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

Evaluation of Image Matching for Art Skills Assessment

While some individuals possess a natural talent for drawing, mastering this skill requires dedicated training and practice. Determining one's skill in the art of drawing requires proper comprehensive assessment. In this paper, we propose a method to measure drawing skill by by matching the hand-drawn image with the original template. Existing techniques often involve complex processes. However, advancements in computer vision allow us to train computers to perform these comparisons at a human-like level, thereby resolving the tedious and overwhelming traditional process. Using computer vision applications, determining image similarity involves identifying the level of similarities in an image with a reference image. We have implemented and analyzed the SIFT feature and Siamese network to measure image similarity. Our results indicate that it is feasible to assess art skill levels. Through feature analysis, we found that SIFT-based key point matching provides a more effective means of detecting drawing skills.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Configurable Clinical Information Extraction with Agentic RAG: What Works, What Breaks, and Why

arXiv:2606.19602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Patient contexts span hundreds of heterogeneous documents and thousands of structured data points, yet the document-level metadata that AI systems need for retrieval and triage is absent or incomplete. Standard retrieval-augmented generation fails on this data, mishandling temporal reasoning, cross-document dependencies, and missing metadata. We deploy ACIE (Agentic Clinical Information Extraction) at University Medicine Essen: an on-premise agentic RAG pipeline that reasons over complete patient contexts and grounds every answer in source passages for clinician verification. We quantify the metadata gap, trace the architectural decisions it shaped, and evaluate extraction alongside an independent retrospective lymphoma registry study, in which nuclear-medicine physicians verify every extracted value against its cited sources. Across 7,326 judgments, clinicians accepted 96.5\% of extractions, with per-type acceptance ranging from 80\% to 99\%.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EmoFSM: A Finite State Machine for Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate people's emotional distress through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in ESC, most of these studies may not define the diagram from a state-model perspective, thereby providing a suboptimal solution for long-term satisfaction. To address such an issue, we leverage the Finite State Machine (FSM) on LLMs, and propose a framework called EmoFSM. Our framework allows a single LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, and self-reason the seeker's emotion, support strategy, and the final response upon each conversation turn. Substantial experiments in ESC datasets suggest that EmoFSM outperforms many baselines, including direct inference, self-fine, chain of thought, finetuning, and externally supported methods, even those with many more parameters.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SPOT-E: Test-Time Entropy Shaping with Visual Spotlights for Frozen VLMs

arXiv:2606.20244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact. Prior inference-time visual interventions can improve grounding without retraining, but they are largely open-loop and lack a mechanism to verify whether highlighted evidence is actually used. We study answer-span prediction entropy as a model-internal feedback signal and show that naive entropy minimization is ambiguous, since low entropy may arise from evidence-grounded confidence or shortcut collapse. To resolve this ambiguity, we introduce low-entropy anchors and an entropy-shaping objective that reduces answer uncertainty while preserving baseline high-confidence tokens. We instantiate this principle in SPOT-E, a plug-and-play test-time method that produces question-conditioned spotlights, optimized per instance via light-weight tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Across all benchmarks and different VLM families, SPOT-E yields consistent gains and improved robustness under visual corruptions. Code is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/YinBo0927/SPOT-E}

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

MiniPIC: Flexible Position-Independent Caching in <100LOC

Retrieval-augmented and agentic workloads repeatedly prefill recurring predictable structured inputs (which we call "spans") such as documents and code files. Yet, prefix caching in engines such as vLLM cannot reuse their KV entries unless they share identical prefixes with another request, while Position-Independent Caching (PIC) implementations within production-grade inference servers typically either require substantial server code changes or keep KV state outside the server, incurring host-to-device transfer overhead. We present Minimalistic PIC (MiniPIC): a minimal, flexible and fast vLLM design built from two ingredients: positional-encoding-free KV cache and user-controlled cache-reuse primitives. MiniPIC stores unrotated K vectors in the KV cache, applies RoPE to K tiles inside attention using per-request logical positions, and exposes three user-facing and token-level primitives: block-aligned padding, span separator (SSep), and prompt depend (PDep), that modify hashing behavior and effective block-level causal attention structure. With fewer than 100 lines of core-engine changes plus a custom attention backend, these primitives are sufficient to realize multiple PIC methods, including Block-Attention, EPIC, and Prompt Cache, within the same running vLLM instance, while natively integrating with KV cache CPU offload implementations. On 2WikiMultihopQA, MiniPIC with interleaved scheduling improves prefill throughput by 49% over baseline vLLM, reduces cached-span time-to-first-token by up to two orders of magnitude, preserves the linear prefill scaling of uncached spans, and incurs only 5.7% worst-case overhead.

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

MVOFormer: Flow-Semantic Transformer for Robust Monocular Visual Odometry

Monocular visual odometry (MVO) is foundational to autonomous navigation and robotic localization. However, existing learning-based MVO approaches often struggle with either a lack of interpretable, complementary features or overly complex multi-stage architectures. These limitations inherently restrict their robustness and cross-domain generalization. In this work, we propose MVOFormer, a novel transformer framework for robust monocular visual odometry. Our architecture features a Flow-Semantic Dual Branch Encoder that synergizes dense geometric motion cues with object-centric semantic priors, explicitly distinguishing static structures from dynamic distractors. These representations are then fused by an Iterative Multimodal Decoder, enabling coarse-to-fine pose refinement while dynamically suppressing attention on unreliable regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that, without any target-domain fine-tuning, MVOFormer achieves superior zero-shot generalization and robustness, significantly outperforming prior learning-based frame-to-frame methods across diverse benchmarks including TartanAir, KITTI, TUM-RGBD, and ETH3D-SLAM.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Judging Against the Reference: Uncovering Knowledge-Driven Failures in LLM-Judges on QA Evaluation

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic judges for question answering (QA) and other reference-conditioned evaluation tasks, little is known about their ability to adhere to a provided reference. We identify a critical failure mode of such reference-based LLM QA evaluation: when the provided reference conflicts with the judge model's parametric knowledge, the resulting scores become unreliable, substantially degrading evaluation fidelity. To study this phenomenon systematically, we introduce a controlled swapped-reference QA framework that induces reference-belief conflicts. Specifically, we replace the reference answer with an incorrect entity and construct diverse pairings of original and swapped references with correspondingly aligned candidate answers. Surprisingly, grading reliability drops sharply under swapped references across a broad set of judge models. We empirically show that this vulnerability is driven by judges' over-reliance on parametric knowledge, leading judges to disregard the given reference under conflict. Finally, we find that this failure persists under common prompt-based mitigation strategies, highlighting a fundamental limitation of LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and motivating reference-based protocols that enforce stronger adherence to the provided reference.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Physically Motivated Ansatz for Open Fermionic Systems on Quantum Computer

arXiv:2606.16823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Determining non-equilibrium steady states (NESS) of open fermionic systems is a fundamental problem akin to finding ground states of closed systems. To address this, variational quantum algorithms can be used to solve the Lindblad master equation, much like the Schrödinger equation, yet ansatz design for NESS remains challenging. Existing approaches rely mostly on hardware-efficient ansätze (HEA), which suffer from the barren plateau problem. Here, we introduce a physically motivated ansatz named NE-UCC. Numerical simulations demonstrate that NE-UCC reliably converges to the steady state even in strongly correlated regimes far from equilibrium, reducing the infidelity by up to ten orders of magnitude compared to HEA. Furthermore, NE-UCC facilitates the exploration of excited eigenmodes with specific symmetries.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Trust the Right Teacher: Quality-Aware Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding

arXiv:2606.18101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding requires vision-language models (VLMs) to identify small target elements in high-resolution screenshots and predict precise screen coordinates. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising post-training approach for this coordinate-sensitive task, since it provides dense token-level teacher signals beyond hard coordinate labels. However, naive OPSD is not well suited to GUI grounding: OPSD evaluates the teacher on student-generated prefixes, the quality of coordinate-token teacher signals can degrade when the prefix has already deviated from the target coordinate, leading to unreliable teacher signal. To mitigate this, We propose quality-aware self-distillation for VLM-based GUI grounding, which improves coordinate-token teacher-signal quality through soft correctness-aware gating and teacher-probability scaling. The soft correctness-aware gate checks whether the teacher's current coordinate-token prediction can still be completed into the ground-truth box under the student-generated prefix. If not, the corresponding teacher signal is down-weighted. Teacher-probability scaling then uses the teacher's confidence as a lightweight factor to further calibrate the strength of the gated supervision. A key empirical finding is that neither component alone improves overall performance, whereas combining them consistently improves performance. This suggests that the two mechanisms play complementary roles: correctness-aware gating suppresses unreliable coordinate-token supervision, while teacher-probability scaling calibrates the strength of the remaining signals. Experiments across six GUI grounding benchmarks show that our method consistently improves the base model and outperforms strong baselines.

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

Spatial Priors via Space Filling Curves for Small and Limited Data Vision Transformers

Though Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become the dominant backbone in many computer vision tasks, due to permutation equivariance, their attention mechanism lacks explicit spatial inductive biases. This become particularly important in two settings: when model capacity is small or training data is limited. Inspired by the attention masking strategies in Linear Transformers and the scanning patterns of Vision SSMs, we introduce VIOLIN, a lightweight masked attention mechanism that encodes spatial structure within attention via Space Filling Curves (SFCs) with less than 0.0015% extra parameters and negligible computational overhead. VIOLIN scans the image using multiple SFCs to construct curve-specific decay masks, which are then combined and multiplied with the attention matrix. Across a wide range of evaluations, VIOLIN consistently improves performance. In limited data regimes such as fine-tuning on VTAB-1K, it boosts accuracy across all task groups and by up to 8.7% on the tasks where spatial information is essential. It can be combined with parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoRA to further increase the performance. Beyond fine-tuning, VIOLIN improves various small scale ViT architectures (e.g., DeiT, DINO) during pretraining on ImageNet-1K. Additionally, on pixel-level CIFAR-100 training, a task that is highly dependent on location information, VIOLIN increases accuracy by up to 7.2%. Overall, VIOLIN provides a computationally efficient yet effective way to inject spatial inductive bias into ViTs, especially benefiting small models and limited data settings.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

OneFocus: Enabling Real-World X-ray Security Screening with a Unified Vision-Language Model

X-ray contraband detection is critical for security in large-scale logistics and transportation, yet conventional detectors struggle to adapt to emerging contraband types and lack fundamental visual understanding. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer strong generalization but are hindered by the scarcity of high-quality X-ray image-caption data. To bridge this critical gap, we present MMXray, a meticulously curated benchmark of 52,124 image-caption pairs spanning 28 fine-grained classes of X-ray contraband. To enrich MMXray with realistic occlusion patterns, we further introduce CleanDET, a dedicated synthesis dataset containing clean foreground contraband images from 28 categories and background images with diverse density levels, together with AnyContraSyn, a controllable synthesis method designed to operate on CleanDET. We also develop OnePipe, an extensible pipeline for systematic data curation. Built on MMXray, we propose OneFocus, a unified VLM that supports four core tasks: visual question answering, contraband localization, classification, and image understanding. OneFocus achieves state-of-the-art performance in X-ray contraband understanding and demonstrates robust cross-domain generalization, establishing a strong vision-language baseline for security screening.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Chest X-Ray as a critical screening tool for Household Contacts of TB: Lessons from Three Years of Programmatic Data in India

Introduction: Household contacts (HHCs) of pulmonary TB patients remain at high risk for TB infection and disease progression, yet many remain asymptomatic and are missed by symptom-screening pathways. While India expanded its TB preventative guidelines to include all HHCs in 2021, chest X-ray (CXR) screening continues to be used selectively, representing a missed opportunity in early case detection. Methods: The analysis uses programmatic data from Project JEET 2.0 (Joint Effort for Elimination of Tuberculosis), implemented by the William J. Clinton Foundation in India, between October 2021 and March 2024. Eligible HHCs (>=5 years) were offered CXR screening as part of TB preventive therapy (TPT) evaluation. Descriptive and multivariable analyses examined predictors of CXR uptake and TB yield. A two-stage logistic regression model estimated potential TB yield under universal CXR coverage. Model performance was evaluated using the area under the curve (AUC), and bootstrap simulations generated counterfactual estimates of missed TB cases. Results: Among 1,034,621 HHCs, 1.02% individuals were found positive for TB, which includes 7,786 HHCs who were on TB treatment already, while an additional 2,812 were identified during pre-TPT evaluation. Among eligible HHCs (n = 1,026,835), 70% were screened with CXR, of which 2.4% had suggestive TB findings. Of these, 79% went for further TB assessment. Symptomatic HHCs were more likely to be CXR screened (84% vs 69%) and assessed for TB, yet two-thirds of all detected TB cases were asymptomatic. It is estimated that universal CXR coverage and TB testing for suggestive cases can increase TB detection by at least 87%. Conclusion: The study provides a scalable approach to expand CXR coverage through public-private partnerships, enabling early TB detection among HHCs, especially among asymptomatic contacts. Future implementations will benefit from integrating AI-enabled reading, along with systematic follow up for those with suggestive findings.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Net-Ev$^2$: A Generative Simulator for Network Event Evolution

arXiv:2606.12494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reducing real-world trial and error has long been a central goal of decision making, and generative simulators advance this goal by modeling the evolution of future states. An even more challenging yet meaningful task is simulating how disturbance events (e.g., accidents) propagate their impacts across real-world networks. The existing approaches fall short of modeling both structured attributes and unstructured semantics of events, and capturing topological structures in simulating network event evolution. Therefore, we are motivated to propose Net-Ev$^2$ ($\underline{Net}$work $\underline{Ev}$ent $\underline{Ev}$olution), a novel generative simulator that jointly leverages event cues while preserving network topology in simulations. Specifically, the framework consists of two stages, namely structure-guided masked pre-training and topology-aware diffusion process, which is achieved by U-Net-like graph downsampling and upsampling during denoising. At inference time, Net-Ev$^2$ can generate simulations using natural-language event input only, with greater flexibility for practical usage. Furthermore, we introduce Net-Ev$^2$-6.5M, a multimodal benchmark of aligned event and network traffic data across four large-scale road networks, as well as a new topology-aware metric, namely JL-MMD, to evaluate topological fidelity in generated network dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization ability of Net-Ev$^2$. Code is made available at https://github.com/Guangyu4/Net-Ev-2.

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

From Static Inference to Dynamic Interaction: A Survey of Streaming Large Language Models

Standard Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed for static inference with pre-defined inputs, which limits their applicability in dynamic, real-time scenarios. To address this gap, the streaming LLM paradigm has emerged. However, existing definitions of streaming LLMs remain fragmented, conflating streaming generation, streaming inputs, and interactive streaming architectures, while a systematic taxonomy is still lacking. This paper provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of streaming LLMs. First, we establish a unified definition of streaming LLMs based on data flow and dynamic interaction to clarify existing ambiguities. Building on this definition, we propose a systematic taxonomy of current streaming LLMs and conduct an in-depth discussion on their underlying methodologies. Furthermore, we explore the applications of streaming LLMs in real-world scenarios and outline promising research directions to support ongoing advances in streaming intelligence. We maintain a continuously updated repository of relevant papers at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Awesome-Streaming-LLMs.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

TopBench: A Benchmark for Implicit Predictive Reasoning in Tabular Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced Table Question Answering, where most queries can be answered by extracting information or simple aggregation. However, a common class of real-world queries is implicitly predictive, requiring the inference of unobserved answers from historical patterns rather than mere retrieval. These queries introduce two challenges: recognizing latent intent and reliable predictive reasoning over massive tables. To assess LLMs in such Tabular questiOn answering with implicit Prediction tasks, we introduce TopBench, a benchmark consisting of 779 samples across four sub-tasks, ranging from single-point prediction to decision making, treatment effect analysis, and complex filtering, requiring models to generate outputs spanning reasoning text and structured tables. We evaluate diverse models under both text-based and agentic workflows. Experiments reveal that current models often struggle with intent recognition, defaulting to just lookups. Deeper analysis identifies that accurate intent disambiguation serves as the prerequisite for leading these predictive behaviors. Furthermore, elevating the upper bound of prediction precision requires the integration of more sophisticated modeling or reasoning capabilities.

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

DragMesh-2: Physically Plausible Dexterous Hand-Object Interaction with Articulated Objects

Dexterous interaction with articulated objects is important for household, assistive, and humanoid manipulation, where multi-finger hands can provide compliant contact patterns beyond parallel-jaw grasping. However, articulated-object manipulation differs from static-object manipulation: the target part cannot be directly actuated, and its motion must emerge through sustained physical hand–handle contact. This makes the transition from object-centric articulated generation to hand-driven dexterous hand–object interaction non-trivial, since geometric trajectory replay or open-loop execution does not model the contact dynamics required to move the articulated part. Moreover, policies trained only for task completion under fixed dynamics can overfit nominal contact loads, especially without tactile or force feedback, and may degrade when the contact load changes. To address these challenges, we present DragMesh-2, a contact-driven framework for dexterous interaction with articulated objects that extends articulated interaction from object-centric generation to hand-driven dexterous hand–object interaction, where articulated motion must arise through physical contact. We further propose PICA, a physically informed contact-aware training mechanism that injects physical signals into policy learning without tactile or force feedback, improving robustness and task success under changing contact loads. Finally, we conduct systematic evaluation across multiple damping conditions and articulated-object categories to study robustness under contact-load variation, and provide a pure-geometry dexterous interaction resource to support future loco-manipulation and humanoid hand–object interaction research. Across seven GAPartNet objects, DragMesh-2 achieves stronger robustness under contact-load variation than the compared methods while maintaining high task success across damping conditions.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Runtime Skill Audit: Targeted Runtime Probing for Agent Skill Security

arXiv:2606.11671v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills let LLM agents reuse instructions, resources, tools, and workflows, but they also create a new place for malicious behavior to hide. A skill may look benign in its documentation or code while becoming harmful only when it is invoked with particular user requests, local assets, persistent state, or multi-step tool interactions. This makes purely static vetting brittle. We present Runtime Skill Audit (RSA), a dynamic analysis method that audits skills by asking what the skill-mediated agent actually does under targeted runtime conditions. Instead of testing every skill with the same generic tasks, RSA profiles risk-relevant interfaces, prepares the execution context needed to exercise them, and assigns security labels from the resulting trace evidence. We instantiate RSA on OpenClaw and evaluate it on 100 skills against representative static baselines. RSA achieves 90.0\% accuracy with an 88.0\% true positive rate and an 8.0\% false positive rate, improving accuracy by 13.0 percentage points over the best static baseline. Under self-evolving attacks, static detectors collapse after one or two rounds, while RSA continues to detect 19–20 out of 20 malicious skills across rounds.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

DF-ExpEnse: Diffusion Filtered Exploration for Sample Efficient Finetuning

arXiv:2606.19656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A natural recipe for intelligent robotic decision-making is initializing from pretrained generative control policies, which have summarized offline experience, and adapting them to self-collected online experience. We present DF-ExpEnse, an exploration technique that improves the quality of online experience collection, thus increasing finetuning sample-efficiency. DF-ExpEnse leverages the multimodal modeling capabilities of the generative control policy to create an expressive and tractably evaluatable candidate set. It then utilizes an ensemble of critics to identify the action that best balances quality with high exploration interest. In fleet settings, DF-ExpEnse further enables cross-agent communication to facilitate collaborative exploration as a group. DF-ExpEnse can be seamlessly integrated with existing strategies that finetune pretrained generative control policies via reinforcement learning. We experimentally validate consistent sample-efficiency benefits through DF-ExpEnse across a variety of manipulation and locomotion tasks, compared to default finetuning and alternative action selection schemes. Project can be found at https://df-expense.github.io.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward

arXiv:2602.00845v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning enables large reasoning models (LRMs) to dynamically acquire external knowledge, but yet optimizing the retrieval process remains challenging due to the lack of dense, principled reward signals. In this paper, we introduce InfoReasoner, a unified framework that incentivizes effective information seeking via a synthetic semantic information gain reward. Theoretically, we redefine information gain as uncertainty reduction over the model's belief states, establishing guarantees, including non-negativity, telescoping additivity, and channel monotonicity. Practically, to enable scalable optimization without manual retrieval annotations, we propose an output-aware intrinsic estimator that computes information gain directly from the model's output distributions using semantic clustering via bidirectional textual entailment. This intrinsic reward guides the policy to maximize epistemic progress, enabling efficient training via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments across seven question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that InfoReasoner consistently outperforms strong retrieval-augmented baselines, achieving up to 5.4% average accuracy improvement. Our work provides a theoretically grounded and scalable path toward agentic reasoning with retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/dl-m9/InfoReasoner

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.11627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. Although this approach successfully improves the student's no-context performance, we identify an interesting and previously unstudied phenomenon: in many settings, reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student actually degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization demands not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the context is reintroduced, a property we call context removability. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight consistency regularizer that first anchors the student's no-context output via stop-gradient, then penalizes the context-conditioned output for deviating from it via forward KL divergence. This simple addition requires only one extra forward pass per training step, yet it effectively mitigates context-induced degradation and, in many cases, even improves no-context performance. Across 12 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, our method improves context-conditioned accuracy in the majority of settings, reduces context-induced harm in 11 out of 12 settings, and effectively eliminates response-length inflation. A mechanistic case study further confirms that context removability is achieved at the representation level, with hidden states remaining nearly identical regardless of whether the context is present.

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

GridVQA-X: A Framework for Evaluating Multimodal Explainability Methods

With the increasing development of Vision-Language Models, it becomes imperative that their predictions are readily explainable to relevant stakeholders. However, the field of explainability has not kept pace with the multimodal surge. While recent Multimodal Explainable AI (MxAI) methods generate explanations to attribute the interaction between different modalities, current evaluation protocols lack the ground truth required to distinguish between true cross-modal reasoning (e.g., spatial composition) and shallow cross-modal shortcuts (e.g., Bag-of-Words attribute matching). It remains unknown whether MxAI methods faithfully capture synergistic interactions or merely hallucinate reasoning on models acting as simple feature detectors. In this paper, we introduce GridVQA-X, the first diagnostic framework specifically designed to evaluate cross-modal explainability. Unlike natural datasets, GridVQA-X leverages a closed-world synthesis logic to generate unique, mathematically guaranteed explanations. We utilize this controlled environment to train paired ground-truth models on identical architectures: $M_{pure}$, which learns robust spatial-relational reasoning and $M_{spur}$, which is structurally forced to rely on cross-modal shortcuts. This behavioral divergence creates a rigorous testbed: a faithful explainer must report distinct reasoning pathways for each model. Our findings reveal that widely used methods fail to distinguish between models relying on genuine spatial-relational reasoning and those exploiting cross-modal shortcuts, highlighting a critical gap in capturing true cross-modal synergy and misrepresenting how multimodal models actually make decisions.

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

MetaboNet-Bench: A Multi-modal Benchmark for Glucose Forecasting in Type 1 Diabetes

arXiv:2606.18640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Glucose forecasting algorithms are an important aspect of glycemic control management in type 1 diabetes. So far, the research community has developed numerous algorithms and models for forecasting. However, it is well-recognized that the lack of standardized model performance evaluation benchmarks makes fair comparison difficult and hinders further innovation, and thus benchmark standardization is in urgent need. Furthermore, many published glucose forecasting algorithms are limited to CGM data alone, ignoring other multimodal signals such as insulin dosing and carbohydrate intake. Here, we introduce MetaboNet-Bench, a benchmark for multimodal glucose forecasting for patients with type 1 diabetes that provides an extensible open-source evaluation framework for comparison of glucose forecasting algorithms that leverage glucose, insulin, and carbohydrate data. We then demonstrate its utility by benchmarking several recently published glucose forecasting models and a custom multimodal time-series model, representing different model architectures. The results show that the benefit of adding data modalities is conditioned on the complexity of the model and that incorporating more clinical metrics helps identify meaningful gaps to fill for future research.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Complete entanglement detection using polynomial invariants

arXiv:2606.16712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing methods for deciding whether a bipartite quantum state is separable or entangled typically fall into one of two categories: they are either complete but require access to an explicit density matrix followed by numerical optimization, or they can be evaluated directly by measuring the quantum system but are incomplete, in the sense that they cannot detect all forms of entanglement. In this work, we overcome both limitations in a unified framework. First, we bypass numerical optimization by deriving separability criteria in the form of universal bounds on tensor powers of separable states. We prove that these bounds are complete: every entangled state violates them for sufficiently large tensor powers. Second, we explicitly construct a corresponding complete family of nonlinear entanglement witnesses, which can detect all forms of entanglement without requiring an explicit density matrix. The witnesses we construct are moreover basis-independent, in the sense that they are invariant under conjugation by local unitaries. Altogether, our results expand the toolbox for entanglement detection in arbitrary local dimensions in a manifestly invariant way.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Systematic Evaluation of Feature Representations for Cancer-Associated sORF Prediction in Non-coding RNA

Short open reading frames (sORFs) within non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have arisen as a hidden layer of gene regulation, encoding small peptides that represent a new class of cancer regulators with diagnostic and therapeutic potential. However, inferring associations between sORFs to specific cancer types remains challenging and requires computational approaches for accurate prediction. Recently, the CoraL framework introduced the first computational approach for predicting cancer-associated peptides, focusing primarily on model architecture while overlooking how feature extraction strategies influence predictive accuracy. We present a systematic evaluation of machine learning models and feature extraction approaches to predict cancer-associated sORFs across 15 cancer types. We benchmarked seven traditional machine learning algorithms combined with three feature extraction methods: k-mer frequency, Word2Vec embeddings, and genomic language model (gLM)-based embeddings. To our knowledge, this is the first study applying gLM-derived embeddings to the prediction of cancer-associated sORFs in ncRNA. Our results show that traditional machine learning models with appropriate feature extraction outperform the CoraL baseline across all cancer types, achieving up to 10% higher accuracy in some of the 15 evaluated datasets. Interestingly, k-mer features consistently outperformed gLM embeddings without fine-tuning, suggesting that local sequence composition may provide more discriminative information for this task and that pre-trained genomic representations may require task-specific adaptation to fully capture these patterns. Additionally, we observed that the way sequences are tokenized, such as the k-mer length, can affect performance: longer fragments (e.g., k=7) sometimes reduced accuracy for Random Forest but had a smaller effect on MLP. Our findings suggest that appropriate feature engineering can provide greater improvements than increasing model complexity.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Large deviation principle for friendship-biases in Galton–Watson trees

arXiv:2606.17381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider the friendship-bias of the vertices in an infinite rooted Galton–Watson tree. The friendship-bias of a vertex is the difference between the average degree of the neighbours of the vertex and the degree of the vertex itself. A vertex is said to be of type $\chi \in S$, with $S = \{-,0,+\}$, when its friendship-bias is, respectively, strictly negative, zero or strictly positive. We consider the fractions $f_l^\chi$ of vertices of type $\chi \in S$ along a random downward path up to branching depth $l \in \mathbb{N}$ and derive a large deviation principle (LDP) for the triple $(f_l^\chi)_{\chi \in S}$ as $l\to\infty$. The branching depth of a vertex counts the number of branchings that occur along the path that connects the vertex to the root of the tree. The rate in the LDP is $l$, while the rate function in the LDP is identified in terms of a variational formula minimising a relative entropy under a linear constraint. We focus on the case of binary branching, for which the rate function is already quite involved. We identify the qualitative properties of the rate function and show how it can be computed numerically. We briefly indicate how to proceed for more general branching and for vertex types along a tree consisting of a finite number of random downward paths. Our paper is the first to consider large deviations of vertex types.