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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Sample Path Properties of the Fractional Wiener–Weierstrass Bridge II

arXiv:2606.11994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fractional Wiener–Weierstrass bridges are a class of Gaussian processes obtained by replacing trigonometric functions in the construction of classical Weierstrass functions by fractional Brownian bridges. A number of their sample path properties were derived in Schied–Zhang (2024,2026). The analysis in these papers left several open questions, most of which are addressed here. Specifically, we prove that, in the regime in which the Weierstrass mechanism dominates the underlying fractional Brownian bridge, the limiting $b$-adic variation coefficient has an absolutely continuous distribution and is therefore genuinely random. At the critical point between the two roughness regimes, we establish the power-variation formula and the critical $\Phi$-variation limit conjectured in Schied–Zhang (2024). Finally, we derive the Hausdorff dimension for the graphs of the sample paths by proving a conjecture from Schied–Zhang (2026) for the missing high-Hurst case.

02.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Blood signatures of cell type-specific aging forecast disease risk and resilience

Authors: Unknown Author

By measuring thousands of proteins in blood samples from over 60,000 people, we built molecular ‘clocks’ to estimate how fast cells age. Our analyses show that cell types age at different rates within the same person. Accelerated aging of specific cell types is associated with increased disease risk, whereas slower aging of others is linked to protection and improved survival.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

MAWARITH: A Dataset and Benchmark for Legal Inheritance Reasoning with LLMs

Islamic inheritance law is challenging for large language models because solving inheritance cases requires complex, structured, multi-step reasoning and the correct application of juristic rules to compute heirs' shares. We introduce MAWARITH, a large-scale annotated dataset of 12,500 Arabic inheritance cases for training and evaluating models on the full reasoning chain: (i) identifying eligible heirs, (ii) applying blocking (\d{hajb}) and allocation rules, and (iii) computing exact inheritance shares. To the best of our knowledge, MAWARITH is the first Arabic corpus and benchmark designed for end-to-end Islamic inheritance reasoning. Unlike prior datasets that restrict inheritance case solving to multiple-choice questions, MAWARITH supports the full reasoning chain and provides step-by-step solutions with justifications grounded in classical juristic sources and established inheritance rules, as well as exact share calculations. This enables models to learn how to generate detailed, step-by-step responses to user queries that reflect real-world Islamic inheritance cases. To evaluate models beyond final-answer accuracy, we propose MIR-E (Mawarith Inheritance Reasoning Evaluation), a weighted multi-stage metric that scores key reasoning stages and captures error propagation across the pipeline. We evaluate six large language models in a zero-shot setting. A commercial model achieves about 90\%, whereas all evaluated open-source models remain below 50\%. Our error analysis identifies recurring failure patterns, including scenario misinterpretation, errors in heir identification, errors in share allocation, and missing or incorrect application of key inheritance rules such as \textquotesingle awl and radd. The MAWARITH dataset is publicly available at https://gitlab.com/nlpresearcher/mawarith.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Multilevel Stochastic Plug-and-Play for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view computed tomography (SVCT) reduces radiation exposure and acquisition time, but the limited number of projection views makes the reconstruction problem severely ill-posed and leads to streak artifacts when analytical methods are used. Plug-and-Play (PnP) methods provide an effective way to combine data fidelity with learned image priors, while stochastic PnP methods further improve robustness by matching the denoiser input distribution through re-noising. However, these methods often require many iterations to converge, which limits their practical efficiency. In this work, we propose a multilevel (ML) stochastic PnP method for SVCT that accelerates stochastic PnP reconstruction. We highlight that, in the stochastic setting, directly enforcing prior coherence across levels would require accurately estimating fine-level prior gradients through multiple denoiser function evaluations, which substantially increases the computational cost. Motivated by this observation, we perform the multilevel steps in multiresolution analysis (MRA) approximation spaces. This choice is supported by the structure of the wavelet decomposition, which causes the prior-coherence correction to vanish in expectation, thereby avoiding costly estimation of fine-level stochastic prior gradients for the coarse-level corrections. Experiments on SVCT reconstruction show that our method, called Multilevel Stochastic Plug-and-Play (ML-SPnP), achieves reconstruction quality comparable to state-of-the-art methods while substantially reducing runtime.

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

RGB-S: Image-Aligned Tactile Saliency for Robust Dexterous Manipulation

Effective visuo-tactile integration is critical for robotic dexterous manipulation, especially when visual observations are unreliable or occluded. However, robustly aligning sparse, heterogeneous tactile measurements with dense visual representations remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing approaches require policies to learn cross-modal correspondences implicitly from limited demonstrations, without leveraging geometric priors. As a result, they are often data-inefficient and generalize poorly when visual observations are degraded. To address this limitation, we propose a framework that explicitly grounds physical contacts in the image domain. Using robot forward kinematics and camera calibration, we project tactile sensor locations directly onto the RGB image plane. We then render force-modulated Gaussian saliency maps to model spatial uncertainty arising from kinematic and calibration errors. By integrating these 2D spatial anchors through a zero-initialized conditioning architecture, our method injects physical contact priors into standard visual backbones while preserving pre-trained visual representations. We evaluate our method on six dexterous manipulation tasks in both simulation and the real world under severe visual occlusions. Real-world experiments show that explicit RGB-S grounding in the image domain improves real-world occluded manipulation success rates by $26.7$ percentage points over the strongest implicit visuo-tactile baseline, suggesting its improved spatial reasoning and robustness to occlusion. Project page: touch-as-saliency.github.io

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

NightFeats @ MMU-RAGent NeurIPS 2025: A Context-Optimized Multi-Agent RAG System for the Text-to-Text Track

We present NightFeats, a structured multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system submitted to the MMU-RAGent competition at NeurIPS 2025, where it was awarded Best Dynamic Evaluation in the text-to-text track. Rather than targeting benchmark maximization, this work proposes a principled pipeline that decomposes knowledge synthesis into three coordinated phases: retrieval, curation, and composition, each governed by explicit intermediate representations and handoff contracts. Inspired by Agentic Context Engineering (ACE), the system introduces temporal-semantic reranking, bounded contradiction reconciliation, and citation-preserving composition as core architectural primitives. Competition results show that NightFeats surpasses proprietary baselines including Claude-SonnetV2 and Nova-Pro on LLM-as-a-Judge and Human Likert evaluations, confirming that architectural transparency and verifiable evidence grounding are better aligned with human preferences than systems optimizing narrowly for automatic similarity metrics.

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

A Survey on Deep Learning Architectures for Point Cloud Classification and Segmentation

Point cloud stands as the most widely adopted format for representing 3D shapes and scenes due to its simplicity and geometric fidelity. However, its inherent unordered and irregular nature, exacerbated by sensor noise and occlusions, introduces unique challenges for machine learning based methodologies. To combat these issues, diverse strategies have been developed, including converting to a format that has orderliness, extracting local geometry, and permutation-invariant or self-attention-based processing. In this paper, our focus is directed towards deep learning models for three fundamental tasks in 3D vision: point cloud classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation. We begin by formally defining point cloud data, followed by an in-depth discussion on its structural characteristics. Then, we categorize notable works based on their backbone structure and evaluate their performance on popular benchmarks. Beyond empirical comparison, we offer insights into architectural innovations and limitations. We also outline open challenges and promising future directions for 3D point cloud understanding.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

CreativeBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Machine Creativity via Self-Evolving Challenges

The saturation of high-quality pre-training data has shifted research focus toward evolutionary systems capable of continuously generating novel artifacts, leading to the success of AlphaEvolve. However, the progress of such systems is hindered by the lack of rigorous, quantitative evaluation. To tackle this challenge, we introduce CreativeBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine creativity in code generation, grounded in a classical cognitive framework. Comprising two subsets – CreativeBench-Combo and CreativeBench-Explore – the benchmark targets combinatorial and exploratory creativity through an automated pipeline utilizing reverse engineering and self-play. By leveraging executable code, CreativeBench objectively distinguishes creativity from hallucination via a unified metric defined as the product of quality and novelty. Our analysis of state-of-the-art models reveals distinct behaviors: (1) scaling significantly improves combinatorial creativity but yields diminishing returns for exploration; (2) larger models exhibit ``convergence-by-scaling,'' becoming more correct but less divergent; and (3) reasoning capabilities primarily benefit constrained exploration rather than combination. Finally, we propose EvoRePE, a plug-and-play inference-time steering strategy that internalizes evolutionary search patterns to consistently enhance machine creativity.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

RTSGameBench: An RTS Benchmark for Strategic Reasoning by Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.18950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with strategic reasoning, i.e., anticipating and influencing other agents' actions, under uncertainty in competitive and cooperative settings. Real-time strategy (RTS) games can be a natural testbed for diagnosing this limitation, as they demand coordination with allies, adaptation to opponents' strategy, and long-horizon planning under partial observability. However, existing RTS benchmarks offer limited evaluation scope, lack systematic competency diagnosis, and remain fixed in the pre-designed scenario coverage. To address these limitations, we present RTSGameBench, which is built on Beyond All Reason, a large-scale RTS game with an expanded battlefield that demands broader strategy diversity than the existing testbeds. The proposed benchmark provides evaluations through diverse gameplay across various matchup structures, diagnostic assessment via mini-games, each targeting an individual strategic competency, and extensible coverage via a self-evolving generation framework that converts free-form queries into new mini-games, improving over successive cycles. Additionally, for VLMs to operate in large-scale RTS games, we provide RTSGameAgent that manages units by an FSM with agentic memory. We empirically validate that multiple state-of-the-art VLMs do not perform well when matchups demand tighter coordination, multiagent coordination and when task scale increases.

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

Reinforcement Learning with Action-Triggered Observations

arXiv:2510.02149v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Action-Triggered Sporadically Traceable Markov Decision Processes (ATST-MDPs), a reinforcement learning framework for partial observability in which full state observations occur stochastically at each step, with probability determined by the chosen action. We derive Bellman equations tailored to this setting and establish the existence of an optimal policy. Exploiting the fact that sporadic observations reveal the full state, we provide an equivalent formulation in which agents commit to action-sequences between consecutive observations. Under the linear MDP assumption, we show that the value function over such action-sequences admits a linear representation in a finite-dimensional feature map, enabling standard regression-based methods. As an application, we derive ATST-LSVI-UCB, an optimistic algorithm achieving regret $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{Kd^3(1-\gamma)^{-3}})$ for episodic learning with geometrically distributed horizons, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $d$ the feature dimension, and $\gamma$ the discount factor (episode continuation probability), matching the known rate for linear MDPs with full observability.

11.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

General-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks

Specialized clinical artificial intelligence (AI) tools are entering medical practice despite scarce independent evaluation. We quantitatively evaluate two clinical AI tools, OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI, built on large language models (LLMs) against three frontier LLMs: GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.6. Our evaluation has three stages: (1) 500 MedQA questions testing medical knowledge, (2) 500 HealthBench items measuring alignment with clinicians and (3) the real clinical queries (RCQ) benchmark, built from 100 de-identified queries from physicians to a general-purpose language model in a live clinical environment. For the RCQ benchmark, 12 US clinicians performed randomized, blinded review of model outputs, producing 1,800 model–question annotations. Frontier LLMs outperformed clinical AI tools in all three evaluations. Clinical AI tools performed comparably to auto-enabled Google Search AI Overview on the RCQ. These findings highlight the need for independent, real-world evaluation of AI tools before they enter clinical settings. In an independent evaluation, frontier large language models outperformed specialized clinical artificial intelligence tools on medical knowledge, clinician alignment and real-world clinical queries.

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

Exploding and vanishing gradients in deep neural networks: the effect of residual connections

arXiv:2606.17013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The well known phenomenon of exploding and vanishing gradients in deep neural networks is analyzed using multiplicative ergodic theory. The effect of adding a residual connection is explained in this context. Specifically, a characterization of Liapunov exponents due to Furstenberg and Kifer is exploited in order to make a precise statement about the Liapunov spectrum and the effect of residual connections on it.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Weights and Gradients: A Taxonomy of Federated Learning Messages

arXiv:2606.16891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning is rapidly evolving beyond the exchange of traditional model weights and gradients, yet existing definitions fail to capture the full scope of modern payloads like synthetic data and federated analytics. This paper addresses the gap by proposing a formal mathematical definition of a federated message that accounts for both utility and privacy. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes these exchanges into three categories: model structures, statistical summaries, and data-conditioned representations. By evaluating these groups based on computational demands, communication costs, and privacy risks, we provide a clearer understanding of the trade-offs involved in decentralized training. Our review of 202 recent publications highlights a significant shift since 2021 toward diverse messaging paradigms, signaling a move away from standard deep learning updates toward more specialized information sharing. This framework provides a structured path for future research to optimize federated systems for varying hardware and security requirements.

14.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Towards modeling phage therapy

by Rob J. de Boer, Robert Schooley, Alan S. Perelson Patients infected with life-threatening multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria have been treated with cocktails of bacteriophages. This is a complicated form of personalized medicine as the phages given to a patient have to be selected beforehand on the basis of their lytic capacity of the infecting bacteria. Because bacteria rapidly become resistant, the evolution of resistance to a diverse cocktail of phages is a complicated dynamical process, during which competing bacterial strains replace one another by accumulating several resistance mechanisms, each of which may involve a fitness cost. As a consequence, it is typically not known why a particular phage therapy succeeded or failed, and how one can optimize the composition of the cocktails to maximize the rate of success. To improve upon this, we extend an existing in vivo-calibrated mouse model into a novel mathematical model for the human situation, and include multiple phages infecting multiple bacterial strains, differing in their resistance to each of the phages. We adjust several parameter estimates of the bacterial model to the human situation, and use the model to describe a successful case of phage therapy involving several cocktails, each containing several phages. In the model, treatment success crucially depended on pretreatment resistance levels, and on the diversity and the timing of the cocktails. Once an appropriate cocktail is found, it is less important to further optimize the infection rates of the phages. Resistant bacterial strains expand rapidly when sensitive strains decline, and the higher the infectivity of the phages, the faster resistant strains expand. Because resistance evolves rapidly, it is best to provide a diverse set of phages right from the start of therapy, i.e., to hit hard and early, and create a high genetic barrier to bacterial resistance.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Longitudinal monitoring exposes correlated temporal protein variations in the female plasma proteome

The plasma proteome is a valuable resource for assessment of the physiological state of the donor. Containing hundreds of different proteins of variable concentrations, it displays substantial inter-donor differences in individual protein levels, making each plasma proteome highly donor-specific. Less is known about intra-donor variability in the plasma proteome over time, although such variations may even be more indicative of a changing physiological state. Here we assessed data obtained from the TIMES cohort, comprising 51 apparently healthy participants monitored monthly over 12 months, focusing especially on temporal variations in blood protein levels. Most strikingly, we observed that several women in this cohort revealed strongly correlated temporal variations in their plasma proteome, including most notably PZP, SHBG, FETUB, AGT, SERPINA6, SERPINA7, CP, APOL1 and KNG1, with levels sometimes fluctuating by more than 20-fold. In contrast, such variations were absent in men. Some of the fluctuating proteins have been known to be hormone-regulated (e.g., PZP, SHBG), but for others this was not yet fully clear. Through the tight co-variation observed for these proteins in the plasma proteome of women, we can conclude that all these proteins are similarly hormone regulated. The findings reported here not only corroborate previous studies showing estrogen-dependent regulation of several plasma proteins, but also extend this category to include also CP, APOL1, and KNG1. As these latter have been often proposed as candidate biomarkers, they should be validated in sex-balanced cohorts and interpreted with caution, especially in large-scale plasma proteomics studies wherein often only one or a few sampling time points are measured per donor.

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

Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Refining Textual Embeddings

Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain a persistent challenge, often stemming from inadequate integration of visual information during multimodal reasoning. A key cause is the model's over-reliance on textual priors and underutilization of visual cues, leading to outputs that are linguistically fluent but visually inaccurate. For example, given an image of an empty kitchen countertop, an LVLM might hallucinate a "bowl of fruit" or "cup of coffee", relying on language associations rather than visual evidence. Most LVLMs incorporate visual features by appending them to the input stream of a pre-trained LLM and training on large-scale vision-language datasets. Our systematic analysis reveals that this strategy often leads to over-dependence on textual information due to the inherent bias of LLMs towards language-dominant representations. This imbalance skews attention towards the text over visual content, weakening the model's ability to ground outputs in visual inputs. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective visual feature incorporation method that encourages the model to learn visually-informed textual embeddings distinct from those of the base LLM and promotes a more balanced attention distribution. Experimental results across multiple hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly reduces hallucinations and fosters more balanced multimodal reasoning. Notably, our approach achieves substantial gains, including +9.33% on MMVP-MLLM, +2.99% on POPE-AOKVQA, up to +3.4% on Merlin, and +3% on the hard-data split of HallusionBench.

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

From Verdict to Process: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Stage Fact Verification

arXiv:2606.13262v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent approaches combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with retrieval-augmented reasoning have shown promise for automated fact verification. To process complex claims, these verification pipelines typically execute multi-stage workflows that coordinate tightly coupled modules, including claim decomposition, evidence gathering, and verdict prediction. However, existing methods optimize individual stages in isolation or rely on fixed heuristics, which limits adaptive coordination among stages and can lead to suboptimal outcomes. In this work, we propose ProFact, an agentic reinforcement learning framework for end-to-end optimization of multi-stage fact verification trajectories. ProFact trains a unified policy to coordinate claim decomposition, evidence seeking, answer generation, and verdict prediction. To address the sparse and delayed supervision provided by final veracity labels, ProFact introduces process-aware rewards that provide stage-level learning signals throughout the verification process. Empirical evaluation shows that ProFact consistently outperforms strong baselines in both verification performance and inference efficiency. These results highlight the effectiveness of process-aware trajectory optimization for multi-stage fact verification.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Towards More General Control of Diffusion Models Using Jeffrey Guidance

A key strength of diffusion models lies in their flexibility, since their outputs can be controlled at sampling time through guidance. However, beyond simple cases such as conditional sampling, the target distribution is often left implicit, defined only through a sampling rule or a heuristic energy function. To address this, we propose Jeffrey guidance, a principled framework that extends diffusion-model control to applications beyond what standard guidance can express. It leverages Jeffrey's rule of conditioning to update marginal distributions towards a prescribed target, preserving the conditional structure and minimally perturbing the joint distribution. We first demonstrate Jeffrey guidance by targeting a prescribed embedding distribution. With Inception embeddings as the target, this leads to substantial reductions in FID on both CIFAR-10 and FFHQ. We further apply Jeffrey guidance to fairness on CelebA-HQ, updating an unconditional diffusion model to enforce independence between attributes.

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

SCC-Loc: A Unified Semantic Cascade Consensus Framework for UAV Thermal Geo-Localization

Cross-modal Thermal Geo-localization (TG) provides a robust, all-weather solution for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. However, profound thermal-visible modality gaps introduce severe feature ambiguity, systematically corrupting conventional coarse-to-fine registration. To dismantle this bottleneck, we propose SCC-Loc, a unified Semantic-Cascade-Consensus localization framework. By sharing a single DINOv2 backbone across global retrieval and MINIMA$_{RoMa}$ matching, it minimizes memory footprint and achieves zero-shot, highly accurate absolute position estimation. Specifically, we tackle modality ambiguity by introducing three cohesive components. First, we design the Semantic-Guided Viewport Alignment (SGVA) module to adaptively optimize satellite crop regions, effectively correcting initial spatial deviations. Second, we develop the Cascaded Spatial-Adaptive Texture-Structure Filtering (C-SATSF) mechanism to explicitly enforce geometric consistency, thereby eradicating dense cross-modal outliers. Finally, we propose the Consensus-Driven Reliability-Aware Position Selection (CD-RAPS) strategy to derive the optimal solution through a synergy of physically constrained pose optimization. To address data scarcity, we construct Thermal-UAV, a comprehensive dataset providing 11,890 diverse thermal queries referenced against a large-scale satellite ortho-photo and corresponding spatially aligned Digital Surface Model (DSM). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCC-Loc establishes a new state-of-the-art, suppressing the mean localization error to 9.37 m and providing a 7.6-fold accuracy improvement within a strict 5-m threshold over the strongest baseline. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/FloralHercules/SCC-Loc.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Riviera model with egoistical settlers

arXiv:2606.16791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Riviera model mimics a densifying settlement along the coastline. In the lattice version, houses are built sequentially in empty sites with the constraint that every newly built house has at least one empty neighboring site. The distribution of clusters of adjacent houses does not obey a closed set of evolutionary equations, but the void-cluster-void distribution does. We compute the latter and extract the cluster distribution from it. In the jammed state, when all voids have length one and the evolution ceases, the cluster distribution has a neat form and exhibits a factorial decay with the length of the cluster. To investigate finite systems, we employ a static approach directly treating jammed states. If the coastline is a finite segment, we determine the statistics of the number of empty sites in the jammed state (the average, variance, and higher cumulants). We also study a continuum version in which houses are built along the line so that each newly built house is sufficiently separated from at least one neighboring house.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Structural Analysis of Prostate Cancer N-Glycans Using Graph-Based Structural Metrics

The N-linked glycans are structurally complex carbohydrate modifications that regulate protein folding, immune recognition, and cellular signaling, and their expression is extensively remodeled during cancer progression, making them promising biomarkers. In this study, prostate cancer-associated N-glycans from a range of relevant peer-reviewed studies were curated and digitized to develop a versatile computational framework that quantitatively encodes their spatial complexity across diverse biological systems. We invented two indices – the Distance & Connectivity Index (DCI) and the Position & Composition Index (PCI) – to capture the spatial information in N-glycans as layered architectures, enabling calculation of residue-level path lengths, branching structure, and compositional diversity. DCI summarizes glycan structure as both a scalar and matrix representation, while PCI does the same but also captures monosaccharide diversity, linkage heterogeneity, and cross-layer branching features. These metrics were computed with GlycoAssessor, an open-source platform that extracts information for the DCI and PCI from glycans drawn via Symbol Nomenclature for Glycans (SNFG) notation. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was applied to evaluate whether glycans from prostate cancer tissues cluster distinctly in a disease-relevant manner. Results show that the spatial information in N-glycans: (1) increased in a multi-dimensional, non-linear manner, (2) objectively segregated structural themes, (3) could function as a potential prostate cancer biomarker that is distinct from mass-to-charge ratio and relative abundance, and (4) could objectively quantify novel subtype classifications of glycans associated with disease states and progression.

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

Enhancing Pathological VLMs with Cross-scale Reasoning

Pathological images are inherently multi-scale, requiring pathologists to integrate evidence from global tissue architecture at low magnification to cellular morphology at higher magnification for accurate diagnosis. While existing pathological datasets for vision-language model (VLM) include various scales, they often lack an explicit cross-scale reasoning objective. This limitation prevents VLMs from capturing essential cross-scale representations and learning evidence-based reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first cross-scale training and evaluation paradigm that formulates pathology interpretation as multi-magnification reasoning. However, creating such a task reveals a critical challenge: multi-image visual question answering (VQA) is prone to text-only shortcuts, which allow models to guess answers using magnification-dependent artifacts rather than visual evidence. To address this, we propose a leakage-aware curation pipeline that combines adversarial text-only screening with constraint-guided question design. Using this pipeline, we construct Scale-VQA, a high-quality benchmark with 4,685 multiple-choice questions grounded in 2,537 pathology images across multiple magnification levels. Finally, we present ScaleReasoner-R1, a model trained via reinforcement learning to optimize performance on the cross-scale VQA task. ScaleReasoner-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on our cross-scale reasoning benchmark and generalizes to SOTA performance on established single-scale benchmarks. Findings suggest that even the limited cross-scale supervision can significantly improve pathological understanding. The code and demos will be open-sourced.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

How should I respond to race-based exclusion in my lab?

Authors:

A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position? A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position?

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

Half a Link can Be Enough to Predict a Whole Link: Understanding Generalization in Knowledge Graph Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.18001v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graph (KG) foundation models (KGFMs) are zero-shot generalizers: trained once, they can predict links on unseen graphs without retraining. However, understanding when and how they can robustly generalize across KGs is still an open question. In this paper, we shed some light on their generalization mechanisms highlighting how their performance on unseen KGs is not uniform when it comes to partially seen links, which we call half-links. In fact, we show that to predict a test triple $(h,r,t)$ it might suffice in practice to have observed the half-link $(h,r)$ or $(r,t)$ in the inference graph. This yields a taxonomy of four scenarios when combinations of these half-links are observed or not. In a rigorous stratified analysis over these scenarios, we reveal that SoTA KGFMs use seen half links for predictions, while unseen half-links pose different challenges. As such, our finer-grained taxonomy can be a diagnostic protocol for robust KGFM generalization and highlights where novel KGFMs can improve.