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

Efficient and Sound Probabilistic Verification for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.20510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Securing AI agents that operate in complex digital environments has become a critical need, and runtime monitoring approaches that formulate and enforce policies expressed in a formal language like Datalog offer a promising solution. However, existing approaches are restricted to deterministic policies. In many practical applications of AI agents, there is a need to enforce security policies in the face of ambiguity, leading to probabilistic predicates or state transitions (for example, a declassifier or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) detector that has some failure probability on each invocation). Furthermore, in many such applications, one cannot easily make the independence assumptions necessary to invoke prior work on probabilistic inference in Datalog. We address this by introducing a sound and efficient framework for such verification based on distributionally robust optimization, computing sound upper bounds on the probability of policy violation regardless of possible correlations between predicates. On standard benchmarks for terminal and tool calling agents, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior art and improves the security-utility trade-off while ensuring rigorous bounds on the probability of policy violation.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Variational Polaron Theory for Ground States of Strongly Coupled Light-Matter and Electron-Phonon Systems

arXiv:2606.19748v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Strong light-matter and electron-phonon coupling generate ground states dressed by virtual bosonic excitations, making bare-state truncations and perturbative treatments unreliable in the ultrastrong-coupling regime. We introduce a nonperturbative variational ground-state framework based on a state-dependent polaron transformation, combined with a product-state ansatz and a second-order perturbative correction for residual matter-boson entanglement. We show that the optimized transformed frame becomes asymptotically decoupled at infinite coupling, because the leading linear coupling is canceled while off-diagonal matter transitions are suppressed by displaced-oscillator overlaps. The approach is asymptotically correct in both weak- and strong-coupling limits and remains accurate in the intermediate regime, where fixed polaron transformations are least reliable. Dicke-model benchmarks reproduce ground-state energies, fidelities, and the superradiant transition, with second-order energy errors below 0.2%. Holstein-model benchmarks yield errors below 0.5% and clarify how translational symmetry affects wave-function quality. This dressed-basis framework enables nonperturbative modeling of strongly coupled light-matter and electron-phonon systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Thinking Outside the [Chat]Box: Bridging Computer Science and Industrial Design for Cognitive-Inclusive Generative AI

arXiv:2606.14306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Generative AI (GenAI) interfaces remain largely constrained to chatbox interaction, which can impose high cognitive demands on users and create substantial barriers for people with intellectual disabilities (ID), including prompt formulation difficulties, response overload, and limited mechanisms to assess information reliability. To explore alternative interaction models for cognitive accessibility, we conducted a cross-disciplinary co-design challenge in which two student cohorts (Computer Science and Industrial Design) developed interface concepts from the same set of functional requirements (e.g., prompt scaffolding, structured output, GUI-based refinement, transparency, and personalization). Comparing the resulting proposals reveals both convergence on foundational requirements (notably initial calibration, proactive prompting, and direct manipulation of response fragments) and complementary contributions that outline a multi-layered support system. Computer Science teams primarily produced structural scaffolding, emphasizing predictability, navigability, and trust through mechanisms such as reliability indicators, explicit sources, and context management for long conversations. Industrial Design teams emphasized experiential scaffolding, focusing on pacing, attention guidance, multimodality, and proactive agency, including step-by-step response flows, focus modes, and assistant-like integrations. We synthesize these findings into a dual-layer scaffolding framework that expands the design space for cognitively accessible GenAI interaction beyond chat-centric models and motivates future work on expert refinement, technical feasibility, and empirical validation with users with ID.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Decomposing Prediction Mechanisms for In-Context Recall

arXiv:2507.01414v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new family of toy problems that combine features of linear-regression-style continuous in-context learning (ICL) with discrete associative recall. We pretrain transformer models on sample traces from this toy, specifically symbolically-labeled interleaved state observations from randomly drawn linear deterministic dynamical systems. We study if the transformer models can recall the state of a sequence previously seen in its context when prompted to do so with the corresponding in-context label. Taking a closer look at this task, it becomes clear that the model must perform two functions: (1) identify which system's state should be recalled and apply that system to its last seen state, and (2) continuing to apply the correct system to predict the subsequent states. Training dynamics reveal that the first capability emerges well into a model's training. Surprisingly, the second capability, of continuing the prediction of a resumed sequence, develops much earlier. Via out-of-distribution experiments, and a mechanistic analysis on model weights via edge pruning, we find that next-token prediction for this toy problem involves at least two separate mechanisms. One mechanism uses the discrete symbolic labels to do the associative recall required to predict the start of a resumption of a previously seen sequence. The second mechanism, which is largely agnostic to the discrete symbolic labels, performs a "Bayesian-style" prediction based on the previous token and the context. These two mechanisms have different learning dynamics. To confirm that this multi-mechanism (manifesting as separate phase transitions) phenomenon is not just an artifact of our toy setting, we used OLMo training checkpoints on an ICL translation task to see a similar phenomenon: a decisive gap in the emergence of first-task-token performance vs second-task-token performance.

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

In-context Region-based Drag: Drag Any Region to Any Shape

Diffusion models have shown promise in drag-style editing. Previous works mainly focus on point-based drag, which is inherently ambiguous. This paper focuses on region-based drag and introduces a novel In-Context Region-based Drag (ICRDrag) method. Under the in-context learning framework, ICRDrag consumes a source image, a source region mask, and a target region mask, producing the target dragged image. Built upon the basic in-context learning model, we introduce two novel attention regularization: 1) image-mask attention consistency to ensure that a target region attends to similar source regions for image and mask modalities; 2) source-target attention correspondence to ensure the mutual correspondence between source and target regions. To facilitate region-based drag, we also construct Paired Region Dataset (PRD), a large-scale dataset with paired masks and images. Extensive experiments show that ICRDrag significantly outperforms existing methods in both quantitative metrics and user studies, achieving superior editing accuracy and visual fidelity. The dataset, code, and model are available at https://github.com/bcmi/ICRDrag-Region-Drag-Editing.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices Regarding Maternal Nutrition Counselling Among Frontline Health Workers in Udupi, Karnataka, India: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed-Methods Study

Background Indias maternal nutrition profile is undergoing a dual-direction shift, with persistent undernutrition coexisting alongside rising overweight and micronutrient deficiencies. Despite national efforts through Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and the National Health Mission (NHM), maternal dietary diversity remains suboptimal in India. Frontline health workers (FLWs) play a central role in delivering nutrition counselling; however, gaps remain between knowledge and its translation into practice, highlighting the need to strengthen training, applied competencies, and health system support within primary care settings. Objective To assess knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) regarding maternal nutrition counselling among FLWs and to explore contextual factors influencing counselling delivery. Methods A sequential explanatory mixed-methods study was conducted in Udupi, Karnataka, India. In phase one, 46 FLWs- Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), Community Health Officers (CHO), and Primary Health Care Officers (PHCO) completed a validated Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) questionnaire. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Kruskal-Wallis test, Spearman correlation, and exploratory multiple linear regression. In phase two, one focus group discussion with 21 participants was conducted and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results FLWs demonstrated moderate KAP scores (37.50 {+/-} 5.09), with lower scores observed in dietary diversity knowledge and counselling practices. CHOs and PHCOs had significantly higher knowledge (p < 0.001) and practice scores (p = 0.002) compared to ASHAs, while attitudes were similar across cadres. Knowledge was positively associated with practice ({rho} = 0.389, p = 0.008). Exploratory regression indicated that cadre and knowledge were associated with practice, while attitude was not statistically significant. Qualitative findings suggested that counselling was largely protocol-based and constrained by workload, limited counselling tools, economic barriers, and cultural food practices. Conclusion Despite positive attitudes towards maternal nutrition counselling, frontline health workers demonstrated gaps in knowledge and counselling practices. Mixed-methods findings suggest that counselling delivery is shaped by both provider competencies and health-system constraints, highlighting the need for implementation-focused strategies to strengthen maternal nutrition counselling in routine antenatal care.

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

Post-Launch Capability Expansion of Vision-Language Models via Prompting for On-Orbit Spacecraft Inspection

Spaceborne inspection systems often deploy perception models prior to launch, after which updating model weights or expanding fixed label sets becomes operationally impractical. While supervised models can be integrated pre-flight, adding new semantic capabilities in orbit requires retraining and re-uploading parameters. We investigate whether prompt-driven vision–language models can enable post-launch semantic expansion, allowing new spacecraft components to be specified via natural-language prompts without modifying onboard weights. We evaluate zero-shot instance segmentation of spacecraft components under a strictly frozen, single-pass inference protocol on a test set of $129$ images of previously unseen satellites. Under fixed global thresholds and no post-processing, SAM3 achieves $0.385$ mAP@$0.5$ and $0.267$ mAP@$0.5{:}0.95$. Performance is strongly scale-dependent: large structural elements like spacecraft bodies ($0.639$ AP@$0.50$) and solar arrays ($0.598$ AP@$0.5$) localize reliably, while relatively small appendages like antennas ($0.221$ AP@$0.5$) and thrusters ($0.081$ AP@$0.5$) remain difficult. Prompt formulation influences performance, with structured prompts incorporating spatial and geometric descriptors yielding up to $82%$ improvement over short category-name prompts. The model operates within the memory and compute envelope of contemporary embedded GPUs, suggesting prompt-driven grounding can provide a practical mechanism for post-launch semantic extension of dominant spacecraft structures while highlighting limitations of zero-shot localization for fine-scale components under orbital domain shift.

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

Interpreting Neural Combinatorial Optimization via Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) achieves strong performance, yet its black-box nature remains a key roadblock to deployment and scientific diagnosis. Standard interpretability tools, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are ill-equipped for NCO, whose decisions are dynamic, state-dependent, and lack proper concept vocabulary definition. To close this gap, we introduce Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks (EPB), to our knowledge, the first framework for interpreting NCO policies by distilling black-box NCO models into human-readable program portfolios. EPB employs an LLM to autonomously evolve a bank of programs, where each program's per-step action distribution serves as the bottleneck. EPB works through an iterative framework: Block I fixes program bank capacity and introduces a hybrid textual-numerical gradient descent scheme that couples numerical gradients for student router updates and textual gradients for LLM-based program revision; Block II dynamically adapts bank capacity via fault-targeted expansion and redundancy pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate EPB's effectiveness and broad applicability, where the distilled program portfolios largely match original performance. EPB also reveals that NCO behavior shifts across optimization stages and can be approximated as a composition of classic heuristic variants. Our work advances interpretable NCO and establishes EPB as a promising tool for interpreting sequential decision-making models.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Closest Accessible Symmetry reduction: a tool for Hamiltonian interpolation analysis

arXiv:2606.18161v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a framework for analysing the spectrum of Hamiltonian interpolations without heavily relying on discretising the interpolation parameter. The method is based on the concept of accessible symmetries: a problem-class-dependent family of certifiable reflections that induce bipartitions of the Hilbert space. At each step, the interpolation Hamiltonian is projected onto the sectors of the accessible symmetry that is closest to being satisfied, yielding a hierarchy of weakly coupled pseudo-eigenspaces together with explicit residual couplings between them. We show that this representation captures qualitative signatures of quantum phase transitions, provides estimates of their location, and offers insights into their nature. The quality of the approximation is controlled by the compatibility between the accessible symmetry family and the problem instance. Although motivated in spirit by adiabatic quantum computation, our approach applies more broadly to the study of Hamiltonian phase diagrams, providing a new perspective on the spectral reorganisation of many-body quantum systems.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

ECHOCARDIOGRAPHY ABNORMALITIES IN PREECLAMPSIA WITH SEVERE FEATURES.

Purpose To determine the frequency of echocardiographic abnormalities in women with preeclampsia with severe features. To describe the spectrum and types of echocardiographic abnormalities associated with preeclampsia with severe features. Method This is a Prospective observational study conducted in Vani Vilas hospital attached to Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute, Bangalore from January 2023 to December 2025. 560 pregnant women diagnosed with severe preeclampsia(SPE) were included in the study. Chronic hypertension without superimposed preeclampsia, underlying cardiac diseases and previous history of peripartum cardiomyopathy were excluded from the study. Transthoracic echocardiography-TTE (2D ECHO) was done to evaluate cardiac structure and function. Echocardiographic abnormalities identified during the study were documented and analysed using descriptive statistical methods. Results Abnormalities in ECHO was noted in 23.03%. A unique finding was the documentation of elevated pulmonary artery systolic pressures (PASP) suggestive of Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) (PASP >35 mm HG) among 20.25% of the participants. It was also the commonest abnormality on ECHO. Mild PH was the commonest (15.71%), moderate PH was seen in 3.92% and severe PH in 0.71% of cases. Next most frequent abnormality was moderate to severe valvular regurgitation (10%), followed by left ventricular hypertrophy (5.53%). Diastolic dysfunction (DD) was seen in 3.92%, systolic dysfunction(SD) in 3.57%, chamber dilatation in 3.57% and LV global hypokinesia in 3.03% cases of SPE Conclusion Preeclampsia with severe features (SPE) is associated with 23.03% abnormalities on echocardiography. SPE is associated with systolic dysfunction, diastolic dysfunction, chamber dilatation, valvular regurgitation, left ventricular hypertrophy and pulmonary hypertension.

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

Learning Action Priors for Cross-embodiment Robot Manipulation

Most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models build on a Vision-Language Model (VLM) backbone by attaching an action module and optimizing the full policy jointly. This design inherits strong visual and linguistic priors from the VLM, but leaves the action module to learn physical motion almost from scratch. As a result, the policy lacks an explicit motion prior, forcing early optimization to simultaneously discover temporal action dynamics and cross-modal alignment, a challenge further amplified in cross-embodiment settings. In this work, we propose to pretrain the action module with motion priors before cross-modal VLA alignment. Specifically, we introduce a two-stage training framework that equips the action module with cross-embodiment temporal motion structure before VLA training begins. In Stage~1, a lightweight flow-matching-based encoder-decoder action module efficiently learns temporal motion structure solely from unconditioned action trajectories, without processing visual or language tokens. In Stage~2, this learned prior is transferred to VLA training through decoder reuse and early-stage latent distillation, aligning visual-language features with the action embedding space while still allowing end-to-end policy refinement. In addition, the trained encoder serves as a compact history compressor, summarizing state-action histories into a single temporal context token for history-aware modeling at negligible cost. Extensive experiments across 13 diverse cross-embodiment tasks on both simulated and real-world platforms validate the effectiveness of our approach. Compared with VLA training without action priors, our model achieves faster convergence, higher success rates, and substantially stronger performance on data-scarce real-world tasks. Moreover, scaling up the action data in Stage~1 yields a more generalizable action prior that directly improves downstream VLA performance.

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

SpeechDx: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Clinical Speech AI

Speech offers a uniquely informative window into health by simultaneously engaging neurological, motor, respiratory, and vocal systems. Current clinical speech AI methods have largely progressed through isolated condition-specific studies, making results difficult to compare and generalization difficult to assess. We introduce SpeechDx, a large-scale benchmark for clinical speech AI spanning 12 datasets and 27 tasks across diverse health conditions. To enable evaluation across shared clinical mechanisms, SpeechDx structures tasks by the stage of speech production they disrupt: conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. The benchmark tests generalization by including tasks with limited labeled data and evaluating the same health condition across multiple datasets, distinguishing clinically meaningful patterns from dataset artefacts. We systematically evaluate 12 state-of-the-art audio encoders across all tasks and under zero-shot cross-condition transfer. Results show that large-scale speech models represent the strongest overall baselines, domain-specific models improve performance only on closely matched tasks, and no current representation generalizes reliably across the clinical speech landscape. SpeechDx establishes a shared evaluation framework for tracking progress toward general-purpose clinical speech representations

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

On The Effectiveness-Fluency Trade-Off In LLM Conditioning: A Systematic Study

Controlling the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a central challenge for their reliable deployment, yet a clear understanding of the involved trade-offs remains elusive. Current approaches to conditioning are often evaluated with a narrow focus on their effectiveness at injecting or removing a target concept, neglecting generation quality. We systematically investigate a range of conditioning methods in both injection and removal scenarios. We find that efficient steering methods frequently achieve conditioning at a steep cost to fluency. Furthermore, we identify a critical yet previously overlooked interaction with the training paradigm: activation steering methods are far less effective on instruction-tuned models than on their base counterparts. Simple prompting and full-fledged supervised fine-tuning, on the other hand, are viable options for concept injection, but are not as good at concept removal. Finally, cheaply computed textual metrics highly correlate to costly LLM-as-judge scores, and provide insights on the behavior of conditioning methods.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Neural Posterior Estimation of Terrain Parameters from Radar Sounder Data

arXiv:2605.08179v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Radar sounders are electromagnetic instruments that can probe deep into the subsurface of Earth and other planetary bodies by processing the echo of transmitted radar waves. Conventional approaches for analyzing such data rely on approximate assumptions and often produce point estimates that ignore parameter correlations as well as galactic and measurement noise. We propose a simulation-based inference approach to terrain parameter inversion from radar sounder data, where synthetic observations from a GPU-based simulator are used to train a neural network-based density estimator for neural posterior estimation (NPE). By explicitly conditioning on reference surface assumptions, the proposed framework allows systematic evaluation of posterior robustness to reference surface variability. We demonstrate that our NPE model is well calibrated on simulated data and transferable to real Mars radar profiles, where we analyze terrain parameters using literature-informed reference values.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

FeedEval: Pedagogically Aligned Evaluation of LLM-Generated Essay Feedback

Going beyond the prediction of numerical scores, recent research in automated essay scoring has increasingly emphasized the generation of high-quality feedback that provides justification and actionable guidance. To mitigate the high cost of expert annotation, prior work has commonly relied on LLM-generated feedback to train essay assessment models. However, such feedback is often incorporated without explicit quality validation, resulting in the propagation of noise in downstream applications. To address this limitation, we propose FeedEval, an LLM-based framework for evaluating LLM-generated essay feedback along three pedagogically grounded dimensions: specificity, helpfulness, and validity. FeedEval employs dimension-specialized LLM evaluators trained on datasets curated in this study to assess multiple feedback candidates and select high-quality feedback for downstream use. Experiments on the ASAP++ benchmark show that FeedEval closely aligns with human expert judgments and that essay scoring models trained with FeedEval-filtered high-quality feedback achieve superior scoring performance. Furthermore, revision experiments using small LLMs show that the high-quality feedback identified by FeedEval leads to more effective essay revisions. We release our code and curated datasets at: https://github.com/BBeeChu/FeedEval.git.

16.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

Challenges and progress in RNA velocity: Comparative analysis across multiple biological contexts

by Sarah Ancheta, Leah Dorman, Guillaume Le Treut, Abel Gurung, Greg Huber, Loïc A. Royer, Alejandro Granados, Merlin Lange Single-cell RNA sequencing is revolutionizing our understanding of cell state dynamics, allowing researchers to capture and quantify the transcriptomic profile of a single cell at a specific timepoint. Among the computational techniques used to predict cellular trajectories, RNA velocity has emerged as a predominant tool for modeling transcriptional dynamics. RNA velocity leverages the mRNA maturation process to generate velocity vectors that predict the likely future state of a cell, offering insights into cellular differentiation, aging, and disease progression. Although this technique has shown promise across biological fields, the performance accuracy varies depending on the RNA velocity method and dataset. We established a comparative pipeline and analyzed the performance of five RNA velocity methods on three datasets based on local consistency, method agreement, identification of driver genes, and robustness to sequencing depth. This benchmark provides a resource for scientists to understand the strengths and limitations of different RNA velocity methods.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

PhenoBIC: operator-free single-cell spatial phenotyping in multiplex imaging data using deep learning of cell staining patterns

Multiplex imaging is a valuable tool for spatially examining tissue microenvironments at the single-cell level to uncover biological and clinical insights. However, most multiplex image analysis workflows currently require manual intervention for cell phenotyping, which slows progress, demands human effort, and yields operator-dependent outputs. Here, we developed PhenoBIC, a pre-trained deep learning model for image classification of the multiplexed biomarker signals in a cell (Biomarker Imprint of a Cell) to classify cell phenotypes. We show that PhenoBIC (F1-score ~0.88) outperforms manual gating (widely used) and other machine learning-based computational approaches for cell marker expression classification. We validated this across multiple biomarkers, tissue sampling strategies (whole biopsies and tissue microarrays), multiplex panels, imaging platforms, and tissue types. We have released our in-house training and validation datasets of ~1.4 million manually curated cell expression ground truth labels. We have also open-sourced PhenoBIC and enabled its community-wide deployment via the QuPath interface.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

ArteryX: A Reliable End-to-End Toolbox for Standardized Intracranial Artery Feature Extraction from 3D TOF-MRA

Cerebrovascular research heavily relies on quantitative analysis of intracranial arteries from time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography, yet existing processing pipelines remain limited by inconsistent artery labeling and a high manual correction burden. We present ArteryX, a toolbox for extracting features that standardizes artery classification across proximal and distal vascular territories. It integrates segmentation handling, isotropic processing, vessel-fused graph construction, and constrained landmark-based classification within a unified artery-specific feature reporting and reproducible workflow. The toolbox extracts morphological, topological, and complexity features including total length, mean radius, volume, surface area, branch count, tortuosity, and fractal dimensionality for standardized artery-segments. Test-and-validation were performed using three complementary datasets: (1)TopBrain-Challenge benchmarking with annotated arteries, (2)synthetic known-reference validation, and (3)exploratory in-vivo cohort of cerebral small vessel disease. In TopBrain analyses, ArteryX with supervised nnUnet segmentation showed minimal bias, while iCafe showed the highest bias and a large limit-of-agreement. ArteryX consistently demonstrated robust downstream quantification performance across segmentation sources (unsupervised/supervised). Agreement analyses showed minimal bias for radius and good sensitivity of extent-dependent metrics throughout the noisier segmentations compared to the state-of-the-art iCafe-toolbox. Furthermore, a stage-wise human-in-the-loop protocol showed lower intervention time than iCafe. In an in-vivo-cohort (48CSVD+, 20CSVD-), ArteryX-derived distal and territory-level features showed group-level differences, not evident with iCafe. To facilitate adoption-and-reproducibility, ArteryX is designed with versioned builds, tutorials, and documentation.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Clarify Before You Draw: Proactive Agents for Robust Text-to-CAD Generation

arXiv:2602.03045v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models have recently enabled text-to-CAD systems that synthesize parametric CAD programs (e.g., CadQuery) from natural-language prompts. In practice, however, geometric descriptions can be under-specified or internally inconsistent: critical dimensions may be missing and constraints may conflict. However, existing fine-tuned models tend to reactively follow the user instructions and hallucinate dimensions when the text is ambiguous. To address this, we propose a proactive agentic framework for text-to-CadQuery generation, named as ProCAD, that resolves specification issues before code synthesis. Our framework pairs a proactive clarifying agent, which audits the prompt and asks targeted clarification questions only when necessary to produce a self-consistent specification, with a CAD coding agent that translates the specification into an executable CadQuery program. We fine-tune the coding agent based on a curated high-quality text-to-CadQuery dataset and train the clarifying agent via agentic SFT on clarification trajectories. Experiments show that proactive clarification significantly improves robustness to ambiguous prompts while keeping interaction overhead low. ProCAD outperforms frontier closed-source models, including Claude Sonnet 4.5, reducing the mean Chamfer distance by 79.9% and lowering the invalidity ratio from 4.8% to 0.9%. Our code and datasets are made publicly available on https://github.com/BoYuanVisionary/Pro-CAD.

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

BenchX: Benchmarking AI Models for Cancer Detection and Localization with Demographic and Protocol Biases

Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved remarkable success in medical imaging, but it is widely recognized that these models often perform inconsistently across real-world clinical settings. Such inconsistencies occur when patient demographics and imaging protocols vary, for example, in detecting small tumors, analyzing scans from different contrast phases, or evaluating patients of different ages or sexes. To quantify these inconsistencies, we develop a large-scale, open benchmark of 85,355 CT scans that systematically evaluates 12 tumor-detection AI models across tumor size, location, patient subgroup, and imaging protocol. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to extract and organize subgroup information from clinical data, which makes the analysis both scalable and reproducible. Our benchmark reveals that current state-of-the-art AI models, optimized for average accuracy, perform poorly in rare or underrepresented subgroups, such as young, female African Americans. However, collecting sufficient annotated data for these rare cases is often impractical. The benchmark provides a foundation for building more reliable and robust AI models for tumor detection and highlighting the need for rigorous, subgroup-level evaluation in medical imaging and computer vision. Datasets, code

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

GDGU: A Gradient Difference-based Graph Unlearning Method for Cyberattack Localization in Electric Vehicle Charging Networks

arXiv:2606.19566v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) can expose distribution feeders to cyberattacks. While machine learning methods, including graph neural networks, can localize which bus is compromised, significant challenges remain in data sharing and model training. For example, privacy regulations grant EVCS owners the right to delete their training data from a deployed model, yet retraining from scratch on every request is computationally prohibitive. To address this, we study graph unlearning (GU) for EVCS cyberattack localization, formulated as a feature-level unlearning problem on a graph-level multi-label classification task. Specifically, we propose gradient difference-based graph unlearning (GDGU), which removes the influence of the requested deletion data through a first-order parameter correction. The correction is computed from the gradient difference between the original training data and a modified dataset in which only the charging power features at the requested EVCS buses are unlearned. Then, a batch-normalization recalibration and a brief recovery fine-tuning step are applied to restore localization utility. We benchmark GDGU against two second-order GU baselines on the IEEE 34-bus, 123-bus, and 8500-node distribution networks across three graph neural network backbones and cumulative unlearning scenarios. GDGU matches the strongest baseline on localization utility and reaches forgetting fidelity close to full-retraining, while unlearning 10 to 12 times faster than retraining from scratch and using far less memory than the second-order GU baselines.

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

LLMs Struggle to Measure What Distinguishes Students of Different Proficiency Levels: A Study of Item Discrimination in Reading Comprehension Assessment

Item discrimination is a fundamental psychometric property of educational assessment, which measures whether an item meaningfully distinguishes students with higher proficiency from students with lower proficiency. While various existing works have explored whether large language models (LLMs) can estimate item difficulty, it remains unclear whether they can capture item discrimination. In this work, we evaluate 42 proprietary and open-weight LLMs in zero-shot settings using two complementary approaches: direct discrimination prediction, where models explicitly estimate an item's discrimination value from its content, and response-based Classical Test Theory (CTT) calibration, where LLM answers are treated as synthetic student responses to compute discrimination scores. Our results show that direct prediction yields weak alignment with human-calibrated discrimination: the best-performing model reaches only a Spearman correlation of 0.152. Response-based CTT calibration provides a stronger but still limited signal, with the all-persona synthetic respondent pool reaching a Spearman correlation of 0.241. These findings highlight item discrimination as an open challenge for LLM-based psychometric evaluation: current LLMs contain non-random discrimination-relevant signal, but they do not yet reliably capture how assessment items distinguish human students.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Class-Incremental Motion Forecasting

arXiv:2603.09420v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Motion forecasting enables autonomous vehicles to anticipate scene evolution by predicting the future trajectories of dynamic agents. However, existing approaches typically assume a closed-world setting with a fixed object taxonomy and access to high-quality perception, limiting their applicability in the real world where perception is imperfect, and new object classes may emerge over time. In this work, we introduce class-incremental motion forecasting, a novel setting in which new object classes are sequentially introduced over time and future object trajectories are predicted directly from camera images. We propose the first end-to-end framework for this setting, which adapts to newly introduced classes while mitigating catastrophic forgetting of previously learned ones. Our method generates motion forecasting pseudo-labels for known classes and matches them with 2D instance masks from an open-vocabulary segmentation model. This 3D-to-2D keypoint voting mechanism filters inconsistent and overconfident predictions, while a query feature variance-based replay strategy samples informative past sequences to preserve prior knowledge. Extensive evaluations on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 show that our approach successfully preserves performance on known classes while effectively adapting to novel ones. We further demonstrate zero-shot transfer to real-world driving and show that the framework extends naturally to open- and closed-loop end-to-end class-incremental planning on nuScenes and NeuroNCAP. Code and models will be made publicly available at https://omen.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

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

ProcessThinker: Enhancing Multi-modal Large Language Models Reasoning via Rollout-based Process Reward

Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning. Recent post-training with reinforcement learning under verifiable rewards (RLVR) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) can improve multimodal reasoning, but most approaches rely on sparse outcome-only rewards. As a result, they struggle to tell whether an incorrect answer comes from a small mistake late in the reasoning or from an unhelpful trajectory from the start. A common solution is to train a process reward model (PRM) for step-level supervision, but this typically requires large-scale high-quality chain-of-thought annotations and additional training cost. We propose ProcessThinker, a practical post-training pipeline that provides step-level process rewards without training an explicit PRM. ProcessThinker first rewrites reasoning traces into a step-tagged format for cold-start supervised fine-tuning, then applies GRPO with a standard format reward and our rollout-based process reward. Concretely, for each intermediate step, we sample multiple continuations from that step and use the empirical success rate (final-answer verification) as the step reward. This gives dense credit assignment and encourages reasoning steps that more reliably support a correct conclusion, helping reduce inconsistent or self-contradictory progress across steps – a key issue in logical reasoning. Across four challenging video benchmarks (Video-MMMU, MMVU, VideoMathQA, and LongVideoBench), ProcessThinker consistently improves over the baseline model Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

The Program Is Still There: A Conservation Law for Program Discovery

arXiv:2606.13799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding the shortest program that generates a sequence is uncomputable, and for six decades that fact has been mistaken for a wall around finding any generating program. It is not a wall but a price, and this paper measures it. For every algorithm that learns about a candidate program only through its score, a class spanning Levin search, evolutionary methods, simulated annealing, and the cross-entropy method, we define the coupling width of a search problem and prove an unconditional worst-case lower bound, exponential in that width with base one less than the domain size. From it follows a conservation law: structural knowledge injected into a search trades one for one against the search it removes, and their sum can never fall below the length of the program sought. Levin's 1973 upper bound and the lower bound proved here are the two ends of one conserved quantity, closing on each other as the instruction set grows. The only escape is to read a candidate's structure rather than its score, and its price, which we prove for generic targets, is incompleteness. A deterministic engine built on this theory recovers a generating program, certified by compressing its data and predicting an unseen continuation, for 2,383 of 3,914 sequences across four independent populations, including 244 of the 256 elementary cellular automata, with measured discovery cost rising along program length more than an order of magnitude inside the score-oracle worst case.