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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

EMFusion: Uncertainty-Aware Conditional Diffusion Model for Multivariate Narrow-band Exposure Forecasting

arXiv:2512.15067v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid growth in wireless infrastructure has increased the need to accurately estimate and forecast electromagnetic field (EMF) levels to ensure ongoing compliance, assess potential health impacts, and support efficient network planning. While existing studies rely on univariate forecasting of wideband aggregate EMF data, multivariate narrow-band EMF forecasting is needed to capture the inter-operator and inter-frequency variations essential for proactive network planning. To this end, this paper introduces EMFusion, a conditional diffusion-based EMF forecasting framework that integrates diverse contextual factors, such as time of day, season, and holidays, while providing uncertainty-aware probabilistic forecasts. The proposed architecture features a residual U-Net backbone enhanced by a cross-attention mechanism that dynamically integrates external conditions to guide the generation process. Furthermore, EMFusion integrates an imputation-based sampling strategy that treats forecasting as a structural inpainting task, ensuring temporal coherence even with irregular measurements. Unlike standard point forecasters, EMFusion generates empirical probabilistic prediction intervals from the learned conditional distribution, providing uncertainty-aware probabilistic forecasting rather than simple point estimation. Numerical experiments conducted on the multivariate narrow-band EMF datasets demonstrate that EMFusion with the contextual information of working hours outperforms the baseline models with or without conditions. The proposed EMFusion outperforms the best baseline by 23.85% in continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) and 13.93% in normalized root mean square error.

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

MOSIC: Model-Agnostic Optimal Subgroup Identification with Multi-Constraint for Improved Reliability

arXiv:2504.20908v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current subgroup identification methods typically follow a two-step approach: first estimate conditional average treatment effects and then apply thresholding or rule-based procedures to define subgroups. While intuitive, this decoupled approach fails to incorporate key constraints essential for real-world clinical decision-making, such as subgroup size and propensity overlap. These constraints operate on fundamentally different axes than CATE estimation and are not naturally accommodated within existing frameworks, thereby limiting the practical applicability of these methods. We propose a unified optimization framework that directly solves the primal constrained optimization problem to identify optimal subgroups. Our key innovation is a reformulation of the constrained primal problem as an unconstrained differentiable min-max objective, solved via a gradient descent-ascent algorithm. We theoretically establish that our solution converges to a feasible and locally optimal solution. Unlike threshold-based CATE methods that apply constraints as post-hoc filters, our approach enforces them directly during optimization. The framework is model-agnostic, compatible with a wide range of CATE estimators, and extensible to additional constraints like cost limits or fairness criteria. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate its effectiveness in identifying high-benefit subgroups while maintaining better satisfaction of constraints.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Scaling limit of additive functionals for reversible non-gradient exclusion process: critical cases

arXiv:2606.13442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For the reversible speed-change exclusion process $(\eta_t)_{t \geq 0}$ in $\mathbb{Z}^d$, we study the scaling limit of additive functionals ${\Gamma_t(f) = \int_0^t f(\eta_s)\, \mathrm{d} s}$. Concerning the local centered function $f$, the previous work [Commun. Math. Phys. 104, 1-19, 1986] by Kipnis and Varadhan and [Comm. Pure Appl. Math., 66: 649-677, 2013] by Gon{ç}alves and Jara respectively covered the cases $d \geq 3$ and $d=1$. The present paper completes the missing part $d=2$, and also develops the theory for functions with higher degree. The novelty is a quantitative homogenization of the resolvent, which allows to overcome the obstacle of correlation function in non-gradient models.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Uncertainty-Aware Longitudinal Forecasting of Alzheimer's Disease Progression Using Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.24604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Longitudinal modelling of Alzheimer's disease progression is clinically useful only if it can describe not just the most likely next diagnosis, but how a patient may evolve over time and how reliable that forecast is. Most deep learning approaches reduce this problem to single-step classification, treating cognitively normal, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia as flat categories while providing limited insight into how uncertainty accumulates across future visits. We propose a probabilistic framework that combines ordinal diagnosis prediction, multi-horizon trajectory generation, and decomposed uncertainty estimation. A Temporal Fusion Transformer encoder is adapted with a CORAL ordinal output layer, asymmetric loss weighting, and converter oversampling to respect disease-stage ordering and improve sensitivity to MCI-to-dementia transitions. Conditioned on the learned patient-context representation, an autoregressive Mixture Density Network generates five-year probabilistic trajectories for diagnosis state, CDR Sum of Boxes, MMSE orientation, and hippocampal volume. On ADNI, the model outperforms linear, recurrent, and transformer baselines for next-visit diagnosis prediction, with the strongest gains on MCI-versus-dementia discrimination. Generated trajectories achieve near-nominal 90% credible interval coverage, widening uncertainty across the forecast horizon, and biomarker dynamics consistent with expected Alzheimer's disease progression. We further separate aleatoric from epistemic uncertainty using analytic mixture variance and a five-member bootstrap ensemble, which provides the strongest encoder diversity and output-level epistemic signal. Epistemic uncertainty is higher for rare progression archetypes, MCI and dementia patients, and under external evaluation on OASIS-3, where it increases alongside prediction error.

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

The Linguistics Olympiads: Towards a New Corpus for Linguistics Research?

Linguistics olympiad problems (LOPs) are a category of self-sufficient puzzles consisting of a scaled-down corpus representative of certain linguistic phenomena, from which the solver must deduce a primitive set of rules of the language and then translate a new set of elements. The linguistics olympiads (LOs) have become a worldwide phenomenon with 43 different territories taking part in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) 2025. While the typology and solving strategies of LOPs have been analysed, their scientific facet and connections to academic linguistics have yet to be explored. LOPs are directly connected to many linguistic fields, e.g., linguistic typology, linguistic relativity, and linguistics fieldwork. Recently, LOPs have become a research focus as benchmarks for large language models, thus highlighting their usefulness in computational linguistics. Nevertheless, they have not yet been integrated into mainstream linguistics research. This paper attempts to open new directions of including this particular type of puzzle in academic research by offering a structured evaluation of LOPs as linguistic data sources and proposes criteria for their responsible use in academic research. Starting from a set of over 1800 LOPs, this study critically examines the potential of LOPs as a novel corpus for linguistics research by discussing their strengths and limitations as tools, as well as the areas of linguistics into which these problems could fit. This work forms the foundation for a broader initiative aimed at bridging the gap between LOs and academic linguistics, by establishing a robust theoretical framework for LOPs.

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

Bimanual Robot Manipulation via Multi-Agent In-Context Learning

arXiv:2604.20348v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful reasoning engines for embodied control. In particular, In-Context Learning (ICL) enables off-the-shelf, text-only LLMs to predict robot actions without any task-specific training while preserving their generalization capabilities. Applying ICL to bimanual manipulation remains challenging as the high-dimensional joint action space and tight inter-arm coordination constraints rapidly overwhelm standard context windows. To address this, we introduce BiCICLe (Bimanual Coordinated In-Context Learning), the first framework that enables standard LLMs to perform few-shot bimanual manipulation without fine-tuning. BiCICLe frames bimanual control as a multi-agent leader-follower problem, decoupling the action space into sequential, conditioned single-arm predictions. Evaluated on 13 tasks from the TWIN benchmark, BiCICLe achieves 70.5% average success rate, outperforming the best training-free baseline by 6.1 percentage points and surpassing most supervised methods. We also demonstrate superior real-world performance on 3 tasks without hardware-specific retraining.

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

Oops, Wait: Discourse Tokens Matter in Reasoning Model

Recent studies suggest that even data-efficient training with ($\simeq$1K) reasoning trajectories can induce non-trivial reasoning capabilities in large language models through post-training. Such training corpora often contain iconic tokens such as "wait", "so", and "alternatively", which frequently appear in reasoning trajectories and may play a role in this process. This paper focuses on characterizing observable token-level patterns in post-training and a case study of how data-efficient supervised fine-tuning (SFT) differs from, and falls short of, large-scale post-training. To this end, we first identify tokens that correlate with correct answers along reasoning trajectories across models and training setups. We then focus on the distribution and (functional) roles of the "wait" token to primarily study the model trained in a data-efficient manner compared with the counterpart. Our study finds that discourse tokens are associated with correctness and a reasoning accuracy jump, even in data-efficient SFT. This suggests data-efficient SFT can partially reproduce discourse-token patterns to mimic meaningful reasoning behavior, but the patterns are less aligned with high-confidence answer transitions than those from large-scale post-training.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Early-life Urban Environment, Nutrition, and Pubertal Timing in Southern Europe: An Exposome Analysis

Background: Urban environmental and lifestyle factors during early life may influence pubertal timing, but the combined effects of multiple environmental exposures within an exposome analytical framework remain poorly understood. Objective: To examine the association between early-life urban environmental exposures and pubertal timing, and to explore whether these exposures interact with early-life nutritional factors, namely breastfeeding duration and childhood diet quality. Methods: Data from two European population-based birth cohorts were analysed: Generation XXI (G21, Portugal; n=5263; 51.5% girls) and INfancia y Medio Ambiente (INMA, Spain; n=1019; 50.1% girls). Urban environmental exposures including indicators of air pollution, traffic, built environment, and natural spaces were estimated at 4 early-life stages at both cohorts: pregnancy (INMA only), birth, 1 year, and 4-5 years of age. Pubertal development timing was assessed using Tanner staging and/or the Pubertal Development Scale (PDS), and age at menarche was self-reported. Exposome-Wide Association Study (ExWAS) models and unsupervised clustering followed by ordinal logistic regression models were used to examine single- and multi-exposure associations, respectively. Regression models were fitted adjusting for relevant child characteristics, maternal factors, and household socioeconomic conditions, and corrected for multiple testing. Results: Individuals living in more unfavourable urban environments characterised by higher building density, air pollution, and lower access to natural spaces showed earlier pubertal timing according to multiple outcomes, across multiple early-life exposure periods, and in both cohorts. In the G21 cohort, these environmental profiles were associated with earlier age at menarche, particularly for exposures at 1-1.5 and 4-5 years (e.g., 1-1.5y: {beta}=-0.172, FDR-adjusted p-value=0.041), while in the INMA cohort, boys exposed to more unfavourable environmental profiles showed more advanced pubertal development, also particularly for exposures at 1-1.5 and 4-5 years of age (e.g., 1-1.5y; {beta}=0.572, FDR-adjusted p-value=0.008). Among environmental domains, air pollution and traffic were the factors most consistently associated with pubertal timing. Regarding early-life nutritional factors, longer duration of exclusive breastfeeding was associated with a lower Tanner stage among girls in G21. No significant interactions between breastfeeding duration and environmental exposure clusters were observed. Conclusion: Early-life urban environmental exposures, particularly air pollution and traffic, may influence pubertal timing. Exclusive breastfeeding may have a protective role against earlier pubertal development. These findings highlight the importance of improving urban environmental conditions and promoting breastfeeding to support healthy developmental trajectories.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Inference-time Policy Steering via Vision and Touch

arXiv:2606.14981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time steering adapts pre-trained generative robot policies during deployment by verifying candidate actions before execution. While prior methods typically perform this verification only with visual observations, vision alone is often insufficient for contact-rich manipulation, where success depends on both global task progress and subtle local interactions such as contact force. We introduce ViTaL, a visuo-tactile inference-time steering framework that formulates multimodal guidance as a bi-level optimization problem. At the high level, visual sampling-and-verification performs long-horizon mode selection, deciding what behavior the robot should execute. At the low level, tactile-guided diffusion editing refines the selected action sequence over a shorter horizon to satisfy local contact requirements. To support outcome-based steering, ViTaL learns a visuo-tactile latent world model and employs semantically aligned visual and tactile verifiers, including a novel text-conditioned tactile reward that scores predicted tactile futures directly in latent space. Across three real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, ViTaL improves overall success by 51% over the base policy, outperforms unimodal steering by at least 33%, and exceeds naive multimodal fusion by at least 20%. Website: https://yilin-wu98.github.io/vital_website.

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

The Answer Lies Within: Self-Derived Rewards Enable Explainable Relation Extraction

Despite the remarkable reasoning capabilities of large language models, they still struggle with one-shot relation extraction without predefined relation labels. We identify two pitfalls: models are often misled by irrelevant tokens instead of relation-conveying semantics, and they often fail to align with the abstraction level human annotators expect. We introduce a novel framework that closes this gap with two components: (1) COGRE, a cognitively-inspired reasoning framework that structures RE into a series of processes mimicking human text-processing; and (2) HIT@DICT, a reinforcement learning intermediate reward strategy that encourages reasoning to align with relational labels by rewarding relation-relevant phrases in reasoning. The reward is derived on a credit dictionary automatically extracted from correct predictions. Our experiments show that our framework improves both accuracy and explanation quality by addressing these two pitfalls. For example, COGRE with Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on One-shot NYT29 achieves 24.65% F1, surpassing prior reasoning-based designs. Optimizing this approach with RL using HIT@DICT further improves performance by +23.46% points. Finally, human evaluation shows that our best model generates relational phrases closely aligned with gold labels, increasing human explanation quality ratings by 54% (relative).

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

The More the Merrier: Combining Properties for ABox Abduction under Repair Semantics for ELbot

arXiv:2606.19197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Abduction is a central approach to explain missing entailments from a knowledge base by providing a hypothesis, that would, if added to the knowledge base, make the missing entailment become true. Abduction under repair semantics has recently been investigated in detail, where several desirable properties and optimality criteria were considered, such as signature-restrictions and minimality in size and of introduced conflicts. Naturally, hypotheses that satisfy more than one of these properties or combine a property with an optimality criterion would be even more desirable for applications. So far, such hypotheses have not been investigated in the literature. In the present paper, we consider the ABox abduction problem for hypotheses satisfying more than one property or additional optimality criteria, for EL_bot under brave and AR semantics. Our main observation is that often requiring additional properties for hypotheses does not lead to an increase of complexity.

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

Robust $Q$-learning for mean-field control under Wasserstein uncertainty in common noise

arXiv:2606.20356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this article, we present a robust $Q$-learning algorithm for discrete-time mean-field control problems under Wasserstein uncertainty in the common noise law. The algorithm combines a quantization-and-projection scheme with a Wasserstein dual reformulation on the common-noise space. We establish its convergence together with finite-time iteration bounds for both synchronous and asynchronous learning schemes. Numerical experiments on systemic risk and epidemic models compare the asynchronous implementation with an idealized Bellman iteration, illustrate the robustness-performance tradeoff under common-noise misspecification, and report the observed convergence behavior of the asynchronous $Q$-learning algorithm.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

TensorKit.jl: A Julia package for large-scale tensor computations, with a hint of category theory

arXiv:2508.10076v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TensorKit$.$jl is a Julia-based software package for tensor computations, especially focusing on tensors with internal symmetries. This paper introduces the design philosophy, core functionalities, and distinctive features, including how to handle abelian, non-abelian, and anyonic symmetries through the ``TensorMap'' type. We highlight the software's flexibility, performance, and its capability to extend to new tensor types and symmetries, illustrating its practical applications through select case studies.

14.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

Assessing the importance of sex and disease-specific anatomy in electrophysiology and mechanical simulations with a newly developed public virtual cohort of four-chamber heart models

by José Alonso Solís-Lemus, Rosie K. Barrows, Cristobal Rodero, Marina Strocchi, Natalie Montarello, Nishant Lahoti, Cesare Corrado, Abdul Qayyum, Shahrokh Rahmani, Caroline Roney, Gernot Plank, Christoph Augustin, Hao Xu, Alistair Young, Pras Pathmanathan, Ronak Rajani, Steven A. Niederer This work presents a study on how differences in cardiac anatomy attributed to sex and disease can influence cardiac electrophysiology and mechanics using a virtual cohort of four-chamber heart models. Patient anatomy varies across sex and disease. However, capturing this variation in in-silico studies remains poorly accounted for, with studies often using either single representative cases or imbalanced virtual cohorts. Whole-heart electromechanics models incorporate the patient’s anatomy, electrophysiology and mechanics across different scales, from molecular, tissue and whole-heart and circulatory system levels. However, cardiac models are typically built from one or a small number of anatomies, with sex rarely reported and the effects of anatomical variability, which include those due to sex or disease, largely unexplored. This limits clinical translation and reduces regulatory credibility. We developed fifty patient-specific anatomical models of 25 male and 25 female hearts in heart failure and control cases. We ran benchmark passive inflation and paced activation simulations with consistent parameters and boundary conditions across cases to isolate the impact of anatomical variations with sex and disease. Heart failure models exhibited increased chamber volumes, larger volume changes during inflation, and delayed activation times relative to controls. These trends were consistent across sexes, although right ventricular activation showed a significant sex-based difference. Variations in anatomy with sex and disease have a significant impact on cardiac simulations, which support the inclusion of multiple heart anatomical models in in-silico trials. The resulting virtual cohort captures key anatomical variability and is publicly available, along with the underlying code (see Data Availability statement).

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Differentiable Composite Approximation Framework for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Maneuvering Modeling from Sea-Trial Data

arXiv:2606.19711v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Field-based modeling from onboard measurements can produce autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) maneuvering models that reflect real operating characteristics. From an approximation perspective, conventional maneuvering models use predefined constraint polynomial bases, whereas data-driven models use data-adaptive bases. Motivated by this basis-function view, this paper presents a differentiable composite-approximation formulation, in which the polynomial-basis component and the data-adaptive basis component are treated as differentiable parts of a single predictor and calibrated jointly. A gradient-based co-calibration method is developed for full-scale AUV maneuvering prediction, where a sensitivity-aware mechanism regulates bounded polynomial updates while the neural residual captures remaining nonlinear discrepancies under a shared prediction objective. To account for ocean-current effects in field data, a turning-motion-based current estimation and compensation procedure is incorporated to construct current-compensated learning targets for training and rollout. The framework is evaluated using sea-trial data collected from a 7-meter AUV under multiple maneuvering conditions. Results show that the proposed method improves recursive trajectory and velocity prediction compared with polynomial-only, neural-only, and frozen-prior hybrid baselines, demonstrating its applicability to field-data-based AUV maneuvering modeling.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM: Element-Level Assessment of Randomized Controlled Trial Reporting Using Large Language Models

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) play a central role in assessing the benefits and harms of interventions. Incomplete reporting in RCT publications can compromise the verifiability and usefulness of RCTs. SPIRIT and CONSORT reporting guidelines aim to improve the completeness of RCT protocols and results publications, respectively. However, many RCTs are not reported completely. Checking manuscripts automatically could help authors improve the completeness of reports prior to publication. We previously annotated SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, a corpus of 200 articles (comprising 100 protocol-results publication pairs) using 83 checklist items drawn from SPIRIT 2013 and CONSORT 2010. We also trained machine learning models to automatically assess reporting at the item level. Each checklist item can include multiple constituent elements (i.e., specific details required for that item), and an item might be considered fully reported when all of its elements are present. However, prior work does not explicitly capture or evaluate reporting at the element level. To address this gap, we extended SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM by incorporating element-level annotations and using them to assess reporting completeness (SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM). We formulated element-level assessment as a machine reading comprehension task, operationalized through 119 questions, where each question targets a specific reporting element within a checklist item. Using the 200 articles included in SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, two annotators independently answered 119 questions for 50 articles (25 protocol-results pairs) and resolved any discrepancies through discussion; the remaining 150 articles (75 protocol-results pairs) were assessed by a single annotator. We then developed an automated pipeline for element-level assessment using SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM. The pipeline first applies a PubMedBERT-based model to identify sentences containing item-level reporting information, then it uses a generative large language model (LLM; GPT-5) with chain-of-thought reasoning to answer element-level questions based on the retrieved evidence. Agreement between the two annotators was high (Gwet's AC1: 0.782) and our pipeline achieved high accuracy in identifying element-level reporting evidence (F1: 0.822, Gwet's AC1: 0.796). Ablation studies indicate that chain-of-thought reasoning and the inclusion of illustrative in-context examples modestly improve LLM performance on the machine reading comprehension task. SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM provides a benchmark for evaluating reporting guideline completeness at the element level, enabling assessment of RCT transparency beyond the simple presence or absence of checklist items and is publicly available at https://osf.io/kznx4/. The automated pipeline establishes a robust baseline for assessing RCT reporting and demonstrates potential as a practical aid for authors, reviewers, and editors to identify and address gaps in completeness and transparency of RCT reports.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Accounting for Human Movement to Improve Exposure-Health Models

Background. Current exposure-health models rely on averaged, residential-based environmental exposures, failing to account for human movement. This aggregation can lead to exposure misclassification and biased exposure-response estimates, potentially distorting our understanding of the true health effects of environmental conditions. We developed exposure disaggregation regression models that explicitly account for human movement when linking environmental exposures to health outcomes. Methods. By weighting pixel-level exposures according to distance from home as a simple proxy for human movement, our model linked disaggregated environmental exposures to individual-level health outcomes. Weights were either fixed a priori or derived from a latent distance-decay power parameter learned from the data. We additionally evaluated model performance under a nonlinear exposure-response relationship. Model performance was assessed across multiple sample sizes (N = 1,114; 50,000; and 100,000). A simulation study examined parameter recovery using bias, empirical standard error (EmpSE), and credible interval coverage. As a case study, Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data from Albania were used to link acute respiratory infection (ARI) outcomes among children under five to pixel-level NDVI within a 3 km buffer around DHS cluster centroids, and the proposed models were applied to these data. Results. Across all models (fixed-weight, learned-weight, and restricted cubic spline models), parameter recovery improved with increasing sample size. At N = 1,114, estimates were biased and imprecise, with incorrect effect direction for exposure-response parameters (e.g., learned-weight {beta}1 bias = - 0.79; EmpSE = 2.61; coverage = 0.88). In contrast, the models accurately recovered parameters at larger sample sizes, including the latent distance-decay parameter (bias = - 0.02; EmpSE = 0.15; coverage = 0.95 at N = 100,000), demonstrating their ability to reliably learn movement-based exposure weights when sufficient data were available. Conclusion. Instead of relying on arbitrarily-sized buffers, this statistical framework provides a novel method for studying environmental exposure-health relationships whilst accounting for human movement. With sufficiently large sample sizes, it can accurately estimate the influence of disaggregated environmental exposures on individual-level health and help address exposure misclassification arising from residential-only metrics. This methodological framework remains scalable, interpretable, and adaptable to other exposures and outcomes, offering a foundation for future work that integrates richer mobility-informed exposure-health research.

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

RedactionBench

Large Language Models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains that require redaction of personally identifiable information (PII). While redacting PII is a data cleaning prerequisite, existing benchmarks conflate extraction mechanics with privacy semantics. A public phone number is not equivalent to a phone number in a medical record. Whether information constitutes a violation depends heavily on who holds it, why, and in what context, fundamentally differentiating redaction from simple entity recognition. Grounded in contextual integrity, we introduce RedactionBench, a manually annotated benchmark comprising 200 diverse documents across 11 domains, mostly seeded from real-world sources. We also introduce R-Score, a novel character-level metric that treats semantically similar redactions equally and nullifies shallow formatting choices, such as varying masking styles for phone numbers. Evaluations across Named Entity Recognition models, entity extraction Small Language Models, and frontier models equipped with agentic tools demonstrate that contextual redaction remains an unsolved problem. A human evaluation with over 80 users on RedactionBench reveals a stark dichotomy in privacy perceptions. Annotators show consensus with target labels for mandatory redactions (89.4 percent) and safe text preservations (94.1 percent), but fail to agree on contextual redactions (47.7 percent). This variance demonstrates the subjective nature of contextual privacy and motivates R-Score, which decouples contextual ambiguity from strict precision. We compare 35 models across families and report their performance in redacting PII. Finally, we release RedactionBench to establish a baseline for future privacy-preserving systems, hoping to inspire efficient model design and standardized evaluations.

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

Analyzing and Improving Fine-grained Preference Optimization in Medical LVLMs

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved strong performance across medical imaging tasks, yet they remain prone to factual inconsistencies, poor visual grounding, and misalignment with clinically meaningful feedback. Existing post-training alignment approaches, including Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants, face three critical limitations in the medical domain: (1) sequence-level reward signals treat clinically critical tokens identically to generic filler text; (2) reliance on static supervised fine-tuning references as preferred responses introduces an off-policy distribution shift, steering optimization toward stylistic artifacts over clinical correctness; and (3) alignment objectives lack explicit visual grounding constraints, leaving models insensitive to subtle yet diagnostically decisive pathological features. Our method leverages a bidirectional token-wise KL regularizer alongside a visual-contrastive grounding objective that pairs clean and lesion-corrupted images to penalize responses generated without adequate visual evidence. Together, these components form a fine-grained, on-policy alignment framework that constructs preference pairs by minimally editing model-generated outputs, correcting only clinically erroneous spans while preserving the original linguistic style. Extensive experiments across medical imaging tasks and clinical text generation benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

JupOtter: Cell-Level Bug Detection in Jupyter Notebooks

arXiv:2606.23877v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jupyter Notebooks are an increasingly popular coding environment used across many domains, especially in Python-based data science and scientific computing. Originally used for prototyping and interactive exploration, notebooks are increasingly used to develop more complex programs, leading to a rapid rise in buggy notebooks on platforms like GitHub. To address this trend, we present JupOtter, a bug detection system designed specifically for Jupyter Notebooks. JupOtter features three novel contributions: (1) a notebook-specific tokenization strategy that preserves cell structure, (2) a cell-level bug prediction technique, and (3) a new labeled dataset, OtterDataset, containing over 21,000 notebooks annotated for fine-grained cell-level bug detection. JupOtter achieves cell-level bug detection F1 scores that surpass static analyzers and large language models in two out of three evaluation datasets.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Analyzing Defensive Misdirection Against Model-Guided Automated Attacks on Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.20470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems increasingly rely on language-model components to interpret instructions, process external data, invoke tools, and coordinate with other agents. These capabilities make prompt-injection and jailbreak attacks more consequential, especially as attackers adopt model-guided automation to scale probing, prompt refinement, and response evaluation. This work analyzes the resulting attack-defense setting through a probabilistic model of a target system, its defense mechanism, and the attacker's automated judge. Our analysis shows that conventional detect-and-block defenses can allow attacker success rate (ASR) to approach one as the query budget grows, since predictable refusals provide useful feedback to automated search. We then examine detect-and-misdirect, where detected malicious interactions receive controlled, non-operational responses designed to induce false-positive errors in the attacker's judge. This strategy reduces the positive predictive value of attacker-selected candidates and yields a bounded asymptotic ASR. We evaluate a proof-of-concept realization of this strategy through Contextual Misdirection via Progressive Engagement (CMPE), a lightweight conversational misdirection method designed to replace predictable refusal text with safe but strategically misleading responses in automated jailbreak settings. On jailbreak benchmarks, CMPE reduces estimated ASR upper bounds by up to two orders of magnitude and nearly eliminates verified attack success in end-to-end PAIR and GPTFuzz attack runs.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

A geometric and deep learning reproducible pipeline for monitoring floating anthropogenic debris in urban rivers using in situ cameras

The proliferation of floating anthropogenic debris in rivers has emerged as a pressing environmental concern, exerting a detrimental influence on biodiversity, water quality, and human activities such as navigation and recreation. The present study proposes a novel methodological framework for the monitoring the aforementioned waste, utilising fixed, in-situ cameras. This study provides two key contributions: (i) the continuous quantification and monitoring of floating debris using deep learning and (ii) the identification of the most suitable deep learning model in terms of accuracy and inference speed under complex environmental conditions. These models are tested in a range of environmental conditions and learning configurations, including experiments on biases related to data leakage. Furthermore, a geometric model is implemented to estimate the actual size of detected objects from a 2D image. This model takes advantage of both intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of the camera. The findings of this study underscore the significance of the dataset constitution protocol, particularly with respect to the integration of negative images and the consideration of temporal leakage. In conclusion, the feasibility of metric object estimation using projective geometry coupled with regression corrections is demonstrated. This approach paves the way for the development of robust, low-cost, automated monitoring systems for urban aquatic environments.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

HOMED enables hierarchical and multimodal optimization of DNA methylation deconvolution across tissues

Cellular heterogeneity is a major confounder in bulk DNA methylation data for epigenome-wide association studies. Existing reference-based DNAm deconvolution methods often ignore hierarchies among related cell types and may generalize poorly across datasets due to limited variability in reference profiles. We developed HOMED (Hierarchically Optimized Methylation Deconvolution), a framework that integrates cell-lineage hierarchies, single-cell RNA sequencing-guided deconvolution, and paired bulk RNA-seq/DNAm data for CpG signature optimization. Across simulated and real peripheral blood mononuclear cell, lung, and placental datasets, HOMED consistently yielded the highest PCCs and lowest RMSEs, outperforming existing scRNA-seq-guided DNAm deconvolution methods, improving accuracy, resolution, and cross-tissue generalizability.

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

PrototypeNAS: Rapid Design of Deep Neural Networks for Microcontroller Units

arXiv:2603.15106v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling efficient deep neural network (DNN) inference on edge devices with different hardware constraints is a challenging task that typically requires DNN architectures to be specialized for each device separately. To avoid the huge manual effort, one can use neural architecture search (NAS). However, many existing NAS methods are resource-intensive and time-consuming because they require the training of many different DNNs from scratch. Furthermore, they do not take the resource constraints of the target system into account. To address these shortcomings, we propose PrototypeNAS, a zero-shot NAS method to accelerate and automate the selection, compression, and specialization of DNNs to different target microcontroller units (MCUs). We propose a novel three-step search method that decouples DNN design and specialization from DNN training for a given target platform. First, we present a novel search space that not only cuts out smaller DNNs from a single large architecture, but instead combines the structural optimization of multiple architecture types, as well as optimization of their pruning and quantization configurations. Second, we explore the use of an ensemble of zero-shot proxies during optimization instead of a single one. Third, we propose the use of Hypervolume subset selection to distill DNN architectures from the Pareto front of the multi-objective optimization that represent the most meaningful tradeoffs between accuracy and FLOPs. We evaluate the effectiveness of PrototypeNAS on 12 different datasets in three different tasks: image classification, time series classification, and object detection. Our results demonstrate that PrototypeNAS is able to identify DNN models within minutes that are small enough to be deployed on off-the-shelf MCUs and still achieve accuracies comparable to the performance of large DNN models.

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arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Dimension-Free Convergence of Discrete Diffusion Models: Adjoint Equations Induce the Right Space

arXiv:2605.17232v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discrete diffusion has become a leading framework for generative modeling in various applications including language, vision, and biology. Existing convergence theory, however, exhibits fundamental limitations. KL-based analyses diverge under singular priors such as the masked distribution, while bounds in total variation (TV) depend on the state space size $S$ and become vacuous for modern language tasks, where vocabularies contain hundreds of thousands of tokens. We develop a unified adjoint-equation-based framework that establishes dimension-free convergence guarantees in any integral probability metric (IPM). To the best of our knowledge, our bounds are the first to be entirely free of $S$ and applicable to both masked and uniform priors. Importantly, our theory relies only on a single standard rate-matrix regularity assumption and applies to general priors. Five novel techniques drive our improvements: working in the space of observables via adjoint equations rather than directly with probability measures, a regularity analysis that yields bounds on any IPM, a coupling argument that removes $S$-dependence under uniform transitions, and score-marginal cancellation and exit-routing techniques that remove $S$-dependence under masked transitions. Our framework thus sharply departs from prior analyses and avoids the shortcomings of pathspace-KL and existing TV-based approaches. Beyond convergence bounds, our framework provides a versatile toolkit for further theoretical study of discrete diffusion models, including principled choices of loss functions and dimension-free step complexity.