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Papers

Apr 27, 2026cs.CL

Psychologically-Grounded Graph Modeling for Interpretable Depression Detection

Automatic depression detection from conversational interactions holds significant promise for scalable screening but remains hindered by severe data scarcity and a lack of clinical interpretability. Existing approaches typically rely on black-box deep learning architectures that struggle to model the subtle, temporal evolution of depressive symptoms or account for participant-specific heterogeneity. In this work, we propose PsyGAT (Psychological Graph Attention Network), a psychologically grounded framework that models conversational sessions as dynamic temporal graphs. We introduce Psychological Expression Units (PEUs) to explicitly encode utterance-level clinical evidence, structuring the session graph to capture transitions in psychological states rather than mere semantic dependencies. To address the critical class imbalance in depression datasets, we employ clinically approved persona-based data augmentation, enable robust model learning. Additionally, we integrate session-level personality context directly into the graph structure to disentangle trait-based behavior from acute depressive symptoms. PsyGAT achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing both strong graph-based baselines and closed-source LLMs like GPT-5, achieving 89.99 and 71.37 Macro F1 scores in DAIC-WoZ and E-DAIC, respectively. We further introduce Causal-PsyGAT, an interpretability module that identifies symptom triggers. Experiments show a 20% improvement in MRR for identifying causal indicators, effectively bridging the gap between depression monitoring and clinical explainability. The full augmented dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31801921.
Rishitej Reddy Vyalla, Kritarth Prasad, Avinash Anand +4
Apr 27, 2026cs.CV

DeepTaxon: An Interpretable Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Framework for Unified Species Identification and Discovery

Identifying species in biology among tens of thousands of visually similar taxa while discovering unknown species in open-world environments remains a fundamental challenge in biodiversity research. Current methods treat identification and discovery as separate problems, with classification models assuming closed sets and discovery relying on threshold-based rejection. Here we present DeepTaxon, a retrieval-augmented multimodal framework that unifies species identification and discovery through interpretable reasoning over retrieved visual evidence. Given a query image, DeepTaxon retrieves the top-kk candidate species with nn exemplar images each from a retrieval index and performs chain-of-thought comparative reasoning. Critically, we redefine discovery as an explicit, retrieval-based decision problem rather than an implicit parametric memory problem. A sample is novel if and only if the retrieval index lacks sufficient evidence for identification, so each retrieval naturally yields a classification or discovery label without manual annotation, thereby providing automatic supervision for both tasks. We train the framework via supervised fine-tuning on synthetic retrieval-augmented data, followed by reinforcement learning on hard samples, converting high-recall retrieval into high-precision decisions that scale to massive taxonomic vocabularies. Extensive experiments on a large-scale in-distribution benchmark and six out-of-distribution datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in both identification and discovery. Ablation studies further reveal effective test-time scaling with candidate count kk and exemplar count nn, strong zero-shot transfer to unseen domains, and consistent performance across retrieval encoders, establishing an interpretable solution for biodiversity research.
Jiawei Wang, Ming Lei, Yaning Yang +8
Apr 26, 2026cs.LG

Interpretable Physics-Informed Load Forecasting for U.S. Grid Resilience: SHAP-Guided Ensemble Validation in Hybrid Deep Learning Under Extreme Weather

Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting is a cornerstone of U.S. grid reliability; however, prevailing deep learning models remain opaque, limiting operator trust during extreme weather. A unified, interpretable, physics-informed ensemble framework is proposed, integrating a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) branch for local feature extraction and a Transformer branch for long-range dependency modeling; the branches are fused through a validation-optimized weighted ensemble and regularized by a physics-informed loss derived from the piecewise parabolic temperature-demand relationship of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) system. Post-hoc interpretability is provided through SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) with the DeepExplainer backend, yielding global and event-level attributions. Using eight years of ERCOT hourly load data (2018-2025) fused with Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS) records from three Texas stations, the framework achieves 713 MW MAE, 812 MW RMSE, and 1.18% MAPE on the test window. For Hampel-flagged extreme events, MAPE falls by 20.7% relative to its Transformer branch and by 40.5% relative to its CNN branch; an ablation confirms that the parabolic and ramp constraints drive a 14.7% RMSE reduction. SHAP analysis reveals a regime shift: temperature dominates under normal operation, whereas wind speed and precipitation become more influential during cold fronts and heatwaves.
Md Abubakkar, Sajib Debnath, Md. Uzzal Mia
Apr 24, 2026cs.MM

BRITE: A Benchmark for Reliable and Interpretable T2V Evaluation on Implausible Scenarios

The rapid advancement of photorealistic Text-to-Video (T2V) generation brings in an urgent need for up-to-date evaluation methods. Existing benchmarks largely overlooked implausible scenarios and do not measure audio-visual alignment. We introduce BRITE, the first framework that unifies (1) implausible prompting, (2) fine-grained assessment of audio-visual consistency, and (3) QA-based interpretable evaluation into a comprehensive T2V benchmark. Unlike fully automated Multimodal LLM-based pipelines, which are prone to hallucination and prompt ambiguity, BRITE guarantees reliability through a rigorous human-in-the-loop protocol for benchmark creation. Evaluating five state-of-the-art models (Sora 2, Veo 3.1, Runway Gen4.5, Pixverse V5.5, and Qwen3Max), we reveal a critical performance gap: while models excel at static object composition, they exhibit significant degradation in object-action binding and audio-visual synchronization. Our framework offers the community a reliable, interpretable benchmark and evaluation framework that can detect and locate limitations in the next generation of T2V models, especially for off-manifold prompts
Advait Tilak, Jiwon Choi, Nazifa Mouli +1
Apr 24, 2026cs.CL

Preference Heads in Large Language Models: A Mechanistic Framework for Interpretable Personalization

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong implicit personalization ability, yet most existing approaches treat this behavior as a black box, relying on prompt engineering or fine tuning on user data. In this work, we adopt a mechanistic interpretability perspective and hypothesize the existence of a sparse set of Preference Heads, attention heads that encode user specific stylistic and topical preferences and exert a causal influence on generation. We introduce Differential Preference Steering (DPS), a training free framework that (1) identifies Preference Heads through causal masking analysis and (2) leverages them for controllable and interpretable personalization at inference time. DPS computes a Preference Contribution Score (PCS) for each attention head, directly measuring its causal impact on user aligned outputs. During decoding, we contrast model predictions with and without Preference Heads, amplifying the difference between personalized and generic logits to selectively strengthen preference aligned continuations. Experiments on widely used personalization benchmarks across multiple LLMs demonstrate consistent gains in personalization fidelity while preserving content coherence and low computational overhead. Beyond empirical improvements, DPS provides a mechanistic explanation of where and how personalization emerges within transformer architectures. Our implementation is publicly available.
Weixu Zhang, Ye Yuan, Changjiang Han +7
Apr 23, 2026cs.CV

Interpretable facial dynamics as behavioral and perceptual traces of deepfakes

Deepfake detection research has largely converged on deep learning approaches that, despite strong benchmark performance, offer limited insight into what distinguishes real from manipulated facial behavior. This study presents an interpretable alternative grounded in bio-behavioral features of facial dynamics and evaluates how computational detection strategies relate to human perceptual judgments. We identify core low-dimensional patterns of facial movement, from which temporal features characterizing spatiotemporal structure were derived. Traditional machine learning classifiers trained on these features achieved modest but significant above-chance deepfake classification, driven by higher-order temporal irregularities that were more pronounced in manipulated than real facial dynamics. Notably, detection was substantially more accurate for videos containing emotive expressions than those without. An emotional valence classification analysis further indicated that emotive signals are systematically degraded in deepfakes, explaining the differential impact of emotive dynamics on detection. Furthermore, we provide an additional and often overlooked dimension of explainability by assessing the relationship between model decisions and human perceptual detection. Model and human judgments converged for emotive but diverged for non-emotive videos, and even where outputs aligned, underlying detection strategies differed. These findings demonstrate that face-swapped deepfakes carry a measurable behavioral fingerprint, most salient during emotional expression. Additionally, model-human comparisons suggest that interpretable computational features and human perception may offer complementary rather than redundant routes to detection.
Timothy Joseph Murphy, Jennifer Cook, Hélio Clemente José Cuve
Apr 23, 2026cs.CV

an interpretable vision transformer framework for automated brain tumor classification

Brain tumors represent one of the most critical neurological conditions, where early and accurate diagnosis is directly correlated with patient survival rates. Manual interpretation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans is time-intensive, subject to inter-observer variability, and demands significant specialist expertise. This paper proposes a deep learning framework for automated four-class brain tumor classification distinguishing glioma, meningioma, pituitary tumor, and healthy brain tissue from a dataset of 7,023 MRI scans. The proposed system employs a Vision Transformer (ViT-B/16) pretrained on ImageNet-21k as the backbone, augmented with a clinically motivated preprocessing and training pipeline. Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) is applied to enhance local contrast and accentuate tumor boundaries invisible to standard normalization. A two-stage fine-tuning strategy is adopted: the classification head is warmed up with the backbone frozen, followed by full fine-tuning with discriminative learning rates. MixUp and CutMix augmentation is applied per batch to improve generalization. Exponential Moving Average (EMA) of weights and Test-Time Augmentation (TTA) further stabilize and boost performance. Attention Rollout visualization provides clinically interpretable heatmaps of the brain regions driving each prediction. The proposed model achieves a test accuracy of 99.29%, macro F1-score of 99.25%, and perfect recall on both healthy and meningioma classes, outperforming all CNN-based baselines
Chinedu Emmanuel Mbonu, Tochukwu Sunday Belonwu, Okwuchukwu Ejike Chukwuogo +1
Apr 22, 2026cs.LG

Interpretable Quantile Regression by Optimal Decision Trees

The field of machine learning is subject to an increasing interest in models that are not only accurate but also interpretable and robust, thus allowing their end users to understand and trust AI systems. This paper presents a novel method for learning a set of optimal quantile regression trees. The advantages of this method are that (1) it provides predictions about the complete conditional distribution of a target variable without prior assumptions on this distribution; (2) it provides predictions that are interpretable; (3) it learns a set of optimal quantile regression trees without compromising algorithmic efficiency compared to learning a single tree.
Valentin Lemaire, Gaël Aglin, Siegfried Nijssen
Apr 22, 2026cs.LG

R2IF: Aligning Reasoning with Decisions via Composite Rewards for Interpretable LLM Function Calling

Function calling empowers large language models (LLMs) to interface with external tools, yet existing RL-based approaches suffer from misalignment between reasoning processes and tool-call decisions. We propose R2IF, a reasoning-aware RL framework for interpretable function calling, adopting a composite reward integrating format/correctness constraints, Chain-of-Thought Effectiveness Reward (CER), and Specification-Modification-Value (SMV) reward, optimized via GRPO. Experiments on BFCL/ACEBench show R2IF outperforms baselines by up to 34.62% (Llama3.2-3B on BFCL) with positive Average CoT Effectiveness (0.05 for Llama3.2-3B), enhancing both function-calling accuracy and interpretability for reliable tool-augmented LLM deployment.
Aijia Cheng, Kailong Wang, Ling Shi +1
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

LogosKG: Hardware-Optimized Scalable and Interpretable Knowledge Graph Retrieval

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly integrated with large language models (LLMs) to provide structured, verifiable reasoning. A core operation in this integration is multi-hop retrieval, yet existing systems struggle to balance efficiency, scalability, and interpretability. We introduce LogosKG, a novel, hardware-aligned framework that enables scalable and interpretable k-hop retrieval on large KGs by building on symbolic KG formulations and executing traversal as hardware-efficient operations over decomposed subject, object, and relation representations. To scale to billion-edge graphs, LogosKG integrates degree-aware partitioning, cross-graph routing, and on-demand caching. Experiments show substantial efficiency gains over CPU and GPU baselines without loss of retrieval fidelity. With proven performance in KG retrieval, a downstream two-round KG-LLM interaction demonstrates how LogosKG enables large-scale, evidence-grounded analysis of how KG topology, such as hop distribution and connectivity, shapes the alignment between structured biomedical knowledge and LLM diagnostic reasoning, thereby opening the door for next-generation KG-LLM integration. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/LARK-NLP-Lab/LogosKG, and an online demo is available at https://lark-nlp-lab-logoskg.hf.space/.
He Cheng, Yifu Wu, Saksham Khatwani +5
Apr 18, 2026cs.CV

Conditional Evidence Reconstruction and Decomposition for Interpretable Multimodal Diagnosis

Neurobiological and neurodegenerative diseases are inherently multifactorial, arising from coupled influences spanning genetic susceptibility, brain alterations, and environmental and behavioral factors. Multimodal modeling has therefore been increasingly adopted for disease diagnosis by integrating complementary evidence across data sources. However, in both large-scale cohorts and real-world clinical workflows, modality coverage is often incomplete, making many multimodal models brittle when one or more modalities are unavailable. Existing approaches to incomplete multimodal diagnosis typically rely on group-wise or static priors, which may fail to capture subject-specific cross-modal dependencies; moreover, many models provide limited interpretability into which evidence sources drive the final decision. To address these limitations, we propose Conditional Evidence Reconstruction and Decomposition (CERD), a framework for interpretable multimodal diagnosis with incomplete modalities. CERD first reconstructs missing modality representations conditioned on each subject's observed inputs, then decomposes diagnostic evidence into shared cross-modal corroboration and modality-specific cues via logit-level attribution. Experiments on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) demonstrate that CERD outperforms competitive baselines under incomplete-modality settings while producing structured and clinically aligned evidence attributions for trustworthy decision support.
Shaowen Wan, Yanjun Lv, Lu Zhang +5
Apr 17, 2026eess.IV

Dual-Modal Lung Cancer AI: Interpretable Radiology and Microscopy with Clinical Risk Integration

Lung cancer remains one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Conventional computed tomography (CT) imaging, while essential for detection and staging, has limitations in distinguishing benign from malignant lesions and providing interpretable diagnostic insights. To address this challenge, this study proposes a dual-modal artificial intelligence framework that integrates CT radiology with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) histopathology for lung cancer diagnosis and subtype classification. The system employs convolutional neural networks to extract radiologic and histopathologic features and incorporates clinical metadata to improve robustness. Predictions from both modalities are fused using a weighted decision-level integration mechanism to classify adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, large cell carcinoma, small cell lung cancer, and normal tissue. Explainable AI techniques including Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, Integrated Gradients, Occlusion, Saliency Maps, and SmoothGrad are applied to provide visual interpretability. Experimental results show strong performance with accuracy up to 0.87, AUROC above 0.97, and macro F1-score of 0.88. Grad-CAM++ achieved the highest faithfulness and localization accuracy, demonstrating strong correspondence with expert-annotated tumor regions. These results indicate that multimodal fusion of radiology and histopathology can improve diagnostic performance while maintaining model transparency, suggesting potential for future clinical decision support systems in precision oncology.
Baramee Sukumal, Aueaphum Aueawatthanaphisut
Apr 17, 2026cs.LG

EVIL: Evolving Interpretable Algorithms for Zero-Shot Inference on Event Sequences and Time Series with LLMs

We introduce EVIL (\textbf{EV}olving \textbf{I}nterpretable algorithms with \textbf{L}LMs), an approach that uses LLM-guided evolutionary search to discover simple, interpretable algorithms for dynamical systems inference. Rather than training neural networks on large datasets, EVIL evolves pure Python/NumPy programs that perform zero-shot, in-context inference across datasets. We apply EVIL to three distinct tasks: next-event prediction in temporal point processes, rate matrix estimation for Markov jump processes, and time series imputation. In each case, a single evolved algorithm generalizes across all evaluation datasets without per-dataset training (analogous to an amortized inference model). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to show that LLM-guided program evolution can discover a single compact inference function for these dynamical-systems problems. Across the three domains, the discovered algorithms are often competitive with, and even outperform, state-of-the-art deep learning models while being orders of magnitudes faster, and remaining fully interpretable.
David Berghaus
Apr 16, 2026cs.LG

SOLIS: Physics-Informed Learning of Interpretable Neural Surrogates for Nonlinear Systems

Nonlinear system identification must balance physical interpretability with model flexibility. Classical methods yield structured, control-relevant models but rely on rigid parametric forms that often miss complex nonlinearities, whereas Neural ODEs are expressive yet largely black-box. Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) sit between these extremes, but inverse PINNs typically assume a known governing equation with fixed coefficients, leading to identifiability failures when the true dynamics are unknown or state-dependent. We propose \textbf{SOLIS}, which models unknown dynamics via a \emph{state-conditioned second-order surrogate model} and recasts identification as learning a Quasi-Linear Parameter-Varying (Quasi-LPV) representation, recovering interpretable natural frequency, damping, and gain without presupposing a global equation. SOLIS decouples trajectory reconstruction from parameter estimation and stabilizes training with a cyclic curriculum and \textbf{Local Physics Hints} windowed ridge-regression anchors that mitigate optimization collapse. Experiments on benchmarks show accurate parameter-manifold recovery and coherent physical rollouts from sparse data, including regimes where standard inverse methods fail.
Murat Furkan Mansur, Tufan Kumbasar
Apr 5, 2026cs.LG

Learning an Interpretable Risk Scoring System for Maximizing Decision Net Benefit

Risk scoring systems are widely used in high-stakes domains to assist decision-making. However, existing approaches often focus on optimizing predictive accuracy or likelihood-based criteria, which may not align with the main goal of maximizing utility. In this paper, we propose a novel risk scoring system that directly optimizes net benefit over a range of decision thresholds. The model is formulated as a sparse integer linear programming problem which enables the construction of a transparent scoring system with integer coefficients, and hence, facilitates interpretation and practical application. We also establish fundamental relationships among net benefit, discrimination, and calibration. Our analysis proves that optimizing net benefit also guarantees conventional performance measures. We evaluated our method on multiple public datasets as well as on a large-scale credit risk dataset. This computational study demonstrated that our interpretable method can effectively achieve high net benefit while maintaining competitive discrimination and calibration performance.
Wenhao Chi, Ş. İlker Birbil
Mar 3, 2026cs.LG

Enhancing Physics-Informed Neural Networks with Domain-aware Fourier Features: Towards Improved Performance and Interpretable Results

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) incorporate physics into neural networks by embedding partial differential equations (PDEs) into their loss function. Despite their success in learning the underlying physics, PINN models remain difficult to train and interpret. In this work, a novel modeling approach is proposed, which relies on the use of Domain-aware Fourier Features (DaFFs) for the positional encoding of the input space. These features encapsulate all the domain-specific characteristics, such as the geometry and boundary conditions, and unlike Random Fourier Features (RFFs), eliminate the need for explicit boundary condition loss terms and loss balancing schemes, while simplifying the optimization process and reducing the computational cost associated with training. We further develop an LRP-based explainability framework tailored to PINNs, enabling the extraction of relevance attribution scores for the input space. It is demonstrated that PINN-DaFFs achieve orders-of-magnitude lower errors and allow faster convergence compared to vanilla PINNs and RFFs-based PINNs. Furthermore, LRP analysis reveals that the proposed leads to more physically consistent feature attributions, while PINN-RFFs and vanilla PINNs display more scattered and less physics-relevant patterns. These results demonstrate that DaFFs not only enhance PINNs' accuracy and efficiency but also improve interpretability, laying the ground for more robust and informative physics-informed learning.
Alberto Miño Calero, Luis Salamanca, Konstantinos E. Tatsis
Jan 22, 2026cs.CL

YuFeng-XGuard: A Reasoning-Centric, Interpretable, and Flexible Guardrail Model for Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, safety guardrails are required to go beyond coarse-grained filtering and support fine-grained, interpretable, and adaptable risk assessment. However, existing solutions often rely on rapid classification schemes or post-hoc rules, resulting in limited transparency, inflexible policies, or prohibitive inference costs. To this end, we present YuFeng-XGuard, a reasoning-centric guardrail model family designed to perform multi-dimensional risk perception for LLM interactions. Instead of producing opaque binary judgments, YuFeng-XGuard generates structured risk predictions, including explicit risk categories and configurable confidence scores, accompanied by natural language explanations that expose the underlying reasoning process. This formulation enables safety decisions that are both actionable and interpretable. To balance decision latency and explanatory depth, we adopt a tiered inference paradigm that performs an initial risk decision based on the first decoded token, while preserving ondemand explanatory reasoning when required. In addition, we introduce a dynamic policy mechanism that decouples risk perception from policy enforcement, allowing safety policies to be adjusted without model retraining. Extensive experiments on a diverse set of public safety benchmarks demonstrate that YuFeng-XGuard achieves stateof-the-art performance while maintaining strong efficiency-efficacy trade-offs. We release YuFeng-XGuard as an open model family, including both a full-capacity variant and a lightweight version, to support a wide range of deployment scenarios.
Junyu Lin, Meizhen Liu, Xiufeng Huang +12
Jan 19, 2026cs.CL

Paid Voices vs. Public Feeds: Interpretable Cross-Platform Theme-Based Analysis of Climate Discourse

Climate discourse online shapes public understanding of climate change and informs political and policy debate, yet it unfolds across structurally different environments: paid advertising platforms host targeted, institutionally produced messaging, while public social media reflects largely organic, user-driven discussion. We present a comparative analysis of climate discourse across paid advertisements on Meta (previously Facebook) and public posts on Bluesky from July 2024 to September 2025. To support it, we develop an interpretable thematic discovery pipeline that clusters texts by semantic similarity and uses large language models (LLMs) to label clusters with concise, human-interpretable themes, requiring no predefined topic inventory or seed set. Using these themes, we find the two environments diverge systematically: paid advertising centers on strategic promotion of specific solutions in a formal, forward-looking register, whereas organic discourse centers on systemic critique in a crisis-oriented, scientifically grounded one. We also evaluate the utility of the discovered themes through downstream stance prediction and theme-guided retrieval tasks. While our analysis focuses on climate communication, the framework generalizes to comparative thematic analysis across heterogeneous communication environments.
Samantha Sudhoff, Pranav Perumal, Zhaoqing Wu +1
Dec 18, 2025cs.CV

Interpretable Similarity of Synthetic Image Utility

Synthetic medical image data can unlock the potential of deep learning (DL)-based clinical decision support (CDS) systems through the creation of large scale, privacy-preserving, training sets. Despite the significant progress in this field, there is still a largely unanswered research question: "How can we quantitatively assess the similarity of a synthetically generated set of images with a set of real images in a given application domain?". Today, answers to this question are mainly provided via user evaluation studies, inception-based measures, and the classification performance achieved on synthetic images. This paper proposes a novel measure to assess the similarity between synthetically generated and real sets of images, in terms of their utility for the development of DL-based CDS systems. Inspired by generalized neural additive models, and unlike inception-based measures, the proposed measure is interpretable (Interpretable Utility Similarity, IUS), explaining why a synthetic dataset could be more useful than another one in the context of a CDS system based on clinically relevant image features. The experimental results on publicly available benchmark datasets from various color medical imaging modalities including endoscopic, dermoscopic and fundus imaging, indicate that selecting synthetic images of high utility similarity using IUS can result in relative improvements of up to 54.6% in terms of classification performance. The generality of IUS for synthetic data assessment is demonstrated also for grayscale X-ray and ultrasound imaging modalities. IUS implementation is available at https://github.com/innoisys/ius.
Panagiota Gatoula, George Dimas, Dimitris K. Iakovidis
Sep 24, 2026quant-ph

Learning and interpreting policies for simultaneous entanglement requests in quantum networks

Future quantum networks will make use of entanglement to perform numerous tasks, such as sending quantum information over long distances, distributed quantum computing, and quantum sensing. In general, these tasks will need to be performed simultaneously in various regions of a network, while minimizing resources and latency. We will thus require policies for scheduling link-level entanglement resources, and using the link-level entanglement to create various forms of multipartite entanglement required for every task. In this work, we address this problem using reinforcement learning. We formulate a Markov Decision Process for the problem and use double deep Q-networks (DQN) with Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs), experience replay buffers, and curriculum training to obtain policies. The key physical parameter is the probability of link-level entanglement generation, i.e., the link activation probability. We show that our policies maintain 100% success for up to 71% lower link activation probability than the baseline heuristics for a set of physically relevant network topologies. We then examine an additional constraint where experiment (task) placements are restricted to specific hardware types and demonstrate a similar advantage in performance over heuristics, with our policy maintaining at least an 80% success rate for up to a 59% lower link activation probability. Finally, we explore methods to interpret the learned policy by defining metrics enabling conclusions to be drawn about the model's behavior and by tasking a large language model (LLM) to derive a novel heuristic given example actions taken by the DQN-trained policy. We find that the LLM heuristic performs similarly to the DQN-trained policy in performance, indicating a promising method for interpretable policy extraction for large quantum networks, where direct training becomes computationally expensive.
Leon Rode, Sumeet Khatri, Supartha Podder
Sep 22, 2026cs.AI

When Are Aggregate Agent Traces Diagnosable? Traffic-Governed Interpretation and Calibrated Abstention

Runtime traces can appear transparent, but a closed-loop policy determines which states are visited and which failures become visible. We study a simulated hotel-pricing agent mapping time, inventory, and market state to discrete price actions under varying demand regimes. A fault may leave no aggregate trace when the policy rarely visits affected cells. We treat entry into aggregate-only fault interpretation as a diagnosability decision preceding scoring or localization. A reference-map gate requires repeated clean-policy support; a matched runtime gate then requires joint support in clean and current streams. Signal analysis occurs only after both pass. We calibrate false admission on a disjoint clean stream at the physical-component level and model detection by affected clean traffic rather than nominal cell coverage. In a frozen one-shot heldout, 55/72 (76.4%) regime-component units were reference-admitted, representing 20 physical components; 54/55 passed matched runtime admission, while the rejected unit abstained. Stable false admission was 0/20, with a one-sided exact 95% upper bound of 0.1391, meeting the frozen 0.20 criterion. Across 540 repeated unit-arm rows nested in those 20 clusters, affected clean traffic reduced negative log likelihood by 29.3% relative to cell coverage, a gain of 0.1264 nats per row (cluster-bootstrap 95% interval [0.0593, 0.1918]). Adding mask family and its interaction improved log loss by 0.0015 nats per row (one-sided upper bound 0.0066), below the frozen 0.01 practical-sufficiency margin. A development audit found that exact minimum hitting set and greedy selection chose identical supports in 12/12 scenarios because singleton evidence had resolved the conflicts. The result is a bounded rule for interpreting aggregate agent behavior: first establish exposure, then score change, and abstain when the trace cannot support the claim.
Peiying Zhu, Sidi Chang
Sep 21, 2026cs.AI

Representation-guided in-context learning for medical image interpretation with multimodal large language models

Medical image interpretation is central to diagnosis and care, yet adapting general-purpose multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often requires resource-intensive domain-specific fine-tuning. Here we introduce representation-guided in-context learning (RG-ICL), a training-free inference framework that retrieves query-aligned demonstrations using frozen encoders, without task-specific parameter updates. Across eight datasets spanning histopathology, radiology and retinal fundoscopy, RG-ICL improved classification (mean gain 20 percentage points) and visual question answering (VQA) (mean gain 13 percentage points) over no-context and conventional ICL, approaching or exceeding training-based comparators. Which cases were retrieved mattered more than how many: 6 query-aligned cases outperformed up to 32 randomly selected ones, whereas fixed or random cases often reduced accuracy below baseline. For VQA, aligning reference cases with both image content and question intent produced further gains. These findings indicate that for medical image interpretation, curating which reference cases an MLLM sees is a practical alternative to retraining it.
Minda Zhao, Fangyu Hu, Yan Luo +8
Sep 20, 2026eess.IV

ORION-CMR: On-scanner Reporting with Integrated Foundation Model for End-to-End Cardiac MRI Analysis and Interpretation

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) provides comprehensive cardiac assessment but remains underutilized because of the complexity of acquisition, post-processing, and interpretation. Existing artificial intelligence (AI) methods address isolated tasks, limiting clinical integration. We present ORION-CMR (On-scanner Reporting with Integrated fOunda-tioN Model), the first clinically evaluated scanner-native end-to-end CMR foundation model. Pretrained on 12,896,733 CMR images from 9,258 studies, ORION-CMR performs sequence classification, ventricular function assessment, late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) detection, binary and multiclass disease classification, and local large language model-based report generation in approximately 90 seconds. The framework. was evaluated on public benchmarks and clinically validated in a multi-vendor cohort of 68 subjects with normal examinations, congenital heart disease, dilated cardiomyopathy, and myocardial infarction. ORION-CMR outperformed supervised baselines and the previously published CMR foundation model (CMR-FM), achieving state-of-the-art performance for LGE classification and scar segmentation. Clinical evaluation achieved an AUC of 0.96 for normal-versus abnormal classification and 0.88 for multiclass disease classification, while generated reports demonstrated 81.4% agreement with expert interpretation. These results demonstrate the feasibility of real-time scanner-native AI-assisted CMR analysis and automated report generation.
Omer Burak Demirel, Kelly K. Horst, Alessio Perazzolo +15
Sep 17, 2026cs.HC

Semantic Action Graph: A Shared Representation for Agent Grounding and Human Interpretation of Sports Highlights

Generative agents are increasingly used to select and narrate video highlights, but they typically operate over unstructured or frame-level representations. Their output is consequently difficult for a viewer to verify and steer toward individual preferences. We present the semantic action graph, a lightweight domain schema that represents a sports match as performer, action, recipient, moment, and state nodes connected by role, temporal, and outcome edges. The schema demonstrates three key properties: 1) connected event sequences, 2) a shared, closed vocabulary, and 3) frame-addressable moments, making it suitable to serve two consumers at once: an agentic pipeline that composes narrated highlights, and a visual interface through which viewers query and inspect the same structure. We instantiate it in SportSAGE, a design probe pairing a four-module highlight pipeline with a graph interface, and report feedback from 12 soccer fans. Participants were satisfied with the quality of the generated highlights and narratives, and used the graph interface to search, navigate, and interpret the match highlights. These results provide early evidence that one small, human-readable schema can ground agent generation and support human interpretation at the same time.
Tica Lin, Deepak Chandran, Gauri Jagatap +4
Sep 11, 2026cs.CL

Rubric-Aligned Disentangled Evaluation of Human Simultaneous Interpreting

Human simultaneous interpreting (SI) is commonly assessed with analytic rubrics separating meaning transfer, delivery quality, and temporal synchrony, yet no automatic metric is designed for rubric-aligned segment-level SI evaluation. We construct a professionally annotated corpus of 1,101 SI segments with scores for meaning transfer (LQ), delivery quality (EXP), and perceived latency (LAT). We show that structured LLM prompting and scalar supervision collapse rubric dimensions, yielding near-zero correlation with human ratings and strong cross-dimension coupling. To isolate supervision structure under identical backbone capacity, we introduce dual regression heads on a LoRA-adapted COMET-KIWI encoder. On a held-out talk-level test set, the model achieves Pearson correlations of 0.388 (LQ) and 0.301 (EXP), improving over frozen COMET-KIWI. Given low absolute rater agreement, we interpret results relative to human consistency and target stable ranking signals for formative assessment.
Ziyu Zhang, Satoshi Nakamura
Aug 31, 2026cs.CV

CheXGround: Anatomical Region Tokens for Grounded Longitudinal Chest X-ray Interpretation

Recent radiology multi-modal language models have made substantial progress in chest X-ray report generation, visual question answering, and temporal reasoning. While longitudinal chest X-ray interpretation compares sequential examinations to describe change, visual grounding aims to connect clinical language with localized image evidence. Although longitudinal modeling and visual grounding have each advanced radiology language models, how localized visual evidence can support longitudinal interpretation remains under-explored. We introduce CheXGround, a region-grounded longitudinal chest X-ray language model that represents paired studies through corresponding anatomical regions. CheXGround extracts anatomical regions from current and prior radiographs, encodes them as temporally enhanced Region-of-Interest (ROI) tokens, and combines them with global temporal image context during generation. To connect these region tokens with clinical text, we propose Temporal Region--Phrase Alignment, a pretraining objective that aligns temporal anatomical representations with localized report phrases. We evaluate CheXGround on single-study and longitudinal Visual Question Answering (VQA), longitudinal findings generation, temporal grounded VQA, and anatomical grounding. Across these tasks, CheXGround improves clinical language quality, temporal reasoning, and localization accuracy over recent baselines. Our results suggest that organizing longitudinal evidence at the anatomical level is a strong representation for grounded radiology language modeling. Project page: https://adonaydem.github.io/chexground-website
Adonay Demewez Gebremedhin, Wessam Shehieb, Sara Alansari +4
Aug 13, 2026cs.CV

SketchSense: Learning to Interpret Imperfect Sketch Guidance for Image Inpainting

Sketch-guided image inpainting provides intuitive structural control, yet real sketches often mix reliable global intent with locally crowded, displaced, incomplete, or deliberately unconventional strokes. Existing approaches typically either retain the input sketch as a fixed condition throughout denoising or refine it into a clean structure before RGB synthesis. The former assumes uniformly reliable strokes and can propagate local errors throughout generation; the latter must resolve ambiguous structure before emerging appearance and semantic context become available. We propose SketchSense, a framework that interprets imperfect sketch guidance by synchronously denoising interacting RGB and structure streams. Bidirectional Attention Fusion couples appearance generation with structural recovery, producing a refined structure that exposes the model's evolving sketch interpretation. A phrase-level objective aligns the semantic grounding of the two streams. Sketch-Aware Spatial Regulation further adapts sketch use to local generation states by modulating attention and the fusion process, while an optional signed prior injects preserve-versus-correct intent into feature representations and attention behavior. Experiments on natural and structurally complex imagery show substantial gains over existing methods in both restoration quality and structural fidelity.
Zian Yang
Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

GeoThreat: Transferable Targeted Adversarial Attacks on Large Vision-Language Models for Remote Sensing Image Interpretation

Adversarial attacks against large vision-language models (LVLMs) serve as an effective means of assessing their robustness in cross-modal semantic understanding. Existing studies mainly focus on corrupting visual inputs to induce predefined erroneous responses in general vision-language tasks, whereas corresponding investigations in remote sensing fields remain largely underexplored. Compared with natural image understanding, remote sensing image interpretation requires joint reasoning over local discriminative cues and global scene context. This poses additional challenges to achieving transferable semantic manipulation toward specified responses under black-box settings. To tackle these challenges, we propose GeoThreat, a transferable targeted adversarial attack method against LVLMs for remote sensing image interpretation. Specifically, GeoThreat modulates adversarial representations in accordance with the target content at both conceptual and perceptual levels. The class tokens from surrogate image encoders are employed as conceptual representations, while perceptual representations are distilled from patch tokens of the adversarial example through collaborative importance estimation. Beyond merely rolling out attention scores across layers, we incorporate adversarial-target similarity gradients to more faithfully characterize the relevance of local visual cues to the intended semantic manipulation. The perceptual representations are then dynamically aligned with target patch tokens in a cross-attentive manner, facilitating the adaptation of local cues toward designated semantic details. Finally, adversarial perturbations are iteratively updated via ensemble-based joint optimization of conceptual calibration and perceptual adaptation. Extensive experiments across diverse LVLMs demonstrate the superiority of GeoThreat in both transferability and controllability.
Yimin Fu, Yuefeng Bai, Baicheng Pan +2
Jul 19, 2026quant-ph

Interpreting Quantum Learning Models via Stochastic Processes

Quantum machine learning models define probabilistic input--output maps through coherent quantum evolution and measurement. While such models can exhibit computational advantages, their internal functioning and decision making generally resists interpretation in terms of stochastic trajectories through intermediate configurations. In contrast to classical (Markovian) stochastic processes, quantum dynamics generically violates the Chapman--Kolmogorov divisibility condition, preventing a decomposition into probabilistically meaningful intermediate transitions. We develop a probabilistic framework for representing quantum learning models as stochastic processes over configuration spaces where the dynamics are modeled as linear maps on probability distributions. Starting from a fixed POVM, arbitrary quantum channels induce transition kernels on the associated probability representation. For informationally complete POVMs, and in particular SIC-POVMs, these kernels are Markovian but generally quasi-stochastic, with non-classicality appearing as negativity. By contrast, projective spaces admit positive stochastic kernels but generally require non-Markovian dynamics due to the failure of Chapman--Kolmogorov divisibility. This yields a trade-off between negativity and dependence on past configurations, i.e. quantum dynamics can be represented either by Markovian quasi-stochastic maps or by positive stochastic processes with higher Markov order. We discuss how such representations of quantum dynamics can be interpreted as stochastic walks through a memory space in the spirit of Projective Simulation, a model of learning and agency in which decisions arise from random walks over an episodic memory network. We further outline how finite-order stochastic kernels can approximate such quantum deliberation processes and show in what regimes the classical machine learning model is recovered.
Johannes Fankhauser, Lukas J. Fiderer, Hans J. Briegel
Jul 17, 2026cs.CV

Attention-Guided Saliency Maps for Interpreting Visualization Literacy in VLMs

Understanding how vision-language models (VLMs) interpret data visualizations remains an open problem, and is increasingly important as these models are used for analytical tasks where reliable reasoning is essential. We introduce a lightweight, diagnostic saliency map method tailored for text generation over images using transformer models, the current state-of-the-art models in visualization interpretation. Our approach aggregates the language model's attention over the visual tokens across all heads and layers, then maps this attention back onto the vision encoder's patch grid to localise it over the image, producing a direct correspondence between each generated answer token and the image regions it attended to. This yields fast, gradient-free saliency maps that expose how VLMs allocate focus across visual elements during answer generation, enabling inspection of whether model attention aligns with semantically relevant components. We evaluate our approach using a deletion metric which validates the causal faithfulness of our saliency maps to the model's behavior.
Maeve Hutchinson, Abderrahmane Wassim Mehdaoui, Pranava Madhyastha