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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Local Stabilizer Codes in Three Dimensions without String or Self-Similar Fractal Logical Operators

作者:

arXiv:2606.19873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error-correcting codes (QECs) are essential components quantum computation and have deep connections to quantum phases of matter. A key obstruction to passive self-correcting QECs is the presence of string logical operators, which can generate logical errors through constant-energy-barrier processes. Haah's Codes (fracton codes) showed that three-dimensional stabilizer codes can forbid such string logical operators, but their translation-invariant structure supports self-similar fractal logical operators with a logarithmic energy barrier. We introduce the qutrit random cubic codes, a family of local qutrit Calderbank-Shor-Steane stabilizer Hamiltonians with similar cube-check structure as Haah's Code 1 but built from spatially varying stabilizers. We prove that these models retain the no-string property and numerically observe that they have properties distinct from translation-invariant fracton codes: the smallest ground-state degeneracy exponent is $k=2$ for odd $L$ and $k=4$ for even $L$; noncontractible plane-logical operators span the entire logical space; and charge-push diagnostics show that the self-similar fractal operators are absent. These results demonstrate that constrained randomness can fundamentally change the nature of stabilizer codes and improve their self-correction properties. They further point to broader families of quantum error-correcting codes and quantum phases beyond canonical topological and fracton orders.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A Comprehensive Ecosystem for Open-Domain Customized Video Generation

Recent progress in video generation has shown impressive visual synthesis capabilities. However, open-domain customized video generation remains limited by the lack of large-scale, annotated datasets capturing diverse identity-specific attributes. To address this, we introduce PexelsCustom-1M, the first publicly available million-scale dataset for identity-preserving video generation, containing one million curated triplets across 8,000+ categories. Leveraging this, we propose CustoMDiT, a parameter-efficient framework that adapts a pretrained multimodal Diffusion Transformer into a customized video generator with only 8% additional learnable parameters. Our method surpasses prior state-of-the-art. However, benchmarks such as DreamBooth cover only 100 classes, which is insufficient for real-world applications. To overcome this, we construct OpenCustom, a new benchmark with 1,000+ categories, created via cross-dataset knowledge fusion from ImageNet and MS-COCO. Extensive experiments confirm the advantages of both our dataset and model. We will open-source the entire ecosystem–including dataset, pipeline, benchmark, and implementations–to support further research.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Reasoning for Mobile User Experience with Multimodal LLMs: Task, Benchmark, and Approach

arXiv:2606.13192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: User experience (UX) centered on usability, perceived consistency, and functional clarity is fundamental to real-world user interfaces (UI). The application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in the field of user interfaces is evolving rapidly, such as visual element grounding, graphical user interface (GUI) agents, and design-to-code generation. However, research efforts on evaluating UX based on UI screenshots are still immature. To address this, we propose UXBench, a novel multimodal benchmark consisting of 2,000 VQA data samples designed to assess MLLMs' ability to perform UI-based reasoning. UXBench includes 8 tasks based on real-world UI screenshots that require fine-grained diagnosis of UX issues across layout relationships, visual hierarchy, and content consistency. Our extensive evaluation of mainstream MLLMs shows that they remain fundamentally limited in their capacity for UI-based reasoning. The results underscore the need for further advancements in this area. To bridge this gap, we propose UI-UX, an MLLM based on Qwen3-VL-4B-Thinking foundation model and enhanced via reinforcement learning with two key innovations: a reward routing mechanism that dynamically balances perceptual understanding and logical reasoning during inference, and an asymmetric transition reward that suppresses redundant or insufficient reasoning steps. Experiments demonstrate that UI-UX achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on UXBench, attaining an accuracy of 0.7963 – surpassing Claude-4.5-Sonnet's 0.6550 – while exhibiting strong generalization across diverse UI tasks and maintaining low inference latency.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Capability Minimization as a Safety Primitive: Risk-Aware Causal Gating for Least-Privilege LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.13884v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern decision systems increasingly rely on learned components whose outputs may be confident yet wrong, exposing downstream actions to costly errors. We introduce Risk-Aware Causal Gating (RACG), a framework that decides whether to act on, defer, or abstain from a model's prediction by combining causal effect estimation with calibrated risk control. RACG models the causal pathway from candidate actions to outcomes and gates each decision according to an estimated counterfactual risk rather than raw predictive confidence. To make gating reliable, we derive distribution-free bounds on the probability of acting under high-risk conditions and show how these bounds translate into operating thresholds that satisfy user-specified safety constraints. We further propose an adaptive gating policy that adjusts to distribution shift by monitoring discrepancies between predicted and realized outcomes, tightening the gate when causal assumptions appear violated. Across simulated interventions and real-world decision benchmarks, RACG reduces high-cost errors substantially while preserving most of the utility of an ungated policy, and it outperforms confidence-based and selective-prediction baselines at matched abstention rates. Our results indicate that explicitly separating causal risk from predictive uncertainty yields decision systems that are both safer and more transparent, offering a principled mechanism for trustworthy automation in high-stakes settings.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Enhancing CVRP Solver through LLM-driven Automatic Heuristic Design

arXiv:2602.23092v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), a fundamental combinatorial optimization challenge, focuses on optimizing fleet operations under vehicle capacity constraints. While extensively studied in operational research, the NP-hard nature of CVRP continues to pose significant computational challenges, particularly for large-scale instances. This study presents AILS-AHD (Adaptive Iterated Local Search with Automatic Heuristic Design), a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to revolutionize CVRP solving. Our methodology integrates an evolutionary search framework with LLMs to dynamically generate and optimize ruin heuristics within the AILS method. Additionally, we introduce an LLM-based acceleration mechanism to enhance computational efficiency. Comprehensive experimental evaluations against state-of-the-art solvers, including AILS-II and HGS, demonstrate the superior performance of AILS-AHD across both moderate and large-scale instances. Notably, our approach establishes new best-known solutions for 8 out of 10 instances in the CVRPLib large-scale benchmark, underscoring the potential of LLM-driven heuristic design in advancing the field of vehicle routing optimization.

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

Camera and LiDAR BEV Fusion for Cooperative 3D Object Detection on TUMTraf V2X

We describe a Camera and LiDAR fusion detector developed for the TUMTraf V2X cooperative 3D object detection track of the DriveX 2026 challenge. The detector fuses three roadside cameras with a fused infrastructure-plus-vehicle point cloud in a shared bird's-eye-view space and predicts boxes through a CenterPoint-style head with a generalized IoU regression loss and an IoU quality re-ranking head. Trained on the provided train and validation splits, the model reaches a 3D mAP of 0.85 on the public Codabench test split. While iterating on the system, we observed that 44 of the 50 test frames are also present in the released train (40) and validation (4) splits with their labels. We therefore conducted two additional studies to quantify how this overlap affects the final score: (1) a finetuning run that oversamples the 44 overlapping frames, reaching 0.89 mAP, and (2) a post-processing run that replaces predictions on those frames with the released ground truth, reaching 0.99 mAP (uploaded to our Codabench account for testing but not published on the leaderboard). All three configurations and their per-class results are reported.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ICA Lens: Interpreting Language Models Without Training Another Dictionary

Finding interpretable directions in language-model representations is critical for understanding and controlling model behavior. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become the standard tool for this purpose, but using them as the default first lens often requires training, storing, and evaluating large overcomplete dictionaries. This bottleneck limits rapid exploration and raises a fundamental question: how much interpretable structure is already visible from activation geometry before training another neural dictionary? Our intuition is simple: many interpretable directions are selective on tokens, and these directions should look less Gaussian than random directions. We therefore revisit independent component analysis (ICA), a classical method for finding non-Gaussian directions, as a compact lens for language-model interpretability. We find that ICA has been underestimated for LLM interpretability, because prior uses often relied on off-the-shelf ICA implementations that are brittle on LLM activations and lacked systematic tools for inspecting and evaluating the recovered directions. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ICALens, the first practical workflow for stable, efficient, and auditable ICA analysis of LLM representations. It combines an optimized GPU-parallel FastICA pipeline with LLM-specific stability recipes and better fitting diagnostics, enabling efficient and reliable layer-wise analysis. Across GPT-2 Small, Gemma 2 2B, and Qwen 3.5 2B Base, ICALens efficiently recovers compact, human-interpretable directions without per-layer gradient-based dictionary training. On SAEBench, ICA is competitive with public SAEs in sparse probing and outperforms them in targeted probe perturbation under small-to-medium budgets. These results suggest that ICA should not be viewed as a weak baseline, but as an efficient and complementary first lens for exploring language-model representations.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ANEForge: Python for direct computation on the Apple Neural Engine

arXiv:2606.17090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ANEForge is a Python package that programs the Apple Neural Engine (ANE), the fixed-function neural accelerator on every recent Apple device, directly and without CoreML. In production the engine is reachable only through CoreML, which treats it as a scheduling option: no configuration requires the ANE, and a model can silently run on the CPU or GPU instead. ANEForge compiles a lazy tensor graph, built from 58 fused operators and 19 native bridge operators, into a single ANE program. The program is dispatched through the same ANE daemon and kernel-driver stack as Apple's internal framework. Beyond inference, the package reaches the engine's native fused attention, streams int8, int4, and sparse weights, keeps decoder and optimizer state resident across steps, and runs the forward pass, backward pass, and optimizer update of training on the engine. A small fused program completes a call in about 90us, near the engine's 70us per-program dispatch floor, and a pretrained ResNet-18 forward runs end-to-end in 0.33ms. ResNet-18, a sentence encoder, and a Vision Transformer run end-to-end against framework references, and a Stable Diffusion U-Net validates its forward pass. ANEForge targets Apple Silicon under macOS 14 and later. Each release is verified against a recorded macOS and ANE-compiler version.

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

SpecAlign: Efficient Specification-Grounded Alignment of Large Language Models via Synthetic Data

arXiv:2606.16276v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, alignment is no longer governed by a single universal notion of safety or helpfulness, but instead by provider- or application-specific model specifications. These specifications are typically long, structured, and frequently updated, yet existing alignment pipelines lack a systematic mechanism to operationalize them as training signals. In this paper, we propose specification-grounded alignment, a new alignment paradigm that treats provider-authored model specifications as the primary alignment target rather than abstract principles or static benchmarks. To instantiate this paradigm, we introduce SpecAlign, a framework that synthesizes alignment data directly from specification documents. SpecAlign combines structured rule annotation, controllable specification instantiation, and multi-agent adversarial data synthesis to generate fine-grained, boundary-aware preference pairs that capture both compliant behaviors and meaningful specification violations. Experiments across multiple model specifications and backbone models demonstrate that training with SpecAlign consistently improves rule compliance while preserving general capabilities and avoiding over-conservative behavior. These results suggest that grounding alignment in explicit model specifications enables rapid, precise, and scalable adaptation of LLM behavior to evolving policy requirements.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Geometry-Aware Dataset Condensation for Diffusion Model Training

Dataset condensation aims to construct compact datasets from real data via synthesis or selection. However, existing approaches are ill-suited for diffusion model training: synthetic data generation often yields low-fidelity samples unsuitable for authentic modeling, while real subset selection typically fails to preserve the distributional geometry required by diffusion likelihood objectives. To address this, we propose to reformulate real subset selection as a geometry-aware distribution alignment problem. By incorporating one-sided partial optimal transport, our method selectively aligns a compact subset with the full data distribution while allowing unmatched mass in low-density regions, ensuring the preserved geometric structure necessary for effective diffusion model training. To further ensure distributional fidelity, we complement geometric alignment with lightweight feature-statistics and semantic consistency regularization. An efficient two-stage discrete optimization strategy is proposed to achieve this alignment objective. Extensive experiments across diffusion variants, subset sizes, image resolutions, and training rounds show that our method achieves superior fidelity and distributional coverage in diffusion model training. Codes are available at https://github.com/2018cx/GADC.

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

Querying Counterfactuals on Tissue Graphs with Supervised Disentanglement

arXiv:2606.08493v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tissue graph counterfactuals ask how a cell's expression would change under altered spatial neighbor contexts. Such queries are central to predicting cell behavior in tissues, but lack a unified definition, with existing methods targeting specific intervention types or treating cells as i.i.d. In this work, we first formalize tissue graph counterfactuals as a class of spatial interventions that either rewire connections between cells (edge perturbation) or modify the expression of their neighbors (node perturbation). We then introduce Cellina (https://cellina.readthedocs.io) - a framework that uses supervised disentanglement to decompose a cell's intrinsic state from its spatial context, using the latter as a conditioning input for counterfactual predictions. Across benchmarks spanning over 2.5 million spatially-resolved cells in colorectal cancer and mouse brain, Cellina outperforms spatially-informed and non-spatial competitors in in-silico graph perturbations, disentanglement, and scalability. Additionally, we show that Cellina reveals biologically distinct cancer subdomains in an unsupervised manner and enables targeted neighbor perturbation simulations.

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

NOVA: NOise-aware Verbal Confidence CAlibration for Robust Large Language Models in RAG Systems

Accurately assessing model confidence is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in mission-critical factual domains. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely adopted to improve grounding, confidence calibration in RAG settings remains poorly understood. We conduct a systematic study across four benchmarks, revealing that LLMs exhibit poor calibration performance especially when noisy contexts are retrieved. Specifically, contradictory or irrelevant evidence tends to exacerbate the model's overconfidence issue. To address this, we propose NOVA Rules (NOise-Aware Verbal Confidence CAlibration Rules) to provide a principled foundation for resolving overconfidence under noise. We further design NOVA, a noise-aware calibration framework that synthesizes supervision from ~2K HotpotQA examples guided by these rules. By performing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with this data, NOVA equips models with intrinsic noise awareness without relying on stronger teacher models. Empirical results show that NOVA yields substantial gains, improving ECE scores by 10.9% in-domain and 8.0% out-of-domain. By bridging the gap between retrieval noise and verbal calibration, NOVA paves the way for both accurate and epistemically reliable LLMs.

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

Anomalies in Multivariate Time Series Benchmarks Are Mostly Univariate

arXiv:2606.02670v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many recent multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) models incorporate cross-channel modeling, under the implicit assumption that the structure of anomalies may be spread across multiple channels. We evaluate this assumption on eight widely used public benchmarks by introducing a per-segment diagnostic framework that flags, for each labeled anomaly, whether at least one channel deviates individually from its normal history, whether the cross-channel correlation structure changes, or both. The framework shows that no cross-channel rupture occurs without an accompanying univariate deviation across a range of reasonable thresholds. A complementary metric also reveals that on six of the eight benchmarks, at least half of the labeled anomaly segments deviate univariately on 89% to 100% of their timesteps, reaching 100% on three of these datasets. To verify that our framework captures cross-channel structure when present, we construct synthetic data of phase-shifted sinusoidal channels with shared noise. Each anomalous segment is altered through one of two channel-wise corruptions that preserve the per-channel marginal distribution while breaking cross-channel structure, and our framework correctly characterizes these segments as cross-channel-only. On these data, channel-dependent (CD) models successfully exploit the cross-channel signal whereas channel-independent (CI) ones fail. The CI/CD comparison of a recent SOTA detector on real benchmarks further confirms that CD modeling brings no measurable gain. We conclude that current MTSAD benchmarks are unsuitable for validating cross-channel modeling capabilities, and we call for the development of more structurally diverse evaluation sets. The code for this study is publicly available.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CellNet – Localizing Cells using Sparse and Noisy Point Annotations

Counting living cells is an important step in many biological research workflows. Our collaborators at the Wellcome Sanger Institute study vital genes in humans via large scale saturation genome editing screening, which requires repeatedly counting cells a great number of times. Computer Vision based automation is crucial for high throughput and resource efficiency. In this work, we develop a regression-based deep learning computer vision algorithm to detect and count cells in phase-contrast microscopy images. To reduce annotation effort, which in practice often becomes a bottleneck, we focus on counting cells only using sparse point annotations, which are fast and easy to acquire. By comparison to state-of-the-art 0-shot methods, we show that regression-based counting is a promising alternative in low data regimes. Through developing methods to automatically count living cells in microscopy images, we contribute to valuable research on the human genome. The code is available at https://github.com/beijn/cellnet.

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

Quantum speedup from nonclassical polarization

arXiv:2603.23124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a framework for identifying nonclassical speedups in systems with polarization, likewise spin degrees of freedom. By confining the dynamics to the manifold of angular momentum coherent states, which act as the classical reference in this case, we compute the speed limit that bounds the rate of change of the state achievable without generating quantum coherence. A comparison with the unrestricted quantum speed limit enables the quantitative identification of speedups arising from polarization nonclassicality. We apply this framework to the cross-Kerr interaction, demonstrating a persistent speedup scaling as $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{N})$ with the photon number $N$ with a parity effect in favour of even photon numbers. The results establish polarization nonclassicality as a genuine dynamical resource, linking quantum coherence to quantum-enhanced evolution speeds in nonlinear photonic systems.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Specialty Choice Attitudes Among Medical Interns: Evidence from Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences

Background: Choosing a medical specialty is a critical career decision that affects both physicians future professional lives and the composition of the healthcare workforce. Specialty preferences are shaped by multiple personal, educational, and socioeconomic factors, yet evidence from senior medical students in southern Iran remains limited. This study aimed to assess willingness to pursue specialty training among medical interns at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences, identify their preferred specialties, and examine factors associated with their decisions. Methods: This descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study was conducted in 2023 among medical interns at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences in Bandar Abbas, Iran. Using a convenience census approach, all eligible interns were invited to participate, and 83 students completed an online questionnaire. The instrument collected demographic, academic, and occupational data, as well as reasons for willingness or unwillingness to pursue specialty training and specialty preferences. Content and face validity were assessed by faculty members and students, and internal consistency reliability in the present study was acceptable (Cronbach alpha = 0.82). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and logistic regression in SPSS version 27. Results: Of the 83 participants, 50 (60.2%) reported willingness to pursue specialty training, while 33 (39.8%) did not. Among students willing to continue, the most frequently cited reasons were achieving a better economic position, broader job opportunities, and higher social status. Among those unwilling to continue, the most common reasons were fatigue from prolonged studying, financial problems, and the desire to start working after graduation. Radiology was the most common first-choice specialty, followed by otorhinolaryngology, dermatology, and cardiology. In regression analyses, no demographic or academic variable remained independently associated with willingness to pursue specialty training in the final multivariable model. Conclusions: A majority of medical interns were interested in pursuing specialty training, with preferences concentrated in a limited number of specialties perceived as offering favorable financial prospects, prestige, and lifestyle. Economic concerns and educational fatigue were the dominant factors influencing willingness and unwillingness to continue specialty education. These findings highlight the need for structured career counseling, broader exposure to different specialties, and policy measures to address financial and structural barriers to residency training. Keywords: medical specialty choice; medical interns; residency training; medical education; Hormozgan university of medical sciences

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

LLMs+Graphs: Toward Graph-Native, Synergistic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.11560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly, but their limitations in structured and multi-hop reasoning underscore the need for graph-native, synergistic artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Graph-structured data underpins critical applications across social, biological, financial, transportation, web, and knowledge domains, making it essential to understand how LLMs can leverage graph computation for grounded, context-rich inference. Three complementary synergies are emerging: LLMs augmented with graph computation for retrieval and reasoning; bidirectional integration between LLMs and knowledge graphs (KGs), where LLMs support KG construction and curation while KGs enforce semantic constraints and factual consistency; and AI agents strengthened by graph algorithms for planning, decision making, and multi-step reasoning. In parallel, LLMs introduce new capabilities for graph data management and graph machine learning (ML) through natural language interfaces and hybrid LLM-graph neural network (GNN) pipelines. This tutorial synthesizes the algorithms, systems, and design principles driving these converging directions, offering data science and data mining researchers a unified perspective on integrating LLMs, graph data management, graph mining, graph ML, and agentic computation into next-generation graph-native AI systems.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Hierarchical ODE: Learning Continuous-Time Physical Prototypes for Early Link Failure Detection

arXiv:2606.14284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Time series prototype learning is fundamentally challenged by observational ambiguity. Discrete architectures fail to resolve this, as they lack the capacity to decouple stochastic noise from continuous dynamics. Furthermore, rigid closed-set assumptions fail to capture unseen diversity. To address these limitations, we propose a hierarchical ordinary differential equation clustering network, which utilizes neural ordinary differential equation to model latent state evolution as a continuous integral curve. This formulation enforces temporal continuity to effectively disentangle smooth feature trends from stochastic noise, while our adaptive hierarchical mechanism autonomously determines the appropriate number of prototypes without rigid prior constraints. Validated on the early link failure detection task with irregularly sampled time series, the proposed method effectively extracts underlying physical prototypes, thereby enabling robust failure detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJ-LNN/Hierarchical-ODE.

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

TokenPilot: Cache-Efficient Context Management for LLM Agents

As LLM agents are deployed in long-horizon sessions, context accumulation drives up inference costs. Existing approaches utilize text pruning or dynamic memory eviction to minimize token footprints; however, their unconstrained sequence mutations alter layouts, introducing prefix mismatches and cache invalidation. This reveals a critical trade-off between text sparsity and prompt cache continuity. To address this, we present TokenPilot, a dual-granularity context management framework. Globally, Ingestion-Aware Compaction acts as a framework harness to stabilize prompt prefixes and eliminate open-world environmental noise at the ingestion gate. Locally, Lifecycle-Aware Eviction monitors the ongoing residual utility of context segments, enforcing a conservative batch-turn schedule to offload content segments only when task relevance expires. Experiments on PinchBench and Claw-Eval under both isolated and continuous modes demonstrate that TokenPilot reduces costs by 61% and 56% in isolated mode, and 61% and 87% in continuous mode, while maintaining competitive performance compared to prior systems. TokenPilot has been integrated into LightMem2 at https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem2.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Apertus LLM Family Expansion via Distillation and Quantization

arXiv:2605.29128v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The wide adoption of LLMs has led to their use in great variety of applications and scenarios, such as chatbot assistants and data annotation, creating the need for the models to satisfy certain budget and hardware constraints. This has led to the trend of LLMs being released in batches consisting of similar models of various sizes for the family of models to adhere to as wide of a range of constraints as possible. In this paper, we validate distillation and quantization as a cost-effective way to expand model families to new sizes and hardware formats. Based on the open-recipe Apertus 8B LLM, we produce Apertus-v1.1 - a distilled family of models with up to 4B parameters trained on 1.7T permissive license tokens. We demonstrate cost-efficiency and strong accuracy performance of our approach for covering large ranges of hardware and systems requirements.

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

Impact of Hand Impairment and Occlusions on Hand Pose Estimation Accuracy in Augmented Reality Applications

Mixed reality applications can be designed for hand rehabilitation. Augmented reality (AR) head mounted displays (HMDs) specifically allow for ecologically valid tasks because individuals can see their real environment and interact with real objects while receiving additional cues on the HMD. While these applications rely on accurate hand pose estimation, there is a gap in investigating the influence of hand impairment or occlusion from real-object interactions on pose estimation accuracy. Further, comparisons between AR HMD predictions and state-of-the-art pose estimation methods have not been established. The current study assessed pose estimation accuracy of the HoloLens 2 HMD and state-of-the-art pose estimation algorithms (WiLoR, HaMeR, WildHands, and MediaPipe) while individuals with cervical spinal cord injury (cSCI; n = 13, Neurological Level of Injury: C3-C6; American Spinal Injury Association Impairment Scale: A-D) and 15 uninjured controls interacted with clear and opaque objects. Ground truth estimates of 3D joint positions were generated via triangulation from a multi-camera setup. Pose estimation accuracy did not differ between the cSCI and uninjured control groups suggesting that 3D joint predictions from the HoloLens 2 and pose estimation algorithms can generalize to populations with hand impairment. Further, clear objects provided a small accuracy advantage over opaque objects (0.1 mm) and predictions from both WiLoR and HaMeR were slightly more accurate than the HoloLens 2 (2 mm). Overall, these results suggest that the HoloLens 2 may be viable for hand rehabilitation applications and the dataset generated can be used to refine pose estimation methods for hand-impaired populations.

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

DeFrame: Debiasing Large Language Models Against Framing Effects

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their fair responses across demographics has become crucial. Despite many efforts, an ongoing challenge is hidden bias: LLMs appear fair under standard evaluations, but can produce biased responses outside those evaluation settings. In this paper, we identify framing – differences in how semantically equivalent prompts are expressed (e.g., "A is better than B" vs. "B is worse than A") – as an underexplored contributor to this gap. We first introduce the concept of "framing disparity" to quantify the impact of framing on fairness evaluation. By augmenting fairness evaluation benchmarks with alternative framings, we find that (1) fairness scores vary significantly with framing and (2) existing debiasing methods improve overall (i.e., frame-averaged) fairness, but often fail to reduce framing-induced disparities. To address this, we propose a framing-aware debiasing method that encourages LLMs to be more consistent across framings. Experiments demonstrate that our approach reduces overall bias and improves robustness against framing disparities, enabling LLMs to produce fairer and more consistent responses.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Minimum Distance Summaries for Robust Neural Posterior Estimation

arXiv:2602.09161v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference by first training a neural posterior estimator (NPE) on prior-simulator pairs, typically through low-dimensional summary statistics, which can then be cheaply reused for fast inference by querying it on new test observations. Because NPE is estimated under the training data distribution, it is susceptible to misspecification when observations deviate from the training distribution. Many robust SBI approaches address this by modifying NPE training or introducing error models, coupling robustness to the inference network and compromising amortization and modularity. We introduce minimum-distance summaries, a plug-in robust NPE method that adapts queried test-time summaries independently of the pretrained NPE. Leveraging the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a distance between observed data and a summary-conditional predictive distribution, the adapted summary inherits strong robustness properties from the MMD. We demonstrate that the algorithm can be implemented efficiently with random Fourier feature approximations, yielding a lightweight, model-free test-time adaptation procedure. We provide theoretical guarantees for the robustness of our algorithm and empirically evaluate it on a range of synthetic and real-world tasks, demonstrating substantial robustness gains with minimal additional overhead.

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

MBABench: Evaluating LLM Agents on End-to-End Spreadsheet Tasks in Finance

arXiv:2605.22664v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions. To meet enterprise needs, frontier AI labs have developed agents that can construct entire spreadsheets from scratch. This is especially relevant in finance, where core workflows such as financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis are commonly conducted through spreadsheets. Yet, existing spreadsheet benchmarks do not measure this advanced capability, focusing instead on question-answering or single-formula edits. To address this gap, we provide one of the first evaluations of agents on end-to-end spreadsheet tasks, focusing on economically critical financial workflows such as modeling and scenario analysis. Since deliverables therein are routinely reviewed and revised by multiple stakeholders, judging their quality necessarily involves high-level criteria such as readability or ease of modification. To reflect the multidimensional nature of solution quality, we develop an evaluation taxonomy comprising three dimensions: Accuracy, Formula, and Format, each comprising fine-grained criteria that reflect professional standards. The Claude family leads the benchmark and produces the most professional-looking outputs in our qualitative review, but even the strongest agents frequently fall short of professional finance standards and degrade sharply as the difficulty increases beyond a few chained calculations. This suggests that current agents are not yet able to reliably produce professional-quality spreadsheets at the level of complexity real-world workflows demand.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A mosaic of whole-body representations on the human precentral gyrus

Understanding how the body is represented in the motor cortex is key to understanding how the brain controls movement. Although the motor cortex has been mapped in animal models at a fine scale1–10, characterization in humans remains primarily limited to low-resolution recording11–16 and stimulation techniques17–20. Here we created a comprehensive map of the human motor cortex at single-neuron resolution, spanning microelectrode array recordings from 20 arrays across 8 individuals with paralysis from spinal cord injury, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or brainstem stroke, all enrolled in brain–computer interface clinical trials. These arrays broadly sample the crown of the precentral gyrus (PCG; thought to be composed largely of the premotor cortex (Brodmann area 6)). We found that body parts were highly intermixed, such that the entire body was represented in all sampled locations of the PCG, although the relative strength of body parts was roughly consistent with the motor homunculus17,18. We also found two speech-preferential areas with a broadly tuned, orofacial-dominant area in between them. Throughout the PCG, movement representations of the four limbs were interlinked, with homologous movements of different limbs (for example, toe curl and hand close) having correlated representations. These data provide evidence consistent with an intermixed, interrelated and behaviour-centred organization of the motor cortex3,21. The resulting map also provides important targeting information for brain–computer interfaces that seek to restore motor function. A comprehensive map of the human motor cortex at single-neuron resolution is described.