Regional image editing has attracted considerable attention for its spatial controllability. Although instruction-based and mask-reference-based editing methods can achieve strong semantic alignment, reliable regional control remains challenging, where an edit must be accurately localized and naturally integrated with the preserved context. We propose \textbf{MaskFlow}, a training framework for precise localization, consistent background preservation, and seamless boundary transitions. MaskFlow incorporates the mask into the probability path and flow-matching objective, coordinating generation within the editable region with source preservation outside it. The proposed Soft-Poisson de-seaming module further refines the predicted vector field during both training and sampling to improve the smooth integration of the edited foreground with the preserved background. We also design a data synthesis pipeline to construct MEData, a mask-based image editing dataset for training regional image editing models and facilitating further research. Experiments on natural scenes and infographic images demonstrate consistent improvements over competing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06929
State abstraction plays a key role in scaling reinforcement learning to complex but structured systems. In studying such systems, a wide range of behavioral structures have been studied in reinforcement learning, including value functions, invariants, bisimulation relations, and behavioral metrics. However, a general principle for determining what structures are provably preserved under state abstraction is still lacking. In this paper, we present a unified framework for defining and analyzing behavioral structures in reinforcement learning. Our framework provides a compositional way to specify behavioral semantics based on local, one-step descriptions of system dynamics. Using this framework, we establish results showing how behavioral structures can be safely transferred between abstract and concrete systems. We further show how to construct quantitative metrics from logical behavioral semantics with soundness guarantees. Together, these results provide a principled foundation for reasoning about behaviors under state abstraction in reinforcement learning and offer reusable definition and proof principles for a broad class of behavioral structures in reinforcement learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25357
Data videos combine animated visualizations with synchronized narration to communicate quantitative information and are widely used in journalism, education, and public communication. Automatically generating them requires deciding what story to tell, designing effective visualizations, and producing executable animations synchronized with narration. Despite rapid progress in vision-language models (VLMs), it remains unclear how well they can perform this task from a high-level communicative intent, largely because no standardized benchmark exists. We introduce DATAREEL, a benchmark for automated data-driven video story generation containing 328 real-world data reels. Given a data table, a communicative intent, a target duration, and a style reference image, a model must generate executable animation code with synchronized subtitles, which we render and evaluate. Evaluating eight proprietary and open-weight VLMs reveals a substantial capability gap: open-weight models exhibit execution failure rates of up to 39.8%, whereas proprietary models achieve stronger overall performance. Yet even the best-performing models frequently generate static charts, subtitle-animation desynchronization, unstable layouts, and poor adherence to the reference style. We further introduce a strong agentic baseline that decomposes generation into planning, coding, and verification, consistently outperforming direct prompting in both human and automatic evaluations. The task remains far from solved; we release DATAREEL at this https URL to support future work.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25220
We present MameLoshnLM, the first open-source 8B-parameter language model built specifically for Yiddish. Despite Yiddish's rich textual tradition, its limited digital presence and the scarcity of reliable evaluation resources have constrained progress in Yiddish language modeling. Existing multilingual corpora and benchmarks are often poor proxies for the language, containing substantial amounts of noisy, machine-translated, and misclassified text. We address these gaps by introducing Oytser, a high-quality Yiddish pretraining corpus that combines contemporary web-native sources with literary materials, and Kashes, a multi-task benchmark spanning translation, linguistic analysis, information extraction, and language understanding. Using these resources, we continue pretraining Llama 3.1 8B to obtain MameLoshnLM. Across the tasks in the benchmark, MameLoshnLM outperforms open baselines of similar scale. Our analyses show that these gains are not only quantitative: relative to general-purpose multilingual models, MameLoshnLM better captures language-defining lexical and morphological patterns, pointing to a broader failure mode of noisy web-scale multilingual data for low-resource languages. Our results provide both a foundation for Yiddish NLP and a practical template for language model development in historically rich but digitally underrepresented languages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05850
Scientific images are essential for communicating experimental observations, quantitative evidence and conceptual knowledge. Unlike natural images, their quality depends on both visual clarity and scientific informativeness, making assessment challenging. In this work, we present SciQNet, a two-stage multimodal adaptation framework for scientific image quality assessment. The first stage performs domain-adaptive pretraining on scientific document images and the second stage conducts task-specific fine-tuning with joint scoring and understanding supervision. For scoring-oriented supervision, we combine instruction tuning with a Huber loss derived from rating-word logits, while understanding-oriented supervision is formulated as multiple-choice visual question answering. Experiments show that using a 40% stratified subset of the domain-adaptive data gives the best performance among the evaluated pretraining fractions, suggesting that pretraining-data relevance may be as important as pretraining-data scale. The final model achieves an SIQA-S score of 92.21, an SIQA-U score of 47.38 and a combined score of 69.80. This work presents our solution to the ICME 2026 Scientific Image Quality Assessment Challenge, which ranked 2nd in the scoring track.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05691
Large language model agents can discover alphas, yet current methods have three weaknesses. The search cannot adapt during the run, automation usually ends at alpha generation while library selection and model choice stay manual, and alpha discovery can read the test window through loop feedback or code problems. We present AutoScientist-Quant, a self evolving search process that regards quantitative research as one budgeted search problem. A single controller conditions every decision on the remaining budget, choosing at each round whether to improve, combine, pivot, or stop, which node to expand, how many alphas to generate, and how to retrieve past trajectories from the shared memory. The same core then selects from the library and tunes the model, closing the loop from hypothesis to deployable strategy. We also review the evaluation pipeline reused from prior work, fix two lookahead problems, and keep the feedback window disjoint from the held out test window, so every comparison tests true generalization. On CSI universes, the framework attains the best value of nearly every metric in every setting, and these conclusions hold across several backbones and markets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28632
Care plan coordination demands synthesizing heterogeneous clinical, functional, and psychosocial information across multiple professional disciplines, where monolithic LLM pipelines cannot perform in a transparent or safe manner. We present CANOE (Contestable Argumentative Network-of-Experts), a multi-agent neuro-symbolic framework that addresses these limitations through five modules: complexity assessment, adaptive team recruitment, role-based argumentative computation via an Arena-based Quantitative Bipolar Argumentation Framework (A-QBAF), human-in-the-loop contestation, and care-plan synthesis. Role-specialized agents generate supporting and attacking arguments for candidate interventions; conflicts are resolved through arena-based clash resolution before acceptability scores propagate across the argumentation graph. Care planners may accept, reject, edit, or add arguments, and the framework will deterministically recompute the final plan. Evaluation on Discharge Me! and MedicalRAG using ROUGE-L, AlignScore, MEDCON F1, FKGL, and LLM-as-a-judge shows that medically fine-tuned models achieve the strongest clinical correctness and safety, while CANOE's argumentative structure provides faithful explanation and human contestability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05391
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software engineering has shifted the focus from function-level generation to repository-scale assistance. However, existing benchmarks largely rely on bug reports from GitHub Issues, which often allow models to bypass genuine understanding via pattern matching on error logs. This misalignment under-measures Edit Bias, which refers to premature generation, where models prematurely propose code modifications instead of understanding the existing repository architecture. Furthermore, current LLM-as-a-Judge scalar scoring suffers from high variance and low interpretability. This work introduces RepoProbe, a novel benchmark for evaluating repository-level code understanding through open-ended Q&A using GitHub Discussions, which focuses on open-ended architectural inquiries rather than defect reporting. To ensure rigorous evaluation, we propose a Checklist-Based Verification Protocol that decomposes answers into atomic, verifiable facts, thereby replacing subjective ratings with objective verification. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs reveals a persistent gap between high clarity and evidencegrounded technical correctness. It also quantitatively confirms the prevalence of edit bias, in which models prioritize code generation instead of architectural analysis. Finally, we demonstrate that our verification protocol significantly improves evaluation reliability compared to traditional evaluations with scalar scoring.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04783
The ability to accurately assess and anticipate risks in safety-critical scenarios is crucial for autonomous driving systems. While existing research has made progress in collision prediction, accurately quantifying risk levels from monocular vision inputs remains challenging due to the complex dynamics of multi-agent interactions and the inherent uncertainty in real-world environments. To address these challenges, we present NSF-HRPT, a novel framework that combines learning-based perception with structured reasoning for quantitative risk assessment. Our approach features a Neural Semantic Field (NSF) that learns to model scene semantics, trajectory predictions, and probabilistic Time-to-Collision (TTC) distributions from simulation data. During inference, the pre-trained NSF serves as a prior for our Hierarchical Risk Perception Tree (HRPT), which enables efficient parallel computation and spatial reasoning about multi-agent risks. Additionally, we introduce a Sim2Real enhancement strategy that improves real-world applicability without retraining by incorporating priors from foundation models. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on synthetic benchmarks and delivers competitive, near-state-of-the-art results on real-world datasets for both TTC estimation accuracy and risk localization precision. The proposed method provides an effective solution for real-time risk awareness from monocular camera inputs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04776
Neuron counting and segmentation in microscopy images of neuronal cultures is a routine and time-consuming task in neuroscience research, traditionally performed through manual inspection or semi-automatic tools. We present NeuroAdaptTrainer, an open-source Fiji/ImageJ plugin that integrates a YOLO instance-segmentation model directly into the microscopist's workflow. The plugin allows a user to run automatic neuron detection on a single image or a batch of images, manually correct the resulting detections from within Fiji, and use those corrections to adapt the model to new imaging conditions via transfer learning. A built-in external validation module allows the base and adapted models to be compared quantitatively on a held-out annotated set. NeuroAdaptTrainer lowers the barrier for non-specialist users to benefit from deep-learning-based segmentation while keeping expert supervision at the center of the workflow.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05226
Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning often adds social terms to individual rewards, yet the scale of those terms is usually chosen by hand. We ask whether a guilt signal can instead be calibrated from human neural and behavioural data and transferred to artificial agents. Using the public SoDec responsibility fMRI dataset (40 participants), we fit a subject-fixed-effects regression of momentary-happiness changes on outcome-type counts and recover a guilt weight as the Partner-negative minus Social-negative contrast ($\hat{w}=1.118$, Cohen's $d=0.214$). We embed this weight in a two-agent Social Lottery environment and train independent Proximal Policy Optimization actor-critics under four shaping regimes: neurally calibrated, uniform constant, zero (selfish), and a unit-coefficient oracle. Across 1{,}000 evaluation episodes per condition, the calibrated agents track the human Social safe-choice rate most closely ($0.459$ vs.\ human $0.484$; $\mathrm{KL}=0.0012$), while the other three conditions deviate by one to three orders of magnitude in KL. Human neurobehavioural priors can therefore act as quantitative constraints on prosocial reward shaping.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04663
Understanding complex surgical scenes requires recognizing multiple interdependent entities, such as instruments, actions, and targets, while maintaining their relational consistency across time. Existing surgical triplet recognition methods struggle to jointly model intra-frame label dependencies and inter-frame temporal semantics in a unified manner. To address these limitations, we propose a unified framework that integrates spatial, relational, and temporal cues for robust surgical triplet recognition. Specifically, class-specific spatial priors are first extracted through a multi-scale encoder. These priors are then refined by a Label Correlation Modeling module with multi-scale class activation map-guided relational extraction (MS-CAMRE), enabling the model to capture both static co-occurrence patterns and dynamic contextual dependencies among triplet components. Furthermore, a Bidirectional Temporal-Relational Fusion Attention (BTRFA) module harmonizes temporal and relational representations to achieve coherent temporal reasoning. We also introduce a new evaluation metric, the Triplet Consistency Error Rate (TCER), which quantitatively measures the model's ability to preserve causal and semantic consistency across triplets. Extensive experiments on the CholecT45 and ProstaTD datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving AP_IVT by 5.1 percent and 7.8 percent, respectively. Moreover, according to TCER, our approach achieves relative reductions of more than 36 percent and 25 percent on the two datasets, respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework in temporal-relational co-reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04606
3D Language Gaussian Splatting embeds open-vocabulary language features into 3D Gaussian Splatting, providing an efficient explicit representation for text-driven 3D scene understanding. However, existing methods are limited to indoor or small-scale scenes, and tend to fail in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) outdoor scenes, where severe occlusions and long distance viewpoints often lead to incorrect semantic activations and missing target responses. In this paper, we present OutLangSplat which adapts language Gaussian representations to UAV outdoor scenes by improving feature representation and aggregation reliability. For the feature representation, a 2D-3D dual-branch representation with region-based alignment and fusion is designed to improve spatial consistency, reducing incomplete target responses and background misactivations. For the feature aggregation, we introduce a training-free contribution and consistency-aware Gaussian feature aggregation strategy that leverages pixel contribution reliability and cross-view semantic consistency to suppress unreliable responses from noisy viewpoints. A new dataset is provided by manually annotating various objects on four real-world public UAV outdoor scene datasets. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first accessible dataset of open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding for UAV outdoor scenes. Quantitative evaluations and ablation studies demonstrate that OutLangSplat outperforms SOTA methods on both open-vocabulary semantic segmentation and instance localization tasks. The datasets and codes will be open-sourced.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04560
Event-centric intelligent analytical systems heavily depend on explicit causal event knowledge for risk early warning, decision-making support and narrative comprehension. Nevertheless, existing instance-level causal pairs suffer severe generalization deficits on low-frequency long-tail and unseen event combinations. To address this limitation, this work proposes Abstract Event Causal Rule (AECR), a novel relation-level causal abstraction paradigm that transforms concrete cause-effect pairs into generalized abstract causal logic while retaining their intrinsic causal relationships. We design a multi-agent Concrete-to-Abstract Causal Induction (CACI) system coupled with similarity-constrained clustering to distill trustworthy AECRs from noisy raw causal data, based on which two complete AECR knowledge bases are built. To validate the practical utility of abstract causal knowledge, we propose an Abstract Rule-Guided Causal Attention Encoder (AR-GCAE), which injects the retrieved AECRs into the causality Graph Event Prediction (CGEP) benchmark task via rule-guided attention layers and gated representation fusion. Quantitative experimental results reveal that applying AECRs substantially strengthens the generalization capacity of event causal reasoning and brings consistent performance improvements to event prediction, with the most prominent gains observed on rare and unseen event samples.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05205
The quantitative analysis of 3D neuronal morphologies requires capturing both graph topology and spatial geometry. Current message-passing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are bounded by the 1-Weisfeiler-Lehman (1-WL) test, limiting their ability to capture cycles induced by spatial proximities. To address this, we propose a training-free geometric prior based on tropical algebraic geometry. We apply the recently established tropical Abel-Jacobi transform and polarization distances to machine learning on tree-structured data. We introduce a structural transformation pipeline, comprising cycle space augmentation and quotient space construction, to convert spatial trees into cyclic metric graphs suitable for embedding into the Tropical Jacobian. Computing exact tropical polarization distances requires solving the NP-Hard Closest Vector Problem (CVP) on integer lattices. Instead of relying on explicit approximations with quantization errors (e.g., Babai's rounding), we adopt a continuous relaxation on the universal cover of the Albanese torus. We show that the discrete Arakelov-Green measure, computed in closed form via the graph Laplacian's generalized inverse, decomposes exactly into the intrinsic path metric minus the unquantized polarization distance on this cover, avoiding integer lattice searches. This metric yields two descriptors: eigenvectors provide node-level structural coordinates, and the permutation-invariant eigenvalue spectrum provides a graph-level signature. On the BREC benchmark, the eigenvector formulation demonstrates expressivity beyond the 1-WL limit. On 3D morphology datasets (ACT-4, JML-4, BIL-6), the spectrum seamlessly integrates into standard architectures (VAEs, GNNs, Tree-LSTMs) without additional trainable parameters, outperforming explicit lattice approximations and improving classification accuracy over existing spatial models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04460
Understanding which surfaces in a scene are physically accessible to a given tool is fundamental for robotic interaction, yet 3D perception systems typically stop at geometric reconstruction or visibility estimation. Existing geometric accessibility methods require complete, noise-free meshes and fixed kinematic bases, assumptions that fail for mobile platforms mapping incrementally from live data; visibility estimation cannot account for tool geometry or approach-corridor clearance. We propose the Accessibility Field: a per-point labelling of surface accessibility for a given tool, produced in real time from streaming sparse LiDAR and updated at sensor rate as the platform moves. Running entirely on GPU, our method evaluates each surface point against precomputed geometry kernels representing the tool at a set of rotated approach orientations, checking tool collisions and approach-corridor clearance. A scan-centric Truncated Signed Distance Field integration scheme underpins our system, updating only voxels near each observed return rather than projecting every frustum voxel each frame -- critical for nonrepetitive sensors like the Livox Mid-360, where some bins contain no returns. Our system is tool-agnostic, needs no prior scene model, and runs on workstation and Jetson Orin edge hardware. We evaluate quantitatively on synthetic objects and mature-scale Pinus radiata models, showing visibility alone is insufficient as an accessibility proxy: our method achieves F1=90.8 vs. 69.8 for a Hidden Point Removal baseline on mixed-accessibility geometry, and correctly identifies 56.8% of pine branch surfaces as inaccessible despite being visible from the sensor. To our knowledge, this is the first method to estimate per-point surface accessibility in real time from streaming sparse LiDAR without a prior scene model or fixed base frame -- a capability visibility estimation cannot provide.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06412
Electroencephalography (EEG) analysis extends beyond assigning predefined labels to recordings; it requires workflows connecting natural-language instructions, signal processing, quantitative evidence, and scientific interpretation. We term this capability \emph{comprehensive EEG understanding}. Existing evaluations, however, primarily target isolated decoding tasks or system-specific demonstrations, leaving the competence of large language models (LLMs) insufficiently quantified. We introduce \benchmarkname{}, a unified benchmark for comprehensive, instruction-conditioned EEG understanding. It comprises four subsets---Foundational Analysis, Sleep Assessment, Neurocognitive Assessment, and Physiological Integration---covering 17 datasets, \numcases{} tasks, and over \numinstances{} real-data instances. Given an instruction and EEG recordings with optional physiological signals, a system must perform the analysis and produce a scientifically grounded report and, when required, artifacts. Outputs are assessed through numerical, categorical, set, sequence, semantic, and artifact validation. We evaluate \nummodels{} representative LLMs across more than 100K executions under two paradigms: autonomous code execution with CodeAct and structured agentic analysis with BrainAgent. Results vary substantially across models, subsets, difficulty levels, and execution paradigms, showing that EEG competence depends on the model and its operationalization. \benchmarkname{} provides a reproducible testbed for advancing LLM-based EEG understanding. The code and benchmark will be released soon, with evaluation results continuously updated.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04156
Existing reference-free methods for evaluating music perceptual quality alleviate the need for paired noisy-clean data, but they still rely on a background set, which is used to compute aggregated statistics of clean audio samples. In this work, we propose a novel approach that eliminates this requirement, achieving background-set-free and reference-free quality estimation using only a pre-trained Flow Matching backbone. We demonstrate that unconditional Flow Matching inversion via simple Euler integration is sufficient to detect various artificial distortions and accurately rank music generation models against human perceptual judgments. We introduce InvFlowFD, which performs flow inversion and compares a group of inverted samples to the prior distribution. We evaluate our method against prior work, quantitatively and with a thorough human study. Results suggest that InvFlowFD is highly correlated with human perception of sound distortions, as well as generative models' quality, while being more flexible and less restrictive than existing metrics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04142
Confocal microscopy of optically cleared and swelled tissue resolves complex biological structures in 3D, but such acquisitions are highly anisotropic: along the under-sampled axial direction the structure can appear discontinuous, hampering reconstruction and automated quantitative analysis. The usual remedy upsamples the axial dimension to an isotropic volume before training a segmentation model, which requires dense annotations in the upsampled space, a prohibitive labeling burden. We present an end-to-end, GPU-accelerated framework that overcomes this without additional annotations. The model is trained on the native acquisition volume; random rotation of training patches leverages the well-resolved lateral plane to supply the missing axial information, and a z-axis continuity loss keeps neighboring slices consistent. We adapt both a convolutional (3D U-Net) and a transformer (SwinUNETR) backbone, aggregate overlapping patches by Gaussian consensus, and compute point-spread-function-corrected membrane thickness by ray-surface intersection on the GPU. We apply the method to the glomerular basement membrane (GBM), a thin, highly convoluted part of the kidney's filtration barrier that grows more irregular in disease. Segmentation accuracy matches inter-expert agreement. Continuity-aware training improves reconstruction smoothness and suppresses a periodic terracing artifact at minimal accuracy cost. We quantify GBM thickness across the reconstructed 3D surface and capture disease-related thickening, enabling fully automated anisotropic 3D morphometry of biological structures without dense volumetric labels or image restoration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07575
Fetal brain biometry is essential for quantitative assessment of brain development, supporting gestational age estimation, developmental monitoring, and detection of abnormalities. In clinical practice, measurements are manually performed, making them time-consuming and prone to variability. While automated approaches have been proposed, reproducible methods remain limited, particularly those providing anatomically interpretable landmark localization. We present a fully automated deep learning-based framework for reliable and reproducible brain biometry from 3D super-resolution-reconstructed fetal brain MRI. The proposed four-step pipeline derives biometric parameters by jointly estimating linear measurements and their corresponding anatomical landmarks. A 3D convolutional neural network is trained to regress landmark coordinates from brain segmentation label maps, followed by measurement-specific geometric optimization to refine landmark positions and compute measurements. The pipeline is evaluated on two publicly available fetal MRI datasets comprising 150 volumes (gestational age range: 20-37 weeks) acquired across different scanners and protocols, assessing five key biometric measurements across varying acquisition settings and providing a comprehensive evaluation of both measurement accuracy and landmark localization using quantitative metrics and visual assessment. Compared with the only available automated pipeline, the proposed method achieves comparable or improved accuracy for most measurements. In conclusion, we introduce a straightforward pipeline for reliable biometry estimations, with efficiency, interpretability and scalability that support integration into clinical workflows.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03724