Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2509.15927

Enhancing Generative Auto-bidding with Offline Reward Evaluation and Policy Search

Authors:

Zhiyu Mou ↗Yiqin Lv ↗Miao Xu ↗Qi Wang ↗Yixiu Mao ↗Jinghao Chen ↗Qichen Ye ↗Chao Li ↗Rongquan Bai ↗Chuan Yu ↗Jian Xu ↗Bo Zheng ↗…

arXiv:2509.15927v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Auto-bidding is a critical tool for advertisers to improve advertising performance. Recent progress has demonstrated that AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB), which learns a conditional generative planner from offline data, achieves superior performance compared to typical offline reinforcement learning (RL)-based auto-bidding methods. However, existing AIGB methods still face a performance bottleneck due to their inherent inability to explore beyond the static dataset with feedback. To address this, we propose AIGB-Pearl (Planning with \textbf{EvaluAtor via RL}), a novel method that integrates generative planning and policy optimization. The core of AIGB-Pearl lies in constructing a trajectory evaluator to assess the quality of generated scores and designing a provably sound KL-Lipschitz-constrained score-maximization scheme to ensure safe and efficient exploration beyond the offline dataset. A practical algorithm that incorporates the synchronous coupling technique is further developed to ensure the model regularity required by the proposed scheme. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world advertising systems demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2512.15947

MCR-VQGAN: A Scalable and Cost-Effective Tau PET Synthesis Approach for Alzheimer's Disease Imaging

Authors:

Jin Young Kim ↗Jeremy Hudson ↗Jeongchul Kim ↗Qing Lyu ↗Christopher T. Whitlow ↗

Tau positron emission tomography (PET) is a critical diagnostic modality for Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its widespread clinical adoption is hindered by radiation exposure, limited availability, high clinical workload, and substantial financial costs. To address these limitations, we propose the Multi-scale CBAM Residual Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network (MCR-VQGAN) to synthesize high-fidelity tau PET images from structural T1-weighted MRI. MCR-VQGAN advances the standard VQGAN architecture through three enhancements: multi-scale convolutions, ResNet blocks, and Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAM), which collectively improve the capture of local and global features. Using 222 paired T1-weighted MRI and tau PET scans from the ADNI database, we trained and compared MCR-VQGAN against cGAN, WGAN-GP, CycleGAN, and baseline VQGAN. MCR-VQGAN achieved superior image synthesis performance across all metrics (MSE = 0.0056 +/- 0.0061, PSNR = 30.65 +/- 4.47 dB, SSIM = 0.9263 +/- 0.0469). A CNN-based AD classifier trained on real tau PET achieved comparable accuracy on real (63.64%) and synthetic (65.91%) images, indicating that diagnostically relevant features are preserved. Regional SUVR-equivalent analysis across Braak-defined ROIs further indicated strong agreement between real and synthetic tau PET (Pearson r = 0.78-0.88; ICC = 0.71-0.84), with the strongest agreement in Braak V/VI (ICC = 0.838). Together, these results suggest that MCR-VQGAN offers a promising and scalable surrogate for conventional tau PET imaging, potentially improving the accessibility of tau biomarkers for AD research and clinical workflows.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.10403

KCSAT-ML: Probing Reasoning Models with Nationwide-Cohort Human Difficulty

Authors:

Sanghee Park ↗Geewook Kim ↗Kee-Eung Kim ↗

Math reasoning benchmarks have proliferated, yet most lack a per-item difficulty signal grounded in actual human performance. We introduce KCSAT-ML, a decade (2014-2025) of Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (KCSAT; Suneung) mathematics: 664 problems with a 339-item core set carrying official per-item error rates from nationwide cohorts of hundreds of thousands of examinees. We pair the benchmark with Difficulty-aligned Reasoning Gain (DRG): a score-orthogonal metric that asks whether a model's mistakes concentrate on the items humans found hard, or on items humans found easy. Together they expose, across a wide range of VLMs (and LLMs via OCR), three patterns: (i) low-budget accuracy collapses on the high-human-error tail at every model size; (ii) test-time scaling (TTS) raises token use roughly linearly with cohort error rate, while accuracy gains follow a non-monotonic curve; (iii) within a single family, TTS flips between anti-scaling on the hardest items and overthinking on easier ones – two faces of the same alignment failure. On DRG, models with near-identical accuracy can sit at near-opposite values: one model gets wrong what humans also find hard, while another solves the hardest items yet fails on items humans find easy – a contrast that aggregate accuracy hides. Our code and dataset builder will be open-sourced at https://github.com/naver-ai/KCSAT-ML.

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04.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2603.11172

Integrable Massless and Massive Fermions

Authors:

Zhao Zhang ↗

arXiv:2603.11172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One-dimensional integrable fermions can be classified into massless and massive regimes, and the $R$-operator for the latter can be constructed from that of the former. Here, I define integrable massless fermions by the simultaneous satisfaction of the Yang-Baxter equation (YBE) and Shastry's decorated YBE (DYBE) by the $R$-matrix. This notion is strictly more general than Maassarani's `free-fermion algebra', yet more restrictive than the notion of free fermions in exactly solvable quantum models or in integrable two-dimensional classical vertex models dual to quantum spin chains. Within this framework, there emerge two archetypal mechanisms for opening a spectral gap and generating massive fermions: (i) breaking time-reversal symmetry by coupling to external field, and (ii) introducing time-reversal symmetric interactions. These paradigms are realized, respectively, in the XY chain in a longitudinal field and in the Hubbard model, both of which possess non-relativistic, bivariate $R$-matrices. Integrability conditions on local Hamiltonians for both massless and massive fermions are identified, and schematic procedures for uniquely determining their $R$-matrices are proposed.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16811

Scaling LLM Reasoning from Minimal Labels: A Semi-Supervised Framework with a Lightweight Verifier

Authors:

Keizo Kato ↗Chenhui Chu ↗Yugo Murawaki ↗Sado Kurohashi ↗

For the development of Large language models (LLMs), recent approaches to generating pseudo intermediate reasoning have shown remarkable progress. But they typically rely on large numbers of correctly annotated answers to assess reasoning quality. This paper presents a semi-supervised framework that scales reasoning learning from minimal supervision, turning reasoning verification itself into a data creation mechanism. We train a lightweight reasoning-correctness classifier on only a few labeled samples, which judges whether intermediate reasoning traces generated by an LLM are valid. Furthermore, an entropy-based confidence threshold filters out unreliable samples, and the remaining high-confidence reasoning traces are used to fine-tune the model. Experiments on Verifiable Math Problems (Orca-Math subset) and Question Answering on Image Scene Graphs (GQA) with Visual Programming show that our method achieves accuracy comparable to using 10-15x more labeled data. Ablation analyses confirm that both the classifier and entropy filtering are essential for scalable and noise-resistant pseudo-labeling. By replacing expensive answer-level supervision with lightweight reasoning verification, our method provides a practical path toward constructing large-scale reasoning resources and paves the way for future autonomous reasoning systems that learn from minimal human input.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19788

CombEval: A Framework for Evaluating Combinatorial Counting in Large Language Models

Authors:

Yuxu Zhou ↗Ond\v{r}ej Ku\v{z}elka ↗Yuyi Wang ↗Yuanhong Wang ↗Yi Chang ↗

We present CombEval, a dynamic benchmark for evaluating combinatorial counting in large language models. CombEval represents each problem as a typed Cofola specification over entities, combinatorial objects, object dependencies, and constraints, enabling controlled generation of natural-language counting problems with exact solver-verified answers. Unlike static collections, CombEval supports systematic variation of object type, entity scale, constraint count, and reasoning depth. We evaluate 11 LLMs under direct and code-augmented settings and find that models remain brittle on ordered objects, indistinguishable elements, relatively positional constraints, and nested object dependencies. Error analysis further identifies failures in constraint interpretation and counting principles. CombEval provides a diagnostic testbed for studying when and why LLMs fail at combinatorial reasoning. The code and generated benchmark suites are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/YuxuZhou-CN/combination-problem-generation}.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2601.03112

DiT-JSCC: Rethinking Deep JSCC with Diffusion Transformers and Semantic Representations

Authors:

Kailin Tan ↗Jincheng Dai ↗Sixian Wang ↗Guo Lu ↗Shuo Shao ↗Kai Niu ↗Wenjun Zhang ↗Ping Zhang ↗

Generative joint source-channel coding (GJSCC) has emerged as a new Deep JSCC paradigm for achieving high-fidelity and robust image transmission under extreme wireless channel conditions, such as ultra-low bandwidth and low signal-to-noise ratio. Recent studies commonly adopt diffusion models as generative decoders, but they frequently produce visually realistic results with limited semantic consistency. This limitation stems from a fundamental mismatch between reconstruction-oriented JSCC encoders and generative decoders, as the former lack explicit semantic discriminability and fail to provide reliable conditional cues. In this paper, we propose DiT-JSCC, a novel GJSCC backbone that can jointly learn a semantics-prioritized representation encoder and a diffusion transformer (DiT) based generative decoder, our open-source project aims to promote the future research in GJSCC. Specifically, we design a semantics-detail dual-branch encoder that aligns naturally with a coarse-to-fine conditional DiT decoder, prioritizing semantic consistency under extreme channel conditions. Moreover, a training-free adaptive bandwidth allocation strategy inspired by Kolmogorov complexity is introduced to further improve the transmission efficiency, thereby indeed redefining the notion of information value in the era of generative decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiT-JSCC consistently outperforms existing JSCC methods in both semantic consistency and visual quality, particularly in extreme regimes.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11680

Organize then Retrieve: Hierarchical Memory Navigation for Efficient Agents

Authors:

Hao-Lun Hsu ↗Nikki Lijing Kuang ↗Boyi Liu ↗Zhewei Yao ↗Yuxiong He ↗

Large language model (LLM) agents struggle with long-horizon tasks due to their inherent statelessness, requiring all task-relevant information to be encoded in growing input contexts. The resulting degraded reasoning quality, increased inference cost, and higher latency necessitate efficient working memory mechanisms. However, existing approaches either rely on lossy compression or similarity-based retrieval, which often fail to capture temporal structure and causal dependencies required for multi-step agentic tasks. In this work, we present HORMA, a Hierarchical Organize-and-Retrieve Memory Agent that organizes experience into a file-system-like hierarchical structure, where summarized entities are linked to the corresponding raw trajectories, enabling efficient access without losing detailed information. HORMA decomposes working memory into two stages: structured memory construction and navigation-based retrieval. The construction module iteratively refines how experiences are structured by distinguishing between failures caused by missing information and those caused by misleading or overloaded context. The navigation module retrieves task-relevant context by traversing the hierarchy using a lightweight agent trained with reinforcement learning to select minimal yet sufficient context, thereby reducing latency along the critical execution path. Across ALFWorld, LoCoMo, and LongMemEval, HORMA improves task performance under constrained context budgets while requiring at most 22.17% of the baseline token usage in long conversation tasks. Compared to existing methods, it consistently achieves better efficiency-performance trade-offs and generalizes effectively to unseen tasks.

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09.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12168

Fabricating fiber cavity mirror substrates compatible with high coupling efficiency

Authors:

Michael Caouette-Mansour ↗Thomas J. Clark ↗Valeria Mosso Tsedilkina ↗Jack C. Sankey ↗

arXiv:2606.12168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fiber optical cavities offer small mode volumes and correspondingly strong light-matter interactions in an open Fabry-Perot geometry. However, existing fabrication techniques do not reliably produce substrates with surface profiles amenable to high mode matching between the cavity mode and fiber core, thereby limiting the achievable collection efficiency. Here we present a technique to fabricate fiber mirror substrates while using $in situ$ reflectometry to constrain the achievable mode matching prior to coating. By measuring the back-reflection from freshly cleaved fiber tips, we pre-select 138 fibers compatible with 96.5-99.5% mode matching, and after a single CO$_2$ laser ablation pulse, these fibers remained compatible with 95.3-99.2\%. This simple technique provides rapid feedback during each stage of substrate fabrication, greatly enhancing the yield of viable fiber mirror substrates prior to (expensive) coating runs.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19100

AMALIA-VL: A Native European Portuguese Open-Source Vision and Language Model

Authors:

Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet European Portuguese (pt-PT) remains systematically underserved by existing open-source multimodal models, which either conflate it with Brazilian Portuguese or severely under-represent it in their training data mixes. We introduce AMALIA-VL, the first open-source instruction-tuned LVLM built natively for pt-PT, pairing a high-resolution vision encoder with dynamic image tiling and a fully open pt-PT-optimized language model via a learned connector. We contribute with a purposefully designed three-stage training process - vision-language alignment, general visual instruction tuning, and preference optimization - together with a pt-PT-centric multimodal data mix combining curated and translated public datasets with novel datasets that address the near-total absence of European Portuguese multimodal resources. Our evaluation shows that AMALIA-VL establishes a strong baseline for open-source pt-PT LVLMs.We will release model weights, training data, and construction pipelines along with machine-translated pt-PT evaluation benchmarks to help democratize pt-PT LVLM development.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2604.23716

Information-Theoretic Measures in AI: A Practical Decision Guide

Authors:

Nikolaos Al. Papadopoulos ↗Konstantinos E. Psannis ↗

arXiv:2604.23716v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Information-theoretic (IT) measures are ubiquitous in artificial intelligence: entropy drives decision-tree splits and uncertainty quantification, cross-entropy is the default classification loss, mutual information underpins representation learning and feature selection, and transfer entropy reveals directed influence in dynamical systems. A second, less consolidated family of measures, integrated information (Phi), effective information (EI), and autonomy, has emerged for characterizing agent complexity. Despite wide adoption, measure selection is often decoupled from estimator assumptions, failure modes, and safe inferential claims. This paper provides a practical decision framework for all seven measures, organized around three prescriptive questions for each: (i) what question does the measure answer and in which AI context; (ii) which estimator is appropriate for the data type and dimensionality; and (iii) what is the most dangerous misuse. The framework is operationalized in two complementary artifacts: a measure-selection flowchart and a master decision table. We cover both AI/ML and decision-making agent application domains per measure, with standardized Bridge Boxes linking IT quantities to cognitive constructs. Three worked examples illustrate the framework on concrete practitioner scenarios spanning representation learning, temporal influence analysis, and evolved agent complexity.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2603.01250

The MAMA-MIA Challenge: Advancing Generalizability and Fairness in Breast MRI Tumor Segmentation and Treatment Response Prediction

Authors:

arXiv:2603.01250v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy among women worldwide and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging plays a central role in tumor characterization and treatment monitoring, particularly in patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy. However, existing artificial intelligence models for breast magnetic resonance imaging are typically developed and evaluated using heterogeneous datasets, study populations, and assessment protocols, making direct comparison difficult and limiting understanding of model robustness across institutions and clinically relevant patient subgroups. The MAMA-MIA Challenge was designed to address these challenges by providing a standardized benchmark for the joint evaluation of primary tumor segmentation and prediction of pathologic complete response using pre-treatment magnetic resonance imaging only. The training cohort comprised 1,506 patients from multiple institutions in the United States, while evaluation was conducted on an external test set of 574 patients from three independent European centers to assess cross-continental and cross-institutional generalization. A unified scoring framework combined predictive performance with subgroup consistency across age, menopausal status, and breast density. Twenty-six international teams participated in the final evaluation phase. Results demonstrate substantial performance variability under a common external evaluation framework and reveal trade-offs between overall accuracy and subgroup fairness. The challenge provides standardized datasets, evaluation protocols, and public resources to promote the development of robust and equitable artificial intelligence systems for breast cancer imaging.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2604.18105

NIM4-ASR: Towards Efficient, Robust, and Customizable Real-Time LLM-Based ASR

Authors:

Yuan Xie ↗Jiaqi Song ↗Guang Qiu ↗Xianliang Wang ↗Kai Qiao ↗Junfeng Yuan ↗Shengqing Liu ↗Yi Zhang ↗Bowen Chen ↗Ming Lei ↗Jie Gao ↗Jie Wu ↗…

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed – particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under acoustically challenging conditions. To address these issues, we present NIM4-ASR, a production-oriented LLM-based ASR framework optimized for both efficiency and robustness. Grounded in a principled delineation of functional roles between the encoder and the LLM, we redesign the multi-stage training paradigm to align each module with its intended capability boundary. Specifically, we reformulate the pre-training architecture and objective to mitigate the modality gap and improve parameter efficiency; introduce an iterative asynchronous SFT stage to preserve acoustic fidelity and constrain representation drift; and design an ASR-specialized reinforcement learning stage to further enhance recognition quality and robustness. We additionally incorporate a suite of production-oriented optimizations, including robustness under noisy and silent conditions, real-time streaming inference, and hotword customization via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experiments show that NIM4-ASR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks with merely 2.3B parameters, while substantially outperforming larger-scale competitors on internal benchmarks – particularly in entity-intensive real-world scenarios. NIM4-ASR further supports million-scale hotword customization via RAG with sub-millisecond retrieval latency, enabling efficient adaptation to emerging entities and personalized user requirements.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.02320

TVIR: Building Deep Research Agents Towards Text-Visual Interleaved Report Generation

Authors:

Xinkai Ma ↗Zhiqi Bai ↗Dingling Zhang ↗Pei Liu ↗Yishuo Yuan ↗He Zhu ↗Jiakai Wang ↗Qianqian Xie ↗Yifan Zhao ↗Xinlong Yang ↗Hao Cong ↗Zhiheng Yao ↗…

Deep Research Agents have shown strong capability in multi-step information retrieval, reasoning, and long-form report generation, but existing benchmarks and systems remain predominantly text-centric, with limited evaluation of whether visual elements are factually reliable and well aligned with the surrounding analysis. To address this gap, we introduce TVIR (Text-Visual Interleaved Report Generation), which includes TVIR-Bench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated multimodal deep research tasks that require visual elements to serve specific analytical sub-goals, and TVIR-Agent, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that serves as a strong baseline for constructing outlines, retrieving images, generating charts with traceable sources, and composing reports through context-aware sequential writing. We further develop a dual-path evaluation framework that combines Textual Assessment and Visual Assessment. Experiments across nine deep research systems show that TVIR-Agent achieves strong overall performance, underscoring the importance of explicit multimodal design and evaluation for evidence-driven report generation.

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15.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:40b8af690f0e77920f94f604e1d9cf95

Dynamic balance of sparse flux vectors for efficient simulation of culture dynamics and metabolic network reduction

Authors:

Tapia García ↗Torrealba ↗Luna ↗Pérez-Correa ↗J. R ↗Saa ↗P. A ↗

Dynamic Flux Balance Analysis (DFBA) enables simulation of microbial culture dynamics under changing environmental conditions, but remains computationally expensive for tasks such as parameter calibration and fermentation optimization when applied using genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs). To address this challenge, we introduce Dynamic Flux Vector Balancing (DFVB), a reformulation of DFBA that solves an equivalent problem using a pre-computed, sparse basis of flux solutions that reduces the dimensionality of the internal optimization problem without information loss. Notably, DFVB provides a compact, interpretable representation of flux states that can readily identify dynamically inactive pathways and enable simulation-based automatic metabolic network reduction. We showed that DFVB produces the same culture dynamics as DFBA across multiple model scales and conditions, and identifies inactive reactions more accurately than Flux Variability Analysis (FVA) when compared to transcriptomic data profiles. Furthermore, computational performance analyses demonstrated that integrating DFVB with solver warm-start strategies and model reduction enhances computational efficiency relative to DFBA, yielding up to 3-fold reductions in simulation time for large-scale metabolic models. Finally, kinetic parameter estimation of culture dynamics with DFVB in two fermentation scenarios using a large-scale yeast GEM reached equal or higher prediction fidelity and narrower confidence intervals than DFBA, indicating improved parameter identifiability and robustness. Together, these results position DFVB as a scalable, robust, and biologically coherent framework for dynamic metabolic modeling, easing the integration of GEMs for culture dynamics simulation.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19264

Structured Inference with Large Language Gibbs

Authors:

Sanghyeok Choi ↗Henry Gouk ↗Esmeralda S. Whitammer ↗

The knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs) can serve as a substrate for structured reasoning over variables describing a complex world, but accessing this knowledge in a probabilistically coherent manner poses a difficult inference problem. We propose Large Language Gibbs, a scheme for structured probabilistic inference that uses conditional distributions of an LLM as transition operators. Rather than sampling structured objects through single-pass autoregressive generation, we iteratively resample individual variables conditioned on others using an LLM's next-token conditionals. This approach avoids order-dependent biases and produces a stationary distribution that reflects a compromise between all local conditionals. We apply this approach to sampling from synthetic distributions, consistent reasoning tasks, and Bayesian structure learning. The results suggest that the use of LLM conditionals in MCMC is a practical alternative to one-pass generation for structured probabilistic inference under a world prior accessible through noisy LLM conditionals.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2311.16707

Full-resolution MLPs Empower Medical Dense Prediction

Authors:

Mingyuan Meng ↗Yuxin Xue ↗Dagan Feng ↗Lei Bi ↗Jinman Kim ↗

Dense prediction is a fundamental requirement for many medical vision tasks such as medical image restoration, registration, and segmentation. The most popular vision model, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), has reached bottlenecks due to the intrinsic locality of convolution operations. Recently, transformers have been widely adopted for dense prediction for their capability to capture long-range visual dependence. However, due to the high computational complexity and large memory consumption of self-attention operations, transformers are usually used at downsampled feature resolutions. Such usage cannot effectively leverage the tissue-level textural information available only at the full image resolution. This textural information is crucial for medical dense prediction as it can differentiate the subtle human anatomy in medical images. In this study, we hypothesize that Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are superior alternatives to transformers in medical dense prediction where tissue-level details dominate the performance, as MLPs enable long-range dependence at the full image resolution. To validate our hypothesis, we develop a full-resolution hierarchical MLP framework that uses MLPs beginning from the full image resolution. We evaluate this framework with various MLP blocks on a wide range of medical dense prediction tasks including restoration, registration, and segmentation. Extensive experiments on six public well-benchmarked datasets show that, by simply using MLPs at full resolution, our framework outperforms its CNN and transformer counterparts and achieves state-of-the-art performance on various medical dense prediction tasks.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11295

Interpretable Neural Marked Statistics for Cosmological Inference

Authors:

Federico Semenzato ↗Benjamin D. Wandelt ↗Michele Liguori ↗Alvise Raccanelli ↗

arXiv:2606.11295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering cosmological information beyond the power spectrum is a central goal for upcoming cosmological surveys, since late-time non-Gaussian signal in the matter density cannot be accessed through two-point statistics alone. Marked statistics fold part of this information back into the two-point level by reweighting the field with non-linear functions. We propose a neural marking scheme to generalize this process through a set of interpretable, physically motivated transformations that directly allow to interpret the gain in cosmological information at the morphological level. We employ a contrastive learning objective to align learnable marked summaries with the underlying cosmological parameters. At $k_{\max}=0.2\,h\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$, our neural mark tightens the marginalized constraint on $\sigma_8$ by $2.9\times$ and on $\Omega_m$ by $1.8\times$ compared to classical marks, breaking the $\Omega_m-\sigma_8$ degeneracy at the Fisher information level. It further reduces the parameter MSE across our cosmological parameter prior by $1.45\times$ over the best classical mark. The learned latent geometry aligns with the $\Omega_m$ and $\sigma_8$ directions in parameter space, indicating that the contrastive objective recovers the dominant axes of cosmological information. Our approach opens the door to more powerful, interpretable summary statistics for cosmological inference.

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19.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:a2645eba07cb37eaf4a2b728c3d94ee4

SMLMFlow: Improving Structural Resolution in Single Molecule Localization Microscopy with Flow Matching

Authors:

Bauer ↗Panconi ↗Cunha ↗Latron ↗Sage ↗Peters ↗Griffie ↗

While Single Molecule Localization Microscopy (SMLM) aims to generate precise coordinates of molecular targets in cells, the resulting point clouds are inherently blurred by additive noise sources across the experimental, imaging, and processing workflow. This blurring often limits SMLM's ability to accurately quantify complex assembled structures required to address biological issues, despite reported localization precision down to a couple of nanometers. Here, we present SMLMFlow, a machine learning framework for improving structural resolution in SMLM datasets that combines a graph neural network and a hierarchical transformer with flow matching. We show that SMLMFlow improves structural resolution and downstream quantification across different structures, including filaments and protein nano-clusters, and generalizes to new unseen photophysics models.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15532

EIBench: A Simulator-Based Benchmark and Turn-Credit RL for Emotion Management

Authors:

Rongzhi Zhu ↗Xiang Huang ↗Yuchuan Wu ↗Rui Wang ↗Zequn Sun ↗Tao Ren ↗Weiyao Luo ↗Bingxue Qiu ↗Jieping Ye ↗Yongbin Li ↗Wei Hu ↗

Emotional intelligence (EI) in Large Language Models (LLMs) is often evaluated through static understanding tasks or single-response dialogue generation. However, emotion management is interactive: a good model should not only recognize a user's emotion, but also improve the user's emotional and relational state over several turns. We introduce EIBench, a simulator-based benchmark for interactive emotion management. EIBench contains 2,222 scenarios, with 2,009 for training and 213 for held-out testing. The scenarios are organized by a 2x2 taxonomy covering Support, Defense, Repair, and Charm, which together capture different forms of support, boundary maintenance, trust repair, and rapport building. In each scenario, an LLM simulator plays the user, updates an emotion-relation state after each turn, and maps the final state to an anchor-based score. This design makes EIBench both an evaluation benchmark and a training environment: the final state gives the outcome reward, while the per-turn state updates provide dense feedback for RL. We evaluate 15 open- and closed-source LLMs. Current models perform well on support and rapport-building scenes, but struggle with boundary maintenance under user pressure. To improve the EI ability of LLMs, we propose Centered Turn-Credit GRPO (CTC-GRPO), a GRPO extension that reuses the simulator's per-turn state updates as dense turn-level feedback while preserving the final outcome reward. CTC-GRPO improves Qwen3-8B from -22.4 to +22.4 on EIBench and also improves on out-of-distribution evaluations including SAGE (+12.4) and EQBench3 (+20.9%). Our results show that simulator-tracked user states can support both evaluation and training for multi-turn emotion management.

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21.

PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13 DOI: HASH:09e1b7c2032e6adf96b8b52c7c1c674e

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

Authors:

Erkison Ewomazino Odih ↗

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2411.18714

Explainable deep learning improves human mental models of self-driving cars

Authors:

Eoin M. Kenny ↗Akshay Dharmavaram ↗Sang Uk Lee ↗Tung Phan-Minh ↗Shreyas Rajesh ↗Yunqing Hu ↗Laura Major ↗Momchil S. Tomov ↗Julie A. Shah ↗

arXiv:2411.18714v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-driving cars increasingly rely on deep neural networks to achieve human-like driving. The opacity of such black-box planners makes it challenging to accurately anticipate when they will fail, with potentially catastrophic consequences. While research into interpreting these systems has surged, most of it is confined to simulations or toy setups due to the difficulty of real-world deployment, leaving the practical utility of such techniques unknown. Here, we introduce the Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net), a method for faithfully explaining the behavior of machine-learning-based planners that causally grounds their reasoning in human-interpretable concepts without sacrificing performance. We deploy CW-Net on a real self-driving car and show that the resulting explanations improve the human driver's mental model of the vehicle, allowing them to better predict its behavior, particularly in surprising situations. This demonstrates that explainable deep learning integrated into self-driving cars can be both understandable and useful in a realistic deployment setting. We anticipate our method could be applied to other safety-critical systems, such as autonomous drones and robotic surgeons, as well as to other architectures, such as end-to-end learning systems and vision-language-action models. Overall, our study establishes a deployment-validated pathway to interpretability for autonomous agents, which could help make them more transparent and safe.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16295

VisualClaw: A Real-Time, Personalized Agent for the Physical World

Authors:

Haoqin Tu ↗Jianwen Chen ↗Zijun Wang ↗Siwei Han ↗Juncheng Wu ↗Hardy Chen ↗Haonian Ji ↗Kaiwen Xiong ↗Jiaqi Liu ↗Peng Xia ↗Jieru Mei ↗Hongliang Fei ↗…

Vision language models are serving as general-purpose interfaces for complex multimodal tasks. However, deployment still faces three gaps: VLMs typically incur high latency and cost when processing dense video frames and long prompts, the agent scaffold remains static after deployment, and standard video-QA benchmarks do not test whether agents can use visual evidence inside tool-using workspaces. We present VisualClaw, a self-evolving multimodal agent built around two principles. First, hybrid encoding reduces deployment cost by filtering less informative streaming frames with a cascaded gate and compressing the text skill bank through hot/cold top-k injection. Second, skill evolution lets the agent learn from failures: retrieved memories condition an evolver as direct concatenated context or as guided evidence, producing skill-bank updates that help future questions. Across 4 video-QA benchmarks with 2 VLMs, VisualClaw cuts per-question API cost by an average -98% versus full-frame upload and by -25.9% over the offline uniform 8 frame baseline, while boosting accuracy in most settings, e.g., an average +3.85% and a peak +15.80% on EgoSchema with Gemini 3 Flash. To address the gap, we curate VisualClawArena, a 200-scenario multimodal agentic benchmark built through a strict five-stage pipeline; models must use video evidence, documents, dynamic updates, and executable checks inside a workspace. On VisualClawArena, the same framework with computer-use agent backends improves macro accuracy by +2.9% for Codex (GPT-5.5) and +3.2% for Claude Code (Sonnet 4.6) over no-evolution baselines, with a -9.5% cost reduction compared to the uniform-sampled baseline. These properties make VisualClaw a natural fit for edge applications, where the cascade reduces a 1-hour streaming session from ~3,600 API uploads down to only 5-20 calls and the self-evolution makes it a perfect personalized assistant.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12601

Dual-State Slot Attention: Decoupling Appearance and Identity for Video Object-Centric Learning

Authors:

Sieu Tran ↗Duc Nguyen ↗Hao Vo ↗Khoa Vo ↗Ngan Le ↗

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into persistent, object-level representations without supervision. However, existing slot-based methods struggle to maintain stable object identity in challenging settings such as rapid motion and partial occlusion. First, they typically encode both the per-frame appearance of an object and its identity across frames in a single slot vector, creating an objective conflict that leads to slot swapping: reconstruction requires sensitivity to transient visual changes, whereas temporal consistency requires invariance to them. Second, the token renormalization used in Slot Attention can amplify weakly attending slots, allowing them to absorb tokens from other objects and destabilize slot-to-object correspondence. We propose Dual-State Slot Attention (DSSA), a fully self-supervised framework that addresses these limitations by separating appearance from identity and by reducing spurious updates from weakly matching slots. DSSA decomposes each slot into a local state for per-frame appearance and an identity state for temporally stable object information, thereby aligning reconstruction and temporal consistency with separate representations. The identity state is updated through a learned recurrent transition that acts as a temporal filter on the local state, while competition-modulated aggregation (CMA) down-weights updates from weakly matching slots and prevents them from absorbing tokens from other objects. Experiments on MOVi-C, MOVi-D, and YouTube-VIS demonstrate that DSSA consistently improves segmentation quality and temporal consistency over prior methods, while also yielding stronger downstream object recognition and video dynamics prediction. Code and models will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

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25.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15596

Interplay of insurance and financial risks in a non Levy-Renewal environment

Authors:

Dimitrios G. Konstantinides ↗Charalampos D. Passalidis ↗

arXiv:2606.15596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider a multivariate risk model, with common counting process and common process of logarithmic returns for the investment portfolio. We assume that the claim-vectors, the counting process and the logarithmic returns of the investment portfolio satisfy a weak dependence structure. Further, we consider that the counting process represents an inhomogeneous renewal process, and the logarithmic returns represent a cadlag process with independent but not necessarily stationary increments. Under these conditions we provide an asymptotic expression for the infinite-time entrance probability of the discounted aggregate claims into some rare set xA, where A denotes a set from a general set family, crucial for the actuarial practice, when the common distribution of the claim vectors belong to a multivariate heavy-tailed distribution class. This result, is derived under a moment condition for the financial risks, and underlines the multivariate linear single big jump principle. When we restrict the distribution class of the claim-vectors to multivariate regular variation, we find more explicit asymptotic expressions, weakening the moment conditions on the financial risks. The asymptotic formulas, derived through double dependence solution, become more direct and practical in applications. With respect to the technical part, due to non Levy-Renewal framework, the classical Kesten-Goldie theorems are not applicable, nor their extensions. The way we make the discretization of the process of the discounted aggregate claims permits to derive uniform asymptotics with respect to the number of summands, that facilitate the approximation of the infinite sums of the main results.

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