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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

ReMMD: Realistic Multilingual Multi-Image Agentic Verification for Multimodal Misinformation Detection

arXiv:2606.24112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal misinformation detection is increasingly important because viral posts now combine long multilingual narratives, several images, mixed provenance, and subtle text–image framing errors. Existing benchmarks and methods remain poorly matched to this setting: they usually isolate short captions, single images, binary labels, or one manipulation source, while agentic verification remains costly under realistic evidence search. We present ReMMD, a realistic multilingual multi-image agentic verification framework for multimodal misinformation detection. ReMMD includes ReMMDBench, a real-world multimodal misinformation detection benchmark with 500 samples, 2,756 images, five monolingual languages, two cross-lingual settings, three text-length tiers, multi-image posts, five-way veracity labels, eight distortion labels, evidence provenance, and rationales. It also includes ReMMD-Agent, a persistent-memory verifier that decomposes posts into atomic points, builds a reusable evidence set, and predicts structured L1/L2/L3 outputs. Across proprietary systems, open LVLMs, MMD-Agent, and T2-Agent, ReMMD-Agent obtains the best five-way veracity performance, with 41.80% accuracy and 39.12% macro-F1 using GPT-5.2, while reducing cost by 17.5% relative to MMD-Agent and 79.9% relative to T2-Agent. The project is available at https://dang-ai.github.io/ReMMD.

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

On the Stability of Growth in Structural Plasticity

arXiv:2605.15435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard deep-learning pipelines usually choose the network architecture before training and keep it fixed throughout optimization. In contrast, a model can also be adapted by editing its structure during training, for example by pruning existing hidden-neuron units or growing new ones. Although growth is appealing for adaptive and continual systems, we show that it is not simply the inverse of pruning. Pruning selects among units that have participated in training from the start, whereas growth inserts new units into an already specialized optimization trajectory. We isolate this insertion problem and show that newborn units are often forward-active but backward-starved: they participate in the forward computation, yet receive much weaker gradient signal than incumbent units. This disadvantage is minor in small MLP benchmarks, but becomes clear in harder image-classification settings with a convolutional trunk. In these settings, \textsc{Grow} can achieve high final accuracy during the structural-editing procedure, while \textsc{Prune} is stronger when performance is averaged over the training trajectory or when the final sparse network is retrained from scratch. Interventions targeting optimizer state, insertion, selection, and trainability show that improving the integration of newborn units can improve adaptive performance, but does not automatically produce better final subnetworks. In continual-learning benchmarks stressing plasticity loss, \textsc{Grow} becomes competitive mainly when new units have enough time to integrate. Together, these results suggest that \textsc{Grow} should be evaluated not only as an architecture-search operator, but as a time-sensitive optimization process whose success depends on insertion stability.

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

SA4Depth: Consistent Pose-Depth Scale Alignment for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Self-supervised depth estimation from monocular sequences relies on the joint learning of a depth and a pose network. Despite abundant research done to improve the depth network, efforts on the pose remain limited. In this context, even when depth is estimated up to scale, we highlight the importance of the alignment between the scene scales estimated by the pose and depth nets. Then, we introduce SA4Depth, an approach to improve this alignment and boost the depth predictions while keeping the inference time unchanged. Our proposed method uses the depth estimated during training to reproject learnable visual features across consecutive frames and refine the pose estimates by reducing feature alignment residuals. With our method, the estimated scene scales by the separate depth and pose networks are aligned, and the prediction scale consistency is improved across different sequences. Our differentiable refinement integrates seamlessly into existing self-supervised pipelines and substantially improves their depth estimates. We demonstrate this with extensive experiments both outdoors and indoors on KITTI, Cityscapes, and NYUv2. Additionally, results on KITTI Odometry confirm the effectiveness of our pose refinement. Our code is available at https://github.com/Runningchauncey/SA4Depth .

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Recurrent Reasoning on Symbolic Puzzles with Sequence Models

arXiv:2606.15686v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models often appear strong on symbolic and algorithmic tasks, yet this apparent strength can hide brittle behaviour when problems become longer, harder, or slightly out of distribution. A major limitation of current reasoning benchmarks is that many primarily test whether a model can produce a valid answer, while paying less attention to whether the solution is minimal, robust, and stable under controlled difficulty scaling. We introduce RecurrReason, a difficulty-controlled benchmark of four recurrent logic puzzles (Tower of Hanoi, River Crossing, Block World, and Checkers Jumping) with BFS-optimal trajectories and a single interpretable difficulty parameter $N \in \{1,\dots,10\}$, totalling 10{,}817 unique puzzles and 285{,}933 moves. We benchmark two Transformer families, an encoder-decoder model (T5-style) and a decoder-only model (GPT-2-style), under consistent data splits and evaluation criteria, training on $N{=}1$ to $7$ and evaluating on both held-out in-distribution instances and harder out-of-distribution instances at $N{=}8$ to $10$. Fine-tuned pre-trained T5 achieves 97.27\% validation and 81.00\% OOD accuracy on Block World; all models score 0.00\% on River Crossing under all conditions. Failure mode analysis reveals that architecture is a stronger determinant of success than scale. Pre-training transfers only to puzzles with locally structured transition functions. Our code and dataset will be open-sourced upon acceptance.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Measurement incompatibility and quantum steering via linear programming

arXiv:2506.03045v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of deciding whether a set of quantum measurements is jointly measurable is known to be equivalent to determining whether a quantum assemblage is unsteerable. This problem can be formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP). However, the number of variables and constraints in such a formulation grows exponentially with the number of measurements, rendering it intractable for large measurement sets. In this work, we circumvent this problem by transforming the SDP into a hierarchy of linear programs that compute upper and lower bounds on the incompatibility robustness with a complexity that grows polynomially in the number of measurements. The hierarchy is guaranteed to converge and it can be applied to arbitrary measurements – including non-projective POVMs (Positive Operator-Valued Measures) – in arbitrary dimensions. While convergence becomes impractical in high dimensions, in the case of qubits our method reliably provides accurate upper and lower bounds for the incompatibility robustness of sets with several hundred measurements in a short time using a standard laptop. We also apply our methods to qutrits, obtaining non-trivial upper and lower bounds in scenarios that are otherwise intractable using the standard SDP approach, although such bounds are significantly looser than the ones obtained in the qubit case. Finally, we show how our methods can be used to construct local hidden state models for states (i.e., to prove that a state cannot lead to steering under any possible local measurements), or conversely, to certify that a given state exhibits steering; for two-qubit quantum states, our approach is comparable to, and in some cases outperforms, the current best methods.

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

Measuring User's Mental Models of Speech Translation in Human-AI Collaboration

Millions of people use machine translation (MT) tools daily, yet little is known about their perception of what systems can and cannot do. This paper studies users' mental models of speech translation systems through a new framework based on cross-lingual question answering, where users either accept MT output or request professional re-translation to answer questions based on the information presented in a foreign language. By analyzing user behavior and accuracy trends across varying translation qualities, we examine to what extent they can predict where the system is likely to be wrong, and how this mental model evolves. Users develop stronger mental models with practice, especially when they have some knowledge of the source language, primarily by relying on surface-level error cues. Moreover, providing speech transcriptions can help users develop better mental models. Our results show the promise of cross-lingual question answering as a downstream task for studying MT mental models and advancing our understanding of human-AI collaboration.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

SEAL: Searching Expandable Architectures for Incremental Learning

arXiv:2505.10457v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Incremental learning is a machine learning paradigm where a model learns from a sequential stream of tasks. This setting poses a key challenge: balancing plasticity (learning new tasks) and stability (preserving past knowledge). Neural Architecture Search (NAS), a branch of AutoML, automates the design of the architecture of Deep Neural Networks and has shown success in static settings. However, existing NAS-based approaches to incremental learning often rely on expanding the model at every task, making them impractical in resource-constrained environments. In this work, we introduce SEAL, a NAS-based framework tailored for data-incremental learning, a scenario where disjoint data samples arrive sequentially and are not stored for future access. SEAL adapts the model structure dynamically by expanding it only when necessary, based on a capacity estimation metric. Stability is preserved through cross-distillation training after each expansion step. The NAS component jointly searches for both the architecture and the optimal expansion policy. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SEAL effectively reduces forgetting and enhances accuracy while allocating additional capacity only when required. These results highlight the promise of combining NAS and selective expansion for efficient, adaptive learning in incremental scenarios.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

TIGER: Taming Identity, Geometry, and Generative Priors for High-Quality Face Video Restoration

Face Video Restoration (FVR) aims to recover high-fidelity facial videos from degraded input while preserving identity and semantic consistency across frames. Existing methods often struggle to simultaneously address three key challenges: identity shift, viewpoint-entangled guidance, and perceptual realism. To tackle these issues, we propose TIGER, a structured tri-prior fusion framework that Tames Identity, Geometry, and gEnerative pRiors for high-quality FVR. Specifically, an Identity Prior is first established by injecting subject-discriminative embeddings into the latent space, effectively anchoring the subject's identity against severe degradations. Then, to provide temporally consistent structural guidance for dynamic videos, TIGER constructs a Geometry Prior by lifting 2D reference cues into a disentangled 3D parameter space, creating a geometric anchor through cross-source parameter fusion. Moreover, to achieve maximum efficiency without compromising realism, we harness the video generation model's Generative Prior through a one-step rectified flow. We further design a progressive three-stage training optimization strategy that refines structural fidelity, textural reconstruction, and distribution-level realism to ensure robust optimization. We also construct a large-scale FVR dataset to facilitate robust training and standardized evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TIGER achieves state-of-the-art performance in both identity fidelity and temporal stability, delivering a high-quality, efficient and identity-consistent FVR. Project page: https://yzhoulv.github.io/Tiger/.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Encoding parameters by measurement: Forgetting can be better in quantum metrology

arXiv:2512.10541v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce quantum parameter estimation with the encoding being via a quantum measurement. We quantify the precision for estimating parameters characterizing a general two-outcome qubit measurement, considering two cases: when the outcomes of the encoding measurement are recorded and when the same are ignored. We find that in a large variety of such estimation scenarios, forgetting the outcomes yields higher precision. We derive a necessary criterion under which remembering the measurement outcomes provides better precision in comparison to the outcome-forgotten strategy. Furthermore, we establish a necessary and sufficient criterion for the simultaneous estimation of multiple parameters encoded by an arbitrary quantum process, including those involving measurements, using qubit probes, and find when the quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound is valid and achievable. For simultaneous estimation of two parameters characterizing the measurement, we find that the achievable quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound can be a valid precision bound only when the measurement direction depends on the parameters of interest.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Superspace Concentration and Adversarial Robustness in Quantum Algorithms

arXiv:2606.11580v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study superspace concentration as a quantum resource, formalized through the focus measure F(\r{ho}) = {\lambda}_max(\r{ho}_super) - the largest eigenvalue of the reduced superspace state - which quantifies the capacity of a quantum system to concentrate informational weight into a preferred subspace of an extended degree-of-freedom space. We develop a complete resource-theoretic framework around this measure and validate its properties through GPU-accelerated numerical simulation. Analytic decoherence predictions are confirmed to machine precision (1.11 x 10^{-16}) for superspace dimensions dS in {2,4,8,16,32}. Focus monotonicity holds across 10,000 random states with zero violations under four focus-non-generating channels across six system configurations. Focused quantum states resist coherent unitary attacks with significantly greater resilience than standard fidelity predicts, with focus remaining above 0.9 at attack strength {\epsilon} = 0.302 versus {\epsilon} = 0.174 for fidelity. We further demonstrate that the focus measure and the U(dS)-asymmetry measure are operationally distinct: asymmetry remains near zero and provides no robustness signal under coherent and targeted attacks while focus tracks spectral concentration and remains robust until {\epsilon} > 0.3. The connection between Grover's algorithm and superspace concentration is made explicit via the identity F(|{\psi}_k>

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

SEAGAN: domain-Specific and Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Dynamic Plant Processes

arXiv:2606.19623v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) provide a flexible framework for learning from scientific data linked through physical, biological, or functional relationships. One promising domain is plant physiology, where measured responses often arise from multiple interacting processes whose exact separation remains difficult even with manual intervention. In plant physiology, a key example is the A-Ci curve, which relates net CO2 assimilation rate (Anet) to leaf intercellular CO2 concentration (Ci) and is used to estimate photosynthetic parameters in leaf and crop-canopy models. However, reliable estimation requires identifying the active biochemical limitation state at each curve point, which remains a major source of uncertainty. Here, we formulate limitation-state identification along A-Ci curves as a graph-based node classification problem, with curve points as nodes. Domain-specific graph representations are created using distance-based k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) and auxiliary-signal-guided (ASG) connectivity, with edge attributes encoding pairwise relations. The framework was evaluated against conventional learning baselines, graph-based architectures, and an automated fitting-based benchmark. Results on a large synthetic dataset with known ground-truth limitation states show that graph-based models improve classification, particularly near biochemical transition regions. The best-performing configuration, SEAGAN (domain-Specific and Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Dynamic Plant Processes), integrates process-aware node features, edge attributes, kNN connectivity, and graph attention with weighted cross-entropy loss, achieving an F1-score of 0.857 and an accuracy of 0.882. The results show that representing A-Ci curves as graphs improves biochemical limitation-state analysis, with edge-aware attention over local kNN neighborhoods providing the most effective strategy.

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

Structure Over Nonlinearity: Explicit Interaction Architectures for Dynamical Learning

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most learning architectures for dynamical systems rely on generic nonlinear function approximation, often requiring high model complexity to capture structured behaviors. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm in which modeling capability arises primarily from structure rather than from expressive nonlinearities. We introduce a class of explicit structured dynamical units based on wave-inspired interaction structures with internal state. Inspired by wave-based computational principles, the proposed units adopt a strictly causal organization that eliminates algebraic loops, yielding fully explicit models that can be evaluated without implicit solvers. Stacking such units produces layered dynamical architectures with emergent hierarchical behavior. Through experiments on a nonlinear system identification task, we show that depth improves both representation quality and generalization, even under limited parameter optimization. In particular, the proposed architectures produce informative internal representations even under readout-only fitting, indicating that useful dynamical structure emerges from the organization of interactions prior to substantial parameter optimization. These results suggest that structure-first design provides a viable and effective alternative to conventional black-box approaches for learning dynamical systems, highlighting the role of interaction structure as a primary source of model expressivity.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

oxo-flow: compiled, memory-safe bioinformatics workflow orchestration

Authors:

Bioinformatics analyses depend on workflow engines to coordinate dozens of computational tools across complex dependency chains. The most widely adopted engines-Snakemake, Nextflow, the Common Workflow Language (CWL), and the Workflow Description Language (WDL)-run on interpreted or just-in-time (JIT) compiled language runtimes, incurring hundreds of milliseconds of startup latency and providing no compile-time safety guarantees from the host language. We developed oxo-flow, a workflow engine written in Rust that compiles to a single native binary. On an Apple M5 processor, oxo-flow parses, validates, and dry-runs a production-scale workflow in roughly 22 milliseconds-before Snakemake or Nextflow have finished loading their runtime environments. Peak memory usage is 16 megabytes, representing six- to seven-fold reductions relative to Snakemake and Nextflow. Dry-run latency is essentially independent of workflow size: a hundred-fold increase in rule count adds approximately 0.4 milliseconds. oxo-flow integrates 31 command-line tools, a REST interface with 60 endpoints, an embedded web application, and native cluster submission into a single 10-megabyte binary. It provides per-rule environment isolation across seven backends, checkpoint-based fault tolerance with cryptographic output verification, and a formal installation and operational qualification protocol for regulated laboratory environments. Ten curated workflows and three demonstration pipeline repositories are available. oxo-flow is freely available under Apache License 2.0 at https://github.com/Traitome/oxo-flow.

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

A Comprehensive Survey of Knowledge-Based Vision Question Answering Systems: The Lifecycle of Knowledge in Visual Reasoning Task

Knowledge-based Vision Question Answering (KB-VQA) extends general Vision Question Answering (VQA) by not only requiring the understanding of visual and textual inputs but also extensive range of knowledge, enabling significant advancements across various real-world applications. KB-VQA introduces unique challenges, including the alignment of heterogeneous information from diverse modalities and sources, the retrieval of relevant knowledge from noisy or large-scale repositories, and the execution of complex reasoning to infer answers from the combined context. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), KB-VQA systems have also undergone a notable transformation, where LLMs serve as powerful knowledge repositories, retrieval-augmented generators and strong reasoners. Despite substantial progress, no comprehensive survey currently exists that systematically organizes and reviews the existing KB-VQA methods. This survey aims to fill this gap by establishing a structured taxonomy of KB-VQA approaches, and categorizing the systems into main stages: knowledge representation, knowledge retrieval, and knowledge reasoning. By exploring various knowledge integration techniques and identifying persistent challenges, this work also outlines promising future research directions, providing a foundation for advancing KB-VQA models and their applications.

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

AudioX-Turbo: A Unified Framework for Efficient Anything-to-Audio Generation

Audio and music generation based on flexible multimodal control signals is a widely applicable topic, with the following key challenges: 1) a unified multimodal modeling framework, 2) large-scale, high-quality training data, and 3) the prohibitive inference cost of multi-step diffusion sampling. As such, we propose AudioX-Turbo, a unified and efficient framework for anything-to-audio generation that integrates varied multimodal conditions (i.e., text, video, and audio signals) in this work. AudioX-Turbo follows a teacher-student paradigm. The teacher AudioX-Base is built on a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer with a Multimodal Adaptive Fusion module that aligns diverse multimodal inputs for high-fidelity synthesis, and is then distilled into the few-step student AudioX-Turbo via Distribution Matching Distillation adapted to flow matching, complemented by a diffusion-based discriminator for high-quality few-step generation. To support the training of AudioX-Turbo, we construct a large-scale, high-quality dataset, IF-caps-Pro, comprising approximately 9.2M samples curated through a two-stage data collection and annotation pipeline. We benchmark AudioX-Turbo across a wide range of tasks, finding that our model achieves superior performance, especially on text-to-audio and text-to-music generation, while operating at only 4 sampling steps and requiring approximately 25x fewer function evaluations (NFE) than multi-step baselines. These results demonstrate that our method is capable of audio generation under flexible multimodal control, showing efficient and powerful instruction-following capabilities. The code and datasets will be available at https://zeyuet.github.io/AudioX-Turbo/.

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

Online Convex Optimization with Sublinear Noisy Probes

arXiv:2606.14640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) over a convex set $K\subseteq \mathbb R^d$, where in each round $t$ the learner selects $x_t\in K$ and then observes a convex loss $f_t:K\to[0,1]$, with the goal of minimizing regret to the best fixed decision in hindsight. We introduce a unified probing model that generalizes two recent lines of work: sublinear best-expert queries in the experts setting, and pairwise (comparison-based) feedback available every round in OCO. In our framework, the learner has a budget of $k\le T$ pairwise probes; on a probed round it may query two points and learn which one has smaller loss. Our main result shows that even a sublinear and noisy probe budget can provably improve worst-case regret in the full feedback OCO regime. With $k$ $\delta$-noisy pairwise probes, we obtain: $ Reg_T \le O\left(\min\left\{\sqrt{dT\ln T},\; \frac{dT\ln T}{k|1-2\delta|}\right\}\right) $, which is tight (up to logarithmic factors in $T$) across $T$, $k$ and $\delta$. Specifically regarding the noise parameter $\delta \in [0,1]$, the regret guarantee smoothly degrades as the oracle response approaches a coin flip, i.e., $\delta$ is close to $\frac{1}{2}$. When applying the same techniques to a finite $K$ for the prediction with $d$ experts setting, the resulting rates are instead completely tight in all parameters, including $d$. Our analysis gives a streamlined treatment of pairwise probing in OCO by quantifying the benefit of probing via a variance reduction effect, combined with a second-order (variance-based) analysis of Continuous Exponential Weights.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

FinBalance: A Multi-Document Accounting Reconciliation Benchmark

Existing financial-NLP benchmarks mostly evaluate prepared artifacts such as filings, tables, or extracted values. Real accounting begins earlier: source documents must be reconciled into cited journal entries, aggregated into a balance sheet, and checked for contradictions. We introduce FinBalance, a multi-document accounting reconciliation benchmark built from source-document bundles across eight industries, three period types, and five difficulty levels. Human-authored business scenarios, accounting policies, tax/FX treatments, document schemas, distractors, and inconsistency templates are composed by a deterministic generator whose ledger produces journal entries,balance sheets, and 23 inconsistency-code labels. On a 710-record evaluation split, six contemporary LLMs reach at most 46% exact final-balance-sheet accuracy. Four models show a 26-41 pp gap between BS_exact, the model's reported balance sheet, and BS_recon, the balance sheet obtained by replaying its entries through our ledger. Models often recover numerically plausible entries but fail to bind them to supporting documents and aggregate them consistently. Citation-pressure prompting barely changes document-linking errors, while ledger-feedback ablations substantially improve reported balance sheets and expose inconsistency-detection trade-offs. Expert finance reviewers validate the benchmark design and labels.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Accurate computation of the energy variance and $\langle\langle \mathcal{L}^\dagger \mathcal{L} \rangle\rangle$ using iPEPS

arXiv:2511.22669v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Infinite projected entangled-pair states (iPEPS) provide a powerful tensor network ansatz for two-dimensional quantum many-body systems in the thermodynamic limit. In this paper we introduce an approach to accurately compute the energy variance of an iPEPS, enabling systematic extrapolations of the ground-state energy to the exact zero-variance limit. It is based on the contraction of a large cell of tensors using the corner transfer matrix renormalization group (CTRMG) method, to evaluate the correlator between pairs of local Hamiltonian terms. We show that the accuracy of this approach is substantially higher than that of previous methods, and we demonstrate the usefulness of variance extrapolation for the Heisenberg model, for a free fermionic model, and for the Shastry-Sutherland model. Finally, we apply the approach to compute $\langle \langle \mathcal{L}^\dagger \mathcal{L} \rangle \rangle$ for an open quantum system described by the Liouvillian $\mathcal{L}$, in order to assess the quality of the steady-state solution and to locate first-order phase transitions, using the dissipative quantum Ising model as an example.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

An LMM for Precisely Grounding Elements in Documents

Visual grounding in documents is a crucial ability for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in areas such as document understanding, deep research and document error detection. However, existing approaches exhibit poor grounding precision in text-rich document images, often failing to accurately locate the critical document elements needed for reliable reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce PreciseDoc, an LMM specifically designed for precise element grounding and can be further optimized for Document VQA tasks. Specifically, to enhance the basic localization capability, we construct challenging training data by two pipelines capable of mass-producing high-quality documents with paired metadata of fine-grained coordinates, including synthetic hand-filled documents with camera effects. The model develops more real-world functions beyond straightforward localization of single text, such as locating personal information from CVs. Furthermore, we introduce a training paradigm for visual grounded reasoning where the grounding and reasoning are supervised jointly with reinforcement learning to improve the contribution of the grounded evidence. A comprehensive evaluation on various benchmarks demonstrates the advantage of the proposed data and methods in document spatial grounding and document understanding.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Spatial Analysis and Multilevel Determinants of Hypertension in Zambia: Analysis of the 2017 WHO STEPS Survey

Background: Hypertension is the leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor globally, with the fastest-growing burden in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to estimate national hypertension prevalence, map provincial patterns, assess spatial clustering, and identify individual and community-level determinants among Zambian adults using the 2017 WHO STEPS survey. Methods: This cross-sectional study used data from the 2017 WHO STEPS survey, a nationally representative sample of 4,301 adults aged 18-69 years. Hypertension was defined as systolic BP [&ge;]140 mmHg, diastolic BP [&ge;]90 mmHg, or current antihypertensive use. Spatial autocorrelation was assessed via Moran's I and LISA. Four nested generalised linear mixed models with PSU-level random intercepts identified individual and community-level determinants. Results: Overall weighted hypertension prevalence was 24.0%. Lusaka recorded the highest prevalence (30.2%), followed by Southern (29.9%) and Muchinga (28.3%) provinces; Western Province had the lowest (12.4%). Spatial clustering was statistically significant but modest (Moran's I = 0.0247, p < 0.001). Between-cluster variation reduced from ICC = 5.9% to 1.8% in the full model, indicating geographic differences were largely explained by individual characteristics. Age was the strongest predictor; adults aged 60-69 had nearly sevenfold higher odds than those aged 18-29 (AOR 6.92, 95% CI: 4.95-9.66). Women had lower odds than men (AOR 0.64, 95% CI: 0.52-0.79). Obesity (AOR 2.34), overweight (AOR 1.65), high cholesterol (AOR 1.40), diabetes (AOR 1.35), and single marital status (AOR 1.34) were independently significant. Western Province showed consistently lower odds than Central Province (AOR 0.48). Conclusion: Hypertension affects one in four Zambian adults, driven primarily by age, sex, obesity, dyslipidaemia, and diabetes. Geographically prioritised interventions, including community health worker-led screening programmes in Lusaka and Southern Province, would maximise population-level impact. Population-level salt reduction and alcohol policies represent cost-effective complementary strategies. Longitudinal studies with finer spatial resolution are needed to clarify causal pathways underlying observed geographic clustering and inform SDG Target 3.4 progress.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Towards Anomaly Detection on Relational Data

arXiv:2606.18621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational databases are widely used for managing structured data in real-world systems. Detecting anomalies from such relational data is crucial for identifying fraud, risks, and abnormal behaviors, yet remains under-explored. The key challenges lie in the intrinsic complexity of relational data: multi-table attributes are high-dimensional and heterogeneous, making sparse abnormal clues easy to overwhelm by normal or irrelevant information; and anomalies may further manifest as abnormal connection patterns across different foreign-key relations, which existing tabular and graph anomaly detection methods are ill-suited to capture. To address them, we propose RelAD, a reconstruction-based framework that captures anomalies from both attribute and relational edge reconstruction. RelAD contains two core modules: conditional sparse-gated attribute reconstruction, which suppresses redundant multi-table attributes and emphasizes abnormal semantic blocks, and dual-view multi-relational edge reconstruction, which detects relation-specific abnormal connections from both intrinsic and behavioral entity profiles. The resulting attribute and relational signals are integrated through a lightweight fusion module to produce the final anomaly score. We further construct 6 benchmark datasets with systematic anomalies, on which extensive experiments show that RelAD consistently outperforms other baselines while achieving competitive efficiency.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Clinical-grade Cuffless Blood Pressure Monitoring via Deep-tissue Diffuse Speckle Pulsatile Flowmetry

Blood pressure (BP) is a vital sign which is measured to diagnose and manage hypertension. However, current methods to measure BP use inflatable cuffs which cause discomfort and limit the frequency at which measurements can be made, or intra-arterial catheters which are invasive and pose infection risks. Here, we propose and evaluate the use of Diffuse Speckle Pulsatile Flowmetry (DSPF) as a cuffless BP measurement method to address these limitations. DSPF is a laser speckle-based technique which simultaneously records blood flow rate and blood volume (i.e. photoplethysmography or PPG) signals from relatively deep vascular tissue. Using information from these signals, we studied DSPFs effectiveness in measuring systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) through an outpatient study in which 133 patients were recruited, and in measuring beat-to-beat BP waveforms through an inpatient study in which two patients were recruited. In the outpatient study, the DSPF method was able to achieve mean absolute errors (MAEs) of 4.17 mmHg and 2.42 mmHg for SBP and DBP respectively compared to conventional cuff-based methods. It was also able to fulfil the requirements of the AAMI/ESH/ISO 81060-2:2018 standard for BP measurement devices and attain an "A" grade according to the British Hypertension Society grading scheme. For the inpatient study, it produced BP waveforms which had MAEs of 2.35 mmHg and 3.06 mmHg compared to arterial-line measurements for the two patients, respectively. Compared to PPG which has been studied more extensively as a cuffless BP measurement method, we found through ablation studies that DSPF was able to reach significantly lower MAEs and hence better accuracies. DSPF augments the performance of PPG-only methods by leveraging additional information from the blood flow rate signal, and we therefore find it to be a superior cuffless BP measurement method which can potentially be used in outpatient, inpatient, and remote settings.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MIRAGE: Runtime Scheduling for Multi-Vector Image Retrieval with Hierarchical Decomposition

To effectively leverage user-specific data, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is employed in multimodal large language model (MLLM) applications. However, conventional retrieval approaches often suffer from limited retrieval accuracy. Recent advances in multi-vector retrieval (MVR) improve accuracy by decomposing queries and matching against segmented images. They still suffer from sub-optimal accuracy and efficiency, overlooking alignment between the query and varying image objects and redundant fine-grained image segments. In this work, we present an efficient scheduling framework for image retrieval - MIRAGE. First, we introduce a novel hierarchical paradigm, employing multiple intermediate granularities for varying image objects to enhance alignment. Second, we minimize redundancy in retrieval by leveraging cross-hierarchy similarity consistency and hierarchy sparsity to minimize unnecessary matching computation. Furthermore, we configure parameters for each dataset automatically for practicality across diverse scenarios. Our empirical study shows that, MIRAGE not only achieves substantial accuracy improvements but also reduces computation by up to 3.5 times over the existing MVR system.

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arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Software Delegation Contracts: Measuring Reviewability in AI Coding-Agent Work

arXiv:2606.17099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents increasingly accept assigned software tasks, modify repositories under bounded authority, and return work packages for review. Prior work proposed the software delegation contract, covering the task, authority, returned work package, and acceptance context, as the unit of analysis for delegated coding work, but did not measure its effects. This paper reports a controlled pilot study of explicit delegation contracts for coding agents. We built a dependency-free TypeScript API task environment with seeded defects and documentation gaps, authored ten tasks across five families, and ran 64 agent executions across two model tiers under three conditions: a realistic issue-style prompt, an explicit delegation contract, and a contract with a required evidence bundle. Each run was scored with hidden acceptance tests, mutation checks, and scope analysis, then reviewed by three independent condition-blinded model-based reviewers using a fixed rubric, for 192 reviews. Explicit contracts did not improve objective task outcomes: all 64 runs passed hidden acceptance checks, with zero scope violations. They did improve reviewability. Evidence sufficiency improved in 22 of 30 paired comparisons and worsened in none (+0.83 on a 5-point scale, p < 0.0001, Cliff's delta = 0.66); reviewer ambiguity decreased (p = 0.035); changed-file lists, known-limitations sections, residual-risk sections, and reviewer checklists appeared mostly or only when demanded by the contract. Contracts cost +13% agent tokens and +38% wall-clock time, with larger effects for the weaker model tier. On these small tasks, delegation contracts bought reviewability rather than correctness.