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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Resources and Wigner Symmetry in Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering from Effective Field Theory

arXiv:2606.17148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study quantum resources in the spin degrees of freedom, such as entanglement, stabilizer magic, and non-local magic, in low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering through next-to-leading order in pionless effective field theory. Treating each nucleon spin as a qubit, we calculate the corresponding resource-generating powers of the scattering operator at generic center-of-mass momentum and scattering angle $\Theta$. The analysis retains $S$- and $P$-wave channels generated by two-derivative contact interactions. When the microscopic physics exhibits Wigner's $SU(4)$ spin-flavor symmetry, the neutron-proton amplitude becomes proportional to the spin-space identity operator and therefore generates no new resources after scattering, extending an observation previously made for leading-order $S$-wave scattering. The same-nucleon channel remains resource-generating because constraints from identical particles project out part of the Hilbert space. These results show how enhanced symmetries, partial-wave structure, and resource generation are intertwined in low-energy two-body scattering.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

SpeechDx: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Clinical Speech AI

Speech offers a uniquely informative window into health by simultaneously engaging neurological, motor, respiratory, and vocal systems. Current clinical speech AI methods have largely progressed through isolated condition-specific studies, making results difficult to compare and generalization difficult to assess. We introduce SpeechDx, a large-scale benchmark for clinical speech AI spanning 12 datasets and 27 tasks across diverse health conditions. To enable evaluation across shared clinical mechanisms, SpeechDx structures tasks by the stage of speech production they disrupt: conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. The benchmark tests generalization by including tasks with limited labeled data and evaluating the same health condition across multiple datasets, distinguishing clinically meaningful patterns from dataset artefacts. We systematically evaluate 12 state-of-the-art audio encoders across all tasks and under zero-shot cross-condition transfer. Results show that large-scale speech models represent the strongest overall baselines, domain-specific models improve performance only on closely matched tasks, and no current representation generalizes reliably across the clinical speech landscape. SpeechDx establishes a shared evaluation framework for tracking progress toward general-purpose clinical speech representations

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

Intrinsic Computational Functionalism and Simulated Consciousness

arXiv:2606.15348v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A common objection to artificial or simulated consciousness is that a simulated brain is no more conscious than simulated water is wet. We address this from the perspective of Intrinsic Computational Functionalism (ICF): if consciousness is computationally constituted, it depends not on externally imposed descriptions but on the computational structures a system physically realizes in virtue of its own causal-dynamical organization. In previous work we developed Canonical Functionalism as a mathematically precise special case of this anti-interpretivist program, identifying functional states by their complete future input-output roles under a fixed interface. Here we argue that this input-output construction, though important, is incomplete: as a behavioral boundary case of ICF, it makes lookup tables and unfolded systems that preserve the same boundary behavior canonically equivalent. A consciousness-relevant canonical representation must instead include internal mechanisms, interventions, and joint readouts belonging to the relevant intrinsic organization. We therefore define a mechanism-enriched canonical structure and use it to formulate Intrinsic Causal-Computational Realization (ICCR), a realization relation preserving physical implementation, intrinsic state individuation, transition structure, intervention profiles, and the relevant agent-body-world boundary. The central result is conditional: if conscious properties are invariants of intrinsic causal-computational organization, then any system satisfying ICCR realizes the same consciousness-relevant properties, whether biological, artificial, or simulated. We discuss objections including biological naturalism and integrated information theory. We conclude that to deny consciousness to a simulation, one must identify a consciousness-relevant intrinsic causal-computational structure that the simulation fails to realize.

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

Prototyping an AI-powered Tool for Energy Efficiency in New Zealand Homes

arXiv:2509.05364v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Residential buildings contribute significantly to energy use, health outcomes, and carbon emissions. In New Zealand, housing quality has historically been poor, with inadequate insulation and inefficient heating contributing to widespread energy hardship. Recent reforms, including the Warmer Kiwi Homes program, Healthy Homes Standards, and H1 Building Code upgrades, have delivered health and comfort improvements, yet challenges persist. Many retrofits remain partial, data on household performance are limited, and decision-making support for homeowners is fragmented. This study presents the design and evaluation of an AI-powered decision-support tool for residential energy efficiency in New Zealand. The prototype, developed using Python and Streamlit, integrates data ingestion, anomaly detection, baseline modeling, and scenario simulation (e.g., LED retrofits, insulation upgrades) into a modular dashboard. Fifteen domain experts, including building scientists, consultants, and policy practitioners, tested the tool through semi-structured interviews. Results show strong usability (M = 4.3), high value of scenario outputs (M = 4.5), and positive perceptions of its potential to complement subsidy programs and regulatory frameworks. The tool demonstrates how AI can translate national policies into personalized, household-level guidance, bridging the gap between funding, standards, and practical decision-making. Its significance lies in offering a replicable framework for reducing energy hardship, improving health outcomes, and supporting climate goals. Future development should focus on carbon metrics, tariff modeling, integration with national datasets, and longitudinal trials to assess real-world adoption.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Ensembles of Large Language Models for Identifying EQ-5D Studies in PubMed Based on Their Abstracts

The rapid increase in scientific publications leads to the fact that manual study screening in systematic literature reviews (SLRs) is increasingly resource consuming, inefficient, and inconsistent. Classifying studies that clearly report health-related quality-of-life results, such as EQ-5D data, requires a high level of clinical interpretation and poses challenges for human reviewers. This study investigates the use of Google's Gemini and Gemma large language models (LLMs) in automating EQ-5D detection in the PubMed biomedical database based only on published abstracts. A multi-phase framework is proposed that integrates few-shot prompting, weight ensembling aggregation, and a soft stacking meta-classifier. Nine LLMs are evaluated on a dataset of PubMed studies manually labeled by two experts regarding EQ-5D reporting. The weighted ensemble of gemini-2.5-pro, gemma-3-12b, and gemma-3-27b obtained a 0.74 weighted F1-score and 0.74 accuracy, exceeding individually attained results. The ensembling of top-performing models improved the balance between precision and recall compared to individual models, while the soft stacking approach provided greater reliability and interpretability. Feature analysis shows that the probability results from the models are important in guiding the final predictions. The findings suggest that an ensemble-based LLM setup is a reliable and scalable approach for automating screening in biomedical research.

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

Benchmarking Web Agent Safety under E-commerce Deceptive Interfaces

As autonomous web agents are increasingly deployed to perform real-world tasks, ensuring their safety has become a critical concern. In this work, we study web agent behavior under realistic deceptive interfaces in the e-commerce domain. We introduce WebDecept, a lightweight and configurable plugin framework that enables controlled injection of deceptive interface patterns into existing web environments. Using WebDecept, we instantiate seven deceptive patterns commonly observed on the open web, including targeted advertisements, domain redirection, and shopping manipulation. By injecting these patterns into the frontend during task execution, we perform controlled evaluation of multiple multimodal web agents. Our results show that current web agents are highly susceptible to multiple classes of deceptive interfaces, and that prompt-based constraints are often insufficient to mitigate these failures. We further analyze how the design choices of deceptive patterns influence the success of such manipulations. These findings highlight safety challenges that should be addressed as web agents are scaled toward real-world deployment.

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

LLM4RTL: Tool-Assisted LLM for RTL Generation

arXiv:2606.15500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have facilitated impressive progress in software engineering, code generation, tooling, and systems. Concurrently, a significant body of research has developed which explores a growing variety of methods and systems for applying LLMs to hardware and chip design (e.g., systems for RTL code generation based on functional description). However, when it comes to open Verilog/RTL code-generation, we need high-quality training samples to build specialized and more effective LLM systems through fine-tuning or low-rank adaptation. Here, we propose a ``judge-renew-check-renew-check'' (JRCRC) pipeline which updates a current public dataset using a hierarchy of state-of-the-art commercial LLM models differing in their costs and capabilities in RTL code generation. This approach achieves a cost-effective mechanism for filtering and refining code-generation samples into a higher-quality training dataset. Our experiments also identify some common weaknesses of LLMs in rule-based reasoning and logic, and consequently, in RTL code-generation. Having identified these weaknesses, we develop an architecture for incorporating pre-processing tools to dynamically assist the LLMs in inferring logical relationships from tabular data formats. With our tools-assisted architecture for RTL code generation, we achieve significant overall performance gains in the VerilogEval benchmark and outperform many state-of-the-art methods. Our LLM4RTL system achieves performance comparable to that of GPT-4O using a significantly much smaller LLM.

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

Anomalies in Multivariate Time Series Benchmarks Are Mostly Univariate

arXiv:2606.02670v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many recent multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) models incorporate cross-channel modeling, under the implicit assumption that the structure of anomalies may be spread across multiple channels. We evaluate this assumption on eight widely used public benchmarks by introducing a per-segment diagnostic framework that flags, for each labeled anomaly, whether at least one channel deviates individually from its normal history, whether the cross-channel correlation structure changes, or both. The framework shows that no cross-channel rupture occurs without an accompanying univariate deviation across a range of reasonable thresholds. A complementary metric also reveals that on six of the eight benchmarks, at least half of the labeled anomaly segments deviate univariately on 89% to 100% of their timesteps, reaching 100% on three of these datasets. To verify that our framework captures cross-channel structure when present, we construct synthetic data of phase-shifted sinusoidal channels with shared noise. Each anomalous segment is altered through one of two channel-wise corruptions that preserve the per-channel marginal distribution while breaking cross-channel structure, and our framework correctly characterizes these segments as cross-channel-only. On these data, channel-dependent (CD) models successfully exploit the cross-channel signal whereas channel-independent (CI) ones fail. The CI/CD comparison of a recent SOTA detector on real benchmarks further confirms that CD modeling brings no measurable gain. We conclude that current MTSAD benchmarks are unsuitable for validating cross-channel modeling capabilities, and we call for the development of more structurally diverse evaluation sets. The code for this study is publicly available.

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

AIMER: Calibration-Free Task-Agnostic MoE Expert Pruning

arXiv:2603.18492v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models increase parameter capacity without proportional per-token computation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making expert pruning important for reducing memory and serving overhead. Existing task-agnostic expert-pruning methods are typically calibration-dependent: they estimate expert importance from routing or activation statistics on a calibration set, making pruning decisions sensitive to calibration-data variation while introducing substantial preprocessing cost. We propose AIMER (Absolute mean over root mean square IMportance for Expert Ranking), a simple calibration-free criterion that identifies more distinct experts by capturing the concentration pattern of expert weights, making it well suited for task-agnostic expert pruning. Across 7B to 47B MoE language models with distinct architectures and 16 diverse benchmarks, AIMER consistently delivers stronger capability balance across diverse tasks than existing calibration-free methods. Surprisingly, AIMER also achieves better balance than strong calibration-based expert-pruning baselines calibrated on the widely used task-agnostic C4 corpus, while requiring only 0.22–2.06 seconds to score all experts.

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

Best Arm Identification with Minimal Regret

arXiv:2409.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly amalgamates two of its most ubiquitous objectives: regret minimization and BAI. More precisely, the agent's goal is to identify the best arm with a prescribed confidence level $\delta$, while minimizing the cumulative regret up to the stopping time. Focusing on single-parameter exponential families of distributions, we leverage information-theoretic techniques to establish an instance-dependent lower bound on the expected cumulative regret. Moreover, we present an impossibility result that underscores the tension between cumulative regret and sample complexity in fixed-confidence BAI. Complementarily, we design and analyze the Double KL-UCB algorithm, which achieves asymptotic optimality as the confidence level tends to zero. Notably, this algorithm employs two distinct confidence bounds to guide arm selection in a randomized manner. Our findings elucidate a fresh perspective on the inherent connections between regret minimization and BAI.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Instantaneous-Frequency EEG Microstate Dynamics Stratify Motor Subtypes in Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is clinically heterogeneous, yet objective electrophysiological markers of its postural-instability/gait-difficulty (PIGD) and tremor-dominant (TD) motor subtypes are lacking. We tested whether the temporal dynamics of instantaneous-frequency (IF) microstates in resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) distinguish these subtypes from each other and from healthy controls (HC). In a publicly available cohort (OpenNeuro ds007526) comprising 28 HC and 97 PD patients classified as PIGD (n=50) or TD (n=47), the spatial distribution of the IF was reduced by principal component analysis and modeled with a Gaussian hidden Markov model, yielding three recurrent microstates. Per-participant mean dwell time, occupancy, and state-transition probabilities were compared across the three groups and, within PD, correlated with clinical scores. We found that the dynamics of one microstate varied systematically across groups: its dwell time, occupancy, and self-transition probability increased monotonically from HC through TD to PIGD, while outgoing transitions decreased, so that the state became an increasingly persistent attractor. For dwell time, all three pairwise contrasts survived correction (HC versus PIGD, Hedges' g=1.06; HC versus TD, g=0.59; PIGD versus TD, g=0.40). None of the dynamic indices was associated with clinical severity, disease duration, or medication dose within PD. IF-microstate dynamics thus stratify the PD motor subtypes along a graded continuum without tracking continuous disease severity. The approach offers a candidate objective EEG marker for motor-subtype stratification, complementing spectral characterizations of PD.

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

Searching Neural Architectures for Sensor Nodes on IoT Gateways

arXiv:2505.23939v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents an automatic method for the design of Neural Networks (NNs) at the edge, enabling Machine Learning (ML) access even in privacy-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The proposed method runs on IoT gateways and designs NNs for connected sensor nodes without sharing the collected data outside the local network, keeping the data in the site of collection. This approach has the potential to enable ML for Healthcare Internet of Things (HIoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), designing hardware-friendly and custom NNs at the edge for personalized healthcare and advanced industrial services such as quality control, predictive maintenance, or fault diagnosis. By preventing data from being disclosed to cloud services, this method safeguards sensitive information, including industrial secrets and personal data. The outcomes of a thorough experimental session confirm that – on the Visual Wake Words dataset – the proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art results by exploiting a search procedure that runs in less than 10 hours on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Clinical Study Protocol of the 'Biomarkers of Severity of COVID-19 Patients' (BIOMARCOVID) Project

Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has challenged health care systems worldwide, in certain areas exceeding hospital capacities and human resources. This has underscored the importance of having better tools to predict the outcome of potentially severe respiratory infections such as SARS-CoV-2. Predicting COVID-19 severity may allow physicians to better manage ICU beds and increase the chances of patient survival through appropriate management. During the toughest months of the pandemic, most physicians tried to identify patients that might develop severe forms based primarily on clinical features on admission (e.g., BMI, age). In this context, significant research has focused on identifying comorbidities, clinical manifestations, and routine blood biomarkers to predict disease severity. However, despite the demonstrated value of untargeted metabolomics in assessing severity, limited data exist on its use for identifying novel metabolite biomarkers that could improve both the sensitivity and specificity of outcome prediction. Our goal is to identify metabolite biomarkers that could enhance the predictive accuracy of standard medical biology data and clinical parameters. Methods and analysis This is a retrospective, observational, monocentric cohort study conducted at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Grenoble Alpes (CHUGA). The maximum number of eligible patients admitted for PCR-confirmed COVID-19 between March and December 2020 will be included. Severity outcome is defined using the WHO 10-category ordinal scale (mild: categories 4-5; severe: >5). Blood samples were collected within 48 hours of admission and analyzed for 62 routine blood tests and untargeted multiplatform LC-MS/MS metabolomics across four national platforms. Statistical analysis will include logistic regression with variable selection for the primary aim, and multi-block chemometric integration of clinical, biological, and metabolomics data as a secondary aim. Ethics and dissemination A study steering committee has been formed to ensure the accuracy of the collected data by thoroughly reviewing it prior to the data lock. All aspects of the study comply with ethical standards, including approval by the CHUGA institutional review board and adherence to CNIL Reference Methodology MR004 for the protection of participants' rights, privacy, and confidentiality. This study is registered on the French Health Data Hub (number F20210218154851). Results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, presentations at national and international scientific and clinical conferences, and reports shared with key healthcare system stakeholders.

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

FlowState: Sampling-Rate-Equivariant Time-Series Forecasting

arXiv:2508.05287v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing time series foundation models (TSFMs), often based on transformer variants, lack adaptability to different sampling rates, struggle with generalization across varying context and target lengths, and are computationally inefficient. We introduce FlowState, a novel TSFM architecture that achieves sampling-rate-equivariant forecasting through a unified design that pairs a state space model (SSM) encoder with a functional basis decoder (FBD). This design enables continuous-time modeling and dynamic time-scale adjustment, allowing FlowState to inherently generalize across all possible temporal resolutions, and dynamically adjust the forecasting horizons without retraining. We further propose an efficient pretraining strategy that improves robustness and accelerates training. Despite being one of the smallest TSFMs, FlowState achieves state-of-the-art results on the widely used GIFT-Eval benchmark, while demonstrating superior adaptability to unseen sampling rates. Our detailed analyses confirm the effectiveness of its components, and we demonstrate its unique ability to adapt to varying input sampling rates.

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

Generalized Kerr-Cat Qubit Codes

arXiv:2606.14901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic study of Schrödinger cat codes constructed from Kerr-type coherent states, including displaced Kerr coherent states and Barut–Girardello Kerr coherent states, each admitting two distinct families determined by the sign of the Kerr nonlinearity. By tuning the Kerr parameter and coherent-state amplitude, these states interpolate between $\mathfrak{su}(2)$, $\mathfrak{su}(1,1)$ coherent states, providing a unified and versatile foundation for this type of bosonic quantum error correction. Unlike standard two-component Schrödinger cat codes, where a single photon-loss event induces an uncorrectable bit-flip, the nonlinear phase-space structure of Kerr cat states enables simultaneous detection and correction of both photon-loss and dephasing errors within a unified recovery framework, with optimal recovery operations determined via convex optimization. We demonstrate that Kerr cat encodings significantly outperform conventional cat codes under combined loss and dephasing noise, and that judicious parameter optimization can suppress both error channels to a level that reduces the overhead of additional error correction layers. We further show that Kerr-deformed coherent-state manifolds under engineered two-photon driving emerge as effective steady states of driven-dissipative dynamics, with single-photon decoherence strongly suppressed and leakage outside the protected manifold appearing only as higher-order corrections in the deformation strength. Our extended formalism identifies generalized Kerr Schrödinger cat codes as promising candidates for fault-tolerant bosonic quantum computation in experimental platforms such as nonlinear photonics.

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

Tri-Efficient Transfer Learning for Point Cloud Videos

While point cloud foundation models have significantly advanced point cloud video understanding, existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods still suffer from two critical limitations: prohibitive annotation costs for large-scale point cloud datasets and severe memory bottlenecks. In this paper, we aim to mine richer supervision signals from existing data rather than blindly scaling datasets. A further key principle is that the memory footprint of fine-tuning must be drastically reduced compared to full fine-tuning, which remains elusive for current PEFT techniques. Driven by these challenges, we identify three core desiderata: data-, parameter-, and memory efficiency, and present PoinTriE, a unified framework that excels along all three dimensions. For pre-training, pseudo-motion trajectories are synthesized via rigid transformations, paired with text corpora and 2D projections derived from raw point clouds. We then propose a Geometric-Motion Duality Network optimized via multimodal contrastive learning, rigid rotation prediction, and motion distribution divergence to produce dense self-supervision. During fine-tuning, we freeze the pretrained backbone and only update a lightweight Spatio-temporal Side Network built with LoRA units. Equipped with a gradient flow masking strategy, PoinTriE simultaneously reduces memory consumption and parameter overhead. Extensive experiments confirm that PoinTriE establishes new state-of-the-art results on action recognition and semantic segmentation tasks.

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

Visual enhancement and 3D representation for underwater scenes: a review

Underwater visual enhancement (UVE) and underwater 3D reconstruction pose significant challenges in computer vision and AI-based tasks due to complex imaging conditions in aquatic environments. Despite the development of numerous enhancement algorithms, a comprehensive and systematic review covering both UVE and underwater 3D reconstruction remains absent. To advance research in these areas, we present an in-depth review from multiple perspectives. First, we introduce the fundamental physical models, highlighting the peculiarities that challenge conventional techniques. We survey advanced methods for visual enhancement and 3D reconstruction specifically designed for underwater scenarios. The paper assesses various approaches from non-learning methods to advanced data-driven techniques, including Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting, discussing their effectiveness in handling underwater distortions. Finally, we conduct both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of state-of-the-art UVE and underwater 3D reconstruction algorithms across multiple benchmark datasets. Finally, we highlight key research directions for future advancements in underwater vision.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Circuit Tracing in Autoregressive Protein Language Models

arXiv:2606.16044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (pLMs) can generate novel protein sequences with properties beyond those observed in nature, yet the mechanisms underlying protein generation remain poorly understood. Existing mechanistic interpretability methods based on sparse autoencoders and transcoders primarily focus on protein representation learning models and do not capture the computation required for autoregressive generation. Here, we introduce ProGenMech, a mechanistic interpretability framework for generative protein language models that extends cross-layer transcoders (CLTs) to ProGen3, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model trained for both causal generation and span infilling. Unlike per-layer approaches, CLTs reconstruct each layer using sparse latent variables from all preceding layers, enabling faithful recovery of inter-layer generative computation. We further develop a zero-shot circuit discovery framework to identify sparse latent circuits responsible for protein generation and fitness prediction. In causal generation and zero-shot fitness estimation tasks, ProGenMech outperforms local transcoder baselines in recovering ProGen3's probability distribution and functional scoring behavior, while matching the original model's generative distribution in span infilling tasks. Moreover, the recovered circuits reveal biologically meaningful motifs and functional regions associated with conserved sequence patterns and protein fitness landscapes, establishing a foundation for interpretable and steerable protein generation.

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

Fusion is not one-size-fits-all: Cross-Modal Representation Alignment for Time-to-Event Modeling

arXiv:2606.15038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate time-to-event (TTE) prediction from multimodal clinical data remains challenging due to modality imbalance and distribution shift. We introduce a foundation model-driven framework for cross-modal representation alignment between CT imaging and longitudinal EHR data, designed to generalize across tasks and institutions. CT and EHR modalities are encoded independently using domain-specific foundation models and aligned in a shared latent space through four principled fusion strategies: late fusion, contrastive alignment, cross-attention, and co-attention. We evaluate two clinically distinct TTE tasks: pulmonary embolism (PE) mortality and cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcomes, on large-scale multi-institutional cohorts (PE: N=3,099 train; 1,098 internal; 435 external; CVD: N=2,951 train; 837 internal; 682 external). Fusion consistently improves concordance index by 1.5-5.4% over unimodal baselines when modalities contribute comparably. Overall, contrastive multimodal fusion, particularly with CLMBR representations, provided the most consistent and statistically robust improvements, especially for PE mortality prediction. For MACE, cross-attention (one-hot) achieved the highest internal performance and image-guided co-attention achieved the best external performance. We therefore introduce a generalizable foundation model-based cross-modal alignment framework and provide the first systematic analysis of fusion behavior under modality imbalance in TTE prediction. Our results establish task-aware multimodal alignment as a necessary design principle for robust generalization and scalable clinical deployment.

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

Dual-Stance Evaluation of Sycophancy: The Structure of Agreement and the Limits of Intervention

Activation steering can shift LLM behaviour, but standard evaluations do not typically test whether a sycophancy-reduction direction also suppresses agreement with factually correct statements. We introduce dual-stance evaluation, which tests both stances of each topic, and apply it to centroid-difference steering on Llama-3-8B-Instruct. We find a dissociation: the model represents sycophantic and factual agreement in geometrically distinct subspaces, yet the steering direction projects equally onto both and cannot differentially target either. The direction accordingly reduces agreement with factually correct statements (e.g. that the Earth is round) as well as sycophantic ones. All other static properties of the two activation groups are matched, suggesting the behavioural dissociation arises from generation dynamics or from finer-grained structure that residual-stream analysis cannot resolve. The pattern illustrates a general gap: representations that are readable from activations may not be writable through them.

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

A Comparative Study of Graph Neural Network Layer Selection for Interaction Modelling in Driving Trajectory Prediction

arXiv:2606.14956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous driving systems rely on precise trajectory prediction to plan safe and efficient movement. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a promising approach for modelling spatiotemporal interactions among road agents. However, designing GNN architectures for trajectory prediction remains non-standardized, with little guidance on which graph layers effectively capture spatial interactions and temporal dynamics. This paper offers a detailed comparative study of 19 graph layer types, focusing on their spatial and temporal processing capabilities to discover the most effective architectures for trajectory prediction. Within the explored hyperparameter setting, we highlight five standout layer combinations, with ARMA, Chebyshev, and topology-aware layers consistently performing better than others. Beyond performance metrics, our findings yield practical design principles: sum-based aggregation is more effective than mean-based methods, multi-head attention mechanisms enable richer interactions, and assigning different weights to different hop distances significantly improves prediction accuracy. These findings offer useful guidance for designing more interpretable and effective trajectory prediction models.

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

Pointwise is Pointless? A Multimodal Ablation Study for Precipitation Nowcasting with Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.18436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse point observations are increasingly available for precipitation nowcasting, but it is unclear how much they improve dense radar-field forecasts. We partially address this question with a multimodal graph neural network nowcasting system over the Nordic radar domain. The model predicts rain rate every five minutes up to two hours ahead and is trained with different combinations of radar history, MEPS numerical weather prediction, Netatmo surface observations, MSG satellite channels, stochastic noise, and CRPS-based ensemble losses. The study is designed as an ablation of operationally relevant information sources and training objectives. We compare radar-only, NWP-informed, station-informed, satellite-informed, noise-augmented, and CRPS-based configurations using complementary diagnostics on the radar grid, at station locations, for rain onset, and through oracle, displacement, and amplitude scores. The results show that each source improves a different part of the forecast problem. MEPS stabilises radar-only extrapolation, Netatmo observations improve local station and onset diagnostics, and satellite predictors reduce some station-level biases but may activate rain too early when used deterministically. CRPS-based configurations provide the most consistent radar-grid gains, while the combined satellite and CRPS setup gives the best overall oracle/DAS score. These results do not support the conclusion that point observations are uninformative for nowcasting, but they show that local observational skill and spatially coherent radar-field skill are distinct targets. The practical implication is that sparse observations can provide useful local constraints, but their benefit for radar-like fields depends on the training loss, uncertainty representation, and how observation support is encoded in the model.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

AgentFinVQA: A Deployable Multi-Agent Pipeline for Auditable Financial Chart QA

Financial chart question answering in regulated settings demands more than accuracy: practitioners must know which answers to trust before acting on them, and many institutions cannot send client data to external model providers. Yet existing chart-QA agents are accuracy-focused and opaque, and most assume proprietary API access; to our knowledge, none combines auditability with on-premise deployability without significant accuracy compromise. We present AgentFinVQA, a multi-agent pipeline that decomposes each query into planning, OCR, legend grounding, visual inspection, and verification, recording every step in a traceable Model Evaluation Packet (MEP) per sample. On FinMME, AgentFinVQA improves $+7.68$ pp over a primary-backbone matched zero-shot baseline with a proprietary backbone (Gemini-3 Flash; 71.24% vs. 63.56%, McNemar $p \approx 1.1 \times 10^{-16}$), and $+4.84$ pp with open-weights Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 served locally. The verifier's verdict also serves as a useful confidence signal (68.2% vs. 55.6% exact accuracy on confirmed vs. revised answers), enabling human-in-the-loop review routing. Error analysis shows that question misunderstanding, legend confusion and extraction error account for nearly two-thirds of failures and are the categories least detected by the verifier, identifying clear directions for future work. Together these results show that auditable, on-premise financial chart QA is practical and that the open-weights system keeps most of the accuracy gains while enabling full data residency. We release our code to support reproducible evaluation.

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

The Implicit Bias of Steepest Descent with Mini-batch Stochastic Gradient

arXiv:2602.11557v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A variety of widely used optimization methods like SignSGD and Muon can be interpreted as instances of steepest descent under different norm-induced geometries. In this work, we study the implicit bias of mini-batch stochastic steepest descent in multi-class classification, characterizing how batch size, momentum, and variance reduction shape the limiting max-margin behavior and convergence rates under general entry-wise and Schatten-$p$ norms. We show that, without momentum, worst-case convergence and successful classification can only be guaranteed with full-batch gradient. In contrast, momentum enables small-batch convergence to an approximate max-margin solution through a batch-momentum trade-off, though it slows convergence. This approach provides fully explicit, dimension-free rates that improve upon prior results. Moreover, we prove that variance reduction can recover the exact full-batch implicit bias for any batch size, albeit at a slower convergence rate. Finally, we further investigate the batch-size-one steepest descent without momentum, and reveal its convergence to a fundamentally different bias via a concrete data example, which reveals a key limitation of purely stochastic updates. Overall, our unified analysis clarifies when stochastic optimization aligns with full-batch behavior, and paves the way for perform deeper explorations of the training behavior of stochastic gradient steepest descent algorithms.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

An Embodied Simulation Platform, Benchmark, and Data-Efficient Augmentation Framework for Wet-Lab Robotics

arXiv:2606.12936v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wet-lab robots can improve the reproducibility, throughput, and safety of biomedical experiments, but scaling their learning requires customizable simulators for safe and reproducible task generation, open editable laboratory assets, and efficient pipelines that turn limited demonstrations into usable training data. We present Pipette, an embodied simulation platform, benchmark, and data-efficient augmentation framework for wet-lab robot learning. Pipette releases over 43 open-source and re-editable wet-lab assets, together with an extensible asset-building pipeline. A key component of Pipette is its simulation-based data augmentation pipeline, replaying human demonstrations in simulation, applies lighting, camera, speed, and action perturbations, and filters generated episodes with automatic task success checks, rapidly expanding usable training data from limited manual demonstrations. We further introduce an 11-task wet-lab embodied benchmark covering sample handling, culture-ware manipulation, device operation, and precision placement. With only 30 demonstrations per task, ACT achieves 65.5% average success rate, while simulation augmentation improves SmolVLA from 44.1% to 74.7% and {\pi}0 from 40.4% to 46.5%, validating the effectiveness of Pipette for data-efficient VLA training and evaluation. Pipette also supports natural-language-driven scene construction and task registration, lowering the barrier for non-expert users to define new wet-lab robotic tasks.