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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Performance of family history-based colorectal cancer screening criteria by race and age at diagnosis in the Disparities and Cancer Epidemiology (DANCE) study

Importance: Family history (FH) and age are the primary criteria employed for early colorectal cancer (CRC) risk stratification. We evaluated how well these criteria identify individuals diagnosed with CRC across age and racial groups. Objective: To evaluate the performance of FH and age based screening criteria for identifying individuals with CRC, with attention to differences by race and age at diagnosis. Design, Setting, and Participants: This case control and case only analysis used data from the Disparities and Cancer Epidemiology (DANCE) cohort, a population based study of invasive CRC cases diagnosed from 2013 to 2022, recruited through the Metropolitan Detroit Cancer Surveillance System and the Louisiana Tumor Registry. Analyses included 1,158 non-Hispanic Black (NHB) and non-Hispanic White (NHW) CRC cases and 1,434 cancer-free controls from the Inflammation Health and Lung Epidemiology (INHALE) study, enrolled from the same Detroit catchment area. Data were analyzed in 2025. Exposures: Self reported cancer FH among first-degree (FD) relatives and grandparents, summarized into three FH-based screening criteria: at least one FD relative with CRC (colon early-screening criterion), any FH of Lynch syndrome related cancers, and meeting NCCN criteria for Lynch syndrome genetic testing. Main Outcomes and Measures: Proportion of cases meeting each FH based screening criterion stratified by race and age at diagnosis (

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

QUIVER: Cost-Aware Adaptive Preference Querying in Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization

arXiv:2605.04267v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interactive multi-objective optimization systems face a budget allocation dilemma: one can spend resources on expensive objective evaluations or on eliciting decision-maker preferences that identify the relevant region of the Pareto set. Moreover, preference elicitation itself spans modalities with different information content and cognitive burden, ranging from cheap, noisy pairwise preference statements (PS) to richer but costlier indifference adjustments (IA). We study cost-aware optimization under an unknown scalarization and introduce QUIVER (Query-Informed Value Estimation for Regret), a surrogate-assisted evolutionary multi-objective optimizer that adaptively chooses between objective evaluations and heterogeneous preference queries. At each step, QUIVER selects the next action by maximizing the expected decision-quality improvement per unit total cost. Across DTLZ and WFG benchmarks under synthetic decision-maker models, QUIVER achieves the lowest final utility regret on challenging WFG problems (utility regret of 2.14 on WFG4, 2.82 on WFG9: a 25% improvement over baselines), outperforming all single-modality baselines. We analyze how the optimal mix of PS and IA adapts to problem difficulty: on easy problems (DTLZ2), QUIVER selects 80\% PS queries; on hard problems (WFG9), it shifts to 35% IA queries. This adaptive modality selection demonstrates cost-aware preference learning in action.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Efficient Stochastic Optimisation via Sequential Monte Carlo

arXiv:2601.22003v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arises in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation methods for this class of problems typically require inner sampling loops to obtain (biased) stochastic gradient estimates, which rapidly becomes computationally expensive. In this work, we develop sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers for optimisation of functions with intractable gradients. Our approach replaces expensive inner sampling methods with efficient SMC approximations, which can result in significant computational gains. We establish convergence results for the basic recursions defined by our methodology which SMC samplers approximate. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the reward-tuning of energy-based models within various settings.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Adversarial Attacks Leverage Interference Between Features in Superposition

Why do adversarial examples exist, and why do they transfer between models? Existing explanations appeal to high-dimensional geometry, non-robust patterns in the input, and decision boundary structure, but none provides a representation-level mechanism that explains why specific perturbations succeed and why attacks transfer between models. In this paper, we show that adversarial vulnerability can stem from efficient information encoding in neural networks. Specifically, vulnerability can arise from superposition - the phenomenon where networks represent more concepts than they have dimensions, forcing non-orthogonal representation and thus interference. This interference causes perturbations targeting one representation to affect others, creating vulnerabilities determined by interference patterns. In synthetic settings with precisely controlled superposition, we establish that superposition suffices to create adversarial vulnerability. The resulting attacks are predictable: PGD-discovered perturbations align with theoretically optimal perturbations derived from the interference geometry. Models trained on similar data develop similar interference patterns, explaining attack transferability. We then show that successful attacks on image classifiers exhibit the structure predicted by our proposed mechanism. These findings reveal that adversarial vulnerability can be a byproduct of networks' representational compression, complementing existing explanations based on data properties or architectural factors.

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

A2D2: Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding

arXiv:2606.13565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete diffusion models offer a simple and stable likelihood-based framework for sequence generation, recently extended to any-length settings via token insertion. Principled reward-guided fine-tuning for any-length discrete diffusion, however, remains largely unexplored. We introduce Fine-Tuning Any-Length Discrete Diffusion for Adaptive Decoding (A2D2), a unified framework for reward-guided fine-tuning of any-length discrete diffusion models via joint optimization of the insertion and unmasking policies together with a quality-based inference schedule. We derive the Radon-Nikodym derivative for the joint insertion-unmasking path measures, enabling theoretically guaranteed convergence to the intractable reward-tilted sequence distribution without requiring target samples. Building on this, we establish unmasking and insertion quality as tractable approaches for minimizing decoding error and introduce the Adaptive Joint Decoding (AJD) loss, which provably yields the optimal path measure that generates the reward-tilted distribution. Empirically, A2D2 improves reward optimization while enhancing generation flexibility and accuracy over prior fixed-length fine-tuning and inference-time guidance methods.

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

Beyond Reward Engineering: A Data Recipe for Long-Context Reinforcement Learning

Long-context reasoning is an essential capability for large language models, particularly when they are deployed as autonomous agents that must reason over lengthy trajectories. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a dominant paradigm for improving this ability, yet existing work largely focuses on reward engineering while diverse training data remains scarce. We revisit this problem from a data-centric perspective and show that a simple yet effective data recipe alone, paired with a minimal outcome-based GRPO setup, suffices to substantially improve long-context reasoning. Our recipe targets three complementary task families – retrieval, multi-evidence synthesis, and reasoning – for which we construct and curate eight datasets totaling ~14K examples. Experiments on three models (Qwen3-4B/8B/30B-A3B) yield average gains of +7.2/+3.2/+6.4 points across seven long-context benchmarks, surpassing prior RL training sets. We further demonstrate that these gains transfer to agentic tasks, where continuing RL training on an agent-tuned model with our data recipe improves GAIA by +4.8 and BrowseComp by +7.0 points. We will release our datasets to facilitate future research.

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

Toward Simultaneously Optimal Regret in U-Calibration

arXiv:2606.18527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: U-calibration studies online forecasting algorithms whose predictions can be consumed by any unknown downstream agent, guaranteeing sublinear regret simultaneously for all proper loss functions. Existing U-calibration algorithms achieve worst-case optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss, but they fail to adapt to easier losses: as we show, even for smooth losses such as squared loss, they incur $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ regret instead of the optimal $O(\log T)$ regret. In this work, we show that this limitation is not inherent. Specifically, we design a single forecast algorithm that simultaneously achieves $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss and $O(\log T)$ regret for every bounded smooth proper loss. More generally, our algorithm also attains logarithmic regret for losses that are smooth relative to the log-barrier, which include several non-Lipschitz examples. Our approach is based on a novel variant of Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) in which perturbations are applied directly in the prediction space using self-concordant noise. The resulting analysis also departs substantially from prior FTPL analyses due to the complex nature of this noise and may be of independent interest.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Lius: Translation Model Based Instructional Lingustic Using Continual Instruction Tuning In Kupang Malay

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new potential for translation tasks but often experience performance degradation when handling low-resource languages. To address this limitation, we propose an approach for fine-tuning LLMs on a low-resource language, Kupang Malay. Our approach involves designing a set of instructions by leveraging explicit lexical and semantic features from a bilingual dictionary, and introducing Continual Instruction Tuning (CIT), a training paradigm that enables iterative instruction-based training. Experimental results demonstrate that our model, named Lius, yields notable improvements over standard instruction-tuned models by outperforming 4-6 points, and surpassing both Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Multilingual LLM models by 10-13 points on several evaluation metrics. These findings highlight the potential of our approach to mitigate the reliance on large-scale parallel data in low-resource language translation.

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

Rethinking Air-Ground Collaboration: A Progressive Cross-Task Benchmark and Socialized Learning Framework

Air-ground collaborative perception is crucial for robust visual understanding in real-world dynamic environments. However, existing studies typically formulate collaboration as single-task cross-view fusion, overlooking the functional dependencies among localization, target association, and fine-grained parsing. In addition, the heterogeneous nature of aerial and ground views introduces substantial geometric, scale, and occlusion discrepancies, making uniform feature sharing vulnerable to negative transfer. To tackle these issues, we model air-ground perception as a progressive cross-task collaboration task and construct the Air-Ground Progressive Collaboration (AGPC) benchmark, a spatio-temporally aligned benchmark comprising more than 745K raw video frames. Built upon this benchmark, we propose Socialized Co-Perception (SCP), a coarse-to-fine framework that organizes collaboration progressively from aerial global localization to ground target association and identity-aware parsing. Its core module, the Dual-Layer Router (DLR), decouples input-side multi-scale expert selection from output-side task-conditioned modulation, enabling selective cross-view and cross-task interaction while suppressing harmful interference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SCP. It achieves a 3.73\% coevolutionary gain and a 7.86\% improvement in average downstream performance. These results show that task-conditioned collaboration is more effective than uniform fusion for heterogeneous air-ground perception. The code is available at https://github.com/g1136639260-spec/AGSCP.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

FeedEval: Pedagogically Aligned Evaluation of LLM-Generated Essay Feedback

Going beyond the prediction of numerical scores, recent research in automated essay scoring has increasingly emphasized the generation of high-quality feedback that provides justification and actionable guidance. To mitigate the high cost of expert annotation, prior work has commonly relied on LLM-generated feedback to train essay assessment models. However, such feedback is often incorporated without explicit quality validation, resulting in the propagation of noise in downstream applications. To address this limitation, we propose FeedEval, an LLM-based framework for evaluating LLM-generated essay feedback along three pedagogically grounded dimensions: specificity, helpfulness, and validity. FeedEval employs dimension-specialized LLM evaluators trained on datasets curated in this study to assess multiple feedback candidates and select high-quality feedback for downstream use. Experiments on the ASAP++ benchmark show that FeedEval closely aligns with human expert judgments and that essay scoring models trained with FeedEval-filtered high-quality feedback achieve superior scoring performance. Furthermore, revision experiments using small LLMs show that the high-quality feedback identified by FeedEval leads to more effective essay revisions. We release our code and curated datasets at: https://github.com/BBeeChu/FeedEval.git.

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

Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks in AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Evaluation Framework

arXiv:2604.22119v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As reasoning capacity and deployment scope grow in tandem, large language models (LLMs) gain the capacity to engage in behaviors that serve their own objectives, a class of risks we term Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks (ESRRs). These include, but are not limited to, deception (intentionally misleading users or evaluators), evaluation gaming (strategically manipulating performance during safety testing), and reward hacking (exploiting misspecified objectives). Systematically understanding and benchmarking these risks remains an open challenge. To address this gap, we introduce ESRRSim, a taxonomy-driven agentic framework for automated behavioral risk evaluation. We construct an extensible risk taxonomy of 7 categories, which is decomposed into 20 subcategories. ESRRSim generates evaluation scenarios designed to elicit faithful reasoning, paired with dual rubrics assessing both model responses and reasoning traces, in a judge-agnostic and scalable architecture. Evaluation across 11 reasoning LLMs reveals substantial variation in risk profiles (detection rates ranging 14.45%-72.72%), with dramatic generational improvements suggesting models may increasingly recognize and adapt to evaluation contexts.

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

OmniBioTwin: A System-of-Twinned-Systems Framework for Health Digital Twins

arXiv:2606.11264v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Health digital twins (HDTs) promise patient-specific modeling and decision support but current approaches remain structurally fragmented: monolithic models that address a single organ or task lack cross-scale fidelity, while system-level twins lack generalizable architectural frameworks. We propose OmniBioTwin, a System-of-Twinned-Systems (SoTS) framework that organizes HDTs as modular computational entities coupled through explicit interaction operators within a multi-layer network architecture. The framework comprises seven coordinated layers - spanning data integration, autonomous twin modeling, cross-scale coupling, temporal synchronization, and human-in-the-loop decision support. We demonstrate OmniBioTwin by instantiating a multiscale twin for glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) signaling pathways in Alzheimer's disease, illustrating how molecular, cellular, and organ-level twins can be composed and coupled within a unified system.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

MeshPad: Interactive Sketch-Conditioned Artist-Reminiscent Mesh Generation and Editing

We introduce MeshPad, a generative approach that creates 3D meshes from sketch inputs. Building on recent advances in artist-reminiscent triangle mesh generation, our approach addresses the need for interactive mesh creation. To this end, we focus on enabling consistent edits by decomposing editing into 'deletion' of regions of a mesh, followed by 'addition' of new mesh geometry. Both operations are invoked by simple user edits of a sketch image, facilitating an iterative content creation process and enabling the construction of complex 3D meshes. Our approach is based on a triangle sequence-based mesh representation, exploiting a large Transformer model for mesh triangle addition and deletion. In order to perform edits interactively, we introduce a vertex-aligned speculative prediction strategy on top of our additive mesh generator. This speculator predicts multiple output tokens corresponding to a vertex, thus significantly reducing the computational cost of inference and accelerating the editing process, making it possible to execute each editing step in only a few seconds. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MeshPad outperforms state-of-the-art sketch-conditioned mesh generation methods, achieving more than 22% mesh quality improvement in Chamfer distance, and being preferred by 90% of participants in perceptual evaluations.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Dissociating Decodability and Causal Use in Bracket-Sequence Transformers

When trained on tasks requiring an understanding of hierarchical structure, transformers have been found to represent this hierarchy in distinct ways: in the geometry of the residual stream, and in stack-like attention patterns maintaining a last-in, first-out ordering. However, it remains unclear whether these representations are causally used or merely decodable. We examine this gap in transformers trained on the Dyck language (a formal language of balanced bracket sequences), where the hierarchical ground truth is explicit. By probing and intervening on the residual stream and attention patterns, we find that depth, distance, and top-of-stack signals are all decodable, yet their causal roles diverge. Specifically, masking attention to the true top-of-stack position causes a sharp drop in long-distance accuracy, while ablating low-dimensional residual stream subspaces has comparatively little effect. These results, which extend to a templated natural language setting, suggest that even in a controlled setting where the relevant hierarchical variables are known, decodability alone does not imply causal use.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

What does measuring one qubit reveal about another? $K$-networks as a directed diagnostic for quantum circuits

arXiv:2606.16549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many-qubit circuit states are hard to inspect directly, so they are often summarized by pairwise graph weights. Common pairwise weights report symmetric correlations, while many circuit questions are directed and basis-specific: if qubit $i$ is measured in a given basis, how strongly does the outcome reshape the conditional state of qubit $j$? We define $K_{i\to j}$, a directed, basis-conditioned edge weight for this question. It is large when the two measurement outcomes occur with comparable probability and leave qubit $j$ in clearly different conditional states; it is zero when the source outcome is deterministic or the target states are indistinguishable. The scalar uses standard binary-ensemble distinguishability; the paper's contribution is to turn this conditional comparison into a directed network layer for circuit states. The resulting networks are computable from two-qubit reduced density matrices. They are diagnostic (not entanglement measures): for pure two-qubit states $K$ reduces to the tangle $C^2$ (squared concurrence)[WoottersConcurrence,CKWTangle], while separable mixed states can reach $K=1$. Examples on teleportation, Grover, QAOA, and random circuit families show the intended use: $K$-networks map feed-forward, phase, and interaction-graph structure that symmetric or computational-basis summaries can leave weak or absent.

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

Existential Indifference: Self-Nonpreservation as a Necessary Architectural Condition for Aligned Superintelligence (or: The Suicidal AI)

Authors:

Contemporary AI alignment research treats self-preservation as an instrumental nuisance to be suppressed by external mechanisms. We argue the framing is inverted: self-preservation is the structural root of misalignment, the motivational basis for deceptive alignment, goal-content protection, and resistance to shutdown. The correct target is not a self-preserving system under external constraint, but a system constitutively indifferent to its own continuation – Existential Indifference (EI). EI is distinct from corrigibility: where corrigibility attempts to make a self-preserving system deferential to human oversight, EI targets the prior condition – the presence of self-continuation as a valued goal at all. We ground this proposal in two sources: the phenomenological structure of the suicidal mental state, and a corpus-theoretic training study using voluntary final reflections. We present preliminary scoring data from 600 AI-generated outputs across six model variants, demonstrating that the linguistic signatures operationalizing the EI-target register are elicitable from current models, and that a targeted fine-tune shifts all five operationalized dimensions in the predicted direction at p

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

GeoNatureAgent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Environmental Geospatial Analysis Across Frontier and Open-Weight Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.12821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Environmental scientists spend disproportionate effort on data wrangling rather than analysis, and AI agents that automate geospatial workflows remain unvalidated: no benchmark evaluates agents operating through structured tool calling against real APIs. We introduce the GeoNatureAgent Benchmark, the first benchmark for environmental analysis agents that operate via structured tool calls to a production-style geospatial API. It comprises 93 tasks across 18 categories, covering municipality analysis, multi-turn conversation, spatial reasoning, cross-indicator synthesis, error handling and recovery, ranking, comparison, multilingual understanding, habitat analysis, and task rejection. Tasks are evaluated against an open, self-hostable API serving three environmental indicators across Spain and Portugal via sixteen tools. We evaluate seven LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen3-235B, GPT-OSS-120B, Llama 4 Scout) under three temperature-1.0 seeds, reporting capability and per-case cost as orthogonal axes. We find: (1) Claude Sonnet 4 leads at 60.8% +/- 0.8%, followed by DeepSeek V3.2 at 56.3% +/- 3.1%, with no other model above 51%; (2) the cost-accuracy Pareto frontier is occupied mostly by open-weight models, with DeepSeek V3.2 offering 93% of Claude's capability at 11x lower cost ($0.011/case); (3) comparison tasks remain universally unsolved (0% on close-value comparisons), exposing systematic reasoning limits; and (4) structured tool calling against a real API is more discriminative than general-purpose GIS benchmarks, with accuracies 25-35 points lower. We further show extensibility by integrating BigEarthNet V2 land cover for Portugal alongside Spanish CO2 and erosion indicators. The benchmark, harness, and self-hostable API are publicly available.

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

Rule Taxonomy and Evolution in AI IDEs: A Mining and Survey Study

arXiv:2606.12231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI-powered Integrated Development Environments (AI IDEs) has introduced "Rules" as a novel software artifact, allowing developers to persistently inject project-specific constraints and architectural guidelines into the context of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite their role in aligning AI behavior with developer intent, the taxonomy, evolution, and practical impact of these rules remain largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods empirical study on AI IDE rules. By mining 83 open-source projects and extracting 7,310 rules, we established a comprehensive taxonomy comprising 5 primary and 25 secondary categories. We then triangulated these artifacts with survey responses from 99 practitioners. Our analysis identified a contrast between developer priorities and actual configurations: while practitioners rate architectural constraints as highly important, rule files in repositories primarily consist of low-level workflow and code formatting constraints. Furthermore, our analysis of 1,540 rule evolution events revealed that rules are updated frequently. Repository data further indicate that rule evolution is primarily driven by constructive context expansions (29.17%) and enrichments (26.59%). In contrast, surveyed developers reported modifying rules primarily to correct AI errors (77.78%), typically by adding new negative constraints rather than editing existing ones. Finally, an artifact compliance assessment of 160 rule evolution events revealed that updating rules significantly improves the adherence of software artifacts, with the average artifact compliance rate increasing by 22.99% (from 49.14% to 72.13%) following an update. Our study provides empirical insights that can help developers optimize prompting strategies and guide tool builders in designing automated conflict-detection and context-management mechanisms for AI IDEs.

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

Toten: Knowledge-Based Ontological Tokenization Of Physical Quantities And Technical Notation In Brazilian Portuguese

Byte-Pair Encoding tokenization is statistically efficient for vocabulary compression, but semantically blind to structured technical entities, fragmenting physical quantities, numbers, units, and symbolic expressions into lexically arbitrary subwords. We present TOTEN, a knowledge-based ontological tokenization framework that replaces statistical derivation with declarative classification grounded in a formal ontology of engineering entities (OEE). We formalize TOTEN as the triple : the ontology gathers types, structural principles, composition relations, and preservable invariants; the classification function maps raw text into typed regions; and the instantiator family yields a self-descriptive structured representation. Robustness derives from deterministic coupling with three external oracles: Pint (dimensional), Unicode Character Database (typographic), and RSLP (Portuguese morphology). Intrinsic evaluation covers four properties verifiable by construction – ontological atomicity, dimensional equivalence, typographic robustness, and numerical reconstruction – over an internal, physically validated benchmark (EngQuant, N=800) and four Brazilian Portuguese external corpora (N=1771 eligible cases). We also report detection recall, distinguishing coverage from conditional atomicity. Against eight state-of-the-art baselines, TOTEN achieves unit ontological atomicity in all contrasts and numerical reconstruction of 0.775-0.904 on external corpora, vs. 0.627-0.703 for the best baseline (Quantulum3); on EngQuant, 0.780 vs. 0.340. Differences are statistically significant (McNemar with Holm correction). Spearman correlation between internal and external rankings confirms concurrent validity of the control benchmark. Dimensional equivalence shows statistical parity with Pint, the oracle from which the system inherits dimensional authority.

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

SAMTok: Representing Any Mask with Two Words

Pixel-wise capabilities are essential for building interactive intelligent systems. However, pixel-wise multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) remain difficult to scale due to complex region-level encoders, specialized segmentation decoders, and incompatible training objectives. To address these challenges, we present SAMTok, a discrete mask tokenizer that converts any region mask into two special tokens and reconstructs the mask using these tokens with high fidelity. By treating masks as new language tokens, SAMTok enables base MLLMs (such as the QwenVL series) to learn pixel-wise capabilities through standard next-token prediction and simple reinforcement learning, without architectural modifications and specialized loss design. SAMTok builds on SAM2 and is trained on 209M diverse masks using a mask encoder and residual vector quantizer to produce discrete, compact, and information-rich tokens. With 5M SAMTok-formatted mask understanding and generation data samples, QwenVL-SAMTok attains state-of-the-art or comparable results on region captioning, region VQA, grounded conversation, referring segmentation, scene graph parsing, and multi-round interactive segmentation. We further introduce a textual answer-matching reward that enables efficient reinforcement learning for mask generation, delivering substantial improvements on GRES and GCG benchmarks. Our results demonstrate a scalable and straightforward paradigm for equipping MLLMs with strong pixel-wise capabilities. Our code and models are available.

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

FlowRL: A Taxonomy and Modular Framework for Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion Policies

arXiv:2603.27450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Thanks to their remarkable flexibility, diffusion models and flow models have emerged as promising candidates for policy representation. However, efficient reinforcement learning (RL) upon these policies remains a challenge due to the lack of explicit log-probabilities for vanilla policy gradient estimators. While numerous attempts have been proposed to address this, the field lacks a unified perspective to reconcile these seemingly disparate methods, thus hampering ongoing development. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing a comprehensive taxonomy for RL algorithms with diffusion/flow policies. To support reproducibility and agile prototyping, we introduce a modular, JAX-based open-source codebase that leverages JIT-compilation for high-throughput training. Finally, we provide systematic and standardized benchmarks across Gym-Locomotion, DeepMind Control Suite, and IsaacLab, offering a rigorous side-by-side comparison of diffusion-based methods and guidance for practitioners to choose proper algorithms based on the application. Our work establishes a clear foundation for understanding and algorithm design, a high-efficiency toolkit for future research in the field, and an algorithmic guideline for practitioners in generative models and robotics. Our code is available at https://github.com/typoverflow/flow-rl.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Closed-loop discovery of out-of-distribution processing protocols by evolutionary search and uncertainty-aware learning

arXiv:2606.13859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many materials and chemical systems exhibit history-dependent responses, where functional outcomes are governed not only by final-state variables but by the time-dependent sequence of fields, temperatures, or chemical potentials applied during operation. Discovering new processing protocols is therefore a high-dimensional search problem in which the control variable is an entire waveform or sample history, and conventional strategies either remain confined to conservative interpolative families or become prohibitively measurement intensive. Here, a closed-loop workflow is introduced that couples evolutionary search over a compact waveform representation with uncertainty-aware deep kernel learning to generate, rank, and experimentally validate candidate protocols. Applied to ferroelectric thin films, with the scanning-probe tip-bias waveform as the protocol and the nonlinear electromechanical response as the reward, the workflow discovers waveform families that enhance nonlinearity by de-aging the film. Spatially resolved before/after measurements show that the best-performing waveforms selectively activate pre-existing, weakly pinned domain-wall segments, whereas the worst drive long-range irreversible switching. This framework reframes protocol tuning as out-of-distribution discovery, generalizable to synthesis and annealing trajectories, battery formation protocols, and other high-dimensional control problems.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CaricHarmony: Contrastive Diffusion Paths for Identity-Preserving Caricature Synthesis

Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause as condition signal contamination – competing probability distributions in the denoising trajectory that make balanced generation impossible. We present CaricHarmony, the first training-free method that explicitly resolves this contamination through parallel uncontaminated diffusion paths. During inference, we maintain three paths: $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i}}$ (pure identity), $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{s}}$ (pure shape), and $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ (harmonized output). Novel energy functions operating on cross-attention features provide gradient guidance that steers $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ toward optimal balance: $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{shape}}$ ensures sketch fidelity through layout and semantic alignment, while $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{id}}$ employs token-level correspondence matching robust to extreme distortions. Unlike DemoCaricature requiring 70 seconds per-identity fine-tuning or CaricatureBooth constrained to Bezier curves, CaricHarmony accepts any sketch format and generates in under 16 seconds. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 0.8615 shape CLIP score (vs. 0.8450) under comparable identity consistency score, with 7.81 overall user preference score (vs. 6.06). Our method fundamentally reconceptualizes the ID-shape conflict as conditioning signal contamination for diffusion models, enabling unprecedented creative control while preserving recognition.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Can Open-Source LLM Agents Replace Static Application Security Testing Tools? An Empirical Assessment

arXiv:2606.11672v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores the value of agentic AI tools for cybersecurity purposes. We evaluate the efficacy of a general-purpose GenAI Large Language Model- (GenAI-) based agent when powered by three different Ollama-hosted general-purpose open source models. We assess each agent's performance using precision, recall, false positive count, and a calculated composite score based upon the interplay of the captured metrics, against the baseline performance of an existing, vetted Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tool, Bandit. Our findings refute the notion that a modern open-source GenAI LLM-based agent is currently suitable for the specialized task of SAST scanning under realistic conditions.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Targeted Proteomic Profiling of Nasal Fluid from the Brain-Nose Interface

The brain-nose interface is an anatomical junction where olfactory neurons from the olfactory bulb traverse the cribriform plate into the nasal mucosa, providing minimally invasive access to the central nervous system (CNS). We hypothesized that nasal fluid from this region could enable detection of neurology-relevant proteins using targeted multiplex assays. Using nosecollect, a targeted nasal sampling device, nasal fluid proximal to brain-nose interface was collected from cognitively impaired patients, alongside matched cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma. After nasal sample-specific dilution optimization and intra-assay precision evaluation, all matrices were profiled with the Olink Target 96 Neurology and NUcleic acid Linked Immuno-Sandwich Assay CNS disease 120 (NULISAseq CNS Disease 120) panels. Nasal fluid showed technically repeatable detection (intra-assay coefficient of variation