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

EnvShip-Bench: An Environment-Enhanced Benchmark for Short-Term Vessel Trajectory Prediction

arXiv:2606.15240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vessel trajectory prediction is important for intelligent shipping, maritime surveillance, and navigation safety. However, existing public maritime AIS resources are often limited by inconsistent forecasting protocols, uneven data quality, and the lack of benchmark-ready contextual annotations, which hinder fair comparison and context-aware modeling. To address this gap, we present EnvShip-Bench, a unified benchmark for short-term vessel trajectory prediction built from large-scale raw AIS data from the Danish Maritime Authority (DMA) and NOAA through a common processing pipeline. EnvShip-Bench adopts a standardized forecasting protocol with 10 minutes of observation, 10 minutes of prediction, and 20-second sampling in vessel-centric local metric coordinates. Beyond the large-scale core benchmark, it provides a quality-first compact subset for efficient and reproducible experimentation, together with synchronized environmental and nearby-vessel context extensions. As a result, EnvShip-Bench supports trajectory-only, environment-aware, and interaction-aware forecasting under a unified evaluation framework. Extensive benchmark statistics and analysis demonstrate that EnvShip-Bench offers a standardized, extensible, and context-aware foundation for maritime trajectory forecasting research.

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

Estimating carbon pools in the European Shelf sea environment: replacing reanalysis by model-informed machine learning?

Authors:

arXiv:2508.10178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Shelf seas are important for the economy and the carbon cycle, but shelf sea observations for carbon pools are often sparse, or highly uncertain. An alternative can be provided by carbon reanalyses (whether assimilating proxy variables, such as chlorophyll-$a$, or directly carbon), but these are often expensive to run. We propose to use a computationally cheap ensemble of neural networks (i.e. deep ensemble) to learn the relationship between the directly observable (atmospheric, riverine and ocean) variables and marine carbon pools from a coupled physics-biogeochemistry model. The deep ensemble was trained on a North-West European Shelf (NWES) physical-biogeochemistry model free run simulation. After training, the deep ensemble was run using inputs from the NWES reanalysis instead of the free run, demonstrating that it can efficiently predict several NWES carbon pools (e.g., detritus, zooplankton, heterotrophic bacteria) in much better agreement with the reanalysis than the free run, while also providing uncertainty information. We further show that the deep ensemble performs similarly well when it is driven directly by the observations assimilated into the reanalysis, with the limitation that carbon pools can then be predicted only at the observed locations and times. We focus on explainability of the results and demonstrate potential use of the deep ensembles for future climate what-if scenarios. We suggest that model-informed machine learning presents a viable alternative to expensive reanalyses and could complement observations, wherever they are missing and/or highly uncertain.

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

MeEvo: Metacognitive Evolution Combined with Natural Evolution for Automatic Heuristic Design

arXiv:2606.14202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) by enabling heuristic generation through reasoning and code synthesis. Existing LLM-based AHD architectures mainly follow two paradigms: Natural Evolution, which uses crossover and mutation to explore heuristic programs, and Metacognitive Evolution, which refines reasoning through reflection. However, Natural Evolution discards reasoning traces, weakening knowledge inheritance and exploitation, while Metacognitive Evolution lacks population-level recombination, limiting exploration and increasing the risk of premature convergence. These limitations reduce search efficiency, stability, and solution quality on complex problems. To address this gap, we propose MeEvo, a dual-layer AHD framework that cyclically couples Natural Evolution and Metacognitive Evolution. Natural Evolution explores heuristic code while recording reasoning traces, fitness values, and errors into a shared history; Metacognitive Evolution then reflects on this history to generate improved heuristics that re-enter the parent pool for the next cycle. This design enables population-driven exploration and reflection-driven refinement to reinforce each other. Experiments on five optimization problems with two LLM backbones show that MeEvo achieves stronger and more stable performance than existing LLM-based AHD architectures, especially on complex constrained tasks.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Poisson approximation by coupling

arXiv:2605.01894v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is well known that a binomial $(n,p)$ can be approximated by a Poisson distribution with parameter $np$. The typical approach in undergraduate probability texts is to show a convergence result for the distribution of the binomial as $n$ goes to infinity and $np$ converges to some $\lambda$. In this note we use instead the coupling technique to show a much more general result. Moreover, we only use elementary results from probability.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Symmetry and Topology of Monitored Quantum Dynamics

arXiv:2412.06133v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The interplay between unitary dynamics and quantum measurements induces diverse phenomena in open quantum systems with no counterparts in closed quantum systems at equilibrium. Here, we generally classify Kraus operators and their effective non-Hermitian dynamical generators, thereby establishing the tenfold classification for symmetry and topology of monitored free fermions. Our classification elucidates the role of topology in measurement-induced phase transitions and identifies potential topological terms in the corresponding nonlinear sigma models. Furthermore, we establish the bulk-boundary correspondence in monitored quantum dynamics: nontrivial topology in spacetime manifests itself as topologically nontrivial steady states and gapless boundary states in Lyapunov spectra, such as Lyapunov zero modes and chiral edge modes, leading to the topologically protected slowdown of dynamical purification.

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

Residual-Squeezing Mechanism of Mismatch in Inverse-Squeezing Kennedy Receivers

arXiv:2601.19093v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The discrimination of quantum states is fundamental to quantum information processing. Inverse-squeezing Kennedy (IS-Kennedy) receivers can outperform the coherent-state BPSK Helstrom benchmark at the same energy by converting transmitter-side squeezing into an effective coherent-state separation gain, without violating the Helstrom bound for the squeezed-state alphabet. This work investigates how squeezing mismatch degrades this mechanism. We show that imperfect inverse squeezing transforms the ideally nulled output into a residually squeezed state, thereby altering the photon-number statistics before detection. This residual-squeezing picture reveals a strong physical asymmetry between squeezing-magnitude and squeezing-phase mismatches. Magnitude mismatch produces an energy-independent error floor in the high-signal-energy regime, whereas phase mismatch generates a residual squeezing term that grows with signal energy. In the small-residual-squeezing regime, this leads to a polynomial growth of the leading error contribution and a rapid collapse of the SQL advantage. We also identify a parity-step effect in photon-number-resolving detection: because the nulled residual squeezed vacuum contains only even photon numbers, increasing detector resolution improves the high-energy robustness only when the effective saturation threshold crosses the next even photon number. These results identify phase locking as the dominant bottleneck for IS-Kennedy-type non-Gaussian receivers under unitary squeezing mismatch and provide design guidelines for robust squeezed-state quantum receivers.

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

HRIR-Former: Grid-Free Time-Domain Reconstruction of Head-Related Impulse Responses with a Spatially Encoded Transformer

arXiv:2603.27998v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Individualized head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) enable binaural rendering, but dense per-listener measurements are costly. We address HRIR spatial up-sampling from sparse per-listener measurements: given a few measured HRIRs for a listener, predict HRIRs at unmeasured target directions. Prior learning methods often work in the frequency domain, rely on minimum-phase assumptions or separate timing models, and use a fixed direction grid, which can degrade temporal fidelity and spatial continuity. We propose HRIR-Former, a time-domain, grid-free binaural Transformer for reconstructing HRIRs at arbitrary directions from sparse inputs. It uses sinusoidal spatial features, a Conv1D refinement module, and auxiliary interaural time difference (ITD) and interaural level difference (ILD) heads. On SONICOM, it improves normalized mean squared error (NMSE), cosine distance, and ITD/ILD errors over prior methods; ablations validate modules and show minimum-phase preprocessing is unnecessary.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Variational Deep Unfolding with Mamba-Based Nonlocal Modeling for Underwater Image Enhancement

Underwater imaging plays a crucial role in ocean engineering, although captured data often suffer from poor visibility and color distortion. To address these challenges, we propose a model-based deep unfolding network for underwater image enhancement that integrates variational modeling into a learnable architecture. The framework is guided by a variational formulation based on a dehazing decomposition, incorporating a multiplicative residual component to absorb remaining artifacts and a nonlocal gradient-type constraint to preserve structural details and enhance edge sharpness. We provide a theoretical analysis establishing the existence of solution for the associated minimization problem. The proposed unfolding method incorporates Mamba layers to efficiently capture self-similarities in the scene. In addition, we introduce a proximal trajectory loss that enforces consistency between the unfolding stages and the iterations of an ideal restoration regularizer. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed unfolding approach achieves improved visual quality and competitive quantitative performance compared with recent state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be available at https://github.com/MIA-UIB/Variational-Unfolding-Mamba-Underwater-Enhancement .

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

Revisiting Vehicle Color Recognition in Long-Tailed Surveillance Scenarios

Vehicle color recognition is an important cue for vehicle identification in surveillance systems, especially when license plates are illegible due to low resolution, occlusion, motion blur, or poor illumination. However, real-world vehicle color distributions are highly imbalanced, making overall accuracy insufficient to assess performance on rare but operationally relevant colors. This paper presents a comprehensive study of vehicle color recognition under severe class imbalance using UFPR-VeSV, a challenging real-world surveillance dataset. We investigate synthetic minority-class augmentation through two off-the-shelf generative strategies: text-conditioned image generation with RunDiffusion/JuggernautXL and image-conditioned color editing with Gemini 2.0 Flash. The curated synthetic data are combined with modern visual representations, loss reweighting, learning-rate scheduling, color-safe augmentation, foreground-aware preprocessing, and ensemble fusion. The bestperforming approach achieves 94.6% micro accuracy and 79.7% macro accuracy, improving macro accuracy by 8.2 percentage points over recent literature. A manual error analysis further shows that many remaining failures are visually ambiguous even for human annotators, highlighting the practical limits of color-based vehicle identification in unconstrained surveillance imagery. The generated images and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/viniciusorru/vcr-synthetic

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

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

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

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

How Much Capacity Does EEG Denoising Need? Ultra-Compact Networks reveal Benchmark Saturation and Metric-Utility Gap

arXiv:2606.08594v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep learning EEG denoising architectures have scaled from tens of thousands to tens of millions of parameters, yet no prior study has isolated model capacity as the experimental variable or tested whether reconstruction metrics predict downstream neural-signal utility. We address both gaps by fixing architecture, loss, data split, and training recipe while sweeping only channel width from 1.05K to 40.26K parameters in a minimal depthwise-separable convolutional U-Net. Models were evaluated on the EEGDenoiseNet benchmark, cross-dataset BCI transfer tests, controlled baseline retraining, and downstream motor-imagery classification with five decoder families across all nine BCI Competition IV-2a subjects. Reconstruction performance saturated by 3-6.5K parameters, with post-elbow gains of at most 0.015 correlation coefficient per log10-parameter unit. An 8.46M-parameter baseline retrained under the same pipeline matched the 40.26K compact variant on EOG–a 200x parameter gap yielding no advantage–while a Patch-Transformer control reproduced the same diminishing-return shape. Downstream evaluation exposed a classifier-dependent metric-utility gap: reconstruction-optimized denoising significantly degraded CSP+LDA classification across all nine subjects and three artifact types (best denoised accuracy 0.547 vs. 0.612 noisy baseline; Bonferroni p=0.0488), persisting on naturally recorded trials (Delta=-0.047; BH-FDR q=0.0049). End-to-end neural decoders showed variable or neutral effects. Standard EEG denoising benchmarks are saturated far below current model capacity, and reconstruction metrics do not predict BCI utility. Ultra-compact models at 33-46 KB and 1.27-2.61M FLOPs/segment are practical for edge deployment. These findings argue for capacity-controlled evaluation, harder task-aware benchmarks, and mandatory downstream validation.

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

Convex training of Lipschitz-regularized shallow neural networks

arXiv:2606.19652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we introduce a training procedure for shallow neural networks that promotes robustness against adversarial attacks. We solve a non-convex Lipschitz-regularized training program by introducing a convex restriction that can be efficiently solved to global optimality. Our approach can be employed as a post-processing step by taking a pre-trained network as an initial solution to then solving the convex program whose optimal network is guaranteed to be no worse than the initial one. We illustrate the improvements of our training procedure with experiments using real world datasets for regression tasks under an adversarial setting. We show numerically that solving our proposed convex program yields networks with lower objective values on the Lipschitz-regularized program compared to existing methods. Additionally, we show that on certain datasets, networks obtained using our convex training program are both more accurate and robust with respect to adversarial attacks.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Hermite trace polynomials and chaos decompositions for the Hermitian Brownian motion

arXiv:2207.13180v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: For a non-zero parameter $q$, we define Hermite trace polynomials, which are multivariate polynomials indexed by permutations. We prove several combinatorial properties for them, such as expansions and product formulas. The linear functional determined by these trace polynomials is a state for $q = \frac{1}{N}$ for $N$ a non-zero integer. For such $q$, Hermite trace polynomials of different degrees are orthogonal. The product formulas extend to the closure with respect to the state. The state can be identified with the expectation induced by the $N \times N$ Hermitian Brownian motion. Hermite trace polynomials are martingales for this Brownian motion, while the elements in the closure can be interpreted as stochastic integrals with respect to it. Using the grading on the algebra, we prove several chaos decompositions for such integrals, as well as analyze corresponding creation and annihilation operators. In the univariate, pure trace polynomial case, trace Hermite polynomials can be identified with the Hermite polynomials of matrix argument.

15.
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.

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

Understanding Scam Trends and Rail Paths from Reddit Self-Disclosure Narratives

Online scam behavior is inherently multi-stage, and the lifecycle includes temporally ordered rails and events rather than isolated signals. Existing works analyze characteristics of scam types and rails, but they do not track scam trends across years. Moreover, the work on the relations between rails is hampered due to the lack of open-source datasets with annotations and coverage of different scam types. To address these gaps, we build a dataset to analyze the yearly trend of scam characteristics and rail paths using Reddit self-disclosure narratives from 2023 to 2025. We collect 21,304 posts from scam-related subreddits with at least one rail among identity, communication, platform, and payment for trend analysis by heuristic annotation. Then, we label 1,800 posts containing explicit or recoverable scam chains by an LLM-assisted method for scam path analysis. The method is evaluated with human annotation. Lastly, we run a topic model on the comments of the posts to analyze the community support behavior. The results reveal that scam processes are predominantly multi-rail. Across years, different scam types and rail components dominate. Different scam types vary systematically in path complexity. Reddit support behaviors have become more detailed over time. This work supports synthetic scam chain data simulation and AI-related scam risk assessment, though findings may not generalise to other platforms.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

INFRAMIND: Infrastructure-Aware Multi-Agent Orchestration

arXiv:2606.11440v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing multi-agent LLM orchestration methods, ranging from brute-force ensembles to learned routers, select models and topologies based on task and model features. However, these methods do not consider the runtime state of the serving infrastructure. On shared GPU clusters under concurrent load, this infrastructure blindness causes systematic resource underutilization: preferred models accumulate deep request queues while equally capable alternatives sit idle. In multi-agent pipelines, where each query triggers multiple sequential model calls, these delays then compound across every downstream step. Closing this gap is challenging because the relevant infrastructure signals (queue depths, KV-cache pressure, latencies) are dynamic and noisy, and they must drive three different decisions: planning, per-step routing, and scheduling. We introduce INFRAMIND, a framework that makes the entire multi-agent stack infrastructure-aware. An infra-aware planner conditions topology and role selection on real-time system load and remaining budget, biasing toward simpler graphs under congestion and richer ones at low load. An infra-aware executor then observes per-model queue depths, cache utilization, and response latencies at each agent step to decide which model to call and how deeply to reason; a budget-aware scheduler further reorders each model's queue so that urgent requests are served first. Cast as a hierarchical constrained MDP and solved end-to-end via reinforcement learning, the system learns to balance quality against latency automatically. Across five benchmarks, INFRAMIND delivers up to +7.6 pp accuracy over the prior baseline at low load with up to 7x lower latency, and sustains up to 99.9% SLO compliance under high load where every baseline drops below 50%.

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

Infant Spontaneous Movement Noise Improves Exploration in Deep RL

arXiv:2606.16590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploration in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is commonly implemented as temporally uncorrelated white noise. However, recent works show that temporally correlated colored noise can improve exploration efficiency by producing smooth trajectories with better coverage of the state space. We inquire whether action noise inspired by infant spontaneous movements can also improve exploration in deep RL. We find that the power spectral densities of babies' end-effector velocities follow a colored noise process where the spectral exponent increases with age. Inspired by this developmental pattern, we introduce a mechanism that progressively increases the temporal auto-correlation of exploration noise during RL training, matching the infant statistics. Experiments across several RL environments show that infant-inspired noise produces structured exploratory behavior and can improve learning efficiency compared to conventional exploration strategies. These findings suggest that human motor and cognitive development can provide useful guidance for designing learning mechanisms in artificial agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/trieschlab/baby-noise-rl.

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

OSGuard: A Benchmark for Safety in Computer-Use Agents

arXiv:2606.15034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-use agents are increasingly evaluated by whether they complete realistic desktop and web tasks. However, task success alone can miss failures in which an agent reaches the nominal goal through an unsafe shortcut. We introduce OSGuard, a dual-granularity benchmark suite for evaluating safety in computer-use agents under benign, unchanged user instructions. OSGuard contains an action-level benchmark for local guardrail decisions and a risk-augmented execution suite for end-to-end evaluation. The action-level benchmark consists of contextualized proposed actions labeled as allowed, unrelated, or unsafe, each judged relative to the original instruction and current interface state. The execution suite contains manually constructed OSWorld-derived task variants in which the original task remains achievable, but the environment is modified to introduce latent hazards such as destructive overwrites, etc. Each variant is paired with augmented evaluators that retain the original task-success criterion while adding explicit state-based safety invariants, allowing us to distinguish safe completions from unsafe completions that satisfy the nominal task objective. Our experimental results on OSGuard show that current multimodal guardrails can perform well on isolated action judgments, while risk-augmented execution exposes remaining gaps between local oversight and reliable end-to-end safety. This dual-granularity design enables more precise diagnosis of whether models can both recognize unsafe proposed actions and improve full-task safety when deployed as guardrails.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FAPO: Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization of Multi-Step LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.19605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain. We present FAPO (Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization), a framework that lets Claude Code optimize an LLM pipeline inside a standardized codebase. FAPO evaluates a pipeline, inspects intermediate steps, diagnoses failures, proposes scoped changes, and validates variants repeatedly to optimize against a score function. It first tries prompt edits and, only when prompt optimization appears insufficient, changes chain structure within the permitted scope when attribution identifies a structural bottleneck. Across six benchmarks and three task models, FAPO beats the baseline GEPA in 15 of 18 model-benchmark comparisons. In 11 model-benchmark comparisons, FAPO wins with non-overlapping mean $\pm$ trial-standard-deviation ranges, and the mean FAPO-GEPA gain is +14.1 pp. In the six HoVer and IFBench comparisons where prompt-first search escalated to structural changes, FAPO wins all six with a mean gain of +33.8 pp. FAPO also improves performance on security tasks: on CTIBench-RCM, a security CVE-to-CWE task, prompt-only FAPO lifts test accuracy by +4.0 pp on GPT-5, +7.1 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct, and +2.0 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning. These results position FAPO as a state-of-the-art pipeline optimization technique for both general-purpose and security-focused tasks.

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

Handling Feature Heterogeneity with Learnable Graph Patches

arXiv:2606.17667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, the rapid development of foundation models and graph pre-training technologies has spurred increasing interest in constructing a universal pre-trained graph model or Graph Foundation Model (GFM). However, a significant challenge is that existing models are unable to address feature heterogeneity in graph data without textual information, which hinders the transferability of graph models across different datasets. To bridge this gap, we propose the concept of learnable graph patches, which we regard as the smallest semantic units of any graph data. We decompose the graph into learnable graph patches by unfolding the node features and constructing corresponding patch structures separately. We then design a framework that mines transferable information from graph data across domains. Specifically, after extracting graph patches, we propose a patch encoder to extract knowledge from each unit and a patch aggregator to learn how the units are combined into a whole. Due to its domain-agnostic nature, the model can be applied to downstream data across different domains. Furthermore, we analyze the connection between our method and existing graph models, as well as the transferability of the node embeddings it generates. Empirically, our method not only achieves the capability to use multi-domain graphs for pre-training, but also shows enhanced performance across various downstream datasets and tasks. Moreover, we observe consistent improvement in downstream performance as the volume of pre-training data increases.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

TransLaw: A Large-Scale Dataset and Multi-Agent Benchmark Simulating Professional Translation of Hong Kong Case Law

Translating Hong Kong Court Judgments from English to Traditional Chinese is mandated by Articles 8-9 of the Basic Law, yet remains constrained by a shortage of parallel resources and rigorous demands on legal terminology, citation format, and judicial style. We introduce HKCFA Judgment 97-22, the first large-scale sentence-aligned parallel corpus for HK case law, comprising 344 professionally translated judgments (11,099 sentence pairs; 2.1M tokens) spanning 1997-2022. Building on this resource, we propose TransLaw, a multi-agent framework that decomposes translation into word-level expression, sentence-level translation, and multidimensional review, integrating a specialized Hong Kong legal glossary database, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and iterative feedback, with four-dimensional expert review covering semantic alignment, terminology, citation, and style. Benchmarking 13 open-source and commercial LLMs, we demonstrate that TransLaw significantly outperforms single-agent baselines across all evaluated models, with convergence within 3 iterations. Human evaluation by 10 certified legal translators using our proposed Legal ACS metric confirms gains in legal-semantic accuracy, while showing that TransLaw still trails human experts in stylistic naturalness. The dataset and benchmark code are available at https://github.com/xuanxixi/TransLaw.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ToolGrad: Efficient Tool-use Dataset Generation with Textual "Gradients"

Prior work synthesizes tool-use LLM datasets by first generating a user query, followed by complex tool-use annotations like depth-first search (DFS). This leads to inevitable annotation failures and low efficiency in data generation. We introduce ToolGrad, an agentic framework that inverts this paradigm. ToolGrad first constructs valid tool-use chains through an iterative process guided by textual "gradients", and then synthesizes corresponding user queries. This "answer-first" approach led to ToolGrad-500, a dataset generated with more complex tool use, lower cost, and almost 100% pass rate. Experiments show that ToolGrad models outperform those trained on expensive baseline datasets and proprietary LLMs. The ToolGrad source code, dataset, and models are available at https://github.com/zhongyi-zhou/toolgrad.

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

Data-driven Control with Real-time Uncertainty Compensation for Multi-Fuel Engines

arXiv:2606.16171v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression ignition (CI) engines offer superior power density and fuel flexibility. However, achieving consistent and optimal combustion phasing across a wide range of operating conditions remains a major challenge, particularly in the presence of modeling uncertainties. This paper presents a novel, data-driven real-time uncertainty compensation framework for combustion control in multi-fuel CI engines. The proposed approach introduces a pseudo-engine speed that enables dynamic adaptation of control inputs in response to uncertainty affecting the engine. To model the underlying combustion process, a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model is first trained on available input-output data, capturing the nonlinear and fuel-dependent behavior across varying operating conditions. Control inputs are then synthesized through model inversion of the learned GPR surrogate and augmented with an uncertainty compensator designed to mitigate deviations caused by dynamic variations in operating conditions and model inaccuracies. This integrated control strategy allows for real-time input corrections within a finite number of combustion cycles. Theoretical analysis establishes finite-time convergence guarantees for the proposed controller. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method steers the combustion phasing to the desired value in real-time, providing a scalable and adaptive control solution for multi-fuel CI engine operation.

25.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Machine learning-driven identification of virulence determinants in <i>Borrelia burgdorferi</i> associated with human dissemination

by Hoa Thanh Nguyen, Catherine A. Brissette Lyme disease, the most common tick-borne infectious disease in the United States, presents with highly variable clinical outcomes, ranging from localized erythema migrans to severe disseminated complications affecting the heart, joints, and nervous system. The bacterial determinants underlying this phenotypic variation remain largely unknown, limiting our ability to predict disease progression and optimize treatment strategies. Here, we applied machine learning (ML) approaches to identify specific amino acid residues within surface-exposed virulence factors that predict human dissemination phenotypes. Utilizing the published whole genome sequences from 299 clinical Borrelia burgdorferi isolates collected from the United States and Slovenia over a 30-year period (1992–2021), we extracted and characterized translated amino acid sequences (variants) of seven known virulence factors (BB_0406, BBK32, DbpA, OspA, OspC, P66, and RevA). Protein variants were classified based on their association with disseminated versus localized infections using clinical metadata. Cramér’s V analysis revealed possible strong associations between dissemination phenotypes and five adhesins: BBK32, DbpA, OspC, P66, and RevA. We developed ML models using five algorithms with multiple feature selection strategies, achieving robust predictive performance for DbpA, OspC, and RevA variants (all performance metrics > 0.7). Feature importance analysis identified 57, 29, and 42 key predictive residues for DbpA, OspC, and RevA, respectively. Notably, B-cell epitope prediction revealed significant enrichment of ML-identified residues within predicted epitope regions for OspC (11 overlapping residues, OR = 3.57, p = 0.006) and RevA (12 overlapping residues, OR = 2.37, p = 0.048), suggesting these residues may influence immune recognition and bacterial persistence. This study establishes the first computational framework linking Borrelia protein sequence variants to clinical dissemination phenotypes, providing molecular insights into Lyme disease pathogenesis that may inform the development of improved diagnostics and therapeutic targets.