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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration

All-in-One image restoration aims to develop a unified restoration framework for handling diverse degradation types. Existing end-to-end methods usually regard the restoration process as a black-box mapping, lacking an explicit optimization interpretation. Although deep unfolding provides an interpretable iterative modeling paradigm for image restoration, existing methods mostly rely on fixed degradation assumptions or predefined degradation information, making them difficult to adapt to unified restoration requirements under complex degradations and locally damaged content. This limitation restricts their performance in degradation suppression and structural detail recovery. To address these issues, this paper proposes DVANet, a deep unfolding network inspired by the half-quadratic splitting optimization algorithm, which formulates unified image restoration under complex degradations as a collaborative unfolding process between degradation-aware observation consistency and visual-prior-guided reconstruction. Specifically, in the degradation-aware observation consistency branch, a degradation representation module is employed to extract global degradation attributes and local degradation cues, and degradation-conditioned mapping is used to enhance the model's adaptability to different degradation types. In the visual-prior-guided reconstruction branch, DINOv3 is introduced to provide structural and semantic information as hierarchical visual priors, thereby complementing the missing structural information in damaged regions and improving detail recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVANet achieves superior or competitive performance on multi-scenario degradation and cross-domain image restoration tasks, showing favorable degradation adaptability and generalization ability.

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

Why SWAVE May Not Be All You Need:A Concept-Evolution Retrospective on Complex-Valued Recurrent Language Models

arXiv:2606.18324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: SWave is a complex-valued recurrent language model (169.26M parameters, D=384, L=16, T=2048) trained on FineWeb-Edu using 2xH100 NVL. It was designed around three founding premises: that representing language as complex waves rather than real-valued numbers enables richer information encoding; that a Cayley-parameterised unitary transition provides a mathematical guarantee against state decay or explosion; and that a hidden state which rotates rather than shrinks preserves signal integrity over arbitrarily long contexts. The core of SWave evolved substantially across three development phases. The Resonance Head was found to structurally admit imaginary-channel collapse as a global loss minimum (a failure mode we term cos-domination collapse) and was superseded by an untied head with independent real and imaginary embedding tables from the Phase-Associative Memory (PAM) architecture. This resolved the degenerate minimum and enabled stable 200,000-step training (best-step PPL 22.0 at step 89,861). ComplexNorm and the Wave Propagation Scan proved load-bearing throughout all three phases and were retained to the final architecture. ProtectGatedScan was reframed as a structural prior rather than a learned behaviour. The four multi-scale retention concepts showed no measurable improvement under controlled evaluation and were found non-load-bearing. The ComplexGatedUnit was superseded by a real-valued squared-ReLU channel mixer with fewer parameters. The auxiliary training objectives showed no benefit once structural constraints were resolved. The investigation yields a formal characterisation of cos-domination collapse, a parallel scan with a log-space backward pass for numerical stability, six transferable engineering principles for complex-valued recurrent training, and a plan-to-code traceability methodology for catching structural divergences that conventional test suites miss.

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

Comparing Commercial Depth Sensor Accuracy for Medical Applications

Depth estimation has numerous medical and surgical applications. We benchmark four depth sensors on a porcine bone specimen, a porcine belly specimen, and a silicone kidney phantom using stylus-sampled references. These objects contain several real-world challenges, including homogeneous surfaces, specular surfaces, and subsurface scattering. The comparison includes stereo, structured-light, and time-of-flight sensors at a distance of approximately 50 cm. Specifically, the Intel RealSense D405 (Intel RealSense, United States), PMD Flexx2 (pmdtechnologies, Germany), Stereolabs ZED 2i (Stereolabs, France), and Zivid 2M+ 60 (Zivid, Norway) are compared. The Zivid 2M+ 60 performed best across all objects and metrics considered in this work. The ZED ranked second for real tissue, but last on the phantom.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

RCEM: Robust Conversational Search EMbedder in Distributional Shift

We propose RCEM, a Robust Conversational search EMbedder that is additionally equipped with LLM's query reformulation capability without losing base model's generalization. Unlike prior conversational dense retrieval approaches that learn direct conversation-to-passage matching, RCEM aligns conversations, prepended by special token, to LLM-rewritten queries, while preserving the original embedding space. The unchanged embedding space automatically maps the rewritten-query to the relevant passages. As a result, RCEM (1) reduces overfitting by simplifying the alignment task from long passages to shorter rewritten queries, (2) eliminates the need for conversation-to-passage relevance labels for training, and (3) maintains its original embedding space that allows conversational queries against indexes built by original embedder without rebuilding them. Extensive experiments show that RCEM consistently outperforms prior approaches, achieving up to 30% improvement under distributional shift.

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

MoVerse: Real-Time Video World Modeling with Panoramic Gaussian Scaffold

We present MoVerse, a real-time video world model that creates an interactively navigable scene from a single narrow-field-of-view image. This setting is challenging because the input observes only a small fraction of the environment, while interactive roaming requires a complete surrounding world, persistent geometry, controllable camera motion, and temporally coherent high-fidelity observations. MoVerse addresses this problem by separating world construction from observation rendering. It first expands the input into a gravity-aligned 360$^\circ$ panorama with topology-aware diffusion, closing the missing field of view before 3D reasoning. It then lifts the panorama into a persistent 3D Gaussian scaffold using panoramic geometry-aware residual prediction, yielding a dense and directly renderable spatial memory. Finally, a Gaussian-conditioned video renderer translates scaffold renderings along user-specified camera trajectories into photorealistic video. To make this renderer practical for interaction, we train a bidirectional diffusion teacher for high-quality conditional rendering and distill it into a causal autoregressive student for bounded-latency streaming. This design combines the controllability and long-range consistency of explicit 3D representations with the perceptual quality of generative video models. MoVerse supports real-time scene roaming at 8~FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX~4090 GPU, demonstrating a practical path toward single-image world creation with interactive video output.

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

NeST: Neuron Selective Tuning for LLM Safety

arXiv:2602.16835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing approaches often rely on heavyweight fine-tuning that is costly to update, audit, and maintain across model families. Full fine-tuning incurs substantial computational and storage overhead, while parameter-efficient methods, e.g., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), trade efficiency for inconsistent safety gains and sensitivity to design choices. Safety intervention mechanisms reduce unsafe outputs without modifying model weights, but do not directly shape or preserve the internal representations that govern safety behavior. We present NeST, a Neuron-Selective Tuning framework for efficient post-hoc safety alignment. NeST identifies safety-relevant feed-forward neurons via activation probing on vanilla harmful and benign prompts, clusters neurons with similar activation profiles, and trains shared cluster-level updates while freezing the rest of the model. Importantly, NeST is trained only on vanilla malicious prompts, without using jailbreak-specific attack data, yet generalizes robustly to diverse jailbreaks. The learned updates are then folded into the original weights, incurring no inference-time overhead. Evaluated on 14 open-weight language and multimodal models, NeST outperforms lightweight baselines and approaches full fine-tuning robustness with significantly fewer trainable parameters. On text-only models, NeST reduces average jailbreak attack success rate from 44.5% to 1.1% while training only 0.4M parameters on average. Across multimodal settings, it reduces ASR from 55.3% to 1.1%, and for downstream fine-tuned variants, it restores safety by reducing ASR from 53.8% to 0.8%. These results show that robust, maintainable safety alignment can be achieved by concentrating adaptation on localized, functionally coherent safety structures.

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

OmniTraffic: A Controllable Generation Pipeline and Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Reasoning

Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics. However, existing traffic-oriented multimodal benchmarks largely emphasize passive visual recognition or isolated video understanding, offering limited support for evaluating structure-aware traffic reasoning under controlled conditions. We introduce OmniTraffic, a controllable generation pipeline and benchmark for spatio-temporal traffic reasoning. Built around 12 real-world intersections reconstructed into editable 3D traffic environments and complemented by surveillance footage from two countries, OmniTraffic supports both controlled and natural-condition evaluation. It defines a three-level task hierarchy spanning scene perception, multi-view and temporal reasoning, and decision support. Using structured traffic metadata, OmniTraffic generates synchronized multi-view VQA samples covering vehicle states, lane functions, view–BEV correspondence, temporal dynamics, and signal-phase analysis, resulting in 8M VQA samples and a 3K human-verified test set. Evaluation of eleven frontier MLLMs reveals a large human–model gap, with the most pronounced failures in topology-grounded and spatio-temporal reasoning tasks. Fine-tuning a lightweight MLLM on simulated OmniTraffic data further improves performance on real-world traffic scenes, demonstrating the value of simulation-generated supervision for traffic-specific multimodal reasoning. Beyond a fixed dataset, OmniTraffic provides an extensible pipeline with configurable intersections, camera views, traffic demands, signal phases, visual conditions, and rare events.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The ACUTE Protocol: Operationalizing Language Model Activations for Better Calibration, Utility, and Trust

As language models improve and become increasingly deployed to solve a variety of tasks, trustworthiness becomes essential. Calibration is a good proxy for trust: well-calibrated confidence estimates help inform the risk versus reward tradeoff when trusting a specific model output. Unfortunately, even as models improve, they remain poorly calibrated, often biasing towards overconfidence. Additionally, calibration can be gamed: a policy that always predicts the base rate is perfectly calibrated, but completely uninformative. To resolve this, we develop a new metric, expected utility renormalized by the oracle (EURO), that balances calibration and informativeness. We also propose a general-purpose activation-based confidence, utility, and trust estimation protocol (ACUTE) to appropriately adjudicate uncertainty. The ACUTE protocol provides flexible, sample-efficient, and compute-efficient confidence estimators for 3 tasks including multiple choice question answering, tool-calling, and scientific document summarization across 6 models from 4 model families. ACUTE outperforms strong baselines on EURO, while maintaining low calibration error. Taken together, our work shows that equipping LLMs with the ACUTE protocol can improve calibration, utility, and trustworthiness in numerous settings.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Storage and Transport Capacity Design for a Self-Reliable Two-Node Stochastic Resource System

arXiv:2606.12707v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study a two-node stochastic resource system operating over a finite horizon. Each node experiences uncertain supply and demand and is equipped with finite storage. The objective is to ensure that resource levels remain within prescribed limits with high probability. To this end, we formulate a chance-constrained capacity-design problem in which resources can be exchanged through a capacity-limited transport link. We characterize the minimum storage required at each node, derive the optimal transport policy, and quantify the trade-off between storage and transport capacities. Our results show the existence of a critical transport-capacity threshold that enables full risk pooling between the nodes. Moreover, this threshold decreases with the operating horizon, implying that full-pooling performance can be achieved with progressively smaller transport capacity over longer horizons.

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

Action with Visual Primitives

arXiv:2605.22183v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation. A common design in current architectures maps language instructions and visual observations to actions in a single forward pass. While conceptually simple, this formulation entangles instruction comprehension, spatial scene understanding, and motor control within a single learning objective. As a result, the action expert must implicitly relearn cognitive and perceptual capabilities already present in the pretrained VLM, which can limit both learning efficiency and generalization. We introduce AVP (Action with Visual Primitives), an end-to-end architecture that implements this visual-primitive-centric interface: the VLM infers the next-stage target and emits visual-primitive tokens that condition a flow-matching action expert, with supervision derived from end-effector kinematics. Real-robot experiments on general pick-and-place tasks show that AVP improves the success rate by 37.04% over pi_0.5 and outperforms other recent methods, with consistent gains in data efficiency, spatial-compositional generalization, and object-level transfer.

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

LIBERO-Occ: Evaluating and Improving Vision-Language-Action Models under Scene-Induced Occlusion via Viewpoint Imagination

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance on standard manipulation benchmarks, but most evaluations assume that task-relevant objects are fully visible. This assumption often fails in realistic settings, where occlusion makes manipulation partially observable. In this paper, we study scene-induced occlusion as a fundamental challenge for VLA models and introduce LIBERO-Occ, an occlusion-oriented extension of LIBERO. Experiments show that state-of-the-art VLAs suffer substantial performance degradation under occlusion. To address this issue, we propose Viewpoint Imagination (VIM), which generates a complementary view from an occluded primary observation and conditions action prediction on both observed and imagined evidence. VIM improves robustness across task suites, occlusion types, and severity levels without requiring additional cameras at deployment time, suggesting that viewpoint imagination is an promising mechanism for perception completion in partially observable manipulation. Our benchmark and corresponding code are available at: \href{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

A controlled human infection model for symptomatic pertussis in North America using the pertactin-producing clinical isolate D420

Background Despite widespread vaccination, pertussis remains a poorly controlled disease globally and results in substantial annual morbidity and mortality, particularly in young children. Controlled human infection models (CHIMs) using the causative agent Bordetella pertussis are promising systems to enable the study of pertussis disease pathogenesis and immunology and to rapidly assess vaccines and therapeutics. While a pertussis CHIM that produces asymptomatic infection has been established in Europe, the development of a CHIM that leads to symptomatic illness would be advantageous for evaluating vaccine efficacy against both infection and disease. Methods Healthy participants 18-40 years of age were inoculated intranasally with one of eight doses (ranging from 104 to 108 colony forming units (CFU)) of the pertactin-producing B. pertussis isolate D420 at the challenge facility within the Canadian Center for Vaccinology (Nova Scotia, Canada). The study occurred in two stages. In stage one, the B. pertussis dose was escalated in cohort groups of five to six participants until reaching an endpoint where 70-90% of participants exhibited mild (non-severe, Grade 1 or 2) symptomatic infection, defined as the Human Infectious Dose 70-90 (HID70-90). In stage two, additional challenges were conducted for doses below, at, and above the identified HID70-90 to characterize the emerging pertussis model. For all challenge doses, participants were closely monitored during an inpatient stay of up to 24 days and post-discharge for laboratory-confirmed infection, pertussis symptoms, safety, and IgG antibody responses to four B. pertussis antigens including pertussis toxin, filamentous hemagglutinin, fimbriae, and pertactin. All participants received a five-day course of azithromycin, where timing of initiation depended on B. pertussis testing and symptoms. The study was conducted between July 4, 2022 and March 19, 2025. Findings Seventy-five participants were inoculated with one of the eight B. pertussis D420 challenge doses and completed the inpatient stay. From the stage-one dose escalation, we found that 107 CFU of B. pertussis D420 was the lowest dose that achieved the HID70-90, where 9 of 12 participants (75.0%) exhibited mild symptomatic infection. Following stage-two challenges, 16 of 22 total participants at 107 CFU (72.7%) developed mild symptomatic infection, thus verifying the HID70-90. The symptomatic infection rate below the HID70-90 at 5x106 CFU of D420 was 20.0% and above the HID70-90 at 5x107 and 108 CFU were 58.3% and 55.6%, respectively. Symptoms with elevated frequency for symptomatic infection (relative to background symptoms in non-infected) included nasal congestion, runny nose, fatigue, malaise, and cough. At the HID70-90, 50% of symptomatic infections included cough. Serological analyses of the four highest (stage-two) challenge doses (5x106, 107, 5x107, 108 CFU) revealed that antibody titres increased over time post-challenge. Seroconversion for at least one of the four studied antibodies was nearly twice as common for symptomatic (70.0%) than asymptomatic (35.7%) infection and was absent (0%) for non-infected. All infections were cleared following azithromycin treatment (100%) and there were no study-related serious adverse events. Interpretation A safe and reproducible symptomatic pertussis CHIM was achieved, providing a model for research on pertussis disease pathogenesis and immunology and for assessing vaccines and therapeutics. (Clinicaltrials.gov, NCT05136599).

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

ECA: Efficient Continual Alignment for Open-Ended Image-to-Text Generation

Incremental Learning (IL) for Open-ended Image-to-Text Generation (OpenITG) enables models to continuously generate accurate, contextually relevant text for new images while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Unlike prior studies, this paper addresses a more practical scenario in which the predominant category of visual data shifts over time as environments evolve. In this context, we introduce a new notion of continual alignment, which incrementally adapts the alignment module within pre-trained VLMs to preserve high-quality cross-modal representations. Based on this idea, we propose Efficient Continual Alignment (ECA), a novel exemplar-free IL approach for OpenITG. The key challenge is enabling the model to acquire new, task-specific features while minimizing interference with the established alignment without accessing raw data from previous tasks. To address this, ECA employs three core mechanisms: a Mixture of Query (MoQ) module that adapts task-specific query tokens, a Fisher Dynamic Expansion (FeDEx) that dynamically expands model structure based on a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-based metric, and an embedding dictionary with Dictionary Replay (DR) to retain past knowledge. To evaluate ECA's performance, we construct four new IL OpenITG benchmarks that better reflect real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ECA significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting and improves IL performance compared to baseline methods. Code and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/Snowball0823/ECA.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Useful is Causal Invariance for Domain Adaptation in Finite-Sample Settings?

arXiv:2606.12680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models often degrade when they are deployed on a target distribution that differs from the source distributions they were trained on. Recent work in causality-based domain generalization has shown how shared causal structure between domains can induce invariant predictors, e.g., models on a subset of features which have stable risk across structured domain shifts. However, the extent to which such population-level causal invariances can lead to gains in finite-sample settings remains underexplored. In particular, in practice we often have access to a few labeled target samples, a setting called supervised domain adaptation (sDA). In this paper, we explore when (full or partial) causal knowledge can provably improve supervised domain adaptation. As a first step, we study linear regression, where full or partial causal knowledge specifies a collection of invariant or possibly invariant feature subsets, each yielding a source-trained candidate predictor. We derive matching upper and lower bounds showing that finite-sample gains are governed by the target-risk margins separating the candidates, together with the finite-source estimation error. When these margins are sufficiently large relative to $n_Q$, an adaptive aggregation procedure can match the best candidate predictor while avoiding negative transfer relative to target-only learning. On the other hand, when the margins are too small, no algorithm can reliably exploit the candidate collection to obtain faster finite-sample rates. We further connect these margins to structural shift magnitude in linear SCMs and validate the theory on real-world causal benchmarks.

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

How AI Agents Reshape Knowledge Work: Autonomy, Efficiency, and Scope

arXiv:2606.07489v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier AI systems are bridging the gap between intelligence and utility by shifting from conversational assistants to autonomous agents that execute tasks end to end. Using production data from Perplexity's Search and Computer products, we study this transition by examining how AI agents accelerate and reshape knowledge work. Three key empirical findings emerge. First, using sessions with near-identical initial query pairs as natural experiments for the same underlying task attempted with both products, Computer performs 26 minutes of autonomous work per user session, versus 33 seconds for Search. Computer automates task decomposition and execution that Search users might otherwise manually orchestrate and implement. As a result, Computer shifts follow-up query distribution toward higher-order work such as verification and extension. Autonomy also increases execution quality, with per-query dissatisfaction rates 55% lower on Computer than on Search. Second, due to its autonomy advantage, Computer reduces completion time from 269 to 36 minutes on matched tasks, lowering estimated time and cost by 87% and 94%, respectively, compared to humans equipped with Search alone. Third, Computer changes the scope of work that users attempt: Computer queries more often cross occupational boundaries, require higher-order cognition, draw on broader expertise, take the form of composite tasks that bundle interdependent subtasks into a single query, and unlock work activities that are essentially absent from Search usage among the same users. Together, the evidence indicates that AI agents accelerate workflows, enhance output quality, reduce costs, and expand the breadth and depth of automated work.

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

A Temporal Planning Framework for Disruption Aware Dynamic Route Optimization in Heterogeneous Railway Systems

arXiv:2606.14582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient route optimization play a vital role in ensuring both safety and punctuality in railway operations. It is very crucial particularly in heterogeneous multi-gauge railway networks with varying train speed, stopping pattern, infrastructure compatibility constraints increase coordination complexity. In single-track systems these challenges are further intensify due to all trains to share the same track and requires frequent track switching.Stochastic disruptions events including blocked tracks, blocked trains, engine failure and speed slowdowns introduces additional unpredictability in operations and deviate the timetable. However, existing studies predominantly focuses on high-level timetabling, omitting operational details such as track switching coordination. As a result leaving decision to human operators, increasing safety risks into railway operations. This study proposes a framework based on temporal planning for dynamic route optimization and disruption management in heterogeneous railway systems. The framework formulates railway operations as a temporal planning problem using PDDL 2.1 with explicitly modeling gauge compatibility constraints and diverse disruption scenarios. It generates conflict-free timestamped operational plans specifying both optimized schedules and executable action sequences. To evaluate the proposed framework, we developed a benchmark problem set with 200 instances using up to 1,000 track points and 120 trains. Two state-of-the-art temporal planners and a plan validator were employed to assessed the framework. The experimental results demonstrate that the framework effectively generates temporal operational plans for heterogeneous railway systems and handles multi-gauge constraints, disruptions, and reduces dependence on manual decision making.

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

LLM-Assisted Stance Detection in Scientific Discourse: A Test Case in Bayesian Cognitive Science

Qualitative coding is central to social science, but expert annotation is difficult to scale. LLMs offer a possible extension, yet require careful validation when the target construct is interpretive, theoretically loaded, and only indirectly expressed. We study this problem in a difficult case: detecting whether authors treat Bayesian models as descriptions of mental and neural mechanisms (realism) or as useful mathematical tools (instrumentalism). Our method combines a theory-driven codebook, expert-coded reference annotations, a diagnostic-gated prompt-optimization search yielding a shared zero-shot prompt for three frontier LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro Preview), and multi-rater reliability analysis. The final prompt achieved a held-out combined reliability score of 0.76 (harmonic mean of ICC = 0.79 and $\alpha$ = 0.74), with all diagnostics satisfied. Deployed on 6,858 quotes from 210 articles, the three LLMs reached substantial quote-level agreement (ICC = 0.80; $\alpha$ = 0.76; combined = 0.78) and near-perfect article-level rank stability ($r$ = 0.96-0.97 across rater pairs). The corpus was predominantly weakly realist, but article-level stances were rarely uniform: only 1.4% of articles used a single band, while 59.5% spanned four or more. Low-level perception/motor articles scored 8.8 Realism points higher than high-level cognition articles ($p < .001$, $d = 0.60$), quantifying a long-held qualitative intuition. We present this as an expert-led case study; the framework is intended to generalize to similar theoretically demanding tasks, not to all qualitative analysis.

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

Interactive Pareto navigation for deep multi-task learning

arXiv:2606.19521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In multi-task learning, handling an increasing number of objectives can quickly become challenging, both in terms of the computational resources and the decision maker's capacity to choose appropriate trade-offs. A widely used approach is thus to aggregate the individual losses in a single loss function by a weighted sum. This often fails to capture either the decision maker's preferences as a result of the shape of the Pareto front, or requires multiple adjustments and computations which becomes prohibitively expensive in deep learning applications. To address these issues, we introduce a novel framework, Preference Pareto Exploration (PPE), which enforces the decision maker's preferences while accounting for the geometry of the Pareto set in an interactive exploration process. PPE is based on a predictor-corrector method that performs predictor steps tangential to the manifold of Pareto-optimal solutions, following the decision maker's preference. The subsequent corrector step results in a new trade-off reflecting this preference. To avoid explicit Hessian computations when characterizing the tangent space of the manifold, we employ a Krylov subspace method that relies solely on matrix-vector products. These products can be efficiently obtained via automatic differentiation, ensuring both efficiency and robustness throughout the optimization process. The method's functionality and performance are demonstrated using both toy problems and examples from deep learning.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MoCo-AIS: A Contrastive Learning Framework for Similarity Computation of Vessel Trajectories

arXiv:2606.17978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trajectory similarity is a fundamental task in analyzing mobility patterns, essential for applications such as route pattern extraction, mobility prediction, and anomaly detection. Traditional distance-based measures for computing similarity incur high computational cost, driving the adoption of lightweight learning-based approaches. Supervised methods rely on extensive labels derived from traditional distance measures and often reproduce these metrics, which limits generalization. While self-supervised learning addresses this issue through contrastive learning, it lacks a unified framework, making it difficult to compare deep learning (DL) models for consistent trajectory representation. Accordingly, this paper presents MoCo-AIS, a unified framework for learning vessel trajectory embeddings based on the Momentum Contrast (MoCo) paradigm, which formulates similarity learning through positive and negative trajectory pairs. Within this framework, we evaluate a diverse set of leading DL models on large-scale, real-world vessel-tracking AIS datasets that capture diverse navigation behaviors and operating conditions. Results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves similarity learning over existing baselines, while providing a benchmarking platform for evaluating trajectory representation models.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Are LLMs Ready to Assist Physicians? PhysAssistBench for Interactive Doctor-Patient-EHR Assistance

The most plausible near-term role of medical LLMs is to assist rather than replace physicians, yet current evaluations often test isolated capabilities: clinical knowledge, EHR system interaction, or patient communication. Physician assistance instead requires coordinating these capabilities within the same interaction, where physicians issue underspecified requests, patients describe symptoms ambiguously, and EHR systems demand precise tool use. We introduce PhysAssistBench, a benchmark for interactive doctor-patient-EHR assistance. Built from real MIMIC-IV cases, PhysAssistBench uses a scalable pipeline to construct agentic patients: interactive, record-grounded agents that turn static EHR records into multi-turn clinical scenarios while preserving clinical factuality. PhysAssistBench provides a curated bilingual evaluation set of 1,296 manually reviewed and physician-validated turns. Experiments with leading LLMs show that current models remain unreliable in this setting, which exposes a key bottleneck for clinical LLMs: reliable assistance requires coordination across knowledge, communication, and systems, not isolated gains in any of them.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Universal Image Restoration via Internalized Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Image restoration seeks to recover high-quality images from degraded inputs but becomes highly ill-posed under complex, mixed degradations. While unified all-in-one models are common, their performance declines as degradation complexity increases. Recent works adopt Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for multi-round restoration using specialized modules. However, this approach faces two key limitations: (i) increased computational cost due to multi-step processing, and (ii) weak modeling of interactions between degradations during stepwise inference. We introduce CoTIR, a universal image restoration framework that internalizes CoT reasoning within a single model. Concretely, we view image restoration as a specialized subtask of image editing, which implies that a large-scale pre-trained editing model provides a more favorable optimization starting point. Building on this, we fine-tune the model for restoration and further encode structured CoT-style reasoning into the learning objective via a differentiable formulation inspired by Lagrangian optimization, enabling holistic restoration without chaining specialized restorers. To facilitate training and evaluation, we further present CoTIR-Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 5.2 million samples with CoT-style reasoning traces. Extensive experiments on CoTIR-Bench and broad real composite degradation scenes show that CoTIR achieves stronger perceptual quality and more competitive fidelity than both all-in-one models and multi-round restoration methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/gy65896/CoTIR.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Quantum Machine Learning for Industrial Applications

arXiv:2606.14822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Machine Learning have transformed numerous industrial sectors, yet classical paradigms face fundamental limitations: rapidly growing data volumes, rising computational costs, significant energy consumption, and the physical scaling limits of conventional hardware architectures. Quantum computing has emerged as a promising computational paradigm to address these challenges, giving rise to the field of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). In this thesis, the theoretical foundations of QML are investigated, with a focus on near-term and future practical applications. Three central challenges are addressed: the trainability of variational quantum circuits, their expressivity, and their resistance to efficient classical simulation. The trainability of Hamming-weight preserving variational quantum circuits is first studied, and theoretical guarantees are established that resolve an open conjecture on the absence of barren plateaus for this circuit family. Subspace-preserving QML algorithms are then introduced, including photonic circuits and quantum convolutional neural networks, and are designed to mimic classical ML subroutines while offering polynomial quantum advantage. Finally, variational quantum circuits are analyzed as quantum Fourier models, and a framework is derived to jointly characterize expressivity and trainability, from which conditions are obtained under which quantum models provably separate from their classical counterparts. These contributions are intended to advance the theoretical roadmap for harnessing near-term and future quantum technologies in real-world applications.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genome-wide association and multi-omics functional screens reveal the genetic architecture of foveal development

Foveal hypoplasia causes visual impairment across congenital eye disorders, yet the genetic programmes governing foveal development remain poorly characterised and no tractable model exists for foveal disease. In the first genome-wide association study of foveal hypoplasia, we identified 42 sentinel variants mapping to 54 effector genes supported by >= 2 criteria from a variant-to-gene framework incorporating developmental multi-omics. Disruption of six effector genes using mutant lines and CRISPR knockouts in the zebrafish high acuity zone recapitulates structural, functional, and ultrastructural hallmarks of foveal hypoplasia, establishing the first vertebrate disease model. Integration with human foetal single-cell and spatial transcriptomics reveals two temporal waves of effector gene expression and identifies Muller glia as critical mediators of foveal patterning. Phenome-wide analyses reveal foveal variants are pleiotropic with refractive, lenticular, and metabolic traits, connecting foveal development to anterior segment and systemic disease biology. These findings should inform mechanistic studies of macular disease.

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

Federated Medical Image Segmentation under Real-World Label Noise: A Benchmark Suite for Noisy Label Learning Method Selection

While federated learning (FL) enables collaborative medical image segmentation without centralizing sensitive data, real-world deployment is frequently complicated by cross-site label imperfections such as contour disagreement, missing or additional structures, and confused labels. Federated noisy label learning (FNLL) aims to mitigate these effects, yet remains underused in practice as existing evidence is largely based on synthetic noise, simplified settings, and limited real-world noisy evaluation. We address this gap by introducing a benchmark suite that combines diverse real-world noisy datasets, deployment-relevant client-noise scenarios, and label-noise-targeted evaluation to support systematic FNLL assessment and informed method selection. The suite combines curated real-world noisy medical image segmentation datasets from diverse sources with a comprehensive federated segmentation framework including various client-noise scenarios and noise-targeted evaluation. The presented suite provides a realistic and discriminative basis for FNLL evaluation in medical image segmentation and establishes a reusable foundation for fair benchmarking, dataset-specific label-noise characterization, and future method development under realistic federated settings. Code is available at https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/FedSegNoiseBench.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Finite-Sample Bounds for Expected Signature Estimation under Weak Dependence

arXiv:2605.20541v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The expected signature uniquely determines the law of a random rough path under a moment-growth condition, yet finite-sample bounds for estimating its truncations from a single long dependent trajectory remain unavailable. We study a strictly stationary stochastic process equipped with a geometric rough-path lift, observed in non-overlapping blocks of equally-spaced samples, and prove a non-asymptotic mean-squared error (MSE) bound for the block-averaging estimator of its truncated expected signature. Under moment and stationarity assumptions together with a direct covariance-decay condition on block signatures – strictly weaker than $\alpha$-mixing and applicable to long-range-dependent processes – the error separates into a discretization term and a fluctuation term, with rates determined respectively by path regularity and dependence strength. A levelwise rough-factorial variance analysis keeps finite-truncation constants explicit and yields an optimal allocation rule under a fixed observation budget. We verify the assumptions for independent-coordinate fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes in three regimes: short-range (Hurst $1/41/2$. Monte Carlo experiments show empirical slopes steeper than the guaranteed upper-bound rates.