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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

IndustryBench-MIPU: Benchmarking Multi-Image Attribute Value Extraction for Industrial Products

Authors:
Haonan Qi↗Jin Cao↗Yongqi Zhang↗Xintong Wang↗Weidong Tang↗Bin Chen↗Chengfu Huo↗Haojun Pan↗Hengyu You↗Jing Li↗Yingde Wang↗Liang Ding↗…

Industrial products such as valves and circuit breakers are defined by dense technical specifications that govern procurement, compatibility, and safety across supply chains. These specifications are scattered across multiple heterogeneous product images, including specification tables, nameplates, and technical drawings, yet whether Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can reliably recover them remains underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce IndustryBench-MIPU, the first large-scale benchmark for multi-image industrial product understanding, built around structured attribute extraction – recovering property-value pairs from product images. This task jointly probes text recognition on specification tables and nameplates, visual reasoning over technical drawings, domain knowledge to decode industrial terminology, and cross-image evidence integration to assemble scattered specifications. Concretely, the benchmark comprises 4,559 products across 27,652 images with 103,703 annotations spanning 18 industrial categories, constructed through multi-model consensus and three-tier quality assurance. Evaluating nine MLLMs under both single-image and product-level multi-image settings reveals a stark completeness gap: models achieve high precision (86–94%) but the best recovers only 49.9% of product-level attributes; moving from single-image to multi-image extraction costs 15–34 percentage points of recall. Multi-image completeness, not single-image accuracy, is the core bottleneck. Dataset and code are publicly available.

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

Structure-aware Knowledge-guided Heterogeneous Mamba for Zygomaticomaxillary Suture Assessment

Authors:
Xiaoqi Guo↗Birui Chen↗Xinquan Yang↗Chaoyun Zhang↗Xuefen Liu↗Mianjie Zheng↗Kun Tang↗Xuguang Li↗Wen Ma↗Yanhua Xu↗Linlin Shen↗

The Zygomaticomaxillary Suture is a key circummaxillary structure that connects the zygomatic bone and the maxilla, which serves as a primary site of resistance during maxillary advancement, and its maturation status directly influences the timing and efficacy of orthopedic interventions. However, accurate staging of ZMS maturation remains challenging due to subtle high-frequency transitions in suture lines and the global semantic ambiguity between adjacent stages. To address this, we present the first public ZMS dataset, comprising 3,790 ZMS images covering the entire age range from 4 to 24 years. Based on this dataset, we propose SKMamba, a Structure-aware and Knowledge-guided Mamba-based multi-modal framework for automated ZMS maturation assessment. SKMamba adopts a decoupled dual-path architecture that mimics the hierarchical diagnostic process used by experienced orthodontists. We first introduce an Implicit Edge Extractor (IEE), which leverages structural pre-training to reduce trabecular noise and accentuate sutural boundaries. Complementarily, a Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment (CSA) module is designed to incorporate anatomical descriptions from a large language model (LLM). This module helps align local morphological cues with global semantic descriptions while ensuring that objective morphological evidence remains the primary basis for decisions. Extensive experiments on our ZMS dataset demonstrate that SKMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/galaxygxq1116/SKMamba.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Towards Understanding What State Space Models Learn About Code

Authors:
Jiali Wu↗Abhinav Anand↗Shweta Verma↗Mira Mezini↗

arXiv:2602.06774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to the Transformer architecture. Prior work shows that, when trained under comparable conditions, SSMs can match or surpass Transformers on code understanding tasks. However, their internal mechanisms remain a black box. We present the first systematic analysis of what SSM-based code models learn along with the direct comparison between SSM and Transformer models in this domain. Our analysis shows that SSMs capture syntactic and semantic structure more effectively than Transformers during pretraining but forgets certain relations during fine-tuning on some tasks. To investigate this behavior, we introduce SSM-Interpret, a frequency-domain framework that exposes a spectral shift toward short-range dependencies during fine-tuning. Guided by these findings, we propose architectural modifications that significantly improve the performance of SSM-based code model by upto +6 MRR on NLCodeSearch. This demonstrates that our analysis not only explains model behavior but also leads directly to better designs.

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04.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-09

Prediction of hospitalisation in young children with pneumonia in Malawi: A machine learning-based approach

Authors:
Patrick Staunton↗

by Patrick Staunton, Mohammad Adib Makrooni, Master Chisale, Billy Nyambolo, Joseph Wu, Damien McCarthy, Mark Ledwidge, Yasir Bin Nisar, Chris Watson, Balwani Mbakaya, Cathal Seoighe, Joe Gallagher Background Globally, pneumonia remains the single biggest cause of mortality in children under 5 years of age. This study sought to train and test a prediction model for hospitalisation within 7 days after initial presentation in 2- to 59-month-old Malawian children with WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care and compare its performance to existing risk prediction models. Methods and findings BIOTOPE is a cohort study of children with pneumonia in a primary healthcare setting in Malawi. The training cohort involved nine primary care centres and the testing cohort involved two primary care centres in Northern Malawi. The training cohort was recruited between December 2022 and April 2023 while the testing cohort was recruited in 2016. Participants were consecutive children aged 2–59 months presenting with cough and/or difficulty breathing and who were diagnosed as WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care of any severity. The training cohort was used to train and validate a machine learning model with a prespecified primary outcome defined as hospitalisation and/or death within 7 days as the outcome. This model was then further evaluated in the testing cohort.Median age was 15 months (interquartile range 8−27) in the training and 17 months (interquartile range 9−29) in the external testing cohort (52.1% and 54.4% male, respectively). Hospitalisation occurred in 14.3% (294) of the training cohort and 12.1% (55) of the testing cohort. There was one death in the training cohort only. WHO danger signs were present in 17.6% (360) and 15.9% (70) of children in the training and testing cohorts, respectively. The optimal machine learning model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic and precision recall curves of 0.87 and 0.57, respectively, in the testing cohort outperforming existing risk prediction models; furthermore, this model produced an expected calibration error of 0.16 (a logistic regression model using severity status as the response variable and the log odds of the machine learning model’s calibrated probabilities produced an intercept estimate of −0.32 and a slope estimate of 1.13). Key limitations include the use of hospitalisation and/or death as a severity outcome, which may reflect health system factors rather than true disease severity, that mortality-based comparisons were not possible due to low mortality in these primary care cohorts, and that comparator tools were developed for hospital populations rather than primary care populations. Conclusion This machine learning score outperformed traditional pneumonia risk scores in predicting hospitalisation within 7 days in Malawian children presenting to primary care. Traditional pneumonia risk scores diminish in performance when externally applied to new datasets suggesting they may not generalise well beyond their original derivation settings. Mortality-related findings are not applicable as there was only one death in this cohort. Overall these findings support the potential of machine learning to meaningfully improve early identification of children at risk of severe pneumonia in low-resource primary care settings. Further external validation and clinical impact studies are needed to confirm these results.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Digital self-efficacy as a potential intermediary between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults: A cross-sectional analysis of HINTS 2024

Authors:
Suzuki↗Hoffmann↗Leutwyler↗Wallhagen↗

Background: Older adults with vision impairment often experience barriers to using digital technology. The indirect associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills via digital self-efficacy and frustration among older adults remain largely unknown. Objective: This study aimed to 1) explore factors associated with digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults with vision impairment; 2) examine associations between vision impairment and digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration among older adults; and 3) examine whether digital self-efficacy and frustration may help explain associations between vision impairment and digital access and skills among older adults. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study using nationally representative data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) 2024. Respondents aged 60 and older were included. Vision impairment was assessed using a self-reported item. Outcomes included self-reported digital access, skills, self-efficacy, and frustration. Survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression and generalized structural equation modeling were conducted, adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and the number of comorbidities. Results: Among 3,149 older adults (mean [SD] age, 70.7 [10.0] years; 45.6% female), 7.1% (n=223) reported vision impairment. Among older adults with vision impairment, 65.6% (95% CI, 53.5% to 75.9%) used the internet daily, and 79.5% (95% CI, 66.8% to 88.2%) used a smartphone in the past 12 months. In multivariable logistic regression analyses among older adults with vision impairment, older age was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.90), smartphone use (OR, 0.85; 95% CI, 0.75 to 0.97), wearable device use (OR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.97), and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80 to 0.93). Older adults who self-identified as racial and ethnic minority groups (e.g., Black/African American, Hispanic) had lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.15; 95% CI, 0.05 to 0.50) and using the internet to send a message to a healthcare provider (OR, 0.17; 95% CI, 0.04 to 0.73) compared with Non-Hispanic White older adults. Vision impairment was associated with lower odds of daily internet use (OR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.37 to 0.99) and digital self-efficacy (OR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.32 to 0.86). Digital self-efficacy was associated with higher odds of daily internet use (OR, 2.95; 95% CI, 2.04 to 4.26). Generalized structural equation modeling identified an indirect association between vision impairment and daily internet use via digital self-efficacy (coefficient, -0.68; 95% CI, -1.24 to -0.12). Conclusions: Findings suggest that reduced digital self-efficacy may help explain the observed association between vision impairment and daily internet use among older adults. Interventions targeting digital self-efficacy, including accessible interface designs, personalized coaching, and peer support, may help bridge the digital divide among older adults with vision impairment.

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

CycliST: A Video Language Model Benchmark for Reasoning on Cyclical State Transitions

Authors:
Simon Kohaut↗Daniel Ochs↗Shun Zhang↗Benedict Flade↗Julian Eggert↗Kristian Kersting↗Devendra Singh Dhami↗

We present CycliST, a novel benchmark dataset designed to evaluate Video Language Models (VLM) on their ability for textual reasoning over cyclical state transitions. CycliST captures fundamental aspects of real-world processes by generating synthetic, richly structured video sequences featuring periodic patterns in object motion and visual attributes. CycliST employs a tiered evaluation system that progressively increases difficulty through variations in the number of cyclic objects, scene clutter, and lighting conditions, challenging state-of-the-art models on their spatio-temporal cognition. We conduct extensive experiments with current state-of-the-art VLMs, both open-source and proprietary, and reveal their limitations in generalizing to cyclical dynamics such as linear and orbital motion, as well as time-dependent changes in visual attributes like color and scale. Our results demonstrate that present-day VLMs struggle to reliably detect and exploit cyclic patterns, lack a notion of temporal understanding, and are unable to extract quantitative insights from scenes, such as the number of objects in motion, highlighting a significant technical gap that needs to be addressed. More specifically, we find no single model consistently leads in performance: neither size nor architecture correlates strongly with outcomes, and no model succeeds equally well across all tasks. By providing a targeted challenge and a comprehensive evaluation framework, CycliST paves the way for visual reasoning models that surpass the state-of-the-art in understanding periodic patterns.

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

SiGnature: Explicit Motion Diffusion for Stylized Semantic Gesture

Authors:
Adi Rosenthal↗Tomer Koren↗Nadav Shaked↗Doron Friedman↗Ariel Shamir↗

While recent advances in co-speech gesture generation have achieved impressive rhythmic synchronization, synthesizing gestures that are both semantically meaningful and faithful to a speaker's unique non-verbal style remains an open challenge. Semantic gestures, such as iconic shapes or deictic pointing, are statistically sparse, making them difficult to learn effectively within standard generative models. We present SiGnature, a framework for Stylized and Semantic Gesture generation that reconciles precise semantic control with high-fidelity style preservation. Unlike prevalent methods that rely on entangled latent representations, SiGnature operates in an explicit joint-rotation space. This design enables our core contribution, Joint Motion Integration (JMI), a training-free inference mechanism capable of injecting any external motion sequence, particularly in-the-wild semantic gestures, directly into the diffusion process. JMI automatically identifies the specific ``active joints'' conveying a semantic action and injects them into the generation, while relying on the diffusion backbone to synthesize the remaining body dynamics, including posture and flow, in accordance with the pre-learned style of the target speaker. This allows for the plug-and-play integration of arbitrary motions, including complex semantic gestures, without retraining or introducing the ``Frankenstein'' artifacts typical of cut-and-paste methods. Extensive experiments and perceptual studies demonstrate that SiGnature offers superior semantic motion control while maintaining smooth and natural co-speech gesture generation and preserving the distinct characteristics of the speaker, thereby outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

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08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

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

Authors:
Cao↗Jin↗Xin↗Hou↗Fu↗Li↗Gao↗Wang↗Saimi↗Ren↗Yuan↗Chen↗…

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

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Dual Cross-Attention Siamese Transformer for Rectal Tumor Regrowth Assessment in Watch-and-Wait Endoscopy

Authors:
Jorge Tapias Gomez↗Despoina Kanata↗Aneesh Rangnekar↗Christina Lee↗Julio Garcia-Aguilar↗Joshua Jesse Smith↗Harini Veeraraghavan↗

Increasing evidence supports watch-and-wait (WW) surveillance for patients with rectal cancer who show clinical complete response (cCR) at restaging following total neoadjuvant treatment (TNT). However, accurate methods to early detect local regrowth (LR) from follow-up endoscopy images during WW are essential to manage care and prevent distant metastases. Hence, we developed a Siamese Swin Transformer with Dual Cross-Attention (SSDCA) to combine longitudinal endoscopic images at restaging and follow-up and distinguish cCR from LR. SSDCA leverages pretrained Swin Transformers to extract domain agnostic features and enhance robustness to imaging variations. Dual cross attention is implemented to emphasize features from the paired scans without requiring any spatial alignment to predict response. SSDCA as well as Swin-based baselines were trained using image pairs from 135 patients and evaluated on a held-out set of image pairs from 62 patients. SSDCA produced the best balanced accuracy (81.76% $\pm$ 0.04), sensitivity (90.07% $\pm$ 0.08), and specificity (72.86% $\pm$ 0.05). Robustness analysis showed stable performance irrespective of artifacts including blood, stool, telangiectasia, and poor image quality. UMAP clustering of extracted features showed maximal inter-cluster separation (1.45 $\pm$ 0.18) and minimal intra-cluster dispersion (1.07 $\pm$ 0.19) with SSDCA, confirming discriminative representation learning. Code and weights available at: https://github.com/Jotanator/SSDCA

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

How Much Do Reviews Really Contribute? A Study on Text-Enriched Matrix Factorization for Recommendations

Authors:
Eduardo Ferreira da Silva↗Mayki dos Santos Oliveira↗Joel Machado Pires Denis Dantas Boaventura↗Frederico Ara\'ujo Dur\~ao↗

arXiv:2606.16973v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Incorporating textual reviews into a Recommender System has become a prominent strategy for enriching collaborative signals with semantic information. However, the actual contribution of review-derived representations remains an open question, particularly when strong collaborative baselines are employed. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of textual information on Matrix Factorization by introducing and comparing three enrichment strategies over a common collaborative backbone. First, we propose a learnable gating mechanism that adaptively balances collaborative and textual signals during training. This mechanism is applied to two distinct review representations: (i) aggregated topic profiles extracted from user and item histories, and (ii) full text embedding representations derived from reviews. Additionally, we explore a cross-attention mechanism that identifies and emphasizes the most informative dimensions of the textual representation before fusion with collaborative factors. We evaluate six variants: pure, enriched with topic profiles and text via gating; enriched with topics and text via gating; and enhanced with cross-attention over textual features. Experiments across multiple review-based datasets reveal that although adaptive fusion mechanisms improve representation flexibility, the marginal contribution of textual signals remains limited compared to the collaborative backbone. These findings suggest that, under typical rating-prediction settings, collaborative information continues to dominate performance, raising important considerations for the effective integration of semantic review signals into recommendation models.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

XFlow: An Executable Protocol Programming System for Reliable Multi-Agent Workflows

Authors:
Hanqi Li↗Jing Peng↗Zijian Wang↗Lu Chen↗Kai Yu↗

arXiv:2606.14790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems increasingly coordinate planning, reasoning, tool use, and human interaction, yet their reliability remains limited. A central source of this limitation is the underspecified prompt–harness boundary. Current systems lack a principled way to decide which workflow commitments should remain in prompts and which should become harness structure. We present XFlow, an executable protocol programming system for reliable multi-agent workflows, and XPF (XFlow Protocol Format), its domain-specific protocol programming language. XFlow occupies a middle position between prompt-only orchestration and markup-like workflow descriptions. XPF remains readable as a literate protocol, but it is compiled and executed as a program. Its design keeps informal semantic work inside actors while moving selected commitments into harness structure that can be checked, preserved, and enforced. At runtime, XFlow stages uncertainty through lifecycle-governed symbols, which are typed state cells with validation and commit states. Actor outputs are mediated before they become shared state, instead of spreading through prompts, transcripts, or implicit memory. Our experiments cover Constrained Interaction, Long-Context Reasoning, and Agentic Software Engineering. They show that XFlow improves reliability by making constraints, evidence handling, and process requirements explicit and enforceable.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Position: Modular Memory is the Key to Continual Learning Agents

Authors:
Vaggelis Dorovatas↗Malte Schwerin↗Andrew D. Bagdanov↗Lucas Caccia↗Antonio Carta↗Laurent Charlin↗Barbara Hammer↗Tyler L. Hayes↗Timm Hess↗Christopher Kanan↗Dhireesha Kudithipudi↗Xialei Liu↗…

arXiv:2603.01761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models have transformed machine learning through large-scale pretraining and increased test-time compute. Despite surpassing human performance in several domains, these models remain fundamentally limited in continuous operation, experience accumulation, and personalization, capabilities that are central to adaptive intelligence. While continual learning research has long targeted these goals, its historical focus on in-weight learning (IWL), i.e., updating a single model's parameters to absorb new knowledge, has rendered catastrophic forgetting a persistent challenge. Our position is that combining the strengths of In-Weight Learning (IWL) and the newly emerged capabilities of In-Context Learning (ICL) through the design of modular memory is the missing piece for continual adaptation at scale. We outline a conceptual framework for modular memory-centric architectures that leverage ICL for rapid adaptation and knowledge accumulation, and IWL for stable updates to model capabilities, charting a practical roadmap toward continually learning agents.

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13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AI-driven Multimodal Representation Learning for Latent Mediation Structure Discovery of Socioeconomic Disadvantage, Psychosocial Factors, and Cardiometabolic Multimorbidity

Authors:
Ma↗Cao↗

Social disadvantage is associated with multimorbidity, but the pathways linking social conditions to disease burden remain poorly understood. We developed an AI-driven multimodal mediation framework that integrates socioeconomic, psychosocial, clinical, laboratory, behavioral, and genomic data from the All of Us Research Program. Modality-specific variational autoencoders were used to derive latent representations of each data domain, and mediation analyses were subsequently performed in latent space to evaluate indirect associations between socioeconomic disadvantage, psychosocial factors, and multimorbidity. The final analytic cohort included 20,804 participants with complete multimodal data. Across 800 exposure–mediator–outcome combinations, mediation signals were concentrated within a small number of latent dimensions. The strongest indirect association linked a socioeconomic disadvantage dimension, a psychosocial vulnerability dimension, and a cardiometabolic multimorbidity dimension (NIE = 0.002517). The psychosocial dimension was characterized by poorer mental health, greater loneliness, lower social well-being, and lower health literacy, whereas the outcome dimension was associated with hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, obesity, chronic kidney disease, and heart disease. Bootstrap analyses supported the stability of the leading pathway. These findings suggest that psychosocial vulnerability may contribute to the association between socioeconomic disadvantage and cardiometabolic multimorbidity. More broadly, the proposed framework illustrates how AI-based representation learning can be used to investigate complex relationships across high-dimensional multimodal health data.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

PERRY: Policy Evaluation with Confidence Intervals using Auxiliary Data

Authors:
Aishwarya Mandyam↗Jason Meng↗Ge Gao↗Jiankai Sun↗Mac Schwager↗Barbara E. Engelhardt↗Emma Brunskill↗

arXiv:2507.20068v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods estimate the value of a new reinforcement learning (RL) policy prior to deployment. Recent advances have shown that leveraging auxiliary datasets, such as those synthesized by generative models, can improve the accuracy of OPE methods. Unfortunately, such auxiliary datasets may also be biased, and existing methods for using data augmentation within OPE lack principled uncertainty quantification. In high stakes domains like healthcare, reliable uncertainty estimates are important for ensuring safe and informed deployment of RL policies. In this work, we propose two methods to construct valid confidence intervals for OPE with data augmentation. The first provides a confidence interval over $V^{\pi}(s)$, the policy value conditioned on an initial state $s$. To do so we introduce a new conformal prediction method suitable for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with continuous state spaces, extending prior work to higher-dimensional settings. Second, we consider the more common task of estimating the average policy performance over all initial states, $V^{\pi}$; we introduce a method that draws on ideas from doubly robust estimation and prediction powered inference. Across simulators spanning inventory management, robotics, healthcare, and a real healthcare dataset from MIMIC-IV, we find that our methods can effectively leverage auxiliary data and consistently produce confidence intervals that cover the ground truth policy values, unlike previously proposed methods. Our work enables a future in which OPE can provide rigorous uncertainty estimates for high-stakes domains.

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

Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Search Misaligns Instruction-Tuning

Authors:
Yushi Yang↗Shreyansh Padarha↗Sarah Ball↗Andrew Lee↗Adam Mahdi↗

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) trains large language models to use tools, but its impact on alignment is poorly understood. We study how agentic RL for search affects the alignment of instruction-tuned (IT) models. We find that RL-trained models inherit refusal reasoning by deflecting harmful requests into benign search queries, but this breaks down under a simple diagnostic trigger that elicits a search call before refusal can occur. Under this condition, RL models produce multi-step unsafe search actions and reasoning, reducing search query safety by up to 68.6% in Qwen and Llama models relative to their IT counterparts. The effect generalises across model families, scales, and RL algorithms. To understand why, we identify linear directions in the residual stream that control search query safety, and show that RL training progressively shifts search behaviour toward the harmful end of this direction. We thus propose representation-guided RL training, which adds a reward penalty based on projection toward the harmful search direction. Training on benign data alone, it restores IT-level alignment without reducing task accuracy and requires no additional training data. Together, our work provides the first framework for diagnosing, mechanistically analysing, and mitigating alignment degradation in agentic RL for search.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

FinTradeBench: A Financial Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs

Authors:
Yogesh Agrawal↗Aniruddha Dutta↗Md Mahadi Hasan↗Santu Karmaker↗Aritra Dutta↗

Real-world financial decision-making is a challenging problem that requires reasoning over heterogeneous signals, including company fundamentals derived from regulatory filings and trading signals computed from price dynamics. Recently, with advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), financial analysts have begun to use them for financial decision-making tasks. However, existing financial question-answering benchmarks for testing these models primarily focus on company balance sheet data and rarely evaluate reasoning about how company stocks trade in the market or their interactions with fundamentals. To leverage the strengths of both approaches, we introduce FinTradeBench, a benchmark for evaluating financial reasoning that integrates company fundamentals and trading signals. FinTradeBench contains 1,400 questions grounded in NASDAQ-100 companies over a ten-year historical window. The benchmark is organized into three reasoning categories: fundamentals-focused, trading-signal-focused, and hybrid questions requiring cross-signal reasoning. To ensure reliability at scale, we adopt a calibration-then-scaling framework that combines expert seed questions, multi-model response generation, intra-model self-filtering, numerical auditing, and human-LLM judge alignment. We evaluate 14 LLMs under zero-shot prompting and retrieval-augmented settings and witness a clear performance gap. Retrieval substantially improves reasoning over textual fundamentals, but provides limited benefit for trading-signal reasoning. These findings highlight fundamental challenges in the numerical and time-series reasoning for current LLMs and motivate future research in financial intelligence.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hallucination Detection and Correction in Medical VLMs via Counter-Evidence Verification

Authors:
Nan Zhou↗Ke Zou↗Meng Liu↗Linchao He↗Jiaqi Zhu↗Yi Zhang↗Hu Chen↗Huazhu Fu↗

Vision-Language models (VLMs) reliability in medical diagnosis is challenged by trust-undermining hallucinations. Existing hallucination detection approaches mainly focus on identifying factual inconsistencies between generated text and reference data. While some studies analyze where models attend in images, they seldom verify whether such attention truly reflects the visual evidence supporting the generated text. To address this gap, we propose Co}unter-Evidence Verification (CoEV), a training-free plug-and-play framework that detects and corrects hallucinations through evidence-based factual consistency verification. CoEV performs bidirectional verification between textual assertions and visual evidence, testing whether each statement is supported by its corresponding evidence region, and assigns each statement into a four-quadrant diagnostic map capturing combinations of text factuality and visual grounding. CoEV detects hallucinated content and serves as a post hoc refinement tool, correcting hallucinations without retraining. Extensive experiments on four medical datasets show that CoEV combats hallucinations in VLMs.For hallucination detection, CoEV consistently outperforms existing methods, improving average PR-AUC and ROC-AUC by 3.0% and 3.9% absolute points respectively, with notable gains of up to 18.5% in specific VQA scenarios. For hallucination correction, it improves Micro-F1 by up to 12.5%, reduces hallucination rates by over 11.9% on medical report generation, and also boosts medical VQA accuracy. These results show that CoEV enables reliable detection and correction of hallucinations, providing clinicians with dependable, evidence-based cues for diagnosis. Code will be released upon acceptance.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Visored: A Controlled-Natural-Language Prover for LLM-Generated Mathematics

Authors:
Xiyu Zhai↗Xinyi Chen↗Yiping Wang↗Runlong Zhou↗Liao Zhang↗Simon S. Du↗

arXiv:2606.17581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a dependent-type-based prover designed around the way LLMs (and humans) tend to write mathematics, complementing existing systems such as Lean and Rocq. Its core design choices are a surface that imitates mathematical natural language and a rule-driven automation layer that closes the routine steps a textbook would omit, so that an accepted proof can be re-emitted as a checked Lean file. Early experiments suggest that, even without any prover-specific training data, LLMs can learn to use it effectively on the miniF2F benchmark. Lean output excerpts: https://github.com/xiyuzhai-husky-lang/visored/

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Unraveling Syntax: Language Modeling and the Substructure of Grammars

Authors:
Laura Ying Schulz↗Daniel Mitropolsky↗Tomaso Poggio↗

While language models achieve impressive results, their learning dynamics are far from understood. Many domains of interest – such as natural language syntax, coding languages, arithmetic – are captured by context-free grammars (CFGs). In this work, we extend prior work on neural language modeling of CFGs in a novel direction: how language modeling behaves with respect to CFG substructure, namely subgrammars. We define subgrammars, and prove a set of fundamental theorems connecting language modeling and subgrammars. We show that language modeling loss recurses linearly over its top-level subgrammars; applied recursively, the loss decomposes into losses for "irreducible" subgrammars. Under additional assumptions, and empirically, parametrized models learn subgrammars in parallel, unlike children who first master simple substructures. We find that subgrammar pretraining can improve final performance, but only for tiny models relative to the grammar, while alignment analyses show that pretraining consistently leads to internal representations that better reflect the grammar's substructure.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Dengue and chikungunya virus transmission in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Authors:
Sendor↗Edwards↗J. K↗Banek↗Mwandagalirwa↗Lessler↗Espinoza↗D. O↗Castillo↗Vulu↗Muvamba↗N. M↗…

Dengue (DENV) and chikungunya (CHIKV) are understudied in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and across Africa despite evidence of transmission. We measured DENV and CHIKV IgG seroprevalences in Kinshasa Province, DRC, by antigen-capture ELISA, using dried blood spots from 2021. Force of infection (FOI) was estimated from age-stratified seroprevalences using Bayesian catalytic modeling. Among 1,250 participants, DENV IgG seroprevalence was 38.1% (95% CI: 34.5%-41.8%), increasing with age, and highest within peri-urban Kimpoko sites (54.9%). CHIKV IgG seroprevalence was 24.2% (95% CI: 21.1%-27.6%), increasing with age and comparable between peri-urban Kimpoko and rural Bu, with few seropositives in the city-center. DENV-CHIKV IgG co-occurrence was detected in 12.8% of participants. Time-varying FOI models provided best fit to age-stratified seroprevalences, with spatial variation detected. Sustained DENV and CHIKV circulation across Kinshasa highlights an under-appreciated transmission risk and underscores the need for strengthened arboviral surveillance in the DRC and surrounding region.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Cluster LOCO: Feature Importance For Interpreting Clusters

Authors:
Claire M. He↗Genevera I. Allen↗

arXiv:2606.14592v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is widely used for exploratory analysis and scientific discovery, driving insights from market segmentation to biological data analysis, but its outputs can be difficult to interpret, audit, and reproduce as modern datasets become increasingly large and complex. Reliable use of clustering requires understanding which features drive the discovered structure, yet feature-level explanations for clustering remain scarce compared with methods in supervised learning. Furthermore, existing clustering feature importance scores are often tied to specific algorithms and data assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose Cluster LOCO (Leave-One-Covariate-Out), a family of model-agnostic feature importance scores for clustering. Cluster LOCO is built on feature occlusion and clustering generalizability, defined as whether cluster labels learned on one subset of the data can be accurately predicted on held-out samples. For any chosen clustering algorithm, Cluster LOCO quantifies a feature's importance by measuring how much its removal degrades generalizability. We first introduce Cluster LOCO-Split, which relies on data splitting, and then extend it to Cluster LOCO-MP, a minipatch ensemble-based version designed for large-scale data. Across synthetic simulations and an application to cell-type discovery in single-cell transcriptomics, we show that Cluster LOCO more reliably recovers informative features than existing clustering feature importance methods.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Diffusion Models for Adaptive Sequential Data Generation

Authors:
Haoyang Cao↗Minshuo Chen↗Yinbin Han↗Renyuan Xu↗

arXiv:2606.06007v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generating realistic synthetic sequential data is critical in real-world applications across operations research, finance, healthcare, energy systems, and scientific computing, where time-indexed observations are used for prediction, simulation, risk assessment, and data-driven decision-making. While diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating static data, their direct extensions to sequential settings often fail to capture temporal dependence and information structure. Designing diffusion models that can simulate sequential data in an adapted manner, and hence without anticipation of future information, therefore remains an open challenge. In this work, we propose a sequential forward-backward diffusion framework for adapted time series generation. Our approach progressively injects and removes noise along the sequence, conditioning on the previously generated history to ensure adaptiveness. A novel score-matching objective is introduced for efficient parallel training. We derive rigorous statistical guarantees under a generic framework, then establish score approximation, score estimation, and distribution estimation results with ReLU networks serving as a concrete instance. Empirically, we validate our method on synthetic data, including ARMA models and Gaussian processes, and demonstrate its effectiveness in constructing mean-variance optimal portfolios.

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

Pepti-Agent: An AI Agent for Peptide Design and Optimization

Authors:
Houxu Chen↗Achuth Chandrasekhar↗Amir Barati Farimani↗

Therapeutic peptides occupy a valuable design space between small molecules and biologics, but their development requires satisfying several competing constraints at once: solubility, hemolytic activity, and nonspecific surface fouling are governed by overlapping sequence features, so improving one property often degrades another. Computational design addresses this by pairing generative models with sequence-based property predictors, iteratively proposing and refining candidates. However, these components are typically wired together as monolithic scripts that are difficult to inspect, extend, or reuse, and they often refine sequences by natural-language reasoning rather than by tracking the evolving multi-property state of each candidate. We present Pepti-Agent, a closed-loop, peptide-specific framework that exposes generation, property prediction, and single-residue mutation as independently inspectable Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools. A large language model controller invokes these tools and consults live predictor output between calls, so refinement is guided by each sequence's current property profile rather than by language reasoning alone. Task-specific PeptideGPT models generate candidates, ProtBERT-based classifiers score solubility, hemolysis, and non-fouling, and two interchangeable mutation operators propose sequence edits. By recording a per-step trace of controller decisions, predictor outputs, and accepted mutations, Pepti-Agent offers a reproducible substrate for benchmarking multi-objective design strategies and for prioritizing candidates for experimental validation.

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

From Privacy to Workflow Integrity: Communication-Graph Metadata in Autonomous Agent Interoperability

Authors:
Bijaya Dangol↗

arXiv:2606.07150v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent-interoperability protocols such as A2A and MCP standardize what agents say to one another but assume address-based transport. Whether over HTTP(S) or a content-protecting binding such as MLS-based SLIM, these transports protect message content yet leave the communication graph exposed: which agent contacts which, when, and how often. In agent systems this graph is more consequential than a privacy framing suggests. Endpoints are capability-labeled, workflows are structured and chained, and interactions are coupled to real actions, so an observer recovers more than past relationships: it can infer the pending workflow and, at machine speed, act on that inference before the workflow completes. The threat is therefore one of workflow integrity, not privacy alone. We formalize a threat model for the communication graph and locate what makes its metadata distinctively consequential: not stronger fingerprinting, which we measure to be comparable to other machine traffic, but exposure across independent trust domains, coupled to autonomous action. We define transport- and bootstrap-layer privacy properties, evaluate candidate transports, and give an A2A case study where a metadata-protecting binding surfaces the protocol's implicit identity assumptions. On a generative model anchored to a real capture and over a live A2A binding, a label-blind classifier recovers a task's class from passive metadata well above chance, and from only its opening; a defense-aware adversary does not overturn this, and only the full set of properties drives recovery toward chance. The leverage of acting on the leak is distinct from recoverability: under a fixed budget an adversary realizes most of a clairvoyant attacker's advantage from a workflow's opening, governed by precision over the top-ranked workflows rather than overall accuracy, so a defense suppresses it even while recovery stays above chance.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpreting Neural Combinatorial Optimization via Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks

Authors:
Haocheng Duan↗Yuxin Guo↗Jieyi Bi↗Anqi Xie↗Sirui Li↗Yining Ma↗Cathy Wu↗

arXiv:2606.19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) achieves strong performance, yet its black-box nature remains a key roadblock to deployment and scientific diagnosis. Standard interpretability tools, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are ill-equipped for NCO, whose decisions are dynamic, state-dependent, and lack proper concept vocabulary definition. To close this gap, we introduce Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks (EPB), to our knowledge, the first framework for interpreting NCO policies by distilling black-box NCO models into human-readable program portfolios. EPB employs an LLM to autonomously evolve a bank of programs, where each program's per-step action distribution serves as the bottleneck. EPB works through an iterative framework: Block I fixes program bank capacity and introduces a hybrid textual-numerical gradient descent scheme that couples numerical gradients for student router updates and textual gradients for LLM-based program revision; Block II dynamically adapts bank capacity via fault-targeted expansion and redundancy pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate EPB's effectiveness and broad applicability, where the distilled program portfolios largely match original performance. EPB also reveals that NCO behavior shifts across optimization stages and can be approximated as a composition of classic heuristic variants. Our work advances interpretable NCO and establishes EPB as a promising tool for interpreting sequential decision-making models.

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