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

SceneCraft: Interactive System for Image Editing via Scene Graph

Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity.

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

The Quality-Utility Paradox: Why High-Reward Data Impairs Small Model Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation from powerful reasoning models is widely used to improve Small Language Models (SLMs) on mathematical reasoning, often assuming that traces with higher reward model scores provide more useful supervision. We identify a counterintuitive Quality-Utility Paradox in mathematical reasoning distillation. Data refined or synthesized by a stronger Oracle obtains higher perceived quality according to reward models, yet consistently underperforms traces generated by the SLM itself and selected through rejection sampling across Qwen2.5, LLaMA-3, and DeepSeek families. Our analysis shows that Oracle refinement couples logical repair with distributional drift away from the SLM's native reasoning distribution. This drift increases the learner's adaptation cost and can outweigh the benefit of improved reasoning logic. To test this mechanism, we introduce Style-Aligned Refinement, which preserves the native trajectory of the SLM while retaining logical repair from the Oracle. This intervention lowers adaptation cost and restores downstream utility. These findings suggest that effective mathematical reasoning distillation should jointly optimize perceived solution quality and learner-data compatibility, rather than relying solely on reward-model scores. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/Dracoqhl/Quality-Utility-Paradox.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

The Circumplex Degeneracy Behind the Rare-Class Limit in Affect Recognition

In-the-wild expression recognition persistently fails on a few rare emotions, and the standard explanation is class imbalance. Through a controlled multi-task study on two benchmarks, we show the failure is instead a property of affect geometry: the rare classes are degenerate on Russell's circumplex, and that degeneracy bounds what any loss or cost can achieve. Our instrument is a circumplex-cost optimal-transport term that prices expression confusions by their valence-arousal distance. The term improves the official score and expression macro-F1, but a control most studies omit shows the gain is not geometric: a uniform cost, equivalent to a generic confidence penalty, matches it on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.625) and significantly exceeds it on AffectNet (+0.057 over base, larger than the circumplex). What the geometry reshapes is the structure of the errors, making them affectively nearer the truth on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.031 against the uniform control), an effect that does not survive on AffectNet, where a visual confound at the far corner of the circumplex overwhelms it. The rare-class failure, by contrast, is stable across both datasets we examine: the degenerate pairs (anger-fear on Aff-Wild2, anger-contempt on AffectNet) resist frequency-based interventions, the transport term, and an action-unit-augmented cost built specifically to separate them. We conclude that progress on rare expressions requires representations that distinguish the classes, not supervision that reprices their confusions, and we provide the controls and metrics needed to tell the two apart.

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

City landscape in sight: A crowdsourced framework for unlocking urban-scale window view perceptions from real estate imagery

City landscapes viewed through home windows influence quality of life, yet perceptions of actual window views at the urban scale remain understudied. This study presents an approach for large-scale mapping of perceptions using 12,334 window view images (WVIs) collected from actual residential properties listed on real estate platforms in Wuhan, China, representing a rarely explored form of urban view imagery that offers advantages over the rendered or simulated window views commonly examined in previous studies. Through a non-immersive virtual reality platform, we collected 27,477 pairwise comparisons across six perceptual dimensions (e.g.\ Vivid) from 304 participants based on 499 WVIs. A hybrid neural network model was trained to predict human perceptions of all crowdsourced WVIs and map their spatial distribution. Results reveal significant spatial autocorrelation with distinct hot and cold spots across the whole city. Floor level strongly influences human perceptions: while higher floors offer more preferred and extensive window views, lower-floor windows provide residents with quiet and vivid views. An inference model further shows that window view composition matters considerably: high ratios of sky, trees, and low-rise buildings enhance people's preferences and perceptions of vividness, whereas high ratios of high-rise buildings increase perceptions of monotony and oppression. Importantly, these effects are non-linear: the excessive presence of certain elements can alter their impact on human perception. This work advances urban-scale understanding of residents' visual experiences and provides evidence-based guidance for human-centric urban planning and real estate to optimise visual landscapes from windows.

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

Using Reinforcement Learning to Optimize the Global and Local Crossing Number

arXiv:2509.06108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph drawing concerns the algorithmic visualization of graphs. A good drawing of a graph is easy to read and facilitates solving tasks on the graph. Several properties have been identified to occur in good drawings of graphs. Such properties include a low number of crossings, large angles between edges, short edges, and depicting symmetries. Many of these properties are explicitly measurable metrics. This brings us to the insight that graph drawing can be seen as a game. In this paper, we study a single-player optimization game in which the player iteratively moves vertices of a straight-line graph drawing to reduce edge crossings. This game arose naturally from the automatic track of the Graph Drawing Challenge, where solutions are obtained by repeatedly performing local vertex movements. We formalize this process as a game with full information and investigate whether reinforcement learning can discover effective strategies for playing it. Our reinforcement-learning agent observes the local geometric and structural context of a vertex and selects a movement direction with the goal of reducing either the global or the local crossing number, that is, the total number of crossings or the maximum number of crossings per edge. We compare the resulting strategies to existing methods and established crossing-minimization heuristics on standard benchmark graphs. While our approach does not out-compete state-of-the-art methods for minimizing the global crossing number, it is competitive and often superior for minimizing the local crossing number.

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

DrivingAgent: Design and Scheduling Agents for Autonomous Driving Systems

Many autonomous driving systems are increasingly incorporating foundation models to improve generalization and handle long-tail scenarios. However, this trend introduces two key challenges: (i) the manual and labor-intensive process of designing and integrating new models, and (ii) the lack of intelligent, dynamic scheduling mechanisms to meet strict real-time constraints. While Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents offer a promising avenue for automation, existing frameworks are ill-suited for autonomous driving. Specifically, they fail to distinguish between the fundamentally different requirements of system design and real-time scheduling, treat modules as opaque black boxes, and are not designed for continuous operation. To address these limitations, we propose DrivingAgent, a novel agent framework tailored to the dual challenges of autonomous driving system design and scheduling. In the design phase, DrivingAgent automates module development by interpreting system architecture, generating code, and validating modules via super-network training. In the scheduling phase, it employs a lightweight LLM trained with reinforcement learning to dynamically orchestrate system modules in real time, supported by a structured memory that integrates long-term storage with timestamped short-term context. Experimental results demonstrate that DrivingAgent achieves a superior speed–accuracy trade-off on both the nuScenes and Bench2Drive benchmarks.

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

Uncertainty Estimation and Generalization Bounds for Modern Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.13818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This thesis investigates how Bayesian principles can deepen our understanding of modern deep learning systems. While neural networks achieve remarkable predictive performance, their ability to generalize and to quantify uncertainty remains only partly understood. This thesis approaches this challenge from both methodological and theoretical angles: unifying Bayesian inference, function-space modeling, and large-deviation theory under a common probabilistic perspective. On the methodological side, the thesis introduces the Deep Variational Implicit Process (DVIP), a scalable Bayesian framework that extends implicit processes to deep architectures. Complementing this, two post-hoc methods – the Variational Linearized Laplace Approximation (VaLLA) and the Fixed-Mean Gaussian Process (FMGP) – are proposed to equip pretrained deterministic networks with calibrated uncertainty estimates. The theoretical contributions focus on one of the central open questions in modern machine learning: why do large, over-parameterized neural networks generalize so well? To address this, the thesis develops a unified probabilistic framework that connects three key mechanisms – diversity, smoothness, and stochasticity – within the language of PAC-Bayesian and large-deviation theory.

08.
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.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Do Data-Driven Systems Exhibit the Capability to Infer?

arXiv:2606.11769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The European AI Act is the first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), setting out extensive obligations, particularly for so-called high-risk and general-purpose AI systems. A key distinguishing feature of AI systems under the AI Act is the capability to infer. Since the AI Act does not clearly define what inference is, there is a gray area for certain data-driven systems. A specific example is credit scoring systems, which are listed by Annex III of the AI Act. At the same time, however, these are often implemented using statistical models for which it is unclear whether they have the capability to infer and thus fall under the AI definition of the AI Act at all. Motivated by statistical learning theory, this work develops a framework for grading different levels of the capability to infer. Based on the AI Act and the Commission Guidelines on the definition of an artificial intelligence system, we analyze which levels constitute sufficient capability to infer within the meaning of the AI Act and where further regulatory clarity is needed. We illustrate the framework by creating two realistic credit scoring workflows and show whether and where inference occurs in them. Our analysis illustrates that not only individual models but the entire data processing workflow must be considered. It also shows that the involvement of human experts during development can have significant influence on the capability to infer. Code can be found at https://github.com/fraunhofer-iais/inference-framework-creditscorecards.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Effects of Resveratrol as an Adjunct to a Low-Calorie Diet in Postmenopausal Women with Obesity and Knee Osteoarthritis

Background. Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for osteoarthritis and may contribute to pain, functional impairment, inflammation, and cartilage degradation. Resveratrol has potential anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective effects, but its efficacy as an adjunct to dietary intervention remains unclear. Objective. This study evaluated whether resveratrol supplementation provides additional benefits when combined with a low-calorie diet in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. Methods. A total of 97 postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis were included in this randomized controlled clinical study. Participants received either a 10-day low-calorie diet alone or the same diet combined with 150 mg/day trans-resveratrol. Anthropometric parameters, body composition, biochemical markers, pain intensity, functional status, and urinary CTX-II were assessed at baseline and follow-up. Results. Both interventions were associated with reductions in body weight, BMI, waist and hip circumferences, fat mass, glucose, HOMA-IR, lipid parameters, hsCRP, VAS, WOMAC, LAI, and urinary CTX-II. Compared with diet alone, resveratrol supplementation did not provide additional benefits for anthropometric parameters, glucose metabolism, lipid profile, or WOMAC score. However, the resveratrol group showed a greater reduction in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. The obesity class did not modify the treatment effect. Conclusion. A short-term low-calorie diet improved metabolic, inflammatory, and osteoarthritis-related parameters in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. The addition of resveratrol did not enhance weight loss or improve most metabolic outcomes but was associated with greater reductions in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. These findings suggest a potential anti-inflammatory and cartilage-related effect of resveratrol, which requires confirmation in longer randomized trials.

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

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

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

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Multisite Real-World Validation of an Electronic Health Record-Integrated Generative Artificial Intelligence Tool for Venous Thromboembolism Risk Stratification

Background: Guiding risk-appropriate inpatient thromboprophylaxis requires venous thromboembolism (VTE) risk stratification; however, reliable risk determination remains inconsistent in routine care. Health systems increasingly pilot artificial intelligence (AI) tools, yet few studies demonstrate rigorous evaluation in the context of a learning health system (LHS). We evaluated the performance of a pilot electronic health record (EHR)-integrated generative AI (GenAI) system, inHealth General Reasoner (iHGR), for VTE risk stratification versus clinician order set classifications and physician-adjudicated chart review. Methods: This multisite retrospective validation study included adult inpatient admissions at Johns Hopkins Medicine between June 21, 2025, and Dec 18, 2025 (checklist-based order set from June 21, 2025 - November 19, 2025, and clinician judgement-based order set from November 29 - December 18, 2025). From 758 eligible admissions, we randomly sampled 500 balanced by site and order set periods. iHGR and clinician-selected order set classifications were compared with the reference standard (RS). Primary outcomes were iHGR sensitivity and specificity. Secondary analyses compared the order sets with the same RS to evaluate workflow comparators and error patterns. Results: iHGR achieved 81.8% sensitivity (95% CI 77.3-85.6) and 70.9% specificity (63.6-77.3). The checklist-based order set had 61.3% sensitivity (53.7-68.5) and 86.2% specificity (77.4-91.9). The clinician judgement-based order set had 78.1% sensitivity (71.3-83.7) and 65.4% specificity (54.3-75.0). False-negative iHGR classifications were associated with missed narrative risk factors. Conclusion: iHGR showed higher sensitivity for VTE risk than checklist-based order sets and clinician judgement without introducing systematic bias. In silico evaluation of pilot AI systems within LHSs can identify clinically important performance trade-offs and implementation targets before operational scale-up. Narrative clinical data abstraction remained a key limitation, supporting the use of GenAI to support rather than supplant clinician judgement.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Folding the unfoldable 2: using AlphaFold and ESMFold to explore spurious proteins

Motivation: Spurious protein sequences, resulting from gene prediction errors, theoretically should not yield folded structures. AlphaFold2 was previously shown to predict short spurious sequences with high pLDDT scores and was therefore unlikely to distinguish between real proteins and spurious proteins which are usually short. We evaluate whether newer structure prediction methods (ESMFold and AlphaFold3) similarly predict short sequences with high pLDDT or if they better discriminate between spurious and real proteins. Results: All three structure prediction methods (ESMFold, AlphaFold2, and AlphaFold3) predict short spurious sequences from AntiFam with unexpectedly high pLDDT scores, however the discrimination between spurious and real proteins improves beyond 100 amino acids. By analysing sequences with disparate pTM and pLDDT scores, we identified two likely spurious shadow ORFs in Swiss-Prot and one potentially non-spurious AntiFam entry. Using the structure prediction scores, we developed a Gaussian Process Model and evaluated its performance on AlphaFold DB, identifying potential spurious proteins at scale. While limited on its own, this model can increase confidence in spurious protein identification when combined with other methods.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Multi-Modal Agents for Power Distribution Defect Detection: An Evaluation of Foundation Models

作者:

arXiv:2606.12969v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The power distribution network is critical to reliable electricity delivery, yet traditional inspection methods face limitations in semantic understanding, generalization, and closed-loop automation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Multi-Modal Agent framework specifically for power distribution defect detection. Central to this study is the systematic evaluation of multimodal foundation models as unified cognitive engines. We rigorously assess their integrated performance across three critical capabilities: (1) Perception, where the model must accurately identify equipment and generate expert-level descriptions of defects; (2) Reasoning, where the model interprets visual findings to diagnose causes, assess severity, and plan maintenance strategies based on domain knowledge; and (3) Tool Usage, where the model acts as an autonomous operator to execute actions – such as querying knowledge bases or generating work orders – to achieve closed-loop maintenance. To support this evaluation, a domain-specific evaluation dataset and a comprehensive benchmark are developed. Experimental results demonstrate the strengths and limitations of current foundation models in these three dimensions, providing empirical evidence for deploying autonomous agents in high-stakes industrial environments.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Gen-VCoT: Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Diffusion-Based RGB Intermediate Representations

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual reasoning but rely on text-based chain-of-thought (CoT), lacking interpretable visual intermediates. Existing methods use opaque tokens or external tools, missing key properties. We propose Gen-VCoT, a framework using expert vision models to generate RGB images as reasoning intermediates. It has three stages: visual grounding (SAM segmentation), geometric reasoning (Marigold depth maps), and semantic reasoning (Qwen2-VL integration). An adaptive router selects reasoning depth. Evaluations show Gen-VCoT improves spatial (25% better) and depth (50% better) questions, but may hurt simple factual queries. Text CoT outperforms visual intermediates on CLEVR (91.2% vs 62.5%), showing task-dependent optimal representations. Gen-VCoT establishes a new paradigm for interpretable multimodal reasoning.

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

From ASR to ASP: Evaluating Prompt Attack Vulnerabilities Against Open-Source LLMs

Recent studies demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks that generate harmful or sensitive outputs. As open-source LLMs are increasingly adopted in high-impact applications such as finance, law, and healthcare, systematically investigating their security risks is becoming increasingly important towards trustworthy LLM era. This paper comprehensively studies effective prompt injection attacks against 14 widely used open-source and three closed-source LLMs on five attack benchmarks. Moreover, existing evaluation metrics mostly only consider the attack success rate, overlooking uncertainty in model responses. Our proposed Attack Success Probability (ASP) additionally captures uncertain behaviors for evaluation, where the model may initially refuse a harmful request but subsequently provide harmful guidance or vice versa, reflecting inconsistency and ambiguity in attack feasibility. By systematically analyzing the effectiveness of prompt injection attacks, we propose a straightforward and effective hypnotism attack; results show that this attack causes aligned language models, including Stablelm2, Mistral, Openchat, and Vicuna, to generate objectionable behaviors, achieving around 90% ASP. They also indicate that ignore prefix attacks can break all 14 open-source LLMs, achieving over 60% ASP on a multi-categorical dataset. We find that moderately well-known LLMs exhibit higher vulnerability to prompt injection attacks, highlighting the need to raise public awareness and prioritize efficient mitigation strategies.

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

Nightjar: Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Decoding for Large Language Models Serving

arXiv:2512.22420v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates LLM inference by verifying draft tokens in parallel. However, this method presents a critical trade-off: it improves throughput in low-load, memory-bound systems but degrades performance in high-load, compute-bound environments due to verification overhead. Existing speculative decoding methods use fixed lengths and cannot adapt to workload changes or decide when to stop speculation. The cost of restarting speculative inference also remains unquantified. Under high load, the benefit of speculation diminishes, while retaining the draft model reduces KV cache capacity, limiting batch size and degrading throughput. To overcome this, we propose Nightjar, a resource-aware adaptive speculative framework. It first adjusts to the request load by dynamically selecting the optimal speculative length for different batch sizes. Crucially, Nightjar proactively disables speculative decoding when the MAB planner determines that speculation is no longer beneficial, and during the disabled phase, offloads the draft model to the CPU only under GPU memory pressure. This reclaims memory for the KV cache, thereby facilitating larger batch sizes and maximizing overall system throughput. Experiments show that Nightjar achieves up to 14.76% higher throughput than standard speculative decoding and up to 20.18% lower latency in the main benchmark suite under dynamic request arrival rates for real-time LLM serving scenarios.

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

Beyond Uniform Tokens: Adaptive Compression for Time Series Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled time series (TS) analysis by jointly modeling numerical observations and textual context through a shared token interface. However, TS tokens and prompt tokens exhibit fundamentally different information structures, making uniform token processing inefficient. In this paper, we study token efficiency in TS language modeling from an asymmetric-token perspective. We show that TS tokens have highly uneven spectral contributions, where many tokens share redundant frequency patterns while a small subset preserves critical temporal evidence. We also observe that prompt-token influence attenuates with model depth, suggesting that full prompt retention across all layers is unnecessary. Based on these findings, we develop an adaptive token budgeting framework that compresses TS tokens via frequency-domain structure and progressively reduces prompt tokens across layers. Experiments across forecasting, classification, imputation, and anomaly detection demonstrate up to 7.68$\times$ inference acceleration and performance gains in 78\% of evaluated settings, showing the effectiveness of asymmetric token compression for scalable TS foundation models.

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

Improved Baselines with Representation Autoencoders

Representation Autoencoders (RAE) replace traditional VAE with pretrained vision encoders. In this paper, we systematically investigate several design choices and find three insights which simplify and improve RAE. First, we study a generalized formulation where the representation is defined as sum of the last k encoder layers rather than solely the final layer. This simple change greatly improves reconstruction without encoder finetuning or specialized data (e.g., text, faces). Second, we study the prevalent assumption that RAE (using pretrained representation as encoder) replaces representation alignment (REPA), which distills the same representation to intermediate layers instead. Through large-scale empirical analysis, we uncover a surprising finding: RAE and REPA exhibit complementary working mechanisms, allowing the same representation to be used as both encoder and target for intermediate diffusion layers. Finally, the original RAE struggles with classifier-free guidance (CFG) and requires training a second, weaker diffusion model for AutoGuidance (AG). We show that REPA itself can be viewed as x-prediction in RAE latent space. By simply re-parameterizing the output of the DiT model, it can provide guidance for "free". Overall, RAEv2 leads to more than 10x faster convergence over the original RAE, achieving a state-of-the-art gFID of 1.06 in just 80 epochs on ImageNet-256. On FDr6, RAEv2 achieves a state-of-the-art 2.17 at just 80 epochs compared to the previous best 3.26 (800 epochs) without any post-training. This motivates EPFID@k (epochs to reach unguided gFID < k) as a measure of training efficiency. RAEv2 attains an EPFID@2 of 35 epochs, versus 177 for the original RAE. We also validate our approach across diverse settings for text-to-image generation and navigation world models, showing consistent improvements. The code is available at https://raev2.github.io.

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

Quantum ring all-reduce: communication and privacy advantages for distributed learning

arXiv:2606.20344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning models have scaled to unprecedented sizes, making training across distributed devices the de facto standard in the field. In this work, we explore how quantum communications can make distributed training both more communication-efficient and information-theoretically private, for both classical and quantum learning models. Ring all-reduce is the foundational communication primitive for large-scale distributed training. We present a quantum version that reduces per-link online communication by a provably optimal factor of two using pre-shared entanglement and superdense coding, without requiring the learning model or gradient computation to change. Beyond bandwidth, the primitive enables privacy guarantees that are information-theoretically impossible for any classical protocol, achieving composable {\epsilon}-secure aggregation, via verified entanglement, at a 2x overhead in GHZ copies. Our hybrid quantum-classical communication architecture yields simultaneous communication and security advantages for large scale distributed training, regardless of whether the learning itself is quantum or classical. Finally, we characterise quantum advantages in gradient conflict detection for server-to-client communication under bandwidth constraints, a setting that arises after ring all-reduce is completed, when full gradient broadcast to external clients is infeasible. Two variants of the problem admit different separations. For margin-based alignment testing (\textsc{GapIP}_{\tau}), the quantum advantage is quadratic in the margin parameter: \widetilde{O}({\tau}^{-1}\log P) qubits versus \widetilde{O}(\min(\{\tau}^{-2},P)) bits. For sign-consistency auditing against a private parameter matching (\textsc{TieAudit}_{\epsilon}), the advantage represents an exponential separation in communication complexity: \Omega(\sqrt{P}) bits whereas O({\epsilon}^{-2}\log P) qubits suffice.

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

Diagnosing and Repairing Shape-Prior Shortcuts in Long-Range Single-Shot Fringe Projection Profilometry

arXiv:2606.17093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning-based single-shot fringe projection profilometry (FPP) has been studied mostly at close range. The long-range regime (standoff beyond 1 m) remains largely unaddressed: inverse-square intensity falloff lowers fringe signal-to-noise ratio and degrades physical ground truth, the single-shot problem is ill-posed because fringe-order information is absent from one image, and these architectures have not been studied mechanistically. We present a diagnose-repair-verify study using mechanistic interpretability (MI) and conformal uncertainty quantification (UQ) as convergent diagnostics: they agree on one physical failure locus, driving and verifying an architectural repair. On a photorealistic synthetic benchmark (15,600 fringe images, 50 objects at 1.5-2.1 m), a best UNet baseline reaches 14.54 mm object mean absolute error (MAE). Three probes (linear probing, Grad-CAM, flat-plane out-of-distribution test) converge: the baseline solves the task via object-boundary shape priors rather than fringe-phase decoding. We repair this with PhiCalNet, which outputs wrapped phase rather than depth and applies a fixed differentiable calibration layer mapping phase to depth, removing the shape-prior solution from the hypothesis space architecturally rather than by a loss penalty. A physics-informed loss that enforces the same physics as a soft penalty on a depth-regressing network yields no measurable gain, isolating the architecture as the operative factor. PhiCalNet reduces object MAE 3.3x to 4.46 mm; the residual is carried by 0.103% of pixels at the +/-pi wrap discontinuity. Pixel-wise conformal UQ confirms the diagnosis: rejecting the top 5% of object pixels by snapshot disagreement cuts PhiCalNet RMSE by 64% (20.6->7.4 mm) versus 3.5% for the baseline. MI and UQ converge on the same failure locus.

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

Reducing Learner Redundancy in Boosting via Residual Orthogonalization

arXiv:2606.17567v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While sequential residual fitting is the bedrock of standard boosting frameworks, it inherently breeds learner redundancy by repeatedly revisiting correlated error components. To address this bottleneck, we propose a shift from residual fitting to residual orthogonalization and introduce SCBoost. Our framework tackles redundancy through two complementary mechanisms: Spectral Residual Projection (SRP) and Covariance-Regularized Weighting (CRW). During training, SRP projects each residual target onto the orthogonal complement of the historical prediction subspace, forcing successive learners to capture only novel empirical innovations. During aggregation, CRW optimizes ensemble weights on a validation set with an explicit covariance penalty to mitigate remaining correlations. Theoretically, we provide a finite-sample geometric characterization proving that SRP yields an exact additive residual-energy decomposition. Furthermore, under an isotropic-noise assumption, we rigorously establish the conditions under which this projection improves the effective Signal-to-Noise Ratio. Extensive experiments across ten benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCBoost delivers strong out-of-the-box performance, particularly in accuracy and F1 score. This work reinterprets boosting through a geometric lens, suggesting that explicit redundancy control is a principled and necessary step toward more efficient ensemble architectures.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MedCTA: A Benchmark for Clinical Tool Agents

To make clinically grounded decisions, medical AI agents are expected to go beyond simple recognition and be capable of tool retrieval, evidence acquisition, and integration. Existing benchmarks largely evaluate isolated perception or single-turn question answering, and therefore provide limited visibility into failures of planning, tool recruitment, and rollout reliability. We introduce MedCTA, a benchmark for evaluating medical tool agents on clinician-validated, step-implicit tasks grounded in realistic multimodal clinical inputs, including radiology images, pathology slides, and reports. MedCTA comprises 107 real-world clinical tasks with clinician-verified executable trajectories over 5 deployed tools, and supports process-aware evaluation of tool selection, argument validity, execution stability, trajectory fidelity, and outcome quality. We benchmark 18 open- and closed-source multimodal models and find that even frontier systems remain brittle in multi-step clinical tool use: autonomous rollouts are dominated by protocol failures, premature stopping, and incorrect tool recruitment, while gold-standard tool routing yields large but still incomplete gains. These results show that strong backbone perception does not translate into reliable agentic behavior in clinical settings. MedCTA provides a rigorous testbed for auditing, diagnosing, and advancing trustworthy medical AI agents. The dataset and evaluation suite are available at https://ivul-kaust.github.io/MedCTA/

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Womens intentions and motivations towards health behaviour change before pregnancy: a cross-sectional survey of pregnant women in Australia

Introduction: The preconception period (i.e. the weeks and months before pregnancy) is a critical window during which parental health behaviours can influence pregnancy outcomes and the childs long-term health. Modifiable factors such as nutrition, physical activity, substance use, and environmental exposures play a key role, yet womens ability to adopt and sustain healthy behaviours is shaped by complex psychological, social and environmental influences. This study applies the Theory of Planned Behaviour to identify the beliefs underpinning womens preconception behaviours, with the aim of informing support for effective and sustained health behaviour change. Methods: An Australian national retrospective cross-sectional survey of pregnant women (18-49 years), recruited through social media platforms. The 92-item survey captured respondent socio-demographics, pregnancy status and health conditions, health behaviours, and beliefs regarding preconception health behaviours. Respondents level of pregnancy planning was categorised using the London Measure of Unplanned Pregnancy (LMUP). Items regarding preconception beliefs were structured in accordance with the Theory of Planned Behaviour, with a focus on regular exercise, healthy diet, and alcohol avoidance. These beliefs variables were analysed using structured equation modelling to identify paths between latent variables and the items used to estimate each concept. Results: The study was completed by 430 pregnant women of whom 72.7% had a planned pregnancy. Most had a partner, were university educated and in good health. Structural equation modelling showed intention strongly predicted exercise ({beta}=0.65), healthy diet ({beta}=0.54) and alcohol avoidance ({beta}=0.64). Perceived control and partner norms influenced intentions, whereas health professional norms had limited effect. Positive beliefs were associated with folate supplement use and smoking cessation. Conclusion: These findings highlight intention as a key driver of preconception health behaviours, with perceived control and partner influences playing a more significant role than individual beliefs or health professional input. Effective interventions should therefore address structural barriers and actively involve partners, while respecting womens autonomy. Overall, couples-focused, multi-level strategies are likely essential to support meaningful and sustained preconception health behaviour change.

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arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

What Limits Does Quantization Place on Dense Top-$k$ Retrieval? A Theoretical Study

arXiv:2606.11780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We establish conditions for embedding a corpus of $N$ documents as $d$-dimensional vectors such that every $k$-subset $S \subseteq [N]$ is realizable as a result of top-$k$ retrieval by some query vector. Recent work shows that $d = O(k)$ suffices for such embeddings to exist in $\mathbb{R}^d$, independently of $N$. We theoretically prove that this corpus-independent bound is specific to infinite precision. With $B$ bits per coordinate, perfect top-$k$ retrieval requires $Bd = \Omega(k \ln N)$; thus, at any fixed precision, the dimension must grow at least logarithmically with $N$. Specializing to a $\ell_2$-normalized $B$-bit uniform scalar quantization model, we also identify a threshold on the precision $B^{*} = O(\ln \ln N)$ below which no dimension suffices, together with two further regimes that bound the feasible $(B, d)$ pairs. Our result implies that in practical vector databases and dense retrieval systems where quantization is standard, the embedding dimension and possibly the precision must grow with the corpus size.