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

Optimal Deterministic Multicalibration and Omniprediction

arXiv:2606.20557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A model is multicalibrated on a collection of group weights $G$ if it is calibrated – i.e. unbiased even conditional on its prediction – not just overall, but also after reweighting contexts by each $g \in G$. It is a useful property for many downstream applications and is a basic desideratum of trustworthy machine learning. Before this work, all predictors known to attain the minimax-optimal $\widetilde O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ sample complexity rate for $\varepsilon$-multicalibration were randomized, while deterministic predictors were known only with substantially worse sample complexity. Whether randomization is necessary for optimal sample complexity in multicalibration was explicitly asked by [CLNR26] and implicitly in several prior works. We resolve this open problem by giving a minimax-optimal multicalibration algorithm that outputs a deterministic predictor. We then generalize the algorithm to produce optimal deterministic predictors that satisfy outcome indistinguishability (OI) with respect to finite or finitely covered collections of tests. As an application, this also gives deterministic omnipredictors and panpredictors with optimal sample complexity, resolving open problems posed by [OKK25] and [BHHLZ25].

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DeepInsight: A Unified Evaluation Infrastructure Across the Physical AI Stack

arXiv:2606.17574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating a Physical AI stack spans operators that differ by more than three orders of magnitude – from a single foundation-model decoding step to thousands of physics ticks of whole-body control – varying orthogonally in modality, reward semantics, and resource profile. No existing framework spans this range, so the stack is evaluated today by stitching together separate harnesses that share neither runtime nor scoring, preserving each segment's local validity but losing the shared identity needed to diagnose cross-layer regressions. We present DeepInsight, an evaluation infrastructure that serves this full spectrum on a single runtime. Rather than homogenize the regimes, it preserves their heterogeneity behind three narrow abstractions – task, resource, and result – each realized as one invariant shared by every subsystem: one episode driver, one resource-handle protocol implemented by every expensive backend (LLM inference and sandboxed runtimes alike), and one trace identity scheme under which every event is written. Deployed in production across all three layers of an embodied humanoid stack, this single set of invariants onboards new benchmarks largely by configuration. Where mature peer orchestrators exist – at the foundation-model end – it reproduces published references and peer-framework readings within their own spread, runs the same suites faster on a single node, and scales near-linearly across nodes. Its distinctive return is diagnostic: because every layer writes into one shared trace, a regression that begins in one layer and surfaces in another stays localizable on that trace – a cross-layer payoff no federation of per-segment harnesses can reproduce.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Tri-Efficient Transfer Learning for Point Cloud Videos

While point cloud foundation models have significantly advanced point cloud video understanding, existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods still suffer from two critical limitations: prohibitive annotation costs for large-scale point cloud datasets and severe memory bottlenecks. In this paper, we aim to mine richer supervision signals from existing data rather than blindly scaling datasets. A further key principle is that the memory footprint of fine-tuning must be drastically reduced compared to full fine-tuning, which remains elusive for current PEFT techniques. Driven by these challenges, we identify three core desiderata: data-, parameter-, and memory efficiency, and present PoinTriE, a unified framework that excels along all three dimensions. For pre-training, pseudo-motion trajectories are synthesized via rigid transformations, paired with text corpora and 2D projections derived from raw point clouds. We then propose a Geometric-Motion Duality Network optimized via multimodal contrastive learning, rigid rotation prediction, and motion distribution divergence to produce dense self-supervision. During fine-tuning, we freeze the pretrained backbone and only update a lightweight Spatio-temporal Side Network built with LoRA units. Equipped with a gradient flow masking strategy, PoinTriE simultaneously reduces memory consumption and parameter overhead. Extensive experiments confirm that PoinTriE establishes new state-of-the-art results on action recognition and semantic segmentation tasks.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Beyond Compaction: Structured Context Eviction for Long-Horizon Agents

We present Context Window Lifecycle (CWL), a context-management scheme that gives long-horizon LLM agents an effectively unbounded working horizon. As a session accumulates history, CWL keeps the context within budget through graduated, semantically-aware eviction: the agent annotates its trajectory as typed, dependency-linked episodes as work proceeds, and a deterministic, LLM-free policy evicts content in priority order within that structure when a token budget is exceeded. CWL preserves user turns and the exploratory context the agent is actively reasoning over, while aggressively shedding action episodes whose effects are already persisted in the environment, keeping active context near a stable ceiling that also avoids the performance degradation associated with very large prompts. Compared to summarization-based compaction, CWL avoids four well-known limitations: unpredictable lossiness, destruction of causal structure, blocking model cost, and compression-induced hallucination. Compared to recency truncation, CWL is semantically aware: it drops the oldest-and-most-recoverable content according to the dependency graph rather than oldest-in-time regardless of relevance. We describe the annotation protocol, the episode graph, the eviction policy, and the token-accounting loop, and evaluate CWL on long-horizon agentic benchmarks: a single agent session completing 89 sequential tasks across 80 million tokens with no measurable degradation in task accuracy relative to per-task isolated sessions

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

$\mu_0$: A Scalable 3D Interaction-Trace World Model

World models that capture how actions induce physical change enable scalable robot learning without reliance on embodiment-specific action labels. Pixel-space video models provide broad visual priors but expend model capacity on dense appearance reconstruction, while direct action models require embodiment-specific labels that hinder scalability. We present $\mu_0$, a scalable world model based on 3D traces. Rather than predicting dense pixels or directly modeling actions, $\mu_0$ forecasts smooth 3D trajectories for salient interaction points such as objects, tools, hands, and contact regions, yielding a compact, embodiment-agnostic motion interface. To enable training from diverse video sources, our TraceExtract system automatically extracts 3D supervision by selecting keypoints, constructing globally aligned traces, and associating motion segments with hierarchical language captions. This TraceExtract supervision pretrains $\mu_0$ by combining a pretrained vision-language backbone with a modular trace expert, which represents each query via B-spline control points and predicts future traces. Experiments show that $\mu_0$ outperforms baselines in both 2D and 3D trace prediction, including trace prediction models and tokenized VLM methods. Because $\mu_0$ is frozen and reusable, it can be paired with action experts for downstream robot embodiments. Despite action-free pretraining, the resulting trace-conditioned policies achieve performance competitive with VLA models pretrained with action supervision, such as $\pi_0$. These results establish 3D traces as a scalable and transferable representation for cross-embodiment manipulation.

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

The Slop Paradox: How Synthetic Standardization Erodes Clinical Uncertainty and Cross-Modal Alignment in AI-Rewritten Radiology Reports

作者:

AI-assisted clinical documentation tools increasingly summarize, standardize, and reformat radiology reports using large language models (LLMs). We present a controlled measurement of the resulting information degradation. Using 450 chest X-ray reports from the Indiana University dataset, we generate synthetic versions via three realistic LLM rewriting tasks: EHR summarization, standardized rewriting, and teaching case preparation. We measure entity erosion (via medical NER), hedging collapse (loss of clinical uncertainty language), and cross-modal alignment degradation (via BiomedCLIP image-text similarity). Our central finding is a dissociation between information loss and cross-modal fidelity. EHR summarization is the most destructive at the content level, eroding 51.4% of clinical entities and 43.7% of hedging language, yet it preserves image-text alignment almost entirely (a 2.5% drop). The two tasks meant to produce cleaner training data, standardized rewriting and teaching case preparation, do the reverse: they preserve more entities (26.8% and 29.3% eroded) but cause 14.9-16.5% alignment drops, six to seven times those of EHR summarization. We term this the slop paradox: rewriting that makes clinical text look cleaner for multimodal training is precisely what pulls it away from the image. Contrary to our pre-specified hypothesis, rare pathologies were not preferentially degraded: across nine rare-versus-common comparisons, no difference survived multiple-comparison correction, and nominal differences ran in the opposite direction (common > rare), so contamination is invisible to condition-specific monitoring. The dominant determinant of degradation is the type of AI rewriting task, not the clinical content. These findings bear on multimodal medical AI dataset construction and the governance of AI-assisted clinical documentation.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Maximal rigidity of random measure and uniqueness pairs: stealthy processes, quasicrystals and periodicity

arXiv:2512.10686v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article investigates the phenomenon of maximal rigidity in spatial processes, where perfect interpolation of the process is possible from partial information, specifically, from its restriction to a strict subdomain, often resulting in a trivial tail $\sigma$algebra. A classical example known since the 1930's is that a time series is fully determined by its values on the negative integers if its spectrum has a gap, or at least a sufficiently deep zero. We extend such results to higher dimensions and continuous settings by establishing a connection with the concept of uniqueness pairs, rooted in the uncertainty principle of harmonic analysis. We present several other manifestations of this principle, unify and strengthen seemingly unrelated results across different models: quasicrystals and stealthy processes are shown to be maximally rigid on cones, and discrete integer-valued processes are necessarily periodic when they have a simply connected spectrum. Finally, we identify a surprising class of continuous fields with seemingly standard behavior, such as linear variance and finite dependency range, that undergo a phase transition: they are perfectly interpolable on B(0, $\rho$) for $\rho$ ___ 2 $\pi$ but exhibit no rigidity for $\rho$ > 2.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Beyond Uniform Forgetting: A Study of Sequential Direct Preference Optimization Across Preference Settings

Aligning language models with human preferences often requires optimising multiple behavioural objectives. A practical approach is to apply these objectives sequentially using preference optimisation methods such as Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO), but it remains unclear whether later training uniformly degrades preferences learned earlier or whether the effect depends on the relationship between objectives. We study sequential DPO across four preference settings covering distributional conflict, multi-attribute interaction, strong safety signal, and compatible response-quality objectives. Using Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with LoRA adapters, we evaluate all objectives after every stage with a fixed base-model reference. We find that sequential DPO does not produce a single forgetting pattern; preference change ranges from partial degradation to stability, pair-level redistribution, or positive transfer depending on objective relationship, signal strength, and training order. Pair-level analysis using length-normalised policy margins shows that aggregate metrics can mask heterogeneous changes across preference pairs, whereas quartile decomposition reveals that high-confidence pairs can either degrade or improve depending on the setting. Mechanistic diagnostics show that Stage~2 gradients and adapter updates are near-orthogonal to the previous objective across all settings, providing little evidence that direct gradient opposition is the primary driver. These findings suggest that future sequential alignment pipelines should account for objective compatibility and signal strength, rather than assuming that later objectives affect earlier preferences uniformly.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

When AI Meets Finance (StockAgent): Large Language Model-based Stock Trading in Simulated Real-world Environments

arXiv:2407.18957v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can AI Agents simulate real-world trading environments to investigate the impact of external factors on stock trading activities (e.g., macroeconomics, policy changes, company fundamentals, and global events)? These factors, which frequently influence trading behaviors, are critical elements in the quest for maximizing investors' profits. Our work attempts to solve this problem through large language model based agents. We have developed a multi-agent AI system called StockAgent, driven by LLMs, designed to simulate investors' trading behaviors in response to the real stock market. The StockAgent allows users to evaluate the impact of different external factors on investor trading and to analyze trading behavior and profitability effects. Additionally, StockAgent avoids the test set leakage issue present in existing trading simulation systems based on AI Agents. Specifically, it prevents the model from leveraging prior knowledge it may have acquired related to the test data. We evaluate different LLMs under the framework of StockAgent in a stock trading environment that closely resembles real-world conditions. The experimental results demonstrate the impact of key external factors on stock market trading, including trading behavior and stock price fluctuation rules. This research explores the study of agents' free trading gaps in the context of no prior knowledge related to market data. The patterns identified through StockAgent simulations provide valuable insights for LLM-based investment advice and stock recommendation. The code is available at https://github.com/MingyuJ666/Stockagent.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Sparse probes and murky physics: a case study of interpretability challenges in a foundation model for continuum dynamics

arXiv:2606.11657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI emulators are increasingly used in scientific domains where we already have strong theory, benchmarks, and physical intuition. This raises a central evaluation and interpretability question: when a foundation-style model can reproduce known continuum dynamics, what internal mechanism supports that behavior, is the internal behaviour consistent with known physics, and how does it relate to where the emulator succeeds or fails? We investigate a cross-domain foundation model for continuum dynamics, Walrus by Polymathic, using mechanistic interpretability guided by physical principles. We apply a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to probe a selected layer, and address the practical challenge of triaging a large feature set (over 20,000) using enstrophy as a physically grounded metric. As a deliberately simple testbed, we focus on shear flow and compare feature recruitment across multiple shear-flow setups, i.e. parameter values in the numerical simulation. Across setups we find evidence of piecewise consistency, with subsets of features recurring in similar roles, but this structure is intermittent and does not map cleanly onto standard physical decompositions. In parallel, direct comparisons between numerical simulation and the emulator reveal systematic output-level discrepancies, including regimes where energy/structures become too diffuse or too localized. We connect parts of these discrepancies to changes in specific SAE feature usage. Our work highlights open questions for scientific foundation models: how to robustly prioritize mechanistically meaningful features, how to separate stable structure from analysis artifacts (including single-layer and SAE limitations), and how to use established benchmarks to decide when "different" internal representations are genuinely informative rather than merely effective.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

EG-VQA: Benchmarking Verifiable Video Question Answering with Grounded Temporal Evidence

arXiv:2606.24797v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have yielded promising performance on video question answering (VideoQA). Nevertheless, existing benchmarks are predominantly evaluated through answer correctness, while the grounding of predictions in relevant video evidence remains largely unexamined. This disconnect between answer generation and evidence understanding motivates the construction of the Evidence-Grounded Video Question Answering Benchmark (EG-VQA), an open-ended evaluation protocol in which each QA pair is explicitly annotated with supporting temporal evidence, thereby requiring joint reasoning and precise evidence localization. EG-VQA is comprised of 2,067 videos and 11,838 QA pairs with fine-grained evidence annotations. To evaluate predicted evidence, Evidence-Grounded F1 (EG-F1) is introduced as a unified metric in which temporal alignment and semantic consistency against ground-truth evidence are jointly measured. Experimental evaluation reveals that even strong proprietary models struggle to accurately ground their predictions, exposing a fundamental discrepancy between answer correctness and faithful evidence localization. To bridge this gap, EG-Reasoner, an evidence-grounded reasoning model trained with explicit supervision, is proposed. State-of-the-art performance is achieved among open-source models, with results competitive against proprietary systems, particularly pronounced gains are observed on reasoning-intensive tasks such as counterfactual questions. These findings demonstrate that scaling alone is insufficient for robust video understanding and that structured evidence supervision is essential for the development of more reliable and interpretable VideoQA systems.

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

Taming Curvature: Architecture Warm-Up for Stable Transformer Training

arXiv:2606.16768v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training billion-parameter Transformers is often brittle, with transient loss spikes and divergence that waste compute. Even though the recently developed Edge of Stability (EoS) theory provides a powerful tool to understand and control the stability of optimization methods via the (preconditioned) curvature, these curvature-controlling methods are not popular in large-scale Transformer training due to the complexity of curvature estimation. To this end, we first introduce a fast online estimator of the largest (preconditioned) Hessian eigenvalue (i.e., curvature) based on a warm-started variant for power iteration with Hessian-vector products. We show theoretically, and verify empirically, that the proposed method makes per-iteration curvature tracking feasible at billion parameter scale while being more accurate. Using this tool, we find that training instabilities coincide with surges in preconditioned curvature and that curvature grows with depth. Motivated by these observations, we propose architecture warm-up: progressively growing network depth to carefully control the preconditioned Hessian and stabilize training. Experiments on large Transformers validate that our approach enables efficient curvature tracking and reduces instabilities compared to existing state-of-the-art stabilization techniques without slowing down convergence.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Doctors, Wellness Influencers, and Probiotic Gummies: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Gut Health Claims and Financial Conflicts on TikTok

TikTok has emerged as a major source of health information, yet concerns persist regarding the accuracy of content and influence of financial conflicts. Gut health content is particularly vulnerable to misinformation. This study examined the relationship between creator profession ("medical" versus "non-medical") and the quality of gut health claims and the presence of financial conflicts on TikTok. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 412 TikTok creator accounts identified using the search terms "guthealth," "gutcleansing," and "digestion." One video per creator was analyzed. Creator profession was categorized as medical or non-medical. Health claim quality was coded as high, moderate, or poor. Financial conflicts (Showcase, Subscription, external links) were assessed. Modified Poisson regression was used to estimate prevalence ratios (PRs) of health claim quality (high versus poor- or moderate-quality) and financial conflicts between medical and non-medical creators, and negative binomial regression was used to evaluate associations between claim quality and number of video likes. Non-medical creators were more likely than medical creators to present poor- or moderate-quality health claims (adjusted PR: 2.33; 95% CI: 1.50-3.62). Most creators (92%) exhibited at least one financial conflict, and Showcase use was greater among non-medical creators (adjusted PR: 1.57; 95% CI: 1.02-2.42). Videos containing moderate- and poor-quality health claims received three times as many likes as videos containing high-quality claims. Non-medical creators disproportionately produced lower-quality gut health content on TikTok, and misleading claims received greater engagement. These findings highlight a misalignment between information quality and visibility, emphasizing the need for interventions promoting evidence-based health communication.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generation

Recent image generators have demonstrated impressive photorealism and instruction-following capabilities in single-image generation and editing. However, constrained by their architectures, they cannot achieve interleaved generation (text-image sequence), which has crucial applications in visual narratives, guidance, and embodied manipulation. Even the latest open-source Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) exhibit limited performance in this regard. In this paper, we introduce InterleaveThinker, the first multi-agent pipeline designed to endow any existing image generator with interleaved generation capabilities. Specifically, we employ a planner agent to organize the image-text input sequence, instructing the image generator on the required execution at each step. Subsequently, we introduce a critic agent to evaluate the generator's outputs, identify samples that deviate from the planned instructions, and refine the instructions for regeneration. To implement this pipeline, we construct the Interleave-Planner-SFT-80k and Interleave-Critic-SFT-112k to perform a format cold-start. Then we develop Interleave-Critic-RL-13k to reinforce the step-wise instruction correction capability within a generation trajectory using GRPO. Since a single interleaved generation trajectory may involve over 25 generator calls, optimizing the entire trajectory is computationally impractical. Therefore, we propose accuracy reward and step-wise reward, allowing single-step RL to effectively guide the entire generation trajectory. The results show that InterleaveThinker improves performance across various image generators. On interleaved generation benchmarks, it achieves performance comparable to Nano Banana and GPT-5. Surprisingly, it also significantly enhances the base model on reasoning-based benchmarks; for example, on 4-step FLUX.2-klein, we observe substantial gains on WISE and RISE.

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

SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). Tool-augmented agents attempt to address this by augmenting VLMs with specialist perception modules, yet their effectiveness is bounded by the action interface through which those tools are invoked. In this work, we study how the design of this interface shapes the agent's capacity for open-ended spatial reasoning. Existing spatial agents either employ single-pass code execution, which commits to a full analysis strategy before any intermediate result is observed, or rely on a structured tool-call interface that often offers less flexibility for freely composing operations or tailoring the analysis to each task. Both designs offer limited flexibility for open-ended, complex 3D/4D spatial reasoning. We therefore propose SpatialClaw, a training-free framework for spatial reasoning that adopts code as the action interface. SpatialClaw maintains a stateful Python kernel pre-loaded with input frames and a suite of perception and geometry primitives, letting a VLM-backed agent write one executable cell per step conditioned on all prior outputs, enabling the agent to flexibly compose and manipulate perception results and adapt its analysis to both intermediate text and visual observations and the demands of each problem. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks spanning a broad range of static and dynamic 3D/4D spatial reasoning tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the recent spatial agent by +11.2 points, with consistent gains across six VLM backbones from two model families without any benchmark- or model-specific adaptation.

16.
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/}.

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

A Benchmark for Omni-Modal Reasoning in Long Videos

Long-form omni-modal video understanding requires integrating vision, speech, and ambient audio with coherent long-context reasoning. Existing video benchmarks often trade off temporal scale, modality coverage, open-ended interaction, and interpretable scoring. To address this gap, we introduce LongShOTBench, a long video understanding benchmark designed around three coupled goals: holistic omni-modal integration, intent-driven open-ended interaction, and rubric-level diagnosis. It builds single- and multi-turn questions from real viewing scenarios, with systematic tasks probing visual, speech, ambient-audio, temporal, and cross-modal reasoning. Each item includes a reference answer and a weighted criterion-level rubric, letting evaluation identify which perceptual facts, temporal links, modality-grounding requirements, and reasoning steps are satisfied or missed. All samples are manually verified to improve grounding, clarity, and rubric reliability. We also introduce LongShOTAgent, a training-free omni-modal evidence-seeking agent coupling full-video preprocessing with targeted retrieval, query-adaptive segment refinement, and explicit claim verification over visual, speech, and non-speech audio evidence. Its iterative search-refine-verify loop exposes intermediate evidence and lets modality-specific specialists re-analyze relevant moments before answering. We evaluate 105 video-capable models spanning open-source omni-modal models, vision-language systems, audio LLMs, agentic pipelines and closed-source APIs. Current MLLMs remain far from saturating LongShOTBench, while our LongShOTAgent is the strongest training-free system, reaching 66.64% overall. By releasing the benchmark, leaderboard, and method, we provide a shared, interpretable testbed for advancing long-form omni-modal video reasoning. Code, data, and the leaderboard are available at https://longshot.cvmbzuai.com/.

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

Attention, not scale, drives human-AI alignment in multimodal language prediction

Humans routinely draw on visual context to predict upcoming words. To what extent current vision-language models produce comparable behaviour is unclear. Here we placed five state-of-the-art pretrained systems side-by-side with 600 human participants in a web-based Visual-World Paradigm. On each of 100 six-second movie clips, models and participants received either text only or synchronised video and text and judged how likely a specified target word was to appear next; human eye movements were tracked throughout. Adding visual context increased model-human alignment in predictability ratings across all architectures (average Delta r = 0.18) with no impact of parameter size. When visual context was informative, transformer attention significantly increased alignment. Attention maps from two transformer models corresponded with human gaze, explaining up to 70% of the inter-participant variance when the scene contained informative cues. Notably, cross-modal attention reliably tracked anticipatory human fixations on semantic cues. These results suggest that current transformer-based vision-language models can approximate human behaviour exploiting visual context during language prediction - and that selective attention to informative cues, not sheer model scale, is the principal driver of this alignment.

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

Does Head Pose Correction Improve Biometric Facial Recognition?

Biometric facial recognition models often demonstrate significant decreases in accuracy when processing real-world images, often characterized by poor quality, non-frontal subject poses, and subject occlusions. We investigate whether targeted, AI-driven, head-pose correction and image restoration can improve recognition accuracy. Using a model-agnostic, large-scale, forensic-evaluation pipeline, we assess the impact of three restoration approaches: 3D reconstruction (NextFace), 2D frontalization (CFR-GAN), and feature enhancement (CodeFormer). We find that naive application of these techniques substantially degrades facial recognition accuracy. However, we also find that selective application of CFR-GAN combined with CodeFormer yields meaningful improvements.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Context-Aware Feature-Fusion for Co-occurring Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

Object detection in autonomous driving requires precise localization and an inherent understanding of the relational context between co-occurring objects. In extremely complex heterogeneous environments rare classes, small-scale objects, and frequently appearing objects are difficult for standard object detection frameworks to handle. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Context-Centric Feature Fusion (CCFF), which utilizes two attention-based modules, Local Context Fusion Module (LCFM) uses the RoI-to-RoI self-attention mechanism to resolve spatial interactions, mainly considering small and partially obscured objects, while Global Context Attention Module (GCAM) converts the co-occurrence of objects priors by pooling top-K RoI features into a global context attention token, avoiding the computational overhead of pixel-level global pooling. This fusion of local and object-centric global features yields contextualized embeddings that enhance classification results and co-occurring objects detection. Our method is evaluated on two datasets, Cityscapes and BDD100K which demonstrate significant improvement on relational consistency, achieving a Category-level Consistency Strategy (CCS) of 0.973 and 0.969, respectively. Furthermore, our approach produces substantial gains in small object detection (AP_S: 14.1%) and successfully recovers rare classes such as "Train" that are typically lost in large distributions. Our efficiency report shows that the framework processes images in real time with a 0.2 FPS overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/BinayKSingh/CCFF.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimized Quantum States for Sensing in the Presence of Loss and Phase Noise

arXiv:2606.19649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Squeezed vacuum lets gravitational-wave detectors and other quantum sensors surpass the standard quantum limit, and is optimal in the loss-limited regime; phase noise breaks this optimality. Numerically optimizing the quantum Fisher information across the loss and phase-noise landscape, we identify non-Gaussian states that outperform any Gaussian state. These fall into three classes: Fock-like, cubic-phase-like, and states with discrete rotational symmetry. Limiting the average number of photons in the input state to $\bar{n}=5$, with $1-\eta = 5\%$ photon loss and 200 mrad phase noise, the non-Gaussian advantage reaches up to 2.2 dB. Furthermore, we observe that the non-Gaussian advantage can persist even when the measurement strategy is homodyne detection.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

A Dual Edge Spatial Jacobian Image Graph for Interpretable Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Automated diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading from colour fundus photographs can achieve strong predictive performance, but clinical interpretation requires more than an image-level label. It requires understanding how lesion evidence is distributed around retinal vessels and how this evidence relates to quantitative vascular biomarkers. We present a dual-edge spatial-Jacobian image graph for interpretable DR grading. Each fundus image is represented as a graph node with four aligned evidence streams: AutoMorph vessel information ($X_1$), DR-XAI-style lesion evidence maps ($X_2$), a 128-dimensional lesion-based contrastive image embedding ($X_3$), and AutoMorph morphometric biomarkers ($X_4$). The spatial edge branch ($X_{12}$) encodes vessel-lesion geometry, while the Jacobian branch ($X_{34}$) models embedding-biomarker sensitivity. Lightweight two-token attention fuses both edge families into a final image graph. On 2,910 matched non-augmented APTOS images, the full graph achieves 0.8076 accuracy, 0.8312 quadratic weighted kappa, 0.5915 macro-F1, and 0.9330 adjacent-grade accuracy; referable DR reaches 0.9055 accuracy and 0.9711 AUROC. The framework is positioned as an explainable representation-learning tool for lesion-biomarker hypothesis generation, rather than as a deployment-ready clinical classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/Inamullah-Colab/dual-edge-dr-graph-xai.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking attention-based methods for vision transformers' interpretability in retinal fundus imaging

Deep learning models based on Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown strong performance in retinal fundus imaging, but their interpretability remains poorly understood. In particular, attention-based attribution methods are widely used to explain ViT predictions, despite limited evaluation of their faithfulness and biological relevance in medical imaging. Here, we systematically benchmark four attention-based interpretability methods for RETFound, a retinal ViT-based foundation model, that we previously fine-tuned to predict 17 retinal vascular phenotypes from UK Biobank fundus images1. We compare raw attention, attention rollout, gradient-weighted attention rollout, and Chefer's hybrid relevance-based method using both qualitative visualisation and quantitative evaluation frameworks. To assess attribution faithfulness, we perform perturbation-based deletion and insertion experiments, quantifying changes in model predictions as highly attended image regions are progressively removed or restored. To evaluate biological specificity, we run structure-aware analyses combining attribution maps with vessel segmentation and artery-vein labels through the Relative ratio of Attention Intensity (RAI) metric. Across models, attribution maps differed substantially depending on the selected interpretability method, highlighting the need for rigorous quantitative evaluation. Among the evaluated approaches, gradient-weighted attention rollout consistently achieved the strongest perturbation performance and produced attribution maps most closely aligned with the anatomical definition of the predicted retinal traits. Furthermore, vessel-type specific models systematically concentrate attention on the corresponding vascular structures despite being trained using only a single scalar value per image as supervision. These findings demonstrate that attention-based attribution methods capture biologically meaningful vascular representations, while also revealing method-dependent variability in attribution behaviour. This work provides a quantitative framework for evaluating interpretability methods in medical imaging with annotated segmentation and contributes toward more transparent and biologically grounded medical AI systems.

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

Deterministic Integrity Gates for LLM-Assisted Clinical Manuscript Preparation: An Auditable Biomedical Informatics Architecture

arXiv:2606.09500v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As autonomous research agents and AI co-scientist systems push large language models (LLMs) from drafting toward end-to-end manuscript production, the bottleneck shifts from generation to verification. Fluent LLM output can hide fabricated citations, numbers that drift from source tables, and unmet reporting-guideline items; existing tools generate without verifying, and self-critique inherits the blind spots that produce confident fabrication. We describe an architecture pairing generation with verification, resting on three principles: decompose the workflow into self-contained skills, gate every stage transition with halt-on-failure, and resolve each integrity question with the cheapest sufficient mechanism, a deterministic, re-executable check where one suffices and a prose-level probe only where interpretation is unavoidable. This determinism-where-possible split, organized as an integrity-gate taxonomy, is the core contribution. It is realized as MedSci Skills, an open-source toolkit of 43 skills with a 21-detector deterministic tier, evaluated on three public-dataset pipelines (STARD, PRISMA, STROBE) and a seeded-defect ablation. Across the three pipelines every content-hash manifest verified clean and the gates surfaced real defects; on 27 identical injected defects the deterministic gates detected all 27 with no false positives on the matched clean fixtures, whereas a single-prompt LLM reviewer detected 11, its misses in code, bibliography, and style defects the prose hides. Determinism-where-possible verification yields an auditable, re-executable trail that exposes the evidence a human needs to check an LLM-assisted manuscript: feasibility and reproducibility evidence, not a claim of human-competitive quality, which a separate blinded study addresses. MedSci Skills is MIT-licensed and archived (v3.8.0).

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arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

DuDi: Dual-Signal Distillation with Cross-Lingual Verbalizer

Small language models (SLMs) are efficient and scalable, but their multilingual capabilities degrade severely at sub-billion scales, especially for Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. We introduce DuDi, a dual-signal multilingual distillation framework that combines an online sequence-level signal with off-policy and on-policy token-level signals. DuDi further uses a cross-lingual verbalizer to refine teacher feedback and improve teacher-student transferability in multilingual settings. Experiments on SEA-HELM across multiple model families, scales, and teacher-student settings show that DuDi consistently outperforms competitive distillation baselines. Ablations and analyses confirm that sequence-level optimization, token-level supervision, and cross-lingual verbalization provide complementary and transferable learning signals for multilingual SLMs.