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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

3-Key-Input: Exploring the Theoretical Minimum Keys for Text Entry

作者:

How far can we reduce the number of physical keys if we endow an ambiguous keyboard with modern language models? Fewer keys increase hardware design freedom in constrained settings such as assistive devices and mobile form factors. This paper systematically evaluates text entry systems using 2-5 physical keys combined with language-model-based disambiguation. On a 300-sentence English corpus (100 sentences each for Business / Conversational / Technical), we compare key counts (2-5), letter-to-key mappings (layout-based / frequency-based / intentionally worst-case), and decoders (Trie-only, GPT-2 beam search, GPT-4o selection). We find that 3 keys + GPT-4o achieves character error rate (CER) 9.46% and word error rate (WER) 12.20%, reducing CER by 59% relative to 2 keys (CER 23.3%). At 3 keys, the key-stream entropy is 1.54 bits/char; while increasing to 5 keys improves accuracy (CER 5.4%), the marginal gains diminish. Mapping choice has a small impact under standard designs ({\Delta}CER < 0.5 pp), and even an intentionally worst mapping degrades CER by only +0.5 pp, whereas Technical sentences yield roughly twice the error rate of Business. These results suggest that, in our evaluated offline setting under a strong LM prior, 3 keys are a practical minimum for general English.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Disagreement-Based Cross-Model Routing for Implicit Video Question Answering

We study multiple-choice video question answering on the ImplicitQA benchmark, where the correct answer is never explicitly shown but must be inferred from off-screen events, line-of-sight cues, causal structure, and cross-shot spatial layout. On this benchmark a single frontier video LLM already operates near its accuracy ceiling, and we observe that conventional self-consistency strategies – majority voting across repeated samples of the same model – can hurt rather than help, because the model's errors on hard questions are correlated. We propose disagreement-based cross-model routing, a pure inference-time procedure that requires no labels and no training. We triple-sample a native-video model (Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) at temperature zero, exploit the genuine sample-to-sample variance of its video-processing pipeline to identify the roughly 20% subset of questions where the three samples disagree, and route only that subset to a second model from a different family (Claude Opus 4.8) that consumes uniformly sampled frames with adaptive thinking. On the 1001-question validation set with public ground truth – our main evaluation – the method improves AvgAcc by +1.43 over the best single sample of the primary model, with per-category gains concentrated on Motion & Trajectory (+5.49), Inferred Counting (+3.45), and Vertical Spatial Reasoning (+1.82) – the categories most dependent on cross-shot reference resolution. The same pipeline applied to the held-out 172-question CVPR 2026 ImplicitQA challenge test set achieves 82.03 AvgAcc / 79.71 MacroAvgAcc (+1.81 over the best single sample of the primary model), confirming the validation result on an independent split.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Unified Framework for Structured Flow Modeling: From Representation to Verification and Model Discovery

arXiv:2605.18250v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many dynamical systems can be described in terms of structured flows combining source/sink behavior, cyclic dynamics, and topology-constrained transport. These features arise across a wide range of physical, engineered, and data-driven systems. The objective of this work is to establish a unified perspective on such systems, to identify modeling approaches that balance expressivity, interpretability, computational complexity, and data requirements, and to investigate how highly expressive models can be used to uncover the dominant mechanisms underlying observed dynamics. Starting from the Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition of continuous vector fields, we review the recently proposed Graph Vector Field (GVF) framework and its discrete representation on simplicial complexes. We then introduce a hierarchy of alternative approaches, including parametric conditional models, linear graph dynamical systems, and reduced Hodge representations. Finally, we propose a verification and validation methodology based on benchmark datasets from well-understood physical systems and on systematic model-reduction and ablation studies. The resulting family of structured-flow models within a common framework, ranging from low-dimensional parametric representations to full GVF formulations, supports a diagnostic methodology in which gradient, curl, harmonic, and topological contributions are systematically assessed through ablation studies. This process enables the identification of dominant mechanisms underlying the observed dynamics and guides the construction of simplified models tailored to the available data and operational constraints. By separating structural verification, behavioral verification, and domain-specific validation, the proposed approach provides a foundation for scalable and interpretable analysis of complex dynamical systems across multiple application domains.

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

HK-LegiCoST: Leveraging Non-Verbatim Transcripts for Speech Translation

We introduce HK-LegiCoST, a new three-way parallel corpus of Cantonese-English translations, containing 600+ hours of Cantonese audio, its standard traditional Chinese transcript, and English translation, segmented and aligned at the sentence level. We describe the notable challenges in corpus preparation: segmentation, alignment of long audio recordings, and sentence-level alignment with non-verbatim transcripts. Such transcripts make the corpus suitable for speech translation research when there are significant differences between the spoken and written forms of the source language. Due to its large size, we are able to demonstrate competitive speech translation baselines on HK-LegiCoST and extend them to promising cross-corpus results on the FLEURS Cantonese subset. These results deliver insights into speech recognition and translation research in languages for which non-verbatim or ``noisy'' transcription is common due to various factors, including vernacular and dialectal speech.

05.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

Robust discovery of mutational signatures using power posteriors

by Catherine Xue, Jeffrey W. Miller, Scott L. Carter, Jonathan H. Huggins Mutational processes, such as the molecular effects of carcinogenic agents or defective DNA repair mechanisms, produce different mutation types with characteristic frequency profiles, known as mutational signatures. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has been successfully used to discover many mutational signatures, yielding novel insights into cancer etiology and informing targeted therapies. However, the NMF model is only a rough approximation to reality, and even small departures from this assumed model can have large negative effects on the accuracy and reliability of the results. We propose BayesPowerNMF, a Bayesian NMF method that provides nonparametric robustness to model misspecification, principled automated selection of the number of latent processes, and uncertainty quantification of model parameters. In extensive simulation studies, we find that our proposed approach recovers more true signatures with greater accuracy than current leading methods. On whole-genome sequencing data for six cancer types from the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium, we find that our method is able to accurately recover more signatures than the current state-of-the-art.

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

Building Social World Models with Large Language Models

Understanding and predicting how social beliefs evolve in response to events – from policy changes to scientific breakthroughs – remains a fundamental challenge in social science. Given LLMs' commonsense knowledge and social intelligence, we ask: Can LLMs model the dynamics of social beliefs following social events? In this work, we introduce the concept of the Social World Model (SWM), a general framework designed to capture how social beliefs evolve in response to major events. SWM learns state-transition functions for social beliefs by mining temporal patterns in social data and optimizing the evidence lower bound, without the need for explicit human annotations linking events to belief shifts, or for expensive census data. To evaluate SWM, we introduce a benchmark, SWM-bench, derived from real-world prediction markets, specifically Kalshi and Polymarket. SWM-bench includes over 12k data points for social belief prediction tasks spanning diverse domains such as politics, finance, and cryptocurrency. Our experimental results show that SWM significantly outperforms time-series foundation models, achieving state-of-the-art results on Kalshi data and demonstrating competitive performance on Polymarket data, while offering interpretable insights into the underlying mechanisms of social belief dynamics.

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

Neural Slack Variables for Shape Constraints

arXiv:2606.13803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enforcing functional inequality constraints such as monotonicity and convexity in neural networks is a fundamental challenge in many industrial and scientific applications. Classical one-sided penalty methods, along with primal-dual methods gated by complementary slackness, provide constraint gradients only at violated locations, resulting in fragile satisfaction. Architectures that guarantee feasibility by construction, on the other hand, remain largely limited to elementary cases and impose additional inductive biases. We introduce neural slack variables, a deep learning native primal-side approach that converts constraint enforcement into a regression problem by coupling the primary network with a jointly learned auxiliary network. The auxiliary network serves as a valid target for the primary network's constraint quantities, inducing feasibility and regularity. Neural slack variables achieve zero measured violations on dense-grid monotonicity and convexity test cases, where penalty and primal-dual baselines leave residual violations, and enable arbitrage-free learning of volatility surfaces, an open industrial challenge in quantitative finance.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

LLM-ODDR: A Large Language Model Framework for Joint Order Dispatching and Driver Repositioning

arXiv:2505.22695v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Ride-hailing platforms face significant challenges in optimizing order dispatching and driver repositioning operations in dynamic urban environments. Traditional approaches based on combinatorial optimization, rule-based heuristics, and reinforcement learning often overlook driver income fairness, interpretability, and adaptability to real-world dynamics. To address these gaps, we propose LLM-ODDR, a novel framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for joint Order Dispatching and Driver Repositioning (ODDR) in ride-hailing services. LLM-ODDR framework comprises three key components: (1) Multi-objective-guided Order Value Refinement, which evaluates orders by considering multiple objectives to determine their overall value; (2) Fairness-aware Order Dispatching, which balances platform revenue with driver income fairness; and (3) Spatiotemporal Demand-Aware Driver Repositioning, which optimizes idle vehicle placement based on historical patterns and projected supply. We also develop JointDR-GPT, a fine-tuned model optimized for ODDR tasks with domain knowledge. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets from Manhattan taxi operations demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms traditional methods in terms of effectiveness, adaptability to anomalous conditions, and decision interpretability. To our knowledge, this is the first exploration of LLMs as decision-making agents in ride-hailing ODDR tasks, establishing foundational insights for integrating advanced language models within intelligent transportation systems. While the current framework incurs higher computational costs than traditional methods, we show that parallel decomposition and model distillation can reduce latency to production-viable levels for deployment.

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

Visualizing Uncertainty: Spatial Maps of Missing and Conflicting Evidence in Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.15767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding when and why deep neural networks are uncertain is crucial for deploying reliable machine learning systems in safety-critical domains. While existing uncertainty quantification methods provide scalar measures of model confidence, they offer limited insight into which spatial regions of an input contribute to different types of uncertainty. We propose a novel visualization framework, Uncertainty Activation Map (UAM), that combines Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) with Full-Gradient Class Activation Mapping (FullGrad) to generate interpretable spatial uncertainty activation maps. Our approach distinguishes between two fundamental types of uncertainty: vacuity, representing lack of evidence, and dissonance, capturing conflicting evidence between competing hypotheses. By leveraging the complete gradient decomposition property of FullGrad and the principled uncertainty quantification of Subjective Logic, our method produces theoretically grounded visualizations that highlight specific image regions responsible for model uncertainty. With this framework, vacuity and dissonance activation maps are generated by computing belief-weighted attributions, enabling identification of where models lack knowledge versus where they encounter ambiguous evidence. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively addresses the critical gap between uncertainty quantification and explainability, providing intuitive visual feedback to assess model reliability in complex visual recognition tasks.

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

Diffusion Offline Reinforcement Learning for Fair and Energy-Efficient UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks

arXiv:2606.16331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of generative artificial intelligence with wireless communication and signal processing systems has opened new avenues for intelligent, data-driven decision-making in future 6G networks. This work proposes a diffusion soft actor-critic (Diffusion-SAC) approach that leverages offline reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced by denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) to optimize trajectory and scheduling control in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. While offline RL methods, such as conservative Q-learning (CQL), can learn from static datasets, they often struggle to generalize in low-data or dynamic conditions. To address this, we combine the robustness of CQL with the generative power of diffusion models, enabling expressive and signal-aware policy learning that generalizes beyond behavior policies. Applied to a UAV-assisted wireless network, the proposed framework minimizes transmission energy and improves fairness among devices. Simulations show that Diffusion-SAC outperforms standard offline RL baselines, achieving more stable convergence and higher rewards even with limited datasets. The method enhances data efficiency, reduces energy consumption, and increases throughput by more than 35 % compared to existing algorithms, demonstrating its potential for robust policy learning in next-generation wireless control systems.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

CMI-RewardBench: Evaluating Music Reward Models with Compositional Multimodal Instruction

arXiv:2603.00610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While music generation models have evolved to handle complex multimodal inputs mixing text, lyrics, and reference audio, evaluation mechanisms have lagged behind. In this paper, we bridge this critical gap by establishing a comprehensive ecosystem for music reward modeling under Compositional Multimodal Instruction (CMI), where the generated music may be conditioned on text descriptions, lyrics, and audio prompts. We first introduce CMI-Pref-Pseudo, a large-scale preference dataset comprising 110k pseudo-labeled samples, and CMI-Pref, a high-quality, human-annotated corpus tailored for fine-grained alignment tasks. To unify the evaluation landscape, we propose CMI-RewardBench, a unified benchmark that evaluates music reward models on heterogeneous samples across musicality, text-music alignment, and compositional instruction alignment. Leveraging these resources, we develop CMI reward models (CMI-RMs), a parameter-efficient reward model family capable of processing heterogeneous inputs. We evaluate their correlation with human judgment scores on musicality and alignment on CMI-Pref along with previous datasets. Further experiments demonstrate that CMI-RM not only correlates strongly with human judgments, but also enables effective inference-time scaling via top-k filtering. Code is available at GitHub (https://github.com/Haiwen-Xia/CMI-RewardBench). Model weights: CMI-RM (https://huggingface.co/HaiwenXia/CMI-RM). Datasets: CMI-Pref-Pseudo (https://huggingface.co/datasets/HaiwenXia/cmi-pref-pseudo) and CMI-Pref (https://huggingface.co/datasets/HaiwenXia/cmi-pref)

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Virtual Sensing to Enable Real-Time Monitoring of Inaccessible Locations & Unmeasurable Parameters

arXiv:2412.00107v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-time monitoring of safety-critical interior states remains an open problem in energy systems where physical instrumentation is infeasible. Existing approaches rely on explicit governing equations, finite-dimensional state vectors, or per-instance retraining, which prevents mesh-independent, field-level inference at arbitrary interior coordinates under real-time constraints. We introduce operator-based virtual sensing for nuclear-grade thermal-fluid systems: we use the neural-operator framework to learn solution operators that map sparse boundary measurements to coupled internal fields in physically inaccessible regions, framing the problem class explicitly to distinguish it from classical state estimation and pointwise soft sensing. We instantiate this framework with MIMONet, a branch-trunk operator extended with three practical choices: multi-modal branch encoders for heterogeneous (scalar and function-valued) inputs; multiplicative branch fusion to preserve the bilinear PDE coupling structure; and shared-latent multi-field decoding with per-channel basis projections at the trunk's final layer. Evaluated across escalating complexity, from canonical lid-driven cavity flow to pressurized water reactor subchannels to fully coupled heat exchangers, MIMONet achieves below 5% relative errors and sub-millisecond inference on data-center accelerators (0.35 ms / 46 mJ per heat-exchanger inference on an NVIDIA H200, and sub-millisecond across the A40-H200-GH200 range), while remaining stable under 50% sensor noise. By staying accurate as geometric confinement and physics coupling intensify, MIMONet shows that operator-based virtual sensing can restore observability where physical instrumentation fails, establishing simulation-based feasibility within the evaluated operating envelopes as a step toward future experimental and cross-solver validation for safety-critical energy systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

ShipNet: A Geometric Deep Learning Surrogate for Real-Time Ship Hydrodynamics

arXiv:2606.15356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate prediction of hydrodynamic performance is central to ship design, yet high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics remains prohibitively expensive for large-scale parametric exploration. This motivates the development of data-driven surrogate models that provide rapid approximations to hydrodynamic predictions at substantially reduced cost. We present ShipNet, a geometric deep-learning surrogate that predicts both hull-surface pressure distributions and far-field free-surface wave patterns directly from hull geometry and speed. The network employs a regularized dynamic graph convolutional backbone on hull point clouds, with a multi-head decoder for simultaneous near-body pressure and free-surface elevation outputs. Training data consist of 420 inviscid free-surface simulations generated using a potential-flow panel method for two parent yacht hulls, each parameterized into 70 variants and evaluated at three speeds. ShipNet predicts per-point pressure coefficient and two-dimensional wave elevation map using a composite loss that combines point-wise regression and image-structure terms. On a geometry-held-out test set, ShipNet achieves R^2=0.98 for hull pressure and R^2=0.91 for wave fields. Inference requires approximately 0.15s per case, yielding over a 550x speedup relative to the potential-flow solver on conventional hardware. Limitations include the restricted geometry and speed ranges and the inviscid training data, while future work will extend the model to high-fidelity viscous simulations with physics-informed regularization.

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

A Conservation Law for Equilibrium Propagation and Coupled Learning

arXiv:2606.15444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper we show that the physical learning methods known as coupled learning (CL) and equilibrium propagation (EP) conserve a mass-like quantity in the trainable parameters in the continuous-time, small-nudging limit. We prove that this conservation holds in a broad range of physically relevant settings. We then show that the conservation law constrains the training dynamics in a way that makes convergence reliable in important settings for linear circuits. We conclude by discussing some practical implications of this conservation law.

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

SkillJuror: Measuring How Agent Skill Organization Changes Runtime Behavior

arXiv:2606.11543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills augment large language model (LLM) agents with procedural knowledge at inference time, but current benchmarks rarely distinguish what a Skill says from how it is organized. We study this distinction through Progressive Disclosure, where a concise root file points agents to supporting resources on demand, and compare it with a normalized flat baseline. We present SkillJuror, a framework for evaluating Skill writing paradigms through semantically controlled variants, matched multi-trial evaluations, and trajectory evidence while holding task knowledge fixed. In an 82-task SkillsBench study, Progressive Disclosure changes runtime behavior before aggregate outcomes: distinct Skill resources touched per trajectory rise from 1.18 to 3.85, and effective uptake events rise from 1.33 to 3.92. It also yields 17 additional verifier-passing trials out of 410 matched trials (+4.1%) over the normalized flat baseline. The benefit is task-dependent. Progressive Disclosure helps when supporting resources guide implementation, checking, or repair, but is weaker when success hinges on exact output conventions, numerical thresholds, or long artifact-generation pipelines. These results show that Skill organization is not mere presentation: it can change how agents search and apply procedural knowledge, while outcome gains depend on whether the exposed resources are actionable for the task. Code is available at https://github.com/zhiyuchen-ai/skill-juror.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Battery-Explicit Thermodynamic Witnesses of Bell Post-Quantumness

arXiv:2605.09149v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a battery-explicit thermodynamic witness of post-quantum Bell correlations. In each round, a single supplied excitation is routed into an explicit two-level battery if and only if a Bell-game condition is satisfied. The routing operation is implemented by an energy-preserving controlled SWAP, with all logical control registers taken to be degenerate. Thus the correlation resource does not create energy; it only determines the probability that the supplied excitation reaches the battery. The construction is first formulated for finite two-player XOR games. For any such game, the mean battery charge is exactly the game success probability multiplied by the battery gap. Optimizing over local, quantum, or nonsignalling behaviours therefore turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, or nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. For the CHSH game, Tsirelson's bound becomes a strict quantum ceiling on the mean battery charge, while a PR-box behaviour reaches the single-excitation cap. The witness is trusted-module rather than device-independent: it assumes calibrated Hamiltonians, correct classical wiring, and a trusted energy-preserving battery module. We also discuss a reversible-controller implementation, finite-statistics certification from work data, robustness to imperfect battery readout, and cyclic bookkeeping showing that no positive net work is obtained once fuel restoration and memory erasure are included.

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

SkillMoV: Mixture-of-View Routing with Prototype-Conditioned Gating for Unified Multi-View Proficiency Estimation

Estimating human proficiency from video is a key challenge for automated skill assessment, with applications in sports coaching, music pedagogy, surgical training, and workplace learning. Existing approaches often focus on individual scenarios or rely on shared multi-view aggregation, limiting their ability to adapt to heterogeneous camera viewpoints and activity domains. We introduce SkillMoV, a unified, parameter-efficient framework for multi-scenario proficiency estimation from synchronized multi-view video. At its core, SkillMoV introduces a Mixture-of-View Projector (MoVP), which adapts the mixture-of-experts paradigm to camera-specific view features. MoVP is composed of four stages: (i) a Mixture-of-View soft router with twelve expert MLPs that learns view-dependent expert preferences without camera-identity supervision; (ii) cross-view attention to align synchronized cameras; (iii) learnable prototype anchoring to condition the representation on class-level reference vectors; and (iv) a prototype-conditioned gated projection that produces the final skill embedding. We evaluate SkillMoV on EgoExo4D across six skill domains and three separately trained view configurations: Ego, Exos, and Ego+Exos. SkillMoV reaches 50.17% overall accuracy in the Exos setting with a single model trained jointly across all scenarios, surpassing the strongest reported Exos result among the compared methods by 3.57 percentage points. In Ego+Exos, SkillMoV remains close to the best reported result in that setting (47.63% versus 48.20%). Ablations on the selected Exos configuration validate each component: MoV routing contributes +6.61 pp over attentive aggregation, cross-view attention +4.92 pp, prototype anchoring +4.07 pp, and stochastic view dropout +3.90 pp. Through LoRA adaptation, SkillMoV trains only 23.32% of its parameters and adds limited measured overhead relative to a LoRA-only baseline.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Large deviations for marked sparse random graphs with applications to interacting diffusions

arXiv:2204.08789v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked sparse Erdős-Rényi random graphs, obtained by decorating edges and vertices of a sparse Erdős-Rényi random graph with i.i.d. random elements taking values on Polish spaces. We prove that the empirical neighborhood distribution of this model satisfies a large deviation principle in the framework of local weak convergence. We rely on the concept of BC-entropy introduced by Delgosha and Anantharam~(2019) which is inspired on the previous work by Bordenave and Caputo~(2015). Our main technical contribution is an approximation result that allows one to pass from graph with marks in discrete spaces to marks in general Polish spaces. As an application of the results developed here, we prove a large deviation principle for interacting diffusions driven by gradient evolution and defined on top of sparse Erdős-Rényi random graphs. In particular, our results apply for the stochastic Kuramoto model. We obtain analogous results for the sparse uniform random graph with given number of edges.

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

DriveReward: A Comprehensive Dataset and Generative Vision-Language Reward Model for Autonomous Driving

Reward models play a pivotal role in reinforcement learning (RL) and multi-modal trajectory selection for autonomous driving. However, acquiring such rewards typically relies on hand-crafted rule-based objectives or perception ground truth, which hinders generalization for data-scaling. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated feasibility as reward models in other domains, their effectiveness in driving tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we bridge this gap by (1) introducing DriveReward, a reasoning trajectory evaluation dataset rigorously labeled via temporally-grounded visual guidance, and augmented with counterfactual driving behaviors., (2) alongside a specialized Vision-Language Reward Model. To address the scarcity of failure cases in conventional datasets, we propose a counterfactual data annotation scheme to construct cases encompassing diverse driving styles and erroneous behaviors. Evaluations on our proposed benchmark reveal that even leading open-source and proprietary VLMs fail to excel across all tasks, highlighting significant room for improvement in existing models. Building on these findings, we subsequently tailor a specialized 1B reward model that outperforms larger VLMs on task-specific reward alignment. Finally, we validate our reward model's effectiveness by integrating it into RL finetuning and multi-modal trajectory scoring across multiple baselines, achieving performance comparable to rule-based reward calculations in both open-loop and closed-loop evaluation.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SalArt-VQA: Diagnosing Whether VLMs Understand Salient Artifacts in Generated Images

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to detect whether AI-generated images contain visible artifacts, yet their ability to analyze such artifacts remains poorly understood. A correct image-level decision can still hide important failures: a model may correctly flag an artifact while relying on the wrong visual cue, selecting the wrong region, or describing a defect that the image does not support. To evaluate these behaviors directly, we introduce SalArt-VQA, a diagnostic benchmark for fine-grained SALient ARTifact understanding in AI-generated images. SalArt-VQA contains 950 images and 3,681 human-authored multiple-choice questions spanning artifact images, matched real reference images, and paired generated reference images. Four aligned question types evaluate presence detection, semantic localization, spatial grounding, and evidence-grounded defect identification, while the reference splits test calibration and abstention when the annotated defect is absent. Across 20 VLMs, SalArt-VQA reveals failures that image-level detection accuracy hides: the strongest model reaches 99.37% detection recall on artifact images but answers all four artifact-side questions correctly on only 53.26% of images. Comparing artifact images with artifact-free references reveals a sensitivity-calibration tradeoff: sensitive models often make unsupported artifact claims, while conservative models avoid false alarms largely by missing real artifacts. These results show that high artifact detection accuracy alone does not imply grounded artifact understanding. SalArt-VQA exposes these hidden failure modes and provides a fine-grained evaluation of whether VLM artifact claims are supported by local visual evidence.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Physics-Driven Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Isotropic 3D Fluorescence Microscopy under Undersampled Acquisition

Three-dimensional (3D) imaging represents the development of next generation of fluorescence microscopy. However, routine axial down-sampling makes isotropic resolution unrealistic. Here, we propose DeepUI, a physical zero-shot framework designed to achieve isotropic 3D fluorescence images from a low axial sampling rate. DeepUI fully leverages the intrinsic characteristics of 3D images through physics-guided degradation, which incorporates spatial-frequency joint learning to generate a scaled optical transfer function, combined with noise degradation and an up-sampling branch. Typically requiring just 5 minutes for training and 0.5 minutes for high-throughput and fast prediction, we demonstrate the superior performance of DeepUI to get isotropic results, and the exclusivity to axial down-sampling conditions, even in more challenging conditions, including defocused background, noise, and resolution blur.

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

SenFlow: Inter-Sentence Flow Modeling for AI-Generated Text Detection in Hybrid Documents

Sentence-level AI-generated text detection (S-AGTD) for hybrid documents, where humans and LLMs co-author one text, faces two gaps: existing methods classify each sentence in isolation, discarding inter-sentence dependencies, and existing benchmarks omit the newest generation of generators. We construct MOSAIC, a benchmark of 16,000 hybrid documents over PubMed and XSum, generated by DeepSeek-V3.2 and Kimi K2 under stringent quality controls including a perplexity-consistency filter absent from prior benchmarks. We recast S-AGTD as structured prediction over the document sentence sequence and instantiate it as SenFlow, integrating graph-based inter-sentence propagation with linear-chain CRF decoding in a single document-level pass over a sentence graph. SenFlow reaches state-of-the-art performance on MOSAIC, with a +4.15 pp average Macro-F1 margin on cross-domain transfer, the hardest of three protocols of increasing difficulty. We further find that even after the perplexity filter equalizes overt cues, AI insertions retain a generator-dependent sentence-length gap that sentence-level detectors still exploit. Code and data: https://github.com/luojingkun22/SenFlow

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

BRICKS-WM: Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models

arXiv:2606.16489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has achieved remarkable success in continuous control by leveraging latent world models. However, prevailing approaches typically rely on monolithic latent dynamics, entangling environment dynamics into a coupled process. This coupling severely limits reusability: altering the agent necessitates retraining the entire world from scratch, even if the environment remains constant. To address this, we introduce BRICKS-WM (Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models), a framework for the modular assembly of structured world models. Driven by the insight that the physical world is composed of independent entities, we posit that global dynamics can be modeled as a composition of distinct dynamical modules interacting via latent interfaces. As a minimal instantiation, we factorize the latent state space into an actuated Agent module and an external Background module, bridged by a learned latent interface. Unlike prior object-centric methods that prioritize visual segmentation, BRICKS-WM enforces a functional separation in transition dynamics, ensuring that background dynamics remains agnostic to the agent's dynamics. Empirically, BRICKS-WM achieves control performance comparable to strong monolithic baselines when trained from scratch, and enables the reuse of frozen background dynamics across agents.

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.CL) 2026-06-12

CreativeBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Machine Creativity via Self-Evolving Challenges

The saturation of high-quality pre-training data has shifted research focus toward evolutionary systems capable of continuously generating novel artifacts, leading to the success of AlphaEvolve. However, the progress of such systems is hindered by the lack of rigorous, quantitative evaluation. To tackle this challenge, we introduce CreativeBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine creativity in code generation, grounded in a classical cognitive framework. Comprising two subsets – CreativeBench-Combo and CreativeBench-Explore – the benchmark targets combinatorial and exploratory creativity through an automated pipeline utilizing reverse engineering and self-play. By leveraging executable code, CreativeBench objectively distinguishes creativity from hallucination via a unified metric defined as the product of quality and novelty. Our analysis of state-of-the-art models reveals distinct behaviors: (1) scaling significantly improves combinatorial creativity but yields diminishing returns for exploration; (2) larger models exhibit ``convergence-by-scaling,'' becoming more correct but less divergent; and (3) reasoning capabilities primarily benefit constrained exploration rather than combination. Finally, we propose EvoRePE, a plug-and-play inference-time steering strategy that internalizes evolutionary search patterns to consistently enhance machine creativity.