Quantitative
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RecalibrateGPT: AI Fatigue Resilient Conversational Interfaces
2026-09-01 00:16:35Nikhil WaniAbstract
Large language models are powerful, but their interfaces often devolve into a type $\rightarrow$ read $\rightarrow$ retype loop, creating conversational AI fatigue, cognitive load, and eventual task abandonment. To mitigate this, we present RecalibrateGPT, a system introducing five cross-turn operators (Anchor, Replay, Delta, Scope, and Steer) that each target a distinct fatigue type, recalibrating LLM responses through a structured panel by acting on the full conversation history with a single click. Users invoke these operators through the AssistiveButton in one of three operator palette layouts: Vertical, Arc, or Tablet. We conducted two pilot studies with the same 12 advanced LLM users. An initial formative qualitative study identifies a taxonomy of four fatigue types (retyping, scanning, decision paralysis, and context drift) and derives two design objectives for RecalibrateGPT. A follow-up quantitative evaluation finds it reduces perceived cognitive workload by half (NASA-TLX = 2.7) at high perceived usability (SUS = 86.5), suggesting AI fatigue is not just a model-quality issue but an interaction-flow cost that interfaces can remove.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00506
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Expert-like Bone Ultrasound Segmentation through Expert-in-the-loop Mask-conditioned Progressive Learning
2026-08-31 23:24:42Arash Tavangar, Larissa K. Chiu, Hamidreza Khodashenas, Gregory K. Berry, Amir HooshiarAbstract
Manual annotation remains a major bottleneck in ultrasound (US) bone segmentation, where experts typically iteratively refine rough brush masks rather than delineating precise contours in a single pass. We present ExiL, a mask-conditioned progressive learning framework that models annotation as a structured refinement trajectory. ExiL combines a synthetic expert-like brush simulator based on signed distance fields with a lightweight 7.8M-parameter U-Net that learns to complete and refine imperfect masks from US images. During deployment, an expert mode updates the model directly from accepted refinements, enabling continual adaptation to expert behavior. Evaluated using UltraBones100k cadaver data for quantitative segmentation and a prospective volunteer dataset for annotation-efficiency analysis, ExiL reduced single-expert average annotation time from 60 to 20 seconds per frame (66.7\%) and improved mean Dice by approximately 0.045 over non-progressive training, while achieving 0.87 Dice and 2.7 px boundary error in the best trajectory-aware setting. With 10--50 ms inference, ExiL enables real-time, self-improving annotation for US-guided orthopedic workflows in practical clinical labeling.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00473
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LOOMSUM:Weaving Quantitative and Narrative Evidence for Faithful Long Text-Table Summarization
2026-08-31 18:44:18Meng Zhou, Wenhao You, Wei YuanAbstract
Long documents often distribute important information across extensive narrative passages and multiple tables, making faithful summarization particularly challenging. Existing methods may generate individually supported quantitative facts and analytical statements yet associate them incorrectly, producing quantitatively plausible yet analytically unfaithful summaries. In this work, we propose LOOMSUM, a training-free framework that extracts source-grounded atomic evidence, explicitly links table-derived facts with supporting narrative analyses, and plans the discourse structure before generation. We also introduce Table-Grounded Faithfulness (TGF), a claim-level metric that separately evaluates Numeric Grounding, Analysis Support, and Relation Consistency. Experiments on the text--table summarization benchmarks FINDSum and USTT show that LOOMSUM improves analytical faithfulness while maintaining strong summarization quality. Human evaluation finds positive component-level associations with the corresponding human judgments. Our Relation Consistency metric further shows stronger agreement with human relation judgments than generic factuality metrics, indicating that explicit cross-modal linking helps reduce errors in which supported quantities are paired with incorrect narrative interpretations. Together, these findings show that faithful long text--table summarization requires not only grounding individual facts, but also preserving the relations between them.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00241
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Beyond Language Priors: Diagnosing and Fixing Visual-Origin Hallucinations in Multimodal LLM
2026-08-31 18:38:24Peiyang Xu, Xiaopei Zhu, Jun Zhu, Xiaolin HuAbstract
Existing research on object hallucination in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) predominantly attributes the problem to language priors such as over-reliance on textual co-occurrence statistics. We challenge this view by presenting quantitative evidence for a complementary, under-explored cause: visual-origin hallucination, where hallucinations arise from incorrect visual feature extraction and misalignment between image and text embeddings. Through cosine similarity analysis and Smooth Grad-CAM entropy measurements, we show that hallucinated samples exhibit systematically lower image-text similarity (average 0.158 vs. -0.122) and inverted attention patterns, where attention is dispersed when the target object is present but wrongly concentrated when it is absent. Guided by this diagnosis, we propose Adversarial Contrastive Fine-Tuning (ACFT). ACFT uses an Adversarial Hallucination Attribute Flipping (AHAF) procedure, involving minimal, targeted adversarial perturbations that flip an image's hallucination attribute, to construct perfectly aligned positive-negative pairs, which are then used for contrastive fine-tuning. AHAF simultaneously serves as a diagnostic probe, revealing that MLLM visual representations lie dangerously close to hallucination decision boundaries. Requiring only 0.9% of the COCO dataset and adding zero inference overhead, ACFT achieves state-of-the-art performance on POPE, MME, and four description-level hallucination benchmarks across LLaVA, MiniGPT-4, and Qwen2.5-VL. Code is available at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00231
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Multimodal Shared Latent Representation of Narration, Microscope and iOCT Images for Phase Recognition in Vitreoretinal Surgery
2026-08-31 16:41:07Onur Izmitlioglu, Shervin Dehghani, Tarek Ghannoum, Benedikt Schworm, Nassir NavabAbstract
Surgical phase recognition is key to context-aware computer-assisted feedback in vitreoretinal procedures, yet the scarcity of synchronized multimodal intraoperative data, particularly microscope views and intraoperative OCT, limits approaches that aim to replicate the multimodal integration surgeons perform naturally. Surgical narration, by contrast, is abundantly available online and offers rich semantic supervision. Prior work has mainly explored pairwise contrastive learning (e.g., intraoperative OCT-microscope or microscope-narration), leaving the joint modeling of all three modalities largely unexplored. We introduce a framework that uses microscope views as a shared anchor to bridge surgical narrations and intraoperative OCT (iOCT) without requiring a fully synchronized tri-modal dataset, leveraging real microscope-narration videos and a synthetic dataset of synchronized microscope video and tool-aligned iOCT pairs. Contrastive alignment transfers structural priors from the synthetic domain to real videos lacking iOCT, and a dual-head MS-TCN++ integrates the resulting embeddings for joint macro- and micro-phase prediction. Evaluated on real vitreoretinal surgeries, our framework improves macro-phase recognition over a zero-shot baseline (mean F1 0.38 to 0.53) and provides an exploratory route to estimating fine-grained instrument-tissue measurements that are not directly observable in real microscope video alone; these micro-phase estimates are validated quantitatively on synthetic data and shown only qualitatively on real surgery. To our knowledge, this is the first work to unify microscope view, iOCT B-scans, and surgical narrations in a shared latent space for surgical phase recognition.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31065
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Identity-Conditioned Latent Consistency Distillation for Face Synthesis
2026-08-31 16:32:40Tiago Kienen Chaves, Bernardo Biesseck, David MenottiAbstract
Diffusion models have achieved strong results in high-fidelity image synthesis, but their iterative sampling process makes large-scale generation computationally expensive. This limitation is especially relevant when generating synthetic face datasets for face recognition, where a large number of subjects with many samples in different poses, expressions, ages, etc., are required. In this work, we show that identity-conditioned face synthesis can be performed at a substantially lower computational cost by a latent Consistency Model with few iterations, without compromising image quality. For training, we distill knowledge from the foundation Diffusion Model Arc2Face (teacher) by adapting its original text-to-image pipeline to an embedding-to-face setting, replacing textual prompts with ArcFace identity embeddings. Our distilled model (student) generates identity-conditioned face images with an average inference time of 0.4819 seconds per image, compared with 2.102 seconds for Arc2Face, resulting in a 4.36$\times$ speed-up. Quantitative results, based on FID scores, show that the distilled model remains competitive with Arc2Face across all evaluation protocols. On 100k generated images, it achieves near-parity on CelebA (13.921 vs. 12.928) and outperforms the teacher on WebFace42M (9.317 vs. 9.802). Further evaluations on Synth-500 and AgeDB show a moderate performance gap for the former but comparable results for the latter. These results indicate that Arc2Face can be accelerated through task-specific latent consistency distillation while preserving high image quality for large-scale synthetic face generation. Our proposal is publicly available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31053
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Segmentation of Bovid Dentition Under Imperfect Annotations: A Comparative Study of Convolutional and Attention Models
2026-08-31 16:29:31Keith G. Mills, Evan B. Sanders, Gregory J. Matthews, Juliet K. BrophyAbstract
Semantic segmentation decomposes an image into distinct mask regions corresponding to different object categories, such as people, cars, signs or buildings. Advances in machine learning (ML) have shifted this task away from traditional rule-based heuristics such as edge detection, towards deep neural networks (DNN) that learn to classify pixels directly. However, semantic segmentation DNNs crucially depend on expertly designed mask targets to learn from, and imperfect or misaligned masks can interfere with a model's ability to learn effectively. This paper presents a comparative study of segmentation architectures, ranging from convolutional backbones to vision transformers, applied to the B.O.V.I.D. dataset, a corpus of high-resolution bovid dental photographs paired with hand-made segmentation masks not originally designed for ML-based training. We evaluate a range of preprocessing and alignment techniques to mitigate the resulting label imperfections. We find that while these preprocessing choices have limited effect on quantitative metrics such as Dice score and mIoU, their qualitative impact on predicted masks is substantial.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31052
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Does On-Policy Distillation Really Distill? From Noisy Teacher to Self-Improvement
2026-08-31 16:22:10Yi Ding, Ruqi ZhangAbstract
On-policy distillation (OPD) offers dense token-level supervision as an alternative to the sparse outcome-level advantages of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). However, the teacher scores student-generated trajectories that are inherently off-policy for it, so the reliability of its supervision, and hence the source of the student's improvement, remains unclear. We quantitatively analyze teacher supervision during OPD training and find substantial noise whose prevalence increases with teacher scale. Surprisingly, the student policy is insensitive to such noise, converging to comparable performance regardless of whether noisy supervision is retained or removed. Does OPD distill at all? By analyzing what drives its gains, we find that learning concentrates on low log-probability tokens, and using a single fixed negative advantage matches the performance of teacher-provided ones. This suggests that OPD works largely by suppressing low log-probability tokens, which requires no teacher. These findings motivate On-Policy Self-Adaptation (OPSA), a supervision-free method using entropy-adaptive negative advantages. It assigns stronger learning signals to high-entropy positions, suppressing tail tokens, and evenly redistributing probability mass among head tokens. Compared with the base \texttt{Qwen3-1.7B}, OPSA improves Avg@32 by 35.41 points on AIME24, corresponding to a 263\% relative gain, and more than doubles Pass@32 across all three benchmarks. It also outperforms OPD by 16.77 points in Avg@32 on AIME24. Extensive experiments and analyses across model families and tasks further demonstrate its effectiveness and generalizability.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31046
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Pretrained, Curriculum-Tuned, and Ensembled: A Tracer-Aware Interactive Segmentation Pipeline for AutoPET V
2026-08-31 14:13:09Xinglong Liang, Chunyao Lu, Tianyu Zhang, Jiaju Huang, Tao Tan, Yunchao Yin, Lishan CaiAbstract
Interactive lesion segmentation in whole-body PET/CT requires a model to provide a strong initial prediction while also responding efficiently to sparse corrective scribbles during inference. This setting is particularly challenging because tracer distributions, physiological uptake patterns, lesion appearance, and acquisition characteristics differ substantially between FDG and PSMA studies. We present TRIAGE, Tracer-aware Refinement via Interactive Anatomy-Guided sEgmentation. The core backbone is a 3D STU-Net initialized through masked autoencoding pre-training with an asynchronous masking strategy, aiming to learn transferable anatomical and cross-modal representations before task-specific fine-tuning. In parallel, we train an auxiliary organ segmentation model whose predictions provide explicit anatomical context and help distinguish physiological uptake from malignant lesions. A dedicated tracer classifier first routes each study to an FDG- or PSMA-specific branch. Within each branch, a first-stage segmentation model consumes CT, PET, and organ context to generate an initial lesion mask. The initial prediction is then combined with cumulative foreground/background scribbles and refined by a second interactive segmentation network. The FDG and PSMA branches share the same overall processing pipeline but are trained independently to account for tracer-specific appearance and error modes. We additionally employ curriculum-style training and model ensembling to improve robustness across interaction steps and heterogeneous cohorts. Experiments are conducted using the official AutoPET V data and ten-fold split; quantitative results, ablations, and final test-set performance are left as placeholders to be completed after the challenge evaluation. Code: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30844
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Conjoint Audio-to-Spikes Encoding and Processing for Efficient Neuromorphic Speech Recognition
2026-08-31 13:47:14Valentin M. Meunier, Am\'elie Gruel, Pierre Lewden, Adrien F. Vincent, Sylvain Sa\"ighiAbstract
Obtaining data from neuromorphic sensors and processing it with Spiking Neural Networks is a promising solution to lower the energy cost of artificial intelligence. The current rarity of natively neuromorphic datasets promotes the development of software tools to translate input sensory data into spikes. However, highly bio-mimetic simulators can be challenging to implement on digital hardware. In this work, we evaluate the neuromorphic encoding and subsequent classification of audio into spikes using a non-learnable, high-level, programmable encoder targeting hardware implementation on FPGA. We quantify the pipeline's efficiency with hardware-agnostic metrics based on the quantitative spiking activity. Our study focuses on the simultaneous optimisation of encoder and classifier: the first provides efficient and informative data so that the latter achieves a better performance with an overall lower energy cost at learning and inference. This work introduces the first end-to-end neuromorphic spike-encoding and evaluation of the TIMIT dataset. Our simple feedforward network reaches a classification accuracy of 99.77% on a spike-encoded Heidelberg Digits, overcoming the neuromorphic state of the art on this benchmark dataset.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30792
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CoMPASS: Collaborative Molecular Property Prediction via Adaptive Small-Large Model Synergy
2026-08-31 12:14:01Wentao Li, Jiangjie Qiu, Yijun Li, Leyi Zhao, Xiaonan WangAbstract
Accurate molecular property prediction requires both statistical reliability and chemical reasoning. Graph neural networks can be calibrated directly on labeled assays but remain limited by the coverage of their training data. Large language models (LLMs) can compare molecular evidence and articulate chemical rationales, yet are unreliable as standalone quantitative predictors. The central challenge is therefore to determine when an LLM should influence a calibrated model and by how much. Here we present CoMPASS, a retrieval-calibrated framework for small-large model collaboration. CoMPASS retains a graph attention network (GAT) as the predictive anchor, retrieves locally relevant training molecules, provides attention-grounded evidence to an LLM, and converts its proposal into a bounded correction through an agreement-aware gate. Across six classification and two regression benchmarks, CoMPASS improves the GAT anchor in regions of correctable uncertainty while limiting LLM intervention in high-confidence regimes. Ablations show that the gains arise from validation-calibrated retrieval and bounded fusion rather than prompting alone. These results suggest that generative reasoning should augment calibrated prediction through evidence-grounded, controlled corrections rather than direct output replacement. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30674
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Measuring Memory and Generalization as Separable Geometric Channels: The Topo^2 Framework
Abstract
Deep networks trained on noisy labels simultaneously generalize on clean data and memorize flipped labels. These are usually conflated as pressures on one capacity. We present Topo^2, a measurement framework that makes them causally separable, measurable, and law-governed. Persistent-homology H1 structure of the representation space separates into a within-class manifold channel (a function of the training stopping point) and a cross-class channel (a monotone readout of memorized flipped samples). An intervention, the FM0 prescription (zero loss on flipped samples from epoch 0), reaches each setting's generalization ceiling while memorizing essentially nothing. Within the framework we establish a law set with graded evidence: (L2) FM0 separation prescription (9/9); (L1) the within-channel as a training-position function (mid-rise 6/6; convergence-back CIFAR 3/3, SVHN 2/3); (L3) a ring-construction identity (definitional, not a law); and TLS (memory-generalization topological layering): memory is causally additive, anchored (silencing clean collapses the representation), invertible (stripping memory restores near-ceiling generalization), and quantitatively billable (the memorization cost law, effective slope coefficient C ~ 0.38 at the reference capacity: CIFAR-10 0.3801 / SVHN 0.3806 / CIFAR-100 0.384 / VGG 0.3715, capacity-dependent in general and traced to clean-sample feature displacement). We also publish the framework's boundaries: a falsification ledger of nine dead ends, and an instrument-vindication section that excludes six families of global statistics as explanations of the within-channel. The framework turns "memorization" from an ill-defined capacity into a measurable, separable, invertible topological layer.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30487
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ImageCAS-X: a dataset and benchmark for coronary artery segmentation and centerline extraction in coronary CT angiography
2026-08-31 07:58:46Kit M. Bransby, Esther {\O}ksnebjerg, Kristoffer Kj{\ae}r, Jacob Kirkeby, Yasmin El Youssef, A\"ida Jim\'enez, Philip R. Pedersson, Martina C. de Knegt, Klaus F. Kofoed, Rasmus R. PaulsenAbstract
Accurate segmentation of the coronary vessel lumen is a prerequisite for quantitative assessment of atherosclerotic plaque and perivascular adipose tissue in coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA). Cardiologists rely on semi-automated methods for this task because manual vessel tracing and segmentation are labour-intensive. Although many automated methods have been proposed, their validation remains limited by the lack of large, high-quality publicly available datasets. We provide a new dataset of voxel-wise annotations of the vessel lumen and coronary segments, alongside centerlines, and mesh surfaces for 800 scans from the publicly available ImageCAS dataset. Using this dataset, we benchmark established lumen segmentation methods against inter-observer variability, stratifying performance by disease, image quality, coronary dominance, coronary segment, vessel diameter, and lumen attenuation. These labels allow segmentation accuracy to be described in anatomical and clinical context rather than reported as a single aggregate score. The dataset supports the development and validation of methods for lumen segmentation, plaque and perivascular quantification, and haemodynamic modelling.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30404
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Quantitative Evidence Mining for Plausibility-Aware Biomedical AI
2026-08-31 07:48:25Negin Sadat Babaiha, Stefan Geissler, Marie-Christine Simon, Martin Hofmann-Apitius, Marc JacobsAbstract
Biomedical artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly extract, organize, and reuse scientific claims from literature, clinical trials, and regulatory documents. But automatic extraction alone does not make a claim reliable evidence: a claim becomes useful only when it can be traced to its source, linked to the quantitative details that support it, and read within its biomedical context and uncertainty. This matters as large language models (LLMs) and increasingly autonomous systems drive evidence synthesis, knowledge graph (KG) construction, and decision support. Many text-mining and LLM pipelines remain relation-centric: they capture entities and relations such as Drug--TREATS--Disease, but drop the dose, effect size, population, comparator, uncertainty, and conditions under which a claim holds. Such relations can look actionable yet remain hard to verify, compare, or reuse. In this perspective, we argue for a shift toward quantitative evidence mining---extracting values, units, measured entities and properties, context, uncertainty, provenance, and plausibility as structured evidence units that populate evidence-aware KGs and can be checked for source grounding, unit consistency, completeness, and biological plausibility. We outline a framework for plausibility-aware AI that treats extracted claims not as final answers but as auditable evidence objects, making clear what was measured, how much it changed, in which setting, with what uncertainty, and from which source. The central risk is not only incorrect extraction, but claims that look like evidence while lacking the structure needed to trust them.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30393
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Beyond Surface Forms: Symbolic Edits as a Test for Logical Reasoning with LLMs
2026-08-31 05:06:01Ramya Keerthy Thatikonda, Wray Buntine, Ehsan ShareghiAbstract
Logical reasoning with large language models (LLMs) is a critical capability, as it reflects a system's ability to correctly deduce hypotheses from a given context using faithful deductive processes. However, LLM reasoning has often been shown to be sensitive to small surface-level variations in problem formulation, raising questions about whether models truly follow the underlying logical structure. Studying this behavior is challenging because the symbolic components of logical problems, such as operators and predicates, are difficult to systematically manipulate in natural language. We introduce a tool-driven framework for generating controlled, label-preserving edits to logical reasoning problems. Our method operates on symbolic representations of first-order logic and constraint satisfaction problem tasks, enabling targeted modifications to logical operators and other structural components before translating them back into natural language. Using this framework, we evaluate various LLMs under cumulative and individual operator edits and analyze their behavior in response to these changes. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses show that LLM reasoning behavior under controlled operator edits is inconsistent, regardless of model size or family: models sometimes adapt correctly to structural changes but often fail to track their logical consequences. The results from this automated stress test enable an evaluation of language models across different dimensions and help measure the reliability of their reasoning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30256
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SPARK: Skeleton-Guided Reasoning Synthesis from Large-Scale Scientific Literature
2026-08-31 03:55:30Yu Li, Wei Li, Xin Gao, Mengyuan Sun, Xiaoyang Wang, Qizhi Pei, Lijun WuAbstract
Scientific reasoning remains challenging for open-source models, largely due to the lack of high-quality scientific reasoning data. Existing datasets are often dominated by factual recall or formulaic problem solving, with limited emphasis on mechanism understanding, evidence-grounded reasoning, and hypothesis evaluation. To address this, we introduce SPARK (Scientific Paper Abstracted Reasoning sKeleton), a paper-oriented synthesis framework built on Sci-Base, a large-scale corpus of research papers spanning 10 scientific disciplines. Instead of directly converting papers into question-answer pairs, SPARK treats the claim-evidence-derivation structure of a paper as the fundamental unit of reasoning synthesis. Specifically, SPARK (1) distills each paper into a compact reasoning skeleton capturing its central claims and supporting evidence, enabling self-contained question generation, and (2) synthesizes reasoning tasks from four scientific perspectives: mechanistic reasoning, hypothesis falsification, quantitative derivation, and boundary calibration. A final consistency verification stage further removes unsupported or contradictory outputs. Using this framework, we construct Spark-234K, a scientific reasoning dataset with substantially higher difficulty and diversity than existing resources. Experiments show that Spark-234K consistently outperforms existing scientific reasoning datasets while achieving stronger performance with significantly fewer training samples.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30214
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Science sandboxes measure the scientific capability of AI agents
2026-08-31 02:33:38Arya S. Rao, Rodrigo I. Castro, Sager J. Gosai, Kenneth B. Hsu, Yasha Ektefaie, Shantanu Singh, Sangeeta N. Bhatia, Steven K. Reilly, Ryan Tewhey, Eric S. Lander, Pardis C. SabetiAbstract
Scientific progress depends not only on finding solutions, but on learning the rules that explain why they work and using that understanding to design better experiments. We introduce science sandboxes, a framework for studying this capability in AI agents through repeated cycles of experimentation, feedback, and hypothesis revision. Science sandboxes invite an agent to query the natural world in different ways, ranging from "wet" physical experiments, to "damp" predictive models trained on empirical data, to "dry" invented rules. By establishing a common experimental loop and a protocol for evaluating agents within it, science sandboxes allow assessment of both quantitative performance on specific metrics and qualitative scientific reasoning, across a spectrum of empirical verifiability. Here, we instantiate this framework in two biological settings, models of regulatory genomics and protein fitness prediction, and examine the capabilities of frontier agents. Across these settings, we could see when agents successfully optimized a quantitative metric without understanding the rules underlying the system. In particular, their scientific reasoning deteriorated when they encountered systems whose rules fell outside familiar biological priors. By highlighting such failure modes, science sandboxes make the frontier of scientific capability measurable and provide a controlled setting in which to study and ultimately expand it.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30165
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MiBOT: A head-worn robot that modulates cardiovascular responses through human-like soft massage
2026-08-30 21:38:45Alice Mylaeus, Stephanie Vogt, Berken Utku Demirel, Marcel Gort, Mirko Meboldt, Manuel Meier, Christian HolzAbstract
Massage therapy is helpful for the rehabilitation of various diseases, such as headaches caused by migraines and stress. Existing robotic systems have focused on massage therapy on the torso and limbs, but performing massage motions through suitable actuation on a person's head has been a challenge. In this paper, we present MiBOT, a head-worn massage robot that actuates two soft tactors to produce touch motions mimicking human massage. A key design principle behind MiBOT is its silent actuation, which we achieve through pneumatic artificial muscles in conjunction with a controller loop to respond to contact pressure. We evaluated the effectiveness of MiBOT in a controlled study and assessed subjects' blood pressure and heart rate levels while applying MiBOT. We found that our mechanical system generated positive and conclusive quantitative outcomes that are similar to the human-administered massage, decreasing participants' mean systolic and diastolic blood pressure by 2.8 mmHg and 1.7 mmHg, respectively, as well as calming their heart rate by 8-10% on average.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30055
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XQDT: eXplainable and Quantitative Data-Text Alignment Metric with Feedback Signals
2026-08-30 18:20:28Kun Efimov-Zhang, Yifei Song, Claire GardentAbstract
Evaluating data-text alignment remains challenging: existing metrics often provide limited explanations for the scores, while prompt-based LLM-as-Judge methods can be expensive and unreliable. We present an end-to-end explainable evaluation metric that fine-tunes a language model to identify omitted, extra, incorrect, and correct data units in a data-text pair. These local judgements are aggregated into precision, recall, and F1 scores, providing both fine-grained diagnostic feedback and an interpretable measure of alignment quality. Across benchmarks, our fine-tuned models outperform LLM-as-Judge methods in error prediction and achieve competitive precision, recall, and F1 scores, while maintaining strong correlation with human judgements. Beyond evaluation, our verifier outputs also provide useful feedback signals for downstream correction and refinement, supporting alignment-oriented improvement of data-to-text and text-to-data. Code and resources are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29948
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AutoXRD: Autonomous LLM Agents and Comprehensive Evaluation for Powder Diffraction Analysis
2026-08-30 18:05:21Yuetong Wu, Maojun SunAbstract
Powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) is central to materials characterization, yet reliable end-to-end automation remains challenging. An XRD agent must interpret diffraction evidence, operate refinement software, manage coupled parameters in a defensible order, and distinguish numerical improvement from physical validity. In this paper, we propose AutoXRD, an autonomous large language model (LLM) agent framework that organizes powder-XRD analysis as stepwise refinement, grounds actions in observed evidence, and applies deterministic crystallographic and physical checks before accepting results. We further introduce XRDBench with two complementary tracks. XRDBench-QA contains 100 bounded diagnostic tasks that isolate scientific reasoning and decision-making, whereas XRDBench-E2E contains 34 executable workflows that test whether agents can compose these capabilities into complete analyses requiring file inspection, crystallographic-software execution, iterative refinement, evidence preservation, and reporting. We evaluate ten recent LLMs across 1,340 model--task runs. Models average only 57.8 out of 100, falling from 61.9 on XRDBench-QA to 53.7 on XRDBench-E2E. They perform best on refinement-history assessment and result acceptance, but remain substantially weaker on refinement-action selection, phase quantification, indexing, and Rietveld refinement. GPT-5.6 Sol achieves the highest overall score of 81.1, GPT-5.6 Terra the highest XRDBench-E2E point estimate of 81.0, and GPT-5.6 Luna the best score--cost trade-off. Ablations show that all six AutoXRD components consistently improve performance, supporting the framework design. Finally, execution-trace analysis reveals recurring failures in coupled-parameter control, quantitative reasoning, evidence preservation, and workflow termination, motivating stronger scientific constraints, uncertainty-aware decisions, and more efficient planning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00070
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