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Peer-reviewade publikationer — 56237 artiklar

ReConFuse: Reconstruction-Error Guided Semantic Fusion for AI-Generated Video Detection
arXiv:2606.04706v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-generated videos are becoming increasingly realistic, raising serious concerns about misinformation, content authenticity, and media trust. Reliable AI-generated video detection is therefore essential for multimedia forensics, yet remains challenging due to the need to capture spatial artifacts, temporal dynamics, and generalize to evolving generative models. In this paper, we explore reconstruction error as a discriminative forensic cue for AI-generated video detection. By reconstructing input videos with a pretrained WF-VAE, we observe that real and generated videos exhibit distinguishable frame-wise reconstruction error patterns, suggesting that reconstruction errors can reveal their distributional discrepancies. However, extending reconstruction-based image detection to videos is non-trivial, since video reconstruction errors are temporally organized across frames and require semantic context for effective interpretation. To address these challenges, we propose ReConFuse, a reconstruction-guided semantic fusion framework for video-level AI-generated video detection. ReConFuse extracts reconstruction error cues from WF-VAE reconstructed videos, aligns them with multi-frame semantic features, and uses a Mamba-based module to model temporal evolution for video-level classification. Experiments across multiple generators and evaluation settings demonstrate the effectiveness and strong generalization ability of ReConFuse.
Data Efficient Complex Feature Fusion Network For Hyperspectral Image Classification
arXiv:2606.04710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work presents a data-efficient variant of the Attention-Based Dual-Branch Complex Feature Fusion Network (CFFN) for hyperspectral image classification. The proposed model, termed DE-CFFN, retains the original two-stream structure: the Real-Valued Neural Network (RVNN) processes standard hyperspectral patches, while the Complex-Valued Neural Network (CVNN) handles their Fourier-transformed counterparts. The main contribution of this work lies in the feature extraction process and architectural enhancement. Factor Analysis is used for dimensionality reduction, offering improved latent feature representation over Principal Component Analysis. Additionally, both the RVNN and CVNN streams are structurally modified by successively halving the number of filters in the 3D convolutional layers to reduce complexity. The outputs of both branches are concatenated and passed through a Squeeze and Excitation (SE) block to enhance joint feature representation. Evaluated on the Pavia University and Salinas datasets, DE-CFFN achieves classification performance comparable to CFFN, while significantly reducing model size, memory consumption, and inference latency, making it suitable for real-time hyperspectral imaging applications.
The State of Peer Review in Empirical Software Engineering: A Community Survey on Review Load, Quality, and GenAI Use
arXiv:2606.04716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The scientific peer review system has been slowly deteriorating over the last years, and not just within empirical software engineering (ESE) research. Increased submission numbers, high workload, and the rise of generative AI use with all its associated issues have made many cracks in the system more visible. To get a better understanding of the current state of peer review in the ESE community, we conducted a questionnaire survey, which accumulated 120 responses. We report on (i) the perceived review load of community members, (ii) review quality perception as well as frequent challenges for and issues with reviews, (iii) the use of LLM-based tools in the reviewing process, and (iv) the community's suggestions for improving the peer review system. We hope that these community opinions can facilitate more evidence-based discussions about how people want to see the review system change for the better.
Reducing the Filtering Effect in Public School Admissions: A Bias-aware Analysis for Targeted Interventions
arXiv:2004.10846v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Problem definition: Traditionally, New York City's top 8 public schools have selected candidates solely based on their scores in the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). These scores are known to be impacted by socioeconomic status of students and test preparation received in middle schools, leading to a massive filtering effect in the education pipeline. The classical mechanisms for assigning students to schools do not naturally address problems like school segregation and class diversity, which have worsened over the years. The scientific community, including policymakers, have reacted by incorporating group-specific quotas and proportionality constraints, with mixed results. The problem of finding effective and fair methods for broadening access to top-notch education is still unsolved. Methodology/results: We take an operations approach to the problem different from most established literature, with the goal of increasing opportunities for students with high economic needs. Using data from the Department of Education (DOE) in New York City, we show that there is a shift in the distribution of scores obtained by students that the DOE classifies as "disadvantaged" (following criteria mostly based on economic factors). We model this shift as a "bias" that results from an underestimation of the true potential of disadvantaged students. We analyze the impact this bias has on an assortative matching market. We show that centrally planned interventions can significantly reduce the impact of bias through scholarships or training, when they target the segment of disadvantaged students with average performance.
Multipole analysis of substrate-supported dielectric nanoresonator arrays with T-matrix method
arXiv:2006.09137v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Substrates, and layered media in general, are ubiquitous, affect the properties of whatever is in their vicinity, and their influence is, in an arbitrary framework, challenging to quantify analytically, especially for large arrays which escape explicit numerical treatment due to the computational burden. In this work, we develop a versatile T-matrix based framework in which we generalize the coupled multipole model towards arbitrarily high multipole orders and substrate-supported arrays. It allows us to study substrate-supported random/amorphous arrays of high index dielectric nanoparticles which are of wide interest due to relatively low losses and a highly tunable optical response, making them promising elements for nanophotonic devices. We discuss how multipole coupling rules evolve in the presence of a substrate in amorphous arrays for three interaction mechanisms: direct coupling between particles, substrate-mediated interparticle coupling and substrate-mediated self-coupling. We show the interplay between array density, distance from the substrate and its refractive in determining the optical response of an array. As an example, we use this framework to analyze refractometric sensing with substrate-supported arrays and demonstrate that the substrate plays a crucial role in determining the array sensitivity.
Multilingual Long-Form Speech Instruction Following: KIT's Submission to IWSLT 2026
arXiv:2606.04730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the advent of Large Language Models, single-task and token-based multi-task models have evolved into instruction-based systems that infer task and target language implicitly from natural language prompts. This trend is reflected in IWSLT's Instruction Following Track, which this year introduced new tasks including an unknown surprise task, posing a genuine challenge against overfitting to known tasks. We present KIT's submission to the Long and Short Instruction Following tracks in the unconstrained setting. Our approach combines a general data augmentation pipeline that converts short-form corpora into long-form training data through segment concatenation, LLM-based label generation, and cross-lingual translation, yielding over 1M instances across six tasks and four languages. We further show that likelihood-based re-ranking, while highly effective for ASR, systematically degrades semantic tasks by spuriously selecting candidates generated from segmented audio processing rather than holistic long-form inference, a failure mode resolved by combining likelihood with Minimum Bayes Risk decoding.
A Pathology Foundation Model for Gastric Cancer with Real-World Validation
arXiv:2606.04792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gastric cancer remains a major cause of cancer mortality, yet its histological and molecular heterogeneity complicates diagnosis and risk stratification. General-purpose pathology foundation models (PFMs) often plateau on fine-grained endpoints central to gastric cancer care, and few have undergone rigorous prospective validation or clinical reader studies. We present GRACE, a Gastric-specific foundation model for Real-world Assessment and Clinical dEcision support. GRACE was developed from multicenter gastric pathology datasets totaling 48,364 primarily HE-stained whole-slide images from 37,493 patients. When evaluated on 28 clinically relevant tasks, GRACE consistently outperformed representative pancancer PFMs, achieving a macro-AUC of 0.9188, with strong performance for precancerous lesion diagnosis (macro-AUC 0.9322), tumor histopathological assessment (macro-AUC 0.9119), molecular profiling (macro-AUC 0.8682), and prognostic prediction. Beyond benchmarking, GRACE's translational value was substantiated through a rigorous evidence chain. Under safety-gated criteria requiring 100% NPV for rule-out and 100% PPV for rule-in, GRACE streamlined review for up to 69.6% of malignancy-diagnosis cases and triaged 46.8% of MMR-IHC follow-up requests. This translational feasibility was further strengthened by a randomized crossover reader study of pathologist-AI collaboration. With GRACE assistance, diagnostic accuracy improved from 82.0% to 89.9%, yielding nearly twofold higher adjusted odds of a correct diagnosis (OR 1.987) alongside concurrent gains in sensitivity and specificity. AI assistance also reduced diagnostic time by 14.9%, elevated diagnostic confidence by 9.0%, and markedly improved inter-rater agreement. When calibrated to maintain non-inferior performance to senior pathologists, the AI-assisted workflow could triage 60.7% of atrophy and 82.7% of intestinal metaplasia cases.
Breaking the width-scaling limit in high-performance atomically thin 2D nanoribbon transistors
arXiv:2606.04219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State-of-the-art transistors have been successfully scaled the gate lengths and channel thicknesses down to 5 nm for high-performance and energy-efficient information processing. However, reducing channel width below 40-50 nm remains a bottleneck, as dangling bonds, edge disorder, and lateral depletion suppress drive current and degrade device performance. Here, we break this width-scaling wall using ultra-scaled two-dimensional semiconductor (2DSC) nanoribbon transistors down to 15 nm. In contrast to the conventional scaling rule of degradation of current density upon width scaling, our atomically-thin monolayer and bilayer molybdenum disulfide nanoribbon transistors exhibit enhancement of on-current density of up to 230% and 170%,respectively, followed by a saturation for the narrowest channels down to 15 nm. The ultra-narrow nanoribbon transistors maintain the highest on/off ratios reported so far for similar device dimensions, with improved mobility and threshold-voltage stability, indicating reduced edge scattering and depletion with a stronger electrostatic control. These findings lead to a breakthrough in width scaling rules using 2DSC nanoribbons with enhanced performance at narrower channel widths, which is promising for the ultimate scaling of transistors.
Blessing from Human-AI Interaction: Super Reinforcement Learning in Confounded Environments
arXiv:2209.15448v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI becomes more prevalent throughout society, effective methods of integrating humans and AI systems that leverage their respective strengths and mitigate risk have become an important priority. In this paper, we introduce the paradigm of super policy learning that takes advantage of Human-AI interaction for data driven sequential decision making. This approach utilizes the observed action, either from AI or humans, as input for achieving a stronger oracle in policy learning for the decision maker (humans or AI). In the decision process with unmeasured confounding, the actions taken by past agents can offer valuable insights into undisclosed information. By including this information for the policy search in a novel and legitimate manner, the proposed super policy learning will yield a super-policy that is guaranteed to outperform both the standard optimal policy and the behavior one (e.g., past agents' actions). We call this stronger oracle a blessing from human-AI interaction. Furthermore, to address the issue of unmeasured confounding in finding super-policies using the batch data, a number of nonparametric and causal identifications are established under the framework of proximal causal inference. Building upon on these novel identification results, we develop several super-policy learning algorithms and systematically study their theoretical properties such as finite-sample regret guarantee. Finally, we illustrate the effectiveness of our proposal through extensive simulations and real-world applications.
Transformer-Based Autonomous Driving Models and Deployment-Oriented Compression: A Survey
arXiv:2304.10891v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformer-based models are becoming a central paradigm in autonomous driving because they can capture long-range spatial dependencies, multi-agent interactions, and multimodal context across perception, prediction, and planning. At the same time, their deployment in real vehicles remains difficult because high-capacity attention-based architectures impose substantial latency, memory, and energy overhead. This survey reviews representative Transformer-based autonomous driving models and organizes them by task role, sensing configuration, and architectural design. More importantly, it examines these models from a deployment-oriented perspective and analyzes how efficiency constraints reshape model design choices in practice. We further review compression and acceleration strategies relevant to Transformer-based driving systems, including quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation, low-rank approximation, and efficient attention, and discuss their benefits, limitations, and task-dependent applicability. Rather than treating compression as an isolated post-processing step, we highlight it as a system-level design consideration that directly affects deployability, robustness, and safety. Finally, we identify open challenges and future research directions toward standardized, safety-aware, and hardware-conscious evaluation of efficient autonomous driving systems.
UniFine: A Unified and Fine-grained Approach for Zero-shot Vision-Language Understanding
arXiv:2307.00862v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language tasks, such as VQA, SNLI-VE, and VCR are challenging because they require the model's reasoning ability to understand the semantics of the visual world and natural language. Supervised methods working for vision-language tasks have been well-studied. However, solving these tasks in a zero-shot setting is less explored. Since Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has shown remarkable zero-shot performance on image-text matching, previous works utilized its strong zero-shot ability by converting vision-language tasks into an image-text matching problem, and they mainly consider global-level matching (e.g., the whole image or sentence). However, we find visual and textual fine-grained information, e.g., keywords in the sentence and objects in the image, can be fairly informative for semantics understanding. Inspired by this, we propose a unified framework to take advantage of the fine-grained information for zero-shot vision-language learning, covering multiple tasks such as VQA, SNLI-VE, and VCR. Our experiments show that our framework outperforms former zero-shot methods on VQA and achieves substantial improvement on SNLI-VE and VCR. Furthermore, our ablation studies confirm the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed method.
Stumbling Into AI Emotional Dependence: How Routine AI Interactions Reshape Human Connection
arXiv:2606.04150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public discourse and emerging policy typically assume that AI emotional support is a deliberate act: a lonely user consciously seeking comfort from a dedicated companion chatbot. In this paper, we draw on emerging empirical evidence and argue that this picture is inaccurate on two accounts, both in how AI emotional support arises and how it shapes future behavior. First, AI emotional support commonly emerges incidentally within task-oriented interactions on general-purpose platforms, much as workplace friendships deepen through collaboration. Second, these incidental encounters are path-dependent: positive experiences of AI emotional support update people's beliefs about AI's emotional capabilities and redirect their choices for future emotional support, increasing preference for AI and decreasing preference for humans. We review recent evidence, including a large-scale longitudinal study conducted in collaboration with OpenAI, showing that daily five-minute conversations with an AI about personal issues over 28 days led to a 10.3% decrease in the preference for seeking support from humans and an 11.6% increase in the preference for AI. These findings suggest that current policy, focused on companion apps and isolated interactions, cannot adequately protect human connection. Instead, effective regulations should extend to general-purpose AI systems and address cumulative, trajectory-level changes in how people seek support. Recognizing how people stumble into AI emotional support and how those encounters redirect human connections over time is essential to safeguarding human well-being.
High-Quality Entity Segmentation and Grounding
arXiv:2402.02555v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we propose ESG, a pipeline for high-quality entity segmentation and grounding supported by a new dataset EntitySeg. At first, the proposed dataset naming EntitySeg contains images spanning various image domains and entities, along with plentiful high-resolution images and high-quality mask annotations for training and testing. Then, the ESG mainly consists of two modules: CropFormer for high-quality entity segmentation whereas GELLA for accurate noun extraction from sentences and semantic matching between language and visual regions. Unlike existing grounding methods that jointly train a segmentation and a large language model, ESG adopts a two-stage decoupled design, preserving high-quality masks and grounding robustness without the trade-offs often introduced by joint training. CropFormer ensures high-quality entity segmentation results, which can then be encoded into the GELLA model for effective grounding. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed pipeline across five tasks, including entity segmentation, panoptic segmentation, open-vocabulary segmentation, referring segmentation, and panoptic localized narratives. Furthermore, GELLA module of ESG pipeline is highly flexible and capable of processing mask inputs from any segmentation framework, thanks to its lightweight colormap/vision encoder, language/mask decoder, and association module. The entity segmentation dataset and grounding code will be released at https://github.com/qqlu/Entity.
Crafting Your Evolving Dreams: Concept-Incremental Versatile Customization
arXiv:2606.04797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Custom diffusion models (CDMs) have garnered significant interest owing to their remarkable capacity for generating personalized concepts. However, the majority of CDMs unrealistically presume that the user's collection of personalized concepts is static and incapable of incremental growth over time. Furthermore, they exhibit significant catastrophic forgetting and concept neglect of previously learned concepts when incrementally learning a sequence of new ones. To resolve the above challenges, we develop a novel Continually Customizable Diffusion Model (CCDM), enabling users to perform concept-incremental versatile customization. Specifically, we design an attribute-decoupled LoRA (AD-LoRA) module and a relevance-guided AD-LoRA aggregation strategy to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. They can preserve concept-specific attributes of each task and leverage beneficial inter-task correlations to enhance the continual learning of new customization tasks. Additionally, to address the challenge of concept neglect, we propose a controllable regional context synthesis strategy that performs multi-concept composition in alignment with user-provided conditions. This strategy enhances the overall consistency in multi-concept synthesis by guaranteeing semantic independence between user-defined regions and their smooth boundary transitions. Experiments show our CCDM exhibits significant improvements over baseline methods.
Uncertainty-Aware (Un)Supervised Few-Shot User Adaptation for On-Device Personalized Human Activity Recognition
arXiv:2606.04798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR) models often degrade on unseen users due to domain shifts caused by individual movement patterns and sensor placement. Practical wearable HAR systems therefore require personalization methods that are lightweight, applicable whether calibration data is labeled, unlabeled, or unavailable, and robust under limited calibration. We present a gradient-free framework that repurposes pretrained HAR classifiers as Prototypical Networks using using prior prototypes, which preserve zero-shot performance and regularize adaptation. For labeled calibration, we introduce closed-form Bayesian prototype estimation and extend the same principle to unlabeled calibration. With only 3 seconds of calibration data per activity (one shot), supervised adaptation improves macro-F1 by +2.76 to +33.44 percentage points across four datasets, while unsupervised adaptation improves by +0.56 to +32.13 points. Since adaptation requires only closed-form prototype updates, the framework enables efficient and robust on-device personalization of preexisting HAR classifiers.
Magnetic field free nonreciprocity in tapered atomic cladded nano waveguide
arXiv:2606.04589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optical nonreciprocity is a fundamental requirement for modern optical communications and quantum information processing, where it is essential to protect sensitive sources from destabilizing feedback and preserving quantum coherence. Conventional nonreciprocal devices are based on the Faraday effect; however, their dependence on bulky permanent magnets poses a significant barrier to chip-scale integration and scalability. Moreover, the application of a magnetic field is undesired in many quantum atomic systems. In this work, we demonstrate magnet-free optical nonreciprocity on a fully integrated platform utilizing a Nanophotonic Alkali Silicon Waveguide (NASWAG) interfaced with hot rubidium vapor. By employing velocity-selective optical pumping (VSOP), we break time reversal symmetry by taking advantage of the Doppler effect-generated by the thermally moving atoms, a phenomenon traditionally viewed as a limitation in atomic spectroscopy. We show that the use of suspended tapered waveguides significantly mitigates transit-time broadening, thereby enabling the observation of a robust nonreciprocal response. We further characterize the dependence of the isolation contrast on pump power, finding that the experimental measurements and numerical simulations correspond and provide mutual support for the underlying physical model. With proper optimization, the demonstrated effect may be used in the future for applications such as magnetic free optical isolators.
Reconciling Causality and Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics with Hamiltonian Causal Models
arXiv:2606.04822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal modeling of physical temporal phenomena must handle interventions that act along trajectories, nonstationary induced laws, path-dependent effects, and feedback mediated by dynamics, all challenging in standard causal models. We introduce Hamiltonian Causal Models (HCMs), a trajectory-level framework in which observed variables interact with local environments and interventions act as controls of Hamiltonian mechanisms. HCMs separate immutable equations of motion from intervenable mechanisms and define causal effects as discrepancies between interventional path laws. A key motivation for HCMs is their natural interface with non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Entropy production quantifies the irreversibility of a process and is a central causal observable: it is estimable from data and witnesses causal effects along the system's evolution that are invisible to endpoint and cumulative versions of the standard average treatment effect. As in physics, cause and effect are not primitives of the relation between two random variables but arise from the non-invertibility of the thermodynamic arrow. With this, our paper reconciles the language of statistical causal models and non-stationary thermodynamics, offering new tools to describe causality in a wide range of physical systems.
When Both Layers Learn: Training Dynamics of Representing Linear Models via ReLU Networks
arXiv:2606.04476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study the gradient descent dynamics for jointly training both layers of a one-hidden-layer ReLU network to fit a linear target function. Concretely, we consider a realizable setting where inputs are drawn i.i.d. from a Gaussian distribution and labels follow a planted linear model. This stylized framework captures salient features of end-to-end training in inverse problems and certain auto-encoder models. Despite its apparent simplicity, the dynamics remain poorly understood, in part because the loss landscape contains multiple non-strict saddle points, making it unclear why gradient descent from random initialization reliably escapes bad stationary regions. We provide a detailed characterization of the optimization landscape and prove that gradient descent from a moderately small random initialization-simultaneously training both layers-converges to a global minimizer at a linear rate with order-wise optimal sample complexity. Our analysis tracks the trajectory through three phases: an alignment phase in which hidden weights progressively align with the planted direction while the output weights maintain the correct sign pattern; a growth phase in which the norms of both layers increase while preserving alignment; and a local refinement phase in which the aligned neurons rapidly converge to the planted direction, yielding fast local convergence. To rigorously show that GD avoids non-strict saddles, we develop trajectory-level control arguments for the end-to-end dynamics. In addition, we establish novel uniform concentration results that hold along the entire trajectory, and are essential for obtaining order-wise optimal sample complexity. We corroborate our theory with extensive experiments across a range of configurations.
LiSeCo: Linear Semantic Control for Language Generation
arXiv:2405.15454v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The prevalence of Large Language Models (LLMs) in critical applications highlights the need for controlled language generation methods that are both computationally efficient and enjoy performance guarantees. To address this need, we use a common model of concept semantics as linearly represented in an LLM's latent space. In particular, we take the view that natural language generation traces a trajectory in this continuous semantic space, realized by the language model's hidden activations. This view permits a control-theoretic treatment of text generation in latent space, in which we propose Linear Semantic Control (LiSeCo), a lightweight, gradient-free intervention that dynamically steers trajectories away from regions corresponding to undesired meanings. In particular, we propose to directly intervene, in an online fashion, the activations of the token that is being generated in embedding space. Crucially, LiSeCo does not simply steer activations towards a desirable region. Instead, it relies on classical techniques from control theory to precisely control activations in a context-dependent way, and guarantees that they are brought into a specific pre-defined region of embedding space that corresponds to allowed semantics. The intervention is computed in closed form according to an optimal controller formulation, minimally impacting generation time. This control of the activations in embedding space allows for fine-grained steering of attributes of the generated sequence. We demonstrate that our approach is effective on different tasks -- toxicity, sentiment, and language (English/Spanish) steering -- while maintaining text quality.
Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Visual State Space Models
arXiv:2406.09407v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision State Space Models (VSSMs), a novel architecture that combines the strengths of recurrent neural networks and latent variable models, have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual perception tasks by efficiently capturing long-range dependencies and modeling complex visual dynamics. However, their robustness under natural and adversarial perturbations remains a critical concern. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of VSSMs' robustness under various perturbation scenarios, including occlusions, image structure, common corruptions, and adversarial attacks, and compare their performance to well-established architectures such as transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks. Furthermore, we investigate the resilience of VSSMs to object-background compositional changes on sophisticated benchmarks designed to test model performance in complex visual scenes. We also assess their robustness on object detection and segmentation tasks using corrupted datasets that mimic real-world scenarios. To gain a deeper understanding of VSSMs' adversarial robustness, we conduct a frequency-based analysis of adversarial attacks, evaluating their performance against low-frequency and high-frequency perturbations. Our findings highlight the strengths and limitations of VSSMs in handling complex visual corruptions, offering valuable insights for future research. Our code and models will be available at https://github.com/HashmatShadab/MambaRobustness.
NextMotionQA: Benchmarking and Judging Human Motion Understanding with Vision-Language Models
arXiv:2606.04773v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable evaluation of human motion understanding is fundamental to advancing embodied AI, robotics, and animation. However, existing benchmarks suffer from coarse semantic granularity, undifferentiated difficulty, limited annotation quality, and pervasive answer ambiguity, leaving them unable to diagnose where current models fail. To bridge this gap, we introduce NextMotionQA, a comprehensive benchmark that leverages vision-language models (VLMs) for semi-automated, expert-verified dataset. NextMotionQA features three complementary tasks: multiple-choice question answering, video captioning, and fine-grained error correction. Each task is systematically structured across three core semantic axes and stratified into three task complexity levels. Our extensive evaluation of twelve representative VLMs uncovers critical capability gaps and weakness that remain invisible under conventional, single-task evaluations. In a complementary direction, recent work has begun using VLMs as judges for text-to-motion evaluation; we ask whether they show the same degradation under harder tasks. We find that VLMs align strongly with expert ratings on coarse criteria (Cohen's \kappa=0.70) but break down on fine-grained, part-level judgment (\kappa=0.10), validating the paradigm in its strong regime while clarifying its limits.
SoftPINCH: EMG-Driven Soft Exoskeleton Assistance for Finger Flexion and Grasping
arXiv:2606.04776v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Surface electromyography (sEMG) provides a non-invasive interface for detecting hand-movement intention and controlling wearable assistive devices. However, reliable EMG-driven hand assistance remains challenging because EMG signals are affected by noise, motion artifacts, electrode placement, muscle fatigue, and inter-subject variability. At the same time, many hand exoskeletons remain mechanically restrictive or bulky, limiting comfort and natural hand motion. This work presents SoftPINCH, an EMG-driven soft wearable exoskeleton for thumb-index finger flexion and pinch grasp assistance. The system combines a tendon-driven soft exoskeleton, fingertip magnetic contact sensing, and neural EMG decoding for intention-based assistance. Surface EMG was recorded from forearm muscles during index and thumb movements, and three subject-independent decoding architectures were evaluated: LSTM, CNN+LSTM, and CNN+LSTM with attention. The CNN+LSTM and CNN+LSTM-attention models both achieved 99.4% LOSO test accuracy, outperforming the standalone LSTM, which reached 97.8%. However, the attention mechanism did not provide a significant improvement over CNN+LSTM, indicating that CNN-based feature extraction was sufficient for robust EMG representation. The CNN+LSTM model was therefore selected for real-time deployment due to its high accuracy and lower architectural complexity. Functional evaluation showed that active exoskeleton assistance reduced muscular effort during isolated finger flexion and object grasping. During weighted grasping, assistance reduced muscular effort across all tested loads, with a 92.6% reduction at the highest load. These results demonstrate the potential of SoftPINCH for intuitive, low-effort pinch assistance using real-time EMG-driven soft robotic control.
IRIS-GAN: Staged Specialist Detection of Deepfake Faces
arXiv:2606.04863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce IRIS-GAN, a specialist forensic detector for synthetic face images under cross-generator shift. Rather than addressing universal synthetic-image detection, we focus on faces generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs), which are state-of-the-art in deepfake content, and train the detector through staged exposure to increasingly demanding GAN families while retaining earlier generators. The final model reaches fake-detection rates above 99% across the GAN families considered and classifies an external real-face dataset with 98.9% accuracy. Grad-CAM analysis further reveals measurable generator-dependent spatial response patterns, which remain informative for a secondary heatmap-only classifier. Out-of-family tests on diffusion-generated faces confirm that IRIS-GAN is a specialist detector, with some capability to reach non-GAN deepfakes. These results establish staged training as an effective strategy for robust GAN-face forensics.
Sibley's Guard-Point Convexity Measure: A Perimeter Counterexample and a Dominance Bound
arXiv:2606.05052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Sibley's guard-point convexity measure for simple polygons and compare it with the exterior and perimeter convexity measures. We prove the exterior inequality G(F) <= E(F) and disprove the pointwise perimeter inequality G(F) <= P(F) by an explicit nonconvex pentagon with G(F) = 62/63 and P(F) = 185/189. Nevertheless, we prove the uniform bound G(F) <= 2P(F) for every simple polygon. Thus the pointwise perimeter inequality is false, but the corresponding asymptotic non-domination conclusion remains true. We also record an auxiliary guard-point-adapted anisotropic perimeter ratio, which isolates the directional loss in the Euclidean perimeter comparison.
From Network Experience to Subscriber Retention: An Explainable AI Framework for Mobile Operators
arXiv:2606.04838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This article presents a framework for the prediction of subscriber churn in mobile operators also known as telecommunication operators (or telcos). This framework covers relevant aspects of data-driven approaches using explainable artificial intelligence and machine learning. To demonstrate the robustness of the framework, we implement it on real data from one of the globally leading telcos with tens of millions of subscribers and show results and actionable insights confirming the usefulness and longevity of the framework. Our results suggest that subscriber quality of experience (QoE) indicators provide stronger churn signals than traditional network counters alone, reinforcing the need for QoE-centric analytics in modern operations in telcos. We conclude with future research directions for improving churn predictability and operational deployment.