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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

E-mem: Multi-agent based Episodic Context Reconstruction for LLM Agent Memory

arXiv:2601.21714v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) agents towards System~2 reasoning, characterized by deliberative, high-precision problem-solving, requires maintaining rigorous logical integrity over extended horizons. However, prevalent memory preprocessing paradigms suffer from destructive de-contextualization. By compressing complex sequential dependencies into pre-defined structures (e.g., embeddings or graphs), these methods sever the contextual integrity essential for deep reasoning. To address this, we propose E-mem, a framework shifting from Memory Preprocessing to Episodic Context Reconstruction. Inspired by biological engrams, E-mem employs a heterogeneous hierarchical architecture where multiple assistant agents maintain uncompressed memory contexts, while a central master agent orchestrates global planning. Unlike passive retrieval, our mechanism empowers assistants to locally reason within activated segments, extracting context-aware evidence before aggregation. Evaluations on the LoCoMo benchmark demonstrate that E-mem achieves over 54\% F1, surpassing the state-of-the-art GAM by 7.75\%, while reducing token cost by over 70\%.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Rethinking One-Step Image Editing through ChordEdit: Reproduction, Simplification, and New Insights

One-step image editing is important for making text-guided editing fast, practical, and easy to deploy, but its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. We revisit ChordEdit through reproduction, ablation, and simplification. Our analysis shows that a) the chord window $\delta$ largely acts as an effective timestep shift from $t$ to $t - \delta$; b) chord transport acts on high-noise images and mainly performs low-frequency semantic editing; and c) proximal alignment acts on low-noise images and complements it by adding high-frequency target details. In this view, ChordEdit naturally decomposes editing into a coarse low-frequency transport stage and a fine high-frequency alignment stage. These findings suggest a path toward prompt-conditioned dynamic timestep selection for adaptive image editing. All code and results can be found at \href{https://github.com/Harvard-AI-and-Robotics-Lab/ChordEdit-Reproduction}{link}.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

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

Operator Boosting Produces Pareto-Efficient PDE Surrogates

arXiv:2606.17460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operators are widely used as surrogate solution maps for partial differential equations (PDEs), but full-size models can be costly to store, deploy, and evaluate in many-query scientific workflows. This work introduces Operator Boosting, a stagewise residual-learning framework for constructing compact neural-operator surrogates directly, rather than training a large model and compressing it afterward. Starting from the empirical mean predictor in normalized output coordinates, the method trains a sequence of tiny same-family neural operators on residual fields and incorporates each correction through validation-selected shrinkage. We instantiate the framework with Fourier neural operators (FNOs), DeepONets, and convolutional neural operators (CNOs), and compare boosted tiny stacks against full-size monolithic baselines across one-, two-, and three-dimensional PDE benchmarks from PDEBench, APEBench, and The Well. Across 30 dataset-architecture pairs, 21 show positive mean accuracy gains and 17 have positive confidence intervals, while all boosted stacks reduce trainable parameter count by approximately 72-95%. Best-model comparisons show empirical Pareto improvements on 7 of 10 completed PDE benchmarks, including two-dimensional Navier-Stokes, shallow-water dynamics, Darcy flow, one-dimensional transport and reaction systems, and three-dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes. These results show that Operator Boosting often improves the empirical accuracy-parameter Pareto frontier of neural PDE surrogates, while also exposing PDE- and architecture-dependent regimes where residual boosting fails to offset compression.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Sample from What You See: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Diffusion Bridge with Observation-Embedded Stochastic Differential Equation

arXiv:2512.07212v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Imitation learning with diffusion models has advanced robotic control by capturing the multi-modal action distributions. However, existing methods typically treat observations only as high-level conditions to the denoising network, rather than integrating them into the stochastic dynamics of the diffusion process itself. As a result, the sampling is forced to begin from random noise, weakening the coupling between perception and control and often yielding suboptimal performance. We propose BridgePolicy, a generative visuomotor policy that directly integrates observations into the stochastic dynamics via a diffusion-bridge formulation. By constructing an observation-informed trajectory, BridgePolicy enables sampling to start from a rich and informative prior rather than random noise, substantially improving precision and reliability in control. A key difficulty is that diffusion bridge normally connects distributions of matched dimensionality, while robotic observations are heterogeneous and not naturally aligned with actions. To overcome this, we introduce a semantic aligner to unify the visual and state inputs and align the observations with action representations, making diffusion bridge applicable to heterogeneous robot data. Extensive experiments across 52 simulation tasks on three benchmarks and 5 real-world tasks demonstrate that BridgePolicy consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative policies. Our code is available at https://jianghcsr.github.io/BridgePolicy_page/.

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

GENIE: A Fine-Grained Measure for Novelty

Large Language Models have consistently demonstrated a lack of creativity and diversity across tasks. Prior work has focused on addressing whether models are capable of generating creative outputs. Here, we aim to consider novelty and investigate what makes model-generated content novel or not novel in a task-specific manner. We propose a fine-grained evaluation metric GENIE to measure the novelty of responses along task-specific features with respect to a population of responses. We show that unlike GENIE, holistic metrics struggle to capture the high-dimensionality of novelty and do not provide insight on which properties they target. Finally, we use GENIE to measure the effectiveness of mitigation methods that address creativity to better understand where these methods can improve novelty.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Stationarity-and-Coupling Criterion for Training-Free Time-Lagged Spectral Embeddings of Multivariate Time Series

arXiv:2606.13823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study training-free fixed-length descriptors for multivariate time series and ask not merely whether such a descriptor performs well, but when it can be expected to work at all. Our object of study is $D(\tau)$, built from a time-lagged correlation matrix truncated at the Marchenko-Pastur edge so that only signal-bearing eigenvalues survive and classified by cosine similarity to class centroids with zero learned parameters. The central contribution is not the descriptor but a falsifiable applicability criterion for it. Working from a stationary Gaussian VAR(1) model, we argue that $D(\tau)$ separates two classes when the signals are approximately stationary and the class information lives in their cross-channel temporal coupling rather than in marginal per-channel power. We derive, semi-formally, three consequences: a distinguishability condition, why the static ($\tau=0$) covariance collapses to chance, and why a stationary but power-discriminated paradigm defeats the descriptor. The criterion is operational: a two-part pre-flight test – an augmented Dickey-Fuller stationarity check and a power-baseline saturation check – predicts applicability before any training. We validate both halves on a mixed assortment. On four paradigms that satisfy the criterion (Sleep-EDF, BCI-IV-2a, MIT-BIH, ESC-50) the descriptor is competitive with strong baselines at a fraction of their cost, reaching $88.5\pm4.5\%$ under 20-subject leave-one-subject-out on Sleep-EDF on a single CPU thread. On three that violate it – non-stationary ERPs, and financial-volatility and wearable-stress regimes that are power-discriminated – it fails exactly as the pre-flight predicts, and these negatives are the more informative half. We are explicit that $D(\tau)$ is not the most accurate representation; its value is a compact, training-free embedding whose domain of validity is known in advance.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reasoning Text-to-Video Retrieval for Operating Room Clips via Action-Driven Digital Twins

Text-to-video retrieval in operating rooms (OR) is an enabling technology for OR safety, as it allows stakeholders to retrieve and inspect recordings of specific events. However, because the most safety-critical events may not follow the common structure, to unlock its full potential text-to-video retrieval must be able to handle implicit queries that require reasoning to identify the right video (e.g., the step right before clipping). However, existing methods rely on global embeddings that cannot reason over such queries. We propose OR3, a text-to-video retrieval method that converts clips into action-driven digital twins (ActDTs), grouping concurrent subject-action-object triplets under non-overlapping temporal intervals. Moreover, rather than cross-modal matching through paired encoders, OR3 performs imagination-based retrieval where an LLM generates hypothetical ActDTs from queries. This enables intra-modal matching via a single encoder trained with ActDT-tailored hard negatives. Finally, evidence-grounded refinement revises imagined ActDTs based on discrepancies with top candidates to capture procedure-specific patterns. We construct a benchmark from MM-OR with 276 implicit queries across four reasoning categories over 386 clips from robotic knee procedures. OR3 achieves 57.6 R@1 and 77.3 R@5, outperforming the strongest baseline. These results demonstrate that OR3 enables fine-grained discrimination between visually similar OR video clips through temporal action reasoning.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Exploring Feature Extraction Technique Parameters for Acoustic Gunshot Classification

arXiv:2606.19568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Acoustic gunshot detection is a problem with applications across civilian public safety, military operations, and wildlife conservation, yet the field lacks a rigorous exploration of feature extraction techniques with a focus on generalization to realistic data. The mixed effectiveness of commercial gunshot detection and classification systems indicates an open problem that is not adequately addressed by the current literature. In this paper, we present a systematic investigation of common feature extraction techniques using a dataset of 23,000 gunshot recordings across 85 firearms and 21 calibers. We benchmark three feature extraction techniques with 12 total unique parameter sets using ResNet-18. Our results demonstrate that using the correct feature extraction technique can improve top-1 accuracy by up to 20%, and utilizing the correct parameters for a given feature extraction technique can improve that value by up to 4.7%.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Movement Primitives in Robotics: A Comprehensive Survey

arXiv:2601.02379v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Biological systems exhibit a continuous stream of movements, consisting of sequential segments, that allow them to perform complex tasks in a creative and versatile fashion. This observation has led researchers towards identifying elementary building blocks of motion known as movement primitives, which are well-suited for generating motor commands in autonomous systems, such as robots. In this survey, we provide an encyclopedic overview of movement primitive approaches and applications in chronological order. Concretely, we present movement primitive frameworks as a way of representing robotic control trajectories acquired through human demonstrations. Within the area of robotics, movement primitives can encode basic motions at the trajectory level, such as how a robot would grasp a cup or the sequence of motions necessary to toss a ball. Furthermore, movement primitives have been developed with the desirable analytical properties of a spring-damper system, probabilistic coupling of multiple demonstrations, using neural networks in high-dimensional systems, and more, to address difficult challenges in robotics. Although movement primitives have widespread application to a variety of fields, the goal of this survey is to inform practitioners on the use of these frameworks in the context of robotics. Specifically, we aim to (i) present a systematic review of major movement primitive frameworks and examine their strengths and weaknesses; (ii) highlight applications that have successfully made use of movement primitives; and (iii) examine open questions and discuss practical challenges when applying movement primitives in robotics.

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

CoMNeT: A MedNeXt-CorrDiff Framework for Volumetric Brain Tumor Segmentation

Accurate brain tumor segmentation from multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is critical for treatment planning, response assessment, and quantitative neuro-oncology research. However, automated segmentation remains a difficult task in computer vision because of variation in tumor appearance and MRI protocols across patient scans. Moreover, clinically important regions such as enhancing tumor (ET) and tumor core (TC) are often small relative to the full brain volume, furthering increasing the difficulty of achieving high voxel-level precision. In this paper, we show that combining a modern 3D convolutional segmentation model with corrective diffusion-based refinement and ensembling improves volumetric glioma segmentation on the UTSW-Glioma dataset. We propose CoMNeT, a MedNeXt-CorrDiff framework that uses four MRI modalities as input and predicts ET, TC, and whole tumor (WT) regions for automated brain tumor segmentation. MedNeXt is used as the primary segmentation model with Global Response Normalization for feature learning, while CorrDiff is trained as a postprocessing residual refinement method to correct errors in the probability maps before final thresholding. Using five-fold cross-validation, CoMNeT achieved the highest Dice score for most tumor regions, with ET, TC, WT, and average Dice scores of 0.7543 +/- 0.0261, 0.6806 +/- 0.0166, 0.9049 +/- 0.0128, and 0.7798 +/- 0.0184, respectively. CoMNeT outperformed two selected baseline models: SegResNet (0.7555 +/- 0.0190 average Dice) and standalone MedNeXt (0.7697 +/- 0.0154 average Dice). Our findings support the use of corrective diffusion and fold-level probability ensembling as practical additions to existing state-of-the-art 3D convolutional models for automated glioma segmentation.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

SproutRAG: Attention-Guided Tree Search with Progressive Embeddings for Long-Document RAG

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems must balance retrieval granularity with contextual coherence, a challenge that existing methods address through LLM-guided chunking, single-level context expansion, or hierarchical summarization. These approaches variously depend on costly LLM calls during indexing or retrieval, limit context aggregation to a single granularity level, or introduce information loss through summarization. We present SproutRAG, an attention-guided hierarchical RAG framework that addresses this trade-off by organizing sentence-level chunks into progressively larger but semantically coherent units, using learned inter-sentence attention to construct a binary chunking tree. Unlike prior approaches that rely on external LLMs, fixed context expansion, or lossy summarization, SproutRAG learns which attention heads and layers best capture semantic document structure, enabling multi-granularity retrieval without additional LLM calls or compressed summaries. At retrieval time, SproutRAG uses hierarchical beam search to retrieve candidates at multiple granularities, capturing multi-sentence relevance beyond flat retrieval. The framework is trained end-to-end with a joint objective that improves both embeddings and tree structure. Experiments across four benchmarks spanning scientific, legal, and open-domain settings demonstrate that SproutRAG improves information efficiency (IE) by 6.1% on average over the strongest baseline. Code is available on https://github.com/AmirAbaskohi/SproutRAG.

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

FUSE: Frequency-domain Unification and Spectral Energy Alignment for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification

Despite significant progress in multi-modal Re-Identification (ReID), existing methods tend to emphasize low-frequency cues. Consequently, they focus on attributes such as color, illumination, and coarse appearance, while overlooking mid and high-frequency structures that encode geometric, textural, and identity-discriminative details. This imbalance leads to incomplete spectral representations and unstable cross-modal alignment. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FUSE, a frequency-domain framework that reformulates multi-modal ReID as a two-stage process of spectral disentanglement and energy alignment. The proposed Spectral Decomposition Module (SDM) adaptively partitions features into low, mid, and high-frequency subspaces, enabling hierarchical spectral modeling. The Cross-Modal Alignment Module (CAM) further enforces energy alignment and subspace complementarity across modalities via frequency-consistency regularization. In addition, FUSE incorporates learnable frequency modulation to enhance robustness under varying illumination and heterogeneous sensor conditions. Extensive experiments on RGBNT201, RGBNT100, and MSVR310 show that FUSE achieves 9.1\% mAP and 9.5\% Rank-1 improvements, establishing an interpretable frequency-domain paradigm for multi-modal representation learning.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Judging to Improve: A De-biased VLM-as-3D-Judge Protocol for Single-Image 3D Generation

arXiv:2606.20364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A companion study established a de-biased, cross-model VLM-as-3D-judge that reliably ranks single-image-to-3D mesh quality where cheap geometry and CLIP proxies fall short. This paper asks: can that judge's preferences specialize a strong open generator, TRELLIS, on one asset class (furniture), cheaply and without human labels? Taking the judge from ranking to optimization is where the work lives. Pushing a VLM judge into the training and evaluation loop exposes failure modes ranking never triggered, so our contribution is an optimization-grade hardening of the judge: a training judge (Qwen2.5-VL-7B) held distinct from an evaluation judge (InternVL3-8B) to break circularity; position-bias correction; and fixes for three failure modes (image overload, geometry-hiding splat renders, and reference-free judging that rewards clean-but-wrong outputs), with calibration evidence (clear-gap win-rate 0.83-1.0; base-vs-base ~0.5). Using this protocol as an independent evaluator, and working only from public models and data with lightweight parameter-efficient adaptation, we find our methods match the strong base rather than exceed it. Independent base samples carry essentially no learnable preference (0.94 order-flip rate), so signal must be engineered by quality-contrastive construction. Across six adaptation methods, two input regimes, and a severity sweep, the most targeted - conditioner repair under severe degradation - reaches parity (0.50) with the base, while no method clears the >=65% win-rate target. The result is mechanistic: clean inputs saturate the judge, flow-DIT fine-tuning washes out through the sampler, and conditioning repair is the locus that moves geometry. Win-rates are directional at n=8 objects. Matching a strong public-data base with cheap adaptation is itself informative: exceeding it needs more than lightweight PEFT on public data, and the judge protocol is reusable.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

A unified smoothing framework for protein domain bigram model

Biomolecular sequences can be represented as strings over an alphabet, an analogy that has motivated many applications of computational linguistic techniques to biological problems. However, such methods must be adapted to the characteristic scale and organization of biomolecular data. Here, we consider the problem of bigram smoothing for multidomain protein architectures, where domain bigram frequency data is extremely sparse and differs from textual data in alphabet size, string length distribution, the relationship between bigram and unigram frequencies, tandem repeat lengths, and the distribution of domain adjacencies. Moreover, some domain combinations are unobserved because they are biologically incompatible, others because the data are incomplete. A smoothing method that distinguishes these two cases is required. We propose a unified smoothing framework based on interpolation that can be tuned to accommodate different bigram data characteristics. Within this framework, we design specific model variants suited to protein domain bigram data: these assign low adjusted counts to pairs that are likely incompatible, while making appropriate adjustments for undersampled pairs. We demonstrate empirically that this approach distinguishes the two cases while preserving the characteristic signatures of multidomain data.

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

A Formal Framework for Declarative Agentic AI in Business Process Analysis

arXiv:2606.15291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI opens new opportunities for automating Business Process (BP), enabling autonomous decision-making and dynamic adaptation. However, realising this potential requires BP entities and their interactions to be defined with formal precision. This paper presents a formal framework for Agentic BP analysis through the AGO methodology. AGO captures the modelling perspective in terms of who is acting (Agents), why it is carried out (Goals), and what the relevant entities are (Objects). Grounded in set theory and mathematical logic, we formally define the AGO entity types and their interactions, organising all definitions into a BP Knowledge Base (BPKB). The resulting BPKB supports structured querying, incremental updates, and automatic generation of BP workflows, while ensuring soundness and completeness of the derived paths.

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

The Energy Blind Spot: NVIDIA's Flagship Edge AI Hardware Cannot Support Process-Level Energy Attribution

arXiv:2605.27599v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic AI workloads - where a single user goal triggers multi-step orchestration, tool calls, retries, and failure recovery - are being targeted for edge deployment, with NVIDIA, Dell, HP, ASUS, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte all shipping GB10-based desktop AI systems in 2026. We recently demonstrated that orchestration structure dominates agentic energy cost, with workflows consuming 4.33x more energy per successful goal than linear baselines and OOI reaching 7.63x for multi-step reasoning tasks. Separately, Raj et al. show that CPU-side processing accounts for up to 90.6% of total latency and 44% of total dynamic energy in agentic workloads. We report a systematic energy-observability audit of the ASUS Ascent GX10 (GB10 SoC) and find that the platform exposes no CPU energy counter, no INA power-rail monitor, no IPMI/BMC, and no SCMI powercap protocol through any supported software interface. The only on-device energy telemetry is instantaneous GPU power via NVML. We further discover that the MediaTek firmware already computes per-rail energy internally via an undocumented ACPI interface (SPBM), but NVIDIA states there are "no plans to expose CPU rail information." On-device per-process energy attribution - as performed on x86 via RAPL - is therefore not reproducible on this platform through supported interfaces. We formalize a hardware requirements specification for energy-attributed AI, propose an interim calibration bridge for per-domain energy decomposition - confirmed on the Acer Veriton GN100 where CPU energy accumulators are live - and identify a standards-track path via SCMI powercap. Our findings motivate the low-carbon computing community to demand energy observability as a first-class hardware requirement.

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

LUCID: Learned Undersampling-Adaptive Consistency-Guided Inference with Deterministic Flow Matching for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view CT reduces radiation dose and scanning time by acquiring fewer projection views, but angular undersampling makes reconstruction severely ill-posed, causing streak artifacts, structural blurring, and loss of fine details. Existing supervised methods are often tied to specific sampling settings, whereas generative methods may introduce anatomically inconsistent hallucination-like structures under severe undersampling. We propose Lucid, a sparsity-adaptive, consistency-guided reconstruction framework based on a Flow Matching generative prior for sparse-view CT. Lucid is trained only on high-quality CT images to learn a continuous transport between a Gaussian distribution and the high-quality CT image distribution, independent of view sampling. During inference, the sampling sparsity level is explicitly incorporated to adapt the generative trajectory of a single pretrained model. Specifically, Lucid constructs a degradation-matched initial state by sparsity-weighted fusion of the sparse-view FBP image and Gaussian noise, performs sparsity-modulated Flow Matching updates, and applies projection-domain data-consistency correction after each prior update. Experiments under multiple sparse-view settings show that Lucid achieves stable reconstruction performance across different sampling densities, improves image quality and structural fidelity, and reduces the risk of hallucination-like structures in generative sparse-view CT reconstruction.

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

Authority, Truth, and Citation Bias: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Benchmark for Studying Epistemic Susceptibility in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.13104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in citation-augmented settings, yet the effect of citation presence on model behavior independent of factual content remains poorly understood. We introduce AuthorityBench, a 220,564-prompt multi-domain benchmark that isolates how citation-based authority signals influence epistemic behavior in LLMs. The benchmark uses a fully balanced 2x2 factorial design crossing claim veracity with citation veracity, the first to do so, across four domains (general knowledge, science, law, and medicine), with controlled variation over 40 prompt templates, four venue prestige tiers, and a country-coded author name dataset. Evaluating seven models on 12 structured research questions, we find that citation presence, whether real or fabricated, consistently increases hallucination rates relative to a no-citation baseline. The effect is strongest when fabricated citations accompany true claims, raising hallucination rates by 3 to 22 percentage points and reaching 35 to 77% in the general knowledge domain, while legal claims are comparatively robust and venue prestige and author demographics show negligible impact. All datasets and evaluation code are available at: https://github.com/floating-reeds/AuthorityBench

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

Beyond Dark Knowledge: Mixup-Based Distillation for Reliable Predictions

Knowledge Distillation (KD) and mixup have proven effective at inducing smoothness in class boundaries; KD captures inherent class relationships in probability distributions, and mixup enforces them through convex combinations of inputs. Their interaction, however, remains poorly understood, particularly when mixup is applied only during student training. In this setting, the teacher is queried on inputs drawn from a vicinal distribution it never saw during training, a controlled mismatch whose effect on knowledge transfer has not been characterised. We show that this mismatch causes the teacher's supervisory signal to be dominated by distributional confusion rather than inter-class structure. Despite it, the student does not merely imitate the teacher: it independently acquires greater linearity in the vicinal region, a structural property that the teacher lacks, and goes beyond dark-knowledge transfer. KD with mixup consistently improves student accuracy and reduces overconfidence by an order of magnitude relative to the baseline, across CIFAR and ImageNet with varying-capacity teachers. Crucially, calibration propagates from teacher to student independently of accuracy transfer, and temperature scaling governs a measurable accuracy-calibration trade-off that becomes more pronounced under vicinal training. These results reframe mixup distillation not as a degraded version of standard KD, but as a richer transfer channel that simultaneously shapes discriminative performance, uncertainty estimation, and representational geometry.

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

Vision-language models for chest radiography do not always need the image

Medical vision-language models report strong chest radiograph accuracy, and this is increasingly read as evidence that they use the image. That inference is unsafe: a model exploiting finding-name priors scores like one that reads the scan, and no standard benchmark separates them. We introduce a causal audit that intervenes on the image, occluding the relevant region, occluding an irrelevant one, and swapping in another patient's same-label scan, and combines three behavioral metrics to test whether a correct answer depends on the image. Across nine systems, a text-only model with no image access reaches within 5.7 accuracy points of the best multimodal one, and a 119-billion-parameter multimodal model is statistically indistinguishable from a 7-billion text-only baseline. The audit splits the cohort into three models that ignore the image, one that is unstable, and five that use it selectively, for a subset of findings; the categories hold across a second dataset, resolution, and prompt phrasing. Against board-certified radiologists, a text-only model is statistically indistinguishable from a radiologist's accuracy while grounding at zero, whereas the image-using models ground at radiologist-comparable rates. Reported confidence flags ungrounded answers only when a model uses the image. Grounding audits, not accuracy, should gate clinical deployment.

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

Does VLA Even Know the Basics? Measuring Commonsense and World Knowledge Retention in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606.19297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control. We introduce Act2Answer, a lightweight protocol that adapts VLM knowledge benchmarks to VLA evaluation by requiring agents to answer through action. Each question becomes a short tabletop episode where the agent performs a single object-placement action to select among candidate answers, yielding an action-grounded success rate with reduced control confounds. We curate a test suite of such environments across diverse commonsense and world-knowledge categories and introduce layerwise intent probing to localize answer-relevant information across the VLM backbone and action head. In a large-scale study of 7 VLA models and 9 VLM baselines, we systematically rank models across categories, finding that VLAs show solid performance on simple concepts while exhibiting larger gaps on richer semantic categories relative to their source VLMs, that VQA co-training is associated with better knowledge retention, and that answer-relevant signals peak in middle VLA layers but attenuate in upper layers. Act2Answer is available at https://tttonyalpha.github.io/act2answer/.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

CoCoGEC: Counterfactual Generation for Robust Grammatical Error Correction

Grammatical error correction (GEC) systems are usually trained and evaluated on GEC benchmarks, but their performance often drops sharply once the surrounding context is slightly perturbed or extended. This indicates that the existing GEC models usually fail to understand the error patterns in the varying contexts. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the counterfactuals for GEC tasks, where the subtle changes to the contexts could lead to the label flipping issue. We propose CoCoGEC, a counterfactual generation framework that creates copies of training instances with error-irrelevant contexts altered. Our framework systematically generates counterfactuals by (1) generating intra- and inter-sentence counterfactuals that maintain the error patterns as well as syntax of the original instances by altering the word-level and sentence-level contexts; (2) revising the generated counterfactuals by selecting the instances with flipped labels and high GEC Mutual Information (MI) coefficient. Extensive experiments show that our method substantially improves the stability of GEC models, outperforming a set of data augmentation baselines. Particularly, it could achieve absolute F0.5 gains of +9.9, +11.3, and +20.8 points on the perturbed BEA-19*,CoNLL-14*, and TEM-8* data set.Our code is released at https://github.com/Quinnok/CoCoGEC

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

From Proteome Mining to Structural Validation: Phosphopyruvate Hydratase as a Structurally Tractable Drug Target in Kinetoplastid Parasites

Chagas disease, caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, demands novel therapeutic strategies that overcome the toxicity and limited efficacy of current treatments. To address this need, herein we report an integrative, target-centric strategy that combines parasite proteome mining, structural modeling, and experimental validation. Functional enrichment and druggability analyses identified phosphopyruvate hydratase (PPH) as a promising candidate due to its essential metabolic role and limited similarity to human homologs. Notably, proteome mining revealed the presence and conservation of PPH across kinetoplastid parasites, including Leishmania donovani, supporting its evaluation beyond T. cruzi. For the selected PPH sequences, AlphaFold-derived three-dimensional models underwent extensive molecular dynamics refinement, yielding stable conformational ensembles suitable for structure-based studies. Using this validated model, virtual screening of the Latin American Natural Products Database - LANaPDB - identified aptosimon as a top-ranked compound candidate. Molecular dynamics simulations further showed ligand-dependent binding behavior, suggesting alternative binding modes distinct from the canonical substrate configuration. In vitro assays demonstrated consistent antiparasitic activity against intracellular T. cruzi amastigotes (IC50 = 3.52 ug/mL) and Leishmania donovani promastigotes (IC50 = 13.06 ug/mL), supporting the biological relevance of the aptosimon-related lignan chemotype, hinokinin, across two kinetoplastid parasite models. Together, these results support PPH as a structurally tractable and biologically relevant candidate target, while identifying an aptosimon-related lignan chemotype, represented experimentally by hinokinin, as a cross-species antiparasitic scaffold that warrants further biochemical target-validation studies.