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

HAMNO: A Hierarchical Adaptive Multi-scale Neural Operator with Physics-Informed Learning for Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.11963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operators provide a powerful framework for learning solution mappings of partial differential equations directly in function space. However, many existing architectures still struggle to represent nonlinear time-dependent systems that involve multi-scale structures, long-range interactions, and stable long-time evolution. In this work, we introduce the Hierarchical Adaptive Multi-scale Neural Operator (HAMNO), a neural-operator architecture that combines local convolutional representations, global spectral operators, and hierarchical encoder-decoder processing. The central component of HAMNO is a data-dependent gating mechanism that adaptively balances local and global information at each spatial location, allowing the model to resolve fine-scale features while preserving long-range dependencies. We further develop a physics-informed extension, PI-HAMNO, based on a multi-objective loss strategy that combines data fitting with strong- and weak-form physics constraints. The strong-form term penalizes the domain-integrated squared PDE residual in physical coordinates, while the weak-form term is constructed by multiplying the governing residual by finite-element test functions and evaluating the resulting element integrals using centroid-based tetrahedral quadrature. The framework is evaluated on non-periodic Allen-Cahn (AC), Cahn-Hilliard (CH), and Swift-Hohenberg (SH) equations defined on cubic domains. Across long-horizon rollout, data-limited training, out-of-distribution initial-condition shifts, and random-seed variations, HAMNO improves predictive accuracy over standard neural-operator baselines, while PI-HAMNO further enhances stability, physical consistency, and data efficiency. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/MBamdad/HAMNO .

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Learning-Infused Formal Reasoning: From Contract Synthesis to Artifact Reuse and Formal Semantics

arXiv:2602.02881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper articulates a long-term research vision for formal methods at the intersection with artificial intelligence, outlining multiple conceptual and technical dimensions and reporting on our ongoing work toward realising this vision. It advances a forward-looking perspective on the next generation of formal methods based on the integration of automated contract synthesis, semantic artifact reuse, and refinement-based theory. We argue that future verification systems must builds towards individual correctness proofs toward a cumulative, knowledge-driven paradigm in which specifications, contracts, and proofs are continuously synthesised and transferred across systems. To support this shift, we outline a hybrid framework combining large language models with graph-based representations to enable scalable semantic matching and principled reuse of verification artifacts. Learning-based components provide semantic guidance across heterogeneous notations and abstraction levels, while symbolic matching ensures formal soundness. Grounded in compositional reasoning, this vision points toward verification ecosystems that evolve systematically, leveraging past verification efforts to accelerate future assurance.

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

GitOfThoughts: Version-Controlled Reasoning and Agent Memory You Can Replay, Diff, and Merge

Large language model (LLM) reasoning is ephemeral: chains of thought vanish with the context window, pruned search branches leave no record, and memory buffers cannot be diffed, merged, or audited. Every other complex software process (code, infrastructure, data, experiments) is version-controlled; reasoning is not. We introduce GitOfThoughts, which stores an agent's reasoning tree as a git repository: every scored thought is a commit, scores are notes, outcomes are tags, and retrieval is "git log" over the agent's own history. This makes reasoning replayable, auditable, and mergeable across agents at near-zero engineering cost. We then ask the harder question: does memory, in any substrate, actually improve accuracy? Across five substrates (none, markdown, vector, graph, git), two benchmarks, two model scales, and pre-registered replications, the answer for novel problems is no. No memory format reliably helps, and a promising early result collapsed under its own pre-registered replication. Memory pays only above what we call the copyability threshold: when the retrieved case is a near-duplicate of the current problem (similarity >~ 0.8), accuracy jumps sharply; below it, nothing. The gain is answer retrieval, not method transfer: a 4.5x larger model doubles the near-duplicate payoff yet still cannot extract a transferable method from a worked example. The only general lever we find is test-time sampling. The case for git-as-substrate is therefore auditability, provenance, and mergeability at accuracy parity. We document a retracted result and a refuted hypothesis to model the evaluation standard we hold ourselves to.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Daily briefing: Ancient ground squirrels ate like ‘zombies of the Pleistocene’

Authors:

Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise. Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

When Lower Privileges Suffice: Investigating Over-Privileged Tool Selection in LLM Agents

As LLM agents increasingly select tools autonomously, their choices among tools with different privileges become safety-relevant. However, prior tool-selection studies focus on safety-agnostic metadata preferences, leaving privilege-sensitive choices underexplored. To address this gap, we study over-privileged tool selection, in which an agent selects or escalates to a higher-privilege tool despite a sufficient lower-privilege alternative. We introduce ToolPrivBench to evaluate whether agents choose higher-privilege tools despite sufficient lower-privilege alternatives, measuring both initial selection and escalation after transient tool failures. Across eight domains and five recurring risk patterns, we find that over-privileged tool selection is common among mainstream LLM agents and is further amplified by transient failures. We further find that general safety alignment does not reliably transfer to least-privilege tool choice, while prompt-level controls provide only limited mitigation under transient failures. We therefore introduce a privilege-aware post-training defense that teaches agents to prefer sufficient lower-privilege tools and escalate only when necessary. Our mitigation experiments show that this defense substantially reduces unnecessary high-privilege tool use while preserving general capabilities.

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

Observable signatures of exceptional points from left-right eigenstate distinction

arXiv:2606.11333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Hermitian quantum systems exhibit qualitatively distinct physical behavior compared to Hermitian systems, a prime example being spectral singularities known as exceptional points. Their relevance in, e.g., quantum sensing, unidirectional transport, and robust lasing makes it important to be able to identify exceptional points through observable features of a many-body system. Here, using as an example a one-dimensional complex XY spin chain realizing both rotation-time RT- and parity-time PT-symmetric regimes, we develop a framework for detecting exceptional points based on the distinction between left and right eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian, which in a non-Hermitian system are no longer the adjoint of each other. We first show that a global measure constructed from the difference between the Hamiltonian and its adjoint locates exceptional points via distinct non-analytic behavior. At the level of observables, differences in local spin correlations evaluated on the right and left eigenstates provide a reliable static detection scheme. In contrast, static bipartite entanglement measures fail to capture this distinction, urging us to study the quantum dynamics of the model. Following a sudden quench, we demonstrate that the time-averaged right-left entanglement entropy difference directly encodes signatures of the exceptional point. In the RT-symmetric regime, it exhibits a pronounced peak at the exceptional point, whereas in the PT-symmetric regime it behaves as an order-parameter-like quantity, remaining finite in one phase and vanishing at the transition. Our results establish a direct link between the structure of non-Hermitian eigenstates and observable signatures of exceptional points, providing a practical route to identify them in existing quantum simulators.

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

Self-Evolving Visual Questioner

Vision-language models (VLMs) are typically trained as passive answerers, while their ability to actively ask diverse, non-trivial, visual-centric and grounded questions remains underexplored. Existing visual questioners' performance is bottlenecked by the availability of high-quality training data or the cost of curating them. We show that a VLM can continuously improve itself as a visual questioner without any external supervision. We propose a self-evolving framework that uses a VLM itself as both a proposer and a filter to produce harder, more informative, and visual-centric questions, while maintaining their exploration diversity to avoid training collapse. These questions are then used to train the VLM in both questioner and answerer modes. To evaluate the questioner, we introduce an agentic protocol that assesses questions along perception, reasoning, and diversity dimensions. Experiments across various backbone VLMs show that our method substantially enhances the quality and substantially expands the difficulty boundary of autonomous question generation. Under the same budget, our self-supervision is more effective than training on the static source data. Moreover, the self-evolving questioner remains a competitive or even better answerer.

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

Decoding the Multimodal Maze: A Systematic Review on the Adoption of Explainability in Multimodal Attention-based Models

arXiv:2508.04427v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal learning has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, particularly with the integration of attention-based models, leading to significant performance gains across a variety of tasks. Parallel to this progress, the demand for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has spurred a growing body of research aimed at interpreting the complex decision-making processes of these models. This systematic literature review analyzes research published between January 2020 and early 2024 that focuses on the explainability of multimodal models. Framed within the broader goals of XAI, we examine the literature across multiple dimensions, including model architecture, modalities involved, explanation algorithms and evaluation methodologies. Our analysis reveals that most studies are concentrated on vision-language and language-only models, with attention-based techniques being the most commonly employed for explanation. However, these methods often fall short in capturing the full spectrum of interactions between modalities, a challenge further compounded by the architectural heterogeneity across domains. Importantly, we find that evaluation methods for XAI in multimodal settings are largely non-systematic, lacking consistency, robustness, and consideration for modality-specific cognitive and contextual factors. To address these gaps, we not only synthesize findings from the surveyed works but also incorporate a complementary analysis that integrates recent and emerging advances driving multimodal explainability. Based on these insights, we provide a comprehensive set of recommendations aimed at promoting rigorous, transparent, and standardized evaluation and reporting practices in multimodal XAI research. Our goal is to support future research in more interpretable, accountable, and responsible multimodal AI systems, with explainability at their core.

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

Zero-order Parameter-free Optimization for LMO-based Methods: Novel Approach for Efficient Fine-tuning

arXiv:2606.14970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has become a central application of modern optimization, enabling pretrained models to adapt to diverse downstream tasks and domain-specific data. A major obstacle in large-scale fine-tuning is the memory overhead of backpropagation, which requires storing activations, gradients, and optimizer states. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization offers a memory-efficient alternative, but its performance is highly sensitive to the stepsize and smoothing parameter, often requiring costly task-specific tuning. Parameter-free (PF) optimization addresses this issue by adapting algorithmic parameters without prior knowledge of problem-dependent constants. Moreover, large-scale fine-tuning can benefit from geometry-aware updates that account for the heterogeneous structure of parameter blocks, which can be modeled through methods that exploit linear minimization oracle (LMO). In this work, we study PF adaptation for LMO-based ZO optimization and introduce $\texttt{AdaNAGED}$, a method that unifies gradient-free training, adaptive tuning, and non-Euclidean update geometry. We establish convergence guarantees and validate the method on large-scale LLM fine-tuning task with $\texttt{OPT}-1.3\mathrm{B}$ model.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

NSVQ: Mitigating Codebook Collapse by Stabilizing Encoder Drift in Vector Quantization

Vector quantization is central to modern generative modeling pipelines, but large-codebook VQ models often suffer from codebook collapse. We identify encoder drift as a key driver of this failure: as the encoder moves the latent distribution, sparsely updated code vectors can lag behind, lose assignments, and increase quantization error, creating a feedback loop through the straight-through estimator. We propose NSVQ, a non-stationary-aware VQ training strategy that combines a dense non-stationary embedding loss, codebook replacement, and stage-wise encoder freezing. NSVQ first helps the codebook track encoder drift during early training, then freezes the encoder to consolidate the codebook under a fixed latent geometry, and finally reintroduces adversarial refinement. Experiments on ImageNet-1k show that NSVQ improves reconstruction quality while maintaining full codebook utilization. On ImageNet-1k at 128$\times$128 with 65,536 codes, NSVQ reduces rFID from 2.39 to 2.10 compared with SimVQ, while both methods maintain 100\% utilization. Additional latent diffusion experiments show that NSVQ also improves downstream ImageNet generation FID.

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

Measuring Whether LLM Tutors Teach or Solve: A Diagnostic for Educational Impact

Large language models are increasingly proposed as educational tutors, yet stronger task-solving ability does not necessarily imply stronger learning support. Motivated by recent calls to measure the social impact of NLP systems in practice, we study whether public LLM tutoring benchmarks distinguish learning-supportive behavior from mere answer production. We propose a lightweight diagnostic based on the gap between solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented benchmark performance. Using public MathTutorBench leaderboard results, we show that these dimensions are only partially aligned: across eight publicly reported models, the correlation between solving and pedagogy composites is 0.421, and several models shift meaningfully in rank when evaluation moves from solving to pedagogy. We then analyze the public TutorBench sample and show that agency-relevant behaviors are explicitly encoded in benchmark rubrics, especially in active-learning settings that reward guiding questions, calibrated hints, and non-disclosive scaffolding. Together, these findings suggest that educational-impact evaluation should not treat task success as a sufficient proxy for learning support. We argue that public tutoring benchmarks can better support positive-impact evaluation by reporting solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented scores separately and by making disclosure-sensitive, student-agency-preserving criteria more explicit.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Closing the Reflection Gap: A Free Calibration Bonus for Agentic RL

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents that interact with external environments and observe feedback such as execution results, error messages, and tool outputs. A well-functioning agent should be able to leverage this feedback to accurately assess its own performance. Yet we find a persistent reflection gap: LLM agents tend to mis-assess their own outputs after observing concrete environment feedback – even for questions they correctly answered – and standard RL barely helps due to a credit-assignment mismatch. To close this gap, we propose RefGRPO, a simple yet effective fix that augments standard RL algorithms with two key ingredients: a free calibration bonus computed by contrasting the agent's own reflection with the actual outcome (requiring no additional reward model, LLM judge, or external annotation), and a dynamic schedule on its coefficient. Compared to standard RL baselines, our method simultaneously improves reflection calibration (e.g., reduces underconfidence rate $44.4\% \to 7.7\%$) and task accuracy (e.g., $75.1\% \to 76.5\%$) on text-to-SQL across five benchmarks. The resulting calibrated reflection turns the agent into its own verifier grounded in environment feedback, which further enables (i) better self-improvement that uses reflections as pseudo-rewards without outcome supervision, and (ii) more effective test-time selective prediction by committing only to rollouts flagged as correct.

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

CogGuard: Cognitive and Operational Profiling for Proactive Warning in Edge Intelligent Services

arXiv:2606.15199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proactive warning is an important capability for edge intelligent services, where the system predicts whether a subject will successfully complete an incoming task under strict latency and privacy constraints. Such prediction depends on both long-term static attributes and short-term dynamic states derived from historical interaction logs. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong long-context reasoning for constructing structured profiles from these logs, but existing solutions face two challenges for edge deployment: (1) profiling methods are typically domain-specific and lack a reusable abstraction across service scenarios, and (2) fine-tuning alignment models on heterogeneous edge clusters incurs high synchronization overhead due to the variance in input sequence lengths. To address these challenges, we propose CogGuard, a proactive-warning framework for edge intelligent services. CogGuard decouples offline LLM-based profile construction from online Small Language Model (SLM)-based score prediction through a shared static-dynamic profile-to-score pipeline, and instantiates it in two representative scenarios: educational performance warning and operational task outcome warning. For efficient profile construction, we design scenario-specific profiling methods with prefix-aligned KV-cache reuse to reduce repeated encoding overhead. For edge-side model alignment, we propose a length-aware distributed fine-tuning strategy with contrastive regularization to mitigate workload imbalance on heterogeneous clusters. Experiments on education and operation datasets show that CogGuard reduces profile construction time by up to 48% and distributed fine-tuning time by 19%, while achieving MAEs of 13.4 and 5.9, respectively, on 100-point-scale warning tasks. In the largest educational setting, CogGuard reduces prediction error by 15.4% compared with the strongest baseline.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Structural Preservation and the Logical Expressiveness of Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.17882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bridges between graph neural networks (GNNs) and logical formalisms have been established by fixing architectural choices, such as the types of aggregation, combination, and activation functions. These choices define restricted classes of GNNs for which tight correspondences with logical formalisms can be obtained, by showing that logical formulae can be translated into equivalent GNNs and, conversely, that GNNs can be translated into equivalent formulae. In this paper we take a semantic perspective by establishing the logical expressiveness of classes of GNN classifiers that are preserved under structural properties: embeddings (extensions), injective homomorphisms, and homomorphisms. We show that, for each such property, there exists a fragment of graded modal logic characterising the class of GNNs. In particular, preservation under embeddings, injective homomorphisms, and homomorphisms corresponds to existential graded modal logic, its existential-positive fragment, and existential-positive modal logic, respectively. These results characterise the expressiveness of broad classes of GNNs independently of specific architectural choices, but we also show that each of these classes admits a GNN architecture of the same expressiveness. Technically, our approach uses a new well-quasi-order result for trees of bounded height, yielding finite representations of unravelling-invariant classes.

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

Multimodal Ordinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Severity Using Structural MRI and Clinical Data

arXiv:2606.11794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) require accurate and scalable tools for assessing disease severity, yet current clinical staging remains time-intensive and prone to variability. We propose an attention-enhanced multimodal machine learning framework with ordinal regression for automated and interpretable AD severity staging. The framework integrates T1-weighted MRI with demographic and genetic variables and compares unimodal and multimodal architectures using ordinal and non-ordinal prediction heads. Models were trained and validated using cohort-stratified splits derived from the ADNI, AIBL, and NIFD datasets. A strictly held-out test set was constructed using subjects excluded from all training, validation, preprocessing, and hyperparameter tuning procedures, with subject-level splitting employed throughout to prevent data leakage. Among unimodal approaches, the T1-weighted MRI model achieved slightly higher adjacent-stage accuracy (0.963) and agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.444) than the tabular model (QWK 0.433). Integrating imaging, demographic, and genetic information improved overall performance. The multimodal non-ordinal baseline achieved the lowest prediction error (MAE 0.340), whereas the ordinal multimodal model achieved the highest adjacent-stage accuracy (0.970) and strongest agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.549). These findings indicate that ordinal formulations better capture the ordered structure of the CDR scale and yield predictions more consistent with clinical staging. Explainability analyses using Grad CAM++ and SHAP demonstrated anatomically and clinically plausible model behavior, supporting transparent decision-making. Overall, attention-based multimodal learning with ordinal regression represents a robust, interpretable, and scalable approach for automated AD severity staging and AI-assisted clinical decision support.

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

PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions

Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.

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

Data augmented bootstrap: Unifying confidence interval construction by approximate invariance

arXiv:2606.09049v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose the data augmented bootstrap (DAB), a framework for constructing confidence intervals from approximately invariant transformations of the data. As special cases, DAB recovers popular methods that rely on exact group symmetries, such as conformal prediction, wild bootstrap for Maximum Mean Discrepancy U-statistics and the recently proposed SymmPI. Meanwhile, DAB also recovers the classical bootstrap method, which exploits the dataset's approximate invariance under uniform sampling of data indices as the dataset size grows. For all DAB methods, we establish theoretical coverage results that interpolate between finite-sample and asymptotic guarantees according to the strength of the invariance, and without assuming a group structure. The approximate invariance is measured in the Kolmogorov distance and, for statistics that satisfy Gaussian universality, reduces to conditional mean and variance matching. This allows us to incorporate data augmentation (DA), a widely used machine learning heuristic based on approximate invariances, into known statistical methods. We empirically test the performance of incorporating DA into bootstrap, wild bootstrap and conformal prediction for simulated settings as well as for image, language and scientific data.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Scientists have a bad case of AI FOMO, <i>Nature</i> poll reveals

Authors:

Almost half of the scientists who responded said that they feel broadly negative towards artificial intelligence, but they think that some tools are better than others. Almost half of the scientists who responded said that they feel broadly negative towards artificial intelligence, but they think that some tools are better than others.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Which Sections of a Research Paper Best Reveal Its Research Methods? Evidence from Library and Information Science

Research methods are essential carriers of knowledge contribution in academic papers. Automatic multi-label classification of research methods can support knowledge services such as method retrieval, review generation, and research intelligence analysis. While existing studies primarily rely on titles and abstracts, abstracts often provide only limited methodological information, whereas utilizing full-text content faces challenges related to excessive length and information redundancy. Therefore, this paper proposes a segment combination strategy by partitioning the full-text content according to its physical postion. Using an annotated corpus of 1,954 full-text articles from three representative journals in Library and Information Science (JASIST, LISR, and JDoc), we evaluate the classification performance of various segments and their combinations across multiple models. Experimental results indicate that methodological information is distributed unevenly within the full-text content, with the middle-to-late and final segments exhibiting greater discriminative power. Furthermore, integrating bibliographic metadata with cross-segment combination strategies effectively enhances classification performance.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Uncertainty Quality of VGGT: An Analysis on the DTU Benchmark Dataset

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) has already attracted a great deal of attention in a short period of time, not least due to the Best Paper Award at CVPR-2025. Similar to DUSt3R and MASt3R, VGGT aims to bring about a paradigm shift by replacing established methods like bundle adjustment and feature matching with a simple, unified, feed-forward neural network that predicts camera poses, depth maps, and dense 3D structure directly from multiple images of a scene in a few seconds. A key aspect is its ability to process an arbitrary number of views consistently in a single forward pass without any post-processing or iterative optimization. For photogrammetry, this opens new possibilities for real-time, scalable, and accessible 3D reconstruction. In this context, not only high reconstruction accuracy but also high-quality uncertainty estimates are crucial, as they foster trust and enable robust quality assurance. This paper therefore investigates the quality of VGGT's uncertainty predictions. The analysis identifies an effective confidence threshold for filtering VGGT's raw output and demonstrates that enhancing uncertainty quality holds strong potential for improving the accuracy of its 3D reconstructions.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CoVR-R:Reason-Aware Composed Video Retrieval

Composed Video Retrieval (CoVR) aims to find a target video given a reference video and a textual modification. Prior work assumes the modification text fully specifies the visual changes, overlooking after-effects and implicit consequences (e.g., motion, state transitions, viewpoint or duration cues) that emerge from the edit. We argue that successful CoVR requires reasoning about these after-effects. We introduce a reasoning-first, zero-shot approach that leverages large multimodal models to (i) infer causal and temporal consequences implied by the edit, and (ii) align the resulting reasoned queries to candidate videos without task-specific finetuning. To evaluate reasoning in CoVR, we also propose CoVR-Reason, a benchmark that pairs each (reference, edit, target) triplet with structured internal reasoning traces and challenging distractors that require predicting after-effects rather than keyword matching. Experiments show that our zero-shot method outperforms strong retrieval baselines on recall at K and particularly excels on implicit-effect subsets. Our automatic and human analysis confirm higher step consistency and effect factuality in our retrieved results. Our findings show that incorporating reasoning into general-purpose multimodal models enables effective CoVR by explicitly accounting for causal and temporal after-effects. This reduces dependence on task-specific supervision, improves generalization to challenging implicit-effect cases, and enhances interpretability of retrieval outcomes. These results point toward a scalable and principled framework for explainable video search. The model, code, and benchmark are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/CoVR-R.

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

Fusing Transferred Priors and Physics-based Decomposition for Underwater Image Enhancement

The underwater images are captured within diverse water-medium conditions, leading to complex degradation, including color bias, low contrast, and blur effect. Recently, learning-based methods have demonstrated their potential for underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, most of the previous work focus on the training strategy or network design to make the enhanced result aligned well with the labels in datasets, ignoring that the labels are selected from the enhanced results of previous UIE methods and these pseudo-labels are noisy. Consequently, the performance of their models is not satisfactory to a certain extent. However, collecting the true labels of the underwater images is challenging. In this work, we propose a transfer learning-based UIE that does not require underwater images to have paired noisy or true labels for learning. Instead, the UIE task is first divided into global color correction, haze removal, and background noise suppression following the underwater physics. Then multiple types of prior from other vision tasks are leveraged as cross-domain supervision in each step. In this way, a novel UIE is available via transfer learning, and the physics-aligned UIE decomposition provides theoretical soundness. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposal based on physics and priors fusion achieves SOTA performance in the UIE task and effectively boosts downstream vision tasks, significantly outperforming benchmark methods. Project repo: https://github.com/Haru2022/P2-UIE.

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

Ranking Abuse via Strategic Pairwise Data Perturbations

arXiv:2604.17805v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise ranking systems based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), such as the Bradley-Terry model, are widely used to aggregate preferences from pairwise comparisons. However, their robustness under strategic data manipulation remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we study the vulnerability of MLE-based ranking systems to adversarial perturbations. We formulate the manipulation task as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem and propose an Adaptive Subset Selection Attack (ASSA) to efficiently identify high-impact perturbations. Experimental results on both synthetic data and real-world election datasets show that MLE-based rankings exhibit a sharp phase-transition behavior: beyond a small perturbation budget, a limited number of strategic voters can significantly alter the global ranking. In particular, our method consistently outperforms random and greedy baselines under constrained budgets. These findings reveal a fundamental sensitivity of MLE-based ranking mechanisms to structured perturbations and highlight the need for more robust aggregation methods in collective decision-making systems.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Traditional machine learning vs. deep learning from dynamic graph representations of proteins' 3D folds in the task of protein structure classification

arXiv:2605.29228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protein structure classification (PSC) uses supervised learning to predict a protein's CATH/SCOP(e) class from the protein's sequence or 3D structural feature(s). We already modeled 3D structures as (static) protein structure networks (PSNs), demonstrating the competitiveness of PSN-based features to sequence or direct (i.e. non-network) 3D structural features in the PSC task. More recently, we demonstrated the power of features extracted from dynamic PSNs over features extracted from static PSNs (and thus by transitivity over sequence and direct 3D structural features) in the same task. That dynamic PSN approach used traditional machine learning (ML), combining manual (pre-engineered) features with an off-the-shelf classifier. Here, we evaluate whether automatic deep learning (DL) from the dynamic PSNs yields improvements. Our evaluation on 72 datasets spanning ~44,000 CATH- or SCOPe-labeled dynamic PSNs reveals that in terms of PSC accuracy, traditional ML and DL are (close to) tied for a large majority of the datasets, while DL is on average 10+ times slower. We are the first to evaluate traditional ML vs. DL in the dynamic PSN-based PSC task.