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

Non-Parametric Machine Text Detection via Multi-View Gaussian Processes

Adversarial conditions such as paraphrasing and targeted style transfer sharply degrade the accuracy of machine text detectors. A document, however, carries multiple complementary signals (e.g., stylistic features, likelihood and rank-order features, and structural features), and an attack that suppresses one may leave others intact. While a parametric classifier can learn to combine these features given sufficient supervision, classifiers are prone to making confidently incorrect predictions when the distribution shifts (e.g., novel attacks or unseen language models). To address this, we propose a multi-view, non-parametric detection framework that extracts complementary feature views from the same document and aggregates per-view evidence through a Gaussian process ensemble. By aggregating evidence across views, an adversary must simultaneously defeat multiple independent axes of detection, substantially raising the cost of evasion. The Gaussian process formulation additionally provides calibrated probabilities and principled abstention on out-of-distribution inputs, supporting reliable deployment in high-stakes settings. We evaluate on three benchmarks spanning diverse generators and attacks: the DetectRL and RAID benchmarks, and the PAN2025 shared task and demonstrate that our multi-view detector maintains strong performance under the considered attacks, outperforming existing approaches against held out attacks.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Feature extraction for plant growth estimation

Precision agriculture requires the estimation of plant growth stages in real-time. When the plant growth stage is known, the wastage of resources in cultivation, such as nutrients and water, is reduced as only the required resources need to be supplied. Plants at different growth stages, however, have similar morphological features, which can make autonomous growth stage estimation difficult. This paper presents two feature extraction methods for growth stage estimation: one that uses a bank of Gabor filters and morphological operations, and the other that uses pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transfer learning. We test these methods on a publicly available plant growth stage dataset (``bccr-segset``) for two species, canola and radish, grown and captured under indoor conditions. The two proposed feature extraction methods are compared, using support vector machines and boosted trees as classifiers. We find that both methods are suitable for real-time applications, and that CNN features outperform the hand-crafted features, both with regard to speed and accuracy. The best system (VGG-19 features, classified with a radial basis function support vector machine) obtained an accuracy of 98.4% for both species, processing an image in 0.08 seconds.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

From inverse problems to neural operators: prediction, mechanism, and generalization of data-driven models

作者:

arXiv:2606.08956v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientists have historically relied on mathematical models based on differential equations to relate system inputs – forces, fluxes, or heat sources – to outputs, such as displacement, velocity, concentration, and temperature. These models rely on deep domain knowledge to determine the form of the governing differential equation, which is then calibrated with data by solving an inverse problem. In recent years, the field of Scientific Machine Learning has introduced a variety of alternative modeling strategies for physical systems. A method called Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics learns the governing equation as a sparse linear combination of terms in a user-defined library. Neural Ordinary Differential Equations construct the governing equation by taking in the state and its derivatives at the input layer of a neural network. Entirely foregoing the modeling framework of differential equations, neural operators directly learn a non-linear mapping between the system inputs and outputs. From inverse problems to neural operators, all of these modeling strategies can be conceptualized as data-driven machinery to predict a system's response over a range of inputs. It is then natural to wonder how exactly these various strategies relate to each other, and whether they can be neatly taxonomized. Drawing from the philosophical literature on scientific models, we argue that many model types have a common structure, differing only in the assumed model class of the input-output relation they define. Connecting to philosophical ideas on mechanism, and arguing that data from physical systems arises from solutions to parsimonious differential equations, we propose that only certain models are capable of mechanism discovery, and thus generalization. Our analysis is intended to unite apparently disparate modeling strategies and provide insight into their appropriate use cases.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Revealing competitive interfacial reactions in high-energy Li–S batteries

作者:

Charge transfer at solid–liquid interfaces plays a critical role in various energy-storage systems1, particularly under dynamically varying reactant concentrations. Deciphering these intricate reaction pathways remains a substantial challenge, notably in lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries, in which achieving high energy density requires efficient conversion of highly concentrated lithium polysulfides (LiPSs)2,3. However, the mechanisms governing lithium sulfide (Li2S) deposition and dissolution under lean electrolyte conditions remain poorly understood. Here, using in situ liquid-cell electron microscopy, we directly visualize concentration-driven phase segregation at the electrode–electrolyte interface. Within these high-concentration interfacial layers (HCILs), competitive surface and solution dictate the charge-transfer dynamics and ultimately govern Li2S deposition at different phase boundaries. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the aggregation of LiPSs alters molecular geometry, electronic properties and orbital hybridization, collectively facilitating charge transfer through highly concentrated LiPSs clusters. Guided by these insights, we design optimized electrodes that balance interfacial reaction pathways, enabling fast charging (4 C, 26.8 mA cm−2) and achieving high energy densities exceeding 400 Wh kg−1. These findings provide mechanistic understanding of interfacial reactions under practical working conditions and offer a design strategy to advance Li–S batteries. Visualization of concentration-driven phase segregation within high-concentration interfacial layers in the context of high-energy lithium–sulfur batteries using liquid-cell electrochemical transmission electron microscopy reveals competitive interfacial reactions under lean electrolyte conditions at different phase boundaries.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Leave-One-Out-, Bootstrap- and Cross-Conformal Anomaly Detectors

arXiv:2402.16388v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The need for uncertainty quantification in anomaly detection systems has become increasingly important. In this context, effectively controlling Type I error rates without inflating Type II error rates in these systems can build trust and reduce costs associated with false discoveries. The field of conformal anomaly detection emerges as a promising approach for providing respective statistical and finite-sample validity guarantees through model calibration. However, reliance on calibration data imposes practical limitations, especially in low-data regimes. In this work, we formally define and evaluate leave-one-out-, bootstrap-, and cross-conformal methods for conformal anomaly detection, building on methods from the field of conformal prediction. Looking beyond the classical split-conformal approach, we show that derived methods for calculating resampling-conformal $p$-values offer a practical compromise between the data efficiency of full-conformal (transductive) approaches and the computational efficiency of split-conformal (inductive) methods. We validate derived methods and quantify their improvements for a range of one-class classifiers and datasets.

06.
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.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Distinguishing quantum processes with bounded coherent memory

arXiv:2606.19511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distinguishing multi-time quantum processes is a fundamental task underlying the diagnosis, benchmarking, and learning of temporally correlated quantum dynamics. The standard benchmark for distinguishing two processes is the strategy-norm distance, which optimizes over arbitrary adaptive probing strategies but can require large coherent memory and time-dependent control. We introduce machines for autonomous distinction~($\mathsf{MAD}$s): probing strategies that apply the same quantum instrument at each time step, retain the full classical outcome record, and carry a coherent memory of dimension $d_A$. Optimizing over these strategies defines a memory-parametrized distinguishability measure, $d^{(N)}_{\mathsf{MAD}}(\mathbf{P}^N,\mathbf{Q}^N;d_A)$. We show that the resulting hierarchy is monotone in coherent memory and complete at finite times. Specifically, any admissible $N$-step probing strategy can be compiled into a single $\mathsf{MAD}$ with an internal counter and sufficiently large coherent memory, so the hierarchy saturates the strategy-norm benchmark. For recurrent processes generated by repeated system–environment interactions, we derive a single-step description that separates the generation of new distinguishing information from the propagation and decay of information generated at earlier times. Numerical results in a repeated-interaction model show that increasing coherent memory systematically improves the $\mathsf{MAD}$ success probability and closes the gap to the strategy-norm distance while remaining substantially more tractable to evaluate. $\mathsf{MAD}$ distinguishability therefore provides an operational and scalable framework for quantifying what can be learned about genuinely multi-time quantum processes with bounded coherent memory.

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

Adaptive Weighted Averaging

arXiv:2606.12763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of selecting the largest among $n$ unknown values $x_1,\dots,x_n$ given only a single unbiased estimate $y_i$ for each $x_i$. We design strategies that are simultaneously admissible (not uniformly dominated by any other strategy) and also never worse than a given baseline such as uniform random selection. We provide an application to stochastic optimization, where we obtain online-to-batch conversion bounds with a desirable "no-compromise" guarantee: they are never worse than standard random iterate selection, and yet can be significantly better in benign settings.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Do Time Series Foundation Model Benchmarks Hide Regime-Dependent Failures? Evidence from Traffic Speed Forecasting

arXiv:2606.18367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard benchmarks evaluate time series foundation models (TSFMs) using aggregate metrics, but these can mask severe failures in critical operating regimes. We introduce regime-stratified evaluation and apply it to three TSFMs on two standard traffic speed benchmarks. Traffic exhibits abrupt regime switching between free-flow and congested states, producing bimodal speed distributions during transitions. When we stratify by traffic regime, both accuracy and prediction-interval coverage degrade sharply during transitions: transition-regime MAE reaches 11 mph (versus 3 mph overall), and empirical coverage of 90% prediction intervals drops as low as 55%. These failures are invisible in aggregate metrics because free-flow observations dominate the sample. A simple historical conditional baseline (sampling from per-sensor training distributions) achieves better transition coverage than any TSFM, but has far worse overall accuracy. We propose bimodal mixture augmentation (BMA), a post-hoc method that combines TSFM forecasts with historical distributional knowledge, approaching the historical baseline's transition coverage while preserving the TSFM's accuracy. Our results suggest that TSFM benchmarks should incorporate regime-aware evaluation to surface failures that aggregate metrics hide.

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

Think Fast: Estimating No-CoT Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models

arXiv:2606.07157v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many efforts to ensure frontier AI models are safe rely on monitoring their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. If models become able to perform sufficiently complex reasoning internally, without explicit thinking tokens, this would undermine such oversight. We measure how well frontier models reason without CoT across a suite of over 30,000 questions spanning 43 benchmarks in domains including math, coding, puzzles, causality, theory-of-mind, and strategic reasoning. To compare models against humans, we estimate the $50\%$-task-completion time horizon (TH): the human time required for tasks a model completes with $50\%$ success rate. We complement this with a $50\%$ reasoning token horizon: the minimum number of o3-mini reasoning tokens needed for tasks a model solves with $50\%$ success rate. We find that the no-CoT $50\%$ TH of frontier models has been doubling roughly every year over the past six years, with GPT-5.5's TH reaching over 3 minutes and reasoning token horizon exceeding 1,500 tokens. Our median estimates predict that frontier no-CoT THs could exceed 7 minutes by 2028, and 25 minutes by 2030, though these projections carry substantial uncertainty. We recommend frontier developers track this explicitly.

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

Can Post-Training Turn LLMs into Good Medical Coders? An Empirical Study of Generative ICD Coding

Automated International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding is a core medical-coding task for billing, epidemiology, and clinical decision support. Generative large language models (LLMs) are often reported as weak medical coders, but this finding mainly comes from inference-time settings such as prompting, retrieval, reranking, or tool use, leaving the role of task-specific post-training underexplored. We present a controlled empirical study of post-training for generative ICD coding, comparing discriminative baselines with LLM coders across prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning under a common protocol and metric set. To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate RL-based post-training for generative LLM coders in ICD coding. We further introduce PHI, a diagnostic curriculum that extends GRPO to refine missed-code cases. Our results show that prompting-only evaluation substantially underestimates the potential of LLMs for ICD coding. SFT provides the main capability jump, GRPO further improves code-set prediction beyond SFT, and PHI provides targeted gains on macro-level performance. These findings suggest that the main bottleneck is not the generative formulation alone, but how the model is adapted and optimized for full-taxonomy recall. We release our code, data splits, and checkpoints at https://github.com/AlexandreWANG915/LLM4ICD.

13.
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.

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

Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training for Visuomotor Control

Existing vision encoders for robotics face a fundamental bottleneck: robotic datasets lack the scale necessary for large-scale pre-training. Prior work circumvents this data scarcity by turning to internet-scale image and language data or egocentric human video. While these models show promise, neither paradigm learns from paired vision and action data, which downstream visuomotor control policies require. However, robot trajectories, the most direct source of this paired signal, are not available at pre-training scale, motivating us to extract action signals from abundant human video instead. To this end, we introduce CAIP (Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training), a vision encoder that treats human hand poses from large-scale egocentric video as a proxy for end-effector actions. By extracting 3D hand keypoints, a representation that aligns naturally with downstream robot action spaces, CAIP learns a unified action-image representation through a contrastive objective. Leveraging 32,041 hours of egocentric human video and only 88 hours of robotic manipulation data, CAIP outperforms state-of-the-art vision encoders including DINOv2, SigLIP, MVP, and R3M. Evaluated on a challenging real-world dexterous manipulation setup using Dexmate Vega and Sharpa Wave hands, CAIP yields performance gains of more than 30% on tasks involving folding, pouring, and fine-grained manipulation. Our results show that our method of contrastive action-centric pre-training yields a scalable path to achieving robust visual representations better suited for physical interaction.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

APOSM: Pairwise preference learning improves generative small-molecule design

Small-molecule lead refinement is constrained by the cost of synthesizing and assaying candidates, making the surrogate models that prioritize compounds for experimental testing central to the design process. The reliability of such surrogates is limited by the noise and sparsity of screening measurements. We show that training the surrogate on pairwise comparisons between candidate molecules, rather than on absolute predicted scores, yields a substantially more reliable signal for active candidate selection in this regime. We develop APOSM, an active-learning algorithm that combines a fragment-based generator, a pairwise message-passing graph neural network surrogate, and probabilistic ranking inside a batched acquisition loop. On the Practical Molecular Optimization benchmark and a GPCR ligand rediscovery task, APOSM improves target attainment and sampling efficiency over unguided fragment-based optimization, the Graph-GA genetic algorithm, and a pointwise-regression ablation, with the largest gains on tasks where absolute scores are hardest to calibrate.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Spatiotemporal downscaling and nowcasting of urban land surface temperatures with deep neural networks

arXiv:2605.13566v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key variable for various applications, such as urban climate and ecology studies. Yet, existing satellite-derived LST products provide either high spatial or high temporal resolution, resulting in a fundamental trade-off between the two. To address this trade-off, we combine observations from a geostationary and a polar orbiting satellite and provide LST fields at high spatial and high temporal resolution (1 km at 15-min intervals). We demonstrate their application for intraday forecasting of LSTs. To estimate LST fields at high spatiotemporal resolution, a U-Net model is trained to map LST fields from SEVIRI/MSG (3 km and 15 min resolution) to LST fields from Terra/Aqua MODIS (1 km, 4 overpasses per day) that are collocated in space and time. The presented model has been trained on LSTs across large European cities with a population exceeding 1 million inhabitants, and achieves an RMSE = $1.92${\deg}C and near-zero bias MBE = $0.01${\deg}C on the hold-out test set. As a second step, we present an LST nowcasting model based on ConvLSTM architecture, trained across downscaled LST fields with forecast lead times of 15 to 75 minutes. The nowcasting model outperforms a persistence and a Climatological Rolling Median benchmarks, with RMSEs of $0.57$ to $1.15${\deg}C for the considered lead times and biases ranging from $-0.1$ to $0.14${\deg}C. An additional validation conducted against independent MODIS overpasses confirms robust performance. Our LST forecast model at high spatiotemporal resolution is directly applicable to operational satellite-based LST monitoring.

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

MiniPIC: Flexible Position-Independent Caching in <100LOC

Retrieval-augmented and agentic workloads repeatedly prefill recurring predictable structured inputs (which we call "spans") such as documents and code files. Yet, prefix caching in engines such as vLLM cannot reuse their KV entries unless they share identical prefixes with another request, while Position-Independent Caching (PIC) implementations within production-grade inference servers typically either require substantial server code changes or keep KV state outside the server, incurring host-to-device transfer overhead. We present Minimalistic PIC (MiniPIC): a minimal, flexible and fast vLLM design built from two ingredients: positional-encoding-free KV cache and user-controlled cache-reuse primitives. MiniPIC stores unrotated K vectors in the KV cache, applies RoPE to K tiles inside attention using per-request logical positions, and exposes three user-facing and token-level primitives: block-aligned padding, span separator (SSep), and prompt depend (PDep), that modify hashing behavior and effective block-level causal attention structure. With fewer than 100 lines of core-engine changes plus a custom attention backend, these primitives are sufficient to realize multiple PIC methods, including Block-Attention, EPIC, and Prompt Cache, within the same running vLLM instance, while natively integrating with KV cache CPU offload implementations. On 2WikiMultihopQA, MiniPIC with interleaved scheduling improves prefill throughput by 49% over baseline vLLM, reduces cached-span time-to-first-token by up to two orders of magnitude, preserves the linear prefill scaling of uncached spans, and incurs only 5.7% worst-case overhead.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Care Delivery Gap framework: a proof-of-concept patient-reported measure of guideline-referenced care-process omissions in sickle cell disease

Abstract Background:Sickle cell disease (SCD) is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, where delivery of guideline-referenced care remains challenging. Current evaluation approaches rely largely on access indicators and clinical outcomes, which do not directly measure care delivery. We developed the Care Delivery Gap (CDG) framework, a patient-reported approach for identifying care-process omissions, and conducted a proof-of-concept study to assess feasibility and explore variation across income strata. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional framework-development study involving a proof-of-concept sample of 52 individuals with SCD or caregivers recruited through clinics and moderated SCD communities across Africa, North America, and Europe between June 2025 and March 2026. The CDG framework assessed patient-reported omissions in specialist involvement, follow-up continuity, cardiovascular screening, and biochemical surveillance. Analyses were descriptive. Results: Substantial multi-domain care-process omissions were identified despite high reported healthcare engagement. Across geographic income strata, cardiovascular screening was reported by 4/35 (11%) LMIC versus 16/17 (94%) HIC participants, and regular follow-up within the preceding 12 months by 14/35 (40%) versus 16/17 (94%), respectively. High CDG scores, representing 1 omissions across three or four domains, occurred in 20/35 (57%) LMIC compared with 1/17 (6%) HIC participants. Similar disparities were observed across specialist review and vitamin B12 surveillance domains. Conclusion: A structured patient-reported framework identified multi-domain omissions in guideline-referenced SCD care, including among individuals reporting healthcare access. The divergence between access indicators and reported care delivery suggests that service contact alone may not reflect care quality. The framework provides a feasible foundation for future process-level quality measurement in high-burden settings.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Multi-agent rendezvous in fluid flows via reinforcement learning

arXiv:2606.11274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rendezvous is a critical task for multi-agent systems, requiring agents to coordinate to meet at an unspecified location. However, achieving this in fluid environments presents a challenge, as it remains unclear how agents can exploit underlying fluid kinematics to facilitate convergence. In this study, we adopt a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to develop physics-informed rendezvous strategies in vortical flows. Compared to a naive strategy, where agents navigate toward their counterparts, MARL strategies significantly improve the rendezvous rate. MARL strategies also show transferability across varying vortex intensities, vortex scales, and swarm sizes. By breaking the symmetry of the state-action map, MARL strategy leverages a non-intuitive mechanism that prevents agents from becoming trapped in separate vortices, thereby enhancing rendezvous success. Additionally, a heuristic strategy is extracted from the learned strategy and also outperforms the naive strategy. Furthermore, a theoretical analysis demonstrates that fluid deformation impedes the rendezvous process. Large finite-time Lyapunov exponents identify where fluid effects separate adjacent agents, suggesting that targets should be planned in weak-deformation regions. Our findings reveal the important role that agent-fluid interactions play in multi-agent tasks and highlight the MARL capability to explore swarm intelligence in complex flow environments.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GeoDisaster: Benchmarking Orchestrated Agents for Operational Disaster Geo-Intelligence

Remote-sensing vision-language models (RS-VLMs) have advanced Earth-observation analysis toward visual interpretation and instruction-following, yet fall short of operational geo-intelligence, which demands tool-grounded spatial reasoning and structured, evidence-backed decisions. We introduce GeoDisaster, an operational geospatial disaster reasoning benchmark with 2,921 verified instances across 43 question types and five task families: deforestation monitoring, multi-hazard analysis, building-damage assessment, flood-safe routing, and Sentinel-1 SAR flood monitoring. Instances integrate heterogeneous EO/GIS evidence-optical and SAR imagery, raster masks, vector geometries, road networks, and exposure layers-spanning hazard detection, damage assessment, exposure estimation, and diagnostic report generation. Ground-truth answers are grounded in executable geospatial workflows and deterministic consistency checks, removing the need for language-model annotation. We further propose an orchestrated multi-agent framework with 18 disaster-oriented tools, where role-specialized agents coordinate through explicit execution contracts, aligned via Role-Contract Expectation Alignment (RCEA): failure-aware supervised fine-tuning combined with contract-grounded reinforcement learning over dense step-level signals. Experiments show that GeoDisaster challenges existing RS-VLMs and agentic systems, while RCEA improves tool use, evidence grounding, state consistency, and decision generation.

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

Architectural Bias in Face Presentation Attack Detection: A Comparative Study of Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks

Face Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) systems constitute a critical security layer in biometric authentication; however, existing approaches exhibit systematic performance disparities across demographic groups, disproportionately affecting individuals with darker skin tones. This paper presents a comparative empirical investigation of whether Vision Transformer architectures reduce demographic bias in face PAD systems relative to convolutional baselines. Experiments are conducted on the CASIA-SURF Cross-Ethnicity Face Anti-Spoofing (CeFA) dataset. Three architectures are evaluated: a Multimodal ViT-Tiny trained from scratch, a ResNet18 CNN baseline, and a pretrained DeiT-S fine-tuned on CeFA across African, East Asian, and zero-shot Central Asian demographic groups. DeiT-S achieves the highest overall accuracy of 97.27% and the lowest EER of 0.86%, outperforming ResNet18 at 90.15% accuracy. In terms of fairness, DeiT-S reduces the inter-ethnic ACER gap between African and East Asian subjects to 0.13%, compared to 0.75% reported in an LBP-based work [6], representing an 83% reduction. Most notably, while ResNet18 records a BPCER of 10.44% on zero-shot Central Asian subjects, DeiT-S maintains 2.89% on the same unseen group, demonstrating a 3.6x generalization advantage. These results suggest that pretrained Vision Transformers achieve superior PAD accuracy, produce smaller demographic performance gaps, and generalize more equitably across unseen demographic groups, indicating that cross-demographic fairness in PAD may partly be influenced by architectural design.

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

MedCTA: A Benchmark for Clinical Tool Agents

To make clinically grounded decisions, medical AI agents are expected to go beyond simple recognition and be capable of tool retrieval, evidence acquisition, and integration. Existing benchmarks largely evaluate isolated perception or single-turn question answering, and therefore provide limited visibility into failures of planning, tool recruitment, and rollout reliability. We introduce MedCTA, a benchmark for evaluating medical tool agents on clinician-validated, step-implicit tasks grounded in realistic multimodal clinical inputs, including radiology images, pathology slides, and reports. MedCTA comprises 107 real-world clinical tasks with clinician-verified executable trajectories over 5 deployed tools, and supports process-aware evaluation of tool selection, argument validity, execution stability, trajectory fidelity, and outcome quality. We benchmark 18 open- and closed-source multimodal models and find that even frontier systems remain brittle in multi-step clinical tool use: autonomous rollouts are dominated by protocol failures, premature stopping, and incorrect tool recruitment, while gold-standard tool routing yields large but still incomplete gains. These results show that strong backbone perception does not translate into reliable agentic behavior in clinical settings. MedCTA provides a rigorous testbed for auditing, diagnosing, and advancing trustworthy medical AI agents. The dataset and evaluation suite are available at https://ivul-kaust.github.io/MedCTA/

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

Evaluating Bias in Phoneme-Based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems: An Analysis of IPA Transcription Models

The popularization of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems has increased exploration of the demographic biases related to race, age, gender, and accent, often formed from imbalanced training data. Most of these studies focused on standard grapheme-based ASR systems with comparatively little emphasis on phoneme-based systems, such as models that produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) representations. As ASR systems shift toward multilingual support and low-resource language modeling, IPA-based layers serve as a critical, language-agnostic foundation. In this study, we evaluate the performance of two state-of-the-art open-source ASR systems, WhisperIPA and ZIPA, that generate IPA transcriptions across diverse accents and language sources. Our evaluation includes existing multilingual speech corpora and demographically annotated English-language corpora. We measure model performance by comparing model-generated IPA transcriptions against grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) systems using both standard phoneme error rate (PER) and a proposed Soft PER metric that tolerates linguistically similar phoneme substitutions. Our analysis examines how performance varies across languages and demographic groups such as gender, accent, ethnicity, and age, revealing persistent disparities even after accounting for acceptable phonemic variation. These findings provide insight into potential sources of bias and inform the development of more inclusive and linguistically robust phoneme-based ASR systems. Our code and data will be made publicly available to the community.

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

OmniTraffic: A Controllable Generation Pipeline and Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Reasoning

Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics. However, existing traffic-oriented multimodal benchmarks largely emphasize passive visual recognition or isolated video understanding, offering limited support for evaluating structure-aware traffic reasoning under controlled conditions. We introduce OmniTraffic, a controllable generation pipeline and benchmark for spatio-temporal traffic reasoning. Built around 12 real-world intersections reconstructed into editable 3D traffic environments and complemented by surveillance footage from two countries, OmniTraffic supports both controlled and natural-condition evaluation. It defines a three-level task hierarchy spanning scene perception, multi-view and temporal reasoning, and decision support. Using structured traffic metadata, OmniTraffic generates synchronized multi-view VQA samples covering vehicle states, lane functions, view–BEV correspondence, temporal dynamics, and signal-phase analysis, resulting in 8M VQA samples and a 3K human-verified test set. Evaluation of eleven frontier MLLMs reveals a large human–model gap, with the most pronounced failures in topology-grounded and spatio-temporal reasoning tasks. Fine-tuning a lightweight MLLM on simulated OmniTraffic data further improves performance on real-world traffic scenes, demonstrating the value of simulation-generated supervision for traffic-specific multimodal reasoning. Beyond a fixed dataset, OmniTraffic provides an extensible pipeline with configurable intersections, camera views, traffic demands, signal phases, visual conditions, and rare events.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

HalluDesign-NA: Extending HalluDesign for De Novo Nucleic Acid Design

AlphaFold3 has revolutionized the prediction of biomolecular structures and interactions, including atomic-level modeling of nucleic acids. However, the de novo design of structured and functional nucleic acids remains a significant challenge. Here, we extend our HalluDesign framework to nucleic acid design by integrating NA-MPNN for nucleic acid sequence optimization and design. This new framework, HalluDesign-NA, enables iterative sequence-structure co-optimization, facilitating the de novo design of nucleic acids. Computational benchmarking across ssDNA, ssRNA, and aptamer design tasks demonstrates consistent improvements in confidence scores (pLDDT, ipTM), supporting the feasibility of de novo nucleic acid design under various constraints, such as sequence length, symmetry, and protein structure context. We anticipate that HalluDesign-NA will accelerate the de novo design of functional nucleic acids for applications in biotechnology and medicine. The source code for HalluDesign-NA is available at https://github.com/MinchaoFang/HalluDesign_NA.