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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-Gaussian Phase Transition and Cascade of Instabilities in the Dissipative Quantum Rabi Model

arXiv:2507.07092v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The open quantum Rabi model describes a two-level system coupled to a harmonic oscillator. A Gaussian phase transition for the nonequilibrium steady states has been predicted when the bosonic mode is soft and subject to damping. We show that oscillator dephasing is a relevant perturbation, which leads to a non-Gaussian phase transition and an intriguing cascade of instabilities for $k$-th order bosonic operators, as well as a jump in the steady-state qubit polarization. For the soft-mode limit, the equations of motion form a closed hierarchy and spectral properties can be efficiently studied. To this purpose, we establish a fruitful connection to non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. The results for the phase diagram, stability boundaries, and relevant observables are based on mean-field analysis, exact diagonalization, perturbation theory, and Keldysh field theory.

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

Self-Questioning Vision-Language Models: Reinforcement Learning for Compositional Visual Reasoning

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are AI systems that process both images and text, yet they often struggle with compositional visual reasoning questions that require chaining multiple steps together, such as identifying objects, counting them, and comparing the results. Existing approaches improve this reasoning by training models on human-written step-by-step explanations, but creating these annotations is expensive and difficult to scale. We propose a self-questioning framework that trains a VLM to break visual questions into smaller sub-questions and answer each one before producing a final response, using a reinforcement learning algorithm called Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). The model is never shown examples of how to decompose questions, it discovers this behavior on its own, guided by a reward signal that scores whether the output contains sub-questions and whether the final answer is correct. We apply this framework to a 3-billion-parameter model, training on both synthetic scenes of geometric shapes (CLEVR) and real-world photographs (A-OKVQA). On A-OKVQA, both self-questioning and standard reinforcement learning substantially improve accuracy over the untrained model (52.2% and 51.6% vs. 46.8%). We introduce the first self-questioning VLM by rewarding not only the final answer like standard RL but additionally for generating intermediate sub-questions, enabling it to discover compositional decomposition strategies. These results suggest that teaching AI systems to ask themselves intermediate questions is a promising strategy for complex visual reasoning, particularly when the difficulty of a question warrants explicit step-by-step decomposition.

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

Temporal Difference Learning for Diffusion Models

Diffusion models are typically trained with objectives that focus on local denoising targets at individual time steps (or adjacent pairs), which do not enforce consistency between predictions along the denoising trajectory. This lack of cross-time consistency can degrade performance, especially for few-step samplers. We introduce a temporal difference (TD) objective that penalizes inconsistency of the model's multi-step progress along the denoising path. By reformulating the diffusion process as a Markov reward process and casting denoising as a policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning, we derive a unified TD approach that applies to both discrete- and continuous-time diffusion formulations. We further propose a principled sample-based reweighting method that stabilizes training. Empirically, we show that using our TD training can significantly improve sample quality measured by FID, with stronger advantages when the number of sampling steps is small, highlighting its practical utility under low-computation-budget scenarios. We provide ablation studies to justify our design choices, including pairwise loss reweighting, regularization weight, and one-step stride. Overall, our TD approach can be a general drop-in that enforces cross-time consistency and improves generation quality across different diffusion generative models.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Essential Subspace Merging for Multi-Task Learning

arXiv:2606.19164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model. Its core challenge is inter-task interference among task-specific parameter updates. In this paper, we analyze the output shifts induced by task updates and observe that their energy is concentrated in a small number of principal directions. We call the subspace spanned by these directions the essential subspace. In contrast, most remaining directions carry little task-relevant energy, but their accumulation across multiple task updates can cause severe interference during merging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Essential Subspace Decomposition (ESD), which decomposes each task update according to the principal components of its activation shift. Based on ESD, we introduce Essential Subspace Merging (ESM), a training-free static merging method that orthogonalizes and fuses essential components into one compact multi-task model. We further extend ESM to ESM++, a training-free dynamic merging method that decomposes task-specific residuals into low-rank experts and selects the most relevant expert through prototype-based routing during forward inference. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that ESM and ESM++ effectively preserves task knowledge while reducing inter-task interference.

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

PrefSQA: Pairwise Preference Prediction for Speech Quality Assessment and the Critical Role of High Quality Datasets

arXiv:2606.19597v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mean opinion scores (MOS) are widely used for speech quality assessment, yet scalar labels are sensitive to rater variability and listening test differences. This introduces labeling noise, which limits the reliability of MOS prediction. Preference prediction reduces this variability as listeners compare signals directly, producing cleaner labels. We study MOS-free preference prediction and propose PrefSQA, which incorporates uncertainty-aware logits, an impairment attention head, and a module based on non-matching-reference comparisons. We use and refine five datasets, including MOS-derived and low-noise simulated sets with matching and non-matching content, experiment with human preference sets, and test on unseen data. Experiments show small improvements on MOS-derived data, while other sets reveal clear improvement over the baselines, highlighting the value of high-quality preference data and demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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

A Biased Nonnegative Block Term Tensor Decomposition Model for Dynamic QoS Prediction

arXiv:2605.04813v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the rapid development of cloud computing and Web services, Quality of Service (QoS) has become a key criterion for service selection and recommendation. Tensor latent feature analysis provides an effective way to model multidimensional QoS data, and most existing QoS prediction methods are mainly based on Canonical Polyadic (CP) decomposition or Tucker decomposition. However, constrained by their inherent structural properties, these methods cannot accurately capture the complex and dynamic dependencies in user-service interactions, which limits their prediction performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a dynamic QoS prediction framework based on the Biased Nonnegative Block Term Tensor Decomposition Model, termed BNBT. Specifically, the proposed framework is developed from three aspects: (1) block term tensor decomposition is employed to enhance the representation capability of latent feature learning; (2) linear bias terms are incorporated to further improve prediction accuracy; and (3) a tensor-oriented single-element-dependent nonnegative multiplicative update algorithm, called SLF-NMUT, is designed for efficient parameter estimation. Extensive experiments on real-world QoS datasets demonstrate that the proposed BNBT framework consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art QoS prediction methods in terms of prediction accuracy.

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

Model-Based and Data-Driven Hierarchical Control and Topology Co-Design for Robust Networked Systems

arXiv:2606.11596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of networked systems comprising an interconnected set of linear subsystems, disturbance inputs, and performance outputs. Using dissipativity theory, we first propose a model-based hierarchical control design strategy to ensure the closed-loop networked system is dissipative from its disturbance inputs to performance outputs. This involves designing local controllers for each subsystem to enforce local dissipativity guarantees, which are then exploited to co-design distributed global controllers and the interconnection topology to enforce global dissipativity guarantees while optimizing interconnection topology costs. The overall design process requires only solving a sequence of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems, thereby retaining compositionality and decentralizability while avoiding non-convex, iterative design processes that are inefficient and centralized. This model-based hierarchical control design strategy assumes the knowledge of the subsystem dynamics, which may not hold in many real-world networked systems. Motivated by this, we also propose a data-driven hierarchical control design strategy that assumes only the availability of rich input-state-output trajectory data from the subsystems. The proposed data-driven design process assumes that the unknown disturbances affecting the subsystem dynamics are bounded by a quadratic matrix inequality (relaxing conventional bounds) and accounts for this by using the matrix S-lemma. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model-based and data-driven hierarchical control designs is illustrated for a networked system representing a DC microgrid, with the aim of enforcing robust (dissipative) voltage regulation and current sharing.

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

Brain-IT-VQA: From Brain Signals to Answers

Decoding visual content from fMRI signals recorded while a person views images, and specifically answering questions about the seen images, is a long-standing challenge. While significant progress has been made in recent years in visual question answering (VQA) from fMRI, performance remains limited. Moreover, although recent models can make increasingly accurate predictions, they have rarely been used as tools for understanding the structure of visual representations in the brain. We present Brain-IT-VQA, a framework for visual question answering from fMRI. Building on the Brain Interaction Transformer (Brain-IT), our method decodes language tokens from brain activity and integrates them with a language model to answer visual questions. Our model substantially outperforms previous fMRI-based captioning and VQA approaches. We further introduce NSD-VQA, a new dataset and benchmark for visual question answering from fMRI. Unlike existing image-fMRI VQA datasets, which typically provide only a few broad and weakly controlled questions per image, NSD-VQA provides on average 20 question-answer pairs per image across 20 controlled question categories that disentangle multiple levels of visual understanding. This enables more reliable and interpretable evaluation despite limited fMRI test data. Together, Brain-IT-VQA and NSD-VQA provide both a strong predictive framework and a tool for studying brain representations. Using this benchmark, we quantify which forms of visual and semantic information can be reliably decoded from fMRI responses to natural images. We further analyze the contributions of different brain regions across question types.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Emergency hub placement with a neutral-atom quantum computer

arXiv:2606.19589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of emergency operation center placement in disaster response, where a minimal number of hubs must be selected to ensure timely coverage of all affected locations. This task can be formulated as a minimum dominating set problem on a graph encoding reachability within a target response time. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical approximation framework that leverages neutral-atom quantum computers as independent set samplers. Candidate dominating sets are constructed from both small maximal independent sets and complements of large independent sets, and are subsequently refined via a lightweight classical procedure. We benchmark the approach on synthetic instances and realistic case studies, and implement it on the Fresnel quantum processor by Pasqal, solving instances of up to 100 nodes. Our results show that quantum-generated samples, despite hardware noise, enable near-optimal solutions of the placement problem. Overall, our results demonstrate that neutral-atom devices operating in analog mode can already be used to tackle graph optimization problems for real-world applications.

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

Multi-Class Brain Tumor Classification Using Advanced Deep Learning Models: A Comparative Study

Despite recent advancements in deep learning, accurately classifying brain tumors from MRI images continues to pose challenges. In this research, we present a comprehensive evaluation of five different convolutional neural networks (CNN) architectures, including a customized baseline model and four pre-trained models - for use in classifying multi-class brain tumors using a clinically-sourced dataset of approximately 10,000 MRI images. We have utilized five different architectures; VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, and EfficientNetB0, which were all tested and trained within an identical experimental framework. Performance was measured by both overall accuracy and tumor-wise recall as a means to measure the clinically-relevant performance of each architecture. We found that EfficientNetB0 had the best overall classification accuracy at 95%, when compared to the other architectures tested; specifically VGG16 (94.37%), VGG19 (92.29%), DenseNet121 (90.91%) and the customized CNN (78.00%). An especially important finding of our research was the considerable improvement in detecting meningiomas; specifically, while simple CNNs could detect meningiomas with a recall rate of approximately 20%, EfficientNetB0 was able to detect meningiomas with a recall rate of 89%. Meningiomas are often difficult to detect because they can appear very subtly on MRI images. Additionally, an interesting finding was that the deeper VGG19 performed worse than the shallower VGG16. This indicates that in many cases the architectural efficiency of a CNN model may be more important than its depth when working with medical images. Overall, EfficientNetB0 appears to provide the optimal trade-off between classification accuracy, number of parameters used in the model and clinically meaningful performance.

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

Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Fine-Grained Image Tasks: From Evaluation to Diagnosis

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities. While numerous benchmarks have evaluated LVLMs from holistic or task-specific perspectives, their capabilities on fine-grained image tasks-fundamental to computer vision-remain insufficiently understood. To address this gap, we introduce FG-BMK, a comprehensive fine-grained evaluation benchmark containing 1.01 million questions and 0.28 million images, covering diverse scenarios from common object-centric domains to specialized domains. FG-BMK jointly evaluates dialogue-level fine-grained semantic recognition and feature-level visual discriminability through human-oriented and machine-oriented paradigms, enabling diagnostic analysis of whether LVLM failures arise from insufficient visual representations, weak visual-to-semantic grounding, or limited fine-grained knowledge. Through extensive experiments on a diverse set of representative LVLMs/VLMs, we find that current LVLMs remain inadequate fine-grained recognizers, with failures arising from intertwined bottlenecks in visual representations, semantic grounding, modality alignment, and category-level knowledge. We further analyze training design factors for improving fine-grained capabilities and examine how visual and linguistic perturbations affect LVLM predictions. These findings provide diagnostic insights into the limitations of current LVLMs and offer guidance for future data construction and model design in developing more reliable LVLMs for fine-grained visual tasks. Our code is open-source and available at https://fg-bmk.github.io/.

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

PersonaDrive: Human-Style Retrieval-Augmented VLA Agents for Closed-Loop Driving Simulation

Closed-loop driving simulators typically populate their environments with non-ego traffic agents that behave largely the same way, produced either by rule-based traffic managers or by learned models trained toward a single behavioral mode. Recent work introduces style variation through post-hoc labels on observational data or LLM-inferred reward weights, but these signals act as proxies for what a style should reward rather than demonstrations of humans explicitly asked to drive in that style. We introduce PersonaDrive, a pipeline that conditions a vision-language-action (VLA) driving agent on retrieved demonstrations from a style-instructed human driving dataset, in which participants drive CARLA leaderboard routes under aggressive, neutral, and conservative instructions on a driver-in-the-loop rig. The pipeline has three stages: (i) offline triplet mining over per-style human driving data using a combined image-text similarity score; (ii) training a lightweight retrieval head that fuses frozen visual features with a small control encoder over per-style databases; and (iii) fine-tuning a single VLA backbone to treat retrieved context points as in-context behavioral demonstrations during waypoint prediction. At inference, the same backbone is conditioned on any style by swapping which per-style database the retrieval head queries, so selecting a style requires no per-style retraining while enabling human-style, style-diverse non-ego agents for closed-loop simulation. On Bench2Drive, PersonaDrive (no style) improves the driving score by 4.6% over SimLingo and 2.5% over HiP-AD, and under style conditioning attains the highest driving score in every style within a roughly 2% band (its weakest style surpassing the strongest baseline, DMW, by 5.4%), while average speed and acceleration rise by 18% and 25% from the conservative to the aggressive instruction.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Trivariate Hypergeometric Series Formulas for Pure Partition Functions of Multiple $3$-SLE$_\kappa$

作者:

arXiv:2606.14038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pure partition functions of multiple SLE are characterized by null-state partial differential equations, Möbius covariance, and boundary asymptotics. After quotienting by Möbius covariance, the case of three curves is the first genuinely multivariable one: the moduli space has three independent variables, naturally represented by the three unoriented cross-ratios of the three pairs of links. We solve this Möbius-normalized three-variable problem for the two basic link-pattern types of multiple \(3\)-SLE\(_\kappa\), namely the rainbow and neighbor patterns. Writing \(\beta=4/\kappa\), we construct explicit trivariate hypergeometric-series normal forms and identify them with the corresponding pure partition functions for all \(\beta>1/2\) in the rainbow case and all \(\beta\ge2/3\) in the neighbor case. Equivalently, these ranges are \(\kappa\in(0,8)\) and \(\kappa\in(0,6]\), respectively. The proof is analytic. The null-state PDEs and Möbius covariance yield recursion relations for the trivariate coefficient arrays. In the rainbow case, coefficient estimates give convergence and boundary regularity on the closed cube. In the neighbor case, Pfaff systems continue the local power series to a neighborhood of \([0,1)^3\), while side-face equations, regular normal estimates, and corner propagation give continuity on \([0,1]^3\) for \(\beta\ge2/3\). The endpoint \(\beta=2/3\), corresponding to \(\kappa=6\), requires a logarithmic normal term. The two-dimensional boundary degenerations are classical Appell \(F_1\) and Horn \(G_2\) functions. The probabilistic identification uses SLE martingale arguments and Itô calculus, together with positivity and boundary regularity. We also discuss boundary degenerations, including heuristic connections with boundary Green's functions.

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

Learning to Share: Selective Memory for Efficient Parallel Agentic Systems

arXiv:2602.05965v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic systems solve complex tasks by coordinating multiple agents that iteratively reason, invoke tools, and exchange intermediate results. To improve robustness and solution quality, recent approaches deploy multiple agent teams running in parallel to explore diverse reasoning trajectories. However, parallel execution comes at a significant computational cost: when different teams independently reason about similar sub-problems or execute analogous steps, they repeatedly perform substantial overlapping computation. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose Learning to Share (LTS), a learned shared-memory mechanism for parallel agentic frameworks that enables selective cross-team information reuse while controlling context growth. LTS introduces a global memory bank accessible to all teams and a lightweight controller that decides whether intermediate agent steps should be added to memory or not. The controller is trained using stepwise reinforcement learning with usage-aware credit assignment, allowing it to identify information that is globally useful across parallel executions. Experiments on the AssistantBench and GAIA benchmarks show that LTS significantly reduces overall runtime while matching or improving task performance compared to memory-free parallel baselines, demonstrating that learned memory admission is an effective strategy for improving the efficiency of parallel agentic systems. Project page: https://joefioresi718.github.io/LTS_webpage/

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Symmetric Cooperative Motion in Higher Dimensions

arXiv:2606.13459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a distributional convergence result for a multidimensional version of symmetric cooperative motion which was introduced and studied in one dimension in [HRW, SCM1]. Our approach relies on framing the associated recursive distributional equation as a discretization of the porous medium equation. A major challenge is to analyze the behaviour of finite difference schemes which approximate weak solutions of the porous medium equation with unbounded initial data. In overcoming this difficulty, we perform a detailed analysis of the probability mass function of symmetric cooperative motion, in which we introduce several new comparison arguments for the discrete process. Consequently, along the way, we establish a novel multidimensional convergence result for a finite difference scheme approximating the ZKB/Barenblatt solution of the porous medium equation, which is of independent interest.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Filum Terminale Diameter on Routine Pediatric MRI: A Large-Cohort Clinical Reference in 3,406 Children and the Age-Dependent Meaning of the 2-mm Thickened-Filum Threshold

Background. A filum diameter >2 mm is the conventional MRI threshold for a thickened filum, but it derives from small, mostly adult series showing no age dependence; whether one cutoff suits all of childhood is untested. Objective. To build an age-specific filum-diameter reference on routine pediatric MRI and test, adjusting for image resolution, whether the 2-mm threshold is age-stationary. Materials and methods. In this retrospective study an nnU-Net tracer measured the maximal filum diameter on consecutive lumbosacral MRI; versus manual tracing it showed negligible bias but moderate single-measure agreement. After excluding report-confirmed fatty filum, lipoma, or tethered cord, the proportion >2 mm was analysed within one acquisition protocol and by logistic regression adjusting for voxel size and slice thickness. Results. Of 7,245 examinations, 3,869 (53%) were traceable; untraced ones were younger (median 0.75 vs 2.0 years). The presumed-normal cohort had median diameter 1.48 mm. At matched resolution, 2 mm marked the 94th percentile in infants (5.6% exceeded it) but the 83rd by 3-6 years (17.4%); the age effect persisted after adjusting for voxel size and slice thickness (3-6 years vs infants, adjusted OR 4.7; P < .001). Conclusion. Filum diameter clusters near 1.5 mm, and the fixed 2-mm cutoff flags ~5% of infants but ~17% of preschoolers. Caliber should be judged against an age-specific clinical reference, not one fixed cutoff; a thick filum is not itself a diagnosis of tethered cord.

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

Boosting Knowledge Graph Foundation Models via Enhanced Negative Sampling

arXiv:2605.27023v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge graphs (KGs) have become the core backbone of numerous downstream tasks such as question answering and recommender systems. However, despite all this, KGs are often very incomplete. To perform zero-shot knowledge graph completion in unseen KGs, which have different relational vocabularies from those used for pre-training, KG foundation models (KGFMs) receive a wide range of attention. Existing KGFMs often perform training using random negative triples, which are constructed by replacing the head or tail entity of a positive triple with a random entity. However, these negative triples are often constructed with limited quality, providing weak supervision for KGFM training. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective adaptive negative sampling approach, KMAS, to enhance existing KGFMs. KMAS constructs hard negative triples through the updated relation embeddings generated from the existing KGFM's relation encoder. To further adaptively align with the evolving capability of the KGFM during the training process, KMAS adjusts the ratio of hard negative triples dynamically throughout the whole training process: after a warmup phrase, it increases the ratio linearly and then decreases linearly. Extensive experiments are conducted over 44 data sets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed negative sampling method can enhance many SOTA KGFMs without requiring excessive additional time or memory consumption.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Towards Effective Waste Segmentation for Automated Waste Recycling in Cluttered Background

Rapid expansion of urban areas and population growth is causing an immense increase in waste production, which demands the need for efficient and automated waste management. In this scenario, automated waste recycling (AWR) using deep learning methods can assist humans in optimal waste management. Recent deep learning approaches for AWR provide promising waste segmentation performance, however, these methods rely on large backbone networks that are inefficient for AWR systems and suffer from performance deterioration in cluttered scenes. To this end, an optimal waste segmentation network is introduced which effectively utilizes the spatial domain to capture localized structural dependencies and the spectral domain to efficiently extract global contextual relationships. This cascaded design allows the network to progressively leverage both local and global representations across complementary domains to highlight the semantic information necessary for effective segmentation of various waste objects. Furthermore, auxiliary feature enhancement module (AFEM) is introduced to enhance the target objects' boundaries and blob amplification for better segmentation in cluttered scenarios. Extensive experimentation on ZeroWaste-aug, ZeroWaste-f and SpectralWaste datasets reveals the merits of the proposed method.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Scalable Batch Bayesian Optimization Via Subspace Acquisition Functions

arXiv:2411.16206v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Extending Bayesian optimization to batch evaluation can enable the designer to make the most use of parallel computing technology. However, most of current batch approaches do not scale well with the batch size. That is, their optimization efficiencies often deteriorate as the batch size increases. To address this issue, we propose a simple and efficient approach to extend Bayesian optimization to large-scale batch evaluation in this work. Different from existing batch approaches, the idea of the new approach is to draw a batch of axis-aligned subspaces of the original problem and select one point from each subspace using existing acquisition functions. Numerical experiments show that our proposed approach speedups the convergence significantly when compared with the sequential Bayesian optimization algorithm, and performs very competitively when compared with ten batch Bayesian optimization algorithms. The implementation of our proposed approach is available at https://github.com/zhandawei/SubSpace_Acquisition_Functions.

22.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-01

The NIH 2025 Public Access Policy: Immediate access, unequal costs

by Caitlin R. Ryus, Caroline Raymond King, Edward R. Melnick The NIH 2025 Public Access Policy eliminates embargo periods for federally funded research, expanding who can read science. Yet without addressing article processing charges and market concentration, the policy risks creating new barriers to who can afford to perform and publish their science. In this Perspective, Caitlin Ryus and colleagues discuss the NIH 2025 Public Access Policy, highlighting that while expanding who can read science, the policy risks creating new barriers to who can afford to perform and publish their science.

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

Performance Gap Analysis between Latin and Arabic Scripts HTR

Recent studies have shown that handwritten text recognition (HTR) systems perform worse on Arabic-script datasets than on Latin-script data. However, the reasons for this gap are still not well understood due to the lack of controlled comparisons. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of Arabic and Latin scripts HTR using a unified CRNN model for line-level HTR across nine datasets (including KHATT (Arabic), Muharaf (Arabic), NUST-UHWR (Urdu), PHTD (Persian), IAM (English), READ-2016 (German), and others) and di ferent training sizes (K in {100, 500, 1000, 2000, ..., Kfull}). Our results show the performance gap remains: it is large in low-resource settings, decreases with more data, but remains even at full scale, with a consistent difference of 5-7 CER points. We show that annotation quality matters, as many datasets contain labeling errors. Cleaning reduces error rates and narrows the gap, but does not eliminate it. In addition, we find that a fixed number of training samples provides less effective coverage in Arabic due to higher visual variability, requiring more data to learn similar representations. We compare recognition across datasets in terms of the number of text lines and the number of characters, showing an equivalence trade-off. We compare character frequency distributions across scripts and show that Arabic is significantly more heavy-tailed than Latin. Our error analysis reveals that around 30 percent of substitution errors in Arabic datasets (e.g., KHATT) are caused by confusion between visually similar characters, compared to about 15 percent in Latin-script datasets such as IAM.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Arbitrary control over multimode wave propagation for machine learning

arXiv:2402.17750v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlled multimode wave propagation can enable more space-efficient photonic processors than architectures based on discrete components connected by single-mode waveguides. Instead of defining discrete elements, one can sculpt the continuous substrate of a photonic processor to perform computations through multimode interference in two dimensions. Here we designed and demonstrated a device with a refractive index that can be rapidly reprogrammed across space, allowing arbitrary control of wave propagation. The device, a two-dimensional programmable waveguide, uses parallel electro-optic modulation of the refractive index of a slab waveguide with about $10^4$ programmable spatial degrees of freedom. We implemented neural network inference on benchmark tasks with up to $49$-dimensional vectors in a single pass, without digital pre-processing or post-processing. Theoretical and numerical analyses further indicated that two-dimensional programmable waveguides may offer not only a constant-factor reduction in device area but also a scaling benefit, with the area required growing as $N^{1.5}$ rather than $N^2$.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Zero-Shot Captioning for Cultural Heritage: Automated Image Analysis of Traditional Indonesian Clothing

This paper presents Custom ZeroCLIP, a retrieval-augmented vision-language framework for zero-shot captioning of Indonesian traditional garments. The dataset contains 3,800 expert-annotated images from all 38 Indonesian provinces. Using a province-level inductive zero-shot protocol, the model is trained on 24 seen provinces, validated on 6 seen provinces, and evaluated on 8 unseen provinces. The framework combines a frozen CLIP ViT-B/32 image encoder, a CLIP text encoder, a BERT text encoder, and an LSTM caption decoder. During inference, unseen-province labels and captions are unavailable, and retrieval uses only captions from training provinces. No unseen-province image, label, or caption is used during training, validation, or retrieval-bank construction. Custom ZeroCLIP achieves a CLIPScore of 0.8536, BLEU-4 of 0.3342, and METEOR of 0.4859, outperforming existing baselines. Ablation results show that retrieval improves cultural vocabulary recovery with a 19.3\% METEOR gain, while human evaluation confirms stronger cultural accuracy and fluency. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented domain adaptation for culturally grounded caption generation in low-resource heritage settings. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/AnugrahAidinYotolembah/Traditional-Indonesian-Clothing-Captioning-Dataset.