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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A CEFR-Inspired Classification Framework with Fuzzy C-Means To Automate Assessment of Programming Skills in Scratch

arXiv:2604.00730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Context: Schools, training platforms, and technology firms increasingly need to assess programming proficiency at scale with transparent, reproducible methods that support personalized learning pathways. Objective: This study introduces a pedagogical framework for Scratch project assessment, aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), providing universal competency levels for students and teachers alongside actionable insights for curriculum design. Method: We apply Fuzzy C-Means clustering to 2008246 Scratch projects evaluated via Dr.Scratch, implementing an ordinal criterion to map clusters to CEFR levels (A1-C2), and introducing enhanced classification metrics that identify transitional learners, enable continuous progress tracking, and quantify classification certainty to balance automated feedback with instructor review. Impact: The framework enables diagnosis of systemic curriculum gaps-notably a "B2 bottleneck" where only 13.3% of learners reside due to the cognitive load of integrating Logic Synchronization, and Data Representation–while providing certainty–based triggers for human intervention.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SPOT-E: Test-Time Entropy Shaping with Visual Spotlights for Frozen VLMs

arXiv:2606.20244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact. Prior inference-time visual interventions can improve grounding without retraining, but they are largely open-loop and lack a mechanism to verify whether highlighted evidence is actually used. We study answer-span prediction entropy as a model-internal feedback signal and show that naive entropy minimization is ambiguous, since low entropy may arise from evidence-grounded confidence or shortcut collapse. To resolve this ambiguity, we introduce low-entropy anchors and an entropy-shaping objective that reduces answer uncertainty while preserving baseline high-confidence tokens. We instantiate this principle in SPOT-E, a plug-and-play test-time method that produces question-conditioned spotlights, optimized per instance via light-weight tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Across all benchmarks and different VLM families, SPOT-E yields consistent gains and improved robustness under visual corruptions. Code is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/YinBo0927/SPOT-E}

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CrossMaps: Confidence-Aware Open-Vocabulary Semantic Mapping for Rover Navigation

arXiv:2606.16935v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rovers rely on perception to maintain spatial maps that encode both objects and sensor quality (e.g., range reliability, lighting artifacts, data density), guiding data fusion, embedding updates, and navigation under partial observability. To study these coupled perception-navigation processes, we present CrossMaps, a real-time confidence-aware open-vocabulary semantic mapping pipeline that constructs language-queryable maps from RGB-D data. Building on VLMaps-style approaches, CrossMaps integrates multi-scale CLIP embeddings with confidence-aware fusion and a dual-memory architecture consisting of Short-Term Memory (STM) and Long-Term Memory (LTM). The STM aggregates noisy visual observations using geometric, semantic, and temporal confidence cues, while confident and coherent cells are promoted to the LTM as persistent semantic landmarks. Designed for deployment with a Jetson Orin-powered UGV alongside SLAM, CrossMaps runs in real time and produces semantic heatmaps that can be queried with natural language to guide rover navigation.

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

Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!

arXiv:2504.09762v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has become a standard method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called \say{reasoning traces} or even \say{thinking traces} – implicitly anthropomorphizing the traces, and implying that these traces resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem, and as such can provide an interpretable window into the operation of the model's thinking process to the end user. In this position paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous – it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research. We call on the community to avoid such anthropomorphization of intermediate tokens.

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

RIVET: Robust Idempotent Voice Attribute Editing

arXiv:2606.19629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice attribute editing models modify characteristics such as age and gender while preserving speaker identity. In large-scale speech datasets, however, attribute annotations are often noisy or inconsistent, which can cause conditional generative models to produce unstable edits. In this work, we show that idempotency provides an effective mechanism for improving robustness to noisy labels. An idempotent operator is one for which repeated application does not change the result, i.e., f(f(x)) = f(x). Enforcing this property acts as an implicit regularizer that reduces sensitivity to mislabeled examples. We introduce RIVET, a training framework that incorporates an idempotency objective to improve robustness to label noise. We evaluate RIVET under controlled label noise and on the GLOBE dataset with naturally noisy annotations. RIVET improves editing success and better preserves speaker identity than standard training, showing that idempotency improves robustness in voice editing models.

06.
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.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Synthetic Resonance: A Framework for Growth-Oriented Human-AI Relationships

arXiv:2606.18265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As human relationships with artificial intelligence systems become increasingly frequent and sustained, existing language and theory fail to accurately capture the nature of these affiliations. Common descriptors such as mutual understanding, connection, or friendship risk anthropomorphizing systems that lack subjective experience, while dominant frameworks tend to reduce AI to either a tool or a threat. In this paper, I introduce the concept of synthetic resonance as an integrative framework for understanding human-AI relationships. Synthetic resonance describes how relationships humans define as meaningful can emerge between a human and an AI system without the need to attribute shared feelings or mutual awareness. I argue that synthetic resonance is best understood as a structured, dynamic pattern of interaction that can produce a sense of relationship without the presence of a second experiencing subject. By clarifying this distinction, the concept of synthetic resonance offers a more precise way of conceptualizing human-AI relationships and highlights their potential value and ethical implications. I also call for more research that tests the processes and outcomes of synthetic resonance.

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

Does the Question Really Matter? Training-Free Data Selection for Vision-Language SFT

arXiv:2603.09715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual instruction tuning is crucial for improving vision-language large models (VLLMs). However, many samples can be solved via linguistic patterns or common-sense shortcuts, without genuine cross-modal reasoning, limiting the effectiveness of multimodal learning. Prior data selection methods often rely on costly proxy model training and focus on difficulty or diversity, failing to capture a sample's true contribution to vision-language joint reasoning. In this paper, we propose CVS, a training-free data selection method based on the insight that, for high-quality multimodal samples, introducing the question should substantially alter the model's assessment of answer validity given an image. CVS leverages a frozen VLLM as an evaluator and measures the discrepancy in answer validity with and without conditioning on the question, enabling the identification of samples that require vision-language joint reasoning while filtering semantic-conflict noise. Experiments on Vision-Flan and The Cauldron show that CVS achieves solid performance across datasets. On Vision-Flan, CVS outperforms full-data training by 3.5% and 4.8% using only 10% and 15% of the data, respectively, and remains robust on the highly heterogeneous Cauldron dataset. Moreover, CVS reduces computational cost by 17.3% and 44.4% compared to COINCIDE and XMAS.

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

Disparate Impact in Synthetic Data Generation

arXiv:2606.13105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the fairness notion of disparate impact for synthetic data generation (SDG), that assesses whether the utility of generated records is the same across sensitive groups. Our approach departs from existing work on fair SDG, that address the problem of correcting for undue biases in the observed distribution, hence redefining SDG as learning a distribution that is not that of the real data. By contrast, non-disparate impact is notably achieved when the synthetic and real distributions are the same. We expose reasons why SDG may fail to reach that solution and discuss why approximation and estimation errors occur and can be disparate across groups. We notably look into the expressive power of SDG methods relative to distribution complexity, sampling errors due to group proportions, and estimation errors induced by differential privacy mechanisms. We illustrate cases of disparate impact on both artificial and real-world data, focusing on SDG methods that rely on probabilistic graphical models. We also introduce a strategy of learning group-wise SDG models and illustrate how it can improve both the overall utility and its parity in many settings.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Locally Gentle State Certification for High Dimensional Quantum Systems

arXiv:2602.04550v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard approaches to quantum statistical inference rely on measurements that induce a collapse of the wave function, effectively consuming the quantum state to extract information. In this work, we investigate the fundamental limits of locally-gentle quantum state certification, where the learning algorithm is constrained to perturb the state by at most $\alpha$ in trace norm, thereby allowing for the reuse of samples. We analyze the hypothesis testing problem of distinguishing whether an unknown state $\rho$ is equal to a reference $\rho_0$ or $\epsilon$-far from it. We derive the minimax sample complexity for this problem, quantifying the information-theoretic price of non-destructive measurements. Specifically, by constructing explicit measurement operators, we show that the constraint of $\alpha$-gentleness imposes a sample size penalty of $\frac{d}{\alpha^2}$, yielding a total sample complexity of $n = \Theta(\frac{d^3}{\epsilon^2 \alpha^2})$. Our results clarify the trade-off between information extraction and state disturbance, and highlight deep connections between physical measurement constraints and privacy mechanisms in quantum learning. Crucially, we find that the sample size penalty incurred by enforcing $\alpha$-gentleness scales linearly with the Hilbert-space dimension $d$ rather than the number of parameters $d^2-1$ typical for high-dimensional private estimation.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Adiabatically-induced Kawaguchi geometry and jerk in quantum-classical systems

arXiv:2606.16037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatically eliminating the quantum degrees of freedom in a mixed quantum-classical system produces an effective force in the classical equation of motion. The elimination can be made to any order in the adiabatic parameter, generating a series of higher order forces. By applying a sequence of near-identity unitary transformations to the quantum state, we derive a hierarchy of increasingly accurate effective actions for the classical variables. The third order Euler-Lagrange equation is non-Newtonian as the force depends on the jerk, the third order time derivative of position. We find that the third order terms induce a special kind of Kawaguchi geometry on the space of classical variables. This geometry is characterized by an almost symplectic structure and a differential line element that depends on the acceleration in addition to the velocity. Our results can be used to efficiently capture higher order nonadiabatic effects in molecular dynamics simulations.

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

Brick: Spatial Capability Routing for the Mixture-of-Models (MoM) Paradigm

arXiv:2606.13241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Defining query difficulty is one of the hardest problems in deployment engineering. Existing LLM routers rely on surface features such as domain labels, keywords, and token count, ignoring the within-domain variance that actually determines model success. Frontier models cost ten to one hundred times more than local open-weight models, so at production scale even small per-request savings become a direct cloud-bill lever. We present Brick, a multimodal router that scores each model on six capability dimensions, combines this with a per-query difficulty estimate, and dispatches via a cost-penalized geometric rule. A continuous preference knob lets operators slide between max-quality and max-saving profiles at deploy time. On a benchmark of 5,504 queries, Brick at max-quality reaches 76.98% accuracy, beating the best single model (75.02%) and all tested routers. At a neutral cost-quality profile, Brick achieves 74.11% accuracy at 4.71x lower cost than always using the strongest model. At min-cost, it cuts cost 22.15x with 11.85 points accuracy loss. Median latency drops from 51.2s to 22.8s.

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

Text region detection in historical astronomical diagrams

Text detection is a crucial task in the analysis of historical documents. While datasets and benchmarks exist for text detection in manuscripts and maps, the study of text in mathematical diagrams has received little attention. To address this, we introduce a large-scale, diverse, open-access dataset of 948 historical astronomical diagrams containing 10,940 oriented polygonal text regions. Our dataset spans ten centuries (8th to 18th) and seven main linguistic traditions: Arabic and Persian (115), Chinese (332), Byzantine (233), Latin (185), Hebrew (48), and Sanskrit (35). It captures a wide range of diagram styles and textual content, from symbols to multi-line paragraphs. Each text instance is annotated with ordered polygons that precisely delineate text regions and encode the reading direction. In addition, we annotated the 2,293 regions in Latin diagrams with 20 class labels. We evaluated several strong baselines on our dataset, including TESTR, DeepSolo++, and Poly-DETR, a simple extension of DINO-DETR that we design to predict ordered polygon vertices. Poly-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MTHv2 and cBAD2019 benchmarks and provides a solid, simple baseline on our dataset. Code and dataset available online.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Skeleton Sparsification and Densification Scale-Spaces

The Hamilton-Jacobi skeleton, also known as the medial axis, is a powerful shape descriptor that represents binary objects in terms of the centres of maximal inscribed discs. Despite its broad applicability, the medial axis suffers from sensitivity to noise: Minor boundary variations can lead to disproportionately large and undesirable expansions of the skeleton. Classical pruning methods mitigate this shortcoming by systematically removing extraneous skeletal branches. This sequential simplification of skeletons resembles the principle of sparsification scale-spaces that embed images into a family of reconstructions from increasingly sparse pixel representations. We combine both worlds by introducing skeletonisation scale-spaces: They leverage sparsification of the medial axis to achieve hierarchical simplification of shapes. Unlike conventional pruning, our framework inherently satisfies key scale-space properties such as hierarchical architecture, controllable simplification, and equivariance to geometric transformations. We provide a rigorous theoretical foundation in both continuous and discrete formulations and extend the concept further with densification. By growing the skeleton successively instead of shrinking it, we allow inverse progression from coarse to fine scales. Densification scale-spaces can even reach beyond the original skeleton to produce overcomplete shape representations with relevancy for practical applications. Through proof-of-concept experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for practical tasks including robust skeletonisation, shape compression, and stiffness enhancement for additive manufacturing.

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

PRISM: Prosody-Integrated Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Spoken Dialogue

Empathetic spoken dialogue systems require not only semantically appropriate responses but also emotionally aligned prosodic expression. However, cascade pipelines often discard acoustic cues during speech-to-text conversion, while end-to-end speech models lack interpretable control over emotion and knowledge integration. To address these challenges, we propose PRISM, a multi-agent framework for empathetic spoken dialogue that decouples speech perception, response generation, and speech synthesis into coordinated components. PRISM introduces a prosody-to-language translation mechanism to stabilize large language model reasoning and enables on-demand invocation of external knowledge tools for empathetic dialogue generation. Experimental results demonstrate that PRISM achieves consistent improvements in empathy, prosodic appropriateness, and text response generation quality across objective and subjective metrics. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Bxzfrm/PRISM.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Testing Catability and Coherent Superposition of $2\mathcal{D}$ Graphene Quantum system

arXiv:2605.10967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a theoretical framework for describing superposed coherent states in graphene quantum systems using the concept of catability as a phase-sensitive metric functional measure. In this case, the formalism quantifies interference stability and coherence structure via phase-dependent contributions of quantum superposition states. Catability is defined as a functional measure sensitive to relative phase variations within coherent state combinations, serving as a diagnostic tool for quantum interference effects in graphene-based systems. Also, the formulation is extended using Lie algebra techniques, where the underlying symmetry structure of graphene quantum states is represented through operator algebras governing state transformations in quantum space. In this context, to describe nonlocal propagation and phase-resolved dynamics, a Green function approach is incorporated, enabling systematic treatment of quantum correlations in a spatially extended structures framework. A unified framework is constructed by combining Lie algebraic symmetry analysis with Green function propagation theory, yielding a consistent description of phase-sensitive catability in complex graphene quantum configurations within the framework approach. Results provide a structured route for testing coherence, interference stability, and quantum state control in low-dimensional quantum materials systems.

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

MixTeX: Data-Efficient LaTeX OCR via Synthetic Pretraining and Limited Fine-Tuning

LaTeX OCR converts scientific document images into editable LaTeX code. Existing systems rely on large paired datasets, which are costly to collect and limited for low-resource languages. This paper presents MIXTEX, a data-efficient system using synthetic pretraining without real LaTeX sources. Unlike Nougat that depends on arXiv datasets, we generate training data by randomly pairing grammatical Wikipedia text with LaTeX formulas, requiring only syntactic correctness. This eliminates dependency on real document collections, enables scalable data generation (120M tokens), and supports low-resource languages. Following synthetic pretraining, adaptation requires only 400 real samples. Evaluation on a 977-sample benchmark with printed and handwritten English and Chinese shows that this two-stage strategy outperforms methods trained on large real datasets while requiring less human effort and computation. Data, code, and models are publicly available.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Routine use of oral iron for people with heart failure and iron deficiency in primary care; retrospective cohort study

Aims: Iron deficiency is common among people with heart failure and associated with morbidity and mortality. While intravenous iron improves clinical outcomes, oral iron continues to be prescribed in routine practice despite limited evidence of benefit. Methods: We completed a retrospective primary care cohort study (2016 to 2021) to investigate the proportion of people with an incident diagnosis of heart failure who had iron deficiency identified (defined as ferritin

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Graph Structured Combinatorial Semi-Bandit with Nonlinear Reward Associations through Separable Signals

arXiv:2606.14650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The identification of optimal structures within vast arrays of interconnected data necessitates significant sampling- and computational effort. Learning and leveraging underlying signal dependencies can improve efficiency and predictive capabilities considerably, but the ubiquity of nonlinear statistical relations amplifies the complexity of such undertakings. In this paper, we develop novel generic and adaptive strategies equipped with routines for graph-based causal reward modeling, analytic reproducing kernel methods, and Taylor approximation of functional processes. We establish theoretical performance guarantees sublinear in time and linear in data volume over time. Our analyses cover robustness to a multitude of uncertainties arising from noise interference, gradual model convergence, and solution space mismatch. The framework's general appeal is substantiated by a minimalistic set of conditions or reliance on prior estimates, while various outlined modifications address specific or extended settings. To demonstrate practical effectiveness, we conduct numerical experiments using both benchmarked synthetic and real-world transportation datasets.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Beyond Rubrics: Exploration-Guided Evaluation Skills for Reward Modeling

Open-ended reward modeling requires judges that can follow subtle, domain-specific preferences when verifiable answers are unavailable. Existing rubric-based methods often address this by generating criteria online for each query, but the extra generation step can add inference overhead and produce rigid or misaligned guidance. We introduce Eval-Skill, an exploration-guided method that synthesizes reusable evaluation skills for reward modeling and reframes reward guidance as context evolution rather than parameter training or per-query rubric generation. Using only 100 cases per domain for skill evolution, Eval-Skill synthesizes reusable domain-level evaluation skills through two progressive stages, workflow generation followed by principle generation, with exploration and selection interleaved across both stages. Once generated, a skill is directly injected into the judge context. Across multiple RM benchmarks, Eval-Skill consistently improves diverse judge backbones; on RewardBench 2, it yields significant gains over vanilla judging for each main backbone (+13.44% for Qwen3-8B, and 18.51% for DeepSeek-V4-Flash). Further analyses of evolution-time scaling, generalizability, and transferability show that compact evaluation skills offer an efficient new paradigm for LLM-based evaluation. Code is available at https://github.com/xing-stellus-yue/Eval-Skill.

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

Computational Identifiability

arXiv:2606.19361v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identification conditions describe the computability of a target query or parameter of interest as a function of the type and amount of information available. In causal identification, this information is often expressed in the form of a causal graph, and data are observed or collected for some subset of variables in the graph. Target queries may be for a single effect alone or for a class of effects in a given model. The derivation of an identification algorithm then defines mathematically the process by which the desired causal effect(s) can be uniquely determined, theoretically, in expectation. Identifiability in expectation, or 'theoretical identifiability,' generally assumes asymptotic properties, infinite data, or other mathematically idealized conditions. In this paper, we explore a fundamental distinction between this theoretical, idealized notion of identifiability and a proposed alternative that is computation-bound. The framework we propose - 'computational identifiability' - is to instead define a finite computational search procedure for an empirical estimator. If this process finds an estimator empirically, within a desired error tolerance, then identifiability is satisfied, conditional on the specified assumptions of the search (i.e., a prior distribution over the parameters) and conditional on the search procedure itself. Through several experiments, we demonstrate how this framework allows us to answer fine-grained, practical identification questions, such as identification with small finite samples, with ambiguous graphical criteria, with mixed observational-interventional data, and across counterfactual data and estimands. Code is available at https://github.com/lbynum/metadentify.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

FineDialFact: A benchmark for Fine-grained Dialogue Fact Verification

Large language models are known to produce hallucinations - factually incorrect or fabricated information - which poses significant challenges for many natural language processing applications, such as dialogue systems. As a result, detecting hallucinations has become a critical area of research. Current approaches to hallucination detection in dialogue systems primarily focus on verifying the factual consistency of generated responses. However, these responses often contain a mix of accurate, inaccurate or non-verifiable facts, making the use of a single factual label overly simplistic and coarse-grained. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark, FineDialFact, for fine-grained dialogue fact verification, which involves verifying atomic facts extracted from dialogue responses. To support this, we construct a dataset based on publicly available dialogue datasets and evaluate it using various baseline methods. Experimental results demonstrate that methods incorporating Chain-of-Thought reasoning can enhance performance in dialogue fact verification. Despite this, the best F1-score achieved on the HybriDialogue, an open-domain dialogue dataset, is only 0.74, indicating that the benchmark remains a challenging task for future research. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/XiangyanChen/FineDialFact.

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

MineExplorer: Evaluating Open-World Exploration of MLLM Agents in Minecraft

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and action generation. However, their ability to sustain exploration in dynamic open worlds remains unclear. Existing embodied and game-based benchmarks often compress interaction into short-horizon tasks or entangle success with domain-specific game mechanics. In this paper, we introduce MineExplorer benchmark for evaluating open-world exploration capabilities of MLLM agents in Minecraft. We first filter atomic tasks whose solutions rely heavily on Minecraft-specific knowledge to better reflect general open-world reasoning. Then we organize the benchmark around a ReAct-style capability formulation and compose atomic tasks into implicit multi-hop tasks. To further construct reliable instances, MineExplorer uses a multi-agent synthesis workflow that jointly designs task graphs, sandbox scenes, and rule-based milestone evaluators. Human evaluation shows that the multi-agent synthesis workflow produces significantly more reliable instances than a single-agent baseline. Experiments with advanced MLLM agents show that open-world exploration remains challenging, as strong models can handle many single-hop tasks but degrade sharply when hidden prerequisites must be coordinated over longer trajectories. Further analysis finds that task difficulty tracks agent completion, and larger models or thinking modes do not consistently translate into better performance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Jometeorie/MineExplorer.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

When LLMs Analyze Scars: From Images to Clinically-Meaningful Features

Medical image classification faces a fundamental dilemma: while deep learning models achieve remarkable performance at scale, real-world clinical scenarios often suffer from severe data scarcity due to annotation costs, privacy constraints, and disease rarity. This challenge is particularly pronounced in pathological scar classification, where differentiating keloids from hypertrophic scars requires subtle expert knowledge and labeled images are extremely limited. We propose a novel paradigm that repositions large language models (LLMs) as knowledge-driven feature engineers rather than end-to-end classifiers. We call this framework ScaFE (Scar Feature Engineering). Our key insight is that LLMs encode rich medical knowledge that can be externalized as executable feature extraction code, enabling the transformation of high-dimensional images into low-dimensional, clinically interpretable representations. Specifically, we prompt an LLM with established scar assessment criteria to generate deterministic Python code that extracts features aligned with clinical scoring systems such as the Vancouver Scar Scale. Our approach offers three key advantages: (1) data efficiency, achieving robust performance with limited training samples by decoupling knowledge acquisition from statistical learning; (2) privacy preservation, as raw images are processed locally without exposure to external LLMs; and (3) interpretability, through explicit features grounded in clinical reasoning. Extensive experiments on scar classification demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms end-to-end deep learning baselines or using LLMs as black-box classifiers under limited data conditions, establishing a promising direction for integrating LLMs into data-efficient and clinically transparent medical AI systems.