types of generalization gaps across object categories, defect types (including real and synthetic defects), and data domains. VOD disentangles and suppresses object-category-, defect-type-, and domain-specific information, promoting alignment within normal and abnormal samples while preserving their separability, thereby enabling robust generalization across the three gaps. Leveraging the strong alignment between real and synthetic defects within the same object, we perform anomaly detection using only normal and synthetic-abnormal reference, and effectively generalize to unseen real defect types. Experiments on diverse industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate that our method, using a simple cut-and-paste anomaly simulation strategy, achieves strong generalization across the three gaps.

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

Enhancing Visual Feature Attribution via Weighted Integrated Gradients

arXiv:2505.03201v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Integrated Gradients (IG) is a widely used attribution method in explainable AI, particularly in computer vision applications where reliable feature attribution is essential. A key limitation of IG is its sensitivity to the choice of baseline (reference) images. Multi-baseline extensions such as Expected Gradients (EG) assume uniform weighting over baselines, implicitly treating all baseline images as equally informative. In high-dimensional vision models, this assumption often leads to noisy or unstable explanations. This paper proposes Weighted Integrated Gradients (WG), a principled approach that evaluates and weights baselines to enhance attribution reliability. WG introduces an unsupervised criterion for baseline suitability, enabling adaptive selection and weighting of baselines on a per-input basis. The method preserves the core axiomatic properties of IG in a generalized weighted-baseline form. Under an expected, proxy-based fitness–relevance monotonicity assumption, WG provides a probabilistic justification for assigning larger weights to more informative baselines. Experiments on commonly used image datasets and models show that WG improves over EG under our protocol, with up to 36% gains across evaluated convolutional and Transformer architectures. These gains come with additional fitness-evaluation cost, so WG should be viewed as an attribution-fidelity trade-off rather than a faster alternative to EG. By moving beyond the assumption that all baselines contribute equally, Weighted Integrated Gradients offers a clearer and more reliable approach to explaining computer-vision models, improving both understanding and practical usability in explainable AI.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

ECG-Guided Pre-Screening of Family Members for Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

Background: Current clinical guidelines recommend serial ECG and echocardiographic surveillance for first-degree relatives of probands with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM). Objectives: To evaluate the accuracy and validity of ECG alone as a pre-screening tool for the diagnosis of HCM and to develop a random forest (RF) model for HCM phenotype prediction. Method: Pediatric relatives of primary HCM probands attending the cardiomyopathy screening program at The Hospital for Sick Children were included from 1993 to 2025. Subjects were followed until the last follow-up, censored at phenotype conversion. ECGs were classified as normal or abnormal based on predefined parameters. Associations between binary ECG variables and HCM phenotype were assessed using Phi ({varphi}) coefficient. A Random Forest classifier was developed using significant ECG variables (70:30 training: test split) and evaluated using precision, recall, specificity, negative predictive value, F1 score and AUROC. Feature importance was assessed using SHAP analysis. Variables with an impact of >5% were included in a simplified model, which was evaluated by repeating performance metrics and externally validated in a healthy cohort. Results: 350 screened relatives (44% female, mean follow-up 6.8 +- 4.8 years) were included. At baseline, 13% (46350) were phenotype-positive for HCM. 9 subjects converted during the surveillance. Thirteen ECG variables were significantly associated with phenotype-positive HCM and were included in the full random forest model. Four variables had >5% impact (Left ventricular hypertrophy, right ventricular hypertrophy, T-wave inversion and ST-segment depression) and were included in a simplified model, which maintained high specificity (93% vs 97%), negative predictive value (97% vs 93%) and AUROC (90% vs 96%). The simplified model classified 83% subjects as phenotype-negative, with eight being false-negative, all of whom developed an abnormal ECG in a mean of 1 year, and none had an interim adverse cardiac event. The simplified model was evaluated in an independent healthy cohort of 153 school-age subjects and correctly identified 98% as phenotype-negative with 100% NPV. Conclusion: ECG abnormalities were strongly associated with phenotype-positive status. A simplified ECG-based random forest model using four ECG variables demonstrated high specificity and negative predictive value for identifying phenotype-negative subjects. If prospectively validated, this could reduce the need for concurrent echocardiographic screening by up to 83% per encounter, lowering screening burden and cost.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Bayesian Optimization for Learning Nonlinear MPC in Autonomous Agent Navigation

arXiv:2606.14763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time autonomous navigation in dynamic, unknown environments remains a fundamental challenge for mobile robotics. We propose a map-free framework that tightly integrates reactive rolling-horizon planning with nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC). At each control cycle, a LiDAR-based Gaussian occupancy representation is constructed and used to generate collision-free trajectories via A* search, which are then tracked by a CasADi/IPOPT MPC formulation incorporating a smooth sigmoid obstacle barrier. To improve robustness to parameter sensitivity, we adopt an offline Bayesian optimization scheme based on Tree-structured Parzen Estimators (TPE), which identifies near-optimal controller parameters with respect to a composite navigation objective. In addition, a Gaussian Process surrogate is used to analyze parameter sensitivity and provide insight into the optimization landscape. The proposed framework is robot-agnostic and is evaluated on the Unitree Go2 quadruped in simulation using Gazebo, followed by deployment on the physical robot. Experimental results show that parameters tuned in simulation transfer effectively to hardware, maintaining comparable performance without additional tuning. The full system achieves up to a 90.0\% navigation success rate when deployed, along with a 38.9\% average improvement in the evaluation metrics across simulated environments.

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

Gen-VCoT: Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Diffusion-Based RGB Intermediate Representations

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual reasoning but rely on text-based chain-of-thought (CoT), lacking interpretable visual intermediates. Existing methods use opaque tokens or external tools, missing key properties. We propose Gen-VCoT, a framework using expert vision models to generate RGB images as reasoning intermediates. It has three stages: visual grounding (SAM segmentation), geometric reasoning (Marigold depth maps), and semantic reasoning (Qwen2-VL integration). An adaptive router selects reasoning depth. Evaluations show Gen-VCoT improves spatial (25% better) and depth (50% better) questions, but may hurt simple factual queries. Text CoT outperforms visual intermediates on CLEVR (91.2% vs 62.5%), showing task-dependent optimal representations. Gen-VCoT establishes a new paradigm for interpretable multimodal reasoning.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LLM-Based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for Assessing the Explainability of Facial Skin Disease Classification Models

作者:

This study proposes a domain-specific LLM-based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for assessing Grad-CAM explanations in facial skin disease diagnosis models. While previous studies have primarily focused on improving classification performance through data augmentation techniques, relatively few studies have systematically examined whether model explanations are grounded in clinically relevant lesion regions. In this study, geometric augmentation, color-based augmentation, and mixed augmentation strategies were applied to facial skin disease classification models based on EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3, and ResNet18. Grad-CAM was employed to generate visual explanations representing the models' decision-making processes. Furthermore, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework was designed using GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 4.6 to assess Grad-CAM explanations from the perspectives of lesion localization and explanation trustworthiness. To improve evaluation consistency and clinical grounding, a progressive prompt engineering strategy was introduced, incorporating evaluation rubrics, clinical knowledge, penalty rules, and structured output formats.

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

ROSA-RL: Uncertainty-Aware Roundabout Optimized Speed Advisory with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Roundabouts challenge automated driving in mixed traffic, as heterogeneous and non-deterministic human behavior, unknown driving intentions, and high interaction complexity create uncertainty about whether the conflict zone will be blocked or available at the moment of entry. We present ROSA-RL – uncertainty-aware Roundabout Optimized Speed Advisory with Reinforcement Learning. It enables safe and efficient roundabout entry for automated and human-driven vehicles in mixed traffic through probabilistic conflict forecasting. A Transformer-based model predicts conflict zone occupancy over a five-second horizon, capturing multi-agent interactions to anticipate upcoming conflicts and available gaps. The prediction outputs encode uncertainty in future motion and intent, and augment the state of a classical RL framework, enabling uncertainty-aware speed coordination. Evaluated in simulations grounded in real-world data, ROSA-RL can effectively handle uncertainty and outperform a comparable model-based baseline, closing the gap to an ideal setting assuming fully known occupancy while improving traffic efficiency and safety. The source code of this work is available under: github.com/urbanAIthi/ROSA-RL.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Bounding Boxes as Goals: Language-Conditioned Grasping via Neuro-Symbolic Planning

For robotics to be effectively integrated into household or industrial environments, machines must adapt to natural-language prompts in real time. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled zero-shot generalization in robot task and motion planning (TAMP), current state-of-the-art approaches often remain computationally "heavyweight" or require extensive training on thousands of demonstrations. We present GRASP (Grounded Reasoning and Symbolic Planning), a framework designed as a step toward open-vocabulary tabletop manipulation. Our approach leverages a pretrained VLM to translate natural-language queries into neuro-symbolic goal states, grounded in the physical world via a bounding-box detection pipeline. Unlike methods that rely on fixed color lists or hard-coded coordinates, GRASP enables robots to interpret abstract spatial concepts such as "top shelf" and execute tasks without additional fine-tuning. We achieve 73.3% overall success across 90 real-robot trials at three difficulty levels, requiring no task-specific training.

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

EvoTrainer: Co-Evolving LLM Policies and Training Harnesses for Autonomous Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.03108v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous LLM training is often framed as recipe search, which leaves the training harness largely static. This limitation sharpens in agentic RL, where shifting bottlenecks and scalar rewards mask diverse failure modes. We introduce EvoTrainer, an autonomous training framework that co-evolves LLM policies and training-side harnesses through empirical feedback: it diagnoses rollout-level evidence, revises diagnostics, backtests interventions, and accumulates reusable skills. Evaluated on mathematical reasoning, competitive-programming code generation, and repository-level software engineering, EvoTrainer matches or exceeds the human-engineered RL references under the same data, codebase, and evaluation protocol, with the largest gain on long-horizon agentic SWE. Trajectory analyses show that retained strategies diverge across domains, evolving diagnostics prevent invalid high-scoring branches from being promoted, and reusable skills shape later search. Autonomous LLM RL should move beyond recipe search toward joint evolution of policies and the training harnesses that interpret them.

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

PASQA: Pitch-Accent-Focused Speech Quality Assessment Model Trained on Synthetic Speech with Accent Errors

Existing mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models typically predict utterance-level naturalness MOS and can be insensitive to localized pitch-accent errors. We propose Pitch-Accent-focused Speech Quality Assessment (PASQA), which explicitly targets pitch-accent correctness. To train our model, we construct a controlled Japanese accent-error dataset by changing accent patterns using an accent-controllable text-to-speech system, and compute a pseudo accent-quality score from the accent-error rate. PASQA builds on self-supervised representations and employs mora-conditioned fusion, ranking loss, an auxiliary accent-error localization task, and speaker-invariant training. Experiments show that conventional models fail to preserve the ordering by accent-error severity, whereas PASQA achieves high ordering accuracy on both seen and unseen speakers. Further, PASQA shows stronger agreement with human accent-correctness judgments. The code is available at https://github.com/lycorp-jp/PASQA.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Capability Minimization as a Safety Primitive: Risk-Aware Causal Gating for Least-Privilege LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.13884v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern decision systems increasingly rely on learned components whose outputs may be confident yet wrong, exposing downstream actions to costly errors. We introduce Risk-Aware Causal Gating (RACG), a framework that decides whether to act on, defer, or abstain from a model's prediction by combining causal effect estimation with calibrated risk control. RACG models the causal pathway from candidate actions to outcomes and gates each decision according to an estimated counterfactual risk rather than raw predictive confidence. To make gating reliable, we derive distribution-free bounds on the probability of acting under high-risk conditions and show how these bounds translate into operating thresholds that satisfy user-specified safety constraints. We further propose an adaptive gating policy that adjusts to distribution shift by monitoring discrepancies between predicted and realized outcomes, tightening the gate when causal assumptions appear violated. Across simulated interventions and real-world decision benchmarks, RACG reduces high-cost errors substantially while preserving most of the utility of an ungated policy, and it outperforms confidence-based and selective-prediction baselines at matched abstention rates. Our results indicate that explicitly separating causal risk from predictive uncertainty yields decision systems that are both safer and more transparent, offering a principled mechanism for trustworthy automation in high-stakes settings.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

ContinuumCellAgent: A Framework-Guided Agent for Long-Horizon Scientific Research

AI-scientist systems are beginning to automate parts of scientific research. We present ContinuumCellAgent, an autonomous agent that executes literature review, hypothesis formation, computational experimentation, manuscript drafting, and adversarial peer review as a single unattended run. Existing AI scientist systems remain difficult to diagnose because they lack modularity, systematic prompt grounding, and observability into long-running behavior. ContinuumCellAgent addresses these gaps with a modular supernode architecture for stage-wise backend swapping, protocols grounded in curated research-method checklists that also define reviewer rubrics, and a diagnostics layer that records file-based artifacts, message traces, and state transitions. We evaluate the system on open-domain QA benchmarks and biomedical/longevity case studies, showing that it can produce checkable research artifacts while exposing pipeline dynamics for rigorous AI co-scientist research.

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

RoboNaldo: Accurate, Stable and Powerful Humanoid Soccer Shooting via Motion-Guided Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Elite humanoid soccer shooting requires whole-body stability, high-impulse whole-body interactions, and accuracy to targets. Motion tracking-driven reinforcement learning (RL) provides stability in whole-body movement coordination, but a fixed reference makes it hard to adapt to varied ball positions and strike timings; in contrast, task reward-driven RL struggles to explore and discover valid kicks from scratch. We therefore introduce RoboNaldo, a three-stage motion-guided curriculum RL framework for high-impulse humanoid interaction. A single human-kick reference is used as a scaffold and progressively shifts optimization towards shooting performance. The curriculum first learns a stable whole-body kicking prior, then adapts the kick to free-kick settings where the ball is stationary at random positions, and finally extends it to moving-ball shooting through a locomotion-command and kick-trigger interface. A high-level heuristic planner controls this interface during training, while alternative high-level controllers can drive the same low-level policy at inference. In simulation, RoboNaldo demonstrates free-kick shot error 48.6% lower and shoot velocity 2.96x than prior work baselines. In real world on a Unitree G1 with onboard perception, RoboNaldo attains 0.73 m and 0.86 m average target shooting error from 3 m away in free-kick and moving-ball cases, accordingly. And the post-contact ball velocity reaches 13.10 m/s, which is 59-71% of reported professional open-play shot speed. Project page: https://opendrivelab.com/RoboNaldo.

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

Urban Heat MiniCubes: An AI-Ready dataset for urban heat research

arXiv:2606.11534v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban heat is amplified by impermeable surfaces and heterogeneous built environments, yet street-level variability remains difficult to quantify because multi-sensor observations are rarely available in consistent, analysis-ready form at the necessary spatiotemporal scales. We present "Urban Heat MiniCubes," a publicly available, FAIR-oriented dataset designed for machine learning applications in urban heat research. The dataset provides harmonized 90 x 90 km gridded data cubes for 48 cities in the Western Hemisphere spanning 2022-2023, with variables reprojected and collocated to a common grid to reduce preprocessing (e.g., reprojection, resampling, and spatiotemporal alignment). Urban Heat MiniCubes includes two complementary modalities: (i) higher-spatial-resolution, lower-frequency observations from Landsat 8/9 (e.g., surface reflectances) and Sentinel-1 (e.g., synthetic aperture radar backscatter), and (ii) higher-temporal-frequency, coarser observations from GOES-R (e.g., longwave infrared brightness temperatures) and a microwave land surface temperature product. We document variables and metadata and provide technical assessment using inter-variable analyses and autoencoder-based reconstruction-error summaries across pixel classes (e.g., water and cloud). Potential use cases and limitations are also discussed.

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

Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines

arXiv:2606.19134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines (PQLRM), a multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm for tasks whose reward structure is specified by a set of reward machines (RMs). PQLRM combines Pareto Q-Learning (PQL), which maintains sets of vector-valued Q-estimates to approximate the Pareto front, with enhancements from Q-Learning with Reward Machines (QRM), which exploits the factored automaton structure of the reward signal. This yields a multi-policy algorithm that remains sample-efficient under non-Markovian, RM-encoded rewards. Experimental trials show that PQLRM converges faster than a naive PQL baseline applied to the cross-product MDP and can synthesize Pareto-optimal policies that QRM cannot.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Time-Conditioned and Multi-Time Survival Prediction from 2D PET/CT Projections in Lung Cancer

Accurate prediction of overall survival (OS) from positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) can support personalized treatment and follow-up strategies in oncology. However, the impact of temporal modeling on imaging-based survival prediction remains insufficiently explored. We investigate how different temporal formulations influence survival prediction by developing two complementary approaches: Attention-guided Time-Conditioned Survival (ATCS) and Multi-Time Survival (MTS). We retrospectively analyzed pre-treatment PET/CT images from 848 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), including 556 for model development and 292 for held-out testing. A previously proposed Time-Conditioned Survival (TCS) model was used as a baseline. Models were trained using 5-fold cross-validation and evaluated on the test set using time-dependent area under the curve (AUC) at 6-month intervals from 0.5 to 5 years. Both ATCS and MTS outperformed the baseline TCS model, achieving mean AUCs of 0.794 and 0.793, respectively, compared to 0.767. ATCS performed better at earlier time points (0.5-3 years), whereas MTS performed better at later intervals (3.5-5 years). Combining tumor-specific and tissue-wise PET/CT features improved performance over either input alone. Finer temporal discretization improved short-term prediction, while coarser intervals provided more stable long-term estimates. These findings demonstrate that temporal modeling and input design influence PET/CT-based survival prediction. The proposed approaches enable time-specific survival estimation from pre-treatment imaging and may support improved risk stratification and clinical decision-making.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

From Tokens to Policy: Causal and Interpretable Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Identification

arXiv:2606.17010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) identification is crucial to explain the impact of an intervention and optimize our policies accordingly. Existing approaches trade expressivity for interpretability, but, if some active heterogeneity drivers are unmeasured, methods at both ends of this spectrum allow for spurious HTE characterization with no causal reading. In this work, we focus on controlled experiments and argue that an oracle HTE causal characterization via the latent interactors is now within reach, thanks to (i) more extensive pre-treatment measurements, i.e., multi-modal and multi-view, and (ii) scalable representations with minimal human supervision. We then re-frame HTE identification as a Markov-blanket discovery problem on a sufficient and aligned pre-treatment representation, and introduce Neural EXposure Interaction Search (NEXIS), an iterative procedure with provable and empirically validated consistent selection. We deploy NEXIS on two anti-poverty programs in Africa, augmenting each with satellite imagery capturing previously unmeasured environmental effect modifiers, leading to novel, interpretable and prescriptive guidelines to optimize the programs' next iterations.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VISTA: An End-to-End Benchmark for Visual Spec-to-Web-App Coding Agents

We present VISTA (VIsual Spec-To-App Benchmark), a benchmark for evaluating the end-to-end web-app generation capabilities of LLM-based agents. Unlike prior code generation benchmarks that focus on algorithmic tasks, VISTA targets realistic UI-centric development, where agents must produce functional, visually coherent applications from underspecified inputs. We define five prompt-information conditions that vary along two axes, visual/structural fidelity and stack constraint: (1) text only with free stack choice, (2) text with reference screenshots under three specified stacks, (3) text with reference screenshots under free stack choice, (4) text with screenshots and pruned Figma structure under a single specified stack, and (5) text with screenshots and pruned Figma structure under free stack choice. To enable robust evaluation, each page in the benchmark is manually annotated with interactive UI components and around three visual anchor points, addressing the well-known limitations of script-based testing tools such as Playwright in open-ended code generation settings. Evaluation combines DOM-grounded reference matching, behavior-specific browser tests, and CLIP-based visual similarity, jointly measuring structural alignment, behavioral completeness, and overall visual fidelity. We use VISTA to assess four agent systems drawn from two model families and two harnesses, finding that visual fidelity and functional correctness are partially decoupled across both input conditions and agents, and that agent editing style varies sharply but is largely orthogonal to task quality. VISTA establishes a rigorous and reproducible foundation for advancing agent-based software engineering research.

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

A Comparative Study of Graph Neural Network Layer Selection for Interaction Modelling in Driving Trajectory Prediction

arXiv:2606.14956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous driving systems rely on precise trajectory prediction to plan safe and efficient movement. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a promising approach for modelling spatiotemporal interactions among road agents. However, designing GNN architectures for trajectory prediction remains non-standardized, with little guidance on which graph layers effectively capture spatial interactions and temporal dynamics. This paper offers a detailed comparative study of 19 graph layer types, focusing on their spatial and temporal processing capabilities to discover the most effective architectures for trajectory prediction. Within the explored hyperparameter setting, we highlight five standout layer combinations, with ARMA, Chebyshev, and topology-aware layers consistently performing better than others. Beyond performance metrics, our findings yield practical design principles: sum-based aggregation is more effective than mean-based methods, multi-head attention mechanisms enable richer interactions, and assigning different weights to different hop distances significantly improves prediction accuracy. These findings offer useful guidance for designing more interpretable and effective trajectory prediction models.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DivQuant: Estimation of Species Richness and Entropy from Small Samples

Estimating diversity properties of discrete distributions from a small observed sample is a fundamental problem in algorithmic statistics that has applications in many fields, in particular bioinformatics, but also in ecology or linguistics. The two most common diversity measures are the number of distinct elements in a multiset, also referred to as species richness in ecology or alpha diversity in microbial analysis, and the Shannon entropy, also referred to as evenness. Estimating these properties from a small sample is particularly challenging for distributions with many rare elements. Thus, many estimators have been proposed in the past that, in practice, work well for different types of distributions. We present DivQuant, an optimization-based, extrapolating richness and entropy estimator with three contributions. First, we formulate the upsampling problem as a convex quadratic program with a Neyman {chi}2 objective. Unlike the linear program of its predecessor RichnEst, DivQuant admits confidence intervals via {chi}2 test inversion that are empirically well-calibrated. Second, we replace RichnEst's fixed-threshold fingerprint truncation with the rare/abundant fingerprint split of Valiant and Valiant, which strongly reduces problem size and preserves enough degrees of freedom for the confidence-interval program to remain valid and feasible. Third, we plug the optimal population fingerprint returned by the program into Shannon's entropy formula to obtain an entropy estimate. DivQuant attains close-to-nominal 95% confidence intervals in essentially all tested regimes, including six simulated distribution families, Tara Oceans microbiome data, and 10X Genomics scRNA-seq data, while competing state-of-the-art methods (RichnEst, iNext, PreSeq) miss the true richness in up to 80% of instances, well above the nominal 5%. In addition, DivQuant outperforms classical asymptotic entropy estimators (Miller-Madow, CAE) and the extrapolating iNext estimator. Running times remain competitive, with DivQuant typically completing in seconds. DivQuant is available as a command-line tool at https://gitlab.com/rahmannlab/divquant.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

WaveDINO: Learning-Based Atmospheric Correction of Unwrapped InSAR Interferograms Validated by GNSS: Results at Laguna del Maule and Campi Flegrei Volcanoes

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) enables effective monitoring of volcanic deformation; however, the observed signals are often corrupted by atmospheric phase delays, seasonal surface changes, and decorrelation effects. Existing atmospheric correction methods, such as numerical weather model-based methods, can reduce these effects but do not consistently remove atmospheric artefacts and may introduce residual biases. To address these limitations, we propose a novel learning-based method for denoising unwrapped InSAR interferograms, using a hybrid training strategy that combines physically motivated synthetic deformation with real atmospheric noise. Specifically, we introduce WaveDINO, a wavelet-based multi-scale denoising framework conditioned on frozen DINOv3 foundation-model features and terrain information. Training uses synthetic magma-source deformation superimposed on short-term interferograms to expose the network to realistic atmospheric statistics while retaining known ground truth. Performance is evaluated on both controlled synthetic data and long-term real interferograms from Laguna del Maule (Chile) and Campi Flegrei (Italy), with independent GNSS measurements used for validation. WaveDINO consistently outperforms competing models, improving agreement with GNSS measurements, and reducing mean GNSS misfit by approximately 3% and 19% at two sites, respectively, while surpassing weather-model-based corrections.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Cryogenic Uniaxial Strain Cell for Quantum Devices

arXiv:2606.11485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanical strain is a powerful resource for tuning quantum systems, but existing piezoelectric strain cells are generally optimized for fragile, high-aspect-ratio single crystals rather than the thick, square-profile chips typical of semiconductor quantum devices. Furthermore, adapting these cells for qubits requires accommodating dense RF and DC wiring while maintaining strict electrical isolation from high-voltage piezo actuators. Here, we present a piezoelectric uniaxial strain cell designed to homogeneously strain thick, square-profile substrates. We introduce a highly symmetric dual-chip loading configuration that effectively suppresses flexural deformation and shear stress. The cell integrates a high-density RF/DC interposer to support standard wire bonding and encloses the actuators in a grounded Faraday cage to prevent unwanted Stark shifts in the device layer. Finite element simulations confirm that combining stiff actuators with this symmetric mounting drastically improves strain homogeneity. Finally, we validate the apparatus experimentally by applying uniaxial strain to a 200 $\mu$m thick silicon die. Surface strain measurements demonstrate an applied strain of 215 $\mu\epsilon$ for 200 V applied piezo bias.