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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Multimodal Brain Tumour Classification Using Feature Fusion

Clinicians diagnose brain tumors by synthesizing patient symptoms, medical history, and quantitative imaging data from modalities such as MRI and CT scans into a unified clinical judgement. However, most deep learning models rely on MRI/CT images alone, failing to replicate the clinicians multimodal reasoning. We explore a two-branch multimodal network combining raw MRI scans with 91 extracted radiomic features (intensity, texture, shape, and boundary descriptors) to classify brain tumors into glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no-tumor. A pre-trained CNN backbone encodes the image stream, whereas a dedicated MLP encodes the radiomic stream. Both streams are fused via concatenation, gated, or bidirectional cross-modal attention strategies. Across nine experimental runs on a balanced 7,200 image dataset, all multimodal configurations outperform unimodal baselines with gated fusion achieving the best accuracy of 96.13%.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ACCORD: Action-Conditioned Contextual Grounding for Language Agents

User instructions are often underspecified because humans rely on implicit assumptions about the surrounding environment. For large language model (LLM) agents operating in information-rich digital and physical environments, these assumptions cannot be inferred from the instruction alone; they must be recovered from the current state of tools, data, interfaces, and observations. Effective execution therefore requires agents to identify missing context, ground it in observed evidence, and carry it forward into subsequent actions. We show that current agents often fail to do so. They act from assumed rather than observed specifics, overlook information they could have gathered, and fail to incorporate evidence that has already been returned. Building on this insight, we propose ACCORD (Action-Conditioned Contextual Grounding), a simple and effective agent framework for adaptive grounding. Before each action, ACCORD actively probes the environment for missing information and integrates relevant context from the agent's trajectory that would otherwise be overlooked. Requiring no additional training or task-success signals, ACCORD improves task-goal completion on AppWorld by up to +20.6 points with GPT-5-mini, from 42.0% to 62.6%, compared to strong baselines. These gains persist with a substantially stronger base model (+10.8 with Claude-4.5-sonnet), an open-weight model (+10.1 with Qwen3.5-27B-FP8), and on the embodied AlfWorld benchmark (+7.4 success rate with GPT-5-mini).

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

Islamic Large Language Models: From Knowledge Acquisition to Trustworthy and Hallucination-Resistant AI

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for knowledge-intensive question answering, including religious and legal questions. Islamic knowledge is a particularly demanding setting: answers are expected to be grounded in authoritative sources, citations must be exact, Arabic varieties differ substantially from the language of classical sources, and legitimate jurisprudential disagreement must be represented rather than collapsed into a single answer. This survey reviews the emerging field of Islamic LLMs and trustworthy Islamic AI. We organize the literature around Arabic NLP and Arabic-centric LLMs, Islamic NLP resources, Qur'anic question answering, Islamic knowledge benchmarks, retrieval-augmented generation, Islamic legal reasoning, inheritance reasoning, hallucination evaluation, and trustworthiness. We argue that fluency in Arabic is not sufficient for Islamic AI. Reliable systems require curated sources, retrieval and verification modules, citation-aware generation, madhhab-aware reasoning, human expert evaluation, and benchmarks that measure not only answer accuracy but also faithfulness, source validity, and reasoning quality. The survey concludes with a research agenda for hallucination-resistant Islamic AI systems.

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

Harness In-Context Operator Learning with Chain of Operators

arXiv:2606.12318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural operators approximate mappings between function spaces, but often generalize poorly to other operators and usually require fine-tuning or retraining. In-Context Operator Networks (ICON) addresses this issue by prompting the model with numerical context so that the model learns specific operators from prompts and adapt to different operators without fine-tuning. However, ICON may still fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) operator tasks. Inpired by the success of harness engineering of Large Language models (LLMs), we introduce Chain of Operators (CHOP), a framework that harness a frozen ICON to OOD operator tasks without updating its parameters. Specifically, CHOP constructs a chain of operators consisting of explicit elementary transformations and the frozen ICON. Experiments on a scalar conservation law and a mean-field control problem show that CHOP reduces relative inference error over direct ICON evaluation, while each operator in the chain remains interpretable and in closed form. A chain constructed on one PDE family further generalizes to a different family, indicating shared mechanisms across harness systems.

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

FreshRetailNet-LT: A Stockout-Annotated Censored Demand Dataset for Latent Demand Recovery and Forecasting in Fresh Retail

arXiv:2505.16319v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate demand estimation is critical for the retail business in guiding the inventory and pricing policies of perishable products. However, it faces fundamental challenges from censored sales data during stockouts, where unobserved demand creates systemic policy biases. Existing datasets lack the temporal resolution and annotations needed to address this censoring effect. To fill this gap, we present FreshRetailNet-50K, the first large-scale benchmark for censored demand estimation. It comprises 50,000 store-product time series of detailed hourly sales data from 898 stores in 18 major cities, encompassing 863 perishable SKUs meticulously annotated for stockout events. The hourly stock status records unique to this dataset, combined with rich contextual covariates, including promotional discounts, precipitation, and temporal features, enable innovative research beyond existing solutions. We demonstrate one such use case of two-stage demand modeling: first, we reconstruct the latent demand during stockouts using precise hourly annotations. We then leverage the recovered demand to train robust demand forecasting models in the second stage. Experimental results show that this approach achieves a 2.73% improvement in prediction accuracy while reducing the systematic demand underestimation from 7.37% to near-zero bias. With unprecedented temporal granularity and comprehensive real-world information, FreshRetailNet-50K opens new research directions in demand imputation, perishable inventory optimization, and causal retail analytics. The unique annotation quality and scale of the dataset address long-standing limitations in retail AI, providing immediate solutions and a platform for future methodological innovation. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Dingdong-Inc/FreshRetailNet-50K) and code (https://github.com/Dingdong-Inc/frn-50k-baseline}) are openly released.

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

Bayesian Anytime Pareto Set Identification for Multi-Objective Multi-Armed Bandits

arXiv:2606.18785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying Pareto optimal solutions is critical to support multi-objective decision-making. We introduce the first anytime Multi-Objective Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm for the Pareto Set Identification problem, taking a Bayesian approach: Top-Two Pareto Front Thompson Sampling (TTPFTS). We benchmark TTPFTS against state-of-the-art fixed-budget Pareto Set Identification algorithms on synthetic environments. Next, we demonstrate its practical utility in a challenging multi-objective molecular discovery setting by efficiently exploring an ultra-large synthesis-on-demand molecular library. Furthermore, we introduce a novel uncertainty quantification metric that estimates our algorithm's confidence in the predicted Pareto set. We demonstrate that this metric effectively proxies true performance, yielding a robust methodology for monitoring learning progress in complex settings. Finally, we complement these empirical findings with a theoretical proof of the algorithm's asymptotic correctness.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Visual Verification Enables Inference-time Steering and Autonomous Policy Improvement

arXiv:2606.18247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world should learn from their experience and improve over time. This requires a mechanism of practicing and learning from feedback. In this paper, we propose VERITAS, a generator-verifier framework for generalist robot policies for inference-time policy steering and self-improvement. We use a pre-trained generalist robot policy as a ``generator'' and pair it with a gradient-free ``visual verifier'' that evaluates actions at inference time. This framework enables inference-time steering that improves policy performance without additional training. We demonstrate that inference-time verification consistently outperforms vanilla generalists without training on additional demonstration data. Additionally, we demonstrate that the verified rollouts provide effective supervision for offline policy improvement: policies fine-tuned on verified self-generated trajectories achieve consistent performance gains. Notably, we find that post-training with verified rollouts achieves comparable efficiency to expert demonstrations, while requiring no human interventions. Our results highlight inference-time verification as a practical and scalable mechanism for improving robotic policies during deployment.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Judging to Improve: A De-biased VLM-as-3D-Judge Protocol for Single-Image 3D Generation

arXiv:2606.20364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A companion study established a de-biased, cross-model VLM-as-3D-judge that reliably ranks single-image-to-3D mesh quality where cheap geometry and CLIP proxies fall short. This paper asks: can that judge's preferences specialize a strong open generator, TRELLIS, on one asset class (furniture), cheaply and without human labels? Taking the judge from ranking to optimization is where the work lives. Pushing a VLM judge into the training and evaluation loop exposes failure modes ranking never triggered, so our contribution is an optimization-grade hardening of the judge: a training judge (Qwen2.5-VL-7B) held distinct from an evaluation judge (InternVL3-8B) to break circularity; position-bias correction; and fixes for three failure modes (image overload, geometry-hiding splat renders, and reference-free judging that rewards clean-but-wrong outputs), with calibration evidence (clear-gap win-rate 0.83-1.0; base-vs-base ~0.5). Using this protocol as an independent evaluator, and working only from public models and data with lightweight parameter-efficient adaptation, we find our methods match the strong base rather than exceed it. Independent base samples carry essentially no learnable preference (0.94 order-flip rate), so signal must be engineered by quality-contrastive construction. Across six adaptation methods, two input regimes, and a severity sweep, the most targeted - conditioner repair under severe degradation - reaches parity (0.50) with the base, while no method clears the >=65% win-rate target. The result is mechanistic: clean inputs saturate the judge, flow-DIT fine-tuning washes out through the sampler, and conditioning repair is the locus that moves geometry. Win-rates are directional at n=8 objects. Matching a strong public-data base with cheap adaptation is itself informative: exceeding it needs more than lightweight PEFT on public data, and the judge protocol is reusable.

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

Decidable By Construction: Design-Time Verification for Trustworthy AI

arXiv:2603.25414v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A prevailing assumption in machine learning is that model correctness must be enforced after the fact. We observe that the properties determining whether an AI model is numerically stable, computationally correct, or consistent with a physical domain do not necessarily demand post hoc enforcement. They can be verified at design time, before training begins, at marginal computational cost, with particular relevance to models deployed in high-leverage decision support and scientifically constrained settings. These properties share a specific algebraic structure: they are expressible as constraints over finitely generated abelian groups $\mathbb{Z}^n$, where inference is decidable in polynomial time and the principal type is unique. A framework built on this observation composes three prior results (arXiv:2603.16437, arXiv:2603.17627, arXiv:2603.18104): a dimensional type system carrying arbitrary annotations as persistent codata through model elaboration; a program hypergraph that infers Clifford algebra grade and derives geometric product sparsity from type signatures alone; and an adaptive domain model architecture preserving both invariants through training via forward-mode coeffect analysis and exact posit accumulation. We believe this composition yields a novel information-theoretic result: Hindley-Milner unification over abelian groups computes the maximum a posteriori hypothesis under a computable restriction of Solomonoff's universal prior, placing the framework's type inference on the same formal ground as universal induction. We compare four contemporary approaches to AI reliability and show that each imposes overhead that can compound across deployments, layers, and inference requests. This framework eliminates that overhead by construction.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Three-Layer Framework for AI in Scientific Discovery

作者:

arXiv:2606.13566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current discussions of AI in scientific discovery are often dominated by two visible capabilities: search over existing knowledge and execution through optimization, simulation, and automation. Both are important, but neither fully captures the central act of discovery: the formation and evolution of models. This paper proposes a three-layer view of AI in discovery. Layer 1 is search and retrieval by large language models. Layer 2, as the main innovation of this paper, is model formation through qualitative reasoning: the capacity to recognize when a current framework is structurally inadequate and to understand the problem within a broader representational space, not through trial and error, but through structural insight into what is missing and where it can be found. Layer 3 is execution, optimization, and refinement. The main claim is that Layer 2 is both the most important and the least developed. Search without model formation remains confined to inherited frameworks, while execution without conceptual revision only amplifies an existing formulation. We illustrate Layer 2 reasoning through three case studies: S. S. Chern's intrinsic proof of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the resolution of the Nesterov Accelerated Gradient convergence problem via Lyapunov functions, and the autonomous disproof of the Erdos unit distance conjecture by OpenAI in 2026. Each case exhibits the same structural signature: a framework that had become inadequate, a missing conceptual object, and a resolution found in an unexpected neighboring field.

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

Utility-Constrained Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.14029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained MDPs (CMDPs) are a widely adopted framework for incorporating safety into RL agents; however, the framework does not support risk-sensitive constraints. This can be problematic: For example, CMDPs allow for optimal solutions that, in order to satisfy the risk-neutral constraints, mix infrequent catastrophic behaviors and frequent, overly conservative ones. Moreover, prior empirical results suggest that enforcing stricter, risk-sensitive constraints can improve performance even under risk-neutral evaluation. The natural framework to incorporate risk-sensitive constraints is utility-constrained MDPs (UCMDPs), but no practical solutions for this problem existed. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful methodology for UCMDPs and constrained RL. Besides allowing for risk-sensitive constraints, our framework does not require us to fix constraint limits in advance of training the agent, provided that a sensible range is known. This increases policy flexibility and, in practice, allows for adjustments to these limits at no extra training cost. Besides benefiting from the generality of the framework, our agent shows strong performance in practice, consistently matching or outperforming existing baselines in several Safety Gymnasium benchmark tasks.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MB-Loc: Multi-planar Bird's-eye-view Localization in outdoor LiDAR scenes

Global LiDAR localization is a fundamental task for autonomous navigation systems. Recent methods perform Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) and achieve superior accuracy over Absolute Pose Regression (APR) solutions by predicting dense 3D world coordinates. However, SCR approaches introduce two major bottlenecks: severe computational inefficiency from processing raw 3D geometries and significant performance degradation under varying sensor viewpoints. To address these limitations, we present MB-Loc, a lightweight and viewpoint-robust SCR framework. Instead of relying on heavy 3D convolutions, we project the input LiDAR scan into a 2.5D Multi-planar Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation. By slicing the point-cloud along the Z-axis and mapping signed depths into discrete 2D planes, MB-Loc retains essential 3D geometric structures while exploiting the computational tractability of standard 2D CNNs. To handle the inherent sparsity of outdoor LiDAR, we introduce a KL-regularized latent bottleneck that explicitly models spatial uncertainty without injecting stochastic noise. Finally, to ensure rotation robustness, we apply 3D spatial augmentations prior to planar projection, forcing the network to implicitly learn viewpoint-invariant features. We perform extensive experiments on the publicly available NCLT dataset and demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Operating at real-time inference speeds, MB-Loc significantly outperforms traditional 3D-SCR architectures in computational efficiency.

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

Task-guided cross-subject latent alignment: a multi-encoder-decoder VAE

arXiv:2606.15989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aligning neural activity across subjects offers the promise of discovering shared computational principles and generalizable decoders. However, traditional alignment methods require shared stimuli across subjects, a constraint that limits applicability to naturalistic paradigms with limited or non-overlapping data. We introduce a Multi-Encoder-Decoder Variational Autoencoder (MED-VAE) that achieves cross-subject alignment without shared stimuli by anchoring representations to a common scaffold provided by a pretrained ANN. Using the Natural Scenes Dataset, we show that MED-VAE creates common latent spaces with superior semantic organisation, achieving higher cross-subject alignment than common methods while maintaining robust generalisation to held-out stimuli where traditional methods degrade. Reconstructing from these common spaces back to each subject's original neural space, MED-VAE preserves equal stimulus-driven signal in its cross-subject latent space. Finally, we show that this superior alignment directly enables cross-subject neural prediction, as demonstrated via cross-subject image decoding. In summary, we introduce a framework to identify generalisable common subspaces for cross-subject predictions and downstream tasks, demonstrated here for visual cortex responses to static images.

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

Metacognitive Myopia in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potentially harmful biases that reinforce culturally embedded stereotypes, influence moral judgments, or amplify positive evaluations of majority groups. We propose metacognitive myopia as a cognitive-ecological framework accounting for a conglomerate of established and emerging LLM biases. Our theoretical framework posits that biased samples in the information environment cause five symptoms of metacognitive myopia in LLMs: integration of invalid embeddings, susceptibility to redundant information, neglect of base rates in conditional computation, decision rules based on frequency, and inappropriate higher-order statistical inference for nested data structures. Moreover, it posits that the two main components of metacognition, monitoring and control, could account for these five symptoms. Accordingly, we further outline how monitoring and control could be approximated technically, for instance, through hidden parallel reasoning histories that allow interactive LLMs to evaluate risks of myopic inference before generating overt responses. Our theoretical framework provides a novel perspective on flawed human-machine interactions and agentic AI and raises significant ethical concerns regarding the implementation of LLMs in organizational structures and high-stakes decisions.

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

Trustworthy Self-Composable Big-Data-as-a-Service: An LLM-Orchestrated Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Data Engineering, AutoML, MLOps Deployment, and Drift-Aware Lifecycle Optimization

arXiv:2606.17915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) platforms require re liable automation across data ingestion, cleaning, feature engi neering, model development, deployment, and post-deployment monitoring. However, existing LLM-based data science agents and AutoML systems mainly focus on isolated workflow stages, leaving limited support for lifecycle-level orchestration, artifact governance, human oversight, and drift-aware adaptation. This paper proposes a trustworthy self-composable BDaaS frame work based on LLM-orchestrated multi-agent collaboration. The proposed architecture decomposes the BDaaS lifecycle into specialized agents for data ingestion, data cleaning, feature engineering, AutoML training, model evaluation, MLOps de ployment, monitoring, and drift detection. A central LLM or chestration layer coordinates agent execution, validates interme diate outputs, manages workflow context, and enables dynamic workflow composition. The framework also incorporates shared artifact governance, reproducibility support, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and drift-aware feedback loops. A prototype-based evaluation is conducted using controlled tabular benchmark datasets with missing values, categorical variables, outliers, class imbalance, and simulated covariate drift. Compared with manual ML, AutoML-only, and single-agent LLM baselines, the pro posed multi-agent BDaaS pipeline achieves competitive predictive performance while improving lifecycle-level reliability, including workflow completion, artifact traceability, deployment readiness, reproducibility, and drift recovery. The results suggest that LLM-orchestrated multi-agent systems can extend conventional AutoML toward trustworthy, adaptive, and production-oriented BDaaS lifecycle automation.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Lifted Schrödinger Bridges for Gaussian Mixture Endpoints: Projection Gaps and Path-Space Obstructions

arXiv:2605.24795v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study stochastic density control between Gaussian-mixture endpoint distributions under Brownian prior dynamics. Since the direct Schrödinger bridge between Gaussian mixtures is generally not available in closed form, we introduce a lifted path-space construction in which each trajectory is augmented with a source–target component label. Consequently, the problem decomposes into Gaussian component-to-component Schrödinger bridges with explicit marginal, drift, and cost formulas, while the mixture-level assignment reduces to a finite-dimensional entropic coupling problem with a Sinkhorn scaling form. We then analyze the projection obtained by discarding or forgetting the label. By construction, the projected law satisfies the original Gaussian-mixture endpoint constraints, but its relative entropy generally differs from the lifted relative entropy by a nonnegative conditional label-information gap. This gap reveals a path-space obstruction: the lifted optimizer cannot, in general, be identified with the direct unlabeled Schrödinger bridge after projection. We also derive the posterior-averaged Markov drift associated with the projected marginal flow, prove a kinetic-energy upper bound, and identify a common path-potential condition under which the projection gap vanishes. Several numerical illustrations showing density and shape control are recorded for a self-contained exposition.

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

AUTOGATE: Automated Clock Gating via Toggling-Aware LLM-based RTL Rewriting

arXiv:2606.17461v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-grain clock gating (FGCG) is among the most effective techniques for reducing dynamic power, yet current FGCG optimization flows remain largely manual. Recent LLM-based RTL optimization approaches remain limited by two key drawbacks: (1) the inability to process long waveform traces spanning millions of cycles, and (2) the difficulty of scaling optimization to large hierarchical codebases while preserving correctness. In this work, we present AUTOGATE, the first agentic framework for industry-grade RTL power optimization, enabling workload-aware clock-gating optimization across large hierarchical codebases. AUTOGATE introduces a Machine Learning (ML)-LLM co-design that bridges waveform-level analysis and RTL rewriting. Specifically, we design an ML-based clustering algorithm that distills raw toggling traces into compact, structured representations that guide LLM-based RTL rewriting. This enables accurate identification and application of clock-gating opportunities without requiring LLMs to directly process raw waveform data. To enhance scalability, AUTOGATE employs a hierarchical multi-agent architecture that decomposes large designs into independently optimizable modules, enabling coordinated optimization across deep design hierarchies. We evaluate AUTOGATE on a diverse set of designs ranging from small RTL designs to large industrial-grade codebases. Experimental results show that AUTOGATE consistently reduces dynamic power relative to baselines. Across the small-design suite, AUTOGATE reduces dynamic power by 49.31% on average. On industry-scale designs, it achieves 19.34% and 7.96% dynamic power reductions on NVDLA and BlackParrot, respectively, and up to 6.86% on highly optimized proprietary production designs.

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

Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer for Spacecraft 6D Pose Estimation

Vision sensors provide a lightweight solution for spacecraft proximity operations, but monocular spacecraft 6D pose estimation remains difficult under illumination variation, specular reflection, shadowing, weak texture, and background interference. These factors make local visual evidence spatially unreliable and can destabilize pose regression. This article proposes a Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer (PAID-ViT) for robust spacecraft pose estimation.The proposed model separates pose-relevant structure tokens from illumination-sensitive appearance tokens, estimates patch reliability before pose aggregation, and uses foreground mask supervision to preserve silhouette cues. A parameter-free geometric recovery module converts normalized crop coordinates, log-depth, and a continuous 6D rotation representation into camera-frame rotation and translation. Experiments on SPEED+ V2, the SPEED+ validation/lightbox/sunlamp evaluation configuration used in this study, suggest that PAID-ViT reduces translation error and improves robustness in the challenging sunlamp domain, while ablation studies support the complementary roles of illumination disentanglement, reliability-aware token aggregation, mask supervision, and training-side regularization.

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

PointDiffusion: Diffusion-Based Scene Completion in the Point Cloud Domain

Reconstructing dense 3D scenes from sparse LiDAR point clouds is a fundamental challenge in autonomous driving, where latent diffusion models offer a promising solution. However, existing approaches rely on object-level autoencoders that collapse into unstable global representations at outdoor scale and suffer from ground truth data corrupted by odometry drift that systematically degrades supervision quality. Furthermore, multi-step diffusion inference incurs prohibitive latency for real-time deployment. We propose a novel multi-token Gaussian VAE with cross-attention pooling for stable scene-scale LiDAR compression, combined with an anchor-based ICP ground truth refinement pipeline that eliminates drift-induced noise from training supervision. Together, these components enable a scaffold-free single-step diffusion completion model that achieves an approximately 16x reduction in squared Chamfer distance on SemanticKITTI seq. 08 (0.396 m^2 to 0.024 m^2), surpasses LiDiff and ScoreLiDAR by 17-19% and 10-11%, respectively, and operates at 25-143x lower inference latency. Our results demonstrate that data quality dominates model design in this regime and that multi-token latent spaces provide a stable first stage for latent diffusion-based scene completion.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MLUBench: A Benchmark for Lifelong Unlearning Evaluation in MLLMs

arXiv:2606.12809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are trained on massive multimodal data, making data unlearning increasingly important as data owners may request the removal of specific content. In practice, these requests often arrive sequentially over time, giving rise to the challenging problem of MLLM Lifelong Unlearning. However, most existing benchmarks are limited in scale and scope, failing to capture the complexities of MLLM lifelong unlearning. To fill this gap, we introduce the MLUBench, a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark featuring 127 entities across 9 classes under lifelong unlearning requests. We perform extensive experiments using MLUBench and reveal that existing unlearning methods suffer from severe, cumulative degradation. More critically, we further identify the unique challenge of this problem: unlike in unimodal models, MLLM lifelong unlearning is constrained by the need to preserve multimodal alignment. Continually unlearning from one modality could degrade the entire model. To alleviate this challenge, we propose LUMoE, an effective method. Experiments demonstrate that LUMoE significantly mitigates the degradation problem faced by baselines. The source code and the MLUBench dataset are open-sourced in https://github.com/lihe-maxsize/Lifelong_Unlearning_main.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Improving Crash Frequency Prediction from Simulated Traffic Conflicts Using Machine Learning Based Microsimulation

arXiv:2606.12500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic microsimulation combined with surrogate safety measures has increasingly been used as a proactive alternative to historical crash data for predicting crash frequency for current or planned road infrastructure designs. However, existing microsimulation-based safety studies have adopted simplified rule-based behaviour models, which reproduce traffic flow reasonably well but often fail to generate realistic conflict dynamics, limiting crash prediction accuracy. Recent advances in machine learning (ML)-based behaviour models offer a promising opportunity to potentially improve microsimulation realism and crash frequency predictions by learning human driving behaviour directly from large-scale trajectory datasets. To investigate this possibility, traffic microsimulation was conducted for five real-world signalised intersections in Leeds, UK, using both a standard rule-based model and a state-of-the-art ML model. Simulated vehicle trajectories were analysed using a two-dimensional Time-to-Collision metric to identify simulated conflicts, which were then modelled using Extreme Value Theory to predict crash frequency. Results show that conflicts from the ML model yielded crash predictions in line with the real-world crash data, whereas the rule-based model did not permit meaningful predictions, presumably due to a lack of model calibration to the specific simulated intersections. Directly using ML-generated simulated crashes to predict real-world crash frequency also yielded poor results, suggesting that while current ML models can realistically reproduce conflicts, they are not yet able to generate realistic crashes. Overall, the findings demonstrate that ML-based behaviour models are promising for improving crash prediction from simulated conflicts, without a need for location-specific model calibration, and suggest clear future directions for ML-based traffic microsimulation.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Statistical Foundations of LLM-based A/B Testing: A Surrogacy Framework for Human Causal Inference

arXiv:2606.17165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Organizations and researchers show increasing interest in using large language models (LLMs) in place of human participants in A/B tests, in the hope of experimenting faster and at lower cost. We study when a treatment effect estimated on LLM outcomes recovers the effect that would have been measured on the human population of interest. Distributional equivalence between LLM and human outcomes would make any standard estimator valid but is unrealistic. We therefore develop a statistical framework that adapts surrogate endpoint theory to LLMs. The framework shows that calibrating LLM outcomes to human outcomes identifies the average treatment effect under surrogacy and comparability conditions that are jointly weaker than distributional equivalence. When these conditions fail, the effect of interest is only partially identified, and we provide diagnostics that can falsify surrogacy on historical experiments together with a bound on the worst-case bias from limited overlap. We further show that the stochasticity inherent to LLMs introduces both bias and variance, but using an average of multiple draws as the surrogate mitigates both. We illustrate the methods and theory in simulations and an application to A/B tests on Upworthy headlines. A central takeaway from our work is that the validity of LLM outcomes as surrogates can only be falsified for past treatments and never verified for new ones, so human experiments remain indispensable for novel interventions. We discuss the role of LLM choice, prompting, and temperature as design variables, and how to size human experiments for validation.

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

BRICKS-WM: Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models

arXiv:2606.16489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has achieved remarkable success in continuous control by leveraging latent world models. However, prevailing approaches typically rely on monolithic latent dynamics, entangling environment dynamics into a coupled process. This coupling severely limits reusability: altering the agent necessitates retraining the entire world from scratch, even if the environment remains constant. To address this, we introduce BRICKS-WM (Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models), a framework for the modular assembly of structured world models. Driven by the insight that the physical world is composed of independent entities, we posit that global dynamics can be modeled as a composition of distinct dynamical modules interacting via latent interfaces. As a minimal instantiation, we factorize the latent state space into an actuated Agent module and an external Background module, bridged by a learned latent interface. Unlike prior object-centric methods that prioritize visual segmentation, BRICKS-WM enforces a functional separation in transition dynamics, ensuring that background dynamics remains agnostic to the agent's dynamics. Empirically, BRICKS-WM achieves control performance comparable to strong monolithic baselines when trained from scratch, and enables the reuse of frozen background dynamics across agents.

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

CogGen: Cognitive-Load-Inspired Fully Unsupervised Deep Generative Modeling for Compressively Sampled MRI Reconstruction

arXiv:2603.04438v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fully unsupervised deep generative modeling (FU-DGM) offers significant potential for compressively sampled magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) reconstruction. Representative FU-DGM formulations, such as deep image prior (DIP) and implicit neural representation (INR), employ architectural bias to induce a low-dimensional manifold in the image space that aligns with the forward observation. However, as the underlying inverse system is highly ill-posed, prolonged iterative fitting in FU-DGM typically leads to poor efficiency and noise amplification. In this paper, guided by the cognitive principle of easy-to-hard learning, we propose CogGen, an FU-DGM framework that reformulates CS-MRI reconstruction as a staged inversion problem. Specifically, CogGen implements an self-paced curriculum learning (SPCL)-driven progressive scheduling strategy through an MRI-aware dual-threshold weighting criterion, which adaptively regulates k-space measurement participation. The data-consistency residual thresholding evaluates the fitting reliability of the current generator, while the k-space radius thresholding controls stage-wise measurement exposure, thereby avoiding uniform fitting throughout optimization. Theoretically, our analysis shows that, when early stages favor easy-to-fit measurements, CogGen yields a reduced local sufficient-iteration bound and a smaller cumulative noise-amplification bound, explaining the improved convergence behavior and reconstruction fidelity of CogGen within a finite iteration budget. Numerical experiments demonstrate that both CogGen instantiations, CogGen-DIP and CogGen-INR, achieve superior performance over prevailing CS-MRI reconstruction techniques, including unsupervised and supervised pipelines.