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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Stability of Khintchine-type inequalities via log-monotonicity

arXiv:2606.19313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate Khintchine-type inequalities for the weighted sums $S=\sum_ka_kX_k$ of independent copies of a symmetric random variable $X$. We show how log-monotonicity of the sequence $r_k(X)=k! \mathbb{E}[X^{2k}]/(2k)!$ implies sharp comparisons between the $L_p$ and $L_2$ norms of $S$ for every even integer $p\geq 2$, extending classic Khintchine-type inequalities and yielding new results in the log-convex setting. We also investigate the stability of our inequalities. Our first stability inequality sharpens the classic inequality by a deviation of the coefficient vector from the coordinate extremizers, while the second quantifies deviation from the Gaussian limit. Our results recover recent stability inequalities for random signs and apply to a broad class of distributions, including type-$\mathscr{L}$ random variables, ultra sub-Gaussian random variables and Gaussian mixtures.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Neural Correlates of Human Food Memory link to Microbial, Homeostatic, and Hedonic Signals: Evidence from a Prebiotic Randomized Clinical Trial

Background Homeostatic and hedonic brain circuits regulate eating behavior but also shape how food memories are encoded and retrieved. Objective We examined neural correlates during food memory encoding and retrieval during functional MRI before and after a 14-day prebiotic intervention in a preregistered, double-blind crossover trial (NCT03829189). Design 55 healthy adults with overweight (19 females, age 28{+/-}6.5, BMI 25-30 kg/m2) underwent 3 Tesla task-based functional MRI before and after dietary intervention of prebiotic (30g inulin/day) or equicaloric placebo for 14 days. Peripheral metabolic, short-chain fatty acids (SCFA), and microbial markers using 16S rRNA analysis were assessed in fasting blood and feces. Results Food memory was enhanced by assigned reward value and engaged brain activity in hedonic regions, including the nucleus accumbens, orbitofrontal cortex, caudate, cingulate, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and ventral tegmental area, as well as homeostatic and memory-related such as the hypothalamus and the hippocampus. Higher neural activations during food encoding were related to higher Actinobacteriota abundance, fecal SCFA acetate, and creatinine levels, and lower ghrelin levels. Activations in reward-related and homeostatic brain areas partially correlated with insulin, glucagon-like peptide-1, leptin, and thyroid-stimulating hormone levels. Neural activations related to food memory decreased after prebiotic intervention. The prebiotic supplementation induced decrease of hippocampal activity during food encoding related to changes in gut microbiota Firmicutes abundance. Conclusions This study indicates that neuronal food-related memory processes depend on homeostatic and hedonic brain signals modulated by the gut-brain axis. Our findings raise implications for the treatment of obesity and substance use disorder.

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

SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). Tool-augmented agents attempt to address this by augmenting VLMs with specialist perception modules, yet their effectiveness is bounded by the action interface through which those tools are invoked. In this work, we study how the design of this interface shapes the agent's capacity for open-ended spatial reasoning. Existing spatial agents either employ single-pass code execution, which commits to a full analysis strategy before any intermediate result is observed, or rely on a structured tool-call interface that often offers less flexibility for freely composing operations or tailoring the analysis to each task. Both designs offer limited flexibility for open-ended, complex 3D/4D spatial reasoning. We therefore propose SpatialClaw, a training-free framework for spatial reasoning that adopts code as the action interface. SpatialClaw maintains a stateful Python kernel pre-loaded with input frames and a suite of perception and geometry primitives, letting a VLM-backed agent write one executable cell per step conditioned on all prior outputs, enabling the agent to flexibly compose and manipulate perception results and adapt its analysis to both intermediate text and visual observations and the demands of each problem. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks spanning a broad range of static and dynamic 3D/4D spatial reasoning tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the recent spatial agent by +11.2 points, with consistent gains across six VLM backbones from two model families without any benchmark- or model-specific adaptation.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

ORCA: A Platform for Open-Source Dexterity Research

arXiv:2606.14561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotics manipulation research increasingly focuses on two-finger parallel grippers for their effectiveness, affordability, and ease of teleoperation. Grippers are nonetheless limited by their form factor, often requiring bimanual setups even for simple reorientation tasks. Anthropomorphic hands are a more natural platform for dexterous robot learning – closer to the human hand, and capable of learning from human video – yet they remain hard to use in learning research: even where open and accessible hand hardware exists, the software for control, simulation, teleoperation, and retargeting is scattered in one-off code bases, and largely disconnected from the robot-learning ecosystem. In this work, we introduce the \orca~learning stack, an open-source research stack for dexterity as a first-class robot learning domain. Our \orca~stack unifies low-level control, simulation, teleoperation from a range of consumer platforms, and hand retargeting, behind a single interface, and integrates natively with popular robot-learning frameworks such as \lerobot, so dexterous hand researchers can leverage the same data, training, and evaluation pipelines used for non-dexterous robot learning. We demonstrate a complete end-to-end workflow, collecting expert demonstrations of an in-hand reorientation task by teleoperation with a consumer-grade VR headset, training an autonomous policy with \lerobot, and evaluating the learned policy in a fully reproducible and observable setup. We open-source the entire stack as a shared, reproducible foundation for dexterous-manipulation research.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

HeatKV: Head-tuned KV-cache Compression for Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models have recently demonstrated impressive image generation quality while maintaining low latency. However, they suffer from severe KV-cache memory constraints, often requiring gigabytes of memory per generated image. We introduce HeatKV, a novel compression method that adapts cache allocation in each head based on its attention to previously generated scales. Using a small offline calibration set, the attention heads are ranked according to their attention scores over prior scales. Based on this ranking, we construct a static pruning schedule tailored to a given memory budget. Applied to the Infinity-2B model, HeatKV achieves $2 \times$ higher compression ratio in memory allocation for KV cache compared to existing methods, while maintaining similar or better image fidelity, prompt alignment and human perception score. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) for VAR model KV-cache compression, showcasing the effectiveness of fine-grained, head-specific cache allocation. Code and calibration script available at https://github.com/arm-research/heatkv.

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

LLMs on Tabular Data with Limited Semantics: Evidence from Industrial Car Retrofit Prediction

arXiv:2606.15314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Industrial retrofit planning depends on structured operational data rather than free text: planners must estimate whether a newly registered prototype will require a retrofit, which retrofit package it will need, and how long the work will take. We study an industrial dataset linking a prototype-registration system (284,271 vehicles) with a retrofit-management system (48,716 cleaned visits), and compare strong tabular machine learning baselines with three LLM-based strategies on row-serialized inputs: embedding features (Amazon Titan), direct prompted classification (Claude Sonnet 4), and an ML+LLM stacking approach. Across binary occurrence prediction, 15-way retrofit-type classification, per-visit duration regression, and an aggregated monthly benchmark, classical tree ensembles remain the strongest standalone models. However, the LLM results reveal a consistent pattern: embeddings remain useful on tables (binary AUC = 0.982), direct prompting collapses once semantic signal is stripped by hashing (binary AUC = 0.500; multiclass weighted F1 = 0.018), and hybrid stacking yields the best manually built multiclass model (weighted F1 = 0.626). On the monthly benchmark, lag-based machine learning outperforms time-series foundation models, though Chronos-small remains competitive in zero-shot forecasting. The results suggest that on privacy-constrained industrial tables, LLMs are more effective as complementary components than as replacements for strong tabular baselines.

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

Faithful by Construction: Claim-Anchored Attribution for Multi-Document Summarization

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End-to-end large language models (LLMs) produce fluent multi-document summaries but remain prone to hallucination, and the attributions they offer are typically coarse (whole documents or passages) and generated post hoc, leaving each summary statement hard to verify. We revisit the modular Extract–Select–Rewrite paradigm and recast its intermediate representation as the unit of attribution. We present CAMS, a Claim-Anchored Multi-document Summarization framework that (i) extracts atomic claims with token-level provenance from every source document, (ii) clusters equivalent claims across documents while flagging inter-source conflicts, (iii) selects a support-aware and salient subset, and (iv) rewrites the selection into a summary in which every sentence is anchored to a support-checked claim that links back to one or more source spans. Because content is localized before it is realized, the pipeline is attribution-oriented by construction and faithfulness-oriented by construction: it structurally preserves fine-grained, multi-source traceability while using support-aware selection, constrained rewriting, and verification to encourage, rather than guarantee, factual faithfulness. We evaluate quality, faithfulness, and localization on MultiNews, analyze conflict handling on DiverseSumm, and test zero-shot transfer on WCEP, using a two-regime protocol that separates reference-free citation quality from gold-aligned localization accuracy, and we add an evaluator-decoupled audit that tests citation precision with a support model never used for selection or verification. CAMS matches strong end-to-end and span-attribution baselines on summary quality while substantially improving faithfulness and citation precision, lifting multi-source attribution accuracy by roughly two-thirds, and exposing a controllable faithfulness–coverage trade-off that end-to-end models leave implicit.

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

The Long Tail, Not the Front Page: Cold-Start Prediction of Crowd Highlight Salience

A social highlighter's most useful signal – which passages a crowd of readers marks – exists only for documents people have already read. Can the aggregate crowd salience of a document be predicted from its text before its marks accumulate? Prior work on this data found that zero-shot language models recover highlight locations worse than a trivial lead (position) baseline, so we ask whether a model trained on the highlight corpus can beat that baseline. Using a pre-registered ladder of models and a by-document cluster bootstrap, we find a small but robust edge: a logistic ranker over sentence embeddings and positional/contextual features beats the lead baseline by +0.044 average precision (95% CI [+0.029, +0.058]; clears a pre-registered margin delta=0.03 in 97% of resamples, and stable across pipeline re-runs). Two unsupervised extractive baselines (centroid, LexRank-style centrality) lose to lead, and the trained model beats them by +0.108, so the edge is not recovered by generic unsupervised proxies – it reflects learning from real reader marks. In product terms, precision@3 rises from 0.25 to 0.39 (+55% relative) and the model beats lead on 69% of documents. An ablation attributes the edge to the raw embedding (+0.014) and training augmentation (+0.010), each with a positive CI. The edge is not a temporal-generalization failure, and we find no evidence that content drift or near-duplicate leakage explains it. A standardized regression shows the advantage is governed mainly by document popularity (lower popularity, larger edge) and by label reliability. It nearly vanishes only on the most popular content; there it is the lead baseline that strengthens, not the model that weakens. Because our evaluation conditions on documents that eventually accumulated readers, these results are a retrospective cold-start simulation.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ToolGrad: Efficient Tool-use Dataset Generation with Textual "Gradients"

Prior work synthesizes tool-use LLM datasets by first generating a user query, followed by complex tool-use annotations like depth-first search (DFS). This leads to inevitable annotation failures and low efficiency in data generation. We introduce ToolGrad, an agentic framework that inverts this paradigm. ToolGrad first constructs valid tool-use chains through an iterative process guided by textual "gradients", and then synthesizes corresponding user queries. This "answer-first" approach led to ToolGrad-500, a dataset generated with more complex tool use, lower cost, and almost 100% pass rate. Experiments show that ToolGrad models outperform those trained on expensive baseline datasets and proprietary LLMs. The ToolGrad source code, dataset, and models are available at https://github.com/zhongyi-zhou/toolgrad.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Clusters are All You Need: Pre-Training the Tsetlin Machine with Semantic Clusters from Language Models for Interpretability

Pre-trained language models such as BERT achieve strong text classification performance but lack transparency, limiting their use in high-stakes settings. The Tsetlin Machine (TM) offers fully interpretable, clause-based reasoning but captures little semantic information, and prior attempts to bridge the two rely on static word embeddings that miss contextual meaning. We propose a semantic pre-training framework that transfers knowledge from a pre-trained language model into a TM without using embeddings. Text samples are grouped into semantically coherent clusters with K-means or Top2Vec, and the resulting cluster-sample pairs pre-train a non-negated TM with enhanced Type I feedback. The TM thereby learns interpretable semantic keywords that are fine-tuned on downstream tasks. Across five datasets, our method substantially outperforms vanilla and embedding-based TMs and reaches performance competitive with BERT while remaining interpretable.

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

Locally Acting Grover Mixers for Constraint-Preserving QAOA

arXiv:2606.11530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Grover mixer quantum alternating operator ansatz (GM-QAOA) employs the Grover mixer to confine the quantum evolution to the feasible subspace defined by the problem. Its mixing unitary, however, requires a global multi-controlled phase-shift gate acting on all qubits, resulting in substantial circuit overhead on near-term quantum devices. In this work, we propose locally acting Grover mixers tailored to initial states that admit a product structure over disjoint qubit subsystems, which may be obtained by encoding only a subset of problem constraints into the initial state preparation. The proposed method preserves the search space defined by the initial state while significantly lowering implementation cost, as the global multi-controlled phase-shift gate is replaced with local operations on disjoint subsystems. Numerical simulations on the exact-cover problem and the traveling salesman problem (TSP) demonstrate that the proposed method achieves convergence behavior comparable to that of the original GM-QAOA, while using shallower circuits with fewer gates. We further compare two constraint encoding strategies for the TSP, encoding only a subset of constraints versus all constraints into the initial state preparation, and show that the former combined with the proposed mixer yields markedly more compact circuits at the point where comparable solution quality is achieved.

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

SAT, MaxSAT, and SMT for QLDPC Distance Computation: A Large-Scale Empirical Study

arXiv:2606.12445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exact distance computation for quantum LDPC (QLDPC) codes plays a central role in validating candidate fault-tolerant quantum-code constructions, yet the computational structure of this problem remains poorly understood. Despite substantial recent progress in QLDPC design, it remains unclear which algorithmic principles govern the practical scalability of exact distance computation and which classes of exact solvers are best suited to this task. To address these questions, we conduct a systematic study of SAT- and MaxSAT-based formulations for exact QLDPC distance computation across representative codes. We further compare these formulations against several established exact-distance approaches in order to better understand the algorithmic landscape of exact QLDPC distance computation. Our study challenges and refines several prevailing intuitions about exact QLDPC distance computation. First, despite the XOR-rich structure of QLDPC parity checks, practical scalability appears to be governed more by the handling of cardinality constraints and optimization bounds than by parity reasoning alone. Accordingly, XOR-aware reasoning does not provide a systematic advantage across our benchmark suite. Second, Brouwer-Zimmermann-style search, long regarded as the benchmark paradigm for exact distance computation in sparse classical codes, no longer maintains its traditional scalability advantage in the QLDPC setting. This finding challenges the expectation that techniques successful for sparse classical codes remain dominant for QLDPC codes. Third, substantial qualitative differences arise even among MaxSAT solvers themselves. Branch-and-bound MaxSAT significantly outperforms unsat-core-based MaxSAT on challenging benchmarks, demonstrating that solver architecture and optimization strategy play a decisive role in practical scalability.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Rolling Stock Planning Using the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm

arXiv:2606.11383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rolling stock planning is a complex optimization problem in railway management that involves assigning physical trains to scheduled trips while minimizing operational costs. In this work, we address a specific instance of this problem featuring 190 trips over two days, subject to constraints such as mandatory maintenance stops. We reformulate the problem as a Maximum-Weight Independent Set (MWIS) problem on a graph where nodes represent feasible train cycles. To handle the computational complexity of the large search space, we propose a hybrid divide-and-conquer algorithm. This approach iteratively selects subgraphs and solves the MWIS problem using various solvers, including exact classical methods and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). We evaluate the algorithm's performance by comparing these methods and analyzing the scaling with respect to subgraph size, with QAOA assessed through both classical simulation and execution on a quantum device (IQM Emerald). Our results indicate that increasing the subgraph size generally improves solution quality, demonstrating that the hybrid framework can effectively bridge the gap between polynomial-time approximate solvers and exponential-time exact methods.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

UST-GNN: A Unified Spatial–Topological Graph Neural Network Framework for Urban Analytics–Demonstrated through a Case Study on Urban Health Prediction

arXiv:2504.04739v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how social, demographic, environmental, and spatial factors jointly shape urban outcomes is essential for sustainable urban development and evidence-based policy. Traditional statistical approaches often struggle to capture complex non-linear relationships, while many machine learning methods overlook the joint roles of spatial autocorrelation and network topology in urban systems. Recent advances in GeoAI have addressed these challenges only partially, often treating spatial effects, graph structure, evaluation, and interpretability separately. We present UST-GNN, a unified spatial–topological graph neural network framework that integrates neighbourhood connectivity, heterogeneous urban features, and positional/locational embeddings into a single representation. Using the MedSAT dataset, which contains over 150 environmental and socio-demographic variables and six prescription outcomes across 4,835 neighbourhoods in Greater London, UST-GNN outperforms strong statistical, geographically enhanced, and graph Machine Learning baselines, improving out-of-sample $R^2$ by 8.4–13.2\% under strict spatial cross-validation. We further introduce a lightweight principal-component module to interpret learned node embeddings geographically and relate them to policy-relevant covariates. The resulting analyses recover established patterns, offer new perspectives on debated associations, and reveal novel predictors warranting further causal investigation. Together, these findings demonstrate the value of graph-based spatial machine learning for urban health analytics, environmental inequality assessment, and evidence-based urban policy. Beyond predictive gains, UST-GNN provides a unified GeoAI analytical pipeline that can be embedded into urban digital twin workflows for scenario testing, monitoring, and data-informed decision-making for healthier, more sustainable cities.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Pulse-optimised circuit elements for scalable and noise-resilient quantum chemistry

arXiv:2606.17357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Useful chemistry calculations on near-term quantum processors are hindered by current algorithmic runtimes. We develop a methodology to significantly reduce these runtimes. Typically, variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithms are implemented as sequences of primitive gates. Our methodology instead relies on gradient-ascent pulse engineering to construct hardware-tailored pulses for the direct implementation of VQEs. As problem sizes increase, it quickly becomes intractable to optimise a pulse that implements an entire VQE ansatz circuit. However, leading VQEs are constructed in a modular fashion. A problem-tailored VQE is assembled from parameterised circuit elements that simulate hopping between two or four electronic spin orbitals. We show that these circuit elements can be implemented more efficiently using hardware-tailored pulses. We numerically demonstrate our methodology on a silicon spin-qubit quantum processor. We find that common circuit elements, known as single- and double-qubit excitations, can be implemented in less than 289 ns and 927 ns, respectively. Compared with conventional gate-based implementations, our pulse-accelerated qubit excitations provide a scalable approach for faster and therefore more noise-robust quantum chemistry simulations by reducing VQE runtimes by up to a factor of 15.3.

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

On Local Population-Risk Certificates

作者:

arXiv:2606.19147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops local certificates for population-risk increments around a current model. For a local candidate set \(\mathcal D\), the certificate is a two-sided confidence band for \(P({\ell_{\theta+v}-\ell_\theta})\) over \(v\in\mathcal D\). As an application, the upper endpoint of this band yields a risk-controlled update rule: an update is accepted only when its certified upper endpoint is nonpositive; otherwise the current model is retained.

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

Variational Model Merging for Pareto Front Estimation in Multitask Finetuning

arXiv:2412.08147v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pareto fronts are useful to find good task-mixing strategies for multitask finetuning, but they are also costly to compute. To reduce costs, recent works have used existing model merging methods to help train cheap surrogate models to estimate the Pareto fronts. However, no work has yet considered designing new model-merging methods to directly, and provably, improve the quality of Pareto fronts. Here, we fill this gap by proposing a new Bayesian approach called Variational Model Merging. In this approach, existing model-merging methods are obtained as special cases of "posterior-merging" when Gaussian posteriors are used and new model-merging strategies can be derived by using non-Gaussian posteriors. Our main theoretical result is to show that more flexible posteriors necessarily yield better estimates of Pareto fronts. For instance, a Pareto front estimate obtained by merging full-Gaussian posteriors is expected to be better than that obtained by using isotropic Gaussian posteriors. We validate the theory through extensive empirical results on vision and language transformers where better Gaussian families consistently yields better or comparable Pareto fronts. Our work is a rare instance where Bayesian ideas are used to improve Pareto analysis.

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

PU-UNet: Stable Multiplicative Interactions for Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv:2606.20035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many dense prediction networks rely on additive feature transformations and model higher-order feature interactions only implicitly. Product units provide an explicit mechanism for multiplicative feature modeling, but their logarithmic–exponential formulation can cause numerical instability, which has limited their use in deep dense prediction networks. In this work, we propose Product-Unit U-Net (PU-UNet), a residual U-Net that integrates stable product-unit residual blocks into rich low-resolution stages for medical image segmentation. The proposed formulation combines smooth positivity mapping with log-domain clipping, enabling stable multiplicative feature learning with negligible computational overhead. On ISIC 2018, Kvasir-SEG, and BUSI, PU-UNet achieves Dice scores of 0.942, 0.959, and up to 0.925, respectively. Compared with a matched Residual U-Net baseline, PU-UNet consistently improves Dice and IoU while keeping parameters, FLOPs, and inference latency nearly unchanged, and reduces the image-level false-positive rate on normal BUSI cases from 0.077 to zero. Ablation studies suggest that the gains are associated with product-unit interactions, are strongest under low-resolution placement, and benefit from the proposed stabilization design. These results suggest that stable product-unit residual learning can be an effective way to enhance U-Net-style segmentation networks with explicit multiplicative interactions.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Instability of a nonlinear oscillator with small friction and small additive noise

arXiv:2606.11389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $\lambda = \lambda(\beta,\sigma,a,b)$ denote the top Lyapunov exponent for the linearization along trajectories of the noisy damped non-linear oscillator $\ddot{x}+\beta \dot{x} + ax+bx^3 = \sigma \dot{W}_t$, where $a$, $b$ and $\beta$ are all positive and $\sigma \neq 0$. In 2004 Arnold, Imkeller and Sri Namachchivaya stated without proof that $\lambda(\varepsilon^2 \beta,\varepsilon \sigma,a,b) \sim \overline{\lambda} \varepsilon^{2/3}$ as $\varepsilon \to 0$ with $\overline{\lambda} > 0$. This paper contains a proof of this assertion.

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

PEFT-MedSAM: Efficient Fine-Tuning of Medical Foundation Models for Explainable Skin Lesion Segmentation

Automated segmentation of skin lesions using deep learning models for dermoscopic images can be very helpful in finding melanomas earlier than they would normally be detected. However, most deep learning methods available do not perform well. The aim of this paper is to present a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method called PEFT-MedSAM for adapting the Medical Segment Anything Model (MedSAM) to automatically segment dermoscopic skin lesions. The PEFT-MedSAM method uses only the lightweight mask decoder for training the model while keeping the pre-trained image encoder and prompt encoder frozen. The experiments performed on the ISIC 2018 benchmark dataset shows that PEFT-MedSAM obtains a dice coefficient of .9411 and an intersection over union value of .8918 when compared to both a fully trained U-Net baseline (.8715 dice coefficient) and zero-shot MedSAM inference (.8997 dice coefficient). The external validation of the model using PH2 dataset shows .9467 dice coefficient with +/- .0310 standard deviation. Supportive evidence for these claims include a p-value less than .0001 for Wilcoxon signed rank tests comparing the two datasets and bootstrap-estimated 95% confidence intervals of [.9364,.9447] that represent the estimated range of possible values for the average dice coefficient obtained by repeating the test. To increase clinical trustworthiness, we used Grad-CAM explainability along with a pointing game based evaluation methodology to evaluate the CNN baseline model on the validation set. The results showed that we had an accuracy rate of 98.27% on the validation set of 519 images and confirmed that the model classified regions containing skin lesions.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

EndoCoT: Scaling Endogenous Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Models

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been widely integrated into diffusion frameworks primarily as text encoders to tackle complex tasks such as spatial reasoning. However, this paradigm suffers from two critical limitations: (i) MLLMs text encoder exhibits insufficient reasoning depth. Single-step encoding fails to activate the Chain-of-Thought process, which is essential for MLLMs to provide accurate guidance for complex tasks. (ii) The guidance remains invariant during the decoding process. Invariant guidance during decoding prevents DiT from progressively decomposing complex instructions into actionable denoising steps, even with correct MLLM encodings. To this end, we propose Endogenous Chain-of-Thought (EndoCoT), a novel framework that first activates MLLMs' reasoning potential by iteratively refining latent thought states through an iterative thought guidance module, and then bridges these states to the DiT's denoising process. Second, a terminal thought grounding module is applied to ensure the reasoning trajectory remains grounded in textual supervision by aligning the final state with ground-truth answers. With these two components, the MLLM text encoder delivers meticulously reasoned guidance, enabling the DiT to execute it progressively and ultimately solve complex tasks in a step-by-step manner. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks (e.g., Maze, TSP, VSP, and Sudoku) achieve an average accuracy of 92.1%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 8.3 percentage points. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://internlm.github.io/EndoCoT/.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Instrumental and Proximal Causal Inference with Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2603.02159v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Instrumental variable (IV) and proximal causal learning (Proxy) methods are central frameworks for causal inference in the presence of unobserved confounding. Despite substantial methodological advances, existing approaches rarely provide reliable epistemic uncertainty (EU) quantification. We address this gap through a Deconditional Gaussian Process (DGP) framework for uncertainty-aware causal learning. Our formulation recovers popular kernel estimators as the posterior mean, ensuring predictive precision, while the posterior variance yields principled and well-calibrated EU. Moreover, the probabilistic structure enables systematic model selection via marginal log-likelihood optimization. Empirical results demonstrate strong predictive performance alongside informative EU quantification, evaluated via empirical coverage frequencies and decision-aware accuracy rejection curves. Together, our approach provides a unified, practical solution for causal inference under unobserved confounding with reliable uncertainty.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Null-Space Diffusion Distillation Unlocks Speed, Fidelity and Realism in Lensless Imaging

Lensless imaging reconstructs scenes from highly multiplexed measurements, resulting in a severely ill-posed inverse problem. In this work, we identify a fundamental trade-off between measurement consistency, perceptual quality, and inference speed across lensless reconstruction paradigms. Traditional methods favor consistency but produce perceptually degraded results, supervised approaches achieve high-quality reconstructions with fast inference but may violate physical constraints, and diffusion-prior methods achieve high perceptual quality and consistency–particularly when structured constraints such as range-null decomposition are used–but remain slow due to iterative sampling. Motivated by this observation, we propose Null-Space Diffusion Distillation (NSDD), a single-pass reconstruction model that distills structured diffusion-prior inference into an efficient feed-forward network. NSDD learns to produce high-quality reconstructions that preserve measurement consistency while avoiding costly iterative sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that NSDD achieves perceptual quality and consistency competitive with diffusion-prior methods, while providing significantly faster inference and offering a favorable balance across all three objectives. Furthermore, ablation experiments show that distilling the range–null decomposition improves reconstruction quality and robustness over unstructured full-reconstruction distillation, including on unseen real scenes. These results highlight the potential of structure-aware distillation for efficient lensless imaging. Code is available at github.com/JRCSAVSN/NullSpaceDiffusionDistillation.

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

Plug-and-Adapt: Multimodal Coreference Resolution at First Sight with a Pretrained Alignment Model

Visual information helps resolve ambiguity in coreference resolution, leading to notable performance gains. However, existing Multi-modal Coreference Resolution (MCR) methods require training with (partially) annotated data from the target dataset before they can be applied, preventing their direct usability and raising concerns about generalization. While Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) with billions of parameters offer promising zero-shot capabilities, they remain largely inaccessible. Their massive size limits deployability, and many are only accessible through paid APIs. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-adapt method that strategically adapts a carefully pre-trained alignment model for immediate use in MCR tasks, designed to eliminate the need for training on scarce benchmark datasets or relying on resource-intensive VLLMs. Specifically, we first pre-train a fine-grained alignment model between textual and visual contextual information using vision-language alignment datasets. We then repurpose the alignment model to MCR through similarity aggregation by fusing visual and categorical cues with evidence theory, thereby enhancing effectiveness. Experiments on the Coreference Image Narratives (CIN) benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a 5.31\% and 2.12\% improvement in CoNLL F1 over SOTA dedicated methods and popular VLLMs, respectively. We further evaluate our method on a masked CIN dataset for robustness testing and on a specially constructed VCR-MCR dataset for generalization assessment, with results confirming both capabilities.

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

Current World Models Lack a Persistent State Core

World models are increasingly regarded as a decisive step toward artificial general intelligence, yet modeling the physical world demands more than rendering convincing frames on demand: it requires an internal world state that keeps evolving over time, decoupled from observation, so that objects endure and events run to their conclusions whether or not a camera is watching, much as the moon holds to its orbit when no one is looking. This requirement is a blind spot of existing benchmarks, which reward surface properties such as fidelity, motion, and camera controllability while never asking whether a generated world keeps evolving once it is unobserved. We introduce WRBench, the first systematic diagnostic benchmark that treats camera motion as an intervention on observability and resolves evaluation into a human-calibrated chain that asks whether the camera executes the requested interaction, whether the scene stays continuous and identifiable while in view, and whether a returning target remains consistent with the event that was set in motion. Across 9{,}600 videos from 23 models spanning four control paradigms, one finding proves stubborn: current systems maintain the observed world as a tracking shot, resuming a returning target in the state at which it was abandoned rather than advancing the event while it went unseen. Because this failure recurs across control paradigms, model families, and increments of scale, robust world-state evolution does not follow from cleaner imagery, tighter control, richer geometric priors, or sheer parameter count We therefore argue that the stability of the physical state kernel and the consistency of worldlines under viewpoint intervention should become first-class objectives of world-model design, so that a world model captures how the world will unfold rather than how the next frame appears.