#01Jul 27, 2026
cs.AI
ERUnderstand: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Structured ER Diagrams
Ali Ansari, Yasmin Mohammadi, Farnoush Nili and 3 more
Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) are central to conceptual database design, yet they are typically available only as rendered images rather than machine-readable schemas, limiting AI-assisted database engineering. We introduce ERUnderstand, the first large-scale benchmark for structured understanding of ER diagrams, comprising 2,960 diagrams collected from curated educational sources, real-world schemas, and synthetically generated examples spanning diverse domains, notations, complexity levels, and Extended Entity-Relationship (EER) constructs. Each diagram is paired with a standardized machine-readable representation for fine-grained evaluation of schema elements. Evaluating state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs), we find that while common ERD elements are recovered reliably (F1 > 0.74), performance drops sharply on weak entities (as low as 0.28 F1), multivalued attributes (0.14 F1), and N-ary relationships (0.07 F1). Reasoning-augmented models improve overall performance by 15-25% but remain sensitive to linguistic priors and increasing diagram complexity. ERUnderstand provides a standardized benchmark for evaluating multimodal understanding of conceptual database schemas. The benchmark, dataset, evaluation toolkit, and generation code are publicly available at https://github.com/salinaria/ERUnderstand.
#02Jul 27, 2026
cs.LG
Global Convergence of DGM and PINN Algorithms for Solving Nonlinear PDEs
Justin Sirignano, Konstantinos Spiliopoulos, Samuel Cohen
The Deep Galerkin Method (DGM) and Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have become widely-used methods for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) in the rapidly growing field of scientific machine learning. In these methods, a neural network is trained to approximate the PDE solution by using (stochastic) gradient descent to minimize the PDE residual of the neural network. Due to the non-convexity of the PDE residual objective function, the trained neural network may, in principle, only converge to a local minimizer of the objective function (which would not be a solution of the PDE). Therefore, there is a longstanding question regarding the mathematical foundations of these algorithms, and it is highly valuable to establish that the trained neural network will converge to the PDE solution. For a class of semi-linear PDEs (nonlinear in the solution and its first derivative), we prove that neural networks trained with gradient descent to minimize the PDE residual objective function will converge to the PDE solution.
#03Jul 27, 2026
cs.LG
Causal-TS: A Python Library for Causal Discovery in High-Dimensional and Nonstationary Time Series
Mohammad Fesanghary
We describe Causal-TS, an open-source Python library for causal discovery in high-dimensional and nonstationary multivariate time series. Causal-TS provides four specialized algorithms-CDNOTS, CDNOTS+, CEDAR, and GRACE-along with wrappers for GES, Granger, LASSO-VAR, and LGES, all sharing a unified conditional independence (CI) test layer with GPU acceleration via PyTorch. A regime discovery pipeline detects structural breaks via pluggable changepoint detectors and runs discovery per regime with regime-specific parameters. A command-line interface, synthetic data generators, and optional DoWhy integration provide an end-to-end pipeline from raw time series to causal effect estimates. The library is pip-installable, tested on Python 3.10--3.12, and available at https://github.com/bloomberg/causal-ts.
#04Jul 27, 2026
cs.CV
ClinFusion: A Vision-Centric Multimodal LLM System for Holistic Medical Understanding
Hangjie Yuan, Yichen Qian, Zhiwei Tang and 21 more
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold immense potential to revolutionize clinical practice, yet deploying them in the medical domain is fundamentally a vision-centric challenge: models must absorb knowledge from heterogeneous 2D and 3D medical images, and evaluation protocols must align with radiologists' clinical practice and provide an accurate, fine-grained and factualness-driven assessment. In this paper, we introduce ClinFusion, a vision-centric MLLM designed for holistic medical understanding that systematically addresses these limitations. We propose a compositional and cascaded vision encoder architecture featuring a Cascade Spatial-Aware Locality Fusion operator that unifies diverse 2D and native 3D medical image understanding within a fused encoder. We further introduce a vision-grounded evaluation framework, including MedIF-Bench for instruction-following assessment and a region-of-interest-grounded method for clinically aligned and factualness-driven report generation evaluation. We show that ClinFusion sets a new state-of-the-art across a comprehensive suite of 2D and 3D multimodal medical benchmarks---spanning visual question answering, report generation, and instruction following---as well as textual medical tasks, outperforming leading open-source medical MLLMs (\textit{e.g.}, Hulu-Med, Lingshu) on 20 out of 24 benchmarks and demonstrating multimodal capabilities better than powerful proprietary models such as GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3-Flash on 13 out of 16 benchmarks, and can be further augmented with agentic tool use for retrieval-augmented and tool-assisted clinical workflows. A blinded evaluation by board-certified radiologists confirms that ClinFusion produces the highest-ranked reports, and validates our RoI-grounded metric as achieving the strongest correlation with expert judgment among all automatic evaluation metrics examined.
#05Jul 27, 2026
cs.RO
Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation
Yifan Ye, Yankai Fu, Yaoxu Lv and 26 more
Multimodal foundation models learned to see and to speak by consuming the whole internet. Embodied agents admit no such shortcut, since they require data that couple observations with physical states and actions. These signals can be provided, to varying degrees, by multiple data sources. In this work, we organize the embodied data ecosystem as a "pyramid" spanning five complementary sources: real-robot data, UMI-style data, egocentric and exocentric data, simulation data, and general vision-language data. We organize the pyramid around the tension between scalability and robot alignment, and further characterize each source in terms of data quality, diversity, reusability, and physical fidelity. We then analyze recent embodied foundation models through the lens of their data recipes, examining how different sources are selected, aligned, and mixed during pretraining. For embodied brain models, vision-language-action models, and world-action models alike, we relate data composition to capabilities in perception, reasoning, planning, action generation, and world prediction. We close by discussing six open challenges: building large-scale tactile datasets, collecting failure and recovery data, developing scalable data-collection pipelines, aligning actions across embodiments, leveraging egocentric data for dexterous manipulation, and designing principled data recipes for robot learning. We hope this work paves the foundation for the design of next-generation embodied systems.