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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RefGC-SR$^2$: Reference-guided Generated Content Super-Resolution and Refinement

Reference-guided generation (e.g., object compositing, customization) has progressed rapidly, yet current pipelines share a fundamental limitation: the object-centric high-resolution reference image (HRRI) provided by users is downsampled to a fixed low-resolution (LR) before being fed into the model, so the fine-grained details are discarded before the output is even produced. In addition, the generation step then introduces its own artifacts (e.g., identity distortion) on top of this loss. Existing reference-guided generated content refinement (RefGCR) methods can correct some of these artifacts but still operate in the LR domain; reference-guided super-resolution (RefSR) methods recover resolution but assume natural-image degradations and ignore the artifact distribution of generative pipelines. To address both gaps in a single formulation, we introduce a new task: reference-guided generated content super-resolution-refinement (RefGC-SR$^2$), where the original HRRI is reused at the post-processing stage to recover lost details, refine generative artifacts, and upscale the output simultaneously. We construct the first real-world triplet data generation pipeline for this RefGC-SR$^2$ task, training a diptych-conditioned generator to synthesize paired low-quality anchors that public pretrained models cannot provide. We further present a frequency-aware diffusion transformer model for RefGC-SR$^2$ that selectively injects fine details from the HRRI while removing generative artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RefGC-SR$^2$ model successfully (i) refines the object identity faithfully with respect to the reference, and (ii) recovers high-resolution details, so that the final result is significantly higher quality and practically more usable compared to existing RefGCR and RefSR baselines.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MMRINet: Efficient Mamba-Based Segmentation with Dual-Path Refinement for Low-Resource MRI Analysis

Automated brain tumor segmentation in multi-parametric MRI remains a critical yet underserved challenge in resource-constrained clinical settings, where deep 3D networks requiring high-end GPUs are not viable. This is particularly acute across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where low-field scanners, heterogeneous patient demographics, and severe data scarcity compound the difficulty of applying standard deep learning pipelines. We present MMRINet, a lightweight segmentation architecture purpose-built for these constraints. At its core, MMRINet replaces quadratic-complexity self-attention with linear-complexity Mamba state-space models, enabling efficient long-range volumetric context modeling without the computational overhead of Transformer-based approaches. We combine two lightweight refinement components:Dual-Path Feature Refinement (DPFR), which extracts complementary detail and contextual representations to improve feature diversity under limited data, and Progressive Feature Aggregation (PFA), which hierarchically fuses multi-scale decoder outputs for sharper segmentation boundaries. Evaluated on the BraTS-Lighthouse SSA 2025 challenge dataset, comprising 3D MRI scans from Nigerian clinical sites, MMRINet achieves an average Dice score of 0.752 and an average HD95 of 12.23 mm with only ~2.5M parameters, outperforming all evaluated baselines, including UNETR, Swin-UNETR, SegMamba, and SegResNet3D. These results indicate that strong validation-set segmentation performance can be achieved with substantially reduced computation, offering a practical step toward AI-assisted neuro-oncology in low-resource clinical environments. Our GitHub repository can be accessed here: BioMedIA-MBZUAI/MMRINet.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Towards Understanding and Measuring COGNITIVE ATROPHY in LLM Behaviour

arXiv:2606.18129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent incidents involving LLMs used for mental-health support reveal a critical evaluation gap: surface-level safety scores do not capture how models behave across realistic, emotionally sensitive interactions over time. Existing benchmarks measure knowledge, safety, or static response quality, but miss whether LLM interactions help users keep reflecting, coping, and making decisions themselves. We formalize this missing dimension as COGNITIVE ATROPHY, a process-level behavioural measure in AI-mediated mental-health support distinct from safety and helpfulness. To measure it, we introduce COGNITIVE ATROPHY BENCH, a clinically grounded benchmark built from 1,576 fully human-generated counseling conversations, 15,680 turns, and 42,230 responses from five LLMs. Three clinical and neuropsychology experts developed a 20-attribute schema spanning user context, response behaviour, and global risk flags; six trained clinical reviewers applied it with span-grounded evidence, producing 5,324 reviewer judgments. We further introduce the User-Input Risk Index (UIRI), the Cognitive Atrophy Risk Index (ARI), and trajectory summaries. Across five LLMs, models show a consistent moderate-to-high level of atrophy-aligned behaviour across single and multi-turn settings. While models generally respond to overt safety cues, they adapt less reliably when users seek solutions or decisions. The dominant recurring patterns are directive advice, problem-solving, recommendation responses, topic shifts, and forms of validation that may reinforce dependence rather than reflection. Our work makes COGNITIVE ATROPHY measurable and provides a foundation for auditing model behaviour in sensitive LLM conversations.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

A note on the $\mathcal{W}_2$-convergence rate of the empirical measure of an ergodic $\mathbb{R}^d$-valued diffusion

arXiv:2502.07704v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this note, we consider a Stochastic Differential Equation under a strong confluence and Lipschitz continuity assumption of the coefficients. For the unique stationary solution, we study the rate of convergence of its empirical measure toward the invariant probability measure. We provide rate for the Wasserstein distance in the mean quadratic and almost sure sense.

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

Persona-Pruner: Sculpting Lightweight Models for Role-Playing

Language Models (LMs) have shown remarkable potential as role-playing chatbots, delivering consistent, stylized interactions when given a specification of a character or user persona. However, applying these capabilities to real-world applications (e.g., ecosystems with numerous NPCs interacting simultaneously) exposes a critical inefficiency due to the excessive computational cost. In this paper, we question the necessity of dedicating a full, generalist model to a single persona, hypothesizing that a specific character identity relies on only a fraction of the model's total capacity. We observe that naively pruning LMs often severely degrades the role-playing performance for a specific persona; it does not distinguish between redundant knowledge and essential character traits. We propose Persona-Pruner, a framework that sculpts a lightweight role-playing model by isolating persona-specific sub-networks from a single description. Our experiments consistently show that Persona-Pruner preserves role-playing performance substantially more effectively than existing state-of-the-art LLM pruning techniques, reducing the performance drop from the dense model by up to 93.8% over the strongest baseline on RoleBench in LLM-as-a-judge score, while still maintaining general LLM capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/jsu-kim/Persona-Pruner.

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

Phase transitions for contact processes on sparse random graphs via metastability and local limits

arXiv:2505.22471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a new perspective on the asymptotic regimes of fast and slow extinction in the contact process on locally converging sequences of sparse finite graphs. We characterise the phase boundary by the existence of a metastable density, which makes the study of the phase transition particularly amenable to local-convergence techniques. We use this approach to derive general conditions for the coincidence of the critical threshold with the survival/extinction threshold in the local limit. We further argue that the correct time scale to separate fast extinction from slow extinction in sparse graphs is, in general, the exponential scale, by showing that fast extinction may occur on stretched exponential time scales in sparse scale-free spatial networks. Together with {the results of} Nam, Nguyen and Sly (Trans.\ Am.\ Math.\ Soc.\ 375, 2022), our methods can be applied to deduce that the fast/slow threshold in sparse configuration models coincides with the survival/extinction threshold on the limiting Galton-Watson tree.

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

Latent Gaussian Splatting for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking

arXiv:2602.23172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Capturing 4D spatiotemporal scene structure is crucial for the safe and reliable operation of robots in dynamic environments. However, existing approaches typically address only part of the problem: they either provide coarse geometric tracking via bounding boxes or detailed 3D occupancy estimates that lack explicit temporal association and instance-level reasoning. In this work, we present Latent Gaussian Splatting (LaGS) for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking (4D-POT). We revisit the underlying representation and model 3D features as a sparse set of feature-bearing Gaussians. These act as dynamic, volume-oriented keypoints that enable spatially continuous, distance-weighted aggregation of multi-view features before being splatted into a voxel grid for decoding. This point-centric formulation enables flexible, data-dependent receptive fields and long-range spatial interactions that are difficult to capture with local and dense voxel-based operators. A hierarchical Gaussian representation further enables multi-scale reasoning by combining global context from coarse super-points with fine-grained detail from higher-resolution streams. Extensive experiments on Occ3D nuScenes and Waymo demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for 4D-POT. We provide code and models at https://lags.cs.uni-freiburg.de/.

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

GEMSS: A Variational Bayesian Method for Discovering Multiple Sparse Solutions in Classification and Regression Problems

arXiv:2602.08913v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: High-dimensional, underdetermined and highly correlated systems are common in data science practice, especially when analyzing physical measurements. In such settings, feature selection poses a fundamental challenge because multiple distinct sparse subsets may explain the response equally well. Their identification is crucial not only for predictive modeling but also for generating domain-specific insights into the underlying mechanisms. Yet, conventional methods typically isolate a single solution, obscuring the full spectrum of plausible explanations. This work introduces GEMSS (Gaussian Ensemble for Multiple Sparse Solutions), a variational algorithm designed to simultaneously discover multiple, diverse sparse feature combinations. The method employs a structured spike-and-slab prior for sparsity, a mixture of Gaussians to approximate the intractable multimodal posterior, and a Jaccard-based penalty to further control solution diversity. A single objective function is optimized via stochastic gradient descent. The method is tested on 128 comprehensive experiments by a novel benchmarking framework designed to generate artificial problems with multiple sparse solutions of equal predictive properties. This allows us to measure the retrieval of ground truth features rather than only evaluating predictive performance – characteristics more fitting to our practical needs. A comparative analysis shows that GEMSS consistently outperforms five prominent feature selection methods adapted through the ALFESE framework. Finally, we demonstrate practical usability through 3 challenging real-world datasets from metabolomics and physical chemistry: GEMSS successfully isolates multiple distinct yet quality solutions. GEMSS is available as a PyPI package 'gemss'. The corresponding repository github.com/kat-er-ina/gemss/ includes the full codebase and a free, no-code application GEMSS Explorer.

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

HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizers

Holistic visual tokenizers are fundamental to unified multimodal models (UMMs) as they map diverse visual inputs into a unified representation space. In this paper, we present HYDRA-X, the first UMM that unifies image and video tokenization within a single Vision Transformer (ViT). Our design is driven by two core challenges: efficiently injecting spatiotemporal reconstruction capability into a native ViT, and embedding image- and video-level semantic awareness into the latent space. To address the first, comprehensive ablations reveal two key findings: (1) frame-level causal temporal attention suffices for visual reconstruction, whereas full spatiotemporal attention degrades it; and (2) hierarchical temporal compression substantially outperforms single-step alternatives. To tackle the second, we propose a lightweight decompressor that upsamples temporally compressed features under joint image-video teacher supervision, thereby enforcing complementary semantic structures within the compact latent space. Building on this holistic tokenizer, we further propose a principled improvement of the editing pipeline: source-target interaction should occur at the latent level inside the tokenizer rather than at the semantic level inside the LLM, substantially improving editing consistency and accelerating convergence. Instantiated at the 7B dense model, HYDRA-X achieves strong performance across image and video understanding and generation tasks, paving the way for future unified-tokenizer UMMs.

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

CrossFlow: One-Step Generation Across Latent and Pixel Spaces

Most diffusion and flow-matching generators define the prior, probability path, and prediction target in the same representation space. Latent diffusion improves efficiency by moving this path into an autoencoder latent space, but the final sample is still produced by a separately trained decoder. This separation creates a mismatch: the generator is optimized for latent-space prediction, while final quality depends on how the decoder handles generated latents that may differ from clean encoder outputs. We introduce CrossFlow, a cross-space flow formulation that maps noisy latent inputs directly to pixel-space images. The key technical step is a velocity-free one-step objective: the latent trajectory defines the training path, but the supervised prediction is an image rather than a latent displacement. This lets one model act both as a one-step latent-to-pixel generator and as a decoder replacement for latent diffusion pipelines. On class-conditional ImageNet-1k at $256\times256$, CrossFlow-XL achieves 1.62 FID with one function evaluation. Ablations show that the latent encoder and pixel-space perceptual and adversarial losses are important for fidelity. These results indicate that cross-space flow objectives can combine the efficiency of latent representations with direct pixel-space supervision, without requiring a separate decoder at inference.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Mix-QVLA: Task-Evidence-Aware Mixed-Precision Quantization of Vision-Language-Action Models

We propose Mix-QVLA, a task-evidence-aware mixed-precision PTQ framework for VLA models. Mix-QVLA anchors each quantized variant to the full-precision action-token reference decision and evaluates whether quantization preserves task-relevant evidence across key VLA functional boundaries. It computes normalized gradient-weighted task-evidence maps from boundary activations and compares full-precision and quantized maps using evidence-mass and attribution-distribution distortion, capturing changes in both the strength and allocation of decision-supporting evidence. A soft-bottleneck objective aggregates boundary-level degradation into layer-wise sensitivity scores. Mix-QVLA further models sensitivity throughout task execution, capturing phase-dependent shifts in layer importance rather than assuming a fixed sensitivity profile. The resulting evidence- and time-aware scores guide mixed-precision bit allocation under model-size and BitOps budgets. Extensive evaluations on OpenVLA-style policies show that Mix-QVLA improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off of low-bit VLA deployment. On LIBERO, Mix-QVLA reduces OpenVLA-OFT memory from 15.4 GB to 4.1 GB, retains 96.3 average success compared with 97.1 for the BF16 model, and achieves a 1.52x inference speedup.

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

Language Shapes Mental Health Evaluations in Large Language Models

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in socially sensitive mental health contexts, including support chatbots, screening, and content moderation. This raises a reliability question: do semantically equivalent mental health inputs elicit comparable evaluations across languages, or systematic shifts consistent with language-associated social and cultural contexts? We examine this question in an English-Chinese setting with GPT-4o and Qwen3-32B using a two-level framework: construct-level evaluative orientation, measured by psychometric stigma instruments, and decision-level behavior, measured by binary stigma detection and four-class depression severity classification. Across instruments and models, Chinese prompts elicit higher stigma-related scores than English prompts. At the decision level, Chinese prompts reduce sensitivity to stigmatizing content and produce more conservative depression severity judgments, leading to more under-estimation errors. These findings show that prompt language can shift both evaluative orientation and downstream behavior in LLM-based mental health evaluation. They highlight the need to evaluate multilingual LLMs not only for aggregate performance, but also for whether they apply comparable evaluative standards across languages in socially sensitive domains.

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

RoboPIN: Grounded Embodied Reasoning via Pinned Chain-of-Thought

arXiv:2606.15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning. However, current vision-language models rely on text-only or coordinate-augmented chain-of-thought, where entity references remain implicit and ambiguous. This may cause the reasoning process to decouple from visual evidence, entity references to drift across steps, and a causal disconnection between the reasoning trajectory and the final answer, with these problems further amplified in multi-view scenarios due to cross-view appearance changes. To address these issues, we propose Pinned Chain-of-Thought (\pincot{}), a structured reasoning paradigm that pins every reasoning step to visual evidence. \pincot{} introduces the concept of \reasoninganchor{}, which binds each task-relevant entity to a structured visual anchor with entity name, unique identity, view index, and spatial grounding, enabling consistent entity tracking across reasoning steps and views. We build a fully automated data generation pipeline to construct \dataset{}, a high-quality \pincot{}-formatted reasoning dataset. We then train \method{} through three-stage post-training that progressively injects embodied knowledge, structured reasoning ability, and process-supervised alignment, with rewards that directly constrain both anchor localization and identity consistency during reasoning. On 14 benchmarks covering embodied spatial reasoning, multi-view reasoning, and pointing, \method{} with only 4B parameters consistently outperforms 7B level open-source embodied models, achieving a 12\% average improvement over the strongest 7B baseline, Mimo-Embodied. Further analysis shows that \pincot{} improves grounding accuracy and cross-step identity consistency, validating the effectiveness of process supervision.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Evaluating and Enhancing Negation Comprehension in Remote Sensing MLLMs

arXiv:2606.20177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various Remote Sensing (RS) tasks. However, their ability to comprehend negation remains underexplored, limiting deployment in real-world applications where models must explicitly identify what is false or absent, e.g., emergency responders need to locate non-flooded routes for evacuation. To comprehensively study this limitation, we introduce RS-Neg, the first benchmark to evaluate negation understanding across region-level to scene-level tasks. Specifically, we design an automated data generation pipeline for RS imagery, using LLMs to synthesize diverse negation queries, and introduce a dynamic visual focus module for verification. Our evaluation reveals that advanced RS MLLMs struggle with negation, exhibiting hallucinations and substantial performance degradation. To close this gap, we propose NeFo, a novel test-time learning method that explicitly incorporates the logical role of negation into the model optimization. Remarkably, using about 5\% unlabeled test samples, NeFo significantly improves the negation understanding of models and shows strong generalization to unseen tasks. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.

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

Analytic Bijections for Smooth and Interpretable Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2601.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A key challenge in normalizing flows is finding expressive invertible scalar bijections. Existing approaches face trade-offs: affine transformations are smooth and analytically invertible but lack expressivity; monotonic splines offer local control but are only piecewise smooth and act on bounded domains; residual flows achieve smoothness but need numerical inversion. We introduce three families of analytic bijections that are globally smooth ($C^\infty$), defined on all of $\mathbb{R}$, and analytically invertible in closed form, combining the favorable properties of prior approaches. Beyond serving as drop-in replacements in coupling flows, where they match or exceed spline performance, we develop radial flows: a novel architecture using direct parametrization that transforms the radial coordinate while preserving angular direction. Radial flows exhibit exceptional training stability, produce geometrically interpretable transformations, and on targets with radial structure can achieve comparable quality to coupling flows with $1000\times$ fewer parameters. We provide comprehensive evaluation on 1D and 2D benchmarks, and demonstrate applicability to higher-dimensional physics problems through experiments on $\phi^4$ lattice field theory, where our bijections outperform affine baselines and enable problem-specific designs that address mode collapse.

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

ProfiLLM: Utility-Aligned Agentic User Profiling for Industrial Ride-Hailing Dispatch

arXiv:2606.18803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bringing Large Language Models (LLMs) into industrial ride-hailing dispatch as semantic feature extractors over platform-scale behavioral logs is a compelling but under-explored data systems problem. Production matching pipelines remain dominated by structured numerical features, yet decisive behavioral signals (e.g., a driver's habitual aversion to certain regions) are inherently contextual and naturally expressible as LLM-generated user profiles. However, scaling such profiling to a live, millisecond-latency dispatcher faces three intertwined constraints rarely addressed together: on a platform with millions of daily orders, logs exceed any LLM's context window by orders of magnitude; most users are long-tail, with too few interactions for per-user profiling; and surface-fluent profiles do not necessarily improve downstream prediction utility. We present ProfiLLM, an agentic LLM data pipeline that operationalizes utility-aligned user profiling for production matching systems through two modules. (1) Tool-Augmented Global Knowledge Mining equips an LLM agent with 27 analytical tools to mine platform-scale data, producing reusable global knowledge, adaptive user clustering rules, and region-level supply-demand priors. (2) Utility-Aligned Profile Exploration generates multiple candidate profiles per cluster, evaluates them via a lightweight downstream utility proxy, iteratively refines the best candidates and constructs preference pairs for DPO fine-tuning. Deployed on DiDi's production dispatcher, ProfiLLM achieves up to +6.14% relative AUC improvement in outcome prediction, up to +4.35% GMV gain in dispatching simulation, and consistent improvements in a 14-day online A/B test including +0.47% GMV, +0.33% Completion Rate, and -0.82% Cancel-Before-Accept rate.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Toward Trustworthy AI: Multi-Target Adversarial Attacks and Robust Defenses for Continuous Data Summarization

arXiv:2606.11804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trustworthy AI requires reliable data-processing pipelines, not only robust downstream predictive models. As an upstream component, data summarization determines which information is retained and passed to subsequent learning or decision modules. Therefore, adversarial perturbations to the summarization process can compromise trustworthy AI in an upstream manner: they may alter the selected summary, reduce its representativeness, and further degrade the utility of subsequent learning tasks. In this paper, we study adversarial attacks on continuous data summarization under similarity-level perturbations through DR-submodular optimization. We show that a class of multi-resolution image summarization objectives can be formulated as multilinear extensions of non-negative submodular set functions and satisfy DR-submodularity with $m$-weak monotonicity. We then formulate multi-target attack generation as a min-max problem, where one admissible perturbation of the similarity structure is optimized to degrade multiple target summarization models. To mitigate such perturbations, we formulate robust defense against mixed attack types as a regularized max-min problem. For both problems, we develop approximation algorithms with theoretical guarantees. Experiments on real-data and controlled clustered benchmarks show that the proposed attack is effective in representative low-to-moderate budget regimes and can induce downstream task-performance loss. The proposed defense improves the robustness–mitigation trade-off in structured settings, while also revealing the parameter sensitivity of robust protection on real data.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Recursive perturbation approach to time-convolutionless master equations: Explicit construction of generalized Lindblad generators for arbitrary open systems

arXiv:2506.04095v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a recursive perturbative expansion for the time-convolutionless (TCL) generator of an open quantum system in a generalized Lindblad form. This formulation provides a systematic approach to derive the generator at arbitrary order while preserving a Lindblad-like structure, without imposing assumptions on the system or environment beyond an initially uncorrelated state. The generator is written, at all orders, in a canonical form, which also corresponds to the minimal dissipation condition, which uniquely specifies the decomposition of the generator into Hamiltonian and dissipative contributions. To validate the method and show its effectiveness in addressing non-Markovian dynamics and strong-coupling effects, we compute the generator explicitly up to fourth order.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

The Erdős-Hajnal High-Girth Subgraph Conjecture Holds in the Polynomial Chromatic-Sparsity Regime

作者:

arXiv:2606.17901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For a graph $G$ put $h_r(G)=\max{\chi(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r}.$ Erdős and Hajnal asked whether $h_r(G)\to\infty$ as $\chi(G)\to\infty$, for every fixed $r\ge4$. We prove this in every fixed polynomial edge-density regime: for all $r\ge4$, $k\ge2$, $P,C>0$, there is $M=M_{r,k}(P,C)$ such that $\chi(G)\ge M,\ e(G)\le C\chi(G)^P\Longrightarrow h_r(G)\ge k.$ Quantitatively, after replacing $P$ by $P\vee2$ and $C$ by $C\vee2$, $M_{r,k}(P,C)\le \exp!\left(O_{r,k}\bigl((P+2+\log(C\vee2))^2\bigr)\right),$ and consequently the same conclusion holds throughout the quasi-polynomial range $e(G)\le \exp\bigl(C_0(\log\chi(G))^a\bigr),\ 1 < a < 3/2,$ for all sufficiently large $\chi(G)$. In each fixed polynomial-density regime we also obtain $f_{P,C}(k,r)\le k^{O_{r,P,C}(1)}.$ The proof combines a chromatic-defect random extraction lemma, compact and near-quadratic sparse-core bases, and a peeling/thinning bootstrap increasing the admissible edge exponent by $1/(r-1)$. We also prove structural saturation results for possible counterexamples, including Moore-strength exact-cycle packings and quadratic saturation in projected colour-pair space. Finally, writing $h_r^{\mathrm f}(G)=\max{\chi_{\mathrm f}(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r},$ we develop a fractional random-extraction framework based on Mohar-Wu preservation. We prove sufficient cheap-cycle-killing criteria and verify them for several structured families, including clique-organised families, line graphs of incidence graphs of equal-order generalized quadrangles and generalized hexagons, and the Bohman-Keevash tracking-time triangle-free-process graph. We also isolate a density-free obstruction that any proof using this fractional surgery route must overcome.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Researchers Say Mental Model/Theory of Mind of AI, What Are They Really Talking About?

arXiv:2510.02660v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When researchers claim AI systems possess ToM or mental models, they are fundamentally discussing behavioral predictions and bias corrections rather than genuine mental states. This position paper argues that the current discourse conflates sophisticated pattern matching with authentic cognition, missing a crucial distinction between simulation and experience. While recent studies show LLMs achieving human-level performance on ToM laboratory tasks, these results are based only on behavioral mimicry. More importantly, the entire testing paradigm may be flawed in applying individual human cognitive tests to AI systems, but assessing human cognition directly in the moment of human-AI interaction. I suggest shifting focus toward mutual ToM frameworks that acknowledge the simultaneous contributions of human cognition and AI algorithms, emphasizing the interaction dynamics, instead of testing AI in isolation.

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

Regional Climate Model Emulation with Diffusion Approaches: What is the Added Value of Generative Machine Learning?

arXiv:2606.14570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emulators provide a cost-effective alternative to regional climate models (RCMs) by capturing their dynamical downscaling function. They link large-scale predictors simulated by global climate models (GCMs) to RCM-simulated high-resolution fields of the target variable, here precipitation. Machine learning methods, typically deep learning, are cheaper than running RCMs in computation time and energy. Among them, generative models are appealing because they can simulate ensembles of local high-resolution fields consistent with the predictors. This ensemble, which we call the uncertainty envelope, remains to be properly assessed for added value. Here, we make three contributions. First, we introduce ParamDiffusion, a new two-stage diffusion-based framework, and compare it with a state-of-the-art diffusion approach. Second, we expand standard validation through a comprehensive framework aligned with climate-science needs, examining specific precipitation events, including extremes. Third, within this framework, we assess the added value of diffusion approaches relative to deterministic methods. We intercompare four deep-learning models: a deterministic model designed to capture the precipitation tail; a parametric probabilistic model based on it; a recently proposed diffusion approach; and ParamDiffusion, which couples the parametric model with a diffusion model. Our results show that diffusion-based approaches reproduce climatological precipitation statistics with high skill, including distributional tails and spatially compounded extremes, while generating spatially detailed fields. However, none of the assessed models consistently accounts for the most extreme RCM-simulated events within its uncertainty envelope. Diffusion models are therefore promising for probabilistic RCM emulation, but progress is still required before they can reliably represent high-impact precipitation extremes.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Twisted (co)homology of non-orientable Weyl semimetals

arXiv:2511.22303v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The quasi-particle excitations in Weyl semimetals, known as Weyl fermions, are usually forced to emerge in charge-conjugate pairs by the Nielsen–Ninomiya theorem. When the Brillouin zone is non-orientable, this constraint is replaced by a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ charge cancellation, as a result of the chirality becoming ill-defined on such manifolds; this results in configurations with seemingly non-zero total chirality. Here, we set out to explain this behaviour from a purely topological perspective, and provide a classification of non-orientable Weyl semimetal topology in terms of exact sequences of twisted (co)homology groups. This leads to several discoveries of direct physical importance: in particular, we recover the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ charge cancellation in a coordinate-independent way, allowing meaningful limits to be set on its physical interpretation. A detailed discussion is provided on a specific Klein bottle-like topology induced by a momentum-space glide symmetry, including a full review of the insulating and semimetallic invariants of the system and a classification of the surface states on the non-orientable boundary. Beyond this, we provide a complete survey of all possible non-orientable Brillouin zones and their associated invariants, and extend our formalism into the realm of non-Hermitian topological physics and inversion-symmetric Weyl semimetals. Our work exemplifies the vast potential of fundamental mathematical descriptions to not only aid the corresponding physical intuition, but also predict novel and hitherto overlooked phenomena of great relevance throughout the physics research forefront.

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

EEG-FM-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for the Systematic Evaluation and Diagnostic Analyses of EEG Foundation Models

arXiv:2508.17742v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electroencephalography foundation models (EEG-FMs) have advanced brain signal analysis, but the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks impedes model comparison and scientific progress. Current evaluations rely on inconsistent protocols that render cross-model comparisons unreliable, while a lack of diagnostic analyses obscures the internal mechanisms driving transfer efficiency and scaling behaviors. To address this, we introduce EEG-FM-Bench, a unified system for the standardized evaluation of EEG-FMs. The benchmark integrates 14 datasets across 10 paradigms and incorporates diverse experimental settings, including multiple fine-tuning strategies, task organizations, and classifier configurations, supported by tools for gradient and representation analysis. Our experiments and analysis reveal several critical insights: (1) multi-task learning often acts as a useful regularizer that mitigates overfitting in data-scarce EEG contexts, although negative transfer can arise under specific task paradigms; (2) pre-training efficiency is currently limited by gradient conflicts between reconstruction objectives and downstream tasks; (3) under released checkpoints and a matched downstream protocol, model or data scale alone does not fully explain transfer performance, while objective alignment, adaptation compatibility, and EEG-specific design appear to be important factors. This benchmark enables fair comparison and reproducible analysis, providing a step toward fairer comparison and more interpretable analysis of EEG-FMs. Code is available at https://github.com/xw1216/EEG-FM-Bench.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

A Novel Correction Method for QT Interval in the Presence of Left Bundle Branch Block Morphology

Background Accurate assessment of the QT interval is challenging in the presence of QRS prolongation, such as during ventricular pacing or bundle branch block. Current correction methods are heterogeneous and lack consensus. To evaluate the relationship between QRS duration and QT interval during ventricular pacing and to develop a practical correction method for QT assessment. Methods In this prospective single-centre study, 94 patients undergoing electrophysiology study for supraventricular tachycardia were included. Standardised pacing was performed at the same cycle length from the right ventricular (RV) apex, high output and low output pacing from His catheter, and coronary sinus (reference). QRS and QT intervals were measured from 12-lead ECGs. Changes in QT (QT) and QRS duration (QRS) were analysed using linear regression and mixed-effects modelling. QT correction formulas of the form QT corrected = QT N x QRS were evaluated using Bland-Altman analysis across multiple coefficients. Results A significant positive correlation between QRS and QT was observed across all pacing sites (r = 0.52-0.74, p < 0.001). In mixed-effects modelling, QRS was a strong independent predictor of QT (0.59, p < 0.001), with no significant interaction between pacing site and QRS, supporting a consistent relationship across pacing locations. Bland-Altman analysis demonstrated that correction coefficients of 0.65-0.70 minimised systematic bias compared with lower coefficients, with similar precision across models (SD 16 ms) and no evidence of proportional bias. A coefficient of 0.65 provided the most balanced performance between bias and variability. Conclusion QT prolongation during ventricular pacing is primarily driven by QRS widening and follows a consistent linear relationship across pacing sites. A simple correction using QT corrected = QT 0.65 x (QRS 100 ms) provides a practical and accurate method for QT assessment, with potential clinical applicability in patients with conduction abnormalities or ventricular pacing.

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arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Correct When Paired, Wrong When Split: Decoupling and Editing Modality-Specific Neurons in MLLMs

Although Knowledge Editing provides an efficient mechanism for updating the knowledge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we find that current paradigms still suffer from an important yet remain underexplored issue : editing decoupling failure, where entity-related knowledge can be updated when the model is triggered by multimodal inputs (text–image query pairs), however, it often reverts to outdated pre-edit facts when the paired inputs are split into unimodal ones. Our in-depth empirical analysis reveals that the entity knowledge in MLLMs is not stored as a unified representation, but is instead distributed across disentangled modality-specific pathways. As a result, updates biased toward multimodal queries fail to propagate effectively to unimodal circuits. To bridge this gap, we propose DECODE, which explicitly disentangles and localizes modality-specific neuron groups for targeted knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DECODE consistently achieves effective knowledge updates under different modality triggers, thereby mitigating editing decoupling failures.