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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

IterCAD: An Iterative Multimodal Agent for Visually-Grounded CAD Generation and Editing

Computer-Aided Design is pivotal in modern manufacturing, yet existing automated methods predominantly rely on open-loop, one-shot generation, creating a mismatch with iterative real-world practices. In this paper, we present IterCAD, a unified multimodal agent framework for closed-loop, interactive CAD generation and editing. We formulate the task as a multi-turn interaction between a multimodal agent and an executable CAD sandbox, covering three tasks: Drawing-to-Code, Text-to-Code, and Interactive Editing. To support this, we develop a data synthesis pipeline incorporating advanced industrial manufacturing features to generate standard-compliant multi-view engineering drawings, complex code-editing tasks, and high-fidelity interaction trajectories. We optimize the agent via progressive SFT followed by geometry-aware reinforcement learning with viable-prefix masking to enhance code executability and geometric fidelity. Finally, we introduce the IterCAD-Bench evaluation suite and propose the Chamfer Distance Tolerance-Recall (CD-TR) curve alongside its AUC-TR metric, establishing a survivor-bias-free standard that unifies code validity and geometric precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IterCAD achieves highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both code executability and geometric precision, while exhibiting superior capabilities in closed-loop iterative refinement.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

OmniOPD: Logit-Free On-Policy Distillation via Speculative Verification

On-Policy Distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own generative trajectories under dense token-level feedback from a stronger teacher, mitigating both the off-policy distribution shift of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and the sparse credit assignment of Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, standard OPD faces two coupled limitations. First, it requires direct access to the teacher's token-level logits, excluding a broad class of capable proprietary models from serving as teachers. Second, the token-level logit signal itself is brittle, depending on a narrow overlap of plausible next tokens between teacher and student, and prone to amplifying degenerate patterns such as repetition loops. In this paper, we introduce OmniOPD, a novel framework that addresses both limitations through a logit-free, chunk-level supervision signal. OmniOPD replaces deterministic logit matching with Monte Carlo rollouts that approximate the teacher's local preferences through a continuous semantic similarity metric over multi-token chunks, and concentrates this supervision via a peak-entropy scheduler that audits the student only at its high-uncertainty reasoning forks. A Dirichlet-Multinomial Bayesian prior and a base-model KL anchor further bound the variance of discrete sampling and prevent policy collapse across unaudited tokens. Across competitive benchmarks, OmniOPD surpasses the standard OPD approach by up to +28.64% on math, confirming that chunk-level semantic verification extracts a more reliable learning signal than token-level logit matching, whose high information density is offset by significant noise and brittleness. Furthermore, when paired with stronger black-box teachers such as Claude-4.5-Haiku and Gemini-2.5-Flash, OmniOPD achieves an additional +9.54% relative on math over its open-weight teacher counterpart, advancing the student past the performance of self-exploratory RL.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Tokens to Faces: Investigating Discrete Speech Representations for 3D Facial Animation

The choice of speech representation is critical in speech-driven 3D facial animation. Representations differ in what they encode: SSL features emphasize segmental and semantic cues, neural codecs yield latents optimized for acoustic reconstruction, and ASR-style objectives produce label-based spaces. We evaluate four speech representation families for 3D facial synthesis, comparing their facial reconstruction quality across two facial decoders using objective metrics and a perceptual evaluation. We additionally conduct probing analyses that relate tokenized representations to phonetic units and to articulatory deformations. We found that encoding phonetic classes is beneficial for accurate facial animation prediction on both semantic and label-based representations with comparable facial animation quality. From the latter, we introduce an Audio Visual Text-to-Speech (AVTTS) pipeline that leverages, as a shared space, discrete representations to decode speech and 3D facial motion.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

A Survey on Agentic Security: Applications, Threats and Defenses

LLM-based agents are now used throughout cybersecurity. While these agents facilitate powerful and autonomous security applications, their autonomy opens up new attack surfaces, and the security community is actively building defenses to secure them. Yet the literature on this subject has grown quickly and unevenly. Existing surveys treat applications, threats, and defenses in isolation, leaving no unified account of how an agent's capabilities, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures interconnect. In this work we present the first holistic survey of the agentic security landscape, structuring the field around the fundamental pillars of Applications, Threats and Defenses. We provide a comprehensive taxonomy of over 260 papers, explaining how agents are used in downstream cybersecurity applications, inherent threats to agentic systems, and countermeasures designed to protect them. In addition, we provide detailed pillar-specific and cross-cutting analyses that show the security-lifecycle coverage of agentic applications, comparison between red-teaming and blue-teaming agents, and the adversarial use of red-teaming applications. On the threat side, we analyze the entry points and agent-loop stages that attacks target, their specificity to the agentic setting, and the threat models they assume. On the defense side, we analyze the prevailing defense strategies, their cost and security trade-offs, and where in the agent lifecycle they are deployed. We further map which defenses cover which attack classes and chart trends in agent architecture, backbone model usage, data modality coverage, and the growth of attack and defense research over time. Taken together, these findings indicate that agentic systems are structurally fragile by default and that securing them will require defenses that span the full agent lifecycle rather than single-layer fixes.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Point-Identification of a Robust Predictor Under Latent Shift with Imperfect Proxies

arXiv:2603.15158v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Addressing the domain adaptation problem becomes more challenging when distribution shifts across domains stem from latent confounders that affect both covariates and outcomes. Existing proxy-based approaches that address latent shift rely on a strong completeness assumption to uniquely determine (point-identify) a robust predictor. Completeness requires that proxies have sufficient information about variations in latent confounders. For imperfect proxies the mapping from confounders to the space of proxy distributions is non-injective, and multiple latent confounder values can generate the same proxy distribution. This breaks the completeness assumption and observed data are consistent with multiple potential predictors (set-identified). To address this, we introduce latent equivalent classes (LECs). LECs are defined as groups of latent confounders that induce the same conditional proxy distribution. We show that point-identification for the robust predictor remains achievable as long as multiple domains differ sufficiently in how they mix proxy-induced LECs to form the robust predictor. This domain diversity condition is formalized as a cross-domain rank condition on the mixture weights, which is substantially weaker assumption than completeness. We introduce the Proximal Quasi-Bayesian Active learning (PQAL) framework, which actively queries a small, targeted set of diverse domains that satisfy this rank condition. PQAL can recover the point-identified predictor, demonstrates robustness to varying degrees of shift and outperforms previous methods on synthetic data and semi-synthetic dSprites, IHDP, ACS Folktables datasets.

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

Optimal Impulse Control for Cyber Risk Management

arXiv:2410.17706v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We explore an optimal impulse control problem wherein an electronic device owner strategically calibrates protection levels against cyber attacks. Utilizing epidemiological compartment models, we qualitatively characterize the dynamics of cyber attacks within the network. We determine the optimal protective measures against effective hacking by formulating and solving a stochastic control problem with optimal switching. We demonstrate that the value function for the cluster owner constitutes a viscosity solution to a system of coupled variational inequalities associated with a fully coupled reflected backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE). Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive algorithm alongside a verification procedure to ascertain the optimal timing for network protection across various cyber attack scenarios. Our findings are illustrated through numerical approximations employing deep Galerkin methods for partial differential equations (PDEs). We visualize the optimal protection strategies in the context of two distinct attack scenarios: (1) a constant cyber attack, (2) an exogenous cyber attack strategy modeled with a Poisson process.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Structure preserving properties of higher order moment closures for TASEP

arXiv:2604.15925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) is a stochastic model for the unidirectional flow of interacting particles on a 1D-lattice that is much used in systems biology and statistical physics. Its master equation describes the evolution of the probability distribution on the configuration space. The size of the master equation grows exponentially with the length of the lattice. It is known that the complexity of the system may be reduced using mean-field approximations. We provide a rigorous definition of a family of such models using moments of any order and an extension to the pair approximation for obtaining closures for the system. The dimension of these models grows linearly with the lattice size and exponentially in the order of the approximation. Moreover, we show that the states of these models still have a probabilistic interpretation and that basic structural properties of the master equation are preserved. This extends known results on the Ribosome Flow Model which can be viewed as the first order approximation for TASEP.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

A unified smoothing framework for protein domain bigram model

Biomolecular sequences can be represented as strings over an alphabet, an analogy that has motivated many applications of computational linguistic techniques to biological problems. However, such methods must be adapted to the characteristic scale and organization of biomolecular data. Here, we consider the problem of bigram smoothing for multidomain protein architectures, where domain bigram frequency data is extremely sparse and differs from textual data in alphabet size, string length distribution, the relationship between bigram and unigram frequencies, tandem repeat lengths, and the distribution of domain adjacencies. Moreover, some domain combinations are unobserved because they are biologically incompatible, others because the data are incomplete. A smoothing method that distinguishes these two cases is required. We propose a unified smoothing framework based on interpolation that can be tuned to accommodate different bigram data characteristics. Within this framework, we design specific model variants suited to protein domain bigram data: these assign low adjusted counts to pairs that are likely incompatible, while making appropriate adjustments for undersampled pairs. We demonstrate empirically that this approach distinguishes the two cases while preserving the characteristic signatures of multidomain data.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

SA4Depth: Consistent Pose-Depth Scale Alignment for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Self-supervised depth estimation from monocular sequences relies on the joint learning of a depth and a pose network. Despite abundant research done to improve the depth network, efforts on the pose remain limited. In this context, even when depth is estimated up to scale, we highlight the importance of the alignment between the scene scales estimated by the pose and depth nets. Then, we introduce SA4Depth, an approach to improve this alignment and boost the depth predictions while keeping the inference time unchanged. Our proposed method uses the depth estimated during training to reproject learnable visual features across consecutive frames and refine the pose estimates by reducing feature alignment residuals. With our method, the estimated scene scales by the separate depth and pose networks are aligned, and the prediction scale consistency is improved across different sequences. Our differentiable refinement integrates seamlessly into existing self-supervised pipelines and substantially improves their depth estimates. We demonstrate this with extensive experiments both outdoors and indoors on KITTI, Cityscapes, and NYUv2. Additionally, results on KITTI Odometry confirm the effectiveness of our pose refinement. Our code is available at https://github.com/Runningchauncey/SA4Depth .

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

VCBench: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Single-Cell Foundation Models

Single-cell foundation models are increasingly positioned as virtual cells, yet their capabilities are assessed by fragmented, largely single-task benchmarks that obscure where these models improve on simple baselines. VCBench addresses this by synthesizing four independent virtual-cell frameworks into seven capability dimensions: perturbation response prediction, cross-species universality, gene regulatory network (GRN) inference, modality integration, temporal dynamics, multi-scale integration, and in silico experimentation. Each dimension is assessed for operational testability under current architectures and datasets: five admit direct or proxy evaluation, while multi-scale integration and in silico experimentation are structurally untestable as end-to-end tasks. We evaluate five foundation models (Geneformer, scGPT, UCE, TranscriptFormer, Arc State) against pre-registered linear and nearest-neighbor baselines across the five testable dimensions, and report three findings. First, the baselines match or exceed every foundation model on four of the five scored dimensions, replicating the reported competitiveness of linear baselines on perturbation prediction and extending it to cross-species transfer, GRN inference, and temporal ordering. Second, TranscriptFormer alone exceeds the strongest baseline on cross-modal RNA-to-protein prediction (53% Pearson improvement, with a documented contamination caveat) and is the only model to reach Level 2 in the pre-registered Virtual Cell (VC) Level rubric; the architectural choice behind this advantage simultaneously causes a spectral collapse that destroys its temporal-ordering performance, a tradeoff invisible to single-task benchmarks. Third, no foundation model publishes a complete cell-level training manifest, leaving data contamination undetectable to users. Alongside the benchmark, VCBench releases a Contamination Reporting Schema and contributes two further methodological tools: a common-label-set protocol that controls for class-count confounds in cross-species transfer, and a spread-error correlation probe for epistemic calibration.

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

Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion for Domain-Robust Whole-Slide Survival Analysis

arXiv:2606.19966v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whole-slide images (WSIs) are widely used for computational cancer prognosis. However, most existing methods primarily focus on in-domain performance and fail to generalize across clinical centers. This limitation stems from their reliance on pixel-derived representations that are highly susceptible to domain-specific artifacts caused by staining protocols and scanner hardware. We hypothesize that high-level pathology semantics, such as tumor grade and micro-environmental architecture, provide a domain-invariant semantic representation that mirrors the robust diagnostic logic of human pathologists. Therefore, we propose a Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion Survival (SAEFS) framework, where SAEFS derives semantic anchors from WSIs via Visual Question Answering (VQA), employs a dual-stream WSI evidence extraction architecture, uses Dirichlet-based Subjective Logic to model uncertainty, and fuses semantic and visual evidence through a cautious conjunction rule to avoid overconfident fusion from correlated sources. Trained exclusively on one source domain and evaluated zero-shot across four unseen domains, SAEFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models both in prediction accuracy and reliability, improving the average C-index by 10.2%. Quantitative analyses further show that VQA-derived semantic features exhibit significantly lower cross-center divergence than pixel-derived features, highlighting their robustness for cross-center clinical applications.

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

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations between mechanical oscillators revealed through SU(1,1) interferometry

arXiv:2606.18202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum correlations are essential for achieving quantum advantage in computing, communication and sensing. Moreover, their observation challenges and constrains our fundamental understanding of nature. Mechanical oscillators in the quantum regime provide an appealing platform for preparing and investigating quantum correlations at macroscopic scales. Despite substantial progress, however, continuous-variable quantum correlations stronger than entanglement have not yet been observed in this macroscopic regime. Here, we report the experimental observation of continuous-variable Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations between two spatially-separated mechanical oscillators with an effective mass of $\sim 16 \,\mu g$ each. This is achieved by coupling them to a superconducting qubit which allows for engineering a two-mode squeezing interaction when parametrically driven. Crucially, we show that this interaction can be used to witness quantum correlations through the realization of a mechanical SU(1,1) interferometer. Our results expand the toolbox of operations in circuit quantum acoustodynamics and demonstrate that quantum correlations stronger than entanglement can also be observed in macroscopic systems, thereby shedding light on the boundary between quantum and classical regimes.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Manipulation of Topological Corner States via Subchiral Symmetry

arXiv:2606.17975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Higher-order topological phases provide robust corner modes, but their use requires controllable creation, isolation, and transfer of individual modes and their superpositions. Here we demonstrate, using the two-dimensional Benalcazar-Bernevig-Hughes model as an example, that subchiral symmetry provides a general control principle for manipulating topological corner modes. The conventional chiral symmetry decomposes into four subchiral symmetries, each associated with one zero-energy corner mode. By selectively breaking these subsymmetries with controlled intercell hoppings, we reduce the fourfold corner-state manifold step by step to single isolated modes. We further design adiabatic protocols that transfer either a single corner state or a superposition of two corner states between selected corners, while preserving the relative phase in the latter case. Both numerical simulations and IBM quantum-processor implementations show that the proposed protocols can be executed with high fidelity, establishing subchiral symmetry as a route to programmable higher-order topological state manipulation.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

High coverage, persistent gaps: quality of Antenatal Care and its determinants in Zambia based on the 2024 Demographic and Health Survey.

Abstract Background Evaluating antenatal care (ANC) quality is critical to reducing maternal and neonatal mortality. In Zambia, despite high basic ANC attendance, comprehensive national evidence on the clinical content and quality of services remains limited. This study assessed the coverage of WHO-recommended ANC interventions and identified factors associated with care quality using the latest national data. Methods A cross-sectional analysis was conducted using data from the 2024 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey. The final analytic sample comprised 4,829 women aged 15-49 with a live birth in the preceding 5 years. A composite index of 15 selected, equally weighted WHO-recommended components evaluated clinical assessment, counseling/screening, preventive interventions, and utilization. Survey-weighted Poisson regression estimated adjusted incidence rate ratios (aIRRs) for the count of ANC components received. Results The mean ANC quality score was 12.5 out of 15 (95% CI: 12.4-12.6), and 78.5% (95% CI: 77.0-80.0) of women achieved adequate ANC ([≥] 12/15 components). While individual clinical and counseling coverage generally exceeded 90%, only 47.2% (95% CI: 45.3-49.0) of women initiated care during the first trimester, and just 4.8% (95% CI: 4.1-5.6) achieved [≥] 8 ANC contacts. Maternal education was the strongest and most stable predictor of quality across all models. Compared to no education, higher education was associated with an 8.0% higher expected quality score (aIRR = 1.080, 95% CI: 1.051-1.110). Lower ANC quality was significantly associated with unwanted pregnancies (aIRR = 0.970, 95% CI: 0.956-0.993) and with residence in Western (aIRR = 0.923, 95% CI: 0.897-0.951) and North Western (aIRR = 0.966, 95% CI: 0.937-0.996) provinces. Absence of distance barriers and residence in Eastern, Luapula, and Copperbelt provinces were associated with higher quality scores. Conclusion While average ANC component coverage in Zambia is high, critical gaps persist in early initiation and total contact frequency. Care adequacy is strongly influenced by maternal education, relationship status, pregnancy intention, and regional inequities. These findings underscore the need for interventions targeted at uneducated women, preventing unintended pregnancies, and underserved regions such as Western and North Western Provinces. Keywords: Antenatal care quality, ANC content, Zambia, maternal education.

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

Average Rankings Mask Per-Subject Optimality: A Friedman-Nemenyi Benchmark of EEG Motor-Imagery BCI Decoders

arXiv:2606.24394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is the dominant non-invasive modality for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), yet reliable decoding of motor imagery is hampered by inter- and intra-individual variability. A recurring claim is that one decoding pipeline, most often a spatial or Riemannian method, is broadly preferable. We test the weakest version of that claim under the most favourable conditions. Using the Mother of All BCI Benchmarks (MOABB) framework, we evaluated 1,056 decoding configurations (feature extractor x scaler x classifier), >340,000 subject-level model fits, across three public left-versus-right motor-imagery datasets (PhysionetMI, 109 participants; Cho2017, 52; Zhou2016, 4) and two frequency bands (8-15 Hz, 8-30 Hz). Every model is fit and tested within a single session of a single participant, the easiest regime, giving every pipeline its best chance. We apply the statistics standard for multi-classifier comparison: Friedman omnibus tests, Nemenyi critical-difference analysis and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with effect sizes. Covariance tangent-space projection (cov-tgsp) and Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) are the strongest families, but their ordering is dataset-dependent and, on the largest and most heterogeneous cohort (PhysionetMI), statistically indistinguishable (Nemenyi p = 0.27; Kendall's W = 0.11). At the individual level the single best pipeline is optimal for only 35% of PhysionetMI participants, and nonlinear descriptors are best for roughly one third; matching pipeline to participant adds about seven accuracy points over the best fixed choice. The ranking is not an artefact of dimensionality, and classifier and scaler choices are secondary to the feature representation. Even in the easiest regime, no single pipeline dominates: a lower bound on the personalization problem and a quantitative case for participant-aware model selection rather than a universal decoder.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

CuMA: Aligning LLMs with Sparse Cultural Values via Demographic-Aware Mixture of Adapters

As Large Language Models (LLMs) serve a global audience, alignment must transition from enforcing universal consensus to respecting cultural pluralism. We demonstrate that dense models, when forced to fit conflicting value distributions, suffer from Mean Collapse, converging to a generic average that fails to represent diverse groups. We attribute this to Cultural Sparsity, where gradient interference prevents dense parameters from spanning distinct cultural modes. To resolve this, we propose \textsc{CuMA} (Cultural Mixture of Adapters), a framework that frames alignment as a conditional capacity separation problem. By incorporating demographic-aware routing, \textsc{CuMA} internalizes a Latent Cultural Topology to explicitly disentangle conflicting gradients into specialized expert subspaces. Extensive evaluations on WorldValuesBench, Community Alignment, and PRISM demonstrate that \textsc{CuMA} achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming both dense baselines and semantic-only MoEs. Crucially, our analysis confirms that \textsc{CuMA} effectively mitigates mean collapse, preserving cultural diversity. Our code is available at https://github.com/Throll/CuMA.

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

Contextual Invertible World Models: A Neuro-Symbolic Agentic Framework for Colorectal Cancer Drug Response

arXiv:2603.02274v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Precision oncology is currently limited by the small-N, large-P paradox, where high-dimensional genomic data is abundant but pharmacological response samples are sparse. While deep learning achieves predictive accuracy, it frequently fails to provide the mechanistic clarity required for clinical adoption. We present the Contextual Invertible World Model (CIWM), a Neuro-Symbolic Agentic Framework that bridges this gap by integrating a quantitative machine learning emulator with a Large Language Model reasoning layer. Utilising a stringently curated, high-fidelity data engineering pipeline on the Sanger GDSC dataset (\( N=83 \)), we isolate true biological signals from in vitro artifacts to establish a rigorous baseline predictive correlation for complex transcriptomics (\( r=0.268 \)). Through Inverse Reasoning, we perform in silico CRISPR perturbations across the colorectal landscape. The framework autonomously overturns classical mechanistic assumptions, identifying a hierarchical dominance of mutant KRAS over the APC/Wnt-axis in driving 5-fluorouracil resistance (\( \Delta=-0.0469 \)) via a "KRAS Shield" mapped to MAPK/PI3K networks. Furthermore, the agentic layer identified a "PIK3CA Paradox", revealing that repairing PIK3CA inadvertently increases chemoresistance (\( \Delta=+0.0085 \)) by triggering a compensatory feedback loop that hyperactivates the dominant MAPK survival pathway.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Benchmarking LLMs' Mathematical Reasoning with Unseen Random Variables Questions

Recent studies have raised significant concerns regarding the reliability of current mathematics benchmarks, highlighting issues such as simplistic design and potential data contamination. Consequently, developing a reliable benchmark that effectively evaluates large language models' (LLMs) genuine capabilities in mathematical reasoning remains a critical challenge. To address these concerns, we propose RV-Bench, a novel evaluation methodology for Benchmarking LLMs with Random Variables in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we build question-generating functions to produce random variable questions (RVQs), whose background content mirrors original benchmark problems, but with randomized variable combinations, rendering them "unseen" to LLMs. Models must completely understand the inherent question pattern to correctly answer RVQs with diverse variable combinations. Thus, an LLM's genuine reasoning capability is reflected through its accuracy and robustness on RV-Bench. We conducted extensive experiments on over 30 representative LLMs across more than 1,000 RVQs. Our findings propose that LLMs exhibit a proficiency imbalance between encountered and ``unseen'' data distributions. Furthermore, RV-Bench reveals that proficiency generalization across similar mathematical reasoning tasks is limited, but we verified it can still be effectively elicited through test-time scaling.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

The Target ALS Global Natural History Study: Cross-platform proteomics to accelerate biofluid biomarker and drug target discovery in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal, rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disease of motor neurons for which therapeutics are limited. Improved biomarkers are imperative to improve patient care and therapeutic development. Here, we employed 35-plex isobaric tandem mass tag labeling based on isobutyl-proline reporter group (TMTpro) to perform unbiased proteomic analysis of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma from control (n= 28, n= 31) and sporadic ALS (sALS) (n= 39, n= 41), from the Target ALS Global Natural History Study (TALS GNHS). We identified 2,875 proteins in CSF and 1,118 proteins in plasma and identified known and novel differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) between controls and sALS, some of which were orthogonally validated using immunoassay. Comparison of TMTpro-MS and Olink proximity extension assay proteomics revealed common and non-overlapping differentially expressed proteins illustrating strengths unique to each platform. This initial cross-sectional proteomic study of biofluids from the TALS GNHS, with unrestricted availability of study results to the research community, highlights the potential of this resource as a potent platform for ALS biomarker discovery.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

ZeroGVC: Zero-Shot Generative Video Compression with Autoregressive Diffusion Priors

Recent generative video compression methods leverage powerful generative priors to achieve perceptually pleasing reconstructions. However, most existing approaches require additional training to adapt generative models to produce realistic reconstructions from compact representations. In this paper, we propose ZeroGVC, a zero-shot generative video compression framework that leverages pretrained autoregressive diffusion priors for low-delay video reconstruction. ZeroGVC encodes the first frame of each group of pictures (GOP) with an image codec and represents subsequent P-frames through Codebook-Guided Autoregressive Latent Compression. This design is motivated by our observation that the compression scheme of denoising diffusion codebook models is effective in few-step consistency sampling. By selecting compact combinations of reproducible codebook noise vectors, ZeroGVC steers the latent denoising trajectory toward the target P-frame while allowing the decoder to reproduce the same trajectory in only a few denoising steps. In addition, we design an optional bidirectional reference mode that mitigates error propagation by leveraging the next I-frame context without introducing any additional bitrate overhead. Extensive experiments on standard video compression benchmarks demonstrate that ZeroGVC achieves superior perceptual reconstruction quality at ultra-low bitrates without any additional training.

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

MedVeriSeg: Teaching LISA-Like Medical Segmentation Models to Verify Query Validity Without Extra Training

Despite recent progress in text-prompt-based medical image segmentation, existing LISA-like MLLM-based methods typically generate masks regardless of whether the target specified in the query is present, leading to hallucinated segmentation. In this work, we propose MedVeriSeg, a training-free query verification framework that enables LISA-like medical segmentation models to reject false segmentation queries. MedVeriSeg first quantifies the response quality between the [SEG] token and image features through a Similarity Response Quality Scoring Module. To further improve robustness, it employs a Lightweight Routed Multi-Agent Verification Module, which fuses quantitative score evidence with qualitative agent evidence to comprehensively verify the validity of the query. To support systematic evaluation, we construct MedVeriSeg-Bench, a benchmark designed for query verification in medical image segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that MedVeriSeg effectively identifies false segmentation queries and reduces hallucinated segmentation, while maintaining a high acceptance rate for valid queries, thereby largely preserving the segmentation utility of LISA-like medical segmentation models.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

LARE: Low-Attention Region Encoding for Text-Image Retrieval

Image retrieval in crowded scenes is particularly challenging due to the salience bias of conventional visual encoders, which tend to focus on dominant objects while neglecting low-attention regions that are often crucial for fine-grained retrieval. We propose LARE (Low-Attention Region Encoding), a framework that explicitly models these overlooked regions. LARE adopts a dual-encoding strategy that encodes low-attention regions of an image and the full image in parallel, leading to more diverse and informative image embeddings. To evaluate image retrieval performance in challenging crowded scenes, we introduce Dense-Set, a challenging subset derived from COCO and Flickr30K. In this subset, images are re-captioned to provide richer descriptions of low-attention or previously overlooked regions. This dataset highlights the limitations of existing retrieval models and enables a more rigorous evaluation under densely crowded scene conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework improves retrieval performance by preserving subtle, non-dominant visual cues within the shared latent space.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

To Intervene or Not: Guiding Inference-time Alignment with Probabilistic Model Blending

The wide deployment of LLMs has made model alignment necessary to make newly trained models safely and effectively respond to user instructions. Among different methods, inference-time alignment is often cheaper as it intervenes (i.e., offers guidances) only during output generation. Existing proposals apply guidances extracted from certain aligned models without properly assessing their reliability. Nonetheless, our systematic evaluation reveals that guidance effectiveness varies drastically across models; since ineffective guidances lead to further confusion and thus further interventions, the resulting excessive interventions typically indicate poor performance. To make interventions more effective and thus more efficient, we introduce BlendIn, an inference-time alignment framework that shifts from binary decisions to creating hybrid distributions integrating both models' knowledge. BlendIn stabilizes inference-time alignment by performing quality-aware alignment and proportionally weighting each model's contribution based on reliability. Compared with existing works, it preserves beneficial guidance while downweighting unreliable suggestions. BlendIn provides both diagnostic signals and mitigation strategies for misaligned guidance, achieving consistent and up to 50% performance improvement on challenging model pairs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/DecayingSeart/BlendIn.

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

Automated jailbreak attack targeting multiple defense strategies

arXiv:2606.16751v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, their safety remains a critical concern due to their susceptibility to adversarial prompt-based attacks. In this paper, we present UNIATTACK, an adversarial testing framework designed from a defense-oriented perspective to systematically construct effective black-box attack prompts. Unlike prior approaches that rely on static templates or iterative model-specific tuning, UNIATTACK extracts minimal but high-impact attack features from diverse existing attacks, optimizes them via a specialized attacker LLM, and composes them into flexible templates through automated refinement process. This feature-centric construction enables one-shot attacks that generalize across multiple models and safety categories, providing a practical tool for assessing LLM robustness. Our evaluation results shows that compared to the baselines, UNIATTACK achieves an average attack success rate (ASR) improvement of 64.63\%-248.82\% on models deployed with multi-layered defense mechanisms and it only takes 0.03\%-4.96\% cost of the baselines. UNIATTACK artifact is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UniAttack-Artifact-30F1.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Phenotyping TPF via Self-Supervised Learning: A Label-Agnostic Framework with Expert Validation

The full potential of artificial intelligence in tibial plateau fracture characterisation remains unrealised, constrained by a fundamental dependency on labelled datasets whose consistency cannot be guaranteed: conventional classification schemes such as Schatzker and AO/OTA suffer from inter-observer variability, causing supervised models to learn human disagreement rather than stable fracture morphology. We design, implement, and validate a label-agnostic framework that eliminates this constraint by learning fracture representations directly from imaging data without observer-assigned labels. A RadImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 encoder is fine-tuned on 154 cleaned knee radiographs using the SimCLR contrastive objective, preceded by a data cleaning protocol and followed by UMAP dimensionality reduction and k-means clustering to discover four imaging-derived phenotypes. Phenotype validity is assessed through a blinded expert review protocol administered to two independent clinicians. The four phenotypes demonstrate robust stability (bootstrap ARI = 0.319 +/- 0.041), strong internal cohesion (silhouette = 0.511), and coherence ratings of 3-5/5 from both reviewers under blinded conditions; one phenotype was unanimously identified as exhibiting comminution – a high-complexity feature isolated without any supervisory signal. Inter-partition comparison against Schatzker labels yields ARI = 0.013, confirming orthogonality to conventional classification boundaries. Notably, expert reviewers anchored to established classification vocabularies perceived imaging-derived groups as heterogeneous precisely where Schatzker alignment was lowest, suggesting that Schatzker-trained perception and label-agnostic embedding geometry measure orthogonal dimensions. These findings establish label-agnostic SSL phenotyping as a reproducible and clinically interpretable complement to conventional classification.