arXiv:2603.22311v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fluorescence-based Ca$^{2+}$-imaging is a powerful tool for studying localized neuronal activity, including miniature Synaptic Calcium Transients, providing real-time insights into synaptic activity. These transients induce only subtle changes in the fluorescence signal, often barely above baseline, which poses a significant challenge for automated synaptic transient detection and segmentation. Detecting astronomical transients similarly requires efficient algorithms that will remain robust over a large field of view with varying noise properties. We leverage techniques used in astronomical transient detection for miniature Synaptic Calcium Transient detection in fluorescence microscopy. We present Astro-BEATS, an automatic miniature Synaptic Calcium Transient segmentation algorithm that incorporates image estimation and source-finding techniques used in astronomy and designed for Ca$^{2+}$-imaging videos. Astro-BEATS outperforms current threshold-based approaches for synaptic Ca$^{2+}$ transient detection and segmentation. The produced segmentation masks can be used to train a supervised deep learning algorithm for improved synaptic Ca$^{2+}$ transient detection in Ca$^{2+}$-imaging data. The speed of Astro-BEATS and its applicability to previously unseen datasets without re-optimization makes it particularly useful for generating training datasets for deep learning-based approaches.

arXiv:2603.22386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based systems are becoming increasingly popular for solving tasks by constructing executable workflows that interleave LLM calls, information retrieval, tool use, code execution, memory updates, and verification. This survey reviews recent methods for designing and optimizing such workflows, which we treat as agentic computation graphs (ACGs). We organize the literature based on when workflow structure is determined, where structure refers to which components or agents are present, how they depend on each other, and how information flows between them. This lens distinguishes static methods, which fix a reusable workflow scaffold before deployment, from dynamic methods, which select, generate, or revise the workflow for a particular run before or during execution. We further organize prior work along three dimensions: when structure is determined, what part of the workflow is optimized, and which evaluation signals guide optimization (e.g., task metrics, verifier signals, preferences, or trace-derived feedback). We also distinguish reusable workflow templates, run-specific realized graphs, and execution traces, separating reusable design choices from the structures actually deployed in a given run and from realized runtime behavior. Finally, we outline a structure-aware evaluation perspective that complements downstream task metrics with graph-level properties, execution cost, robustness, and structural variation across inputs. Our goal is to provide a clear vocabulary, a unified framework for positioning new methods, a more comparable view of existing body of literature, and a more reproducible evaluation standard for future work in workflow optimizations for LLM agents.

arXiv:2603.22705v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by significant clinical and biological heterogeneity. Conventional group-mean analyses of eye movements often mask individual atypicalities, potentially overlooking critical pathological signatures. This study aimed to identify idiosyncratic oculomotor patterns in ASD using an "outlier analysis" of smooth pursuit eye movement (SPEM). Methods: We recorded SPEM during a slow Lissajous pursuit task in 18 adults with ASD and 39 typically developed (TD) individuals. To quantify individual deviations, we derived an "outlier score" based on the Mahalanobis distance. This score was calculated from a feature vector, optimized via Principal Component Analysis (PCA), comprising the temporal lag ($\Delta$t) and the spatial deviation ($\Delta$s). An outlier was statistically defined as a score exceeding $\sqrt{10}$ (approximately 3.16$\sigma$) relative to the TD normative distribution. Results: While the TD group exhibited a low outlier rate of 5.1%, the ASD group demonstrated a significantly higher prevalence of 38.9% (7/18) (binomial P = 0.0034). Furthermore, the mean outlier score was significantly elevated in the ASD group (3.00 $\pm$ 2.62) compared to the TD group (1.52 $\pm$ 0.80; P = 0.002). Notably, these extreme deviations were captured even when conventional mean-based comparisons showed limited sensitivity. Conclusions: Our outlier analysis successfully visualized the high degree of idiosyncratic atypicality in ASD oculomotor control. By shifting the focus from group averages to individual deviations, this approach provides a sensitive metric for capturing the inherent heterogeneity of ASD, offering a potential baseline for identifying clinical subtypes.

arXiv:2603.22777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agricultural pest management increasingly relies on timely and accurate access to expert knowledge, yet high quality labeled data and continuous expert support remain limited, particularly for farmers operating in rural regions with unstable/no internet connectivity. At the same time, the rapid growth of AI and LLMs has created new opportunities to deliver practical decision support tools directly to end users in agriculture through compact and deployable systems. This work addresses (i) generating a structured insect information dataset, and (ii) adapting a lightweight LLM model ($\leq$ 7B) by fine tuning it for edge device uses in agricultural pest management. The textual data collection was done by reviewing and collecting information from available pest databases and published manuscripts on nine selected pest species. These structured reports were then reviewed and validated by a domain expert. From these reports, we constructed Q/A pairs to support model training and evaluation. A LoRA-based fine-tuning approach was applied to multiple lightweight LLMs and evaluated. Initial evaluation shows that Mistral 7B achieves an 88.9\% pass rate on the domain-specific Q/A task, substantially outperforming Qwen 2.5 7B (63.9\%), and LLaMA 3.1 8B (58.7\%). Notably, Mistral demonstrates higher semantic alignment (embedding similarity: 0.865) despite lower lexical overlap (BLEU: 0.097), indicating that semantic understanding and robust reasoning are more predictive of task success than surface-level conformity in specialized domains. By combining expert organized data, well-structured Q/A pairs, semantic quality control, and efficient model adaptation, this work contributes towards providing support for farmer facing agricultural decision support tools and demonstrates the feasibility of deploying compact, high-performing language models for practical field-level pest management guidance.

arXiv:2603.22846v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied Visual Tracking (EVT), a core dynamic task in embodied intelligence, requires an agent to precisely follow a language-specified target. Yet most existing methods rely on single-agent imitation learning, suffering from costly expert data and limited generalization due to static training environments. Inspired by competition-driven capability evolution, we propose CoMaTrack, a competitive game-theoretic multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that trains agents in a dynamic adversarial setting with competitive subtasks, yielding stronger adaptive planning and interference-resilient strategies. We further introduce CoMaTrack-Bench, the first benchmark for competitive EVT, featuring game scenarios between a tracker and adaptive opponents across diverse environments and instructions, enabling standardized robustness evaluation under active adversarial interactions. Experiments show that CoMaTrack achieves state-of-the-art results on both standard benchmarks and CoMaTrack-Bench. Notably, a 3B VLM trained with our framework surpasses previous single-agent imitation learning methods based on 7B models on the challenging EVT-Bench, achieving 92.1% in STT, 74.2% in DT, and 57.5% in AT. The benchmark code will be available at https://github.com/wlqcode/CoMaTrack-Bench

arXiv:2603.22935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chest X-ray report generation and automated evaluation are limited by poor recognition of low-prevalence abnormalities and inadequate handling of clinically important language, including negation and ambiguity. We develop a clinician-guided framework combining human expertise and large language models for multi-label finding extraction from free-text chest X-ray reports and use it to define Ran Score, a finding-level metric for report evaluation. Using three non-overlapping MIMIC-CXR-EN cohorts from a public chest X-ray dataset and an independent ChestX-CN validation cohort, we optimize prompts, establish radiologist-derived reference labels and evaluate report generation models. The optimized framework improves the macro-averaged score from 0.753 to 0.956 on the MIMIC-CXR-EN development cohort, exceeds the CheXbert benchmark by 15.7 percentage points on directly comparable labels, and shows robust generalization on the ChestX-CN validation cohort. Here we show that clinician-guided prompt optimization improves agreement with a radiologist-derived reference standard and that Ran Score enables finding-level evaluation of report fidelity, particularly for low-prevalence abnormalities.

arXiv:2603.23003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The comparison of dental records is a standardized technique in forensic dentistry used to speed up the identification of individuals in multiple-comparison scenarios. Specifically, the odontogram comparison is a procedure to compute criteria that will be used to perform a ranking. State-of-the-art automatic methods either make use of simple techniques, without utilizing the full potential of the information obtained from a comparison, or their internal behavior is not known due to the lack of peer-reviewed publications. This work aims to design aggregation mechanisms to automatically compare pairs of dental records that can be understood and validated by experts, improving the current methods. To do so, we introduce different aggregation approaches using the state-of-the-art codification, based on seven different criteria. In particular, we study the performance of i) data-driven lexicographical order-based aggregations, ii) well-known fuzzy logic aggregation methods and iii) machine learning techniques as aggregation mechanisms. To validate our proposals, 215 forensic cases from two different populations have been used. The results obtained show how the use of white-box machine learning techniques as aggregation models (average ranking from 2.02 to 2.21) are able to improve the state-of-the-art (average ranking of 3.91) without compromising the explainability and interpretability of the method.

arXiv:2603.23082v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) develops over a prolonged preclinical phase, during which neuropathological changes accumulate long before cognitive symptoms appear. Identifying cognitive functions affected at early stages is critical for the preclinical detection of asymptomatic individuals at-risk of AD. Early risk identification could enable timely interventions aimed at mitigating the development of significant future cognitive impairment. While episodic memory decline typically appears after substantial medial temporal lobe damage, spatial navigation has emerged as a particularly sensitive cognitive function in preclinical AD. In this review, we provide an overview of spatial navigation computations and the tasks used to assess them, highlighting how spatial navigation relies on neural circuits corresponding to the earliest sites of AD pathology. We synthesize evidence from cognitively unimpaired individuals with AD biomarkers, i.e. individuals at-risk of AD, and discuss future research directions. Overall, performance on spatial navigation tasks, particularly path integration and wayfinding, correlates with plasma and CSF biomarkers of AD pathology, notably p-tau. Spatial navigation assessment can represent a sensitive and scalable approach for early detection of individuals at-risk of AD in preclinical stages, and will inform future interventions to mitigate the progression toward clinically significant cognitive impairment.

arXiv:2603.23149v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying safety-critical agents requires anticipating the consequences of actions before they are executed. While world models offer a paradigm for this proactive foresight, current approaches relying on visual simulation incur prohibitive latencies, often exceeding several seconds per step. In this work, we challenge the assumption that visual processing is necessary for failure prevention. We show that a trained policy's latent state, combined with its planned actions, already encodes sufficient information to anticipate action outcomes, making visual simulation redundant for failure prevention. To this end, we introduce DILLO (DIstiLLed Language-ActiOn World Model), a fast steering layer that shifts the paradigm from "simulate-then-act" to "describe-then-act." DILLO is trained via cross-modal distillation, where a privileged Vision Language Model teacher annotates offline trajectories and a latent-conditioned Large Language Model student learns to predict semantic outcomes. This creates a text-only inference path, bypassing heavy visual generation entirely, achieving a 14x speedup over baselines. Experiments on MetaWorld and LIBERO demonstrate that DILLO produces high-fidelity descriptions of the next state and is able to steer the policy, improving episode success rate by up to 15 pp and 9.3 pp on average across tasks.

arXiv:2603.22292v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential decision making using Markov Decision Process underpins many realworld applications. Both model-based and model free methods have achieved strong results in these settings. However, real-world tasks must balance reward maximization with safety constraints, often conflicting objectives, that can lead to unstable min/max, adversarial optimization. A promising alternative is safety reachability analysis, which precomputes a forward-invariant safe state, action set, ensuring that an agent starting inside this set remains safe indefinitely. Yet, most reachability based methods address only hard safety constraints, and little work extends reachability to cumulative cost constraints. To address this, first, we define a safetyconditioned reachability set that decouples reward maximization from cumulative safety cost constraints. Second, we show how this set enforces safety constraints without unstable min/max or Lagrangian optimization, yielding a novel offline safe RL algorithm that learns a safe policy from a fixed dataset without environment interaction. Finally, experiments on standard offline safe RL benchmarks, and a real world maritime navigation task demonstrate that our method matches or outperforms state of the art baselines while maintaining safety.

arXiv:2603.22352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) offers a practical path to self-improvement of language models, but existing methods face a key trade-off: endogenous self-play can drift over iterations, while corpus-grounded approaches rely on curated data environments. We present \textbf{WIST}, a \textbf{W}eb-grounded \textbf{I}terative \textbf{S}elf-play \textbf{T}ree framework for domain-targeted reasoning improvement that learns directly from the open web without requiring any pre-arranged domain corpus. WIST incrementally expands a domain tree for exploration, and retrieves and cleans path-consistent web corpus to construct a controllable training environment. It then performs Challenger--Solver self-play with verifiable rewards, and feeds learnability signals back to update node posteriors and guide subsequent exploration through an adaptive curriculum. Across four backbones, WIST consistently improves over the base models and typically outperforms both purely endogenous self-evolution and corpus-grounded self-play baselines, with the Overall gains reaching \textbf{+9.8} (\textit{Qwen3-4B-Base}) and \textbf{+9.7} (\textit{OctoThinker-8B}). WIST is also domain-steerable, improving \textit{Qwen3-8B-Base} by \textbf{+14.79} in medicine and \textit{Qwen3-4B-Base} by \textbf{+5.28} on PhyBench. Ablations further confirm the importance of WIST's key components for stable open-web learning. Our Code is available at https://github.com/lfy-123/WIST.

arXiv:2603.22365v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the rapid growth of interconnected devices, accurately detecting malicious activities in network traffic has become increasingly challenging. Most existing deep learning-based intrusion detection systems treat network flows as independent instances, thereby failing to exploit the relational dependencies inherent in network communications. To address this limitation, we propose Q-AGNN, a Quantum-Enhanced Attentive Graph Neural Network for intrusion detection, where network flows are modeled as nodes and edges represent similarity relationships. Q-AGNN leverages parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) to encode multi-hop neighborhood information into a high-dimensional latent space, inducing a bounded quantum feature map that implements a second-order polynomial graph filter in a quantum-induced Hilbert space. An attention mechanism is subsequently applied to adaptively weight the quantum-enhanced embeddings, allowing the model to focus on the most influential nodes contributing to anomalous behavior. Extensive experiments conducted on four benchmark intrusion detection datasets demonstrate that Q-AGNN achieves competitive or superior detection performance compared to state-of-the-art graph-based methods, while consistently maintaining low false positive rates under hardware-calibrated noise conditions. Moreover, we also executed the Q-AGNN framework on actual IBM quantum hardware to demonstrate the practical operability of the proposed pipeline under real NISQ conditions. These results highlight the effectiveness of integrating quantum-enhanced representations with attention mechanisms for graph-based intrusion detection and underscore the potential of hybrid quantum-classical learning frameworks in cybersecurity applications.

arXiv:2603.22366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a Quantum Federated Autoencoder for Anomaly Detection, a framework that leverages quantum federated learning for efficient, secure, and distributed processing in IoT networks. By harnessing quantum autoencoders for high-dimensional feature representation and federated learning for decentralized model training, the approach transforms localized learning on edge devices without requiring transmission of raw data, thereby preserving privacy and minimizing communication overhead. The model leverages quantum advantage in pattern recognition to enhance detection sensitivity, particularly in complex and dynamic IoT network traffic. Experiments on a real-world IoT dataset show that the proposed method delivers anomaly detection accuracy and robustness comparable to centralized approaches, while ensuring data privacy.

arXiv:2603.22479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Defining a constructive process to build general capabilities for language models in an automatic manner is considered an open problem in artificial intelligence. Towards this, we consider the problem of building a curriculum of tasks that grows a model via relevant skill discovery. We provide a concrete framework for this task, using a family of tasks called cross-entropy games, which we postulate is universal in a suitable sense. We show that if it is possible to grow the curriculum for relevant skill discovery by iterating a greedy optimization algorithm, then, under natural assumptions, there is essentially only one meta-objective possible (up to a few hyperparameters). We call the resulting process cognitive training. We postulate that, given sufficiently capable language models as players and meta-samplers and sufficient training time, cognitive training provides a principled way to relevant skill discovery; and hence to the extent general capabilities are achievable via greedy curriculum learning, cognitive training would be a solution.

arXiv:2603.22528v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and knowledge graphs offer new opportunities for interacting with engineering diagrams such as Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs). However, directly processing raw images or smart P&ID files with LLMs is often costly, inefficient, and prone to hallucinations. This work introduces ChatP&ID, an agentic framework that enables grounded and cost-effective natural-language interaction with P&IDs using Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG), a paradigm we refer to as GraphRAG for engineering diagrams. Smart P&IDs encoded in the DEXPI standard are transformed into structured knowledge graphs, which serve as the basis for graph-based retrieval and reasoning by LLM agents. This approach enables reliable querying of engineering diagrams while significantly reducing computational cost. Benchmarking across commercial LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic) demonstrates that graph-based representations improve accuracy by 18% over raw image inputs and reduce token costs by 85% compared to directly ingesting smart P&ID files. While small open-source models still struggle to interpret knowledge graph formats and structured engineering data, integrating them with VectorRAG and PathRAG improves response accuracy by up to 40%. Notably, GPT-5-mini combined with ContextRAG achieves 91% accuracy at a cost of only $0.004 per task. The resulting ChatP&ID interface enables intuitive natural-language interaction with complex engineering diagrams and lays the groundwork for AI-assisted process engineering tasks such as Hazard and Operability Studies (HAZOP) and multi-agent analysis.

arXiv:2603.22593v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders uncover thousands of features in vision models, yet explaining these features without requiring human intervention remains an open challenge. While previous work has proposed generating correlation-based explanations based on top activating input examples, we present a fundamentally different alternative based on causal interventions. We leverage the structure of Vision-Language Models and steer individual SAE features in the vision encoder after providing an empty image. Then, we prompt the language model to explain what it ``sees'', effectively eliciting the visual concept represented by each feature. Results show that Steering offers an scalable alternative that complements traditional approaches based on input examples, serving as a new axis for automated interpretability in vision models. Moreover, the quality of explanations improves consistently with the scale of the language model, highlighting our method as a promising direction for future research. Finally, we propose Steering-informed Top-k, a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of causal interventions and input-based approaches to achieve state-of-the-art explanation quality without additional computational cost.

arXiv:2603.22629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adapting pretrained language models to low-resource, morphologically rich languages remains a significant challenge. Existing vocabulary expansion methods typically rely on arbitrarily segmented subword units, resulting in fragmented lexical representations and loss of critical morphological information. To address this limitation, we propose the Lexically Grounded Subword Embedding Initialization (LGSE) framework, which introduces morphologically informed segmentation for initializing embeddings of novel tokens. Instead of using random vectors or arbitrary subwords, LGSE decomposes words into their constituent morphemes and constructs semantically coherent embeddings by averaging pretrained subword or FastText-based morpheme representations. When a token cannot be segmented into meaningful morphemes, its embedding is constructed using character n-gram representations to capture structural information. During Language-Adaptive Pretraining, we apply a regularization term that penalizes large deviations of newly introduced embeddings from their initialized values, preserving alignment with the original pretrained embedding space while enabling adaptation to the target language. To isolate the effect of initialization, we retain the original pre-trained model vocabulary and tokenizer and update only the new embeddings during adaptation. We evaluate LGSE on three NLP tasks: Question Answering, Named Entity Recognition, and Text Classification, in two morphologically rich, low-resource languages: Amharic and Tigrinya, where morphological segmentation resources are available. Experimental results show that LGSE consistently outperforms baseline methods across all tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of morphologically grounded embedding initialization for improving representation quality in underrepresented languages. Project resources are available in the GitHub link.

arXiv:2603.22785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This retrospective cohort study used continuous AI monitoring to estimate fall rates by exposure time rather than occupied bed-days. From August 2024 to December 2025, 3,980 eligible monitoring units contributed 292,914 hourly rows, yielding probability-weighted rates of 17.8 falls per 1,000 chair exposure-hours and 4.3 per 1,000 bed exposure-hours. Within the study window, 43 adjudicated falls matched the monitoring pipeline, and 40 linked to eligible exposure hours for the primary Poisson model, producing an adjusted chair-versus-bed rate ratio of 2.35 (95% confidence interval 0.87 to 6.33; p=0.0907). In a separate broader observation cohort (n=32 deduplicated events), 6 of 7 direct chair falls involved footrest-positioning failures. Because this was an observational study in a single health system, these findings remain hypothesis-generating and support testing safer chair setups rather than using chairs less.

arXiv:2603.22796v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied agents for creative tasks like photography must bridge the semantic gap between high-level language commands and geometric control. We introduce PhotoAgent, an agent that achieves this by integrating Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) reasoning with a novel control paradigm. PhotoAgent first translates subjective aesthetic goals into solvable geometric constraints via LMM-driven, chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, allowing an analytical solver to compute a high-quality initial viewpoint. This initial pose is then iteratively refined through visual reflection within a photorealistic internal world model built with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). This ``mental simulation'' replaces costly and slow physical trial-and-error, enabling rapid convergence to aesthetically superior results. Evaluations confirm that PhotoAgent excels in spatial reasoning and achieves superior final image quality.

arXiv:2603.22815v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong performance across various multimodal tasks by leveraging the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, processing visually complex and information-rich images, such as infographics or document layouts, requires these models to generate a large number of visual tokens, leading to significant computational overhead. To address this, we propose PinPoint, a novel two-stage framework that first identifies instruction-relevant image regions and then refines them to extract fine-grained visual features for improved reasoning and efficiency. Central to our approach is the Instruction-Region Alignment, which localizes relevant regions using both visual input and textual instructions. We further introduce new annotations that provide richer ground-truth supervision for instruction-relevant regions across challenging VQA benchmarks: InfographicVQA, MultiPageDocVQA, and SinglePageDocVQA. Experimental results show that PinPoint not only achieves superior accuracy compared to existing methods but also reduces computational overhead by minimizing irrelevant visual tokens.