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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Holo-World: Unified Camera, Object and Weather Control for Video World Model

Video world models are moving toward preserving an observed world under controllable camera and object motion while allowing its environmental state to change. Yet these controls remain isolated, and weather generation typically relies on a source video or reconstructed scene that already specifies future structure. We study a first-frame-anchored source-to-state setting, where the model starts from a single image and follows explicit camera and object controls and an optional weather instruction, then generates a video that either preserves the source world or transfers it to a target weather state. To address these challenges, we first build HoloStateData, a state video dataset that turns diverse videos into unified control samples for camera, object, and weather supervision. Second, we introduce Holo-World, a unified controllable video world model that jointly controls scene from a single image. Its Unified Scene Adapter factorizes world preservation and weather transfer into distinct parameter subspaces, using rendered background, geometry buffers, and object controls to maintain controlled scene structure while modeling weather-dependent appearance and particle effects. Additionally, Scene-Weather Decomposed CFG guides scene and weather residuals separately, strengthening target weather effects without over-amplifying the full condition. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Holo-World maintains precise camera and object control with consistent scene structure while transferring scenes into diverse target weather state, outperforming video-to-video weather editing baselines on weather-state generation. Our project page is available at \url{https://xiangchenyin.github.io/Holo-World/}.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking Action Spaces in Reinforcement Learning for Vision-based Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606.18594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In real-world reinforcement learning (RL), the choice of action space can play a key role in shaping motion smoothness, safety, and overall task performance. In this study, we evaluate pose increment, pose velocity, joint position increment, and joint velocity across two vision-based manipulation tasks: object picking and pushing. We train policies in simulation and deploy them to the real world using sim-to-real transfer. We find that action-space representation indeed significantly affects sim-to-real performance. In particular, we find that the joint velocity action space is best for the vision-based picking and pushing tasks in terms of smoothness and final task performance. We also provide practical guidance for RL practitioners in choosing action spaces for both simulation and real-world experiments.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Periodic-MAE: Periodic Video Masked Autoencoder for rPPG Estimation

In this paper, we propose Periodic-MAE, a self-supervised framework for learning generalizable spatio-temporal representations of periodic physiological signals from unlabeled facial videos. The proposed method leverages a masked autoencoder (MAE), which learns high-dimensional facial representations by reconstructing masked video tokens without relying on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) specific supervision. To explicitly align representation learning with the characteristics of rPPG, we introduce a periodicity-aware frame masking strategy based on video resampling, enabling the encoder to learn representations that capture quasi-periodic temporal patterns relevant to pulse signal estimation. In addition, physiological bandlimit constraints are integrated into the MAE pre-training framework, exploiting the sparsity of pulse signals in the frequency domain to guide the learned representations toward physiologically meaningful patterns. After pre-training, the learned representations are transferred to downstream rPPG estimation, where the encoder serves as a generic feature extractor for recovering pulse-related signals from facial videos. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including PURE, UBFC-rPPG, MMPD, and V4V. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed approach on a real-world rPPG dataset collected under unconstrained lighting conditions and subject motion. Experimental results demonstrate that Periodic-MAE consistently improves rPPG estimation performance, particularly in challenging cross-dataset and real-world evaluation settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziiho08/Periodic-MAE.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fisher geometry reshapes the effect of incompatibility in multiparameter quantum estimation

arXiv:2606.11343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multiparameter quantum estimation faces two fundamental obstacles: sloppiness, i.e., anisotropy of the quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM) that renders some parameter directions insensitive, and incompatibility, the non-commutativity of optimal measurements for different parameters. The trade-off bound $C_T$ captures their joint impact on precision, but it has remained unclear how the distribution of incompatibility across parameter planes affects its overall cost. Here we separate the total amount of incompatibility from its location. We introduce a dimensionless quantity $G_n^{(F)}$ that measures the alignment between the incompatibility distribution and the eigenvalues of the QFIM, and show how the Frobenius scale of the incompatibility contribution factorizes. We obtain a bound and prove the incompatibility cost lies between this bound and a rank-dependent multiple thereof. We also prove that at fixed sloppiness, or equivalently fixed Fisher volume, concentrating incompatibility into a single parameter plane reduces the optimized trade-off cost because the Fisher geometry can then be reshaped to allocate more Fisher area to that plane. A qutrit $SU(2)$ encoding numerically confirms that states with larger incompatibility strength can nevertheless incur a smaller cost if the matching factor $G$ is sufficiently small. Our results establish that the distribution of incompatibility relative to the Fisher eigenbasis is a central diagnostic for multiparameter estimation, beyond the total incompatibility strength.

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

Semantic Reasoning in Medicine: The Role of Knowledge Graphs Across Five Key Domains

arXiv:2606.15155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a promising solution for integrating and reasoning over complex biomedical and clinical data in healthcare. By representing structured relationships among entities such as diseases, drugs, symptoms, and patient records, KGs provide a semantic backbone for decision-making, prediction, recommendation, and personalized care. Recent advances have demonstrated their utility across diverse medical applications–including clinical decision support systems, disease and treatment outcome prediction, health recommender systems, precision medicine, and medical question answering–where KGs often enhance interpretability, semantic coherence, and patient-specific reasoning. In parallel, a growing body of work focuses on medical KG generation itself, proposing frameworks that construct graphs from EHRs, clinical narratives, biomedical literature, and web resources using ontologies, semantic web technologies, deep-learning-based information extraction, and hybrid neuro-symbolic pipelines. Despite this progress, significant challenges remain, including limited and fragmented knowledge coverage, difficulties in aligning heterogeneous data sources, the fragility of current reasoning and representation-learning methods on dense multi-relational graphs, and unresolved issues related to privacy, bias, and accountability. This survey reviews and categorizes current research on KGs in medicine along both application-oriented and methodology-oriented dimensions, discusses their benefits and technical foundations, and outlines key limitations and open research directions. By analyzing trends, architectures, and evaluation practices, this work aims to guide future developments in KG-driven medical AI systems and support their safe and effective integration into healthcare environments.

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

CausalT5k: Diagnosing Refusal and Failure Modes in Trustworthy Causal Reasoning Across Causal Rungs

arXiv:2602.08939v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models increasingly produce fluent causal explanations, yet they often fail in ways aggregate accuracy cannot diagnose: confusing association with intervention, abandoning correct judgments under pressure, over-refusing valid claims, or answering when evidence is underdetermined. We introduce CTK, a diagnostic benchmark of 5,147 cases and growing, across 10 domains and all three levels of Pearl's Ladder of Causation. Unlike benchmarks that only score correctness, CTK reveals why a model failed by annotating causal rung, trap type, pressure sensitivity, refusal quality, and Utility-Safety tradeoffs. Its Sheep/Wolf taxonomy separates valid causal designs from inferential traps; paired neutral/pressure variants measure sycophantic drift through Bad Flip Rate; and Wise Refusal fields test whether a model identifies the missing information needed before endorsing a claim. CTK exposes failure modes hidden by aggregate accuracy: the Skepticism Trap, Rung Collapse under scaling, pressure-induced drift, Detection-Correction gaps, and counterfactual error modes. Rather than prescribing a correction method, it provides the diagnostic substrate for studying causal-reasoning failure profiles.

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

PorTEXTO: A European Portuguese Benchmark for Visual Text Extraction

European Portuguese (pt-PT) is largely absent from OCR benchmarks, which skew toward high-resource languages. The few benchmarks that cover pt-PT focus on historical artifacts and literature. This work addresses modern OCR applications, introducing PorTEXTO, the first benchmark for contemporary and culturally relevant pt-PT visual text extraction. To ascertain quality, we employ an annotation pipeline combining transcriptions from a frontier LVLM with exhaustive review by native speakers. We observe a sharp performance drop from synthetic to real world samples in most models, and find that, currently, specialized multilingual data is a better driver for pt-PT performance than model size or resolution budget, motivating the release of open pt-PT OCR resources.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Structural Preservation and the Logical Expressiveness of Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.17882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bridges between graph neural networks (GNNs) and logical formalisms have been established by fixing architectural choices, such as the types of aggregation, combination, and activation functions. These choices define restricted classes of GNNs for which tight correspondences with logical formalisms can be obtained, by showing that logical formulae can be translated into equivalent GNNs and, conversely, that GNNs can be translated into equivalent formulae. In this paper we take a semantic perspective by establishing the logical expressiveness of classes of GNN classifiers that are preserved under structural properties: embeddings (extensions), injective homomorphisms, and homomorphisms. We show that, for each such property, there exists a fragment of graded modal logic characterising the class of GNNs. In particular, preservation under embeddings, injective homomorphisms, and homomorphisms corresponds to existential graded modal logic, its existential-positive fragment, and existential-positive modal logic, respectively. These results characterise the expressiveness of broad classes of GNNs independently of specific architectural choices, but we also show that each of these classes admits a GNN architecture of the same expressiveness. Technically, our approach uses a new well-quasi-order result for trees of bounded height, yielding finite representations of unravelling-invariant classes.

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

Direct Fisher Score Estimation for Likelihood Maximization

arXiv:2506.06542v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the problem of likelihood maximization when the likelihood function is intractable but model simulations are readily available. We propose a sequential, gradient-based optimization method that directly models the Fisher score based on a local score matching technique which uses simulations from a localized region around each parameter iterate. By employing a linear parameterization to the surrogate score model, our technique admits a closed-form, least-squares solution. This approach yields a fast, flexible, and efficient approximation to the Fisher score, effectively smoothing the likelihood objective and mitigating the challenges posed by complex likelihood landscapes. We provide theoretical guarantees for our score estimator, including bounds on the bias introduced by the smoothing. Empirical results on a range of synthetic and real-world problems demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing benchmarks.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Real-World Effectiveness and Safety of Avacopan in ANCA-Associated Vasculitis: A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-analysis

Background: The efficacy and safety of avacopan in ANCA-associated vasculitis (AAV) has been established in randomized trials of of avacopan as a glucocorticoid (GC) sparing therapy. However, real world evidence (RWE) has an important role in confirming effectiveness and evaluating safety in more generalizable settings. This study aimed to synthesize RWE on the effectiveness and safety of avacopan in adults with AAV. Methods: A systematic literature review and meta analysis of non interventional real world studies was conducted in accordance with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Eligible studies included adults with AAV treated with avacopan in routine clinical practice. Pooled estimates of effectiveness and safety outcomes were calculated using random effects meta-analyses. Primary outcomes included remission at 6 and 12 months and sustained remission at 12 months. Secondary outcomes included relapse, GC use and dosing, hepatotoxicity, infections, and treatment discontinuation. Exploratory outcomes included changes in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) and dialysis related endpoints. Results: A total of 71 studies were included and contributed to quantitative analyses. Pooled remission for patients on avacopan was 87% (95% CI: 75%-94%) at 6 months and 93% (95% CI: 86%-97%) at 12 months, and sustained remission was 86% (95% CI: 74%-93%) at 12 months. Relapse at 12 months was low (7%; 95% CI: 4%-11%). GC use was 36% at both 6 and 12 months. Improvements in eGFR were observed at 6 months (18 mL/min/1.73 m2) and 12 months (18 mL/min/1.73 m2), and dialysis liberation was 66% in a limited subset. Among avacopan patients, 11% experienced any hepatotoxicity, including 7% with serious (defined as directly reported or requiring hospitalization) hepatotoxicity, while 7% experienced serious (defined as directly reported or requiring hospitalization) infection. Conclusions: In real world clinical practice, avacopan is associated with high remission rates, low relapse rates, and a consistent GC sparing effect, with effectiveness comparable to standard of care regimens. Findings support its clinical use with appropriate safety monitoring; however, the observed heterogeneity in hepatotoxicity and the limited comparative effectiveness evidence highlight areas requiring further investigation.

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

Quantized Stochastic Primal-Dual Methods for Distributed Optimization under Relaxed Global Geometry

arXiv:2606.11339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study distributed optimization with stochastic gradients and finite-bit communication modeled by random (unbiased) quantization. We propose q-PDGD, a quantized stochastic primal-dual method, and analyze it under relaxed global geometry. Under restricted secant inequality (RSI), a constant step-size yields linear contraction to an explicit neighborhood determined by gradient noise, quantization distortion, and network connectivity, while a diminishing step-size achieves O(1/k) convergence without shared-minimizer assumptions. Under Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality, we obtain linear-to-neighborhood convergence in the same stochastic quantized setting. Our results match the best-known centralized stochastic rates in oracle complexity, and are supported by experiments demonstrating the predicted tradeoffs between quantization level, step-size choice, and graph structure.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

When Calibration Fails the Vulnerable Hospital: Federated Conformal Risk Control via Risk-Curve Shrinkage

arXiv:2606.20115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conformal risk control (CRC) provides distribution-free guarantees on segmentation quality by calibrating a prediction-set threshold on held-out data. In federated deployments, the standard approach pools calibration scores across sites into a single threshold. We provide the first quantification, on real multi-institutional brain tumor data (FeTS-2022, 1,251 subjects, 20 institutions), showing that this naive pooled CRC protects the average hospital but violates coverage at 40% of individual institutions, with the worst site exceeding the target false-negative rate by 7.8 percentage points. The naive alternative, per-site local CRC, largely restores coverage but inflates prediction sets by 83x, rendering them clinically useless. We propose a shrinkage-based federated CRC protocol: each site transmits only its empirical risk curve (G scalars) to a server, which computes a shrinkage-regularized threshold per site. A single hyperparameter n0 smoothly trades worst-case coverage for prediction-set efficiency; leave-one-site-out sensitivity analysis identifies n0=19, achieving 2.7/20 violations at 2.0x stretch. We further show that direct Lagrangian optimization of coverage budgets fails, concentrating risk on vulnerable hospitals, and that the finite-sample correction term is essential: removing it triples violations. The marginal CRC guarantee is preserved by construction under the stated site-mixture assumption; per-site coverage is validated across four targets with three seeds. No patient-level images, masks, or per-volume scores leave any site.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Accounting for allelic diversity and multicopy gene detection improves the accuracy of antibiotic resistance genotypic determination

Background Genomic prediction of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) relies on the accurate detection of resistance genes or allelic variants of core genes from raw or assembled genomes sequences. For several bacterial species and antibiotics, AMR genotype-phenotype discrepancies are common, indicating that important sources of error remain unresolved. For Enterococcus faecium, we focused on identifying the sources of discrepancies for tetracycline resistance, for which genotypic detection had shown particularly low accuracy. We investigated the effect of structural variation in antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), including gene duplications, truncations, interruptions, and mixed configurations of complete and partial gene copies, as a source of genotype-phenotype discrepancies from short-read data. We conduct further extended investigations to other antibiotic families and into another bacterial species: Escherichia coli. Methods We analyzed collections of E. faecium and E. coli genomes, integrating high-quality complete assemblies, simulated Illumina short reads, and matched AMR phenotypic data. The integrity, copy number, and allelic diversity of ARGs were examined for multiple antibiotic classes, and their impact on ARG detection and accuracy of AMR determination was assessed using several commonly used bioinformatic tools (SRST2, ARIBA and AMRFinderPlus). Results For E. faecium, after ruling out the effect of specific tet allelic variants on tetracycline susceptibility, we found that the integrity and copy number of tet(M) had a major effect on detection accuracy. Duplicated and incomplete ARGs are also common in E. faecium genomes, particularly for macrolides (erm(B)) and aminoglycosides (ant(6)-Ia and aph(3')-IIIa). In E. coli, similar patterns were observed for tet(A), erm(B) and aminoglycoside-associated genes (aph(3')-IIIa and ant(6)-Ia). Across ARGs in both species, short-read mapping methods wrongly reported interrupted genes as complete in some instances, while assembly-based methods often failed to resolve complete copies of duplicated genes. Detection accuracy improved when tools were adapted to account for gene integrity and when extended AMR databases incorporating species-specific alleles were included. Conclusions Our findings reveal that bioinformatic limitations in dealing with ARG copy number and completeness, and in accounting for allelic variation, underly a substantial source of genotype-phenotype errors, highlighting the need for improved AMR databases and bioinformatic tools that consider these factors to achieve reliable genomic prediction of AMR.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Integrating Spatially Adjusted Protein Summaries for Survival Prediction in Spatial Proteomics

Recent advances in spatial proteomics, particularly imaging mass cytometry, enable the measurement of protein expression at the single-cell level while preserving a spatial context. Conventional survival analyses, however, typically rely on patient-level averages of protein intensities and therefore overlook spatial heterogeneity and tissue architecture. To address this limitation, we introduce a framework that incorporates spatial information into survival modeling by generating spatially adjusted protein summaries (SAPS). In this approach, cell-level protein intensities within each patient are modeled using spatial spline regression to capture spatial trends. From these models, we extract two complementary features: a spatially adjusted mean expression and a residual variance that reflects cell-to-cell variability unexplained by spatial effects. These summaries are then incorporated into Cox proportional hazards models in combination with clinical covariates. In simulation studies, our proposed framework achieved improved predictive performance compared to other alternative methods. The application of the method to breast cancer imaging mass cytometry data indicate that spatially adjusted summaries may enhance survival prediction and reveal biologically interpretable spatial protein patterns, suggesting high translational potential. This methodology offers an efficient means of translating complex spatial proteomics data into patient-level features, providing both improved survival prediction and new insights into the role of spatial heterogeneity in cancer outcomes.

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

Efficient Reinforcement Learning by Guiding World Models with Non-Curated Data

arXiv:2502.19544v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Leveraging offline data is a promising way to improve the sample efficiency of online reinforcement learning (RL). This paper expands the pool of usable data for offline-to-online RL by leveraging abundant non-curated data that is reward-free, of mixed quality, and collected across multiple embodiments. Although learning a world model appears promising for utilizing such data, we find that naive fine-tuning fails to accelerate RL training on many tasks. Through careful investigation, we attribute this failure to the distributional shift between offline and online data during fine-tuning. To address this issue and effectively use the offline data, we propose two techniques: i) experience rehearsal and ii) execution guidance. With these modifications, the non-curated offline data substantially improves RL's sample efficiency. Under limited sample budgets, our method achieves nearly twice the aggregate score of learning-from-scratch baselines across 72 visuomotor tasks spanning 6 embodiments. On challenging tasks such as locomotion and robotic manipulation, it outperforms prior methods that utilize offline data by a decent margin.

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

Self-Questioning Vision-Language Models: Reinforcement Learning for Compositional Visual Reasoning

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are AI systems that process both images and text, yet they often struggle with compositional visual reasoning questions that require chaining multiple steps together, such as identifying objects, counting them, and comparing the results. Existing approaches improve this reasoning by training models on human-written step-by-step explanations, but creating these annotations is expensive and difficult to scale. We propose a self-questioning framework that trains a VLM to break visual questions into smaller sub-questions and answer each one before producing a final response, using a reinforcement learning algorithm called Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). The model is never shown examples of how to decompose questions, it discovers this behavior on its own, guided by a reward signal that scores whether the output contains sub-questions and whether the final answer is correct. We apply this framework to a 3-billion-parameter model, training on both synthetic scenes of geometric shapes (CLEVR) and real-world photographs (A-OKVQA). On A-OKVQA, both self-questioning and standard reinforcement learning substantially improve accuracy over the untrained model (52.2% and 51.6% vs. 46.8%). We introduce the first self-questioning VLM by rewarding not only the final answer like standard RL but additionally for generating intermediate sub-questions, enabling it to discover compositional decomposition strategies. These results suggest that teaching AI systems to ask themselves intermediate questions is a promising strategy for complex visual reasoning, particularly when the difficulty of a question warrants explicit step-by-step decomposition.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Computers via Protocols, Comparing IBM's Heron vs IBM's Eagle

arXiv:2603.04377v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing hardware rapidly advances, objectively evaluating the capabilities and error rates of new processors remains a critical challenge for the field. A clear and realistic understanding of current quantum performance is essential for guiding research priorities and driving meaningful progress. In this work, we apply and extend a protocol-based benchmarking methodology (Meirom, Mor, Weinstein Arxiv 2505.12441) that utilizes well-defined \underline{quantumness} thresholds. By evaluating performance at protocol level rather than the gate level, this approach provides a transparent and intuitive assessment of whether specific quantum processors, or isolated sub-chips within them, can demonstrate a practical quantum advantage. To illustrate the utility of this method, we compare two generations of IBM quantum computers: the older Eagle architecture and the newer Heron architecture. Our findings reveal the genuine operational strengths and limitations of these devices, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in the newer Heron generation. This work was made possible by IBM Quantum policies that enable independent and objective assessment of its quantum computers and sub-chips. We strongly encourage other companies to emulate the independent qubit availability and the fair pricing that allow researchers to perform such assessments.

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

DOG-DPO:Dynamic Optimization in Geometry for Safety Alignment

arXiv:2606.07678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment for large language models relies on preference data, but current pipelines often train on large, redundant datasets. Existing data selection methods typically score each preference pair independently, collapsing directional preference information into scalar quality or diversity scores. This sample-centric view is especially limiting in multi-dataset settings, where shared safety directions coexist with dataset-specific residual risks. We propose DOG-DPO, a training-free data selection framework that treats preference pairs as structured geometric signals. DOG-DPO first represents each preference pair as a direction in model representation space. It then decomposes multi-dataset preference geometry into a global anchor subspace and dataset-specific residual subspaces. Finally, it selects subsets by maximizing diversity-based coverage, encouraging broad, non-redundant coverage of alignment directions before DPO training. Across six safety benchmarks and two model backbones, DOG-DPO achieves a strong utility-robustness trade-off using only 11% of the preference pairs. It recovers most of the safety gains of full-data training while remaining entirely teacher-free, training-free, and substantially faster than representative selection baselines.

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

Fodor and Pylyshyn's Systematicity Challenge Still Stands

The recent successes of neural networks producing human-like language have caused significant stir in cognitive science, with many researchers arguing that classical puzzles about human cognition and challenges to artificial intelligence are being solved by neural networks. A notable case is the argument from systematicity due to Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, argues that humans display systematic biconditional dependencies. For example, someone can understand the sentence "John saw Mary" just in case that they understand the sentence "Mary saw John." Symbolic systems explain this systematicity of language and thought, while neural networks offer no immediate explanation. Several recent articles argue that this challenge has now been met by neural networks. In particular, Brenden Lake and Marco Baroni argue that their meta-learning for compositionality protocol matches and perhaps explains human systematicity. We demonstrate that these conclusions are premature. Among other results, we found that their model struggles to learn rules that are even slightly out of distribution compared to their training data. Furthermore, the model behaves unsystematically even on many within-distribution problems. We conclude that Fodor and Pylyshyn's challenge to neural networks remains unmet.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Boundary-Centric Clip-Budgeted Active Learning for Temporal Action Segmentation

Temporal action segmentation (TAS) in untrimmed videos requires dense temporal supervision. However, most of the annotation cost is spent identifying action transitions where segmentation errors concentrate and small temporal shifts can disproportionately degrade segment-level metrics. We introduce B-ACT, a clip-budgeted active learning framework that explicitly allocates supervision to these error-prone boundary regions. B-ACT operates in a hierarchical two-stage loop: (i) it ranks and queries unlabeled videos using predictive uncertainty, and (ii) within each selected video, it detects candidate transitions from the current model predictions and selects the top-$K$ boundaries via a novel boundary score. The boundary score fuses neighborhood uncertainty, class ambiguity, and temporal prediction dynamics to reveal the underlying importance of each frame. Importantly, our annotation protocol requests labels only at the boundary frames while still training on boundary-centered clips to exploit temporal context through the model's receptive field. Extensive experiments on GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast demonstrate that boundary-centric supervision delivers strong label efficiency and consistently surpasses representative TAS active learning baselines and prior state of the art under sparse budgets. Gains are largest on datasets where performance is highly sensitive to boundary placement, as measured by edit and overlap-based F1 metrics.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution. This causally entangled credit can lead agents to discard useful evidence or preserve irrelevant information. We propose HiMPO, a Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization framework for assigning less-entangled credit to memory-writing actions in long-horizon agents. HiMPO first estimates the local utility of a memory update by comparing the task-relevant information recoverable from the previous and updated memories under the same pre-write state. It then uses hindsight relevance as a bounded retrospective filter that attenuates memory credit when local utility is not supported by the target outcome. The resulting memory-specific advantage is applied only to memory tokens, while trajectory-level rewards optimize the rest of the agent behavior. Across judge-based open-domain tasks and objective compressive-memory QA, HiMPO improves over strong memory-based and RL-based baselines while preserving compressed-context efficiency. Controlled interventions further show that HiMPO reduces blame leakage from tool-induced errors and improves attribution fidelity of memory updates.

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

Can AI Agents Synthesize Scientific Conclusions?

Scientific AI agents increasingly retrieve evidence, reason across sources, and synthesize conclusions used in consequential decisions. Yet, their ability to do so in high-stakes domains such as health remains unclear. We introduce SciConBench, a large-scale live benchmark of 9.11K questions and expert-written conclusions from systematic reviews to evaluate open-domain scientific conclusion synthesis. The benchmark draws on an expert-validated automated evaluation pipeline that decomposes conclusions into atomic facts and measures correctness and comprehensiveness via factual precision and recall. To mitigate data leakage, we further introduce SciConHarness, a clean-room evaluation harness that equips agents with controlled web interaction to ensure valid measurement. Evaluating 8 frontier models and deep research agents, we find that factual quality remains low: under clean-room settings, the best agent achieves only a factual F1 of 0.337. Our clean-room setting consistently reduces performance relative to unconstrained evaluation, suggesting that leakage inflates estimates of models' true synthesis capabilities. Finally, we audit consumer-facing agents (e.g., Google AI Overview, OpenEvidence) and find they frequently generate incomplete and sometimes contradictory conclusions, even when the ground-truth answer is available. Overall, our results show that reliable synthesis of scientific conclusions remains an open challenge, and that clean-room evaluation is essential for assessing open-domain AI agents.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Cross-Silo De-Anonymization Under Local Differential Privacy: Threat Model, Phase Transition, and Coordination Necessity

arXiv:2606.16763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a person's records appear in k independent data silos, each protected by (epsilon, delta)-differential privacy, standard composition yields a valid (k*epsilon, k*delta)-DP guarantee for the joint output. This worst-case bound, however, does not answer the concrete inference question: at what k can an adversary actually identify a target person? This paper develops the information-theoretic framework needed to answer that question. We introduce cross-silo person-level DP (XSP-DP), a Pufferfish-style privacy notion whose adjacency relation captures all records of a single person across all silos simultaneously, and verify that the standard basic composition bound carries over to this adjacency model. Within this framework we prove that de-anonymization undergoes a phase transition at k* = Theta(log n / epsilon^2) (population size n, per-silo RR parameter epsilon): a Fano lower bound shows any estimator fails for k > k*. An explicit XOR + randomized-response construction demonstrates information synergy: each silo's output is individually uninformative about the target, yet the joint mutual information is strictly positive. For non-coordinated binary randomized-response mechanisms, we prove that de-anonymization is inevitable once k exceeds the threshold, establishing that cross-silo coordination is necessary. These results provide a baseline threat model and Theta-level threshold for cross-silo inference attacks under local DP.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LineageMark: Multi-user White-box Watermarking for Contribution Tracing in Model Derivation Chains

arXiv:2606.17123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In open large language model (LLM) ecosystems, models are frequently adapted across multiple domains and applications, forming multi-stage derivation chains. Consequently, tracking and verifying historical contributions is essential for model provenance and intellectual property protection. However, existing watermarking methods are mainly designed for single-user, one-time embeddings, often fail under repeated model derivation and incremental updates. To address this problem, we propose LineageMark, a multi-user white-box watermarking framework for model derivation chains. The framework encodes watermarks in model parameters using a projection-based approach. Stable carriers are first selected to reduce sensitivity to model changes, each watermark bit is then represented as a projection statistic over these carriers. Additional watermark insertions introduce only bounded perturbations in the projection space, and margin constraints are used to maintain signal integrity. We evaluate the effectiveness of LineageMark in multi-stage model derivation chains. Experimental results show that LineageMark preserves contributor watermarks across multi-stage derivation and supports incremental multi-user watermark insertion. Furthermore, it exhibits robustness against perturbations such as re-watermarking, fine-tuning, quantization, and pruning.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Multimodal Brain Tumour Classification Using Feature Fusion

Clinicians diagnose brain tumors by synthesizing patient symptoms, medical history, and quantitative imaging data from modalities such as MRI and CT scans into a unified clinical judgement. However, most deep learning models rely on MRI/CT images alone, failing to replicate the clinicians multimodal reasoning. We explore a two-branch multimodal network combining raw MRI scans with 91 extracted radiomic features (intensity, texture, shape, and boundary descriptors) to classify brain tumors into glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no-tumor. A pre-trained CNN backbone encodes the image stream, whereas a dedicated MLP encodes the radiomic stream. Both streams are fused via concatenation, gated, or bidirectional cross-modal attention strategies. Across nine experimental runs on a balanced 7,200 image dataset, all multimodal configurations outperform unimodal baselines with gated fusion achieving the best accuracy of 96.13%.