中 EN
Sign In Register

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.

Sign In Register
01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Advancing Clinical Implementation of Cardiovascular Polygenic Risk Scores Through Patient-Level Robustness Assessment

Authors:
de La Harpe↗Vaucher↗Kutalik↗Fellay↗Thorball↗C. W↗

Background and Aims: Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) can perform equivalently at the population level yet disagree for individual patients. We examined whether such intra-individual variability reflects genuinely complementary risk information or mainly statistical and methodological uncertainty, and whether it affects clinical classification once PRSs are integrated into SCORE2-OP. Methods: In 4,137 ASCVD-free participants of the CoLaus|PsyCoLaus cohort (478 incident events over a median 14.4 years), we identified 16 ASCVD-PRSs with practically equivalent population-level performance using Bayesian equivalence testing. We quantified intra-individual variability (standard deviation, coefficient of variation, intraclass correlation, Cohen's kappa, extreme discordance), tested whether discordance exceeded chance, decomposed scores into shared and unique genetic components, and assessed variability after integration into SCORE2-OP, benchmarked against perturbation of systolic blood pressure. Results: For a typical individual, risk estimates varied by 18 percentile points across PRSs. Discordance matched chance expectations under a shared-signal model, with no distinct phenotypic profile among discordant individuals, and predictive power resided overwhelmingly in the shared genetic component. Variability tracked PRS size and weighting rather than distinct variants. After integration into SCORE2-OP, 75.6% of participants were placed in different categories by at least one model and 54.6% as both low and high risk; instability was concentrated near guideline thresholds and far exceeded that from blood-pressure measurement error. Conclusions: Equivalent population-level performance is not sufficient to treat PRSs as interchangeable at the individual level, and methodological standardisation and pragmatic clinical trials remain necessary to determine whether PRS integration improves long-term cardiovascular outcomes.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

EverydayGPT: Confidence-Gated Routing for Efficient and Safe Hybrid GPT-RAG Conversational QA

Authors:
Jaspreet Singh Nahal↗

Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines route every query through retrieval and generation unconditionally, incurring unnecessary computation and propagating low-quality context to the generator. We introduce EverydayGPT, a lightweight conversational QA system built around a Confidence-Gated Routing (CGR) mechanism that formalises the routing decision as a joint policy over retrieval distance and extraction adequacy. The backbone is a 205M-parameter GPT trained from scratch on 10B tokens of FineWeb-Edu. CGR avoids invoking the costly GPT pathway (~5.9s) for 85 percent of queries by resolving them via fast RAG extraction (~45 ms), yielding over 120x latency reduction on the majority of queries while maintaining answer quality. On a 500-question in-domain benchmark, the system achieves F1 = 0.226 +/- 0.004 compared to 0.171 for GPT-only and 0.210 for unconditional RAG. Gains over strong baselines are modest but consistent, while efficiency improvements are substantial (6.3x mean latency reduction). A structured grounding audit finds no unsupported claims in the sampled set, with explicit scope limitations. We position this work as a study of routing strategies under resource constraints rather than a claim of state-of-the-art performance.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

CALIBER: Calibrating Confidence Before and After Reasoning in Language Models

Authors:
Conor Finlay↗Joshua Kurien↗Saurabh Dash↗Marzieh Fadaee↗Beyza Ermis↗

Reasoning language models are increasingly asked not only to answer difficult questions, but also to estimate their likelihood of success. Existing methods typically elicit confidence only once: either before thinking or after answering. We argue that confidence in reasoning models is state-dependent: before thinking, confidence should estimate the chance of the model correctly solving the prompt, while after thinking it should predict whether the realized answer is likely to be correct. This distinction determines the appropriate supervision target: prompt-level success should supervise confidence estimates made after seeing the prompt, while individual answer-level correctness should supervise confidence estimates made after answering. We introduce CALIBER (Calibration Before and After Reasoning), which elicits both estimates and supervises each with the target matched to its information state. Under this unified protocol, CALIBER reduces Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by 52.5% over the strongest single-confidence baseline on BigMathDigits for the 7B model, while achieving the best Brier score and AUROC, and remains within 2.1 points of the best accuracy. Further, on a larger 30B model, CALIBER achieves the best ECE on BigMathDigits while remaining competitive in Brier score and AUROC. Out of distribution, it achieves the best ECE and Brier score on GPQA and TriviaQA, and remains competitive on SimpleQA. Ablations further show that this position-target alignment is most beneficial under distribution shift where it consistently reduces calibration error across all out-of-distribution benchmarks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Dense Coordinate-List Fine-Tuning Induces a Controllable Interference Surface in Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Chenyu Zhou↗Qiliang Jiang↗Boguang Pan↗

arXiv:2606.14507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning vision-language models to emit dense coordinate lists improves visual grounding but also changes how models serialize, repeat, and terminate structured outputs. We study this behavior as a generation and control surface. In Gemma 4 12B, high-capacity q/k/v/o LoRA raises class-aware F1@0.3 from 0.007 to 0.448 while inducing repeated-tail pressure (duplicate rate 0.080, max repeat 23). A q/v rank sweep keeps max repeat at 21-22 across ranks 4-64, showing capacity persistence. The target signal is separable: object-level repeat-stop removes exact repeated records (duplicate rate 0.000, max repeat 1) while preserving F1 (0.494 to 0.490) and stricter F1@0.5 (0.381 to 0.385). Structure-axis probes localize the effect to bbox-coordinate object lists; dense non-bbox and spatial/count JSON remain repeat-clean, including under high-capacity adapters. Qwen3-VL-8B reproduces a clean controlled endpoint (F1@0.3 0.318, duplicate rate 0.000), and COCO 2017 reproduces acquisition plus duplicate pressure. Dense coordinate-list adaptation therefore creates a structure-bound, cross-family interference surface that can be measured and controlled.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

scMagnifier: Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes via GRN-informed perturbations and consensus clustering

Authors:
Zhenhui He↗

by Zhenhui He, Dong Kangning Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data remains challenging, as their subtle transcriptional differences are often obscured by technical noise and data sparsity. Here, we present scMagnifier, a consensus clustering framework that leverages gene regulatory network (GRN)-informed in silico perturbations to amplify subtle transcriptional differences and uncover latent cell subpopulations. scMagnifier perturbs candidate transcription factors (TFs), propagates perturbation effects through cluster-specific GRNs to simulate post-perturbation expression profiles, and integrates clustering results across multiple perturbations into stable subtype assignments. Additionally, scMagnifier introduces regulatory perturbation consensus UMAP (rpcUMAP), a perturbation-aware visualization that provides clearer separation between cell subtypes and guides the selection of the optimal number of clusters. In both single-batch and multi-batch benchmarks, scMagnifier consistently improves the resolution and accuracy of fine-grained cell type identification. Notably, when integrated with spatial clustering methods such as STAGATE, scMagnifier is compatible with spatial transcriptomics workflows and effectively reveals tumor cell subtypes and their spatial organization in ovarian cancer.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Creative Integration: A Decidable Criterion of Creativity

Authors:
Yoshinori Nomura↗

"Integrative" solutions are widely praised but rarely defined: we lack an operational way to tell a genuine integration – one that makes the world cheaper to describe – from a tidy re-description. Building on the lineage that treats creativity and intelligence as compression, we give such a criterion for creative integration (CI): the resolution of a real conflict between A and B is CI if and only if, under a fixed description language, the description length strictly shrinks (C = L_pre/L_post > 1), with the reduction located in the conflict itself. We make the judgment decidable through four binary, conjunctive gates, and we fix its extension through a taxonomy of pseudo-integration that names and rejects the look-alikes. We back the criterion with a curated, multi-domain corpus and – crucially – validate it not by human inter-rater agreement but by four falsifiable tests it could fail: an independent computational check, discrimination against hard negatives, out-of-sample prediction, and description-language robustness; all pass with margin. The contribution is not "creativity is compression" but its decidability, discrimination, and corpus: on this account, what makes a move genuinely creative – rather than merely novel – is that it compresses a conflict, with novelty and value as downstream symptoms; whether all creativity is so constituted we state as an explicit conjecture. We claim only the sign of C-1; we judge, not generate. The result is a citable primitive for a broader program.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Quantum Reservoir Computing for Short-Term Power Load Forecasting in Resource-Constrained Energy Systems

Authors:
Mansi Od↗Param Pathak↗Nouhaila Innan↗Muhammad Shafique↗

arXiv:2606.12806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Short-term load forecasting is essential for reliable energy management, but practical deployment on edge devices requires models that remain accurate under limited memory, finite measurement budgets, and hardware noise. This work proposes a hardware-efficient Quantum Reservoir Computing (QRC) framework for energy load forecasting, where a fixed quantum reservoir transforms temporal input windows into high-dimensional features and only a classical Elastic Net readout is trained. To reduce deployment cost, the trained readout is compressed using post-training fixed-point quantization at bit widths from 8 to 2 bits. The framework is evaluated on the Tetouan and Spain energy load datasets under exact statevector simulation, 512-shot finite sampling, and realistic hardware-noise models from IBM FakeTorino and IBM FakeMarrakesh. Results show that 6-bit readout precision preserves full-precision forecasting performance while reducing readout memory by 81.2%. Below this point, degradation becomes dataset dependent, with Tetouan showing stronger sensitivity and Spain degrading more gradually. Hardware-noise validation further shows that the trained readout transfers to noisy reservoir states without retraining. These findings support quantized QRC as a resource-aware forecasting approach for near-term quantum time-series applications.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Cross-Dataset Bloom Question Classification: Supervised Models and Prompted LLMs

Authors:
Abdolali Faraji↗Mohammadreza Molavi↗Zohreh Rasoulkhani↗Mohammadreza Tavakoli↗G\'abor Kismih\'ok↗

Automatic Bloom's taxonomy classification of assessment questions can substantially reduce instructor workload, but labeling is subjective and teacher-dependent. Prior machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches reported strong within-dataset results, yet were rarely evaluated in cross-dataset settings, leaving real-world generalizability unclear; meanwhile, LLM effectiveness for Bloom question classification has not been systematically studied. We evaluated the cross-dataset generalization of existing ML/DL methods and assessed LLMs with multiple prompting strategies on five datasets; the best prompting strategy combined in-context examples with course-specific action verbs. Supervised ML/DL models degraded substantially on unseen datasets, whereas LLMs were more stable, suggesting a robust alternative across diverse educational contexts. Based on the best prompting strategy, we also presented a lightweight UI that supports instructors in automatically classifying large question banks; a usability study indicated low workload and high usability.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RIDGECUT: Learning Graph Partitioning with Rings and Wedges

Authors:
Qize Jiang↗Angelo Zangari↗Linsey Pang↗Alice Gatti↗Mahima Aggarwal↗Giovanna Vantini↗Xiaosong Ma↗Weiwei Sun↗Sourav Medya↗Sanjay Chawla↗

arXiv:2505.13986v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs by learning heuristics that generalize across instances. However, effectively incorporating domain knowledge into RL frameworks for graph partitioning remains challenging, as existing approaches typically rely on unconstrained node-level actions that lead to large action spaces and inefficient exploration. In this paper, we propose RidgeCut, an RL framework that constrains the action space to enforce structure-aware partitioning in the Normalized Cut problem. Using transportation networks as a motivating example, we introduce a novel concept that leverages domain knowledge about urban road topology – where natural partitions often take the form of concentric rings and radial wedges. By transforming the graph into linear or circular representations, our method enables the use of transformer-based policies and efficient learning via Proximal Policy Optimization. The resulting partitions from RidgeCut are not only aligned with expected spatial layouts but also achieve lower normalized cuts compared to existing methods. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world traffic graphs demonstrate that RidgeCut consistently outperforms existing methods while exhibiting strong inductive generalization across graph sizes. Although motivated by road networks, RidgeCut provides a general mechanism for embedding structural priors into RL frameworks for graph partitioning.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Exact Linear Attention

Authors:
Weinuo Ou↗

arXiv:2605.18848v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper introduces Exact Linear Attention (ELA), a mechanism that achieves linear computational complexity for Transformer attention by exploiting the exact decomposition property of kernel functions, thereby eliminating approximation error. We identify and address two key limitations of prior linear attention – gradient explosion and token attention dilution – by imposing kernel constraints that ensure non-negativity, discriminability, and geometric interpretability. Several kernel functions are proposed, including the Hadamard Exp Kernel, Summation Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, and Subtraction Squared Euclidean Distance Kernel, each tailored for specific attention behaviors. Beyond the core attention formulation, the paper presents three engineering innovations: (1) a Hyper-Link structure that replaces traditional residual connections to mitigate gradient degradation; (2) a Memory Lobe module based on bidirectional linear attention, which captures "transformation flow" across layers to implement qualitative memory and an implicit reinforcement learning paradigm; and (3) a routing-score-based bias mechanism for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to improve interpretability and semantic alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that ELA achieves up to 6x faster decoding speed and 75% reduction in KV cache memory usage compared to full attention, while maintaining comparable or superior training performance. The proposed memory module accelerates convergence and enhances generalization. Furthermore, we extend the linear attention principle to vision models, yielding YOLO-LAT, which attains up to 4.3x GPU inference speedup and 7.9x parameter reduction with competitive detection accuracy. These results underline the broad applicability of exact linear attention for scaling Transformer models to ultra-long sequences and efficient visual tasks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Learning QoE from Packet-Level Measurements in Encrypted Video Conferencing Traffic

Authors:
Michael Sidorov↗Ofer Hadar↗

The quality of the user experience has become one of the most important aspects in todays world, as it directly influences individuals willingness to continue using or abandon a product or service. In this context, video conferencing applications (VCAs), which experienced widespread adoption following the COVID-19 pandemic, must deliver excellent performance to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded market. Although content providers (CPs) such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Meet can assess conversation quality by comparing transmitted and received data. The widespread use of end-to-end encryption in VCAs makes quality-of-experience (QoE) evaluation by internet service providers (ISPs) far more challenging. Since ISPs do not have access to the encrypted content, they must rely on passive measurements of unencrypted traffic characteristics on the data path. In this work, we present a simple yet effective QoE prediction framework based on an almost stock convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that uses only the packet sizes extracted from the communication between two participants in a video conferencing (VC) call to predict two QoE metrics: BRISQUE and MOS. The proposed framework is simple, easy to implement, and does not require high-end computational resources, yet it provides superior prediction performance, as shown in our experiments on two custom datasets collected from WhatsApp and Zoom, which achieve substantial improvements over previous models for the QoE prediction task.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Ultra Flash: Scaling Real-Time Streaming Video Generation to High Resolutions

Authors:
Luxury↗Jie Huang↗Zihao Fan↗Xiaoxiao Ma↗Jun-hao Zhuang↗Yuming Li↗Zeyue Xue↗Siming Fu↗Haoran Li↗Mingchen Zhong↗Guohui Zhang↗Shichen Ma↗…

While recent autoregressive video diffusion models achieve remarkable streaming quality, they remain confined to low resolutions (e.g., 480P), leaving efficient, scalable, real-time high-resolution video generation a fundamental open challenge. To bridge this gap, we present Ultra Flash, a cascaded streaming framework capable of real-time high-resolution video generation. Ultra Flash achieves ~30 FPS at 1K resolution and ~18 FPS at 2K resolution on a single GPU through three key contributions: (1) an architecture-preserving T2V-to-TV2V super-resolution training paradigm coupled with an AIGC-oriented data degradation pipeline that effectively preserves the generative capability of the base model, enabling enhanced high-resolution detail when cascaded after mainstream low-resolution generative models; (2) a causal streaming latent upsampler paired with a high-resolution decoder, which enhances spatiotemporal coherence while enabling efficient latent spatial scaling and precise high-resolution decoding with negligible computational overhead; and (3) a cascade high-resolution streaming video generation optimization scheme that first performs hybrid-reward-enhanced sparse causalization and single-step distillation of the super-resolution model, then introduces cascaded streaming self-forcing preference optimization with dynamic cache management, jointly enhancing overall coherence, improving quality, and enabling real-time high-resolution streaming video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ultra Flash reliably produces ultra-high-resolution streaming video while maintaining state-of-the-art visual quality and superior efficiency. Project Page: https://xin1u.github.io/UltraFlash/

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Integrating Reasoning and Generalization in Text-to-SQL via Self-Enhanced Fine-Tuning

Authors:
Feng Lyu↗Jinfeng Cen↗Sijing Duan↗Hao Wu↗Shucheng Li↗Weixu Zhang↗Haolun Wu↗

arXiv:2606.15598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-SQL aims to translate natural language questions into executable SQL queries over structured databases, enabling non-expert users to access data intuitively. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in this task, existing LLM-based approaches often struggle to strike a balance between strong reasoning capabilities and robust generalization. To address these limitations, we propose CoTE-SQL to enhance the LLM-based text-to-SQL generation with three key innovations: (i) self-enhanced reasoning traces distilled from LLMs without human annotation, (ii) structured chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting with modular decomposition and examples retrieval, and (iii) error-aware revision based on SQL execution feedback. Extensive experiments on the Spider and Bird benchmarks demonstrate that CoTE-SQL achieves new state-of-the-art performance among methods built on open-source LLMs with comparable model sizes on Bird (53.39% EX / 59.02 VES) and strong results on Spider (79.60% EX / 77.19 VES), with especially significant gains on complex queries. Results highlight the effectiveness of combining self-enhancement, structured reasoning, and execution-time feedback within an LLM-based framework for text-to-SQL design.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Authors:
Junhui Li↗Jialu Li↗Youshan Zhang↗

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

FlowObject: Flow Steering for Bridging Generative Priors and Reconstruction Fidelity

Authors:
Yuchen Rao↗Xuqian Ren↗Yinyu Nie↗Sayan Deb Sarkar↗Biao Zhang↗Vincent Lepetit↗Friedrich Fraundorfer↗

Recovering complete 3D representations of objects from few casual image captures remains a significant challenge. Recent 3D generative models, particularly those based on Flow-Matching (FM), can synthesize high-quality textured assets; however, they often suffer from ''synthetic bias'' where learned priors override observational evidence, alongside a lack of alignment with the observed instance. Conversely, optimization-based methods like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provide high fidelity on visible surfaces but fail to reason about unobserved geometry. In this paper, we present FlowObject, a framework that reformulates sparse-view 3D reconstruction as a training-free, guided inverse problem. Our approach applies a dual-space guidance strategy to steer the Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) trajectory of a flow-matching model, enabling the completion of unseen regions through learned generative priors while enforcing strict consistency with real-world observations. By integrating a 3DGS refinement stage, FlowObject further bridges the gap between ''synthetic-looking'' generative outputs and photorealistic reconstructions. Comprehensive benchmarks on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that current state-of-the-art methods often struggle to achieve geometric completeness and observational consistency simultaneously, especially under severe occlusions. In contrast, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generative models and optimization-based frameworks in both geometric completeness and view-dependent appearance fidelity.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

BrainG3N: A Dual-Purpose Tokenizer for Controllable 3D Brain MRI Generation

Authors:
Max Van Puyvelde↗Ibrahim Gulluk↗Wim Van Criekinge↗Olivier Gevaert↗

arXiv:2606.19651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three-dimensional (3D) brain MRI is central to clinical neurology and neuro-oncology, where generative models could augment under-represented cohorts, simulate disease trajectories, and support privacy-preserving data sharing. Latent diffusion has been the go-to solution for modeling imaging data, but it places two competing demands on the tokenizer: encoder embeddings must retain the clinical information that downstream tasks act on, and the decoder must reconstruct anatomically faithful volumes. Existing reconstruction-driven tokenizers achieve the second at the expense of the first. To address this, we introduce a fully volumetric masked-autoencoder (MAE) based tokenizer for 3D brain MRI latent diffusion, decoupling encoder and decoder: a frozen 3D MAE encoder produces clinically informative embeddings, while a dedicated CNN decoder reconstructs voxels from a linear projection of those embeddings. We pretrain the encoder on 35,309 volumes from 18 public cohorts spanning four modalities, ten disease categories, and 200+ acquisition sites, and demonstrate its dual utility in two settings. First, on a 23-task linear-probing benchmark, the encoder outperforms or matches SOTA models (i.e., BrainIAC, BrainSegFounder, and MedicalNet) on 21 of 23 tasks. Second, a conditional diffusion transformer (DiT) trained on these clinically informative embeddings supports both conditional generation across six variables and patient-specific longitudinal forecasting. Together these results establish a single 3D brain-MRI embedding space capable of both downstream clinical tasks and controllable generation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Same Evidence, Different Answer: Auditing Order Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors:
Akshay Paruchuri↗Sanmi Koyejo↗Ehsan Adeli↗

Standard benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) score each item on one canonical ordering and miss whether order-irrelevant shuffling changes the answer, a baseline reliability property called for by emerging AI evaluation guidelines. We introduce Facet-Probe, a five-facet audit (option, evidence-chunk, document-rank, image-set, and mixed-modality ordering) of 18 frontier and open-weight MLLMs. A Bayesian item-response model separates ordering noise from per-facet bias, and a same-ordering control estimates the decoder-stochastic floor for observed flips. We find that none of the 18 MLLMs we audit are order-invariant: screened per-facet panel-mean flip rates span 24-50%. A Gemini same-ordering control at temperature 0 estimates a substantial ordering excess over a same-input decoder-noise floor in verified cells. Capability predicts but does not eliminate flips; the best model still flips on 13.4% of trials. In our Gemini mitigation tests, training-free prompt changes are modality-conditional and do not transfer from text to visual reasoning. These results suggest that prompt-level mitigation alone is unlikely to provide general order robustness, motivating future work on training-time and architectural approaches. We propose cross-ordering flip rate as a standard reporting axis for MLLMs.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-05-29

Structural and dynamic basis of NOD2 tandem CARD association and NOD1/2–RIP2 signaling complexes

Authors:
Jitendra Maharana↗

by Jitendra Maharana, Aritra Bej, Debasish Biswal, Debashis Panda, Arjun Sharma NOD1 and NOD2, founding members of the NOD-like receptor (NLR) family, play a crucial role in host defense against bacterial infections. Recognition of peptidoglycan-derived ligands triggers ATP-dependent oligomerization of the NACHT domain, exposing the CARD domains that recruit the adaptor protein RIP2 via CARD–CARD interactions to activate the NF-κB signaling cascade. Although NOD1/2-RIP2 interactions and RIP2CARD filament assembly are established, the precise interfaces that stabilize hetero–CARD filaments remain poorly defined. Here, we integrate in silico structural modeling with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to elucidate structurally compatible arrangements of NOD1–RIP2 and NOD2–RIP2 hetero–CARD filaments. Our results reveal that NOD1CARD subunits form a structurally compatible homomeric scaffold via canonical (type-I–III) interfaces, accommodating multiple tiers of RIP2CARD rings at both filament termini. Meanwhile, the NOD2 tandem CARDs adopt multiple discrete conformations, reflecting a more intricate structural mechanism. In stable filament conformations, tandem CARDs converge at the type-II interface, with RIP2CARD rings stacking onto CARDa (top-down) and CARDb (bottom-up) interfaces, highlighting the structural role of NOD2CARDb in RIP2-mediated CARD–CARD interaction. In silico mutagenesis, involving charge-reversal and alanine scanning of key interfacial residues, disrupts NOD1–RIP2 and NOD2–RIP2 interactions at both top-down and bottom-up interfaces, leading to rapid interface destabilization within 0.1–0.4 μs of simulation. Together, these results reveal conserved and receptor-specific mechanisms governing NOD1/2–RIP2 CARD–CARD interactions and provide deeper structural and dynamic insights into the complex structural mechanisms for NLR-mediated inflammatory signaling.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Visual Place Recognition in Forests with Depth-Aware Distillation

Authors:
Walter Nedov↗Saimunur Rahman↗Kavindie Katuwandeniya↗David Hall↗Kaushik Roy↗Peyman Moghadam↗

Visual place recognition in natural forest environments remains challenging due to repetitive vegetation, weak structural cues, and significant appearance variation across traversals. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a lightweight depth-aware distillation framework that injects geometric cues into a DINOv2-based place recognition model, while maintaining its pre-trained descriptor space. Evaluated on the recent WildCross benchmark, the proposed approach yields gains over an appearance-only counterpart, providing robustness to appearance variations. These results demonstrate the importance of depth as a strong complementary modality for place recognition in natural environments and identify depth-aware distillation as a promising direction for more robust forest perception.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Chip Paradigm Framework

Authors:
Cai↗Ling Qiao↗Bin Yang↗Fumin Luo↗WeiGui Guo↗GuoRong Zhang↗XueFei Liu↗Fan Xu↗Qinglang Guo↗Bin Wu↗

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.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Binary Tracking for Spatial QA and Navigation with Open Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Dongbin Na↗Chanwoo Kim↗Soonbin Rho↗Giyun Choi↗Gangbok Lee↗Dooyoung Hong↗

arXiv:2606.16902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work addresses spatial question answering for service robots traversing long egocentric routes. Given a query such as "where can I find a dry cleaner on the way back home?", the system returns a metric coordinate that downstream navigation components can act on. Prior Spatial Question Answering approaches leverage retrieval-augmented agents built on closed-source models such as GPT-4o for path exploration. However, robots operating in the real world often cannot reliably depend on online closed-source models due to network instability, communication latency, and deployment cost. It creates a need for open-source based Spatial Question Answering approaches that can run onboard the robot, yet prior research in this direction remains limited. This work proposes BinTrack, a simple yet effective, fully open-source spatial-localization agent that leverages the temporal ordering of a robot's trajectory. BinTrack performs a binary search over the trajectory segments between two anchor landmarks identified from a query. It improves overall accuracy by up to 22.8% over other open-source implementations and even matches the reported closed-source model result on the global category of the SpaceLocQA benchmark, the most challenging setting that has so far required strong reasoning agents such as GPT-4o. Furthermore, its optimized inference strategy consistently yields more than a 1.5x inference speedup over previous approaches. Finally, this work releases GangnamLoop, a novel and practical multi-trip outdoor benchmark collected by deploying a real quadruped robot on public streets with the anonymization policy. It revisits the same locations under different outdoor conditions and pairs the robot's low viewpoint with the human owner's. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/BinaryTracking

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Memory Makes the Difference: Evaluating How Different Memory Roles Shape Conversational Agents

Authors:
Yuxin Wang↗Paul Thomas↗Zhiwei Yu↗Yuan Gao↗Saeed Hassanpour↗Soroush Vosoughi↗Robert Sim↗Nick Craswell↗

Prior research on memory mechanism in RAG-based conversational system has emphasized how memory is stored and retrieved. However, far less is known about how memories with different functional roles influence response quality. Specifically, how they shape an agent's responses under varying conversational contexts and whether they lead to substantively different response behaviors. Existing evaluations in conversational system are also largely reference-based, insufficiently capturing the nuances in responses that may address users' preferences differently. In this work, we probe the impact of different memory types in shaping agents' responses. We present a fine-grained taxonomy of conversational memory, classify retrieved memories into different role types, and design a user-centric evaluation framework that simulates user perspectives. Through comparative experiments on long-term datasets and frontier LLMs, our analysis reveal many differentiated effects of memories: e.g., clarifying memory improves responses' factual accuracy and constraint awareness, making them more correct and personalized; irrelevant memory reduces topic relevance and degrades constraint awareness. Despite the power of frontier LLMs, these findings shed light on how different memory types can be leveraged to produce more personalized responses and inspire further research in this direction.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum walk-based optimisation for capacitated vehicle routing with homogeneous and heterogeneous fleets

Authors:
Edric Matwiejew↗Aidan Smith↗Callum Neill↗Paulo Santos↗Ugo Varetto↗Jingbo Wang↗

arXiv:2606.12856v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) is an appealing candidate for quantum optimisation due to its combinatorial complexity and practical importance. However, the problem's constrained search space poses a challenge for such quantum algorithms. We introduce a quantum walk-based optimisation algorithm (QWOA) for the CVRP with homogeneous or heterogeneous vehicle fleets, addressing this challenge through a continuous-time quantum walk over a product space that coincides with combinatorial structures intrinsic to the CVRP solution space. Relative to the prior QWOA-based formulation, this approach reduces the per-layer gate complexity from $\mathcal{O}(n^{3}\log n)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n^{2}\log n)$ and supports a circuit parameterisation schedule generated by a fixed number of classical parameters. Exact state-vector simulation on instances with up to $n=8$ customers and $K=3$ vehicles demonstrates improved convergence to low-cost solutions using markedly fewer objective function evaluations, with the advantage broadening as problem size increases. These results identify structured product-space walks as a promising tool for optimisation over constrained combinatorial spaces.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

MRMU: A New Paradigm for Mendelian Randomization by Accounting for Measured Covariates and Unmeasured Confounders

Authors:
Hu↗Xiao↗Huang↗Wang↗Zhao↗Yang↗

Mendelian randomization (MR) is a powerful approach for causal inference, however, its reliability is frequently compromised by unadjusted covariates and unmeasured confounders, such as unmeasured pleiotropy and sample structure. To address these challenges, we introduce MRMU, a novel paradigm for the MR framework. Unlike traditional single-variable or multivariable MR methods, MRMU selects instrumental variables only from the exposure of interest and estimates one exposure effect at a time, while jointly accounting for measured covariates and unmeasured confounders. This design improves the reliability of MR analyses. In simulations and real data, MRMU achieved better type I error control, higher statistical power, and more accurate effect estimation than existing MR methods. Applying to coronary artery disease (CAD), MRMU identified robust cardiometabolic risk factors, including LDL-C, APOB, systolic blood pressure, body mass index, and smoking initiation, with consistent evidence across multiple CAD datasets. In contrast, traits such as HDL-C, height, and educational attainment, which were found to be significant by existing MR methods, were no longer supported by MRMU. MRMU further supported blood pressure-related traits, rather than lipid traits, as the more relevant pathway linking urate to CAD. Finally, by integrating large-scale plasma proteomics data, MRMU identified candidate CAD drug targets beyond established HMGCR- and PCSK9-related pathways, highlighting its utility for therapeutic target prioritization.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Geometric obstructions to Lipschitz transport between weighted Hessian $\mathrm{CD}(\kappa,\infty)$ manifolds

Authors:
William Dudarov↗Dan Mikulincer↗

arXiv:2606.11085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct a weighted Riemannian manifold $(\mathbb R^2,g,\mu)$ satisfying $\mathrm{CD}(1/2,\infty)$, the curvature-dimension condition, with the following property: if $\gamma$ denotes a centered Gaussian measure on $\mathbb R^2$, then there is no Lipschitz map $T:(\mathbb R^2,\|\cdot\|) \to (\mathbb R^2,g)$ satisfying $T_\#\gamma=\mu$. Building on this, we prove a Weyl-type asymptotic law for the eigenvalues of the weighted Laplacian $-\Delta_{g,\mu}$ and show that they are asymptotically negligible when compared to the eigenvalues of $-\Delta_{\gamma}$. These results give strong counterexamples to two questions of E. Milman and complement the recent counterexample of Aryan.

Read & Discuss → View Source →