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

EComAgentBench: Benchmarking Shopping Agents on Long-Horizon Tasks with Distributed Hidden Intent

As LLM-based shopping agents enter production, existing benchmarks fail to capture how a shopper's requirements arrive: stated implicitly in the query, recorded in a profile, or revealed only when the right question is asked. Benchmarks that expose full intent upfront and grade only the final choice can neither pose this long-horizon challenge nor explain which requirement an agent missed. To address this gap, we introduce EComAgentBench, a benchmark of 662 tasks grounded in real Amazon products and reviews. Each task scatters these requirements across a visible query, a tool-gated profile, and scripted clarification; an agent must uncover hidden intent, verify candidates against attributes and review evidence, and commit to a single product within 100 tool calls. Moreover, typed, source-tagged rubrics grade every task, attributing each failure to a requirement and its source. Construction is automated yet reliable, with every answer fixed in code before any text is generated and every sample validated. Our evaluation of seven models reveals that even the strongest attains only 57.1% overall accuracy, and rubric satisfaction degrades from visible to hidden sources. Overall, we believe EComAgentBench will serve as a reproducible foundation for moving shopping agents from single-query search toward dependable assistance over long horizons.

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

From Uncertain Judgments to Calibrated Rankings: Conformal Elo Estimation for LLM Evaluation

arXiv:2606.13221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale. LLM-as-a-judge offers a cheaper alternative, but judge scores carry systematic errors - such as position bias, self-preference, or intransitivity - that can strongly miscalibrate the resulting rankings. We quantify the resulting judge-human disagreement at two complementary levels. At the local level, we estimate per-battle uncertainty from the judge's own score differences by propagating calibrated win probabilities rather than hard labels into the Bradley-Terry procedure. This alone provides a drastic improvement to Elo estimation accuracy, bringing LLM-derived ratings within 17.9 Elo MAE of human-derived ones when averaged over 55 held-out models on LMArena. At the global level, we apply split conformal prediction to the residual gap between LLM-derived and human-derived Elo ratings across held-out models, producing prediction intervals with distribution-free marginal coverage guarantees that account for irreducible LLM-human disagreement. Together, these two layers yield a low-cost evaluation tool that provides developers with calibrated Elo estimates and honest uncertainty bounds, without access to large-scale human annotations.To facilitate reproducibility, we release our code at https://github.com/kargibora/SoftElo .

03.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

<i>HoloBio</i>: A holographic microscopy tool for quantitative biological analysis

作者:

by Waira Mona, Maria J. Gil-Herrera, Emanuel Mazo, Daniel Córdoba, Sofia Obando-Vasquez, Maria J. Lopera, Rene Restrepo, Carlos Trujillo, Ana Doblas, Raul Castaneda Holographic imaging in microscopy enables label-free quantitative information of biological specimens and has found applications across a wide range of biomedical studies, from cell morphology to particle dynamics; yet its widespread adoption is often limited by the lack of accessible and standardized analysis software. We present HoloBio, an open-source, Python-based graphical user interface developed to address this issue. This software offers two primary operational modes: a Real-Time mode that enables live processing of holograms at video frame rates, and an Offline mode designed for post-processing previously recorded holograms. HoloBio is compatible with holograms recorded using both lens-based and lensless systems, supporting off-axis architectures in telecentric and non-telecentric configurations, as well as slightly off-axis and in-line optical setups. The software incorporates tools for cell tracking, phase profiling, thickness estimation, and morphological analysis, including cell counting and object area quantification. HoloBio is designed to be accessible for users without coding expertise, offering a reproducible, high-throughput environment tailored for researchers in biology, biophotonics, and biomedical imaging.

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

OmniSapiens: A Foundation Model for Social Behavior Processing via Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv:2602.10635v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Socially intelligent AI systems must reason across diverse human behavioral tasks and generalize to new social contexts. However, behavioral data is inherently heterogeneous, comprising diverse modalities and prediction targets that produce uneven training signals across samples, creating imbalanced learning dynamics that challenge existing AI models. To address this, we develop Omnisapiens-7B 2.0, a foundation model for social behavior processing that explicitly addresses learning from heterogeneous behavioral data. This is enabled through Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization, a new RL method that rebalances learning signals across samples by approximating each sample's contribution to the policy update and using these estimates to drive geometrically centered, inertially smoothed advantage modulation for stable training. Omnisapiens-7B 2.0 achieves the best and most consistent performance across 10 behavioral tasks, while also attaining the best performance on all five held-out benchmarks, with gains of up to +12.02% and +9.37% respectively. Furthermore, it demonstrates more consistent and interpretable reasoning traces, supporting reliable real-world behavioral applications. Our model is available at https://github.com/MIT-MI/human_behavior_atlas.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Energy Teleportation under Equilibrium and Nonequilibrium Environments

arXiv:2511.01518v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum energy teleportation (QET), implemented via local operations and classical communication, enables carrier-free energy transfer by exploiting quantum resources. While QET has been extensively studied theoretically and validated experimentally in various quantum platforms, enhancing energy output for mixed initial states, as the system inevitably interacts with environments, remains a significant challenge. In this work, we study QET performance in a two-qubit system coupled to equilibrium or nonequilibrium reservoirs. We derive an analytical expression for the energy output in terms of the system Hamiltonian eigenstates, enabling analysis of energy output for mixed states. Using the Redfield master equation, we systematically examine the effects of qubit detuning, nonequilibrium temperature difference, and nonequilibrium chemical potential difference on the energy output. We find that the energy output for mixed states often follows that of the eigenstate with the highest population, and that nonequilibrium environments can enhance the energy output in certain parameter regimes.

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

Viral Proteins Reveal Geometry of Protein Language Models

arXiv:2606.12609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models are trained on highly imbalanced datasets, raising the question of how they represent underrepresented biological sequences. Using viral proteins as a case study across ESM model families, we identify a dominant nativeness axis in embedding space, aligned with masked reconstruction perplexity, that orders sequences from well-modeled cellular proteins through viral proteins to shuffled and random sequences. Scaling contracts this axis unevenly across viral families. Despite this, protein language model embeddings retain viral-specific signal: viral proteins remain linearly separable beyond zero-shot perplexity and shallow sequence features. Together, these results suggest that pLM representations are structured by a general notion of nativeness while preserving information specific to distinct biological groups.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

IdealGPT: Iteratively Decomposing Vision and Language Reasoning via Large Language Models

The field of vision-and-language (VL) understanding has made unprecedented progress with end-to-end large pre-trained VL models (VLMs). However, they still fall short in zero-shot reasoning tasks that require multi-step inferencing. To achieve this goal, previous works resort to a divide-and-conquer pipeline. In this paper, we argue that previous efforts have several inherent shortcomings: 1) They rely on domain-specific sub-question decomposing models. 2) They force models to predict the final answer even if the sub-questions or sub-answers provide insufficient information. We address these limitations via IdealGPT, a framework that iteratively decomposes VL reasoning using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, IdealGPT utilizes an LLM to generate sub-questions, a VLM to provide corresponding sub-answers, and another LLM to reason to achieve the final answer. These three modules perform the divide-and-conquer procedure iteratively until the model is confident about the final answer to the main question. We evaluate IdealGPT on multiple challenging VL reasoning tasks under a zero-shot setting. In particular, our IdealGPT outperforms the best existing GPT-4-like models by an absolute 10% on VCR and 15% on SNLI-VE. Code is available at https://github.com/Hxyou/IdealGPT

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Nonlocal Games on Graph Ensembles

arXiv:2606.16784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum entanglement is one of the most striking discoveries in all of science. This effect allows, for instance, two spatially separated agents to coordinate their actions, without communication, to an extent that is both counter-intuitive, and provably impossible by any other physical means. A recently discovered example is that of mobile agents (players) performing spatial coordination tasks such as rendezvous, where the agents aim to meet on a network without communication. Until now, demonstrations of this advantage have relied on highly idealized conditions: agents are assumed to have complete knowledge of the topography, and experiments have been restricted to simulations using data generated by qubits within a single quantum processor. Here we address both limitations by developing a theory for graph ensembles that capture topographical uncertainty and by experimentally demonstrating the advantage in rendezvous scenarios between physically separated ion-trap systems with access to remote entanglement. Moreover, we simulate a broader set of problems on superconducting hardware. Surprisingly, when players are given the ability to gather more local information the quantum advantage increases – a feat impossible by classical means. Our findings establish a concrete route toward practical quantum advantages in motion coordination problems. More broadly, they point to a new way of using portable quantum devices to enhance collective decision-making in uncertain environments.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimized Quantum States for Sensing in the Presence of Loss and Phase Noise

arXiv:2606.19649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Squeezed vacuum lets gravitational-wave detectors and other quantum sensors surpass the standard quantum limit, and is optimal in the loss-limited regime; phase noise breaks this optimality. Numerically optimizing the quantum Fisher information across the loss and phase-noise landscape, we identify non-Gaussian states that outperform any Gaussian state. These fall into three classes: Fock-like, cubic-phase-like, and states with discrete rotational symmetry. Limiting the average number of photons in the input state to $\bar{n}=5$, with $1-\eta = 5\%$ photon loss and 200 mrad phase noise, the non-Gaussian advantage reaches up to 2.2 dB. Furthermore, we observe that the non-Gaussian advantage can persist even when the measurement strategy is homodyne detection.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Spectrum Aware Illumination Estimation Using Multispectral Image

Multispectral (MS) imaging extends beyond conventional RGB imaging by capturing more spectral bands, thereby improving illuminant spectrum estimation (ISE). However, existing methods often fail to fully exploit spectral information, resulting in suboptimal performance under diverse lighting conditions and across different sensor domains. Hence, we propose a deep learning framework with a spatio-spectral feature extraction block, which incorporates spectral attention mechanisms to enhance spectral correlation and preserve illuminant-relevant spatial features. Through the inclusion of an illuminant prior (IP), our approach prioritizes specific channels that provide more meaningful information in an MS image. We also propose a spectral-domain transform across different MS sensor spaces. The results demonstrate that illuminant spectra learned in high-dimensional sensor spaces can be effectively transformed to various lower-dimensional camera sensor spaces without any additional training. To facilitate evaluation, we introduce a real-world MS dataset containing high-dimensional ground-truth illumination spectra captured under diverse lighting conditions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy compared to existing models, thus providing a practical solution for real-world ISE. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/hyejin5/Spectrum-Aware-Illumination-Estimation-Using-Multispectral-Image.

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

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this limitation, we propose Rabtriever, which independently encodes queries and documents, while providing comparable cross query-document comprehension capabilities to rerankers. We start from training a LLM-based generative reranker, which puts the document prior to the query and prompts the LLM to generate the relevance score by log probabilities. We then employ it as the teacher of an on-policy distillation framework, with Rabtriever as the student to reconstruct the teacher's contextual-aware query embedding. To achieve this effect, Rabtriever is first initialized from the teacher, with parameters frozen. The Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) paradigm is then adopted, which integrates a lightweight, trainable predictor between LLM layers and heads, projecting the query embedding into a new hidden space, with the document embedding as the latent vector. JEPA then minimizes the distribution difference between this projected embedding and the teacher embedding. To strengthen the sampling efficiency of on-policy distillation, we also add an auxiliary loss on the reverse KL of LLM logits, to reshape the student's logit distribution. Rabtriever optimizes the teacher's quadratic complexity on the document length to linear, verified both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that Rabtriever outperforms different retriever baselines across diverse rationale-based tasks, including empathetic conversations and robotic manipulations, with minor accuracy degradation from the reranker. Rabtriever also generalizes well on traditional retrieval benchmarks such as MS MARCO and BEIR, with comparable performance to the best retriever baseline.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Shortened blastocyst vitrification achieves live birth rates comparable to standard protocols: an analysis of 3168 cryotransfers

Study question Do shortened blastocyst vitrification and warming protocols provide comparable live birth rates (LBR) and obstetrical and perinatal outcomes to traditional vitrification and warming protocols? Summary answer Shortened vitrification and warming protocols provide comparable LBR, obstetric and perinatal outcomes to traditional protocols. Shortened vitrification coupled with traditional multi step warming benefitted women >35yrs. What is known already Embryo viability following cryopreservation is dependent on blastomere survival and functional integrity, both impacted by ice crystal formation and osmotic gradients. Recent innovations in cryopreservation challenge the need for stepwise dehydration and rehydration protocols. While one step ''fast'' blastocyst warming protocols seem to provide equivalent clinical outcomes to traditional ''slow'' protocols, fewer studies investigate whether blastocyst dehydration rates can be similarly increased. A thorough safety and effectiveness evaluation remains necessary for both treatment success and offspring health. Study design, size, duration Three clinics within a network participated in this retrospective consecutive cohort study, with cycle data collected for 3603 warmed blastocysts resulting in 3168 frozen blastocyst transfers in 2170 patients between 2023 and 2025. We modelled the relationship between ''fast'' versus ''slow'' protocols and outcomes with Generalized Additive Models, and linear and logistic regressions where appropriate. Two tailed chi square with Yates correction was used to examine pregnancy loss and obstetrical and perinatal outcomes; p0.05). Importantly, women 35yrs or older at vitrification (n=1715 transfers) profited from a F/S strategy, which provided a significant increase in live birth rates (OR:1.42 [1.02-1.98] p=0.038) compared to S/S. The same improved live birth following a F/S strategy were also seen in embryos of lower quality (OR:1.78 [1.12-2.83] p=0.015), suggesting of a protective effect of this cryopreservation strategy on the developmental competence of impaired germplasm. Limitations, reasons for caution Factors affecting the results may be unaccounted for by the study retrospective nature. Wider implication of the findings Overall, shortened, ''faster'' vitrification and warming protocols provide comparable reproductive outcomes to traditional ones. The combination of shorter exposure to cryoprotectant (CPA) during vitrification and stepwise osmotic gradient during warming provided significant clinical benefits specifically to patients >35 and lower quality embryos, pointing to the possibility of adapting vitrification protocols to specific patients populations and optimizing their clinical outcomes.

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

How do Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Vision Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.

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

Root-Selecting Fixed-Point Inversion for Rectified Flows via Trajectory Straightness

Finding the initial noise that generates a given data sample, known as inversion, is a key component for downstream applications such as training-free image editing. Existing fixed-point inversion methods improve inversion accuracy by formulating each inversion step as a fixed-point problem, but they lack a principled mechanism for selecting among multiple fixed-point solutions that can arise in practice. We observe that different selections induce different inversion trajectories, leading to substantial variation in reconstruction and editing quality. For rectified flows, we further find that this variation is closely associated with trajectory straightness, motivating straightness as a principled selection criterion. We propose SelFix, a fixed-point inversion method that selects fixed-point solutions inducing straighter inverse trajectories while retaining convergence to an exact inverse root under standard local assumptions. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and PIE-Bench show that SelFix improves fixed-point inversion, achieving stronger real-image reconstruction and better source-preserving prompt-based editing than prior inversion baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/seminkim/selfix.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Something from Nothing: Data Augmentation for Robust Severity Level Estimation of Dysarthric Speech

arXiv:2603.15988v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dysarthric speech quality assessment (DSQA) is critical for clinical diagnostics and inclusive speech technologies. However, subjective evaluation is costly and difficult to scale, and the scarcity of labeled data limits robust objective modeling. To address this, we propose a three-stage framework that leverages unlabeled dysarthric speech and large-scale typical speech datasets to scale training. A teacher model first generates pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples, followed by weakly supervised pretraining using a label-aware contrastive learning strategy that exposes the model to diverse speakers and acoustic conditions. The pretrained model is then fine-tuned for the downstream DSQA task. Experiments on five unseen datasets spanning multiple etiologies and languages demonstrate the robustness of our approach. Our Whisper-based baseline significantly outperforms SOTA DSQA predictors such as SpICE, and the full framework achieves an average SRCC of 0.761 across unseen test datasets.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Capital Asset Pricing Model with Size Factor and Normalizing by Volatility Index

arXiv:2411.19444v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) relates a well-diversified stock portfolio to a benchmark portfolio. We insert size effect in CAPM, capturing the observation that small stocks have higher risk and return than large stocks, on average. For some size-based stock portfolios, dividing their returns by the Volatility Index makes them closer to independent and normal. In this article, we combine these ideas to create a new discrete-time model, which includes volatility, relative size, and CAPM. We fit this model using real-world data, prove the long-term stability, and connect this research to Stochastic Portfolio Theory. We fill important gaps in our previous article on CAPM with the size factor.

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

Recovering Stranded Discrimination in Knowledge Tracing: Per-Item Bias Correction via Empirical-Bayes Shrinkage

arXiv:2606.14123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deployed knowledge-tracing models are typically frozen after training, yet systematic per-item logit bias arises, from limited per-item expressivity in backbone architectures and from post-deployment shifts in item properties, degrading prediction quality. Global post-hoc calibrators such as Platt scaling, temperature scaling, and isotonic regression improve probability estimates but leave discriminative ability, as measured by AUC, unchanged. This AUC invariance is a structural consequence of monotone score-only transforms; recovering the stranded discrimination requires conditioning on item identity. We propose SLC (State-space Logit Correction), which converts binary observations to Gaussian pseudo-observations via Laplace/IRLS, applies empirical-Bayes shrinkage through a Kalman smoother, and fits an offset-Platt link. The state-space formulation also yields a detectability bound that characterizes the Bernoulli information floor, explaining why temporal tracking provides no benefit at current data densities. Across four datasets, five backbones, and three seeds, SLC improves AUC on all four datasets and NLL on three, with the advantage concentrating on sparse items. Cross-domain controls suggest that the same phenomenon can arise beyond education when the deployed backbone leaves entity-level bias.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Knowledge Manifold: A Riemannian Geometric Framework for Semantic Mapping and Geodesic Analysis of Scientific Literature

arXiv:2606.05907v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the knowledge manifold: a Riemannian geometric space in which a corpus of documents is arranged according to semantic positional relationships derived from character n-gram TF-IDF representations. The framework proceeds in five tightly coupled stages. First, each document is converted to a character-level n-gram TF-IDF vector (4-7 grams, up to 250,000 features, L2-normalized) and embedded in a two-dimensional knowledge map via constrained stress minimization with repulsion, variance, and centering regularizers. Second, knowledge at an arbitrary query point is estimated through Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) interpolation using a cubic-spline kernel, yielding an interpolated TF-IDF feature vector that can be linguistically characterized. Third, directional knowledge gradients at 0, 45, and 90 degrees are computed from the SPH interpolation map, and pairwise directional similarity is quantified via inner product and cosine similarity. Fourth, a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model, with a Constant x RBF + White kernel fitted on a 10-dimensional SVD projection, provides a Bayesian posterior mean, uncertainty estimate, and per-document contribution rate at the query point. Fifth, geodesics in the knowledge space are obtained by minimizing a discrete Riemannian path energy derived from the SPH-induced metric tensor, using L-BFGS-B with seven deterministic initial-path candidates. We apply the formulation to a corpus of 20 papers in fiber-reinforced composite materials and aerospace structural mechanics, showing that the semantic map recovers meaningful research clusters, geodesic paths reveal natural conceptual bridges between distant topics, and SPH/GPR interpolation enables the generation of virtual knowledge: hypothetical paper abstracts describing unstudied but geometrically predicted research directions.

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

VEPHand: View-Efficient Photometric Hand Performance Capture at Scale

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

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

AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement

Existing low-light image enhancement methods often face a bottleneck between the representation capacity of illumination-field modeling and computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Adaptive Illumination Gaussian Splatting Network (AIGS-Net), an ultra-lightweight architecture for fast low-light enhancement. Unlike conventional static priors, AIGS-Net constructs an input-adaptive 2D Gaussian Splatting illumination field. The opacity of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically modulated by relative luminance statistics of the input image, and spatially varying illumination compensation is rendered through ordered alpha compositing. To guide adaptive illumination compensation efficiently, a zero-parameter nonlinear multiscale contextual encoding module is introduced to extract low-frequency structures and local contrast cues without additional convolutional weights. To suppress noise amplification and sensor-induced color bias, AIGS-Net integrates noise-mask estimation, locked single-channel Gamma mapping, cross-channel consistency regularization, and target color-alignment constraints. Experiments on LOL and LSRW benchmarks show that AIGS-Net improves detail recovery and color fidelity while requiring only approximately 40 learnable parameters, achieving an effective trade-off between enhancement quality and extreme inference efficiency.

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

APT: Atomic Physical Transitions for Causal Video-Language Understanding

Physical events are not understood by their names alone, but by the causal state changes that compose them. A clip-level label such as "bounce" can be correct while hiding the process that makes the event physically valid, from support loss and contact onset to rebound and settling. To make this hidden process explicit, we introduce Atomic Physical Transitions (APTs): minimal, temporally localized state changes that bind a visible cue to an active physical mechanism and before/after dynamical regimes. An APT chain represents a video as an ordered causal transition sequence rather than a single aggregate event label: event labels tell what happened; APT chains explain why it happened. To make APTs learnable by VLMs, we construct mixed-source APT data from human annotations and simulator ground truth, covering 14 transition types across contact, gravity, friction, and rotation/stability, with 27,303 timed instances over 1,246 trials. Using this data, we find that current VLMs miss transition-level physics, with zero-shot recall at most 14% and errors dominated by missed transitions. Direct fine-tuning on APT chains improves transition detection but causes event-level forgetting, indicating that the model learns a specialized answer format rather than a reusable physical representation. We therefore propose APT-Tune, a parameter-efficient recipe that teaches VLMs to use causal transitions without forgetting how to answer video questions. It combines image-pad-aware supervision, format-conditional co-training, and mechanism-conditioned domain-to-type decoding to make APT learning format-robust and physically grounded. With only 11 M LoRA parameters on Qwen3-VL-2B, APT-Tune substantially improves APT recall while also improving event-level video transfer. These results show that APTs are not a new answer format, but a human-aligned causal supervision signal for physical video understanding.

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

UrbanWell: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Spatio-Temporal Urban Wellbeing Analytics

arXiv:2606.15890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding urban wellbeing from multimodal data requires integrating heterogeneous spatial and temporal signals, posing significant challenges for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We introduce UrbanWell, a large-scale benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the spatio-temporal reasoning capabilities of MLLMs for urban wellbeing analytics through joint modeling of satellite and street view imagery. UrbanWell spans 38 cities across multiple years and includes diverse indicators covering (1) environmental conditions (CO$_2$, NO$_2$, PM${2.5}$, and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), (2) spatial accessibility (minimum distance to supermarkets and restaurants), (3) urban form (road length, road density, and land use), (4) urban vitality (population, economic activity diversity, and land use diversity), and (5) subjective perception attributes (e.g., safety, beauty, liveliness, wealth, and quietness). All indicators are aligned at grid level to enable standardized evaluation. Beyond static prediction, UrbanWell defines temporal reasoning tasks, including future value forecasting from historical observations and temporal trend classification. We benchmark 15 state-of-the-art representative MLLMs in a zero-shot setting, providing a comprehensive comparative evaluation across spatial and temporal dimensions. Experimental results indicate that while MLLMs capture salient spatial and perceptual cues, their performance varies substantially across heterogeneous urban indicators spanning environment and subjective perception. UrbanWell serves as a unified benchmark for evaluating multimodal spatial and temporal reasoning in urban wellbeing analytics, offering a standardized testbed for systematic assessment and future research on multimodal urban intelligence. Our codes and datasets are accessible via https://github.com/axin1301/UrbanWell-Benchmark.

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

NARRAS: Edge-Triggered Distributed Inference for CSI-Based Localization in Vehicular IoT Networks

arXiv:2606.11914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: CSI-based localization with spatially distributed antenna arrays exposes a basic resource trade-off. Each array can provide a rich view of the channel, but forwarding observations from all arrays to a fusion center is wasteful when only a few carry useful information, and the shared uplink supports only a limited number of simultaneous transmissions. We let each array decide locally whether its current observation is worth reporting, subject to a budget on the average number of active transmitters. We refer to this abstraction as Edge-Triggered Distributed Inference (ETDI). It captures a broader class of task-oriented communication problems where resource-constrained devices share an access channel for a common inference task. We instantiate ETDI for CSI-based localization, a common scenario in vehicular IoT networks. Spatially distributed remote antenna arrays (RAAs) encode local channel state information (CSI) from user equipment (UE) transmissions into latent features, and the fusion center estimates the UE position from the subset of reported features. We propose NARRAS, a decentralized reporting policy in which each RAA combines a recurrent summary of its recent observations with a memory of the last latent it transmitted. Training controls an explicit activity budget through differentiable activity penalties and validation-calibrated deterministic thresholds, and uses channel-chart regularization to shape the latent geometry. Experiments show that, at comparable uplink activity, NARRAS improves localization accuracy over learned and heuristic sparse-reporting strategies, while dense full-report models remain useful budget-free references. In low-activity regimes, chart regularization further reduces high-percentile localization errors, suggesting that geometry-aware latent representations are more robust under sparse reporting.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

The Risk Shadow of Principal Component Analysis: When 99.9999% Variance Preservation Causes Catastrophic Decision Errors

arXiv:2606.14533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) preserves variance, not the information needed to detect rare catastrophic events. This paper proves the existence of a {\it Risk Shadow}: PCA can retain over 99.9999 percent of total variance while completely erasing all signal about rare, high-impact failures. When this happens, even the best possible classifier operating on the PCA representation reduces to a constant predictor. The root cause is a fundamental mismatch between variance maximization and tail risk awareness. To break the shadow, we introduce Expectile PCA (ExPCA) and Tail-Preserving PCA (TP-PCA), two methods that reweight the data covariance toward high-impact events. We prove theoretically that ExPCA strictly outperforms PCA in retaining rare-event information, and we validate our claims on synthetic data and a real-world credit card fraud detection benchmark. Our results call for a fundamental rethinking of variance-based dimensionality reduction in high-stakes decisions.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Context-Aware Optimization of Follow-Up Intervals for Type 2 Diabetes Care Using Markov Decision Processes

arXiv:2606.19092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chronic disease management relies on regular patient-provider interactions to follow-up on disease progression and control. For Type 2 Diabetes (T2D), current guidelines prescribe fixed time intervals between subsequent primary care visits for all patients, overlooking heterogeneity in clinical trajectories and patient characteristics. This study introduces a Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDP) model to optimize subpopulation-specific follow-up interval decisions using Electronic Health Record (EHR) data from 22,154 T2D patients across 10 primary care clinics. Contexts are identified by: i) dimensionality reduction of variables representing the individual health trajectories utilizing Principal Component Analysis, and ii) assigning patients to contexts via principal components and additional patient-level features using clustering. Two distinct contexts emerged, representing a lower- and a higher-risk subpopulation. CMDP-derived policies recommend: (i) follow-up within 1 month if lab value at current visit is unmeasured; (ii) up to 3 months for elevated lab values or recent hospitalizations; and (iii) 6 to 12 months for sustained glycemic control, with shorter follow-up intervals for patients in high-risk context. The optimal policies achieved lower expected cumulative cost than benchmarks (e.g., in the higher-comorbidity context, the CMDP policy reduced cost by about 34.8%, and in the lower-comorbidity context by about 6.4%, relative to an American Diabetes Association-like fixed interval follow-up policy. These findings demonstrate how context-aware approaches can inform adaptive follow-up strategies, and have the potential to advance chronic care management in primary care by synthesizing machine learning and probabilistic decision models.