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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Percolation on hierarchical lattices

arXiv:2606.11503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider independent Bernoulli percolation on top of sequences of hierarchical graphs. Given a graph $G_{1}$ with two distinguished vertices $a_{1}$ and $b_{1}$, the hierarchical graph with seed $G_{1}$ is the sequence $\big( G_{k} \big)_{k \geq 1}$ resulting from the inductive procedure, where the graph $G_{k+1}$ is obtained from $G_{k}$ by replacing each of its edges with a copy of $G_{1}$, attached by the vertices $a_{1}$ and $b_{1}$. We prove that, under sharp hypotheses, percolation on these graphs presents a unique phase transition. Second, we establish the existence of several critical exponents in this context, such as the critical exponents for the correlation length $\nu$, the surface tension $\mu$, the one-arm exponent $\alpha_{1}$. Several results are also obtained for their infinite counterpart $G_\infty$, which is the Benjamini-Schramm limit of $G_k$: uniqueness of the infinite cluster, continuity of $\theta(p)$, existence of the percolation-probability exponent $\beta$ and scaling relations for the critical exponents $\alpha_1$, $\nu$ and $\beta$. Furthermore, we analyze noise sensitivity for crossing functions in $G_{k}$ and establish sharp noise sensitivity in this setting. Finally, we propose a setup where it is possible to verify the locality hypothesis, stating that the critical threshold for percolation is a local property, while critical exponents are determined by the global geometry of the graph. As a consequence of the techniques developed here, we also provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a unique fixed point for the map $p \mapsto \mathbb{E}_p[g]$ in $(0,1)$, where $g:\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ is a nontrivial monotone Boolean function.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Positive Conserved Quantities in the Klein-Gordon Equation

作者:

arXiv:2410.04666v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce an embedding of the Klein-Gordon equation into a pair of coupled equations that are first-order in time. The existence of such an embedding is based on a positivity property exhibited by the Klein-Gordon equation. These coupled equations provide a more satisfactory reduction of the Klein-Gordon equation to first-order differential equations in time than the Schrodinger equation. Using this embedding, we show that the ``negative probabilities" associated with the Klein-Gordon equation do not need to be resolved by introducing matrices as Dirac did with his eponymous equation. For the case of the massive Klein-Gordon equation, the coupled equations are equivalent to a forward Schrodinger equation in time and a backward Schrodinger equation in time, respectively, corresponding to a particle and its antiparticle. We show that there are two positive integrals that are conserved (constant in time) in the Klein-Gordon equation and thus provide a concrete resolution of the historical puzzle regarding the previously supposed lack of a probabilistic interpretation for the field governed by the Klein-Gordon equation. A significant consequence is that the Schrodinger equation is given a relativistic formulation, which does not require creation and annihilation operators, i.e. quantum fields. Physically, this corresponds to a theory in which the positive and negative energy parts do not directly interact, hence there will be no annihilation events–for example, particle-antiparticle collisions which do not result in photon emission. Thus, one practical consequence of this relativistically consistent theory is a simple explanation for dark matter.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Mean-field limits for stochastic particle systems on dense graphs

arXiv:2606.11369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study stochastic interacting particle systems whose interaction structure is described by dense weighted directed graphs converging to a graphon. In the thermodynamic limit, we prove a law of large numbers for the empirical measure process and derive a deterministic nonlinear master equation describing the macroscopic evolution. The limiting equation retains the heterogeneous interaction structure of the microscopic system through the limiting graphon, allowing for spatially non-homogeneous behaviors such as localized or community-type interactions.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

M4FC: a Multimodal, Multilingual, Multicultural, Multitask Real-World Fact-Checking Dataset

Existing real-world datasets for multimodal fact-checking have multiple limitations: they contain few instances, cover on only one or two languages, focus only on one task, or rely on external news article sets for sourcing true claims. To address these shortcomings, we introduce M4FC, a new real-world dataset comprising 4,982 images paired with 6,980 claims. The images, verified by professional fact-checkers from 22 organizations, represent a diverse range of cultural and geographic contexts. Each claim is available in one or two out of ten languages. M4FC spans six multimodal fact-checking tasks: visual claim extraction, claimant intent prediction, fake image detection, image contextualization, location verification, and verdict prediction. We provide baseline results for all tasks and analyze how combining intermediate tasks affects verdict prediction performance. We make our dataset and code publicly available.

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

AVA-VLA: Improving Vision-Language-Action models with Active Visual Attention

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable progress in embodied tasks recently, but most methods process visual observations independently at each timestep. This history-agnostic design treats robot manipulation as a Markov Decision Process, even though real-world robotic control is inherently partially observable and requires reasoning over past interactions. To address this mismatch, we reformulate VLA policy learning from a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process perspective and propose AVA-VLA, a framework that conditions action generation on a recurrent state that serves as a neural approximation to the agent's belief over task history. Built on this recurrent state, we introduce Active Visual Attention (AVA), which dynamically reweights visual tokens in the current observation to focus on regions most relevant given both the instruction and execution history. Extensive experiments show that AVA-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard robotic benchmarks, including LIBERO and CALVIN, and transfers effectively to real-world dual-arm manipulation tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of temporally grounded active visual processing for improving VLA performance in robotic sequential decision-making. The project page is available at https://liauto-dsr.github.io/AVA-VLA-Page.

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

World Tracing: Generative Pixel-Aligned Geometry Beyond the Visible

Image-to-3D methods often trade off faithfulness and completeness: depth estimators are anchored to input pixels but stop at the visible surface, while image-to-3D models generate complete shapes that are often misaligned with the input. We introduce World Tracing, a generative pixel-aligned geometry representation that predicts 3D points aligned with observed pixels while completing geometry beyond the visible surface. For each input pixel, World Tracing predicts an ordered stack of camera-space 3D points, where the first layer represents the visible surface and subsequent layers represent front-to-back intersections with occluded surfaces. We instantiate this representation with a world-tracing diffusion transformer, WT-DiT, which treats multiple geometry layers as separate denoising tokens coupled through factorized and global attention. WT-DiT is trained with pixel-space flow matching and a mixed noise schedule that balances visible-surface reconstruction with occluded-geometry generation. World Tracing achieves strong performance on visible-surface reconstruction and complete geometry generation across object, scene, and dynamic benchmarks, outperforming both depth predictors and image-to-3D generators. It also preserves 2D-to-3D correspondence, enabling text-driven 3D scene editing, geometry-conditioned novel-view video synthesis, and training-free integration with textured-mesh generators.

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

P3B3: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Measuring European and Brazilian Portuguese Variety Bias in LLMs

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become embedded in everyday communication, capturing regional linguistic variation is essential for reliable and equitable language use. In Portuguese, European (pt-PT) and Brazilian (pt-BR) varieties remain unevenly represented, with pt-BR dominating in data quantity, while LLM preference for Portuguese variants remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce P3B3, an expert-curated language variety agnostic benchmark of conversational prompts, along with an evaluation framework for measuring variety bias and controllability. Experiments on several models show that most LLMs exhibit a strong bias toward pt-BR, with variation in controllability across models. These results highlight the need for more balanced multilingual representation across language varieties.

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

Frozen Multimodal Embeddings for Personality and Cognitive Ability Assessment in Asynchronous Video Interviews

Predicting psychological traits from asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) is a challenging multimodal learning problem because labeled datasets are limited while each response contains high-dimensional visual, acoustic, and verbal signals. This paper presents our solution for the ACM Multimedia AVI Challenge 2026, which evaluates two tasks: Track~1 predicts self-reported HEXACO personality traits from personality-related interview responses, and Track~2 classifies cognitive ability levels from structured AVI responses. We treat the problem as a small-sample representation learning task. Instead of fine-tuning large pretrained models, we use frozen multimodal encoders, including CLIP for visual features, Whisper for acoustic features and transcripts, and RoBERTa, E5, and DeBERTaV3 for textual representations, followed by low-capacity downstream models. For Track~1, our trait-specific regression and late-fusion system achieves an average validation MSE of 0.2696, improving over the official baseline of 0.3334. Ablation results show a three-step improvement from a global model (0.3189), to per-trait modeling (0.2871), to per-trait late fusion (0.2696), corresponding to a 19.1\% relative MSE reduction over the official baseline. For Track~2, a compact subject-attribute baseline reaches 0.5781 accuracy, while our multimodal ensemble reaches 0.5313, both above the official baseline of 0.4062. We interpret this result as evidence of possible subject-attribute shortcuts in the validation split rather than robust cognitive inference from AVI content. Overall, our findings suggest that AVI-based psychological assessment benefits from trait-specific multimodal modeling, but cognitive ability prediction requires careful control of dataset shortcuts.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Toward Instructions-as-Code: Understanding the Impact of Instruction Files on Agentic Pull Requests

arXiv:2606.13449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot) collaborate as teammates in different software engineering tasks, including code generation proposed through pull requests (Agentic-PRs). For better agent efficiency, developers create instruction files that guide the AI-agents, including how to navigate the project, locate the right components, run tests, respect best practices, and more. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the creation of these instructions and the performance of AI-agents in creating better pull requests, which have a higher chance of success (i.e., the merge rate), address more complex tasks (e.g., code churn), and require less effort to be merged (e.g., time to merge). To this end, we analyze 15,549 agentic PRs from 148 projects in the AIDev dataset. Using the three dimensions, we compare each project before and after the creation of the instruction files. We find that specifying instructions for AI-agents does not necessarily lead to better results. With the instruction files, 27.7\% of the projects increased their merge rate by at least 20\%, while 26.35\% decreased it. The same observation is seen with the amount of changes (e.g., code churn, number of modified files) and with the efforts to merge an agentic PR (e.g., merge time and number of comments). From a first exploration, we find that projects that managed to increase their merge rate have substantially longer instruction files, which are also well structured into a higher number of sections and sub-sections. Our results motivate the need for research to assist practitioners in framing the development of instruction files as a software engineering activity (aka, Instructions-as-Code).

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

Where Did It Go Wrong? Process-Level Evaluation of Web Agents with Semantic State Tracking

arXiv:2606.15673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web agents act through long interaction sequences, yet existing benchmarks evaluate only terminal success, discarding all process information and offering little guidance on improvement. In this work, we conduct a process-level analysis of web agents. We introduce WebStep, a benchmark of 1,800 task instances with controlled difficulty and automatic semantic state tracking. Each website exposes a deterministic semantic MDP alongside the GUI: the agent operates on the interface, while the environment records high-level states and transitions in the background, enabling fine-grained analysis without manual annotation. Based on the semantic trajectory, we first show that process metrics reveal differences invisible to outcome evaluation: three agents whose success rates cluster within 31-33% diverge in exploration reach versus execution accuracy. Then, decomposing by skill characterizes the nature of these differences, exposing opposite per-skill rankings hidden within the same website: e.g., on Housing, OpenAI CUA outperforms Qwen3.5 by 23.7% on commit actions yet underperforms it by 15.6% on filtering, pinpointing a concrete skill to improve even within a domain. Bifurcation analysis further localizes the decisive error that loses the task and shows that this error is agent-specific rather than shared. Finally, these differences widen as tasks grow harder: success rate is similar on easy tasks but separates sharply as exploration becomes more demanding. Our process-level analysis opens a new avenue in web agent evaluation, providing fine-grained and actionable insight into where and how each agent should be improved.

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

Few-Shot Biomedical Relation Extraction with Large Language Models: A Viable Alternative to Supervised Learning?

Biomedical relation extraction (BioRE) is a key step in transforming biomedical literature into structured knowledge. However, most existing approaches rely on supervised models trained on costly annotated datasets, limiting their scalability and adaptability across relation types and domains. We investigate few-shot BioRE using prompt-based learning with large language models (LLMs) and compare two task formulations: pairwise classification, which predicts relations for individual entity pairs, and joint generation, which extracts multiple relations in a single model call. Experiments on the BioREDirect dataset reveal a clear precision-recall trade-off. Pairwise classification achieves higher recall, whereas joint generation is more precise and computationally efficient. The best-performing model achieves a micro-F1 score of 0.44, substantially outperforming previous few-shot results (0.34) while remaining below the supervised baseline (0.56). Much of this gap is attributable to a single ambiguously defined relation type. When evaluated using macro-F1, which better captures performance across relation types in an imbalanced setting, prompt-based approaches outperform the supervised baseline (0.45 vs. 0.38), particularly on rare relation types. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs for BioRE in low-resource settings and underscore the importance of well-defined relation schemas.

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

C-QUERI: Congressional Questions, Exchanges, and Responses in Institutions Dataset

Questions in political interviews and hearings serve strategic purposes beyond information gathering including advancing partisan narratives and shaping public perceptions. However, these strategic aspects remain understudied due to the lack of large-scale datasets for studying such discourse. Congressional hearings provide an especially rich and tractable site for studying political questioning: Interactions are structured by formal rules, witnesses are obliged to respond, and members with different political affiliations are guaranteed opportunities to ask questions, enabling comparisons of behaviors across the political spectrum. We develop a pipeline to extract question-answer pairs from unstructured hearing transcripts and construct a novel dataset of committee hearings from the 108th–117th Congress. Our analysis reveals systematic differences in questioning strategies across parties, by showing the party affiliation of questioners can be predicted from their questions alone. Our dataset and methods not only advance the study of congressional politics, but also provide a general framework for analyzing question-answering across interview-like settings.

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

Hierarchical Fine-Grained Aerial Object Detection

Fine-grained aerial object detection, driven by the intrinsic granularity of real-world object categories, is crucial for advanced scene understanding in remote sensing. Existing methods largely inherit the paradigm of coarse-grained object detection, relying solely on single-label supervision and thus struggling to distinguish model-level categories with subtle structural differences. However, for each specific model (e.g., Boeing 787), structured prior knowledge such as attributes and hierarchies offers discriminative semantics across multiple granularities. Motivated by this, we present ExpertDet, a scheme that incorporates expert-informed cues to enhance fine-grained aerial object detection. Specifically, we design Vision-aware Masked Attribute Modeling (VMAM), which aligns attribute semantics with visual structures by reconstructing randomly masked attributes from visual cues, enabling the detector to capture subtle structural distinctions. We further propose Hierarchical Visual Instance Promotion (HierVIP), which builds a visual prototype tree based on hierarchical relations and imposes taxonomy-aware constraints to preserve cross-level semantic continuity while enhancing category discrimination. Moreover, we curate a new fine-grained object detection benchmark for Precise recognition of model-specific Ships and Planes from aerial imagery, PSP, covering 106 ship classes and 30 airplane models, respectively, featuring the most extensive collection of model-specific categories among existing aerial object detection datasets to date. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on the PSP benchmark. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that ExpertDet consistently outperforms other fine-grained competitors across hierarchy levels. The dataset, benchmark, and code are available at https://nnnnerd.github.io/PSP-Benchmark/.

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

CyberEvolver: Structured Self-Evolution for Cybersecurity Agents On the Fly

arXiv:2605.26195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks, but most existing systems rely on fixed, human-designed scaffolds that struggle to adapt across diverse targets and failure modes. We introduce \textsc{CyberEvolver}, a self-evolving cybersecurity agent framework that iteratively revises its own scaffold based on experience from failed execution attempts. Self-evolution in cybersecurity is challenging because the space of possible scaffold changes is largely unstructured, execution feedback is sparse and often obscured by the environment, and low-diversity updates can cause errors to compound over repeated iterations. \textsc{CyberEvolver} addresses these challenges with a four-layer evolvable agent architecture that decomposes scaffold optimization into structured components, a trace-to-diagnosis mechanism that converts noisy execution logs into actionable revision signals, and a population-based beam search strategy that preserves diverse agent variants during evolution. We evaluate \textsc{CyberEvolver} on CTF challenges, vulnerability exploitation, and penetration-testing tasks using four open-source LLMs. Across these settings, \textsc{CyberEvolver} improves the seed agent's success rate by $13.6$\,\% on average, and outperforms six human-designed cybersecurity agents as well as two self-improvement methods adapted from other domains. These results suggest that scaffold self-evolution is a promising direction for building adaptive LLM agents for security testing.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

MIRATS framework: Normative multiscale characterization of brain regulatory systems across sex and age using multimodal MRI

作者:

Deep brain systems involved in arousal, autonomic regulation, sensory integration, and homeostatic control remain underrepresented in conventional whole-brain neuroimaging frameworks. In particular, diencephalic and brainstem nuclei are often insufficiently represented in cortex-centered analyses, limiting the normative references needed to interpret systems-level variation in health and disease. To address this gap, we developed a unified multiscale framework with explicit representation of deep nuclei. By integrating cerebral, cerebellar, diencephalic, and brainstem atlases in standard space, we constructed a 220-region whole-brain parcellation and extracted complementary features at three analytical scales: nodal properties, edge-wise connectivity, and persistent-homology-based topological descriptors. We applied this framework to healthy adults from the Human Connectome Project-Aging cohort to characterize normative multiscale organization and test sex- and age-related variation. Applied to this cohort, our framework revealed pronounced heterogeneity across anatomical systems. Brainstem and diencephalic nuclei showed multiscale feature profiles distinct from those of cerebral and cerebellar regions across nodal, edge-wise, and higher-order topological scales. Sex comparisons identified selective differences across different scales, whereas age modeling revealed widespread but feature- and system-dependent variation across adulthood. Together, these findings show that normative whole-brain organization in this deep-system-aware space is structured by system-specific rather than globally uniform patterns. These findings establish a normative multiscale framework for characterizing brainstem-diencephalic-cerebellar-cerebral organization in healthy adults and provide a quantitative reference for future translational studies of disease-related abnormalities in deep regulatory systems.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Global and local genetic overlap among ME/CFS, irritable bowel syndrome and psychiatric traits: a hypothesis-generating analysis

作者:

Background. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) frequently co-occur following infection, yet shared genetic architecture at the locus level has not been systematically characterised. Aims. To estimate global and local genetic correlations between ME/CFS (including infection-onset subgroup), IBS, major depressive disorder (MDD) and loneliness/isolation, and characterise ME/CFS cell-type heritability enrichment. Method. GWAS summary statistics: DecodeME (15,579 ME/CFS; 9,738 infection-onset), FinnGen R9 (9,296 IBS), PGC MDD Wave 2 (45,396) and UK Biobank loneliness (N=455,364). LDSC for global correlations; LAVA for local correlations across 2,495 loci; MAGMA for cell-type enrichment (Descartes Human atlas); coloc.abf for colocalisation. Results. All pairwise global correlations were significant after Bonferroni correction, including ME/CFS-all-MDD (rg=0.598, 95% CI 0.46-0.74) and ME/CFS-all-IBS (rg=0.573, 0.39-0.75). Of 4,232 local tests, 16 reached FDR

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Style-CCL: Content-Preserving Style Transfer via Curriculum Continual Learning

Content-Preserving Style transfer, given content and style references, remains challenging for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) due to entangled content and style features. With a reverse triplet synthesis pipeline to build a million-scale training set and a dual-branch Style-Content DiT (SC-DiT) that decouples style and content via separate ROPE embeddings and causal masking, we observe that such a one-stage training paradigm on mixed style categories causes semantic styles to dominate, hindering texture style learning, and harming content preservation. To address these issues, we propose Style-CCL, a Multi-Stage Curriculum Continual Learning framework that trains SC-DiT from semantic (easy) to texture (hard) styles, and from clean to synthetic data, with Random Memory Rehearsal across stages to avoid catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Style-CCL achieves state-of-the-art performance in three core metrics: style similarity, content consistency, and aesthetic quality.

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

Posterior Continuation with Noise-Conditioned Frequency Exposure for Diffusion Inverse Problems

Diffusion posterior sampling solves inverse problems by combining a pretrained diffusion prior with measurement-consistency guidance. However, full-band guidance can be unreliable at high noise levels, where clean estimates contain score-induced errors and high-frequency measurement directions are weakly identifiable. We argue that posterior guidance should expose measurement frequencies according to the instantaneous diffusion noise level. Based on this principle, we propose a posterior continuation framework that constructs a family of intermediate posteriors whose likelihood emphasizes currently reliable frequency bands and gradually returns to full-band consistency. We instantiate this framework with a stabilized sampler that combines a diffusion predictor, frequency-limited likelihood refinement, and a Haar-domain commitment rule that commits reliable coarse corrections while deferring weakly identifiable details. Across super-resolution, inpainting, and deblurring, our method achieves competitive-to-state-of-the-art restoration performance, including up to 5 dB PSNR improvement on motion deblurring over strong baselines in evaluations on FFHQ and ImageNet.

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

Beyond Weights and Gradients: A Taxonomy of Federated Learning Messages

arXiv:2606.16891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning is rapidly evolving beyond the exchange of traditional model weights and gradients, yet existing definitions fail to capture the full scope of modern payloads like synthetic data and federated analytics. This paper addresses the gap by proposing a formal mathematical definition of a federated message that accounts for both utility and privacy. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes these exchanges into three categories: model structures, statistical summaries, and data-conditioned representations. By evaluating these groups based on computational demands, communication costs, and privacy risks, we provide a clearer understanding of the trade-offs involved in decentralized training. Our review of 202 recent publications highlights a significant shift since 2021 toward diverse messaging paradigms, signaling a move away from standard deep learning updates toward more specialized information sharing. This framework provides a structured path for future research to optimize federated systems for varying hardware and security requirements.

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

Examining the Cognitive Gap Between Authors and Peer Reviewers on Academic Paper Novelty

Novelty is a crucial metric for assessing the quality of academic papers. Scholars strive to highlight the novel aspects of their work, particularly in the title, abstract, and introduction. Peer review, serving as the gatekeeper of scientific rigor, rigorously evaluates the novelty of papers, yet a cognitive gap may exist between author self-promotion and reviewer evaluation. To investigate this, we analyzed 15,328 academic papers published in Nature Communications from 2016 to 2021, along with their peer-review comments. We found that both reviewers and authors emphasize result-oriented innovation, with reviewers adopting a more comprehensive evaluation perspective. Furthermore, by examining promotional intensity against inherent paper novelty, we found that its effect depends on the paper's actual innovation level. Highly innovative papers benefit from stronger promotional language, receiving more positive evaluations. We also found that promotional language significantly correlates with reviewer disagreement on novelty specifically for papers of moderate innovativeness, whereas it has negligible impact for papers with either very high or very low novelty. This reveals how promotional language operates most prominently in the gray area of academic evaluation.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cost-effectiveness of a virtual fracture clinic versus traditional in-person fracture clinic care for adults with acute simple fractures: a protocol for a health economic evaluation within the RECITAL trial

ABSTRACT Introduction Traditional in-person fracture clinics are often overcrowded and inconvenient for patients. Virtual fracture clinics aim to address some of these concerns by improving the efficiency of the orthopaedic service and reducing unnecessary interventions while maintaining safety and quality of care. The RECITAL trial is a non-inferiority randomised controlled trial comparing follow-up care provided at a virtual fracture clinic for people with acute simple fractures to follow-up care provided at an in-person fracture clinic. This study describes the protocol for an economic evaluation of RECITAL where the primary aim is to investigate the cost-effectiveness of a virtual fracture clinic compared with traditional in-person fracture clinic care from a health system perspective. Methods and analysis The RECITAL trial recruited 312 participants with acute simple fractures and randomised them to receive follow-up care provided at a virtual fracture clinic or follow-up care provided at an in-person fracture clinic. We will conduct a within-trial analysis from a health system perspective (primary analysis), as well as a health service, patient and societal perspective. The economic evaluation will estimate the difference in the cost of resource inputs on an intention to treat basis used by participants in the two arms of the trial, allowing comparisons to be made between the in-person and virtual fracture clinics. Data for intervention costs and healthcare utilisation will be collected from trial records, hospital electronic medical records and district performance units. The results of the economic evaluation will be expressed in terms of incremental cost per utility weight gained at 12 weeks and will be plotted on a cost-effectiveness plane. Bootstrapping by resampling will be used to estimate 95% confidence intervals around costs and outcomes, and to calculate the confidence intervals around the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio. A cost-effectiveness acceptability curve (CEAC) will be plotted, which will provide information about the probability that an intervention is cost-effective, given the level of a decision makers willingness to pay for each additional outcome. Ethics and Dissemination The trail was approved by the SLHD Ethics Review Committee (RPAH Zone) (X23-0200 and 2023/ETH01038). The findings will be disseminated through a peer-reviewed journal and conference presentations. Trial registration number The trial was prospectively registered on the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR; 12623000934640)

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

RGFVR: Reference-Guided Face Video Restoration with Flow Matching

Face video restoration from degraded observations is challenging, as it requires simultaneously recovering visual fidelity, temporal consistency, and subject identity. Existing approaches are often either reference-free, which can lead to identity loss when person-specific facial details are lost, or subject-specific, which limits generalization to unseen identities. We propose a subject-agnostic, reference-guided framework for identity-preserving face video restoration. Our method introduces bimodal perceptual-descriptive identity conditioning into a pretrained flow-based text-to-video generator and employs a two-stage training strategy to strengthen identity guidance during restoration. Experiments show that our approach improves restoration fidelity, temporal consistency, and identity preservation, achieving superior performance under challenging video degradations, including downsampling, blur, noise, and compression artifacts. The code is available under: https://github.com/batuhanntosun/RG-FVR.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ICA Lens: Interpreting Language Models Without Training Another Dictionary

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

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

RoVE: Rotary Value Embeddings Attention for Relative Position-dependent Value Pathways

arXiv:2606.11275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) make attention scores position-relative but leave the value pathway position-blind: the message sent by a value token is the same regardless of its distance from the query. We propose RoVE, a parameter-free modification that makes values position-sensitive by rotating them simultaneously with keys, and show that it turns RoPE attention into attentive convolution. This new perspective unifies several independent formulations of the same operation across computer vision, robotics, and modern LLM architectures. Trained 124M and 354M GPT-2 models show consistent empirical gains over RoPE on few-shot in-context learning, out-of-distribution perplexity, and long-context retrieval, with the clearest improvements on tasks that require long-range aggregation.

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

RACL: Reasoning-Agent Control Layers for Continuous Metaheuristic Learning

arXiv:2606.20142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces RACL, a Reasoning-Agent Control Layer for metaheuristics. RACL places a reasoning agent above an existing optimizer. The agent does not replace the optimizer and does not modify business constraints. Instead, it controls the optimizer's internal search behavior by observing operational memory, reasoning over past behavior, formulating bounded hypotheses, testing interventions, evaluating outcomes, applying guardrails, consolidating useful policies and explaining its decisions. The experiment uses vehicle routing as a testbed, but the contribution is not a new routing solver, a particular ALNS configuration or a specific set of routing rules. The contribution is the RACL method: a way for a reasoning agent to discover, validate, consolidate and explain algorithmic control rules for a metaheuristic. In the current experimental setting, RACL improves or ties the Operational Memory Policy in 21 of 21 feasible cases and improves or ties a non-reasoning Stagnation-Triggered Policy in 18 of 21 feasible cases, with an average RACL vs STP cost delta of -0.641%. In the Sevilla-9/10 runtime sample, RACL improves average cost by -8.337% versus Fixed and -1.605% versus STP without showing material computational overhead. During the proof-of-concept, Codex was used as an in-the-loop reasoning agent observing executions, interpreting logs and proposing live bounded interventions. The policy proxy was later used only to make quantitative evaluation reproducible.