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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Scaling limits of multitype Bienaymé trees

arXiv:2507.23241v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider critical multitype Bienaymé trees that are either irreducible or possess a critical irreducible component with attached subcritical components. These trees are studied under two distinct conditioning frameworks: first, conditioning on the value of a linear combination of the numbers of vertices of given types; and second, conditioning on the precise number of vertices belonging to a selected subset of types. We prove that, under a finite exponential moment condition, the scaling limit as the tree size tends to infinity is given by the Brownian Continuum Random Tree. Additionally, we establish strong nonasymptotic tail bounds for the height of such trees. Our main tools include a flattening operation applied to multitype trees and sharp estimates regarding the structure of monotype trees with a given sequence of degrees.

02.
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.

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

Towards Steering without Sacrifice: Principled Training of Steering Vectors for Prompt-only Interventions

arXiv:2605.05983v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as an effective and lightweight approach to steer behaviors of large language models (LLMs), among which fine-tuned SVs are more effective than optimization-free ones. However, current approaches to fine-tuned SVs suffer from two limitations. First, they require careful selection of steering factors on a per-SV basis to balance steering effectiveness and generation quality at inference time. Second, they operate as full-sequence SVs (FSSVs), which can sacrifice generation quality regardless of factor selection due to excessive intervention on the model generation process. To address the first limitation, we propose joint training of steering factors and directions, such that post-hoc factor selection is no longer required. Using neural network scaling theory, we find that moderately large initialization sizes and learning rates for steering factors are essential for stability and efficiency of joint training. To tackle the second limitation, we draw inspiration from representation fine-tuning and introduce Prompt-only SV (PrOSV), an SV that intervenes only on a few prompt tokens. Our empirical results show that PrOSV outperforms traditional FSSVs on AxBench when using our joint training scheme. We also find that PrOSV achieves a better tradeoff between general model utility and adversarial robustness than FSSV.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Shared Doubt: Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Confidence Estimation for Language Models

Confidence estimation (CE), i.e., quantifying the reliability of a model's prediction, has attracted great interest in the context of large language models (LLMs). However, most studies focus on English, ignoring the multilingual reality of LLM usage, while many CE methods degrade or require retraining across languages. To address this gap, we investigate whether multilingual LLMs encode shared, language-transferable confidence features in open-ended question answering. We use a lightweight linear probe that predicts answer correctness directly from intermediate representations. Trained monolingually, the probe generalizes zero-shot to unseen, typologically diverse languages without target-language supervision. Learned layer weights and multiple ablations reveal that confidence features concentrate in middle layers across languages, suggesting a shared confidence subspace. While zero-shot cross-lingual performance depends on similarity to the source language, the probe provides a strong baseline without any retraining and compares favorably to other popular confidence estimation methods.

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

Stop the Sampler! Classifier-Based Adaptive Stopping for Sampling Kernels

arXiv:2606.16073v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sampling from complex, unnormalized probability densities is a fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling. While Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide asymptotic guarantees, they often suffer from slow mixing and high computational costs due to fixed or manually tuned trajectory lengths. In this work, we propose a novel framework that treats trajectory termination as a learnable component of the sampling dynamics. By framing MCMC within the theory of non-acyclic generative flow networks (GFlowNets), we train state-dependent neural classifiers to decide when a trajectory has reached a high-density region and should terminate. We theoretically establish the connection between optimal classifiers and the target density via detailed balance conditions and introduce a multilevel training scheme to facilitate exploration in complex geometries. Experimental results across various benchmark densities demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces average trajectory lengths while improving mode coverage and mixing compared to standard MCMC baselines.

07.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-25

<b>HPV vaccination linked to dramatic reduction in cervical cancer deaths</b>

A new study examines the impact of the national HPV vaccination program in England, initiated almost two decades ago — showing huge declines in cervical cancer mortality among young women. A new study examines the impact of the national HPV vaccination program in England, initiated almost two decades ago — showing huge declines in cervical cancer mortality among young women.

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

Parallel Test-Time Scaling with Multi-Sequence Verifiers

arXiv:2603.03417v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling, which generates multiple candidate solutions for a single problem, is a powerful technique for improving large language model performance. However, it is hindered by two key bottlenecks: accurately selecting the correct solution from the candidate pool, and the high inference latency from generating many full solutions. We argue that both challenges are fundamentally linked to verifier calibration, as a well-calibrated verifier improves answer selection and enables early-stopping strategies to reduce latency. However, existing non-generative verifiers are limited as they score each candidate in isolation, overlooking rich contextual information across the set of candidates. To address this, we introduce the Multi-Sequence Verifier (MSV), a lightweight verifier that predicts each candidate's correctness conditioned on the full sampled set. MSV achieves improved calibration, which directly enhances best-of-N selection performance and empowers a novel early-stopping framework. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, MSV improves best-of-64 accuracy by up to 6\% relative to strong baselines, and in the early-stopping setting reaches the same accuracy as baselines with less than half the latency.

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

Colab NAS: Obtaining lightweight task-specific convolutional neural networks following Occam's razor

The current trend of applying transfer learning from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on large datasets can be an overkill when the target application is a custom and delimited problem, with enough data to train a network from scratch. On the other hand, the training of custom and lighter CNNs requires expertise, in the from-scratch case, and or high-end resources, as in the case of hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS), limiting access to the technology by non-habitual NN developers. For this reason, we present ColabNAS, an affordable HW NAS technique for producing lightweight task-specific CNNs. Its novel derivative-free search strategy, inspired by Occam's razor, allows to obtain state-of-the-art results on the Visual Wake Word dataset, a standard TinyML benchmark, in just 3.1 GPU hours using free online GPU services such as Google Colaboratory and Kaggle Kernel.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Impulse Decoding of Quantum LDPC Codes: Equivalence of Degeneracy and Code-Shortening

arXiv:2606.18240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error correction is essential for building scalable quantum computers. Within the stabilizer formalism, the Calderbank-Shor-Steane framework constructs quantum codes from pairs of classical linear codes. A distinctive feature in this setting is degeneracy, where multiple equivalent error estimates exist-a phenomenon that has no classical counterpart, and the lack of a meaningful classical coding-theoretic interpretation of which has remained a gap in the literature. In this paper, we demonstrate that degeneracy is closely related to the classical operation of shortening of a linear block code. Interestingly, the shortening here takes place at the decoder rather than at the encoder. Leveraging this insight, we present a parallel decoding scheme for quantum low-density parity-check codes, which we term impulse decoding, that significantly outperforms belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding, as well as several other existing techniques, under both code-capacity and circuit-level noise, with significantly lesser complexity. We then present another algorithm based on decoding of residual errors, which when combined with impulse decoding achieves further performance improvement under circuit-level noise.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Connections Between Pairs of Filters Improve the Accuracy of Convolutional Neural Networks

While researchers continue to find new and improved network structures for CNNs, most of the newly invented architectures still rely on the traditional pattern of stacking convolutional blocks and separating them with pointwise activation functions. However, there are drawbacks to a network purely building on pointwise nonlinearities. One alternative is to introduce a pairwise connection between two filters of a network. Typical connection functions use multiplications or the minimum operation to realize logical AND connections. In this paper, we go one step further by demonstrating that CNNs can benefit from more general connections, which include parameters that are learned. With such parameters, the network is able to implement different connections in different network layers and better adapt the connection function to the task at hand.

12.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

Catecholamine precursor modulation of human exploration: Evidence from a large gender-balanced sample

by Angela Mariele Brands, Kilian Knauth, David Mathar, Tim Roedder, Kerstin Lisner, Jan Peters The catecholamine precursor Tyrosine has been linked to improved cognitive performance, but investigations into decision-making and reinforcement learning processes known to be under catecholamine control are sparse. We examined the impact of a single dose of Tyrosine (2g) on reinforcement learning and exploration in a large (n = 63) gender-balanced sample in a within-subjects preregistered study. Reinforcement learning performance was significantly improved under Tyrosine. Based on previous work, we preregistered the hypotheses that Tyrosine would reduce directed exploration, response times, and physiological arousal. However, neither response times nor physiological arousal revealed the predicted reductions. Computational modelling using an established pre-registered reinforcement learning model revealed that the performance improvement under Tyrosine was due to an increase value-driven exploitation, without affecting directed exploration. Non-preregistered modelling analyses then revealed that accounting for higher-order perseveration substantially improved model fit, and substantiated the observation of increased value-driven exploitation under Tyrosine. Furthermore, it revealed reliable reductions in directed exploration and value-independent perseveration under Tyrosine. Tyrosine thus improved reinforcement learning performance by stabilizing choice patterns in the service of optimizing reward accumulation, modulating several computational mechanisms thought to be under catecholamine control.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

USS: Unified Spatial-Semantic Prompts for Embodied Visual Tracking with Latent Dynamics Learning

Embodied Visual Tracking (EVT) requires an agent to continuously follow a specified target while actively moving through dynamic environments. However, prevailing EVT paradigms predominantly rely on language-based target indication. While language is expressive and convenient, cluttered scenes often contain multiple objects that satisfy the same semantic description, leading to ambiguous target grounding. We therefore propose a paradigm shift, reframing target indication in EVT from text-only specification to unified spatial-semantic prompting. Based on this paradigm, we introduce Unified Spatial-Semantic Prompts for Embodied Visual Tracking with Latent Dynamics Learning, USS, an end-to-end embodied tracking framework that supports text, point, bounding box, and mask prompts within a unified architecture. USS encodes heterogeneous prompts with modality-specific encoders, fuses prompt tokens with visual features through hybrid attention, and decodes compact prompt-conditioned representations into egocentric waypoints. To further improve temporal robustness, USS incorporates a latent world model that predicts future representations through self-supervised alignment. Real-robot experiments demonstrate that explicit spatial target cues yield higher success rates than text-only prompts, particularly in scenarios involving similar distractors and longer-horizon tracking where maintaining instance-level target identity is critical. In the simulation benchmark, USS also achieves state-of-the-art performance among non-MLLM-based methods and competitive results against recent MLLM-based approaches with faster inference speed. Our findings reveal that spatial-semantic prompting provides a more precise and flexible target indication interface for embodied visual tracking. Project site: https://arescheah.github.io/uss-project-page/.

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

SpheriCity: Designing Trustworthy Conversational AI for Sustainability Decision Support

arXiv:2606.13854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present SpheriCity, an expert-grounded conversational prototype designed to support trustworthy knowledge sensemaking from sustainability reports. City-level circularity assessment reports contain rich information about materials, infrastructure, and policy interventions, yet their length and heterogeneous structure make cross-document synthesis and comparison difficult for practitioners and researchers working on circular economy initiatives. While large language models (LLM) promise faster knowledge access and synthesis, their opaque reasoning, hallucinations, and lack of source transparency introduce risks for trust and interpretability, and require verification in high-stakes sustainability contexts. SpheriCity addresses these challenges through a provenance-first conversational agent that foregrounds evidence traceability, structured synthesis, and interaction scaffolds to support exploratory querying and cross-document synthesis across sustainability reports. We conducted a formative expert review with six sustainability experts using representative queries spanning cross-city comparison, policy summarization, and recommendation-oriented tasks. Experts evaluated responses across dimensions and provided qualitative reflections on the system's usefulness for sustainability knowledge work. Our results reveal that transparent sourcing, contextual explanation, interpretability, and alignment with expert workflow strongly shape expert trust and judgments of system usefulness. This work contributes (1) a conversational prototype for sustainability knowledge sensemaking, (2) an expert-grounded evaluation framework for assessing AI responses in high-stakes knowledge domains, and (3) design insights into how provenance, uncertainty communication, and integration in workflow influence expert users' trust in AI assistance for sustainability decision support.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Train, Retrieve, or Both? A Four-Arm Head-to-Head for Correct Statutory Citation on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act

arXiv:2606.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-represented tenants, landlords, and help-desk staff need to be pointed at the provision of law that actually governs a question, with a correct statutory citation. We study this task on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 (RTA) and its core regulation, asking the operator's question empirically: is fine-tuning enough, or is hybrid retrieval needed? We run a four-arm head-to-head on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (base zero-shot, LoRA SFT-only, RAG-only, and an SFT+RAG hybrid), scored on citation exact-match (section+subsection) over a small, human-verification-pending real eval set. The base model cannot cite the RTA and SFT-only mis-recalls sections; retrieval is essential and drives hallucination to zero by construction; and the SFT+RAG hybrid scores highest at 0.481 exact-match with zero hallucinated citations. Its edge comes from SFT making provision selection more robust to the higher-recall candidate sets that hurt zero-shot RAG. Notably, this cheap bge-small hybrid matches or beats a pipeline built on bigger, specialized retrieval models (a larger embedder and a cross-encoder reranker), and a larger/improved training set does not help either: strong statutory-citation performance here does not require specialized retrieval models or more data. The artifact zeroes hallucination and clears the lift-over-base bar but does not reach the aspirational 0.70 exact-match target. All results are on a small, human-verification-pending real eval set and are reported as preliminary.

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

EAGG: Embodiment-Aligned Grasp Generation via Geometry-Aware Graph Conditioning

arXiv:2606.18092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-end-effector grasp generation seeks a unified model that generalizes across objects and across embodiments ranging from parallel grippers to dexterous end effectors. Existing grasp generators are typically designed for a fixed embodiment or encode embodiment identity with a static descriptor, which weakens transfer when topology, actuation coupling, and contact geometry differ substantially. We present EAGG, an embodiment-aligned grasp generator that represents each embodiment with a topology-aware end-effector graph and an embodiment-specific low-dimensional end-effector control space. A frozen end-effector-cognition backbone converts the current articulated state into geometry-aware tokens that act as a reusable morphology prior, and iterative geometry injection refreshes these tokens throughout sampling so that conditioning remains synchronized with the evolving end-effector geometry. On the MultiGripperGrasp benchmark, EAGG reaches 56.17% average success across six training end effectors, remaining within 1.10 percentage points of specialized training while preserving transfer to finetuning and zero-shot end effectors. Iterative geometry injection further reduces the pooled median contact distance from 0.239 cm to 0.189 cm. These results show that cross-end-effector grasp generation is strengthened by aligning embodiment structure inside a shared generator rather than suppressing embodiment differences. Code is available at https://github.com/wanhaoniu/EAGG.

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

Audited Conformal Prediction for Classification under Unknown Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.14909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for a pretrained classification model deployed under unknown distribution shift. We propose Audited Conformal Prediction (ACP), a method that leverages a small labeled dataset from the target population to train an auxiliary audit model identifying inputs where the legacy model is likely to fail. By integrating the audit model's outputs into the conformal prediction framework, ACP produces prediction sets that guarantee marginal coverage while achieving substantially higher conditional coverage in practice than existing approaches. We develop and analyze two complementary integration strategies – one targeting marginal coverage with improved conditional performance, the other providing explicit group-conditional coverage guarantees – and establish theoretical guarantees for both. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method and illustrate trade-offs between prediction set size and conditional coverage.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

PromptShift-CRC: Drift-Aware Conformal Risk Control for Foundation Models Under Prompt and Domain Shift

arXiv:2606.15964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are now used in settings where the prompts they receive can change quickly. Users change, topics change, policies change, and the model may suddenly face a kind of request that was rare in the calibration data. This makes fixed calibration risky. Conformal prediction and conformal risk control give model-agnostic ways to control error, but they work best when the calibration data still look like the future data. This paper develops PromptShift CRC, a drift-aware conformal risk control method for foundation-model outputs under prompt and domain shift. The method embeds prompts and responses, measures how far the current prompt stream has moved from the calibration pool, gives more weight to relevant or recent calibration examples, and updates the risk level online after observed violations. It reports three practical diagnostics: realized risk error, prompt drift, and effective calibration size. We give conditions under which the method controls risk up to terms for distribution mismatch and weighted quantile uncertainty. In a synthetic prompt-shift benchmark, static conformal risk control fails sharply after drift, while PromptShift-CRC gives the best coverage among the adaptive baselines considered. We then evaluate the same calibration layer on public benchmark derived streams for question answering, toxicity, summarization factuality, and long-context hallucination risk

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Critical spectral behavior and large deviations for geometric $\alpha$-stable processes

arXiv:2606.17501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study the Schrödinger-type operator associated with geometric stable processes on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$, especially the differentiability of spectral function. Let $\mathcal{H}$ be the generator of the geometric stable process and $\mu$ a smooth measure on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. Then the spectral function $C(\theta)$ is defined as $C(\theta) = -\inf \sigma(-\mathcal{H} - \theta \mu)$, where $\sigma(\mathcal{A})$ denotes the spectrum of $\mathcal{A}$ and $\theta$ is a real parameter. Since the geometric stable process exhibits severe local singularities in its Lévy measure, its transition semigroup lacks ultracontractivity, which invalidates classical methods for proving the differentiability. To overcome this obstacle, we use the compact embedding of the extended Dirichlet space into $L^2(\mu)$. As a primary application of this differentiability, we establish a large deviation principle for a positive continuous additive functional associated with the smooth measure $\mu$.

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

Atlas H&E-TME: Scalable AI-Based Tissue Profiling at Expert Pathologist-Level Accuracy

Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining is the cornerstone of histopathology, yet scalable, quantitative analysis of H&E whole-slide images (WSIs) remains a central challenge in computational pathology. We present Atlas H&E-TME, an AI-based system built on the Atlas family of pathology foundation models that predicts tissue quality, tissue region, and cell type labels across multiple cancer types, yielding over 4,500 quantitative readouts per slide at cell-level resolution. A key challenge to validating such systems is overcoming morphological ambiguity inherent to H&E-only ground truth and the limited scalability of more informed references drawing on modalities such as immunohistochemistry (IHC). We address this with a dual validation framework combining biologically grounded depth with technical and morphological breadth. For depth, we propose an IHC-informed multi-pathologist consensus protocol that substantially improves inter-rater agreement over conventional H&E-only annotation. This yields a molecularly grounded reference against which we compare Atlas H&E-TME and pathologists working from H&E alone. For breadth, we benchmark Atlas H&E-TME on over 200,000 high-confidence H&E-only pathologist annotations across 1,500+ cases spanning eight cancer types and their most common metastatic sites, with subtypes covering >90% of clinical cases per cancer type, drawn from 25+ sources and 8+ scanner models. Benchmarked against the IHC-informed consensus, Atlas H&E-TME matches or exceeds pathologist H&E-only performance and generalizes consistently and robustly across this broad morphological and technical scope. In doing so, Atlas H&E-TME turns the H&E slide – the most ubiquitous data in pathology – into a scalable, quantitative window into the tumor and its microenvironment, laying a foundation for the next generation of tissue-based biomarkers in translational and clinical research.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Deep-Learning-Based Pixelated Microwave Filter Design and Characterization using Electro-Optical Electric-Field Measurements

arXiv:2606.18402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional microwave filter design typically relies on iterative parameter tuning and predefined topologies, which limits design space and increases development time. This study uses a deep learning approach combining convolutional neural networks with genetic algorithms to automate pixelated microwave filter synthesis. To validate the approach experimentally, both S-parameter and spatial electric-field measurements were analyzed. The synthesized low-pass filter demonstrated excellent agreement between simulated and measured performance, achieving a 7 GHz passband with over 20 dB suppression beyond 9.5 GHz. Electro-optical measurements, for the first time, revealed electric field patterns that resemble coupled transmission-lines or stub structures, providing insight into the emergent characteristics of AI-generated designs.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Humor Style Drives Laughter, Topic Shapes Acceptability: Evaluating Bilingual Personal and Political Robot-Delivered AI Jokes

arXiv:2606.13256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humor plays a central role in human social relationships, and recent advances in computational humor create new opportunities for integrating humor into human-robot interaction (HRI). While large language models (LLMs) can generate diverse forms of humor, it remains unclear how humor style, joke content, and language preference shape perceptions of robot-delivered humor in group settings. In this exploratory study, we employed a mixed factorial design in which participants evaluated AI-generated jokes delivered by a robot in a university classroom. We examined the effects of humor type (Affiliative, Self-Enhancing, Aggressive, Self-Defeating) and joke content (person-related vs. political) on perceived funniness and appropriateness, as well as preferred language. Results show that humor type significantly influences funniness, with Aggressive and Affiliative humor rated higher, while joke content primarily affects appropriateness, with person-related jokes preferred over political ones. Language preference was shaped by both joke content and participants' self-reported fluency and humor practices.

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

Rapid FinFET Modelling Using an Autoencoder

arXiv:2606.24046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a machine learning framework that leverages an autoencoder (AE) for the efficient modeling of FinFET. We first calibrated a BSIM-CMG model to generate a dataset of current-voltage (ID-VG) characteristics. This data was used to train an autoencoder that compresses full I-V curves into a low-dimensional latent space, which intrinsically encodes key device physics. A key innovation is the explicit incorporation of parameter such as drain to source voltage (VDS) as an input feature, enhancing the model ability to capture bias dependent variation. The trained model successfully reconstructs full I-V curves and directly extracts critical device metrics including threshold voltage (VTH), subthreshold slope (SS), and peak transconductance (gm). This approach demonstrates that data driven compact models, built from actual characterization data, can achieve high accuracy with minimal training data, providing a powerful tool for rapid device characterization, modelling and circuit level simulation.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for Antibody Sequence-Structure Design

Antibodies specifically recognize antigens and play a central role in therapeutic discovery. Designing antibodies for a given antigen remains challenging because antigen-antibody complex data are limited, whereas the sequence and conformational spaces of complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) are large. Retrieved CDR templates from databases or candidate libraries can narrow the design space and improve controllability, but retrieval for novel antigens is often sparse and imperfect; treating retrieved templates as hard conditions can bias the denoising process and cause negative transfer. To address this problem, we propose Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for antibody sequence-structure design (NT-ABDiff), a joint diffusion framework that treats candidate CDR-only templates as optional and potentially unreliable conditions. NT-ABDiff uses reliability-aware template modulation to estimate the context-conditioned usefulness of each candidate and to adaptively reweight and fuse multiple templates during conditioning. We further train the model with mixed-quality and corrupted templates as conditional perturbation regularization, encouraging the denoiser to exploit informative templates while remaining stable when templates are uninformative. Experiments under controlled template shifts and a train-set retrieval evaluation show that NT-ABDiff improves CDR-H3 sequence recovery and structural accuracy over strong baselines, while retaining robustness to missing, mismatched, and corrupted templates. Under a stringent random-template CDR-H3 evaluation, NT-ABDiff improves amino-acid recovery (AAR) from 30.03% to 39.47% and reduces RMSD from 3.160 to 2.915A; with train-set retrieval candidates, it achieves 39.50% AAR and 2.76 {ring} A RMSD. Code, processed splits, {ring} configuration files, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/ShiDeng7rz/NT-ABDiff.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VietFashion: Benchmarking Sketch-Text Composed Image Retrieval for Cultural Outfits

Cultural garments pose a unique challenge for visual retrieval systems, as their identity often depends on subtle structural and symbolic details that are poorly captured by standard AI models. We introduce VietFashion, a new benchmark for sketch-text composed image retrieval centered on the Ao Dai, a traditional Vietnamese garment. VietFashion enables designers and researchers to retrieve culturally meaningful outfits using a combination of hand-drawn sketches, which convey garment structure, and textual descriptions, which encode cultural semantics. The dataset is initialized with 650 sketches and expanded using generative models to produce over 21,000 photorealistic images with aligned captions. Textual prompts that describe detailed outfit attributes, which are extracted from fashion magazines to ensure authenticity and diversity. To better reflect the inherent ambiguity of design intent, VietFashion adopts a multi-target retrieval setting, where a single query may correspond to multiple valid results. We establish standardized evaluation protocols and benchmark state-of-the-art composed image retrieval methods. Experimental results reveal significant performance gaps in modeling fine-grained cultural semantics and multi-modal composition, positioning VietFashion as a challenging benchmark for fine-grained fashion retrieval. The dataset is publicly available at: https://hng0303.github.io/VietFashion.