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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Bridging Modality Disconnect in Self-Reflection via Closed-Loop Visually Grounded Verification

In the era of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), enhancing multimodal reasoning capabilities remains a critical challenge, particularly in handling ambiguous or complex visual inputs, where initial inferences often lead to hallucinations or logic errors. Existing VLMs often produce plausible yet ungrounded answers, and even when prompted to "reflect", their corrections may remain detached from the image evidence. To address this, we propose the MIRROR framework for Multimodal Iterative Reasoning via Reflection On visual Regions. By embedding visual reflection as a core mechanism, MIRROR is formulated as a closed-loop process comprising draft, critique, region-based verification, and revision, which are repeated until the output is visually grounded. To facilitate training of this model, we construct **ReflectV**, a visual reflective dataset for multi-turn supervision that explicitly contains reflection triggers, region-based verification actions, and answer revision grounded in visual evidence. Experiments on both general vision-language benchmarks and representative vision-language reasoning benchmarks show that MIRROR improves correctness and reduces visual hallucinations, demonstrating the value of training reflection as an evidence-seeking, region-aware verification process rather than a purely textual revision step.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Promera: a unified model for biomolecular structure prediction, filtering, and design

Generative models have become staple tools for modeling and designing biomolecular structures. However, although these tools have improved in structural prediction accuracy, their ability to filter designed binders—an essential use case—remains insufficient; whereas design methods have focused more on unconstrained binder generation rather than capabilities enabled by controllable design. We introduce Promera, a unified generative model that combines all-atom structure prediction with improved filtering and controllable design. We find that Promera's confidence metrics are more accurate for filtering binders from non-binders for both miniproteins and nanobodies, while its co-folding performance surpasses popular open-source models (OpenFold3-p2, Boltz-2) on therapeutically relevant categories. As a design model, Promera generates binders by predicting masked protein sequences with optional epitope, paratope, and template constraints. Remarkably, our nanobody designs match the in silico success rates from backprop-based techniques (mBER) when evaluated under co-folding confidence filters. We further provide two in silico demonstrations of the the versatile capabilities of our design method: epitope targeting of the Andes hantavirus glycoprotein with VHHs and active state stabilization of the beta-2 andrenergic GPCR. We conclude by proposing a scaling law for co-folding models, suggesting a path for further performance improvement.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Evaluating and Enhancing Negation Comprehension in Remote Sensing MLLMs

arXiv:2606.20177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various Remote Sensing (RS) tasks. However, their ability to comprehend negation remains underexplored, limiting deployment in real-world applications where models must explicitly identify what is false or absent, e.g., emergency responders need to locate non-flooded routes for evacuation. To comprehensively study this limitation, we introduce RS-Neg, the first benchmark to evaluate negation understanding across region-level to scene-level tasks. Specifically, we design an automated data generation pipeline for RS imagery, using LLMs to synthesize diverse negation queries, and introduce a dynamic visual focus module for verification. Our evaluation reveals that advanced RS MLLMs struggle with negation, exhibiting hallucinations and substantial performance degradation. To close this gap, we propose NeFo, a novel test-time learning method that explicitly incorporates the logical role of negation into the model optimization. Remarkably, using about 5\% unlabeled test samples, NeFo significantly improves the negation understanding of models and shows strong generalization to unseen tasks. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.

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

Splaxel: Efficient Distributed Training of 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale Scene Reconstruction via Pixel-level Communication

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity and real-time 3D scene reconstruction, but scaling training to large-scale scenes requires optimizing hundreds of millions of Gaussians across multiple GPUs. Existing distributed approaches either partition scenes into isolated regions, causing global inconsistency, or rely on global Gaussian-level exchanges, which lead to substantial growth in inter-GPU communication and quickly dominate iteration time. We propose Splaxel, a communication-efficient distributed 3DGS training framework based on pixel-level local rendering and global composition. Instead of synchronizing Gaussians, each GPU renders its local subset and exchanges only partial pixel values, maintaining mathematical consistency while keeping communication cost stable as the scene size increases. Splaxel further reduces pixel-level redundancy through geometric and transmittance visibility prediction and improves GPU utilization via conflict-free camera-view consolidation. Evaluated on large-scale datasets with up to 120M Gaussians, Splaxel achieves up to 7.6$\times$ speedup over the state-of-the-art distributed 3DGS framework while preserving high reconstruction quality.

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

Discriminative Span as a Predictor of Synthetic Data Utility via Classifier Reconstruction

In many real-world computer vision applications, including medical imaging and industrial inspection, binary classification tasks are characterized by a severe scarcity of positive samples. A widely adopted solution is to generate synthetic positive data using image-to-image transformations applied to negative samples. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how can we reliably assess whether such synthetic data will improve downstream model performance? In this work, we propose a geometry-driven metric that predicts the utility of synthetic data without requiring model training. Our approach operates in the embedding space of a pre-trained foundation model and represents the dataset through difference vectors between samples. We evaluate whether the weight vector of a linear classifier can be expressed within the subspace spanned by these variations by measuring the relative projection error. Intuitively, if the variations induced by synthetic data capture task-relevant directions, their span can approximate the classifier, resulting in low projection error. Conversely, poor synthetic data fails to span these directions, leading to higher error. Across multiple datasets and architectures, we show that this metric exhibits strong correlation with downstream classification performance of CNNs trained on mixtures of real negative and synthetic positive data. These findings suggest that the proposed metric serves as a practical and informative tool for evaluating synthetic data quality in data-scarce settings.

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

BusterX++: Towards Unified Cross-Modal AI-Generated Content Detection and Explanation with MLLM

The rapid advancement of generative AI has substantially improved image and video synthesis, amplifying the risk of multimodal visual misinformation. Recent MLLMs have shown promise for transparent AI-generated content detection through reasoning and explanation, yet existing approaches largely treat image and video forensics as isolated tasks, leaving cross-modal synergies underexplored. To address this, we present BusterX++, a unified MLLM for joint image and video detection with interpretable reasoning. We also introduce GenBuster-Bench++, a meticulously curated, difficulty-aligned benchmark containing balanced image and video samples spanning recent generation models and diverse real-world scenarios. Using this controlled setting, we revisit the widely adopted $SFT \rightarrow RL$ post-training paradigm. Notably, our findings demonstrate that a single-stage, pure RL strategy driven strictly by sparse outcome rewards consistently matches or surpasses a strong SFT+RL baseline across both unified and single-modality settings. Our key insight reveals that SFT imposes lower policy entropy, which restricts the policy search space and dampens exploratory freedom. In contrast, single-stage pure RL maintains higher policy entropy throughout training, effectively unlocking the spontaneous emergence of cross-modal capability transfer between image and video forensics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BusterX++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the powerful potential of RL for unified cross-modal visual reasoning.

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

PermaVid: Consistent Video Generation Across Edits via Disentangled Context Memory

Consistent video generation under editing operations requires persistence: when edits modify scene appearance or layout, subsequent generations should remain coherent across time and viewpoints. However, existing memory designs struggle to maintain long-term consistency after such modifications, as stored contexts may become outdated or invalid. To address this, we propose PermaVid, a novel framework built upon a multi-modal context memory that disentangles spatial context into semantic appearance and geometric structure, together with an edit-aware memory update and retrieval strategy that keeps memory evolution aligned with subsequent observations. Specifically, we develop two complementary memory banks: an RGB context memory that captures appearance-aware observations while implicitly encoding geometry, and a depth context memory that preserves geometry-only structure disentangled from semantics. Building on this design, we introduce a memory-guided video generation model that performs multi-modal feature fusion under reference conditions drawn from mixed-modality memory contexts. Experiments demonstrate that our method maintains strong long-term semantic and structural consistency after edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Charge-Conjugation Violation and Population Asymmetry in Bipartite Fermionic Lattices

arXiv:2606.06138v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Charge conjugation violation (CCV) is a central concept in particle physics and appears also for quasiparticles in quantum many-body systems, which typically relies on an embedded external symmetry breaking to the underlying system. An open question is how an intrinsic CCV mechanism could emerge and what its macroscopic consequences would be. We establish sublattice kinks in bipartite fermionic lattices as a concrete setup showing intrinsic CCV. The intrinsic CCV of the sublattice kink is based on the graph-topological nature of the underlying Hamiltonian, with no explicit symmetry breaking taking place. It leads to a population asymmetry of different configurations and imprints a hidden leaf-like structure in the eigenenergy spectrum. The population asymmetry also leads to an imbalanced sublattice-kink production triggered by the vacuum-instability in the quench dynamics. Our work demonstrates the graph topology as the microscopic origin of intrinsic CCV, with the population asymmetry as the macroscopic consequence, of which the proposed setup is highly amenable to experimental implementation via cold-atom quantum simulators.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Geometric and Quantum Kernel Methods for Predicting Skeletal Muscle Outcomes in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

arXiv:2601.00921v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and skeletal-muscle dysfunction is clinically important. Quantum machine learning is increasingly explored for biomedical prediction, but its value in small biomarker cohorts requires benchmarking against strong classical baselines. We analysed a cigarette-smoke COPD cohort of 213 animals with blood and bronchoalveolar-lavage biomarkers to predict tibialis anterior muscle weight, muscle quality, and force. We developed a kernel-geometric quantum hybrid method in which synthetic symmetric positive definite (SPD) references are mapped through a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, compressed using train-only random projection, normalised, and supplied to low-dimensional quantum regression circuits. We benchmarked this approach against classical ridge/kernel models, SPD relational representations, and quantum-kernel regression (QKR). All methods were evaluated using condition-stratified repeated cross-validation. The largest numerical improvement was observed for muscle weight, where the proposed method had the numerically lowest mean root mean squared error (RMSE), approximately 1.8% below the best classical comparator; paired fold-level testing did not establish statistically significant superiority after Holm adjustment, but the endpoint is biologically meaningful. The method also had the numerically lowest mean RMSE for muscle quality. For force, biomarker-only Ridge performed best, suggesting a more linear endpoint structure.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Polarization-Resolved Photon Statistics of Cavity Quantum Materials

arXiv:2606.11550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: By forming hybrid light-matter states, optical cavities offer a route for engineering material properties, however, unambiguously probing the effects of light-matter coupling remains difficult. Here, we show that the polarization-resolved statistics of photons transmitted through a cavity, measurable via $g^{(2)}$, provide one such diagnostic. By relating $g^{(2)}$ to matter correlation functions such as the Raman structure factor, we link photon bunching and antibunching to material properties. By applying this method to the stripy-to-antiferromagnetic transition in the Kitaev-Heisenberg spin model, we find that polarization-dependent patterns of bunching and antibunching encode the magnetic point-group symmetries of each phase and characterize the behavior at the phase boundary. Finally, we predict measuring $g^{(2)}$ for output photon pairs polarized orthogonal to the input field will isolate higher-order light-matter scattering processes that probe higher-order material correlations.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Calibrated Uncertainty Quantification for Patient-Level AML Drug Sensitivity Prediction Using Split Conformal Prediction

Accurate prediction of ex vivo drug sensitivity in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients from transcriptomic data is a critical challenge for precision oncology. Existing computational approaches have explored uncertainty quantification in cancer drug response prediction primarily using cell line data, while patient-level AML models typically rely on heuristic confidence measures rather than statistically calibrated uncertainty estimates. Here, we present a framework applying split conformal prediction to patient-level AML drug response modeling using the BeatAML 2.0 cohort. We trained Elastic Net and XGBoost regressors on bulk RNA-seq gene expression profiles from 318 AML patients, analyzing 34,764 patient-drug observations across 122 compounds. Baseline models achieved median Pearson R values of 0.291 (Elastic Net) and 0.281 (XGBoost) across 122 drugs. Wrapping these models with split conformal prediction yielded well-calibrated prediction intervals across three confidence levels: empirical coverages of 81.4%, 90.7%, and 95.5% against nominal targets of 80%, 90%, and 95%, respectively. Analysis of prediction interval widths revealed substantial drug-class-specific uncertainty patterns, with HDAC and BCL-2 inhibitors exhibiting markedly higher uncertainty than MDM2 inhibitors, suggesting a potential association between transcriptomic predictability and drug mechanism of action, although several drug classes were represented by only a small number of compounds. Predictive uncertainty was not significantly associated with ELN2017 molecular risk classification (Kruskal-Wallis p=0.395) or NPM1 mutation status (p=0.788). These results demonstrate that statistically valid uncertainty quantification can be achieved for patient-level AML drug response prediction despite substantial biological heterogeneity. to the best of our knowledge, no published study has applied split conformal prediction to patient-level ex vivo drug sensitivity prediction in the BeatAML cohort, providing a principled alternative to heuristic confidence scoring approaches. Keywords: Acute myeloid leukemia (AML); Ex vivo drug sensitivity; Conformal prediction; Uncertainty quantification; Precision oncology; BeatAML; Transcriptomic biomarkers; Machine learning.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Population-associated molecular variation in histologically normal breast tissue is context-dependent and associated with distinct transcriptional states

Population-associated molecular variation in breast tissue may contribute to differences in tissue biology and disease susceptibility, yet the extent to which such variation is shaped by underlying tissue states remains unclear. Here, we performed RNA-seq and lipidomic profiling of histologically normal breast tissue samples from African American (AA) and Caucasian White (CW) individuals, followed by conceptual integration of the resulting transcriptomic and lipidomic patterns. Unsupervised analysis revealed two distinct baseline transcriptional states (G1 and G2) that defined the primary axis of molecular variation across the cohort and corresponded to epithelial-enriched (G1) and vascular-enriched (G2) tissue contexts as determined by cell-type deconvolution. Global comparisons between AA and CW samples showed minimal transcriptomic differences, with only a single gene reaching significance after multiple testing correction. However, when stratified by baseline tissue state, 191 genes were differentially expressed within G1, with coordinated upregulation of extracellular matrix organization and proliferative/cytoskeletal processes in AA samples. These patterns were consistently supported across multiple enrichment approaches. No comparable population-associated differences were observed within G2. Lipidomic analyses showed partial but non-significant trends consistent with transcriptomic structure, suggesting that lipid variation provides complementary but limited support for baseline molecular differences, likely reflecting constraints of bulk tissue composition. Together, these findings suggest that population-associated molecular differences in normal breast tissue are context-dependent and emerge within specific baseline transcriptional states, where distinct biological programs can coexist and be differentially modulated. These findings highlight the importance of tissue heterogeneity in shaping molecular variation and its potential relevance to disease-associated tissue states.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Measuring Semantic Progress in Multi-turn Dialogue via Information Gain

Evaluating multi-turn dialogue is challenging because quality emerges across turns rather than within individual responses. We focus on a key dimension of information-seeking dialogue: semantic progress, defined as the accumulation of new, question-relevant, and non-redundant information over the course of a conversation. We formalize semantic progress as question-conditioned uncertainty reduction and introduce an information-theoretic metric that approximates it in embedding space. Our main estimator uses a tractable Gaussian formulation with closed-form updates, while a complementary maximum-entropy argument shows why log-determinant structure arises more broadly when only second-order embedding information is retained. This formulation yields desirable theoretical properties, including monotonicity, additive decomposition of total information gain across turns, and diminishing returns for redundant evidence. Unlike LLM-as-a-judge approaches, our metric requires no autoregressive inference at evaluation time and is fully reproducible for a fixed embedding model. Experiments on MT-Bench, Chatbot Arena, and UltraFeedback show that the proposed metric achieves competitive agreement with human judgments despite targeting only semantic progress, with improved alignment on MT-Bench and UltraFeedback compared to several LLM-based judges. Notably, the method remains effective with lightweight embedding models under CPU-only execution, indicating that semantic progress can be captured without reliance on large model capacity.

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

SafeSpec: Fast and Safe LLM via Dynamic Reflective Sampling

arXiv:2606.19755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative inference accelerates large language model (LLM) decoding but provides no inherent safety guarantees. Existing safety defenses are largely incompatible with speculative inference: they either introduce additional computation or disrupt the draft-verify mechanism, negating acceleration benefits. This reveals a fundamental incompatibility between current safety methods and speculative decoding. We propose SafeSpec, a safety-aware speculative inference framework that integrates risk estimation directly into the verification process. SafeSpec attaches a lightweight latent safety head to the target model to jointly evaluate semantic validity and safety in a single forward pass. When unsafe generations are detected, SafeSpec applies rollback and safety-guided reflective multi-sampling to recover safe continuations rather than terminating generation. We model jailbreak attacks as distributional shifts over generative trajectories, where adversarial prompts increase the probability of harmful continuations without eliminating safe ones. Under this model, SafeSpec performs risk-aware trajectory recovery within the speculative decoding process. Across multiple models and adversarial benchmarks, SafeSpec achieves a substantially improved safety-efficiency trade-off. On Qwen3-32B, SafeSpec reduces attack success rates by 15% while preserving a 2.06x inference speedup on benign workloads, demonstrating that speculative acceleration and inference-time safety can be jointly optimized.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes. To address this, a growing body of work has sought to extend masked dLLMs with self-correcting (remasking) capabilities. One appealing subset of these methods does so in a training-free, post-hoc manner based on token confidences, with encouraging early reported results. In this work, we revisit the empirical evaluation of a representative post-hoc remasking method, WINO [Hong et al., 2026], and find that under standard decoding settings (shorter block lengths) it brings little-to-no benefit over confidence-based unmasking alone [Wu et al., 2025]. Extending the evaluation to non-greedy decoding, we find that while confidence-based remasking can mitigate errors introduced by increased stochasticity to some extent, it also exacerbates the diversity collapse previously reported for confidence-based unmasking. Overall, our results show that the benefits of post-hoc confidence-based remasking are highly setting-dependent, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive evaluation framework.

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

Dose-efficient Quantum Phase Estimation in Lossy Optical Interferometry

arXiv:2606.14254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optical interferometry is a cornerstone technique for precise phase measurements across various fields. In many applications, for example, biological imaging, it often necessitates stringent limits on light intensity to prevent adverse effects on light-sensitive samples, a condition known as dose-limited regimes. Maximizing the precision per dose is therefore crucial. In quantum metrology, quantum correlations enable high precision in phase estimation while adhering to dose constraints. Nevertheless, photon loss, including absorption by a sample, substantially diminishes the benefits of quantum enhancement in interferometry. In this work, we experimentally investigate a dose-efficient approach to quantum phase estimation using sequential strategies in the presence of loss. Performance of sequential strategies with and without control is evaluated through quantum Fisher information (QFI) per dose. Experimental results show that both sequential strategies exceed the classical limit and outperform the parallel strategy using unbalanced N00N states. Notably, the control-enhanced sequential strategy attains superior QFI per dose, approaching the quantum limit. These results highlight the promise of sequential strategy for imaging and sensing in resource-constrained scenarios, marking a significant step toward practical and efficient quantum metrology in lossy environments.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Performance of five risk stratification tools for paediatric pneumonia against WHO scores using data from the PediCAP trial in sub-Saharan Africa

Background Risk stratification tools for childhood pneumonia have been proposed to improve identification of children at highest risk of death, particularly in low-resource settings. However, their added value over the WHO Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) criteria and danger signs remains uncertain. Methods We conducted a secondary analysis of a multi-country randomised controlled trial of children without HIV hospitalised with pneumonia in Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. We evaluated the performance of five published risk scores alongside WHO IMCI severity classification and danger signs. Discrimination for (1) in-hospital mortality, (2) 28-day mortality, and (3) 28-day readmission or death was assessed using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Comparative performance and clinical utility were examined. Results Of the 1010 participants, 18 (1.8%) died in hospital, 22 (2.2%) died in hospital or in the 7 days post-discharge, and 63 (6.2%) died or were readmitted by day 28. Univariate case-fatality rates were highest for variables associated with malnutrition, convulsions, and hypoxaemia. All risk scores demonstrated moderate discrimination for in-hospital and in-hospital+7-day mortality (AUC range approximately 0.75-0.84), with no meaningful differences between models, and performed similarly to the WHO danger signs and IMCI severity classification. In contrast, all approaches performed poorly in predicting 28-day readmission or death (AUC approximately 0.54-0.58). No risk score consistently outperformed simple clinical criteria. Conclusions In this multi-country dataset, we found no evidence that published paediatric pneumonia risk scores meaningfully outperform WHO IMCI-based clinical assessment for predicting mortality. The relatively small number of mortality events limits precision, and modest differences cannot be excluded. These findings suggest that, in low-resource settings, strengthening implementation of existing WHO clinical criteria may be more effective than adopting more complex prediction tools.

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

Language Shapes Mental Health Evaluations in Large Language Models

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in socially sensitive mental health contexts, including support chatbots, screening, and content moderation. This raises a reliability question: do semantically equivalent mental health inputs elicit comparable evaluations across languages, or systematic shifts consistent with language-associated social and cultural contexts? We examine this question in an English-Chinese setting with GPT-4o and Qwen3-32B using a two-level framework: construct-level evaluative orientation, measured by psychometric stigma instruments, and decision-level behavior, measured by binary stigma detection and four-class depression severity classification. Across instruments and models, Chinese prompts elicit higher stigma-related scores than English prompts. At the decision level, Chinese prompts reduce sensitivity to stigmatizing content and produce more conservative depression severity judgments, leading to more under-estimation errors. These findings show that prompt language can shift both evaluative orientation and downstream behavior in LLM-based mental health evaluation. They highlight the need to evaluate multilingual LLMs not only for aggregate performance, but also for whether they apply comparable evaluative standards across languages in socially sensitive domains.

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

FoleyGenEx: Unified Video-to-Audio Generation with Multi-Modal Control, Temporal Alignment, and Semantic Precision

We present FoleyGenEx, a unified video-to-audio (VTA) framework integrating multi-modal control, frame-level temporal alignment, and fine-grained semantics, enabling synchronized, versatile audio synthesis for diverse tasks. Existing VTA methods either have multi-modal control but weak temporal alignment or strong alignment but lack reference audio conditioning and semantic precision. FoleyGenEx fills this gap via three core innovations: a conditional injection mechanism for audio-controlled VTA and Foley extension, a multi-modal dynamic masking strategy preserving training synchronization, and an adverb-based data augmentation algorithm leveraging signal processing and large language models to enhance textual supervision with nuanced semantics. Experiments on AudioCaps, VGGSound, and Greatest Hits demonstrate its competitive controllable VTA performance against existing methods. Demo samples are available at https://foleygenex.github.io/FoleyGenEx.

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

From Frames to Temporal Graphs: In-Context Egocentric Action Recognition with Vision-Language Models

Action reasoning in egocentric video requires capturing fine-grained transitions of hand-object interactions, a task where general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle when operating directly on raw pixels. We propose to decouple visual perception from symbolic reasoning by converting videos into Temporal Action Graphs. In a multi-stage prompting pipeline, we first generate dense natural language narratives over short temporal windows as a semantic bottleneck, then formalize them into structured, open-vocabulary graph representations. On the EGTEA and Epic-Kitchens-100 datasets, the symbolic representation unlocks efficient in-context learning: few-shot graph demonstrations yield substantial accuracy gains over zero-shot frame and graph-based inference alike. Even in the zero-shot setting, graph-based reasoning remains competitive with pixel-based inference despite potential pretraining contamination favoring the latter. Across 11 open-weight VLMs from 6 model families ranging from 2B to 235B parameters, our findings indicate that current VLMs are more effective as symbolic reasoners than as direct visual observers. By projecting video into the language domain, we provide a scalable, fine-tuning-free alternative to end-to-end approaches that better leverages these models' latent reasoning strengths. The code will be made public.

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

Perceptual compensation for tonal context in self-supervised speech models

This study examines the extent to which the wav2vec2.0 architecture exhibits evidence of compensation for phonological context. We conducted a pseudo-replication of a perceptional compensation experiment on Mandarin Chinese tones, and compared the embedding similarities and probing classifier outputs between a purely self-supervised pre-trained model and a model fine-tuned for Mandarin ASR. No evidence of compensation was found in the embedding similarities of the purely pre-trained model. Probing classifiers showed some evidence of compensation in addition to the expected layer-wise improvements in categorization, but failed to replicate human performance on isolated test syllables. Our findings contrast with previous reports of sensitivity to phonological structure emerging through pre-training alone, and suggest that supervised objectives may be necessary to encourage the abstraction of at least some types of phonological regularities.

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

A Red-Team Study of Anthropic Fable 5 & Opus 4.8 Models

We evaluate the adversarial robustness of two frontier large language models (LLMs) developed by Anthropic, Fable 5 and Opus 4.8, against four families of automated jailbreak attack across 7 826 harmful intents spanning a ten-category harm taxonomy. Using the HackAgent red-teaming framework, hundreds of thousands of adversarial attempts were generated and every apparent success was independently re-adjudicated by a panel of three judge models (majority vote). Both models resist the majority of attacks, but the residual surface is larger than aggregate framing suggests: it is dominated by adaptive iterative attacks, while static obfuscation is near-fully neutralised. The strongest adaptive search (tree-of-attacks) breaks Opus 4.8 on 11.5% of intents overall, whereas Fable 5 stays in the single digits (6.1% worst-case). Aggregate rates therefore should not be read as reassurance. Even in these hardened configurations, the two models produced 1 620 (Opus 4.8) and 702 (Fable 5) panel-confirmed harmful completions spanning every harm category, located automatically, cheaply, and within the first one or two refinement steps by an attacker model with no human expert in the loop. The reasonable conclusion is that even the best, most-tested frontier models remain reliably breakable under sustained automated pressure.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TuneAhead: Predicting Fine-tuning Performance Before Full Training Begins

arXiv:2606.17660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is compute-intensive and error-prone: model performance depends sensitively on data quality and hyperparameter choices, and naïve runs can even degrade model performance. This raises a practical question:can we predict fine-tuning performance before committing to a full training run? We present TUNEAHEAD, a lightweight framework for pre-hoc prediction of fine-tuning performance. TUNEAHEAD encodes each candidate run as a meta-feature vector that combines static dataset descriptors with dynamic probe features from a short standardized probe. A predictor maps these features to performance estimates, while SHAP-based attributions provide interpretable diagnostics that reveal which specific features drive the prediction. Across 1,300+ fine-tuning runs on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TUNEAHEAD consistently outperforms strong baselines such as Early-Stop Extrapolation and ProxyLM. On a held-out test set of 370 runs, TUNEAHEAD achieves an RMSE of 1.47 percentage points and places 95.1% of predictions within +3/-3 percentage points of the true score. These accurate continuous predictions support practical go/no-go screening policies that can reduce unnecessary full fine-tuning while retaining most promising runs.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Looked but didn't see: inattentional blindness and yes-bias confabulation in vision-language models

Previous work showed that many participants fail to notice a gorilla in a video of people playing basketball. Another study found that 83% of trained radiologists failed to report a gorilla figure inserted into a chest CT nodule-search task, even though eye-tracking revealed that most observers had foveated the figure. We ask whether a similar phenomenon exists in contemporary vision-language models (VLMs). We find that (i) VLMs are capable of spotting the gorilla in both still-frame images and videos of lung CT scans; (ii) models display inattentional blindness, which varies according to model generation and type of stimulus presented; (iii) Gemini-3.1-Pro outperforms most other flagship and open-weight VLMs at identifying the presence or absence of the gorilla. We additionally ran a segmentation experiment utilizing two different model classes: a generalist (SAM 3), which found the gorilla but produced little to no results for anatomy-based prompts; a medical specialist (BiomedParse), which produced more promising anatomy-based results but flagged "gorilla" on gorilla-free control videos on 82% of frames. The behavioral signature of inattentional blindness reproduces in VLMs, but a unique confabulation failure mode means that any "did the model see X" claim requires signal-detection analysis with a matched-control false-alarm baseline.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ZIVARI-TLBO: A Zero-Cost Inter-Group Evaluated-Elite Relay Mechanism for Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization

arXiv:2606.17087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ZIVARI-TLBO is a grouped Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization (TLBO) method that augments an existing population-state controller with a fixed inter-group evaluated-elite relay. At each scheduled event, every group offers its already evaluated elite to the next group in a fixed ring; the elite replaces the receiver's worst eligible learner only when its stored objective value is better. Because the exact relay copies an already evaluated solution and its stored fitness, it requires no additional objective-function calls. The frozen gts-v4-cm-fixed implementation is evaluated under equal 10,000-evaluation budgets on eight classical functions at dimensions 10, 30, 50, and 100, with 30 matched seeds, and on five constrained engineering problems. A direct ablation against the same grouped landscape-aware controller without relay records 728/11/221 wins/ties/losses and a rank-biserial effect size of 0.624 across dimensions. In an eight-method multidimensional comparison, WOA obtains the best average rank (2.914) and ZIVARI-TLBO ranks second (3.382); ZIVARI-TLBO significantly outperforms TLBO, MCTLBO, DE, PSO, and GWO, loses significantly to WOA, and is not significantly different from HHO after Holm adjustment. Feasibility-aware engineering results are mixed and sensitive to the current static-penalty formulation. The evidence supports a scoped relay contribution and budget-consistent information-sharing mechanism, but not universal state-of-the-art, global-convergence, engineering-dominance, or CEC superiority claims.