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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

From 2D Yang-Mills to Calogero-Sutherland via a colored particle

Authors:
Marcia Tenser↗Amilcar R. Queiroz↗

arXiv:2606.13388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study Yang-Mills theory coupled to a particle on a cylinder, where gauge invariance and compactness reduce the dynamics to a finite dimensional quantum system. In the Abelian case, this yields a model equivalent to the Landau problem on a torus, with a degenerate ground state structure. We generalize this construction to non-Abelian gauge groups and show that, for SU(N), the system reduces to a one dimensional quantum many body problem with a singular Calogero-Sutherland-type interaction.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Factions Within, Uncertain Across: Within-Document Reader Sub-Groups in Social Highlighting

Authors:
Kazuki Nakayashiki↗Keisuke Watanabe↗

When many people highlight the same document, is the crowd a single consensus, or is it internally structured into reader sub-groups that mark different things – and is that structure a stable property of a reader or of the document? Building on prior work showing an individual's within-document highlighting signal is a whisper while individuality lives in selection, we ask the group-level question on a co-readership platform using a margin-preserving curveball null. Experiment 1: within a document, readers form strong sub-groups – pairs agree far beyond what shared salience, mark density, and sentence popularity predict (nearest-neighbour agreement z=+6.3, significant in 88% of documents). Under an eight-block region-preserving null, shared engagement with the same coarse regions of the document accounts for about 40% of this excess; the majority survives as finer reader-specific agreement (z=+3.6, 77% significant). So the within-document crowd is, in a descriptive sense, factional. Experiment 2: is that grouping a stable reader trait? Here we are honest about power. The cross-document split-half reproducibility of a pair's agreement is near zero pooled (+0.078 and 0.000 in two separately drawn samples), and a power calibration shows the test is informative only for pairs that co-read many documents. In the only informative high-overlap subset (k>=4), point estimates are positive but small-sample, imprecise across the separately drawn samples, never significant, and attenuate under the region-preserving null. We therefore leave cross-document stability unresolved: the data is consistent with anything from situational grouping to a weak-to-moderate stable reader trait. The crowd is factional within a document; whether its factions follow the reader across documents is, honestly, beyond our reach.

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

ChartFI: Benchmarking Faithfulness and Insightfulness of Chart Descriptions from Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors:
Fen Wang↗Zekai Shao↗Qiman Kang↗Chunran Hu↗Zhixuan Zhang↗Lexu Xie↗Chao Liu↗Siming Chen↗

Chart descriptions are essential for accessibility, cross-modal retrieval, and assisting readers in extracting insights from complex visualizations. As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly adopted for automated chart description generation, a critical question arises: how faithfully and insightfully do these models actually describe charts? Current benchmarks fall short on two fronts: existing datasets consist of simple, homogeneous charts paired with shallow, fact-enumerating descriptions; and prevailing metrics fail to capture the multi-faceted nature of description quality. To address these gaps, we present the Chart Faithfulness and Insightfulness Benchmark (ChartFI-Bench). We first summarize four dimensions that characterize high-quality chart descriptions: factual accuracy, salient feature emphasis, domain-informed guidance, and chart-text complementarity. Guided by these dimensions, we construct a high-quality benchmark comprising 896 chart-description pairs, which feature visually complex charts and semantically rich descriptions. Furthermore, we design four aligned evaluation metrics – Faithfulness, Coverage, Informativeness, and Acuity – to systematically assess the quality of descriptions across these dimensions. Experiments conducted on mainstream MLLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and reveal common weaknesses among existing models.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

AI-Automation Tooling in Computer Engineering Education: Mixed-Methods TAM/UTAUT Evidence for a General Acceptance Attitude

Authors:
Aung Pyae↗

arXiv:2606.12424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative AI and low-code workflow platforms become routine in software practice, a key educational question is whether the next generation of computer engineers will accept these tools as useful, usable, and worthy of sustained engagement. This paper reports a mixed-methods, cross-sectional study of undergraduate computer engineering students' acceptance of AI automation tooling, instantiated through the open-source platform n8n across three identically scripted workshops in Thailand (n = 103). A 12-item, five-point Likert instrument mapped to six TAM/UTAUT constructs - Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Behavioral Intention (BI), Self-Efficacy (SE), Hedonic Motivation (HM), and Output Quality (OQ) - was complemented by inductive thematic analysis of open-ended feedback. Analyses combined ordinal reliability estimation, bootstrap confidence intervals, non-parametric tests, multiple-comparison-controlled correlations, polychoric dimensionality diagnostics, a common-method-bias check, and between-session comparisons. Acceptance was favorable across all six constructs with large effect sizes, with PE emerging as the strongest construct and HM as the weakest. Dimensionality diagnostics further revealed that canonical TAM/UTAUT sub-facets collapsed into a single general acceptance factor in this short-form post-workshop context, a finding with important methodological and theoretical implications. Qualitative themes converged with the quantitative profile regarding usefulness and enthusiasm but diverged on output quality, revealing a small yet articulate reliability-skeptical minority. The findings support the curricular adoption of AI automation tooling in undergraduate computing education and identify three theory-grounded instructional levers: instruction-sequencing scaffolds, self-efficacy supports, and trust-calibration interventions.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Interaction-Centered Intelligence: Toward an Interaction-Based Theory of Human-AI Co-Creation

Authors:
Nicholas Davis↗

arXiv:2606.00807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Traditional artificial intelligence has largely conceptualized intelligence as isolated computation occurring within bounded agents. Across classical AI, machine learning, and many generative systems, the dominant unit of analysis remains the individual model or autonomous system evaluated through outputs, benchmarks, prediction accuracy, or optimization performance. While these approaches have produced major advances, they often under-theorize the role of interaction in the emergence of intelligence, creativity, meaning, and adaptive behavior. This paper proposes interaction as the primary unit of analysis for co-creative AI and interaction-centered intelligence more broadly. Drawing from distributed cognition, embodied cognition, enaction, participatory sense-making, human-computer interaction, and computational creativity, the paper traces a historical progression toward increasingly relational accounts of intelligence. Building upon prior work in Creative Sense-Making, quantified co-creation, and co-creative systems such as the Drawing Apprentice and AI Drawing Partner, it argues that intelligence emerges through evolving interaction dynamics among agents, environments, and socio-technical systems rather than solely through internal computation. The paper introduces Interaction-Centered Intelligence as a framework for understanding human-AI co-creation, collaborative emergence, adaptive participation, and interactional dynamics. Rather than evaluating intelligence solely through generated outputs, the framework emphasizes interaction trajectories, coordination patterns, participatory engagement, adaptive regulation, and interactional drift unfolding through time. Implications for explainable co-creative AI, hybrid intelligence, enactive AI, and future human-AI systems are discussed.

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

Tunneling Dynamics and Time Delay in Electron Transport through Time-Dependent Barriers with Finite-Bandwidth Reservoirs

Authors:
Shmuel Gurvitz↗Dmitri Sokolovski↗

arXiv:2507.20649v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a model system consisting of a tunneling barrier driven by an external harmonic field and coupled to two leads with finite bandwidth. Avoiding Floquet expansions, we derive simple expressions for the time-dependent tunneling current in the adiabatic regime. Our approach relates the barrier modulation to a measurable time delay in the steady-state periodic current. It provides a physically consistent definition of the tunneling time inside the barrier by subtracting the time delay associated with the leads from the total time delay. We find that the tunneling time always vanishes for wide/high barriers. Remarkably, the time delay persists even when the barrier becomes static, i.e., in the limit where the modulation frequency vanishes. This indicates that the time delay obtained through the introduction of an external periodic perturbation actually reflects an intrinsic property of the tunneling dynamics, rather than an effect of the external drive or of a particular system. We apply our results to the analysis of tunneling times in optical experiments and find good agreement with the experimental data.

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

Optimal scenario design for climate emulation

Authors:
Christopher B. Womack↗Shahine Bouabid↗Andrei Sokolov↗Popat Salunke↗Glenn Flierl↗Sebastian D. Eastham↗Noelle E. Selin↗

arXiv:2606.19302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As deep learning for physical systems continues to grow in popularity, efforts to improve generalizability have primarily focused on designing architectures that embed physical constraints. However, for machine-learning surrogate climate models (emulators), we show that the low structural diversity in existing scenarios commonly used to generate training data places a ceiling on predictive skill. Here, we examine whether training datasets themselves can be optimized to improve generalization. We introduce a method to create datasets that produce emulators capable of generalizing to new, structurally different scenarios absent from the training data. We use a differentiable Simple Climate Model (SCM) to calculate the sensitivity of emulator loss to perturbations in the training data, iteratively updating the training data to maximize emulator skill. For an SCM, training on one scenario optimized in this fashion outperforms an emulator trained on six standard ScenarioMIP pathways. We achieve this higher predictive skill despite training on a smaller dataset, finding that our emulator successfully isolates distinct physical behaviors of different climate forcing agents (e.g., greenhouse gases vs. aerosols) without single-forcing runs. We then demonstrate that scenarios optimized using an SCM, when used to drive an intermediate-complexity climate model, produce a training dataset that yields a more skillful emulator than training on ScenarioMIP outputs. Our results suggest that, in the compute-constrained environment of running full-scale climate models, generating a small number of dynamically rich scenarios provides greater marginal value for emulation and characterizing system responses than expanding the suite of traditional emissions pathways.

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

TrustErase: Auditable Instant Machine Unlearning with Passport-Embedded Representations

Authors:
Rutger Hendrix↗Leonardo G. Russo↗Concetto Spampinato↗Matteo Pennisi↗Giovanni Bellitto↗

arXiv:2606.17122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The demand for privacy-compliant AI has amplified the need for machine unlearning; yet, existing retraining or distillation-based methods remain unverifiable and computationally costly. We introduce TrustErase, a verifiable, data-free unlearning framework leveraging passport-embedded representations for instant, modular, and auditable forgetting. By treating passports as cryptographic keys within parameter-efficient adaptation layers, TrustErase enables the removal of specific classes or datasets through simple deactivation, without retraining, fine-tuning, or access to the original data. A singular value based decomposition conceals passports within model weights, ensuring that unlearning actions remain transparent and provably compliant. Evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 show that TrustErase matches or exceeds state-of-the-art benchmarks such as DELETE, L2UL, and Boundary Shrink, while operating in a strictly data-free regime. Ultimately, TrustErase establishes a new paradigm for trustworthy, accountable, and instantly forgettable AI systems.

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09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

RepGene: Toward a Unified Gene Representation Space Robust to Missing Biological Views

Authors:
Hou↗Xia↗Hu↗Qin↗Zhang↗Li↗Fang↗Cao↗

Genes can be described through multiple heterogeneous biological views, including genomic sequence, transcript sequence, protein sequence, textual knowledge, and single-cell expression context, yet existing gene embeddings remain largely modality-specific and difficult to compare or reuse when many views are unavailable. We study a narrower but practically important question: whether pretrained embeddings from these distinct sources can be organized into a shared gene representation interface that remains usable under severe missing-modality conditions. To investigate this question, we introduce RepGene, a lightweight single-branch framework that combines modality adapters, a shared encoder, presence-aware fusion, and self-supervised cross-view objectives to map five biological views into one latent space. Our goal is not to claim a new multimodal learning principle or to establish superiority over all simpler fusion strategies, but to provide an initial technical instantiation for testing whether such a shared interface is feasible in a fixed-feature setting. Under a two-stage protocol in which RepGene is trained self-supervised on frozen upstream embeddings and evaluated by downstream linear probing, we find preliminary evidence that the learned representation is broadly competitive in the full-modality setting and remains informative when only partial modality subsets are observed at inference time. The strongest signal in our study is robustness under missing views: average performance changes are often limited when one modality is removed, and even single-view inference remains non-trivial in the evaluated benchmark regime.These results do not resolve unified biological representation learning, and they should be interpreted in light of incomplete simple-fusion baselines, limited architectural ablation, benchmark dependence, and possible upstream feature exposure. We therefore position RepGene as a feasibility study and a starting point for stronger comparisons, broader benchmarks, and leakage-aware validation.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

S23DR 2026: End-to-End 3D Wireframe Prediction via DETR-Style Set Prediction with Contrastive Denoising

Authors:
Nitiz Khanal↗

We present WireframeDETR, our submission to the Structured Semantic 3D Reconstruction (S23DR) 2026 Challenge, which requires predicting a 3D building wireframe from multi-view COLMAP point clouds. Our method applies DETR-style set prediction directly to 3D point clouds, producing wireframes as sets of edge coordinate pairs without any intermediate vertex detection stage. We introduce three technical contributions: (1) contrastive denoising training that stabilises noisy Hungarian matching in early epochs; (2) a multi-scale encoder that aggregates the last encoder layer outputs via learned scalar weights; and (3) progressive auxiliary loss weighting that concentrates gradient signal on the decoder layers that most benefit from it. Our model achieves a public test HSS of 0.575 (F1~=~0.664, IoU~=~0.516) and a best validation HSS of 0.534 on the cleaned val split.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Explaining Attention with Program Synthesis

Authors:
Amiri Hayes↗Belinda Li↗Jacob Andreas↗

arXiv:2606.19317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A longstanding goal of research on interpretable deep learning is to replace opaque neural computations with human-meaningful symbolic descriptions. In this paper, we propose an approach for approximating the behavior of components of deep networks with executable programs. We focus on attention heads in transformer language models. For a given head, we first compute its associated attention matrices on a collection of randomly selected training examples. Next, we prompt a pre-trained language model with a summary of these matrices, and instruct it to generate a set of Python programs that can reproduce the associated attention patterns given only text from the input sentence. Finally, we re-rank programs according to how well our final set of programs predict behavior on held-out inputs. We demonstrate that a set of fewer than 1,000 such generated programs can reproduce the attention patterns of heads in GPT-2, TinyLlama-1.1B, and Llama-3B, achieving an average Intersection-over-Union similarity above 75% on TinyStories. Moreover, the best-fit programs can replace neural attention heads without substantially affecting model behavior: replacing 25% of attention heads with programmatic surrogates across the three models incurs only a 16% average perplexity increase, while maintaining performance on a variety of downstream question answering benchmarks. This work contributes a scalable pipeline for reverse-engineering attention heads in transformer models using human-readable, executable code, advancing a path toward symbolic transparency in neural models.

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

Task-Instructed Causal Routing of Vision Foundation Models for Multi-Task Learning

Authors:
Donghyun Han↗Yuseok Bae↗Jung Uk Kim↗Hyung-Il Kim↗

Vision foundation models (VFMs) have demonstrated strong robustness and transferability across a wide range of visual tasks. However, each model typically encodes strong inductive biases shaped by its pre-training objective and data domain, resulting in fragmented yet complementary visual knowledge. As a result, a single model often struggles to capture the diverse visual representations required across multiple dense prediction tasks. To address this limitation, we propose TIGER (Task-Instruction-Guided Expert Routing), a framework that coordinates multiple heterogeneous VFMs for multi-task dense prediction. Instead of naively aggregating expert features, TIGER leverages natural-language task instructions to guide a routing network that assigns token-level expert weights conditioned on task semantics, enabling adaptive integration of complementary expert features. TIGER further introduces a counterfactual loss that aligns routing decisions with each expert's causal contribution by measuring prediction changes when experts are excluded, encouraging more reliable and interpretable routing. We evaluate TIGER on two multi-task dense prediction benchmarks, NYUD-v2 and Pascal Context, where it consistently outperforms recent multi-task learning baselines while keeping all VFMs frozen. These results demonstrate that combining instruction-guided expert routing with counterfactual causal alignment enables effective coordination of heterogeneous vision foundation models.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Gaussian Spatial Priors for Anatomy-Aware Object Detection in Surgical Videos

Authors:
Yunfan Li↗Artem Shmelev↗Himanshu Gupta↗

Detecting anatomical structures in surgical video is essential for intraoperative safety frameworks such as the Critical View of Myopectineal Orifice (CVMPO) in inguinal hernia repair. While prominent structures like the Cooper's Ligament and Triangle of Doom are reliably detected by standard methods, smaller structures such as the epigastric vessels remain challenging due to their visual ambiguity and intermittent visibility. We observe that the spatial relationship between structures is anatomically constrained, and propose a Gaussian Spatial Prior (GSP) module that encodes this relationship as a compact, parametric bias injected into the self-attention of a DAB-DETR decoder. The prior is computed offline from training annotations as a small set of frozen Gaussian parameters and recomputed at each decoder layer using the iteratively refined reference points. On a dataset of inguinal hernia repair videos with 5-fold cross-validation, GSP improves dependent class detection by $+33.5\%$ ($AP_{50}$) over DAB-DETR and $+53.9\%$ over YOLOv26, while also improving anchor detection by $+6.0\%$. These gains are statistically significant across all folds ($p=0.012$, paired $t-$test).

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

TimeVista: Exploring and Exploiting Vision-Language Models as Judges for Time Series Forecasting

Authors:
Zhi Chen↗Yuxuan Wang↗Jialong Wu↗Yong Liu↗Haoran Zhang↗Xingjian Su↗Jianmin Wang↗Mingsheng Long↗

arXiv:2606.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality time series forecasting is pivotal for real-world decision-making. However, traditional point-wise metrics often fail to reveal complex temporal patterns and align poorly with human intuitive preferences. While the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' paradigm has revolutionized text evaluation by providing flexible, human-aligned judgment, its application to time series remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as judges for time series forecasting, harnessing their ability to comprehend time series plots grounded in textual information. Specifically, we propose a novel framework integrating micro- and macro-level judgments informed by contextual information to evaluate time series forecasting. To this end, we introduce TimeVista, a comprehensive VLM-as-a-Judge benchmark comprising 5563 time series samples paired with detailed evaluation rubrics. Extensive meta-evaluations demonstrate that VLMs are highly reliable judges, achieving significantly higher consistency with human preferences than conventional metrics. Building upon our benchmark, we comprehensively assess recent Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) under the VLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Our results demonstrate that VLMs serve as robust and interpretable judges, providing a comprehensive, human-aligned standard for evaluating time series models.

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

GRACE: Step-Level Benchmark for Faithful Reasoning over Context

Authors:
Hoang Pham↗Dong Le↗Anh Tuan Luu↗

Many reasoning tasks require models to reason over input context, from document-grounded question answering to rule-based deduction. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting produces traces that appear transparent, yet individual steps can silently deviate from the source evidence, even when the final answer is correct. Existing methods detect hallucinations at the response level but fail to identify where in the chain a failure occurs or what type it is. We introduce GRACE, the first human-annotated step-level faithfulness benchmark with a data-driven error taxonomy for context-grounded textual reasoning. GRACE covers CoT traces from 10 models across 4 source datasets, with each step annotated for faithfulness, error category, and natural language explanation. A data-driven taxonomy, discovered bottom-up via unsupervised clustering, organizes failures into two tracks: GRACE-Inference (deductive errors) and GRACE-Grounding (factual grounding errors), with four categories each. The evaluation set is human-annotated and challenging by design. Our experiments reveal substantial headroom for current models. In addition, integrating step-level faithfulness signals into reinforcement learning pipelines improves both downstream accuracy and reasoning reliability.

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

CADET: Physics-Grounded Causal Auditing and Training-Free Deconfounding of End-to-End Driving Planners

Authors:
Zikun Guo↗

arXiv:2606.14438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end (E2E) autonomous-driving planners trained by imitation are prone to statistical shortcuts: they associate scene elements that merely co-occur with expert actions (a roadside object, a building facade) with driving decisions, rather than the variables that causally determine them. Such causal confusion silently compromises reliability in long-tail scenarios, and it is difficult to detect, because prevailing open-loop metrics (L2 displacement and collision rate) are dominated by ego status and do not indicate whether a planner depends on spurious cues. Existing remedies based on causal-intervention training require retraining large models and cannot audit a planner that is already deployed. We present CADET, a training-free framework that audits, benchmarks, and repairs spurious reliance in pretrained E2E planners without any parameter update.

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

Intrinsic Computational Functionalism and Simulated Consciousness

Authors:
Ryota Kanai↗Shuqin Ma↗

arXiv:2606.15348v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A common objection to artificial or simulated consciousness is that a simulated brain is no more conscious than simulated water is wet. We address this from the perspective of Intrinsic Computational Functionalism (ICF): if consciousness is computationally constituted, it depends not on externally imposed descriptions but on the computational structures a system physically realizes in virtue of its own causal-dynamical organization. In previous work we developed Canonical Functionalism as a mathematically precise special case of this anti-interpretivist program, identifying functional states by their complete future input-output roles under a fixed interface. Here we argue that this input-output construction, though important, is incomplete: as a behavioral boundary case of ICF, it makes lookup tables and unfolded systems that preserve the same boundary behavior canonically equivalent. A consciousness-relevant canonical representation must instead include internal mechanisms, interventions, and joint readouts belonging to the relevant intrinsic organization. We therefore define a mechanism-enriched canonical structure and use it to formulate Intrinsic Causal-Computational Realization (ICCR), a realization relation preserving physical implementation, intrinsic state individuation, transition structure, intervention profiles, and the relevant agent-body-world boundary. The central result is conditional: if conscious properties are invariants of intrinsic causal-computational organization, then any system satisfying ICCR realizes the same consciousness-relevant properties, whether biological, artificial, or simulated. We discuss objections including biological naturalism and integrated information theory. We conclude that to deny consciousness to a simulation, one must identify a consciousness-relevant intrinsic causal-computational structure that the simulation fails to realize.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Graphical-Probabilistic Modeling of Generative Flows in LLM-Native Software Systems

Authors:
V\'ictor A. Braberman↗Flavia Bonomo-Braberman↗

arXiv:2606.15943v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineering LLM-native software remains a challenging and immature field. Current practice is largely exploratory, relying on experimentation and heuristic techniques such as prompting and context engineering. These, however, are low-level and lack the principled structure needed to support design-level reasoning or analysis. In contrast, traditional software engineering leverages modularity and abstraction to communicate and analyze system behavior. To bring similar rigor to LLM-native development, we propose methods for documenting generative flows and for stating properties of LLM-based software designs. Such methods must account for the stochastic, prompt-dependent behavior of large language models while remaining expressive enough to capture emergent phenomena. Our initial approach is based on graphical probabilistic models, tailored to capture phenomena characteristic of LLM-native systems. This framework – what we term Generation Networks – aims to provide a foundation for principled reasoning about generative interactions and system-level properties in LLM-centric software architectures.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Assessing Reliability of Symbol Detection in Concept Bottleneck Models

Authors:
Javier Fumanal-Idocin↗Javier Andreu-Perez↗

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) are a relevant tool for explainable Artificial Intelligence because they make their predictions through human-interpretable symbols. However, high task accuracy does not guarantee that these symbols are detected faithfully: jointly trained CBMs may encode task-specific shortcuts in the bottleneck, making their explanations unreliable. In this paper, we study concept-detection reliability by swapping independently trained concept detectors and classification heads that share the same symbolic vocabulary. We use the resulting performance degradation, concept-level metrics, and symbol-wise uncertainty estimates to identify concepts that are especially prone to spurious firing. Finally, we propose a reliability-aware training strategy in which a shared concept detector is optimized with multiple classification heads and penalized for relying on globally or instance-wise unreliable symbols. On CUB-200-2011 with full concept supervision, detectors and heads are almost freely interchangeable (swap drop below one accuracy point, relative retention above $99\%$, and no concept detected below chance), whereas on a controlled synthetic task we show that, as the concept-supervision weight is reduced, models keep near-perfect task accuracy while swapped accuracy and agreement with the ground-truth concepts collapse to chance. Our reliability-aware training substantially mitigates this leakage, roughly doubling swap accuracy in the leaky regime.

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

Variance Reduction for Non-Log-Concave Sampling with Applications to Inverse Problems

Authors:
M. Berk Sahin↗Ahmet Ege Tanriverdi↗Behzad Sharif↗Abolfazl Hashemi↗

arXiv:2606.16257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling from high-dimensional, non-log-concave distributions with unnormalized densities is a fundamental challenge in machine learning, particularly when the exact gradient of the potential is unavailable and must be approximated via stochastic gradients that exhibit high variance under a fixed budget of gradient computations per iteration. Although variance reduction techniques such as SGD with momentum, STORM, and PAGE have demonstrated improved convergence properties in non-convex optimization, their implications for sampling from non-log-concave distributions remain largely unexplored. In this work, we develop the first unified analysis of these estimators for sampling from non-log-concave distributions. We establish improved non-asymptotic convergence rates in $\varepsilon$-relative Fisher information and, under a Poincaré inequality assumption, in squared total variation distance, and further prove weak convergence to the target distribution. We extend our analysis to solving inverse problems with score-based generative priors. We empirically validate our theory and demonstrate that, under a fixed gradient computations per iteration, variance-reduction techniques consistently improve sample quality in two standard imaging applications.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

Authors:
Zheng Chen↗Kai Liu↗Jue Gong↗Jingkai Wang↗Lei Sun↗Zongwei Wu↗Radu Timofte↗Yulun Zhang↗Xiangyu Kong↗Xiaoxuan Yu↗Hyunhee Park↗Suejin Han↗…

This paper presents the NTIRE 2025 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the 10th NTIRE Workshop at CVPR 2025. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective network designs or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art SR performance. To reflect the dual objectives of image SR research, the challenge includes two sub-tracks: (1) a restoration track, emphasizes pixel-wise accuracy and ranks submissions based on PSNR; (2) a perceptual track, focuses on visual realism and ranks results by a perceptual score. A total of 286 participants registered for the competition, with 25 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, the main results, and methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance the state of the art and foster progress in image SR.

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

It's About Time: Temporal References in Emergent Communication

Authors:
Olaf Lipinski↗Adam J. Sobey↗Federico Cerutti↗Timothy J. Norman↗

Emergent communication enables agents to develop bespoke languages that improve communication efficiency. Despite the known importance of temporal structure in natural language, there is no existing evidence of temporal references in emergent communication. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring how agents communicate about temporal relationships. We analyse three potential factors for the emergence of temporal references: environmental, external, and architectural. Our experiments demonstrate that altering the loss function is insufficient for temporal references to emerge; rather, architectural changes are necessary. A minimal change in agent architecture, using a different batching method, allows the emergence of temporal references. This modified design is compared with the standard architecture in a temporal referential games environment, which emphasises temporal relationships. The analysis shows that over 95% of the agents with the modified batching method develop temporal references, without changes to their loss function. We consider temporal referencing necessary for future improvements to the agents' communication efficiency, enabling future agents to use a closer to optimal coding as compared to purely compositional languages. These insights provide the basis for incorporation of temporal references into other emergent communication settings, and investigation of other aspects of language.

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

BrainFusionNet: a deep learning and XAI model to understand local, global, and sequential features of MRI images for improved brain tumour detection

Authors:
Md Taimur Ahad↗Bo Song↗Yan Li↗

The noise of Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI poses challenges for Deep Learning DL when tumor boundaries are obscured tumor location and appearance are complex Therefore we develop BrainFusionNet that combines Convolutional Neural Networks CNNs Vision Transformers ViT and Gated Recurrent Units GRUs to extract spatial contextual and sequential features from MRI images for improved brain tumor classification Furthermore explainable AI such as SHAP LIME and GradCAM are integrated to visualise and highlight image regions that contribute to BrainFusionNets decisionmaking process The proposed BrainFusionNet model is evaluated on two publicly available MRI datasets Kfold validation suggests 98 accuracy on both datasets The model was compared with the six stateoftheart SOTA CNNs and transfer learning Among the SOTA CNNs DenseNet121 and VGG16 achieved the highest accuracy of 96 The novelty of BrainFusionNet is that the hybrid model effectively extracts local and global features from MRI images even in smallscale tumor regions and small tumor sizes The model has a balanced sequential CNN architecture to capture lowlevel and deeperlayer features a customized ViT that captures local features stabilizes gradient flow and reduces the risk of vanishing gradients during MRI image training The CNN and ViT outputs are fed into a GRU for final classification Furthermore we analyze pixel intensities to determine whether MRI image quality affects image classification Our findings are very novel in image interpretation as we found that the distribution of pixel intensities in MRI images affects DL performance

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Resolving Diagnostic Discordance in Group 2 Pulmonary Hypertension Through Staged Physiologic Testing: Insights From PVDOMICS

Authors:
Rischard↗PVCOMICS Study Group↗Mendoza↗Insel↗Beck↗Erzurum↗Frantz↗R. P↗Finet↗J. E↗Hassoun↗Hemnes↗…

Background World Symposium on Pulmonary Hypertension (WSPH) Group 2 pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a clinically integrated phenotype attributed to left heart disease, whereas pre- versus post-capillary classification is operationalized primarily by pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (PCWP). Although current recommendations emphasize contextual interpretation and provocative testing for intermediate PCWP values, the relationship between PCWP-based classification and underlying phenotype has not been systematically evaluated. We aim to quantify phenotype-hemodynamic discordance across the PCWP spectrum and evaluate a staged physiology-guided framework incorporating inhaled nitric oxide (iNO), ventricular geometry, and provocative testing. Methods We studied 1,032 participants from the NHLBI-sponsored PVDOMICS cohort with multidisciplinary adjudicated phenotypes integrating clinical, imaging, physiologic, and hemodynamic data. Stage-specific PCWP thresholds classified pre- versus post-capillary physiology at rest, during iNO, and during provocation (fluid challenge or invasive cardiopulmonary exercise testing [iCPET]). Echocardiographic right ventricular-to-left ventricular (RV/LV) ratio was evaluated as a marker of ventricular interdependence. Restricted cubic spline and staged concordance analyses defined certainty-based PCWP ranges and incremental diagnostic yield. Results Adjudicated Group 2 phenotype was present in 37.0% of participants. Resting PCWP demonstrated good discrimination (AUC 0.86), but substantial bidirectional phenotype-hemodynamic discordance persisted across intermediate PCWP ranges. At a resting PCWP of 12 mmHg, 25% of participants classified as pre-capillary had adjudicated Group 2 PH, whereas at 18 mmHg, 35% classified as post-capillary remained discordant non-Group 2. Concordance did not approach 90% until PCWP values were 24 mmHg. Dynamic testing incrementally improved concordance within these overlap zones. Nearly half of adjudicated Group 2 PH participants (46.5%) were not identified by resting PCWP alone; incorporation of iNO and provocative testing increased cumulative Group 2 identification by 63.4% and improved sensitivity from 79.9% to 83.7%. Model discrimination improved from an AUC of 0.863 to 0.908 (likelihood-ratio P

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