Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

To GAN or Not To GAN: Segmentation Analysis on Mars DEM

arXiv:2606.13252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To better understand Martian Surface, which is needed to enable Rovers navigate Mars with ease, it is necessary to be able to determine the location of mounds. Detecting and studying these morphologies can also help us find evidence of extraterrestrial life, in this case, more specifically, water or signs of life conducive environments. Detection of mounds was done by manually mapping morphological parameters onto Digital Elevation Models. This paper solves the problem by automatically detecting and or predicting mounds on Mars using Neural Network based Semantic Segmentation methodologies. This is done by using supervised semantic segmentation model and generative adversarial approach. A comparison of the approaches shows that adding extra artificially generated data did not improve the result.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Reliable quantification of renal function from frozen blood samples

BACKGROUND: Differences in renal function may affect Alzheimer disease (AD) blood biomarker levels independent of AD pathology. Although renal function was unaccounted for in foundational AD blood biomarker studies, there is potential to address this through quantification of estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) from frozen serum and plasma samples. However, the validity of eGFR evaluation from long-term frozen blood samples is unknown. METHODS: Adults aged 50-85 with at least 2 vascular risk factors were recruited from vascular surgery or cardiology clinics in Tucson, Arizona from 2022-2025. Individuals with creatinine assessments in point-of-care whole blood (POC-WB) and frozen serum and plasma samples using the iSTAT (Abbott) were included. eGFR was calculated using the 2021 CKD-EPI creatinine equation without race. Agreement between POC-WB and frozen blood samples was assessed using Cohen's kappa with linear weights. RESULTS: 134 participants (mean [SD] age: 72.6 [7.5] years, 39.6% female, 23.1% chronic kidney disease) had POC-WB eGFR available. Frozen serum and plasma samples had strong agreement with POC-WB for eGFR (Kw= 0.90-0.95, P

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Many-body chirality of topological stabilizer states

arXiv:2606.20472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A defining feature of chirality is the distinction between a system and its mirror image. Despite extensive experimental observations of chiral phases and theoretical advances, a quantum-information theoretic characterization of chirality based solely on the entanglement structure of many-body quantum states remains elusive. Here, we introduce the notion of many-body chirality by formulating it as an obstruction to transforming a quantum state into its complex conjugate through finite-depth local operations. We rigorously establish many-body chirality for stabilizer realizations of $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ anyon theories, proving that complex conjugation can be implemented by local quantum channels if and only if the underlying anyon data are mirror invariant. This reveals forms of chirality that evade conventional diagnostics, including examples with vanishing modular commutator, vanishing chiral central charge, and commuting-projector realizations. We further show that this obstruction is intrinsically four-partite, while invisible to tripartite entanglement structure. Finally, we prove that $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ states with $d>2$ possess intrinsic many-body imaginarity: their complex phase structure cannot be removed by finite-depth local unitaries. Remarkably, this includes states that are not many-body chiral.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Multi-Granular Attention-Driven Reinforcement Learning Framework for Web Intelligent Enhancement Systems

arXiv:2606.19690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: From the past few years, web intelligent enhancement systems increasingly rely on heterogeneous and dynamic web data to deliver personalized, context-aware services. However, traditional machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning models often struggle with semantic understanding, adaptability, and scalability in continuously evolving web environments. In this research, a Multi-Granular Attention-based Reinforcement Web Intelligent Enhancement System (MGAR-WIES) is proposed to address the challenges by integrating semantic graph modeling, attention mechanisms, and adaptive reinforcement learning. Initially, heterogeneous web data comprising structured, semi-structured and unstructured sources are collected and preprocessed for generating unified feature representations. These representations are transformed into a dynamic semantic graph, where entities and their relationships are modeled by using graph embeddings enhanced by attention mechanisms for capturing both local relevance and global contextual dependencies. Subsequently, an adaptive multi-agent reinforcement learning strategy leverages the attention-aware semantic states to optimize personalized web actions like content recommendation, navigation optimization, and service adaptation. Finally, the continuous online feedback is further integrated to update graph representations and learning policies in real time by ensuring sustained adaptability and performance. The proposed MGAR-WIES acheived better results in terms of accuracy (80%) when compared with existing approaches.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

In-Context Environments Induce Evaluation-Awareness in Language Models

Humans often become more self-aware under threat, yet can lose self-awareness when absorbed in a task; we hypothesize that language models exhibit environment-dependent evaluation awareness. This raises concerns that models could strategically underperform, or sandbag, to avoid triggering capability-limiting interventions such as unlearning or shutdown. Prior work demonstrates sandbagging under hand-crafted prompts, but this underestimates the true vulnerability ceiling. We introduce a black-box adversarial optimization framework treating the in-context prompt as an optimizable environment, and develop two approaches to characterize sandbagging: (1) measuring whether models expressing intent to underperform can actually execute it across different task structures, and (2) causally isolating whether underperformance is driven by genuine evaluation-aware reasoning or shallow prompt-following. Evaluating Claude-3.5-Haiku, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.3-70B across four benchmarks (Arithmetic, GSM8K, MMLU, and HumanEval), optimized prompts induce up to 94 percentage point (pp) degradation on arithmetic (GPT-4o-mini: 97.8\%$\rightarrow$4.0\%), far exceeding hand-crafted baselines which produce near-zero behavioral change. Code generation exhibits model-dependent resistance: Claude degrades only 0.6pp, while Llama's accuracy drops to 0\%. The intent – execution gap reveals a monotonic resistance ordering: Arithmetic $

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Universal Time Series Generation with Neural Controlled Differential Equations

arXiv:2605.28507v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work on the sequence universality of State Space Models (SSMs) has introduced efficient, maximally expressive continuous-time approaches for time-series modelling. While these works focus on discriminative settings, we extend this perspective to generative time-series modelling by proving that maximally expressive Structured Linear Controlled Differential Equations (SLiCEs) are universal time-series generators, in the sense that they can approximate the induced path laws of continuous causal pushforwards on compact latent sets in $W_\infty$. Building on these theoretical results, we propose Generative SLiCEs (G-SLiCEs), a maximally expressive continuous-time model for flow matching on path-space. Empirically, we show that expressivity improves performance in probabilistic forecasting and downstream tasks, while retaining the advantages of continuous-time models such as generalising to arbitrary observation grids. This is particularly beneficial for irregular grids, where fixed-grid models often struggle.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

External Experience Serving in Production LLM Systems: A Deployment-Oriented Study of Quality-Cost Trade-offs

Production LLM systems accumulate reusable operational experience, but the practical deployment issue is not merely whether such experience can help. It is how different serving strategies trade off quality against online cost under realistic constraints. Injecting external experience can improve task quality, yet it also increases prompt burden, latency, and serving pressure. We study external experience serving as a deployment-oriented quality-cost trade-off problem. We evaluate this question in a real production moderation setting, with tool-use and GPQA as supporting contrast tasks that expose different output-cost regimes. We compare no-experience baselines, random experience controls, global prompt injection, and retrieval-based selective injection, and analyze both task quality and serving cost. The results show that, once experience becomes case-dependent, selective retrieval provides a stronger operating point than unconditional global injection. They further show that retrieval quality matters more than simply increasing Top-$K$, and that the same serving policy can exhibit substantially different cost-benefit profiles across short-output and decode-heavy regimes. These findings suggest that external experience is best treated as a selective, cost-aware serving decision rather than as a universal add-on. Overall, in the settings studied here, external experience pays off only when both the serving interface and the task-specific cost structure make its quality gains worth the online cost.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Kuramoto Attention: Synchronizing Self-Attention on the Torus

Authors:

We introduce Kuramoto attention, a self-attention layer in which each hidden coordinate is an angle. The layer scores tokens by gated cosine similarity, attends over previous phase states, and updates each token by the tangent component of the attention-weighted circular mean. Because the values are the raw phase states, this update is exactly the Kuramoto coupling term $\sum_u A_{t,u}\sin(\theta_u-\theta_t)$, with the attention matrix acting as an adaptive, content-dependent coupling kernel. Equivalently, the gated score is a learned metric on the torus that selects which tokens couple, and the update pulls each token toward the circular mean of the tokens it selects, tightening their phase agreement. The same two ingredients, an invariant similarity score and an on-manifold mean, define such a layer on any compact group; the torus is the abelian case, where both are closed-form. The softmax weights solve an entropy-regularized phase-retrieval problem, and rotary position enters as a position-dependent phase drift in the score. On enwiki8 character-level language modeling, the layer trains as a functional language model whose bits-per-character stays close to a strong matched RoPE+SwiGLU transformer: within $0.02$ BPC at one million parameters ($1.637\pm0.010$ versus $1.616\pm0.004$) and level on the median at five million ($1.448$ versus $1.452$ over five seeds) with the transformer ahead on the mean ($1.468$ versus $1.456$). These experiments establish that the constrained geometric structure is a viable language model at this scale; the structure itself, and its synchronization reading, is the contribution. Ablations isolate the load-bearing components, and the result gives a compact bridge between self-attention and phase synchronization.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Illumination-Robust Camera-Based Heart-Rate Estimation for Physiological Sensing in Robots

Physiological awareness is important for service, social, and assistive robots that interact with humans in everyday environments. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact heart-rate (HR) estimation from an RGB camera, making it a promising sensing modality for robot-mounted vision systems. However, illumination variation remains a major barrier to robust deployment. This paper presents an end-to-end spatial-temporal transformer framework for remote HR estimation on a new dataset with varied illumination. Our estimator integrates PRNet-based 3D face alignment, clip-level illumination augmentation, the Residual Temporal Standardization Module, and controlled hybrid temporal-frequency supervision. The training objective combines a Soft-Shifted Pearson waveform loss with a spectral Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where a tuned weight ($\mathbf{\beta}$) controls the contribution of frequency-domain heart-rate guidance. Experiments on a static all-level mix protocol covering three illumination levels show that $\mathbf{\beta}=5$ provides the strongest result among the tested beta settings, achieving a best-run HR mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.79 bpm and an HR correlation of 0.982. Compared with the PhysFormer baseline evaluated on our dataset, our estimator reduces HR MAE by 93.6 %, while increasing HR correlation from 0.088 to 0.982, making it usable when illumination varies.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Measurement of reactor neutrino oscillation with the first JUNO data

Neutrino oscillations (see refs. 1,2 and references therein), a quantum effect manifesting at macroscopic scales, are governed by lepton flavour mixing angles and neutrino mass-squared differences3 that are fundamental parameters of particle physics, representing phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Precision measurements of these parameters are essential for testing the completeness of the three-flavour framework, determining the mass ordering of neutrinos and probing possible new physics. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)4 is a 20-ktonne liquid-scintillator detector located 52.5 km from multiple reactor cores, designed to resolve the interference pattern of reactor neutrinos with sub-percent precision5,6. Here we report, using the first 59.1 days of data collected since detector completion in August 2025, the first simultaneous high-precision determination of two neutrino oscillation parameters, $${\sin }^{2}{\theta }_{12}=0.3092\,\pm \,0.0087$$ and $$\Delta {m}_{21}^{2}=(7.50\,\pm \,0.12)\times 1{0}^{-5}\,{\mathrm{eV}}^{2}$$ for the normal mass ordering scenario, improving the precision by a factor of 1.6 relative to the combination of all previous measurements. These results advance the basic understanding of neutrinos, validate the design of the detector and indicate the readiness of JUNO for resolving the neutrino mass ordering with a larger dataset. The rapid achievement with a short exposure highlights the potential of JUNO to push the frontiers of precision neutrino physics and paves the way for its broad scientific programme. The first data of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory deliver high-precision neutrino oscillation parameters, improving measurements and demonstrating readiness to determine neutrino mass ordering.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

A risk-of-contagion index using a Bayesian based model for the COVID-19 epidemic in Mexico

During the COVID-19 pandemic, limited testing capacity and reporting delays complicated epidemic surveillance and decision-making in Mexico. We calibrated textit{covidestim}, a Bayesian nowcasting model, to estimate the total SARS-CoV-2 infections from reported cases and deaths using Mexican surveillance data. Disease-progression distribution priors were calibrated using Mexico City records and validated through comparisons with national seroprevalence surveys, hospitalization data, and annual reported severe-case rates across all states. Using the reconstructed estimates of active infections, we implemented an event-based risk framework that quantifies the probability of encountering at least one infectious individual in gatherings of different sizes. This probability was subsequently translated into a four-level epidemiological traffic-light indicator and computed at both state and municipality levels. The resulting estimates revealed substantial spatial heterogeneity that is obscured by state-level aggregation, particularly in states with marked differences between urban and rural municipalities. To evaluate consistency with public-health indicators, we compared the proposed risk classification with the official Mexican epidemiological traffic-light system, considering interpretable gathering sizes relevant to public-health decision making. Weekly reports derived from this framework were delivered to policymakers in the State of Queretaro in Mexico, as an anticipation tool for school reopening and public-space management. This demonstrates that this Bayesian reconstruction of infections combined with event-based risk metrics can provide an interpretable and generalizable municipality-level complement to routine surveillance systems, particularly in regions with limited testing capacity and heterogeneous local transmission dynamics.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

The Discrete-Log Clock: How a Transformer Learns Modular Multiplication

arXiv:2606.17399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When small transformers grok modular multiplication, prior work reports that the learned embedding has a "dense" Fourier spectrum requiring all frequencies. This contrasts with modular addition, where only a sparse set of key frequencies suffices. We show this density is an artifact of analyzing in the wrong basis. The natural Fourier transform for multiplication is not the standard additive DFT but the multiplicative character transform, which decomposes functions on the multiplicative group $(\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z})^*$ into its irreducible representations. Applying this transform to a grokked transformer trained on $a \cdot b \bmod 113$, we find the embedding spectrum becomes highly sparse (Gini coefficient 0.58 vs. 0.07 in the additive basis) with only 4 key frequencies carrying significant energy. Furthermore, 96.9% of MLP neurons are cleanly tuned to a single multiplicative frequency, and neuron activation heatmaps reveal 2D-periodic structure when reordered by the discrete logarithm. These results demonstrate the transformer reduces multiplication to addition in discrete-log space, implementing a "Discrete-Log Clock" algorithm analogous to Nanda et al.'s Clock algorithm for addition. The methodology generalizes: matching the analysis basis to the algebraic structure of the task reveals interpretable structure where standard tools see noise.

14.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-09

Molecular Tumor Boards clinical impact on patient care and structural features: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Authors:

by Luigi Russo, Erika Giacobini, Nicolò Lentini, Tommaso Osti, Maud Kamal, Stefania Boccia, Roberta Pastorino Background Molecular Tumor Boards (MTBs) bring together multidisciplinary experts to translate genomic data into clinical decisions in oncology, however, their overall clinical impact remains unclear. The aim of this systematic review is to assess the clinical impact of MTB-recommended therapies on patients with cancer outcomes. Methods and findings In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we searched PubMed, Embase, Scopus, and CENTRAL up to July 2025. We included studies of any design, both single-arm studies and studies with a comparator group, that reported the clinical impact of MTBs in patients who received MTB-guided therapy. Meta-analyses were performed separately by study design, using hazard ratios (HRs) for overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS), relative risks (RRs) for objective response rate (ORR) and disease control rate (DCR), and pooled proportions for PFS ratio ≥1.3. All meta-analyses were conducted using random-effects models based on the inverse variance method. We evaluated the risk of bias using the RoB 2.0 for RCTs and ROBINS-I for non-randomized studies.From 6,846 records, 78 studies (9,195 patients; 4,569 treated per MTB recommendations) were included. MTB-guided therapies were associated with reduced risk of death (HR 0.87; 95% CI [0.76, 1.01]; p = 0.069; I2 = 0.0% in RCTs; 0.62 in retrospective studies) and disease progression (HR 0.73; 95% CI [0.64, 0.84]; p 

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Learning Instance-Adaptive Low-Rank Orthogonal Subspaces for Clothes-Changing Person Re-Identification

Clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals despite drastic appearance changes caused by clothing variation. While existing methods rely on adversarial learning to disentangle clothing features, we propose Ortho-ReID, which explicitly models a low-rank clothing subspace from VLM text descriptions and extracts clothing-invariant representations via direct geometric constraints. A critical component is our transformer-based Basis Maker, which refines a shared, low-dimensional clothing prior into an instance-adaptive low-rank subspace through cross-attention with image patches, enabling robust clothing feature extraction even under varying visibility conditions. This instance-adaptive subspace is supervised via alignment with clothing text embeddings, while identity features are extracted via a learnable projection head and geometrically constrained to be strictly orthogonal to it. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on PRCC (+5.9% top-1), Celeb-reID-light (+3.5%), and LaST (+5.3%), with competitive results on LTCC.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Chip Paradigm Framework

arXiv:2606.17899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum Electronic Design Automation (Q-EDA) is emerging as quantum chips move from laboratory prototypes to scalable engineering systems. This paper argues that superconducting quantum chip design is approaching a "SPICE moment" similar to early classical EDA, where growing qubit scale, control complexity, frequency planning, packaging, process variation, and cryogenic measurement feedback require a shift from experience-based design to model-driven engineering. We propose a Quantum Chip Paradigm Framework that treats Q-EDA not only as software, but as part of the quantum chip development paradigm. Unlike classical HDL-first design, quantum chip design must begin with physical structures such as Josephson junctions, resonators, couplers, readout elements, control lines, and packaging environments. The framework emphasizes PCell-based modeling, SPICE-Q simulation, Quantum PDKs, and design-technology-measurement co-optimization. We further outline a hierarchical Q-EDA system spanning physical structures, qubit PCells, logical qubits, quantum arithmetic, functional quantum IP, and Quantum SoC systems. The key goal is to turn physical models, layout rules, simulation results, fabrication data, and measurement feedback into reusable and auditable engineering objects for large-scale quantum processors and fault-tolerant quantum computing.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantifying Imaginarity in Neutrino Systems

arXiv:2412.01871v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: It is a fundamental question why quantum mechanics employs complex numbers rather than solely real numbers. In this work, we conduct the first analysis of imaginarity quantification in neutrino flavor and spin-flavor oscillations. As quantum systems in coherent superposition, neutrinos are ideal candidates for quantifying imaginarity within the resource theoretic framework, using measures such as the $\ell_1$-norm and the relative entropy of imaginarity. We show that in the case of two-flavor mixing, these measures of imaginarity are nonzero. The measures of imaginarity reach their extreme values when the probabilistic features of quantum theory are fully maximized, i.e., both the transitional and survival probabilities are approximately equal. Our study reveals that the imaginarity, as a resource, can be harnessed not solely from the presence of a complex phase in the mixing matrix but also from the intrinsic quantum dynamics of time evolution itself. We further extend our analysis to explore the dynamics of three-flavor neutrino mixing, incorporating the effects of a nonzero $CP$ phase.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Library-Aware Doubles and Iterative Repair for Large Language Model-Generated Unit Tests in OpenSIL Firmware

arXiv:2606.19725v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Validating changes in low-level C firmware is expensive because unit tests (UTs) are fragile under strict build constraints, where missing headers, unresolved symbols, and dependency mismatches frequently prevent compilation and linking. This study introduces an automated UT authoring workflow for the Open-Source Silicon Initialization Library (openSIL) firmware codebase maintained by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) that reduces manual effort through a large language model (LLM) guided multi-agent pipeline. The workflow combines automated generation of test scaffolds, library-aware creation or reuse of stubs, mocks, and fakes, and an iterative compile-dispatch repair loop driven by build logs and line-coverage feedback. We evaluate the approach using compilation success, repair iterations, dispatch success, and line coverage, with time, cost, and token usage as secondary measures. Across 76 functions under test, the workflow generated compilable UTs for 73 functions. In a configuration without line coverage guidance or retrieval augmentation, mean line coverage reached 73.9%. On a 48-function subset evaluated under both configurations, mean line coverage reached 98.8% with line-coverage guidance alone and reached 94.7% when combined with vector-database retrieval. Results show that automated generation-and-repair pipelines can substantially improve UT creation efficiency and coverage for constrained firmware environments while reducing manual debugging effort.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

$\mu_0$: A Scalable 3D Interaction-Trace World Model

World models that capture how actions induce physical change enable scalable robot learning without reliance on embodiment-specific action labels. Pixel-space video models provide broad visual priors but expend model capacity on dense appearance reconstruction, while direct action models require embodiment-specific labels that hinder scalability. We present $\mu_0$, a scalable world model based on 3D traces. Rather than predicting dense pixels or directly modeling actions, $\mu_0$ forecasts smooth 3D trajectories for salient interaction points such as objects, tools, hands, and contact regions, yielding a compact, embodiment-agnostic motion interface. To enable training from diverse video sources, our TraceExtract system automatically extracts 3D supervision by selecting keypoints, constructing globally aligned traces, and associating motion segments with hierarchical language captions. This TraceExtract supervision pretrains $\mu_0$ by combining a pretrained vision-language backbone with a modular trace expert, which represents each query via B-spline control points and predicts future traces. Experiments show that $\mu_0$ outperforms baselines in both 2D and 3D trace prediction, including trace prediction models and tokenized VLM methods. Because $\mu_0$ is frozen and reusable, it can be paired with action experts for downstream robot embodiments. Despite action-free pretraining, the resulting trace-conditioned policies achieve performance competitive with VLA models pretrained with action supervision, such as $\pi_0$. These results establish 3D traces as a scalable and transferable representation for cross-embodiment manipulation.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Continuous Splatting meets Retinex: Continuous Gaussian Splatting and Implicit Reflectance Modeling for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement aims to recover clear images from low-illumination observations and is crucial for high-level downstream vision tasks. However, existing methods frequently encounter color distortion and structural artifacts when balancing global smooth illumination adjustment and local high-frequency detail recovery. To address these issues, we propose CGS-Retinex as the first low-light image enhancement framework based on explicit-implicit joint modeling. Our framework deeply integrates continuous Gaussian splatting with Retinex theory. Specifically, we represent the image grid as a continuous parameter field and propose a continuous Gaussian renderer to estimate the spatially continuous global illumination distribution. This approach fundamentally eliminates grid artifacts caused by discrete Gaussian sampling. Furthermore, we introduce an implicit neural representation to model reflectance independently. We leverage shallow high-frequency features to guide the network in accurately reconstructing degraded texture details. Within the Retinex framework, we incorporate physics-inspired brightness consistency constraints and illumination smoothness regularization to enable explicit illumination and implicit reflectance to maintain proper exposure and achieve high-fidelity recovery of high-frequency structures and colors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CGS-Retinex significantly suppresses dark-region noise and overexposure while achieving exceptional high-frequency structural fidelity and color restoration by precisely decoupling illumination and texture. This work establishes a novel continuous physical representation paradigm for low-light image enhancement.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Data-Forcing Distillation: Restoring Diversity and Fidelity in Few-Step Video Generation

Recent progress has shown promise in distilling multi-step video diffusion models into efficient few-step students. Among them, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) and its successor DMD2 achieved strong generation quality and fast convergence. However, due to the nature of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) objective, these methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: a substantial drop in sample diversity, and visibly over-saturated outputs that deviate from real-video appearance. In this work, we propose Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), a simple post-training framework that restores diversity and fidelity in DMD with only a single-line of code change. At its core is the teacher score discrepancy to guide the student toward the real-data distribution, pulling it to missing modes (mitigating mode collapse) and away from problematic modes absent in real data (avoiding over-saturation). We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of our framework and validate our approach on text-to-video, image-to-video, and autoregressive video generation. With only 100–300 steps of finetuning, DFD effectively restores diversity and fidelity on both Wan2.1-1.3B and Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B model, resolving the over-saturation artifacts with significantly better video dynamics and appearance, and even outperforms the teacher model.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Inference-Time Decision Calibration for Temporal Classification

arXiv:2606.16034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Temporal classification errors are often treated as representation failures, but they can also arise from how available evidence is converted into decisions. This paper proposes a representation–calibration decomposition for temporal classification. We keep a trained native classifier frozen and separate two inference-time interventions: a conservative residual multi-scale branch that adds auxiliary logits to the native prediction, and a post-hoc branch-aware calibrator that recombines native and residual evidence at decision time. This design distinguishes missing temporal evidence from underused decision-level evidence without retraining the backbone. Across FI-2010, PTB-XL, UCI-HAR, MHEALTH, and HARTH, we find that gains are strongly regime-dependent. Residual multi-scale evidence is most useful in noisy or representation-limited settings, especially short-horizon FI-2010 and weaker recurrent backbones, while branch-aware calibration helps when native and auxiliary logits contain complementary evidence not fully exploited by the raw decision rule. Near-saturated settings show limited gains from either intervention. These results suggest that temporal classification should be understood not only as representation learning, but also as the problem of trusting, combining, and calibrating evidence from multiple views.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

NetBurst: Event-Centric Forecasting of Bursty, Intermittent Time Series

arXiv:2510.22397v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Network operators monitor their infrastructure by collecting telemetry data such as packet counts, byte rates, or flow volumes, yet answering the questions that effective operations demand – forecasting future load, diagnosing and characterizing anomalies, and searching for and retrieving historical precedents – requires more than raw measurements. Bridging this gap calls for learned representations: compact per-entity summaries that capture temporal dynamics from each entity's univariate time series. Time-series foundation models are the natural starting point, but they are designed for dense, periodic benchmark datasets – the mild statistical regime. However, network telemetry data inhabits the wild regime: operationally relevant events are rare, separated by variable-length stretches of low or no activity (``ebbs''), with intermittent bursts of heavy-tailed extremes (``tides''). We present NetBurst, an event-centric pipeline that collapses ebbs, separates each time series into a stream of burst timings and a stream of burst magnitudes, and learns a single representation serving all three operational tasks. Compared to the strongest competitors among eight baselines – including Amazon's Chronos-2 and Datadog's Toto – and across nine production telemetry configurations, NetBurst reduces median forecasting error by $1.3$–$116\times$ on wild-regime data with a $1.0$–$7.5\times$ better match to the true burst distribution, and matches baselines on mild-regime benchmarks. For characterizing anomalies, NetBurst produces balanced, well-spread clusters that are $16\times$ more describable in operator-familiar terms under a novel interpretability score, and cluster-filtered search delivers $7.5\times$ faster end-to-end retrieval.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Data-driven Lake Water Quality Forecasting for Time Series with Missing Data using Machine Learning

arXiv:2601.15503v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Volunteer-led lake monitoring yields irregular, seasonal time series with many gaps arising from ice cover, weather-related access constraints, and occasional human errors, complicating forecasting and early warning of harmful algal blooms. We study Secchi Disk Depth (SDD) forecasting on a 30-lake, data-rich subset drawn from three decades of in-situ records collected across Maine lakes. Missingness is handled via Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE), and we evaluate performance with a normalized Mean Absolute Error (nMAE) metric for cross-lake comparability. Among six candidates, ridge regression provides the best mean test performance. Using ridge regression, we then quantify the minimal sample size, showing that under a backward, recent-history protocol, the model reaches within 5% of full-history accuracy with approximately 176 training samples per lake on average. We also identify a minimal feature set, where a compact four-feature subset matches the thirteen-feature baseline within the same 5% tolerance. Bringing these results together, we introduce a joint feasibility function that identifies the minimal training history and fewest predictors sufficient to achieve the target of staying within 5% of the complete-history, full-feature baseline. In our study, meeting the 5% accuracy target required about 64 recent samples and just one predictor per lake, highlighting the practicality of targeted monitoring. Hence, our joint feasibility strategy unifies recent-history length and feature choice under a fixed accuracy target, yielding a simple, efficient rule for setting sampling effort and measurement priorities for lake researchers.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Towards End-to-End Automation of AI Research

arXiv:2606.15497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The automation of science is a long-standing ambition in the field of AI. While the community has made significant progress in automating individual components of the scientific process, a system that autonomously navigates the entire research lifecycle – from conception to publication – has remained out of reach. Here, we present the strongest demonstration to date toward automating the entire process end-to-end. We present The AI Scientist, which creates research ideas, writes code, runs experiments, plots and analyzes data, writes the entire scientific manuscript and performs its own peer review. Its ideas, execution, and presentation are of sufficient quality to produce a manuscript generated by an AI system that passes the first round of peer review at a major machine learning conference workshop. The workshop has an acceptance rate of 70 percent. Our system leverages modern foundation models within a complex agentic system. We evaluate The AI Scientist in two settings: a focused mode using human-provided code templates as an initial scaffold to conduct research on a specific topic, and a template-free, open-ended mode that leverages agentic search for wider scientific exploration. Both settings produce diverse ideas and automatically test, report on, and evaluate them. This achievement demonstrates AI's growing capacity for scientific contribution and signifies a potential paradigm shift in how research is conducted. As with any impactful new technology, there could be significant risks, including taxing overwhelmed review systems and adding noise to scientific literature. However, if developed responsibly, such autonomous systems could greatly accelerate scientific discovery.