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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Hyper3D-lite: count-preserving representation auditing for long-read multi-contact genome data

作者:

Long-read and single-molecule sequencing technologies are rapidly increasing molecule-level data, with platforms such as Oxford Nanopore, PacBio HiFi, and Roche sequencing-by-expansion advancing at different technology readiness levels. In the specific context of Pore-C and HiPore-C multi-contact chromatin-conformation assays, long-read multi-contact 3D genome assays preserve molecule-level contact context, but common downstream pairwise projections can expand one multi-contact molecule into many pair records. This creates a representation problem: apparent contact evidence can increase through the counting frame before biological interpretation begins. Hyper3D-lite addresses this problem as a representation-first audit tool for read-to-fragment-style long-read multi-contact inputs. It compares all-pair projection with CPB, a count-preserving statistical accounting reference point, and separates broad software outputs from conservative higher-order candidate calls.

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

On Pitfalls of $RemOve-And-Retrain$: Data Processing Inequality Perspective

The RemOve-And-Retrain (ROAR) benchmark is widely used to evaluate feature attribution methods, yet its validity remains underexplored from an information-theoretic perspective. We show that model- and data-agnostic post-processing of attribution maps (transformations that, by the data processing inequality, cannot add information about the decision function) can often improve ROAR scores. This means that an improved ROAR ranking is not, by itself, evidence that an attribution map carries more information about the model. We trace this failure mode to a bias toward spatially blurry masks. Experiments on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and CUB-200 show a consistent association between blurriness and ROAR performance, a pattern that also appears in the ROAD variant. We provide guidelines for more cautious removal-based benchmarking, with implications for validating mechanistic understanding of neural network internals.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

UltraEP: Unleash MoE Training and Inference on Rack-Scale Nodes with Near-Optimal Load Balancing

arXiv:2606.04101v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) is becoming pivotal for training and serving frontier MoE models, but it also amplifies device-level expert load imbalance into compute stragglers, token all-to-all bottlenecks, and activation-memory spikes. Existing balancers redistribute experts periodically based on historical load, which becomes unreliable for production deployments with non-stationary load patterns. We present UltraEP, the first exact-load, real-time balancer for large-EP MoE training and serving prefill on rack-scale nodes (RSNs). Leveraging the extended scale-up connectivity among dozens of GPUs within RSNs, UltraEP rebalances every microbatch and layer on critical paths, which requires nontrivial co-design of plan solving and expert replication communication to minimize exposed overhead. To this end, UltraEP eagerly reacts to post-gating load with an efficient quota-driven planner, and executes the resulting irregular expert-state transfers with RSN-native persistent tile streaming and relay-based fan-out mitigation. We evaluate UltraEP in a multi-RSN deployment of up to 256 GPUs, using cutting-edge MoE models from 106B to 671B parameters. Averaged across training and serving, UltraEP achieves 94.3% of the force-balanced ideal throughput, delivering 1.49$\times$ improvement over no-balancing, while reducing the final inter-rank imbalance from 1.30$-$4.01 to 1.01$-$1.04.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contactless Respiratory Monitoring on Heterogeneous Mobile Robots: A Multimodal Edge-Computing Framework

Respiratory-rate (RR) monitoring is a critical component of remote triage and victim assessment in emergency response, disaster recovery, and infectious-disease scenarios, where minimizing physical contact can reduce responder risk and improve operational safety. However, field deployment of contactless RR monitoring remains challenging due to variable illumination, posture changes, platform heterogeneity, and the impracticality of wearable sensors in hazardous environments. In this paper, we present a modality-adaptive contactless RR monitoring framework for heterogeneous mobile robots with onboard edge computing. The proposed system combines brightness-adaptive sensor selection across RGB, thermal, near-infrared (NIR), and low-light cameras, keypoint-guided chest ROI extraction for posture-robust monitoring, and a signal-quality-index (SQI)-based filtering mechanism for reliable respiratory estimation. We implement and evaluate the framework on three robotic platforms spanning quadruped and wheeled locomotion and multiple edge-computing architectures. Experiments conducted across diverse lighting conditions, subject poses, and robot-to-subject distances demonstrate that the framework generalizes across platforms without per-platform algorithmic retuning, while revealing modality-specific operational boundaries. RGB provides the broadest coverage up to 8m, NIR remains effective up to 6m, thermal is reliable only at short range, and low-light sensing supports monitoring in complete darkness up to 8m. Overall, the results demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal contactless RR monitoring on mobile robots and support its use as a foundation for autonomous triage and victim assessment in hazardous search-and-rescue settings.

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

The Register Gap: A Meaning Intelligence Framework for Nigerian Public Discourse

We introduce the Meaning Intelligence Framework (MIF), a nine-dimension annotation and evaluation schema for Nigerian public discourse that separates surface sentiment from true communicative intent. Existing benchmarks for Nigerian languages, including NaijaSenti and AfriSenti, treat sentiment classification as a three-way polarity task (positive, negative, neutral). We argue that the dominant failure mode of AI systems on Nigerian discourse is not translation failure but context failure: the same utterance carries opposite pragmatic force depending on speaker, audience, and situation. The MIF operationalises this insight across nine scored dimensions: register, surface sentiment, true intent, irony, coded subtext, risk tier, annotator confidence, speaker emotion, and recommended communications action. We construct a 30-item calibration dataset spanning Standard English, Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin, and code-mixed registers, and evaluate a frontier language model (Gemini 2.5 Flash) under zero-shot and schema-informed prompting conditions. The headline finding is the Register Gap: zero-shot register classification accuracy is 33.3%, rising to 73.3% (+40 points) when the model receives the MIF schema in-context. The composite Meaning Intelligence Score increases by 5.4 points (73.2 to 78.6) under schema-informed prompting, with the largest practical gains in register identification, coded-subtext detection (+10 points), and strategic action recommendation (+10.3 points). We release the framework specification, annotation guidelines, and the 30-item public calibration set to support reproducibility, while retaining a private holdout corpus for contamination-protected evaluation.

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

Riemann-Bench: A Benchmark for Moonshot Mathematics

arXiv:2604.06802v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent AI systems have achieved gold-medal-level performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad, demonstrating remarkable proficiency at competition-style problem solving. However, competition mathematics represents only a narrow slice of mathematical reasoning: problems are drawn from limited domains, require minimal advanced machinery, and can often reward insightful tricks over deep theoretical knowledge. We introduce Riemann-Bench, a private benchmark of expert-curated problems designed to evaluate AI systems on research-level mathematics that goes far beyond the olympiad frontier. Problems are authored by Ivy League mathematics professors, graduate students, and PhD-holding IMO medalists, and routinely took their authors weeks to solve independently. Each problem undergoes double-blind verification by two independent domain experts who must solve the problem from scratch, and yields a unique, closed-form solution assessed by programmatic verifiers. We evaluate frontier models as unconstrained research agents, with full access to coding tools, search, and open-ended reasoning, using an unbiased statistical estimator computed over 100 independent runs per problem. Our results reveal that all frontier models currently score below 10%, exposing a substantial gap between olympiad-level problem solving and genuine research-level mathematical reasoning. By keeping the benchmark fully private, we ensure that measured performance reflects authentic mathematical capability rather than memorization of training data.

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

AmchiBias: Measuring Stereotypical Bias in Goan Identity Groups with a Minimal Pair Dataset in English and Konkani

Socio-cultural stereotypical bias is an important consideration in the development and deployment of NLP systems. It is however often considered only at the national level, despite rich subnational socio-cultural structures. We present AmchiBias, the first benchmark for measuring socio-cultural stereotypical bias for the Indian state of Goa with its unique historically multicultural setting. It covers various Goan identity groups and comprises 313 minimal pairs across eight sociodemographic dimensions in both English and Devanagari Konkani. We then evaluate stereotypical bias in five multilingual encoder models on this benchmark. We find near-chance scores in Konkani, reflecting language incompetence for general multilingual models and a lack of Goan cultural competence for Indian language models. Queried in English, models with a stronger Indian language coverage show higher bias for pan-Indian groups than hyperlocal Goan groups. This suggests the English signal reflects pan-Indian pretraining associations rather than genuine Goan cultural knowledge. Our findings highlight a critical gap in low-resource multilingual NLP evaluation for hyperlocal community identities.

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

LLM-as-an-Investigator: Evidence-First Reasoning for Robust Interactive Problem Diagnosis

arXiv:2606.13220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interactive assistants for technical problem solving. However, when users provide incomplete descriptions or plausible but unverified explanations, LLMs may prematurely align with these assumptions and propose solutions before collecting sufficient evidence. We refer to this behavior as user-driven sycophancy: the tendency of an LLM to reinforce a user-provided hypothesis instead of testing alternative explanations. This paper introduces LLM-as-an-Investigator, an evidence-first agentic AI methodology for robust problem diagnosis. The approach is implemented through a Solution Investigator Agent, which estimates the ambiguity of an initial problem description, generates candidate hypotheses, asks targeted clarification questions, and updates hypothesis probabilities after each answer. Rather than producing an immediate response, the agent continues the investigation until the evidence makes one candidate explanation stronger than the alternatives. To evaluate the approach, we build a benchmark from solved technical forum threads in mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic domains. We use a three-agent evaluation pipeline in which a Problem-Solution Extractor Agent converts solved threads into structured cases, a Ground-Truth Evaluator Agent simulates the user while hiding the known solution, and the tested assistant attempts to recover the solution through dialogue. The experiments compare standard assistants, reasoning-oriented LLMs, and the proposed investigator-based model across LLM backbones. In addition to diagnostic accuracy, we analyze how standard assistants follow misleading user hypotheses in diagnostic cases. The results show that the proposed approach identifies the problem more accurately than direct prompting and reasoning-only baselines, while its evidence-first protocol helps reduce user-induced conversational bias.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

A Quantitative Analysis of Multimodal Biomarkers in Alzheimer's Disease

Despite increasing adoption of multimodal approaches in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) research – aimed at integrating molecular, structural, clinical, and genetic biomarkers to enhance disease characterization – the relationships among these modalities remain poorly understood. A systematic analysis of their dynamic interaction is essential for improving disease modeling, identifying redundant assessments, and reducing patient burden and acquisition costs. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of multimodal AD biomarkers by integrating tau-PET, structural MRI, cognitive scores (MMSE and CDR), and APOE4 data from 789 subjects drawn from the ADNI dataset. In our analyses, we (A) quantify cross-modal mutual information and explained variance to assess redundancy and predictive dependencies; (B) examine associations between tau topologies and structural atrophy across brain regions to select informative ROIs; (C) perform a statistical decomposition of the tau-cognition association into atrophy-related and atrophy-independent components; (D) and identify a dominant neurodegenerative trajectory that aligns with cognitive decline. This study provides a systematic characterization of cross-modal relationships, improving the interpretability and selection of biomarkers in AD. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/antonioscardace/Multimodal-AD.

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

Treatment Response Optimized Clinical Decision Support AI System via Digital Twin Simulation

arXiv:2606.17405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical decision support AI systems (CDSASs) must adapt to evolving patient conditions in real-time while adhering to strict safety constraints. We present an online adaptive framework that integrates Treatment Effect (TE) estimation to quantify clinical benefits, a patient Digital Twin (DT) to simulate treatment trajectories, and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for sequential decision-making. The AI system is initially trained on historical medical records and operates in a continuous learning loop. To ensure safety, a rule-based module monitors vital signs and blocks contraindicated treatments. Cases with strong internal model disagreement are flagged for clinician review, simulated in our experiments via a pre-trained outcome model. We validate our framework using both a synthetic clinical simulator and a real-world ovarian cancer dataset from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). In both simulated and clinical settings, our method demonstrated superior effectiveness and stability in recommending treatments compared to standard computational baselines. Furthermore, the AI system maintains low latency and requires expert consultation for only a minority of cases in our experimental validation, demonstrating its potential as a safe, clinician-supervised tool for personalized medicine that continuously improves through practical use.

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

Jacobian Scopes: token-level causal attributions in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) make next-token predictions based on clues present in their context, such as semantic descriptions and in-context examples. Yet, elucidating which prior tokens most strongly influence a given prediction remains challenging due to the proliferation of layers and attention heads in modern architectures. We propose Jacobian Scopes, a suite of gradient-based, token-level causal attribution methods for interpreting LLM predictions. Grounded in perturbation theory and information geometry, Jacobian Scopes quantify how input tokens influence various aspects of a model's prediction, such as specific logits, the full predictive distribution, and model uncertainty (effective temperature). Through case studies spanning instruction understanding, translation, and in-context learning (ICL), we demonstrate how Jacobian Scopes reveal implicit political biases, uncover word- and phrase-level translation strategies, and shed light on recently debated mechanisms underlying in-context time-series forecasting. To facilitate exploration of Jacobian Scopes on custom text, we open-source our implementations and provide a cloud-hosted interactive demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Typony/JacobianScopes.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Entanglement Degree, Mean Positronium Lifetime, and the $3\gamma$/$2\gamma$ Annihilation-Rate Ratio as Novel PET Biomarkers for Hypoxia – Concept, Challenges, and Predictions

作者:

arXiv:2605.00021v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This manuscript introduces a novel method to assess tissue oxygen concentration via the quantum entanglement (QE) of photons originating from positronium which is produced within the patient's body during positron emission tomography. We also investigate the possibility of assessing hypoxia by simultaneously detecting positronium lifetime and the positronium decay rate ratio. We introduce two distinct quantum sensing approaches. Method 1 utilizes the correlation between oxygen concentration and ortho-positronium (o-Ps) decay rates, relying on the simultaneous measurement of the mean o-Ps lifetime ($\tau_{\mathrm{oPs}}$) and the $3\gamma$-to-$2\gamma$ annihilation rate ratio of o-Ps ($R_{\mathrm{oPs-3\gamma/2\gamma}}$). Method 2 introduces a novel hypothesis: that the degree of QE is sensitive to the relative contribution of annihilation mechanisms (pick-off vs. conversion), which in turn depends on oxygen concentration. We derive a formula for partial pressure of oxygen ($p\mathrm{O}_2$) as a function of $R_{\mathrm{oPs-3\gamma/2\gamma}}$ and $\tau_{\mathrm{oPs}}$ and estimate the measurement accuracy required for these parameters - and for the degree of QE - to sense in-vivo oxygen pressure in the range between hypoxic and physoxic conditions. Theoretical models and quantitative estimates for $R_{\mathrm{oPs-3\gamma/2\gamma}}$, $\tau_{\mathrm{oPs}}$ and for the degree of QE ($C_{\mathrm{QE}}$ ) as a function of $p\mathrm{O}_2$ are provided for water, isopropanol, cyclohexane, isooctane, and adipose tissue. In particular, applying the formulas derived under the working hypothesis that in pick-off process the photons are not entangled, we estimated that for $p\mathrm{O}_2 = 0$, the degree of quantum entanglement $C_{\mathrm{QE}}$ is equal to 0.890 for adipose, 0.886 for isopropanol, 0.867 for water, 0.818 for cyclohexane, and 0.784 for isooctane.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Continuous Audio Thinking for Large Audio Language Models

Large audio language models (LALMs) have shown impressive capabilities on diverse audio understanding tasks, ranging from speech transcription to music analysis. However, because LALMs are typically trained to produce text-aligned responses, their hidden states are progressively shaped for text generation rather than for preserving acoustic information. As a result, the diverse acoustic content that audio carries, such as phonetic detail, prosody, sound events, affect, and pitch, is lost along the way and difficult to leverage in the response. We introduce Continuous Audio Thinking (CoAT), a framework that equips audio language models with a continuous latent workspace for organizing acoustic information prior to response generation, grounded by distillation from audio experts. Within the thinking space, the model can utilize the rich acoustic information provided by expert distillation when generating its response. Furthermore, the proposed continuous thinking block can be processed in a single prefill, so CoAT does not require additional autoregressive decoding cost over the baseline. Across three LALMs, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and Audio Flamingo~3, performance gains on a broad benchmark suite spanning audio reasoning, audio understanding, music classification, speech emotion, and speech transcription demonstrate the effectiveness of CoAT. Further analysis confirms that the auxiliary supervision propagates from the thinking positions to the model's textual responses.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SAAS: Self-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Over-Search Mitigation in Agentic Search

Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack of self-awareness leads to severe over-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novel RL framework designed to cultivate dynamic self-awareness that precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) a search boundary modeling mechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) a boundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness into trajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) a stage-wise optimization strategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoiding reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reduces over-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code and implementation details are released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

CASR: A Robust Cyclic Framework for Arbitrary Large-Scale Super-Resolution with Distribution Alignment and Self-Similarity Awareness

Arbitrary-Scale SR (ASISR) remains fundamentally limited by cross-scale distribution shift: once the inference scale leaves the training range, noise, blur, and artifacts accumulate sharply. We revisit this challenge from a cross-scale distribution transition perspective and propose CASR, a simple yet highly efficient cyclic SR framework that reformulates ultra-magnification as a sequence of in-distribution scale transitions. This design ensures stable inference at arbitrary scales while requiring only a single model. CASR tackles two major bottlenecks: distribution drift across iterations and patch-wise diffusion inconsistencies. The proposed SSAM module aligns structural distributions via superpixel aggregation, preventing error accumulation, while SARM module restores high-frequency textures by enforcing correlation-guided consistency and preserving self-similarity structure through correlation alignment. Despite using only a single model, our approach significantly reduces distribution drift, preserves long-range texture consistency, and achieves superior generalization even at extreme magnification.

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

GDGU: A Gradient Difference-based Graph Unlearning Method for Cyberattack Localization in Electric Vehicle Charging Networks

arXiv:2606.19566v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) can expose distribution feeders to cyberattacks. While machine learning methods, including graph neural networks, can localize which bus is compromised, significant challenges remain in data sharing and model training. For example, privacy regulations grant EVCS owners the right to delete their training data from a deployed model, yet retraining from scratch on every request is computationally prohibitive. To address this, we study graph unlearning (GU) for EVCS cyberattack localization, formulated as a feature-level unlearning problem on a graph-level multi-label classification task. Specifically, we propose gradient difference-based graph unlearning (GDGU), which removes the influence of the requested deletion data through a first-order parameter correction. The correction is computed from the gradient difference between the original training data and a modified dataset in which only the charging power features at the requested EVCS buses are unlearned. Then, a batch-normalization recalibration and a brief recovery fine-tuning step are applied to restore localization utility. We benchmark GDGU against two second-order GU baselines on the IEEE 34-bus, 123-bus, and 8500-node distribution networks across three graph neural network backbones and cumulative unlearning scenarios. GDGU matches the strongest baseline on localization utility and reaches forgetting fidelity close to full-retraining, while unlearning 10 to 12 times faster than retraining from scratch and using far less memory than the second-order GU baselines.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FBSDiff++: Improved Frequency Band Substitution of Diffusion Features for Efficient and Highly Controllable Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation

With large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieving significant advancements in open-domain image creation, increasing attention has been focused on their natural extension to the realm of text-driven image-to-image (I2I) translation, where a source image acts as visual guidance to the generated image in addition to the textual guidance provided by the text prompt. We propose FBSDiff, a novel framework adapting off-the-shelf T2I diffusion model into the I2I paradigm from a fresh frequency-domain perspective. Through dynamic frequency band substitution of diffusion features, FBSDiff realizes versatile and highly controllable text-driven I2I in a plug-and-play manner (without need for model training, fine-tuning, or online optimization), allowing appearance-guided, layout-guided, and contour-guided I2I translation by progressively substituting low-frequency band, mid-frequency band, and high-frequency band of latent diffusion features, respectively. In addition, FBSDiff flexibly enables continuous control over I2I correlation intensity simply by tuning the bandwidth of the substituted frequency band. To further promote image translation efficiency, flexibility, and functionality, we propose FBSDiff++ which improves upon FBSDiff mainly in three aspects: (1) accelerate inference speed by a large margin (8.9$\times$ speedup in inference) with refined model architecture; (2) improve the Frequency Band Substitution module to allow for input source images of arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio; (3) extend model functionality to enable localized image manipulation and style-specific content creation with only subtle adjustments to the core method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify superiority of FBSDiff++ in I2I translation visual quality, efficiency, versatility, and controllability compared to related advanced approaches.

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

Dense Supervision, Sparse Updates: On the Sparsity and Geometry of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.13657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (\textsc{OPD}) has recently become a prominent post-training recipe as it combines two desirable ingredients: on-policy student trajectories and dense teacher supervision, yet how this hybrid changes a model's parameters remains unclear. Across several language and vision-language model pairs and use cases, our analysis yields two main findings. On sparsity, \textsc{OPD}-style updates are small and coordinate-sparse. They are distributed across layers and are usually FFN-heavy. This sparse structure is operationally useful: training only the discovered subnetwork recovers nearly the same performance as full \textsc{OPD}. However, the sparsity-inducing SGD optimizer underperforms AdamW in our optimizer ablation, likely because dense teacher supervision preserves heterogeneous coordinate-wise gradient scales where AdamW's adaptive scaling remains useful. On geometry, the updates are numerically full-rank but spectrally concentrated; they lie mostly away from the principal singular subspaces of the source weights and fall disproportionately on coordinates where the source weights are close to zero. These findings suggest that dense teacher supervision does not turn \textsc{OPD} into ordinary dense parameter rewriting; instead, \textsc{OPD} retains important geometric signatures of on-policy post-training.

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

Near–Real-Time Conflict-Related Fire Detection in Sudan Using Unsupervised Deep Learning

Ongoing armed conflict in Sudan highlights the need for rapid monitoring of conflict-related fire-affected areas. Recent advances in deep learning and high-frequency satellite imagery enable near–real-time assessment of active fires and burn scars in war zones. This study presents a near–real-time monitoring approach using a lightweight Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE)–based model integrated with 4-band Planet Labs imagery at 3 m spatial resolution. We demonstrate that these impacted regions can be detected within approximately 24 to 30 hours under favorable observational conditions using accessible, commercially available satellite data. To achieve this, we adapt a VAE–based model, originally designed for 10-band imagery, to operate effectively on high-resolution 4-band inputs. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner to learn compact latent representations of nominal land-surface conditions and identify burn signatures by quantifying changes between temporally paired latent embeddings. Performance is evaluated across five case studies in Sudan and compared against cosine distance, CVA, and IR-MAD using precision, recall, F1-score, and the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) computed between temporally paired image tiles. Results show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the other methods, achieving higher recall and F1-scores while maintaining viable precision in highly imbalanced fire-detection scenarios. Experiments with 8-band imagery and temporal image sequences yield only marginal performance gains over single 4-band inputs, underscoring the effectiveness of the proposed lightweight approach for scalable, near–real-time conflict monitoring.

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

Artemis: Anatomy-Resolved inTervention for Eliminating Multimodal NeuroImage confounderS

arXiv:2606.18287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal neuroimaging, integrating functional connectivity from fMRI and structural connectivity from DTI, enables non-invasive analysis of brain networks using graph neural networks. However, demographic factors such as age and sex systematically confound the relationship between brain connectivity and clinical outcomes, causing GNNs to exploit spurious shortcuts rather than learning causally invariant representations. While recent causal GNN methods introduce causality at the graph-modeling level, their causal mechanisms remain domain-agnostic without accounting for the real-world confounders inherent in clinical neuroimaging data. Moreover, brain networks are constructed from atlas-based parcellations where each region exhibits distinct sensitivity to demographic factors, necessitating region-aware adjustment. We propose Artemis, a region-level causal framework that bridges this gap with causal intervention at each brain region independently by learning region-specific confounder representations with lightweight parameters. Our adjustment comprehensively utilized the multimodal functional and structural features for graph reasoning as a plug-in module compatible with arbitrary GNN backbones. Experiments on three benchmarks, ADNI for disease diagnosis, OASIS for dementia staging, and HCP for sex classification, demonstrate consistent improvements over representative GNN-based baselines. Multiple supporting experiments further demonstrate statistical significance and neuroscientific interpretability.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Transforming Shape Schemas with Composable Property-Graph Queries (Extended Version)

arXiv:2606.14309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Property graphs may be constrained by schemas that inform both query engines and human users about the shape of valid data, enforcing a contract between data provider and consumer. Composable property-graph queries transform input graphs into output graphs. Then, the question arises of which schema can be expected after one (or several) transformation steps. We investigate how schema constraints can be inferred given an input schema and a transforming query. Specifically, we propose a reasoning procedure that, given an input schema in ProGS and a query in G-CORE infers an output schema. Since graph updates will happen frequently, our inference procedure does not rely on graph instances, such that the computed output schema applies to all graphs originating from any input graph complying with the input schema. Related work has addressed this problem for SPARQL CONSTRUCT queries, encoding it in Description Logics (DLs) so that the output schema is entailed by axioms inferred from input schema and queries. Property graphs and their queries, however, complicate the matter, as property graphs feature label and property annotations as well as first-class edges. Thus, reification has to be used in one way or another, though available DLs lack the means to encode such features directly. We approach this novel challenge via a family of mappings for i) property graphs reified in RDF, aligned with ii) a mapping from ProGS to SHACL and iii) a mapping from G-CORE to SPARQL CONSTRUCT queries. In this manner, schema inference for property graphs becomes manageable, as we break apart the problem through the extra mapping layer and utilize efficient DL reasoners. We develop the metatheory regarding the soundness of inferred schema constraints and the semantic equivalence of mapped schemas and queries.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Statistical Mechanics and Symmetries of Non-Abelian Anyon Proliferation: From Deformation to Decoherence

arXiv:2606.12527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Topological quantum computation relies on braiding non-Abelian anyons, but requires the underlying topological order to survive imperfect state preparation and environmental noise. We show that the instability of topological order to wavefunction deformations and to decoherence, with the latter probed by syndrome distributions, are generically captured by stat-mech models whose symmetries naturally expose the corrupting anyonic excitations. As an example, we combine this framework with Monte-Carlo simulations to resolve the stability of $D_4$ topological order under deformations and quantum channels that proliferate multiple non-Abelian anyon species that individually are unable to condense. We show that beyond a finite threshold, proliferation of two non-Abelian anyon species parasitically condenses a shared Abelian-anyon fusion outcome, destroying the topological order. Our symmetry-based approach sharply differentiates the resulting trivial phase from that obtained by condensing all Abelian charges; in other words, the trivial phase "remembers" which anyons condensed. This framework provides a first step into identifying the relevant symmetry for optimal decoders, conditioned on syndrome measurements, of non-Abelian topological order.

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

MentisOculi: Revealing the Limits of Reasoning with Mental Imagery

Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation. This shift has sparked interest in using intermediate visualizations as a reasoning aid, akin to human mental imagery. Central to this idea is the ability to form, maintain, and manipulate visual representations in a goal-oriented manner. To evaluate and probe this capability, we develop MentisOculi, a procedural, stratified suite of multi-step reasoning problems amenable to visual solution, tuned to challenge frontier models. Evaluating visual strategies ranging from latent tokens to explicit generated imagery, we find they generally fail to improve performance. Analysis of UMMs specifically exposes a critical limitation: While they possess the textual reasoning capacity to solve a task and can sometimes generate correct visuals, they suffer from compounding generation errors and fail to leverage even ground-truth visualizations. Our findings suggest that despite their inherent appeal, visual thoughts do not yet benefit model reasoning. MentisOculi establishes the necessary foundation to analyze and close this gap across diverse model families.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Pulling The REINS: Training-Free Safety Alignment of Video Diffusion Models via Representation Steering

Open-weight video diffusion models can generate photorealistic unsafe content, from violence to misinformation, yet existing defenses either require expensive safety fine-tuning that degrades general capability, or apply external filters that are trivially bypassed by adversarial prompts. We present REINS (REpresentation-space INference-time Safety steering), a training-free method that aligns video diffusion models at inference time by steering their internal representations toward safe generation. Our key finding is that safety-relevant structure is linearly encoded in the hidden-state activations of video diffusion transformers, and a single direction, discovered via Supervised PCA on binary safety labels, suffices to separate safe from unsafe generation trajectories. At inference, adding this direction to hidden states at an intermediate transformer layer redirects generation from harmful content to semantically related safe alternatives, with no weight updates, no concept enumeration, and negligible computational overhead. Through mechanistic analysis, we reveal that while safety information accumulates monotonically with transformer depth, steering effectiveness peaks at intermediate layers (~50% depth), exposing a fundamental tradeoff between information availability and downstream propagation capacity. We evaluate REINS across 9 video diffusion models, multiple parameter scales (1.3B-5B), and both text-to-video and image-to-video generation, to our knowledge, the broadest safety evaluation suite in the video generation literature.

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

Counterfactual Explanations for Deep Two-Sample Testing

arXiv:2606.04009v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Two-sample testing is a fundamental tool for detecting distributional differences across scientific domains, but classical tests (including kernel-based tests) can be ineffective on high-dimensional structured data such as images. Recent deep two-sample tests improve sensitivity in these settings by learning informative representations, yet they provide limited insight into which data features drive rejection of the null hypothesis $H_0$. To address this issue, we propose a counterfactual explanation framework for deep two-sample testing that generates sample-level edits moving observations from a source group toward a target group while explicitly reducing the discrepancy measured by the test. Our method combines a diffusion autoencoder with a pretrained deep two-sample test model and optimizes a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) objective in the test model's representation space to produce plausible counterfactuals. We quantify distribution-level effects through changes in the test statistic and the resulting two-sample p-values. We evaluate the method on synthetic 2D shape datasets and two MRI cohorts. Across both settings, the counterfactual transformations consistently increase p-values relative to the original samples, indicating that the edited source set becomes statistically closer to the target distribution under the test. We measure minimality using LPIPS to ensure the counterfactuals remain close to the original samples. The resulting edits provide interpretable evidence of the features associated with the detected group differences. On MRI, the localized changes are consistent with known anatomical differences between cohorts.