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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Trustworthy Self-Composable Big-Data-as-a-Service: An LLM-Orchestrated Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Data Engineering, AutoML, MLOps Deployment, and Drift-Aware Lifecycle Optimization

arXiv:2606.17915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) platforms require re liable automation across data ingestion, cleaning, feature engi neering, model development, deployment, and post-deployment monitoring. However, existing LLM-based data science agents and AutoML systems mainly focus on isolated workflow stages, leaving limited support for lifecycle-level orchestration, artifact governance, human oversight, and drift-aware adaptation. This paper proposes a trustworthy self-composable BDaaS frame work based on LLM-orchestrated multi-agent collaboration. The proposed architecture decomposes the BDaaS lifecycle into specialized agents for data ingestion, data cleaning, feature engineering, AutoML training, model evaluation, MLOps de ployment, monitoring, and drift detection. A central LLM or chestration layer coordinates agent execution, validates interme diate outputs, manages workflow context, and enables dynamic workflow composition. The framework also incorporates shared artifact governance, reproducibility support, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and drift-aware feedback loops. A prototype-based evaluation is conducted using controlled tabular benchmark datasets with missing values, categorical variables, outliers, class imbalance, and simulated covariate drift. Compared with manual ML, AutoML-only, and single-agent LLM baselines, the pro posed multi-agent BDaaS pipeline achieves competitive predictive performance while improving lifecycle-level reliability, including workflow completion, artifact traceability, deployment readiness, reproducibility, and drift recovery. The results suggest that LLM-orchestrated multi-agent systems can extend conventional AutoML toward trustworthy, adaptive, and production-oriented BDaaS lifecycle automation.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Skill-3D: Evolving Scene-Aware Skills for Agentic 3D Spatial Reasoning

This paper explores agentic 3D spatial understanding, i.e., MLLM agents performing 3D reasoning through tool use. Existing methods often misuse tools and exhibit biased tool preferences under 3D scenarios, leaving the agentic paradigm with only marginal gains over non-agentic strategies. We reveal that 3D spatial reasoning tasks are heterogeneous across scenes, while these agents apply a uniform tool-use strategy to all scenes rather than selecting tools according to the specific scene and task. To address this, we propose Skill-3D, a framework that learns self-evolving scene-aware skills. Specifically, Skill-3D identifies the task scene and records the agent's tool-use trajectory into a Scene Memory, where successful trajectories from similar scenes are aggregated and distilled into a reusable scene-aware skill, with failed ones attached to the skill as lessons. During training, once a similar scene recurs, the corresponding skill is injected to guide the agent, producing new trajectories whose successes and failures further refine the skill, forming a loop in which the memory and the skill library co-evolve. Experiments show that Skill-3D substantially improves tool utilization in 3D spatial reasoning (from 39% to 78% on VSI-Bench), driving the agent toward correct and sufficient tool use. For instance, it improves Gemini-3-Flash by 67% on MMSI-Bench. Furthermore, we conduct agentic post-training over skill-guided trajectories, which boosts Qwen3-VL-8B by 60% on VSI-Bench.

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

Analyzing and Improving Fine-grained Preference Optimization in Medical LVLMs

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved strong performance across medical imaging tasks, yet they remain prone to factual inconsistencies, poor visual grounding, and misalignment with clinically meaningful feedback. Existing post-training alignment approaches, including Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants, face three critical limitations in the medical domain: (1) sequence-level reward signals treat clinically critical tokens identically to generic filler text; (2) reliance on static supervised fine-tuning references as preferred responses introduces an off-policy distribution shift, steering optimization toward stylistic artifacts over clinical correctness; and (3) alignment objectives lack explicit visual grounding constraints, leaving models insensitive to subtle yet diagnostically decisive pathological features. Our method leverages a bidirectional token-wise KL regularizer alongside a visual-contrastive grounding objective that pairs clean and lesion-corrupted images to penalize responses generated without adequate visual evidence. Together, these components form a fine-grained, on-policy alignment framework that constructs preference pairs by minimally editing model-generated outputs, correcting only clinically erroneous spans while preserving the original linguistic style. Extensive experiments across medical imaging tasks and clinical text generation benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach.

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

Would you still call this Dax? Novel Visual References in VLMs and Humans

Vision-language models (VLMs), like human learners, are frequently exposed to new visual concepts, but how they map novel visual references to language after exposure remains largely underexplored, particularly when those references contradict prior knowledge from pre-training. To study this, we present the Novel Visual References Dataset (NVRD): 19,176 images spanning 90 visual concepts across different levels of visual novelty, each with up to 20 increasingly perturbed versions of the original object to probe generalization. Unlike prior work on visual augmentations of familiar concepts, NVRD comprises entirely novel, open-ended stimuli constructed from scratch, mirroring how humans encounter genuinely new concepts. We evaluate 3 open- and 2 closed-source models alongside 2,400 human judgments for direct human-model comparison, and find that (i) models struggle to acquire novel concepts in-context when they contradict prior knowledge, and (ii) while models and humans show correlated sensitivity to visual perturbations, models significantly overgeneralize, extending learned labels to stimuli that humans reject. We contribute NVRD as a corpus and benchmark for research on visual concept learning in both humans and machines.

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

Stepwise Token Selection for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models

In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), inference cost is largely dominated by the visual token prefix rather than the language backbone, making token reduction a key factor for improving efficiency. Existing approaches typically assign independent importance scores to visual tokens and retain a fixed number of top-ranked tokens, implicitly assuming token independence and a uniform compression ratio across inputs. In this work, we reformulate visual token pruning as a sequential decision-making process. Specifically, we introduce a pointer-style selection mechanism that iteratively chooses informative tokens, conditioning each decision on previously selected ones, and dynamically determines when to stop via a learned termination action. This enables joint optimization of both the selected subset and its size. To enable end-to-end training under standard language modeling objectives, we design a differentiable relaxation based on a variance-preserving noise interpolation scheme, allowing gradients to propagate through the discrete selection process. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-v1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms fixed-ratio baselines across different compression levels. Under aggressive pruning that removes 88.9% of visual tokens, our method preserves 94.6% of the original accuracy while achieving a 1.88x speed-up in prefill latency.

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

Data-Forcing Distillation: Restoring Diversity and Fidelity in Few-Step Video Generation

Recent progress has shown promise in distilling multi-step video diffusion models into efficient few-step students. Among them, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) and its successor DMD2 achieved strong generation quality and fast convergence. However, due to the nature of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) objective, these methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: a substantial drop in sample diversity, and visibly over-saturated outputs that deviate from real-video appearance. In this work, we propose Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), a simple post-training framework that restores diversity and fidelity in DMD with only a single-line of code change. At its core is the teacher score discrepancy to guide the student toward the real-data distribution, pulling it to missing modes (mitigating mode collapse) and away from problematic modes absent in real data (avoiding over-saturation). We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of our framework and validate our approach on text-to-video, image-to-video, and autoregressive video generation. With only 100–300 steps of finetuning, DFD effectively restores diversity and fidelity on both Wan2.1-1.3B and Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B model, resolving the over-saturation artifacts with significantly better video dynamics and appearance, and even outperforms the teacher model.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Disentangling Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Physics-Informed Neural Networks. Application to Insulation Material Degradation Prognostics

arXiv:2601.03673v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) provide a framework for integrating physical laws with data. However, their application to Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) remains constrained by the limited uncertainty quantification (UQ) capabilities. Most existing PINN-based prognostics approaches are deterministic or account only for epistemic uncertainty, limiting their suitability for risk-aware decision-making. This work introduces a heteroscedastic Bayesian Physics-Informed Neural Network (B-PINN) framework that jointly models epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty, yielding full predictive posteriors for spatiotemporal insulation material ageing estimation. The approach integrates Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) with physics-based residual enforcement and prior distributions, enabling probabilistic inference within a physics-informed learning architecture. The framework is evaluated on transformer insulation ageing application, validated with a finite-element thermal model and field measurements from a solar power plant, and benchmarked against deterministic PINNs, dropout-based PINNs (d-PINNs), and alternative B-PINN variants. Results show that the proposed B-PINN provides improved predictive accuracy and better-calibrated uncertainty estimates than competing approaches. A systematic sensitivity study further analyzes the impact of boundary-condition, initial-condition, and residual sampling strategies on accuracy, calibration, and generalization, and the influence of measurement noise on aleatoric uncertainty. Overall, the findings highlight the capability of Bayesian physics-informed learning to support uncertainty-aware prognostics and informed decision-making in transformer asset management by tracking aleatoric and epistemic sources of uncertainty.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Augmenting Molecular Language Models with Local $n$-gram Memory

Transformer-based language models for SMILES strings suffer from a locality gap: standard character-level tokenization fragments chemically meaningful motifs, forcing models to repeatedly learn local syntax at the expense of long-range dependencies. To address this without disrupting standard tokenizers, we propose MolGram, which integrates a conditional $n$-gram memory module into molecular language models. MolGram maps local string patterns to learned embeddings via scalable hash lookups and dynamically injects this regional context into hidden states. Evaluations across three tasks, including unconditional molecule generation, forward reaction prediction, and single-step retrosynthesis, show that MolGram consistently improves performance. Crucially, our analyses demonstrate that MolGram outperforms baselines with 3$\times$ more parameters, establishing explicit local pattern memory as a highly efficient inductive bias.

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

From Simulation to Real-World: An In-Field 6D Pose Dataset and Baseline for Robotic Strawberry Harvesting

Robotic strawberry harvesting requires precise 6D pose estimation; however, collecting 6D pose ground truth in real agricultural fields is inherently challenging. Existing 6D pose estimation methods have therefore relied solely on synthetic data that lacks scene-level realism, leaving their performance under real agricultural field conditions unquantified. In this work, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first real-world 6D pose ground truth dataset of strawberries collected in actual agricultural fields (12,040 images). We also introduce a synthetic dataset rendered in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, featuring scene-level realism and domain randomization. Nevertheless, our experiments reveal that a significant sim-to-real gap persists, underscoring the necessity of real agricultural field data for reliable evaluation. We further quantify the sim-to-real gap through baseline 6D pose estimation results across backbone encoders, serving as a reference for future work. The real-world dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LongWebBench: Evaluating Structural and Functional Webpage Generation in Long-Horizon Settings

arXiv:2606.17727v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promising progress in generating webpages from visual inputs, yet existing evaluations mainly focus on short, single-screen, and largely static webpages. We introduce LongWebBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-horizon webpage generation from both structural and functional perspectives. LongWebBench contains 490 real-world long webpages for structural fidelity evaluation and 507 goal-oriented interaction tasks over 129 webpages for functional evaluation. It employs two complementary protocols: a multi-dimensional VLM-based metric for assessing long-range structural coherence, and a DOM-augmented agent-based pipeline for end-to-end functional verification. We further examine the automatic evaluation protocols through human agreement analysis. Experiments with state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary VLMs under single-image and multi-image settings reveal that structural fidelity degrades as webpage length increases, while visually plausible generations often fail to support executable multi-step interactions. These results highlight the need to evaluate long webpage generation beyond visual similarity, with executable interaction as a core criterion. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zheny2751-dotcom/LongWebBench.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Time-spectral control of accidental coincidences in daylight entanglement-based free-space QKD

arXiv:2606.17365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Daylight entanglement-based free-space quantum key distribution (QKD) is limited by accidental coincidences from receiver-admitted background light. We develop and experimentally validate a receiver-level framework linking receiver bandwidth, accepted temporal width, and background-noise density to Bob singles, sifted-key rate, error rate, and quantum bit error rate (QBER) in telecom-wavelength BBM92 QKD. Indoor sweeps show that useful sifted counts saturate near the source-matched bandwidth, whereas broader bandwidth or higher background mainly increases accidental contamination. Increasing the accepted temporal width leaves Bob singles nearly unchanged but directly raises QBER by enlarging the random-overlap probability. A two-dimensional design map shows that the temporal-window margin contracts rapidly with increasing background-to-signal ratio, while the bandwidth margin remains comparatively broad near source-matched filtering. A 10 m rooftop daylight experiment demonstrates operation in the predicted low-accidental regime, yielding a mean sifted-key rate of 2,811 cps and a mean QBER of 4.43%.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

PrologMCP: A Standardized Prolog Tool Interface for LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.14935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier reasoning-tuned language models still fail on deductive tasks at depth, and the cost of improved performance through extended internal reasoning scales poorly. Symbolic delegation offers a complementary route: a language model translates the problem, while a solver performs the inference. However, current autoformalization pipelines for logic programming are typically bespoke integrations tied to particular tasks or agents. We introduce PrologMCP, a task-agnostic, open-source server that exposes Prolog as a stateful tool through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Its compact tool interface, structured error reporting, and per-session isolation make the translate-run-inspect-repair loop a reusable primitive for MCP-capable agents. We evaluate a formalizer agent enhanced with PrologMCP against standard and reasoning LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4.1, and o4-mini) on two subsets of PARARULE-Plus: a general-purpose sample and a more challenging one targeting a specific failure mode of natural-language reasoning. On the general sample, the formalizer matches or exceeds reasoning LLMs (accuracy 1.00 vs.\ 1.00 / 0.998), with the largest gains over standard models (0.762 for GPT-4.1). On the challenging subset, the formalizer remains near-perfect (1.00 / 0.99) while reasoning LLMs drop to 0.95 / 0.94. These results suggest that delegating inference to Prolog via MCP is a robust and inspectable alternative to extended natural-language reasoning.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Learning the Context of Errors: Black-Box Online Adaptation of Time Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.14222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid evolution of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) has advanced zero-shot forecasting across diverse domains. Inspired by the current form of Large Language Models, future TSFMs may be offered as commercialized, closed-source API services. However, many existing online adaptation methods still rely on white-box access for parameter fine-tuning or gradient backpropagation. This paradigm mismatch raises a question: In black-box online adaptation for TSFMs, what should we learn? We answer this with an insight: the predictive errors of the base model are conditioned on both the input and output of the base model (i.e., the context of errors). To validate this insight, we propose ORCA (Online Residual Contextual Adaptation). We conduct extensive experiments across 5 state-of-the-art TSFMs and 8 datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, through ablation studies, we quantitatively analyze the impact of different adapter learning hypotheses on the final adaptation performance in black-box online adaptation. Code available at https://github.com/Fifthky/ORCA.

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

From Paper to Program: Knowledge Externalization for AI-Assisted Quantum Many-Body Code Generation

Authors:

arXiv:2604.04089v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models can write scientific code, but direct paper-to-program translation remains fragile when correctness depends on tacit conventions in the literature. We identify this bottleneck as knowledge externalization: converting implicit computational assumptions – index conventions, gauge choices, fermionic signs, contraction order, and memory constraints – into an explicit technical specification before implementation. We evaluate a multi-stage, human-in-the-loop workflow that inserts such a specification, with validation and stop gates, between theory extraction and code generation. The workflow is tested on two algorithmically distinct quantum many-body tasks: variational sweep-based Density-Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) from a pedagogical review and constructive Pfaffian conversion of Hartree–Fock–Bogoliubov states to matrix product states from the five-page Letter by Jin et al., Phys. Rev. B 105, L081101 (2022), for which no public code is available. For DMRG, all 16 specification-guided model pairings in a $4\times4$ grid satisfy physics-validation criteria, compared with 6/13 direct attempts. A prose-specification ablation indicates that externalized content, not \LaTeX{} formatting, is the essential ingredient. For Pfaffian-MPS, the workflow succeeds in 11/26 archived attempts, whereas direct prompting yields zero audited passes. Cross-specification transfer is asymmetric: non-GPT specifications implemented by GPT~5.5 pass 4/4, while GPT~5.5 specifications implemented by weaker models fail 4/4, indicating a residual implementation-model bottleneck. The resulting Paper-to-Program Many-Body skill provides an auditable protocol for AI-assisted implementation of many-body algorithms and for diagnosing where externalization succeeds or fails.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Toward Calibrated Mixture-of-Experts Under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.20544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration aligns a model's predictive uncertainty with the frequencies of its empirical outcomes and is important for understanding and trusting reported probabilities. Recent work shows that enforcing calibration at the level of individual predictors can improve ensemble accuracy and calibration, with mixture-of-experts (MoE) models showing strong empirical improvements in particular; however, the conditions under which calibration helps MoE are not well understood. In this work, we study how MoE models behave under distribution shift, focusing on how routing mechanisms interact with expert-level calibration. We show that expert calibration is sufficient to ensure calibration of the overall model under a broad class of distribution shifts in hard-routed models, but is insufficient for calibrating soft-routed models. To address this, we propose an adversarial reweighting that penalizes calibration errors of the routed aggregate under distribution shift, and we demonstrate that it improves the accuracy-calibration tradeoff both on average and on difficult subsets of the data, across model classes, prediction tasks, and distribution shifts.

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

The Model Knows, the Decoder Finds: Future Value Guided Particle Power Sampling

arXiv:2605.02427v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A recurring pattern in "reasoning without training" is that base LLMs already assign non-trivial probability mass to correct multi-step solutions; the bottleneck is locating these modes efficiently at inference time. Power sampling provides a principled way to bias decoding toward such modes by targeting p_theta(x)^alpha with alpha > 1, but practical approximations must account for future-dependent correction factors that determine which prefixes remain promising. We introduce Auxiliary Particle Power Sampling (APPS), a blockwise particle algorithm for approximating the sequence-level power target with a bounded population of partial solutions. APPS propagates hypotheses in parallel using proposal-corrected power reweighting and refines their survival through future-value-guided selection at resampling boundaries. This redistributes finite compute across competing prefixes rather than committing to a single unfolding path, while providing a direct scaling knob in the particle count and predictable peak memory. We instantiate the future-value signal with short-horizon rollouts and also study an amortized variant that replaces rollouts with a lightweight learned selection head. AMore broadly, APPS improves the accuracy–runtime trade-off of training-free decoding, further supporting the view that inference-time power approximation can recover gains often attributed to post-training.

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

Integral Formulation of QENDy for Robust Nonlinear System Identification

arXiv:2606.11629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This manuscript proposes an integral formulation of the newly defined quadratic embedding method for identifying nonlinear systems (QENDy). In the original algorithm, trajectory data points along with their time derivatives are used. Methods for calculating time derivatives make the algorithm sensitive to noise. Our integral formulation does not use the time derivatives. This results in a more robust method to learn the dynamics.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

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

Foresight: Iterative Reasoning About Clues that Matter for Navigation

arXiv:2606.12550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-world mapless navigation from sparse language instructions requires resolving underspecified goals and inferring which environmental cues are relevant for reaching the goal. For instance, reaching an out-of-view destination may require interpreting ramps, signs, or detours that reveal where to go or which route to take. Prior works are limited by their reliance on known navigation factors and closed-set factor categories, or identify cues before motion planning and miss plan-dependent cues. We argue that pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can discover novel instruction-relevant cues, but require adaptation to focus on which cues matter and how they should influence motion planning. We realize these ideas in Foresight, a test-time framework in which a finetuned VLM alternates between proposing image-space motion plans and critiquing them using the language goal and visual context. Subsequent plans are conditioned on prior critiques, enabling iterative motion refinement before execution. To align plan critiques and refinements with open-set behavior preferences, we learn a reward model from human feedback and use it to post-train the VLM with reinforcement learning in the plan-critique loop. In offline evaluations and 6 real-world environments, Foresight improves average task success by 37% and reduces interventions per mission by 52% relative to state-of-the-art test-time reasoning and foundation-model baselines, while running in real-time on a Jetson AGX Orin. We will release code, data, and training details to support future work on test-time reasoning for robot motion refinement. Additional videos at: https://amrl.cs.utexas.edu/foresight

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

A controlled human infection model for symptomatic pertussis in North America using the pertactin-producing clinical isolate D420

Background Despite widespread vaccination, pertussis remains a poorly controlled disease globally and results in substantial annual morbidity and mortality, particularly in young children. Controlled human infection models (CHIMs) using the causative agent Bordetella pertussis are promising systems to enable the study of pertussis disease pathogenesis and immunology and to rapidly assess vaccines and therapeutics. While a pertussis CHIM that produces asymptomatic infection has been established in Europe, the development of a CHIM that leads to symptomatic illness would be advantageous for evaluating vaccine efficacy against both infection and disease. Methods Healthy participants 18-40 years of age were inoculated intranasally with one of eight doses (ranging from 104 to 108 colony forming units (CFU)) of the pertactin-producing B. pertussis isolate D420 at the challenge facility within the Canadian Center for Vaccinology (Nova Scotia, Canada). The study occurred in two stages. In stage one, the B. pertussis dose was escalated in cohort groups of five to six participants until reaching an endpoint where 70-90% of participants exhibited mild (non-severe, Grade 1 or 2) symptomatic infection, defined as the Human Infectious Dose 70-90 (HID70-90). In stage two, additional challenges were conducted for doses below, at, and above the identified HID70-90 to characterize the emerging pertussis model. For all challenge doses, participants were closely monitored during an inpatient stay of up to 24 days and post-discharge for laboratory-confirmed infection, pertussis symptoms, safety, and IgG antibody responses to four B. pertussis antigens including pertussis toxin, filamentous hemagglutinin, fimbriae, and pertactin. All participants received a five-day course of azithromycin, where timing of initiation depended on B. pertussis testing and symptoms. The study was conducted between July 4, 2022 and March 19, 2025. Findings Seventy-five participants were inoculated with one of the eight B. pertussis D420 challenge doses and completed the inpatient stay. From the stage-one dose escalation, we found that 107 CFU of B. pertussis D420 was the lowest dose that achieved the HID70-90, where 9 of 12 participants (75.0%) exhibited mild symptomatic infection. Following stage-two challenges, 16 of 22 total participants at 107 CFU (72.7%) developed mild symptomatic infection, thus verifying the HID70-90. The symptomatic infection rate below the HID70-90 at 5x106 CFU of D420 was 20.0% and above the HID70-90 at 5x107 and 108 CFU were 58.3% and 55.6%, respectively. Symptoms with elevated frequency for symptomatic infection (relative to background symptoms in non-infected) included nasal congestion, runny nose, fatigue, malaise, and cough. At the HID70-90, 50% of symptomatic infections included cough. Serological analyses of the four highest (stage-two) challenge doses (5x106, 107, 5x107, 108 CFU) revealed that antibody titres increased over time post-challenge. Seroconversion for at least one of the four studied antibodies was nearly twice as common for symptomatic (70.0%) than asymptomatic (35.7%) infection and was absent (0%) for non-infected. All infections were cleared following azithromycin treatment (100%) and there were no study-related serious adverse events. Interpretation A safe and reproducible symptomatic pertussis CHIM was achieved, providing a model for research on pertussis disease pathogenesis and immunology and for assessing vaccines and therapeutics. (Clinicaltrials.gov, NCT05136599).

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Reliability of Probabilistic Emulation of Physical Systems

arXiv:2606.12997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two dominant approaches have emerged for generating probabilistic forecasts of physical systems: generative models, such as diffusion or flow matching; and ensembles of deterministic models with stochasticity injected, trained using the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) loss. While both approaches have demonstrated strong predictive accuracy, the reliability of their uncertainties has not been systematically assessed. We address this gap by developing a framework to evaluate both approaches across diverse 2D spatiotemporal physical systems, under matched model size and computational budget. We assess the reliability of probabilistic emulation by inspecting the empirical coverage of predictive intervals, while also considering accuracy and computational efficiency metrics. CRPS-trained ensembles typically achieve more reliable uncertainties on both single-step prediction and autoregressive rollouts, demonstrating better coverage than the standard alternative of training generative models in a latent space. Moreover, the CRPS approach offers significantly faster inference. When generative models are trained in ambient rather than a compressed latent space, which is often infeasible for high-dimensional problems, they exhibit comparable coverage to CRPS-trained ensembles, though with substantially larger inference latency. In contrast, when CRPS-trained ensembles are trained in latent space they do not show a marked degradation in coverage with respect to ambient space. Both generative models and CRPS-trained ensembles demonstrate good predictive accuracy. To facilitate future research and application, we release AutoCast, a modular framework implementing both generative models and CRPS-trained ensembles, alongside AutoSim, a flexible dataset generation package for rapid prototyping.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

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

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

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

AI-enhanced tuning of quantum dot Hamiltonians toward Majorana modes

arXiv:2601.02149v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a neural network-based model capable of learning the broad landscape of working regimes in quantum dot simulators, and using this knowledge to autotune these devices - based on transport measurements - toward obtaining Majorana modes in the structure. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner on synthetic data in the form of conductance maps, using a physics-informed loss that incorporates key properties of Majorana zero modes. We show that, with appropriate training, a deep vision-transformer network can efficiently memorize relation between Hamiltonian parameters and structures on conductance maps and use it to propose parameters update for a quantum dot chain that drive the system toward topological phase. Starting from a broad range of initial detunings in parameter space, a single update step is sufficient to generate nontrivial zero modes. Moreover, by enabling an iterative tuning procedure - where the system acquires updated conductance maps at each step - we demonstrate that the method can address a much larger region of the parameter space.

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

Interactor: Agentic RL oriented Iterative Creation for Ad Description Generation in Sponsored Search

This paper focuses on automatically generating informative ad descriptions in sponsored search. Unlike ad titles which are usually optimized to attract user click feedbacks, ad descriptions have a longer text span and possess the potential of incorporating world knowledge to address user search intents while presenting the fine-grained selling points of the ads. We propose Interactor, a multi-turn iterative creation framework optimized with agentic RL for ad description generation. The generation model acts as a policy that interacts with a customized environment consisting of multiple generative reward models. Given initial generations by the policy, the customized GenRMs evaluate multi-dimensional qualities including knowledge capacity and landing page consistency, providing both binary signals and reasoning feedbacks. The policy then iteratively refines the descriptions based on such feedbacks to ensure continuous improvement. Experiments on industrial datasets show that the Interactor framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in generating knowledge-rich and faithful ad descriptions. Since May 2026, it has been deployed online in a leading search ads system, contributing to both ad revenue and user experience.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Two-Stage Fine-Tuning of ResNet50 for High-Sensitivity Melanoma Detection on Dermoscopic Images

Authors:

Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer with five-year survival rates exceeding 99% when detected early but falling sharply once the disease spreads. This paper proposes and evaluates a two-stage fine-tuning approach for ResNet50 applied to binary melanoma classification on dermoscopic images. The core challenges addressed are class imbalance and suboptimal transfer learning from single-stage fine-tuning. After stratified train/validation/test splitting, random oversampling was applied exclusively to the training set to achieve a 1:1 class balance. Stage 1 trained only the classification head with the ResNet50 base frozen, while Stage 2 fine-tuned all layers jointly at a low learning rate of 1e-5 to prevent catastrophic forgetting of learned visual features. On an independent test set of 3,826 images, the model achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.9559, accuracy of 88.34%, sensitivity of 87.56%, specificity of 89.13%, and F1-score of 88.29%. An ablation study confirms the two-stage protocol significantly outperforms single-stage fine-tuning, with sensitivity gains of over 4%. Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate correct lesion localization. A fully deployable Streamlit detection application is provided alongside all training code.