arXiv:2604.01383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: American football practice generates video at scale, yet the interaction of interest occupies only a brief window of each long, untrimmed clip. Reliable biomechanical analysis, therefore, depends on spatiotemporal localization that identifies both the interacting entities and the onset of contact. We study First Point of Contact (FPOC), defined as the first frame in which a player physically touches a tackle dummy, in unconstrained practice footage with camera motion, clutter, multiple similarly equipped athletes, and rapid pose changes around impact. We present GRAZE, a training-free pipeline for FPOC localization that requires no labeled tackle-contact examples. GRAZE uses Grounding DINO to discover candidate player-dummy interactions, refines them with motion-aware temporal reasoning, and uses SAM2 as an explicit pixel-level verifier of contact rather than relying on detection confidence alone. This separation between candidate discovery and contact confirmation makes the approach robust to cluttered scenes and unstable grounding near impact. On 738 tackle-practice videos, GRAZE produces valid outputs for 97.4% of clips and localizes FPOC within $\pm$ 10 frames on 77.5% of all clips and within $\pm$ 20 frames on 82.7% of all clips. These results show that frame-accurate contact onset localization in real-world practice footage is feasible without task-specific training.

arXiv:2603.12445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks have shown promising effectiveness in identifying different types of cancer from radiographs. However, the opaque nature of CNNs makes it difficult to fully understand the way they operate, limiting their assessment to empirical evaluation. Here we study the soundness of the standard practices by which CNNs are evaluated for the purpose of cancer pathology. Thirteen highly used cancer benchmark datasets were analyzed, using four common CNN architectures and different types of cancer, such as melanoma, carcinoma, colorectal cancer, and lung cancer. We compared the accuracy of each model with that of datasets made of cropped segments from the background of the original images that do not contain clinically relevant content. Because the rendered datasets contain no clinical information, the null hypothesis is that the CNNs should provide mere chance-based accuracy when classifying these datasets. The results show that the CNN models provided high accuracy when using the cropped segments, sometimes as high as 93\%, even though they lacked biomedical information. These results show that some CNN architectures are more sensitive to bias than others. The analysis shows that the common practices of machine learning evaluation might lead to unreliable results when applied to cancer pathology. These biases are very difficult to identify, and might mislead researchers as they use available benchmark datasets to test the efficacy of CNN methods.