AI News Archive: June 16, 2026 — Part 21
Sourced from 500+ daily AI sources, scored by relevance.
- HistoRAG: Embedding Historical Methodology in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Through Critical Technical Practice
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the prevailing architecture for grounding language model outputs in external evidence, yet its dominant evaluation paradigms and default configurations remain oriented toward factual question-answering. For interpretive disciplines such as historical studies, ...
- ConSA: Controllable Sparsity in Hybrid Attention via Learnable Allocation
Hybrid architectures combining full attention (FA) and sliding-window attention (SWA) are a promising paradigm for efficient LLM inference. However, existing methods typically rely on hand-crafted rules or simple post-hoc heuristics for FA/SWA allocation and offer limited analysis of the attention b...
- Compositional Skill Routing for LLM Agents: Decompose, Retrieve, and Compose
LLM agents increasingly rely on external skills -- reusable tool specifications -- but real-world tasks often require composing multiple skills, not just selecting one. We formalize this as the Compositional Skill Routing problem: given a complex user query and a large skill library, decompose the q...
- Reading between the Lines: Leveraging Large Language Models for Global Dementia and Depression Assessment from Clinical Interviews
Dementia and depression are the most prevalent neuropsychiatric disorders in geriatric populations, and their overlapping symptoms pose major challenges for differential diagnosis. In this study, we investigate open-weights Large Language Models (LLMs) for predicting dementia and depression severity...
- VoidPadding: Let [VOID] Handle Padding in Masked Diffusion Language Models so that [EOS] Can Focus on Semantic Termination
MDLMs generate text by denoising a preallocated masked response canvas, making response-length modeling central to instruction tuning. Existing MDLMs often inherit the autoregressive convention of using repeated \texttt{[EOS]} tokens for padding during instruction tuning, giving \texttt{[EOS]} a dua...
- Fine-tuning LLMs for Passive Depression Severity Estimation from AI Mental Health Dialogue
Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and early detection of symptom change is essential for timely intervention. Validated instruments such as the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) support symptom monitoring at scale, but real-world completion rates are low, introducing resp...
- Dynamic Rollout Editing for Reducing Overthinking in RL-Trained Reasoning Models
Long-form chain-of-thought reasoning can improve LLM performance on complex tasks, but models often continue generating unnecessary reasoning after a correct answer has emerged. We refer to this behavior as overthinking. We study this phenomenon from the perspective of GRPO-style reinforcement learn...
- Environment-Grounded Automated Prompt Optimization for LLM Game Agents
LLM agents in interactive environments are highly sensitive to their prompts, yet prompt engineering remains a manual, task-specific process. We introduce an automated prompt optimization framework for LLM agents that decomposes the observation-to-action pipeline into a goal-conditioned descriptor a...
- When Multiple Scripts Matter: Evaluating ASR in Clinical Settings
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) in non-English clinical settings is challenged by multiscript variability, where the same term may appear in multiple valid orthographic forms. Conventional string-matching evaluation metrics often underestimate ASR performance by treating orthographic variants as ...
- Improving low-resource ASR using bilingual fine-tuning with language identification: a cross-linguistic evaluation
This study explores how bilingual fine-tuning affects automatic speech recognition (ASR) in low-resource languages. We evaluate this method across nine linguistically and geographically diverse language pairs, covering a range of language families and writing systems. To distinguish the two language...
- ANSUZS
Reinventing AI Chatbots
- A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale
Agent skills -- structured, reusable knowledge artifacts that augment LLM agent capabilities -- have been rapidly adopted in industry, yet their cross-domain impact and use across commercial and open-source models remain under-studied, and no reusable methodology exists for evaluating an individual ...
- Beyond Native Success: Auditing Deployment-Interface Exposure of CLIP Backdoors
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training models are widely reused across downstream interfaces, including feature extraction, retrieval, reranking, and selection. Existing CLIP backdoor, however, usually validate attacks on a small attack-native task, leaving unclear whether the same poisoned checkpo...
- The Slop Paradox: How Synthetic Standardization Erodes Clinical Uncertainty and Cross-Modal Alignment in AI-Rewritten Radiology Reports
AI-assisted clinical documentation tools increasingly summarize, standardize, and reformat radiology reports using large language models (LLMs). We present a controlled measurement of the resulting information degradation. Using 450 chest X-ray reports from the Indiana University dataset, we generat...
- EComAgentBench: Benchmarking Shopping Agents on Long-Horizon Tasks with Distributed Hidden Intent
As LLM-based shopping agents enter production, existing benchmarks fail to capture how a shopper's requirements arrive: stated implicitly in the query, recorded in a profile, or revealed only when the right question is asked. Benchmarks that expose full intent upfront and grade only the final choice...
- LLMs Infer Cultural Context but Fail to Apply It When Responding
Recent work has shown that LLMs overrepresent dominant cultures, particularly Western ones, while marginalizing others. We investigate whether this affects models' ability to generate culturally adapted responses by evaluating their use of local measurement units based on the user's perceived cultur...
- Bridging Functional Correctness and Runtime Efficiency Gaps in LLM-Based Code Translation
While large language models (LLMs) have greatly advanced the functional correctness of automated code translation systems, the runtime efficiency of translated programs has received comparatively little attention. With the waning of Moore's law, runtime efficiency has become increasingly important f...
- From Trainee to Trainer: LLM-Designed Training Environment for RL with Multi-Agent Reasoning
Reinforcement learning pipelines for Large Language Model (LLM) training often rely on manually redesigned environments between stages, requiring practitioners to heuristically infer which configuration will best improve the current policy. To automate this process, we propose the LLM-as-Environment...
- EnvRL: Learn from Environment Dynamics in Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents. However, conventional RL methods for long-horizon agentic tasks often struggle with sparse outcome rewards. Intuitively, this overlooks the rich environment dynamics information contai...
- Beyond Domains: Reusing Web Skills via Transferable Interaction Patterns
Large language model (LLM) web agents are usually deployed as tool callers: each turn, the model reads a fresh page observation and emits one structured tool action. When every action is a low-level primitive, horizons grow quickly and so do policy-facing LLM completions, dominating latency and cost...
- Prompt Perturbation for Reliable LLM Evaluation over Comparison Graphs
Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is important for understanding their capabilities, comparing competing systems, and supporting the deployment of reliable models in practice. For open-ended tasks, pairwise evaluation has become a popular paradigm, in which two responses to the same prompt are...
- Variable-Width Transformers
Scaling model size, specifically depth and width, has driven significant progress in transformer-based language models. However, most architectures maintain a constant width across all layers, allocating a fixed parameter and computation budget evenly despite different layers potentially playing dis...
- Unintended Effects of Geographic Conditioning in Large Language Models
Modern conversational AI systems frequently rely on user metadata to localize responses, yet the unintended regional biases introduced by this hidden context remain poorly understood. In this work, we evaluate location leakage: the phenomenon where a model generates geographic references despite rec...
- Learning task-specific subspaces via interventional post-training of speech foundation models
Speech foundation models, pre-trained on large corpora of unlabelled speech data, produce general-purpose representations which are useful across tasks. However, these representations encode information about salient speech variables in a distributed manner, while downstream speech tasks rely on onl...
- ChLogic: Evaluating Robustness of Logical Reasoning in Chinese Expressions
Large language models perform increasingly well on standardized logical reasoning benchmarks, but whether this ability remains robust beyond English is unclear. We introduce ChLogic, an English--Chinese aligned benchmark that tests whether models preserve logical reasoning performance when the same ...
- GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?
Game generation is an emerging application of coding agents, requiring models to transform natural-language specifications into playable interactive systems. Unlike traditional coding tasks, game generation takes place within a game engine, where scripts, scenes, assets, rendering, and runtime inter...
- Recursive Scaling in Masked Diffusion Models
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for sequence generation. Scaling MDMs is conventionally achieved by increasing the parameter count or the number of denoising steps. We introduce Recursive Masked Diffusion Models (R-MDMs), which add recursive depth as a th...
- Perceptual compensation for tonal context in self-supervised speech models
This study examines the extent to which the wav2vec2.0 architecture exhibits evidence of compensation for phonological context. We conducted a pseudo-replication of a perceptional compensation experiment on Mandarin Chinese tones, and compared the embedding similarities and probing classifier output...
- Toward Accessible Psychotherapy Training Using AI-Driven Interactive Patient Avatars
Training psychotherapists in evidence-based interventions such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) requires repeated practice with meaningful feedback, yet opportunities for safe, standardized training are limited by ethical, logistical, and resource constraints. We introduce a system designe...
- Vision-language models for chest radiography do not always need the image
Medical vision-language models report strong chest radiograph accuracy, and this is increasingly read as evidence that they use the image. That inference is unsafe: a model exploiting finding-name priors scores like one that reads the scan, and no standard benchmark separates them. We introduce a ca...
- SuCo: Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning
Despite remarkable performance on complex tasks, Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often generate excessively long Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT), inflating computational costs even for simple queries. Existing efforts to mitigate this inefficiency typically rely on discrete reasoning modes or fixed budget tie...
- MambaCount: Efficient Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting with Spatial Sparse State Space Duality Block
Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) aims to estimate the number of objects described by text prompts, which is particularly challenging in dense scenes with large scale variations. Existing TOOC approaches predominantly rely on Transformers, whose quadratic complexity with respect to ...
- OPD-Evolver: Cultivating Holistic Agent Evolver via On-Policy Distillation
Memory has become a standard substrate for self-evolving agents, yet retaining experience is not the same as learning how to evolve through it. Existing memory agents can store trajectories, retrieve reflections, or accumulate skills, but often lack the holistic competence to select useful experienc...
- Unified Multimodal Autoregressive Modeling with Shared Context-Visual Tokenizer is Key to Unification
Unified Multimodal Modeling aims to integrate visual understanding and generation within a single system. However, existing approaches typically rely on two disparate visual tokenizers, which splits the representation space and hinders truly unified modeling. We propose UniAR, a unified autoregressi...
- Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scanners
Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based systems. Through an empirical study of existing skill scanners, we find that current defenses primarily rely on textual descriptions, manifests, and source code as the main signals for security analysis, which can leave visually c...
- Predicting Immune Biomarkers with MultiModal Mixture-of-Expert Pathology Foundation Models Empowers Precision Oncology
Predicting immune biomarkers associated with the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) is critical for advancing precision oncology, yet existing approaches are largely limited to single image modalities and suffer from insufficient resolution and incomplete utilization of complementary clinical and ...
- HLS-GPT: A Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) for Continental-Scale NASA Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) Reflectance Reconstruction Across All Bands on Arbitrary Dates
Recent deep learning methods for Landsat and Sentinel-2 reflectance time series reconstruction remain limited by restricted spectral coverage, limited geographic scalability, or patch-based designs with short temporal contexts. We present HLS-GPT, a large-scale generative pretrained Transformer mode...
- Qwen-RobotNav Technical Report: A Scalable Navigation Model Designed for an Agentic Navigation System
Agentic navigation systems require a base navigation model whose observation strategy can be externally reconfigured at inference time, because instruction following, object search, target tracking, and autonomous driving share the same perception-planning backbone yet demand fundamentally different...
- Gaussian Light Field Splatting: A Physical Prior-Driven Vision Transformer for Unsupervised Low-Light Image Enhancement
Existing unsupervised low-light image enhancement methods often encounter local exposure imbalance and color distortion under complex non-uniform illumination. In addition, most Vision Transformers lack an explicit mechanism for modeling the physical priors of illumination degradation. To address th...
- SegDINO: Introducing Multi-Scale Structure into DINO for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation
Self-supervised DINO models provide strong transferable visual representations, yet applying them directly to image segmentation remains challenging. Existing approaches commonly rely on heavy decoders with complex upsampling, introducing substantial parameter and computational overhead. We observe ...
- Beyond Visual Cues: CoT-Enhanced Reasoning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Semi-supervised medical image segmentation has emerged as a dominant research problem in medical image analysis, mitigating annotation scarcity by leveraging consistency regularization on unlabeled data. However, existing approaches operate predominantly via visual pattern matching, relying heavily ...
- MLLMs Get It Right, Then Get It Wrong: Tracing and Correcting Late-Layer Textual Bias
When vision contradicts text, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) consistently favor text, even when images provide clear evidence otherwise. This bias poses risks for applications requiring visual grounding, yet its cause remains unclear. In this paper, we uncover a surprising finding: models ...
- Plug-and-Adapt: Multimodal Coreference Resolution at First Sight with a Pretrained Alignment Model
Visual information helps resolve ambiguity in coreference resolution, leading to notable performance gains. However, existing Multi-modal Coreference Resolution (MCR) methods require training with (partially) annotated data from the target dataset before they can be applied, preventing their direct ...
- A Quantitative Analysis of Multimodal Biomarkers in Alzheimer's Disease
Despite increasing adoption of multimodal approaches in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) research -- aimed at integrating molecular, structural, clinical, and genetic biomarkers to enhance disease characterization -- the relationships among these modalities remain poorly understood. A systematic analysis of...
- High-Fidelity 3D Geometric Reconstruction of Pelvic Organs from MRI: A Hybrid Deep Learning and Iterative Optimization Approach
Patient-specific 3D reconstruction of pelvic organ geometry from MRI is important for pelvic floor modeling and downstream patient-specific analysis. However, while previous studies have focused primarily on either image segmentation or downstream use of 3D models, the reconstruction of high-fidelit...
- Million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy with expert-guided foundation models
Automated pollen identification from microscopy remains a bottleneck in aerobiology, palaeoecology and biodiversity monitoring, because scalable systems must generalise across specimen preparation, scanner settings and geographic origins while retaining palynological interpretability. To address thi...
- LiveStarPro: Proactive Streaming Video Understanding with Hierarchical Memory for Long-Horizon Streams
Despite the remarkable progress of Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs), current online architectures still struggle to simultaneously process continuous video streams, decide autonomously when to respond, and preserve long-horizon contextual memory. These obstacles undermine real-time responsiv...
- BrainWorld: A Structural-Prior-Conditioned Generative Model for Whole-Brain 4D fMRI Dynamics
Whole-brain 4D fMRI generation is valuable for modeling functional brain dynamics, yet existing fMRI foundation models mainly target representation learning and downstream prediction rather than conditional predictive generation. We introduce BrainWorld, a structural-prior-conditioned generative mod...
- GSPan: A Continuous Gaussian Primitive Representation for Arbitrary-Scale Pansharpening
Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by fusing low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) and panchromatic (PAN) observations. Most existing deep learning methods treat pansharpening as fixed-grid prediction, which limits scale adaptation. To address this, we propose G...
- SegTME-UNI2: A Foundation Model-Based Framework for Generalisable Multiclass Cell Segmentation and LLM-Driven Tumour Microenvironment Characterisation in Histopathology
Characterising the tumour microenvironment (TME) from routine H&E-stained histology images requires simultaneous cell segmentation, feature extraction, and interpretable clinical reporting. We present SEGTME-UNI2, a unified framework addressing these requirements. Its core is UNI2-UPERHOVER, a dual-...