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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

An Agentic Retrieval Framework for Autonomous Context-Aware Data Quality Assessment

arXiv:2606.13692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data quality assessment is a critical prerequisite for effective data analytics and data-driven decision-making, yet it remains a challenging task due to the inherently context-dependent nature of data quality. Existing approaches often rely on static rules or manual assessment strategies, limiting their adaptability to diverse usage scenarios and constraining automation at scale. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, offer new opportunities for automating data quality assessment, but raise concerns related to reliability, grounding, and execution safety. In this paper, we propose a unified agentic-retrieval framework for autonomous context-aware data quality assessment. The framework interprets natural-language descriptions of intended data usage, derives context-aware assessment strategies, and generates executable validation logic through a multi-agent workflow. To ensure operational reliability, the framework introduces a feasibility validation stage that evaluates the realism and executability of generated assessment specifications before execution, enabling iterative refinement when necessary. Accepted validation logic is executed deterministically to guarantee reproducible and auditable results. We implement the proposed framework as an end-to-end prototype and evaluate it across multiple usage scenarios applied to the same dataset. The results demonstrate that assessment outcomes adapt meaningfully to different intended uses, while feasibility-gated execution reduces unrealistic or non-executable rule generation. The proposed approach provides a practical foundation for deploying autonomous yet controlled data quality assessment in modern data-driven environments.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning via Label Refinement and Threshold Adjustment

arXiv:2407.05370v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms often struggle to perform well when trained on imbalanced data. In such scenarios, the generated pseudo-labels tend to exhibit a bias toward the majority class, and models relying on these pseudo-labels can further amplify this bias. Existing imbalanced SSL algorithms explore pseudo-labeling strategies based on either pseudo-label refinement (PLR) or threshold adjustment (THA), aiming to mitigate the bias through heuristic-driven designs. However, through a careful statistical analysis, we find that existing strategies are suboptimal: most PLR algorithms are either overly empirical or rely on the unrealistic assumption that models remain well-calibrated throughout training, while most THA algorithms depend on flawed metrics for pseudo-label selection. To address these shortcomings, we first derive the theoretically optimal form of pseudo-labels under class imbalance. This foundation leads to our key contribution: SEmi-supervised learning with pseudo-label optimization based on VALidation data (SEVAL), a unified framework that learns both PLR and THA parameters from a class-balanced subset of training data. By jointly optimizing these components, SEVAL adapts to specific task requirements while ensuring per-class pseudo-label reliability. Our experiments demonstrate that SEVAL outperforms state-of-the-art SSL methods, producing more accurate and effective pseudo-labels across various imbalanced SSL scenarios while remaining compatible with diverse SSL algorithms. The code is publicly available (https://github.com/ZerojumpLine/SEVAL).

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

Evaluating Interactive 2D Visualization as a Sample Selection Strategy for Biomedical Time-Series Data Annotation

arXiv:2603.26592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable machine-learning models in biomedical settings depend on accurate labels, yet annotating biomedical time-series data remains challenging. Algorithmic sample selection may support annotation, but evidence from studies involving real human annotators is scarce. Consequently, we compare three sample selection methods for annotation: random sampling (RND), farthest-first traversal (FAFT), and a graphical user interface-based method enabling exploration of complementary 2D visualizations (2DVs) of high-dimensional data. We evaluated the methods across four classification tasks in infant motility assessment (IMA) and speech emotion recognition (SER). Twelve annotators, categorized as experts or non-experts, performed data annotation under a limited annotation budget, and post-annotation experiments were conducted to evaluate the sampling methods. Across all classification tasks, 2DV performed best when aggregating labels across annotators. In IMA, 2DV most effectively captured rare classes, but also exhibited greater annotator-to-annotator label distribution variability resulting from the limited annotation budget, decreasing classification performance when models were trained on individual annotators' labels; in these cases, FAFT excelled. For SER, 2DV outperformed the other methods among expert annotators and matched their performance for non-experts in the individual-annotator setting. A failure risk analysis revealed that RND was the safest choice when annotator count or annotator expertise was uncertain, whereas 2DV had the highest risk due to its greater label distribution variability. Furthermore, post-experiment interviews indicated that 2DV made the annotation task more interesting and enjoyable. Overall, 2DV-based sampling appears promising for biomedical time-series data annotation, particularly when the annotation budget is not highly constrained.

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

Identification and Inference for Algorithmic Frontiers with Selective Labels

arXiv:2606.14977v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper provides identification results to characterize a fairness-accuracy (FA) frontier, and statistical inference tools to test hypotheses and build a confidence set for the FA-frontier, when outcomes are observed only for selected individuals. When the selection process is unrestricted but loss is measured in specific ways, we provide a characterization of the sharp identification region of the FA-frontier. Under an assumption of unconfoundedness conditional on observables (and unrestricted loss functions), we obtain point identification and propose a debiased machine learning estimator, derive its asymptotic distribution, and show how this can be used to carry out inference for the FA-frontier. In work in progress, we extend the partial identification results to a broader class of loss functions.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

An interpretable unsupervised representation learning for high precision measurement in particle physics

arXiv:2511.22246v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised learning has been widely applied to various tasks in particle physics. However, existing models lack precise control over their learned representations, limiting physical interpretability and hindering their use for accurate measurements. We propose the Histogram AutoEncoder (HistoAE), an unsupervised representation learning network featuring a custom histogram-based loss that enforces a physically structured latent space. Applied to silicon microstrip detectors, HistoAE learns an interpretable two-dimensional latent space corresponding to the particle's charge and impact position. After simple post-processing, it achieves a charge resolution of $0.25\,e$ and a position resolution of $3\,\mu\mathrm{m}$ on beam-test data, comparable to the conventional approach. These results demonstrate that unsupervised deep learning models can enable physically meaningful and quantitatively precise measurements. Moreover, the generative capacity of HistoAE enables straightforward extensions to fast detector simulations.

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

An Analysis of the Coordination Gap between Joint and Modular Learning for Job Shop Scheduling with Transportation Resources

arXiv:2604.24117v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient job-shop scheduling with transportation resources is critical for high-performance manufacturing. With the rise of "decentralized factories", multi-agent reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach for the combined scheduling of production and transportation tasks. Prior work has largely focused on developing novel cooperative architectures while overlooking the question of when joint training is necessary. Joint training denotes the simultaneous training of job and automatic guided vehicle scheduling agents, whereas modular training involves independently training each agent followed by post-hoc integration. In this study, we systematically investigate the conditions under which joint training is essential for optimal performance in the job-shop scheduling problem with transportation resources. Through a rigorous sensitivity analysis of resource scarcity and temporal dominance, we quantify the coordination gap – the performance difference between these two training modalities. In our evaluation, joint training outperforms the majority of dispatching rule combinations and modular training approaches. However, the coordination gap advantage diminishes in bottleneck environments, particularly under severe transport and processing constraints. These findings indicate that modular training represents a viable alternative in environments where a single scheduling task dominates. Overall, our work provides practical guidance for selecting between training modalities based on environmental conditions, enabling decision-makers to optimize reinforcement learning-based scheduling performance.

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

AL-GNN: Privacy-Preserving and Replay-Free Continual Graph Learning via Analytic Learning

arXiv:2512.18295v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual graph learning (CGL) aims to enable graph neural networks to incrementally learn from a stream of graph structured data without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Existing methods particularly those based on experience replay typically store and revisit past graph data to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, these approaches pose significant limitations, including privacy concerns, inefficiency. In this work, we propose AL GNN, a novel framework for continual graph learning that eliminates the need for backpropagation and replay buffers. Instead, AL GNN leverages principles from analytic learning theory to formulate learning as a recursive least squares optimization process. It maintains and updates model knowledge analytically through closed form classifier updates and a regularized feature autocorrelation matrix. This design enables efficient one pass training for each task, and inherently preserves data privacy by avoiding historical sample storage. Extensive experiments on multiple dynamic graph classification benchmarks demonstrate that AL GNN achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing methods. For instance, it improves average performance by 10% on CoraFull and reduces forgetting by over 30% on Reddit, while also reducing training time by nearly 50% due to its backpropagation free design.

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

Graphical Causal Reasoning for Root Cause Analysis in Cloud Networks

arXiv:2606.13532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cloud-computing relies on large-scale networks which are inherently complex systems. In this paper, we present a novel approach to root cause analysis (RCA) of cloud network incidents, leveraging graph-based causal discovery techniques. Our method addresses the limitations of rule-based automation by introducing a spatiotemporal grouping strategy and an automation ontology to reduce the dimensionality of the problem. We construct a causal graph from binary time series data using bivariate Granger causality and conditional independence tests. For inference, we introduce a probabilistic method that assigns edge-specific conditional probabilities as a function of time lag, allowing for interpretable, time-aware root cause scoring via causal graph traversal. We evaluated the system using a labeled dataset of 35 production incidents from a major cloud provider. The model successfully recalled the correct root cause in 85.7% of incidents and produced an exact match in 74.3%. In production, the deployed system has been used in over 800 real-world incidents, with positive qualitative feedback from network engineers. These results highlight the practicality of a data-driven, causal approach to RCA in dynamic and large-scale operational environments.

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

Quantum mechanics in configuration space in context

arXiv:2606.17622v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To enhance the way in which wave-particle duality is implemented in the modelling of quantum mechanical systems, Bukhari et al. [New J. Phys. 27, 084501 (2025)] recently introduced an alternative approach to quantum mechanics, namely quantum mechanics in configuration space. This formalism is based on a physically motivated quantisation of Newtonian mechanics and promotes the classical position-velocity states (x,v) to pairwise distinguishable quantum states. The resulting |x,v> states form the basis of the Hilbert space of individual quantum mechanical particles and evolve along classical trajectories. In this paper, we consider the modelling of a mechanical particle in free space and put quantum mechanics in configuration space into context. It is shown that this formalism increases the continuity between quantum and classical mechanics by avoiding a conceptual inconsistency associated with the definition of momentum in canonical quantisation. In addition, we emphasise that standard quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics in configuration space are based on two distinct formulations of classical mechanics.

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

SPICE: Synergy and Partial Information Based Curriculum Evolution

arXiv:2606.16639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal learning exploits complementary information across heterogeneous modalities. The informativeness of each modality can vary widely across samples and training stages. Existing multimodal curriculum learning strategies often assume that the relative complexity of samples remains unchanged throughout training and therefore cannot adapt to model evolution. We propose SPICE (Synergy and Partial Information based Curriculum Evolution), a novel progressive curriculum framework for multimodal interaction learning. Guided by Partial Information Decomposition (PID) theory, our approach decomposes multimodal interactions into redundant, unique, and synergistic information components, enabling an interpretable and dynamic characterization of sample complexity. Building on this decomposition, we design a progressive curriculum that evolves throughout training, allowing the model to transition from learning shared cross-modal cues to modality-specific patterns and, finally, to complex synergistic interactions. Adapting to model evolution, sample ordering is refined in real-time using PID information estimates derived from unimodal and multimodal predictions. Experiments across multiple multimodal benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over conventional training and state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of PID information decomposition and adaptive sample ordering for multimodal curriculum learning.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

COSMOS: Model-Agnostic Personalized Federated Learning with Clustered Server Models and Pseudo-Label-Only Communication

arXiv:2605.11165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) in heterogeneous environments remains challenging because client models often differ in both architecture and data distribution. While recent approaches attempt to address this challenge through client clustering and knowledge distillation, simultaneously handling architectural and statistical heterogeneity remains difficult. We introduce COSMOS, a model-agnostic framework that enables server-side personalization using only pseudo-label communication. Clients train local models and predict on the public data; the server clusters clients by prediction similarity, trains a cluster-specific model for each group using its own compute, and distills the resulting models back to clients. We provide the first theoretical analysis showing that distillation from the learned cluster models can yield exponential personalization risk contraction, going beyond the convergence-to-stationarity guarantees typically provided in model-agnostic FL. Experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that COSMOS consistently outperforms all model-agnostic FL baselines while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art personalized FL methods. More broadly, our results highlight personalized server-side learning with pseudo-labels as a promising paradigm for scalable and model-agnostic federated learning in highly heterogeneous environments.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

AgentArmor: A Framework, Evaluation, \& Mitigation of Coding Agent Failures

arXiv:2606.19380v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering and deployment are increasingly being delegated to AI coding agents. The scale of their adoption is surfacing rare, but highly destructive, failure modes. In this paper, we study these failure modes as stemming from three distinct mechanisms: underspecification, where default model behavior is unsafe; capability errors, where the safe action is available but the model does not adhere to it due to bias or capability limitations; and agent harness errors, where the model fails to execute the safe action through the harness. We evaluate these across 8 different evaluations, each inspired by real-life deployment failures, totaling 20 coding environments and 59 synthetic transcript templates. Based on this evaluation, we propose AgentArmor, an agent harness modification, to mitigate these errors. By adding an extended system prompt, a separate command classifier, a ``3 strikes'' policy, deterministic guardrails, and tools for the agent to edit its own context, we show that AgentArmor is safer across a statistically significant number of samples. Thus, we suggest concrete mitigations for current coding agents and a design philosophy for future agent harness features.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Robin-Neumann Coupling of PINN and FEM Solvers: A Steklov-Poincaré View, with Application to Fluid-Structure Interaction with Contact

arXiv:2606.14181v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are meshless and carry moving geometry and topology change through resampling of collocation points; the finite-element method (FEM) is the workhorse for boundary-fitted discretisations. Coupling the two across a shared interface promises the best of both, yet existing PINN-FEM schemes are validated only empirically. We put the coupling on a domain-decomposition footing: viewing each solver as a Steklov-Poincaré (trace-to-flux) operator, we transfer the classical Dirichlet-Neumann (DN) divergence diagnosis and its Robin-Neumann (RN) cure, including a closed-form, sweep-free interface impedance, and prove a PINN-specific contraction theorem: a trained network realises only a perturbed Steklov operator with a per-step training residual, and RN still contracts, with no shared-eigenbasis hypothesis, to a floor set by the achieved training loss. Because a PINN has no stiffness matrix, we introduce a Fourier-mode interface probe that recovers the network's resolvable Steklov eigenvalues to within 0.5% and doubles as a diagnostic of the network's spectral cap. The theory predicts measured PINN-FEM contraction rates to within 7% on 1D and 2D Poisson couplings, and a two-slab analogue of the large-added-mass regime shows RN's per-mode impedance matching winning decisively where tuned scalar relaxation saturates. We demonstrate the framework on a Stokes/rigid-disc problem with Alart-Curnier contact: the meshless PINN fluid absorbs the topology change at contact by collocation exclusion alone, no remeshing and no cut cells, and the static-equilibrium contact reaction matches the submerged weight to 0.4% under mesh refinement. We quantify remaining limitations: the warm-started PINN drifts off the Stokes manifold over long horizons, and matched FEM-FEM benchmarks attribute pre-impact squeeze-film signatures to PINN under-resolution.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

DeepRHP: A Hybrid Variational Autoencoder for Designing Random Heteropolymers as Protein Mimics

arXiv:2606.11651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic random heteropolymers (RHPs), consisting of a predefined set of monomers, offer an approach toward the design of protein-like materials. These RHPs, if designed appropriately, can mimic protein behavior and function. As such, there is a need for computational tools to efficiently guide RHP design. We bridge this gap by developing DeepRHP, a modified variational autoencoder (VAE) model under a semi-supervised framework. By equipping a classical VAE with an additional feature-based VAE, DeepRHP forces the latent space to capture structures of critical chemical features as well as individual RHP sequence patterns. In this sense, our method is versatile by allowing any relevant features to be incorporated in a hybrid manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DeepRHP by suggesting potential monomer compositions that stabilize membrane proteins (e.g. Aquaporin Z) in non-native environments and cross-validating our prediction with published results. The concordance between our model and true RHP function suggests strong potential in utilizing hybrid autoencoder architectures to guide RHP design for proteins and other biological compounds.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A ribbon ZX calculus for gauge theory

arXiv:2606.13551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ZX calculus provides a graphical formalism for reasoning about quantum processes, built from two interacting Frobenius algebras associated with the Z and X bases of a qubit. While it has found widespread application in quantum information and computing, its relationship to quantum field theory has only recently begun to be explored. In this work, we further develop this connection by providing a generalization of ZX calculus to two-dimensional Yang Mills theory with a compact gauge group. The key observation is that both frameworks can be organized around the Hopf Frobenius algebraic structure associated with a group algebra, which can in turn be described by the diagrammatics of two dimensional topological quantum field theory. Given the well known relationship between gauge theory and gravity in two and three dimensions, our work paves the way for applications of ZX to low dimensional gravity.

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

DLawBench: Evaluating LLMs Through Multi-Turn Legal Consultation

Lawyer-client consultation is a critical starting point for legal services. Effective legal assistance hinges on eliciting sufficient and truthful information from clients in order to devise strategies that best protect their interests. This task requires Large Language Models (LLMs) not only to perform robust legal reasoning, but also to strategically elicit material facts through multi-turn interactions and effectively guide clients with diverse personalities. Yet existing legal benchmarks overlook this interactive capability. To fill this gap, we introduce DLawBench, a diagnostic benchmark for real-world legal consultation. Drawing on realistic client behavior, we characterize lawyer-client interactions into four types: Cooperative, Dependent, Withdrawn, and Adversarial. Using dialogues grounded in real cases, DLawBench evaluates whether LLMs can effectively conduct legal consultation under realistic conditions. DLawBench comprises 461 cases from Chinese and U.S. law, 5,532 paired fact entries, 3,411 inquiry rubrics, and 3,348 issue-resolution rubrics, and evaluates 26 representative LLMs. Systematic experiments show substantial headroom: the best-performing model, GPT-5.5, achieves only 0.562 on consultation-grounded legal reasoning. More importantly, DLawBench exposes both sycophancy in legal consultation and a paradox: models perform worse when clients need guidance most.

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

UniIntervene: Agentic Intervention for Efficient Real-World Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.12372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (HiL-RL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for real-world robotic manipulation, enabling online policy improvement with human guidance. However, current HiL-RL frameworks remain intervention-intensive, relying on frequent human corrections to redirect the policy out of unproductive exploration, which incurs high labor cost and limits real-world scalability. To address this, we propose UniIntervene, an agentic intervention model that detects unproductive exploration and autonomously recovers the policy toward high-value states, taking over the bulk of interventions from human operators. Specifically, UniIntervene first performs future-conditioned action-value estimation, predicting the latent consequence of the current action and evaluating its induced value, which provides a more stable progress signal. Building on this, a temporal value-risk critic aggregates recent value dynamics and triggers intervention when the estimated value exhibits sustained stagnation or degradation. When intervention is required, UniIntervene retrieves a high-value recovery target from a memory of past intervention episodes and produces executable corrective actions through a goal-conditioned recovery policy. In this way, UniIntervene turns intervention from passive human correction into a value-aware recovery process for efficient real-world RL. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that UniIntervene improves the average success rate by 8.6% while reducing human interventions by 57% relative to state-of-the-art HiL-RL baselines.

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

Natural-Language Temporal Grounding in Hour-Long Videos is a Search Problem: A Benchmark and Empirical Decomposition

Temporal grounding–returning the interval $[t_s, t_e]$ for a natural-language query over a video–is the language interface to long-form video, yet has been studied on short videos; the dynamics of hour-scale natural-language grounding remain underexplored. We take the position that at hour-scale, the binding constraint is search, not recognition: Video-LLMs are bottlenecked not by localizing a nearby event, but–given a natural-language query–by searching for the relevant region of a long video. To test this, we release ExtremeWhenBench, the first open hour-scale grounding benchmark (2,273 queries over 194 videos, mean 75.7 min, max 9 hr) with an open-form query distribution. Every open Video-LLM collapses while a frame-level retrieval baseline outperforms them; a failure taxonomy attributes 85% of failures to search; and a retrieve-then-ground hybrid recovers 6.7x over the monolithic Video-LLM–mirroring retrieve-then-read in open-domain QA.

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

Incentives and Evidence in Learned Service Orchestration

arXiv:2606.16555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for service orchestration has been the subject of sustained research for over a decade, yet it is not used in production at scale. The usual explanation is that learned controllers degrade under delayed and noisy telemetry, workload shifts, and uncontrolled tenants. We test whether existing evidence supports that explanation. We evaluate three highly influential RL-based orchestration systems spanning resource allocation, DAG scheduling, and autoscaling, using pre-registered predictions about comparative degradation under production-relevant perturbations and paired inference with family-wise error correction. Across the tests, most predicted performance reversals do not occur. Diagnostic analyses show that these outcomes often reflect comparator collapse, artefact limitations, or evaluation choices rather than evidence that learned controllers tolerate the perturbations. One apparent advantage under observation lag is roughly fortyfold compared to a Kubernetes HPA-equivalent controller. Another widely cited result cannot be reconstructed from its released artefact, and the strongest reproducible margin is far smaller than the published results. Conclusions also reverse under changes in perturbation magnitude and evaluation mode. Based on these results and broader patterns in the literature, we identify an institutional problem. Publication and review incentives favour benchmark gains against convenient comparators, even when those gains provide little evidence of deployment performance. We argue that the problem is not solely technical. Rather, it is institutional, so learned orchestration needs production-grade comparators, registered perturbation models, separate operational metrics, and publication criteria that reward reproducible operational evidence. Without these changes, the literature can grow without establishing whether learning improves orchestration.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Machine-learned particle flow as a foundation model for collider physics

arXiv:2606.14373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The workflow from particle collision to physics analysis passes through a series of reconstruction steps that are traditionally modular and disconnected, with no shared representation linking low-level detector data to high-level analysis tasks. We show that casting event reconstruction as a machine learning problem naturally produces such a shared representation. We repurpose a machine learning model trained for particle-flow reconstruction (MLPF) to perform three distinct analysis tasks: jet flavor identification, jet energy regression, and missing momentum regression. By appending the per-particle latent representations learned during reconstruction as additional input features, we substantially improve over baselines that use kinematic features alone. We further demonstrate that a single linear layer trained using only the latent representations achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art baseline architectures, and outperforms the baseline for missing momentum regression with approximately 35 times fewer parameters. These results demonstrate that the latent representations learned during reconstruction encode essential physics information needed for downstream analysis, establishing MLPF as a foundation model and offering a concrete step toward an end-to-end pipeline from detector data to physics analysis.

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

Beyond the Linear Separability Ceiling: Aligning Representations in VLMs

A challenge in advancing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) is determining whether their failures on abstract reasoning tasks, such as Bongard problems, stem from flawed perception or faulty top-down reasoning. To disentangle these factors, we introduce a diagnostic framework centered on the Linear Separability Ceiling (LSC), the performance achievable by a linear classifier on a VLM's raw visual embeddings. Applying this framework to state-of-the-art VLMs, we uncover a pervasive ''alignment gap'', where most models fail to generatively outperform the linear separability of their representations. We find that the few models surpassing this ceiling do so via two mechanisms: by further refining visual representations into a more linearly separable format or by executing non-linear decision logic. We demonstrate that this bottleneck is not a fundamental limitation but a solvable visual alignment issue. Our method augments standard next-token prediction with a contrastive objective to restructure the visual manifold into a more one-dimensionally linear geometry, improving image-to-image comparison and enabling models to significantly surpass the LSC on abstract compositional reasoning tasks.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

A MULTICENTER SWEDISH HISTOPATHOLOGY IMAGE DATASET OF PEDIATRIC CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM TUMORS

Refined detection methods, more detailed tumor characterization, and adequate distinction between different pediatric tumor subtypes are necessary to improve diagnosis and treatment, enable precision medicine, and advance patient prognosis. However, the application of computational approaches to pediatric brain tumors remains limited, largely due to the lack of accessible datasets. To address part of this gap, we provide whole slide images (WSIs) of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained tissue sections from all pediatric central nervous system (CNS) samples collected in Sweden between 2013 and 2023. These data represent a population-based national cohort encompassing all six pediatric oncology centers in Sweden and are available through the Swedish Childhood Tumor Biobank (BTB). The dataset includes 1,446 WSIs of sufficient image quality with confirmed CNS tumor diagnoses, derived from 537 unique subjects (562 cases). In addition, diagnosticrelevant clinical information is included. Corresponding whole-genome sequencing (WGS), wholetranscriptome sequencing (WTS), and methylation array data are available for most tumor samples through separate resources. This H&E dataset has been specifically curated to support artificial intelligence-based analyses, while also serving broader applications in medical research and education. When combined with matched molecular data, it provides a valuable resource for advancing multimodal and precision diagnostic approaches in the pediatric population. Refined detection methods, more detailed tumor mapping and adequate distinction between different subtypes of pediatric tumors are necessary to improve treatment, enable precision medicine and improve patient prognosis. Application of computational algorithms for pediatric brain tumors is very limited mainly due to the unavailability of pediatric histology brain tumor data sets. To enable the development of AI models comprehensive datasets covering a wide range of pediatric brain tumors are needed.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

MorphStrata: Layer-Specific Perturbations for Generating Morphence Students in Time-Series Moving Target Defense

arXiv:2606.17435v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series forecasting models remain vulnerable to gradient-based adversarial attacks while existing defense mechanisms typically incur a trade-off in robustness for bounded response and compute cost. The problem is pronounced in Moving Target Defense where maintaining multiple randomized model instances substantially exacerbates the training overhead. In this work, we introduce MorphStrata, a student generation strategy with selective, layer-specific stochastic noise injection that extends the traditional Morphence defense. MorphStrata uses a Transformer backbone as the teacher and perturbs randomly selected architectural blocks to create structured heterogeneity across student models in response to varied data distributions and threat models. We evaluate against vanilla Transformer and Morphence backbones on a suite of benchmarks including the Jena Climate, Electricity Load Diagrams, and Appliances Energy Prediction using FGSM, BIM and PGD attacks across multiple attack strengths. Across datasets and attack regimes, the proposed ensemble maintains comparable adversarial RMSE. Specifically, for high entropy, periodic datasets as in the case of the AEP data, MorphStrata achieves the lowest RMSE across all attacks and perturbation budgets, improving over the static baseline by up to 24.11% and 97.97% under FGSM and BIM respectively at an epsilon value of 0.5 over 30 randomized trials. Targeting the layers to generate MorphStrata students accounts for less than 1% increase in train-times over the Morphence MTD baseline for most of the experiments, while accounting for double digit gains in adversarial RMSE reduction. We also observe a positive correlation between higher pairwise L2 distance (among generated students) and overall defense effectiveness. In summary, MorphStrata maintains adversarial robustness as an MTD defense at marginal cost deltas when compared to existing baselines.

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

TerraMARS: A Domain-Adapted Small-Language-Model Pipeline for Mars Terraforming Literature

Researchers are interested in learning about Mars so that it may eventually become habitable for humans. To achieve this, there is a need for comprehensive knowledge of the planet's atmosphere, hydrology, surface chemistry, radiation environment, and spatial features through the scientific literature. These contain valuable information and meaningful quantitative constraints that can be used in other models and studies, such as habitability assessment and future terraforming studies. We present TerraMARS, an end-to-end information extraction pipeline that combines a domain-adapted Small Language Model to answer Mars terraforming-related questions and convert unstructured Mars science text into machine-readable structured outputs in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. A corpus of open-access papers is collected and processed using a multistage retrieval and chunking framework. Google Gemma 3 1B was adapted to the domain using Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) fine-tuning on Mars-specific question-answering and information extraction datasets. The resulting pipeline generates both types of output and provides a foundation for integrating knowledge from scientific literature into downstream applications like digital twins and habitability modeling for Mars. The output from this pipeline looks promising, but further improvements are needed to increase extraction accuracy and factual consistency.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

AI for Social Good: An Investigation of the Causal Relationship Between Environmental Regulations and Their Effects on Air Pollution in London, UK

arXiv:2606.15257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Air pollution regulation is central to urban public health governance, but estimating its effects is difficult because policies are implemented non-randomly and pollution trajectories are shaped by meteorology, socioeconomic change, temporal trends, and overlapping interventions. This study develops an uncertainty-aware Bayesian deep learning framework to estimate the aggregate effect of air pollution regulations on PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations in London from 2010 to 2020. The framework integrates daily PM$_{2.5}$ observations from Inner London monitoring stations, meteorological covariates, annual socioeconomic indicators, month-of-year and day-of-week indicators, and daily regulation status data for 32 policy measures. A Bayesian LSTM captures temporal dependencies in environmental and socioeconomic covariates, Bayesian embedding layers represent temporal and regulation status inputs, and a regulation status prediction branch supports propensity score-based adjustment for non-random policy implementation. Regulatory effects are estimated by comparing observed PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations with counterfactual predictions under a hypothetical no-regulation scenario, with uncertainty summarized across repeated Bayesian training runs and bootstrap resampling. Results show that London's regulations were associated with an average PM$_{2.5}$ reduction of 1.88 $\mu$g/m$^3$, a relative reduction of 12.35%, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.64-2.12 $\mu$g/m$^3$. Estimated effects were limited before 2013, became clearer from 2013 to 2017, and were strongest in 2018 and 2019. The findings suggest that sustained and cumulative regulatory interventions contributed to measurable improvements in London's air quality. This study demonstrates how uncertainty-aware causal AI can support environmental accountability, public health protection, and evidence-based governance for environmental decision-making.