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.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpretable and Verifiable Hardware Generation with LLM-Driven Stepwise Refinement

arXiv:2606.19387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in software development. However, they are susceptible to hallucinations, meaning that they can introduce subtle semantic and logical errors. Due to the high stakes in chip design and manufacturing, hardware engineers are still reluctant to rely on LLMs for register-transfer level (RTL) generation. In this paper, we propose a hardware generation framework that combines the creativity and broad knowledge of LLMs with the explainability and mathematical rigor of formal methods. Specifically, we devise a set of transformation rules that cover various design decisions and hardware features. By iteratively applying these rules, an LLM agent can convert a design specification into an RTL program with guaranteed correctness. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Multi-Domain Feature Fusion Framework for Generalizable Deepfake Detection Across Different Generators

Deepfakes are artificially generated images, audio, or videos that threaten privacy, security, and information integrity. Detecting such content is crucial for countering disinformation, as the latest models generate highly realistic content. While spatial- or frequency-based approaches achieve good detection rates on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)-based generated deepfakes, they often struggle with recent diffusion model-generated images. In particular, existing approaches rarely exploit complementary multi-domain representations or systematically evaluate cross-generator robustness. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-domain deepfake detection framework called SGFF-Net (Spatial-Gradient-Frequency Fusion Network) that integrates spatial, gradient, and DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform)-based frequency representations within a dual residual learning architecture. Experimental results show that the SGFF-Net achieves 98.95\% accuracy in intra-dataset evaluation and improves performance in both cross-model (70.46\%) and cross-paradigm (69.94\%) settings. Incorporating multi-source training and data augmentation further enhances robustness, increasing accuracy from 70.46\% to 79.80\% in cross-model evaluation, from 69\% to 78\% in cross-paradigm evaluation, and from 61.50\% to 75.80\% on real-world data. Unlike single-domain detectors, the SGFF-Net learns complementary forensic cues across spatial, gradient, and wavelet-frequency domains, resulting in greater robustness under cross-generator and cross-paradigm evaluation. The results further show that combining multi-domain representations with data diversity and augmentation substantially improves generalization, providing practical insights for developing more reliable deepfake detection systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ECA: Efficient Continual Alignment for Open-Ended Image-to-Text Generation

Incremental Learning (IL) for Open-ended Image-to-Text Generation (OpenITG) enables models to continuously generate accurate, contextually relevant text for new images while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Unlike prior studies, this paper addresses a more practical scenario in which the predominant category of visual data shifts over time as environments evolve. In this context, we introduce a new notion of continual alignment, which incrementally adapts the alignment module within pre-trained VLMs to preserve high-quality cross-modal representations. Based on this idea, we propose Efficient Continual Alignment (ECA), a novel exemplar-free IL approach for OpenITG. The key challenge is enabling the model to acquire new, task-specific features while minimizing interference with the established alignment without accessing raw data from previous tasks. To address this, ECA employs three core mechanisms: a Mixture of Query (MoQ) module that adapts task-specific query tokens, a Fisher Dynamic Expansion (FeDEx) that dynamically expands model structure based on a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-based metric, and an embedding dictionary with Dictionary Replay (DR) to retain past knowledge. To evaluate ECA's performance, we construct four new IL OpenITG benchmarks that better reflect real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ECA significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting and improves IL performance compared to baseline methods. Code and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/Snowball0823/ECA.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

An Empirical Study on Predictive Maintenance for Component X in Heavy-Duty Scania Trucks

arXiv:2606.12486v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Condition-based Predictive Maintenance (PdM) for truck fleets has gained momentum in recent years. This maintenance strategy aims to minimize unplanned downtimes and reduce costs by monitoring the health status of vehicles and taking proactive action based on their condition. However, the implementation of condition-based PdM systems is challenging due to the large volume of data generated by the trucks, the inherent complexity of detecting failures through sensor data and the difficulties in finding cost-effective trade-offs in the solution's implementation. In this paper, we define and validate a condition-based PdM methodology built on the assumption that the wear-and-tear state of the monitored component can be represented as a monotonically non-decreasing time series. It involves selecting only the most recent observations from the time series and transforming them into a tabular format for classification using machine learning (ML) models designed for tabular data. Our results indicate that the proposed methodology reduces costs on the Scania Component X dataset compared to current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches, while also simplifying the modeling process through AutoML.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Nanostructure modelling with early fault tolerant quantum computers

arXiv:2606.06442v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Semiconductor nanostructures are central to many developing technologies. Notably, double quantum dots are especially important for semiconductor spin-qubit architectures, quantum sensing applications, and quantum-dot solar cells. Accurate modelling is highly desirable but conventional methods can struggle when dynamics involve more than two interacting electrons. In this work, we present a quantum simulation framework capable of addressing multi-electron double quantum dots. We adopt an efficiently scaling 1$^st$ quantised representation of the system and develop algorithms based on both Trotterisation and Qubitisation. Incorporating insights from classical simulations enables us to produce resource estimates that are more realistic than those obtained from theoretical error bounds. Using a standard surface code model with physical noise at $10^{-3}$, our results indicate that the ground-state energy of four electrons in a double quantum dot can be estimated in approximately 22 hours using 226k physical qubits, or an eight-electron system in 3.3 days with 314k qubits (with runtimes falling dramatically when more qubits are available). We anticipate that incorporating recent advances in surface code architectures may reduce these costs significantly further. Our results suggest that early fault-tolerant quantum computers may become valuable tools for designing mature-era quantum technologies.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Smoothness-Based Derandomization of PAC-Bayes Bounds

arXiv:2606.19105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study PAC-Bayes derandomization for smooth loss functions. Our goal is to obtain generalization bounds that hold with high probability for deterministic predictors by exploiting smoothness properties of both the loss and the predictor class. We show that passing from the Gibbs predictor to the deterministic predictor at the posterior mean has a precise cost, given by the generalization gap of the Jensen gap class. We control this class through its Rademacher complexity, leading to bounds for deterministic predictors that involve flatness quantities expressed in terms of parameter Jacobians and Hessians of the score map. The framework applies to both bounded and unbounded smooth loss functions, and we specialize the results to linear predictors and smooth neural networks. Finally, the Jacobian and Hessian quantities appearing in the theory motivate a practical regularizer. For BatchNorm networks, we compute this regularizer with respect to effective BatchNorm weights obtained by folding the BatchNorm transformation into the adjacent affine weights. Experiments on CIFAR-10 illustrate the behavior of this regularizer under different batch sizes.

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

SemanticXR: Low Power and Real-time Queryable Semantic Mapping with an Object-Level Device-Cloud Architecture

Semantic mapping is a core service that enables grounded interactions in emerging Extended Reality (XR) applications such as AI assistants and spatial object search. Deploying this capability on mobile XR devices requires a system that is open-vocabulary, real-time, and low-power. Existing approaches are compute-intensive and assume server-class resources. Cloud offloading offers a practical path, but no existing system splits semantic mapping across the device-cloud boundary or manages its communication, execution, and memory footprint. We present SemanticXR, the first device-cloud system for real-time, open-vocabulary semantic mapping and querying under XR power, bandwidth, and memory constraints. Our key insight is to elevate semantically identifiable objects to first-class units of communication, execution, and memory across the device and server. On the server, object-level parallelism and geometry downsampling improve mapping latency, while object-level depth-mapping co-design reduces upstream bandwidth. On the device, an object-level sparse local map with incremental updates and update prioritization enables network-robust querying with bounded memory and downstream bandwidth. Object-level configurable resource usage vs. quality trade-offs let applications and the system adapt mapping to application requirements and operating conditions, respectively. Against a device-cloud baseline with the same perception models, object-level organization improves server-side mapping latency by 2.2X at equal semantic quality. Depth-mapping co-design maintains upstream bandwidth under 2.5 Mbps. On the device, SemanticXR sustains sub-100 ms query latency for up to 10,000 objects even under network drops, supports tens of thousands of objects within 500 MB, and scales downstream bandwidth with map changes, not total scene size. The system adds only 2% device power during normal operation.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

EEG-FM-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for the Systematic Evaluation and Diagnostic Analyses of EEG Foundation Models

arXiv:2508.17742v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electroencephalography foundation models (EEG-FMs) have advanced brain signal analysis, but the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks impedes model comparison and scientific progress. Current evaluations rely on inconsistent protocols that render cross-model comparisons unreliable, while a lack of diagnostic analyses obscures the internal mechanisms driving transfer efficiency and scaling behaviors. To address this, we introduce EEG-FM-Bench, a unified system for the standardized evaluation of EEG-FMs. The benchmark integrates 14 datasets across 10 paradigms and incorporates diverse experimental settings, including multiple fine-tuning strategies, task organizations, and classifier configurations, supported by tools for gradient and representation analysis. Our experiments and analysis reveal several critical insights: (1) multi-task learning often acts as a useful regularizer that mitigates overfitting in data-scarce EEG contexts, although negative transfer can arise under specific task paradigms; (2) pre-training efficiency is currently limited by gradient conflicts between reconstruction objectives and downstream tasks; (3) under released checkpoints and a matched downstream protocol, model or data scale alone does not fully explain transfer performance, while objective alignment, adaptation compatibility, and EEG-specific design appear to be important factors. This benchmark enables fair comparison and reproducible analysis, providing a step toward fairer comparison and more interpretable analysis of EEG-FMs. Code is available at https://github.com/xw1216/EEG-FM-Bench.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Explainable deep learning improves human mental models of self-driving cars

arXiv:2411.18714v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-driving cars increasingly rely on deep neural networks to achieve human-like driving. The opacity of such black-box planners makes it challenging to accurately anticipate when they will fail, with potentially catastrophic consequences. While research into interpreting these systems has surged, most of it is confined to simulations or toy setups due to the difficulty of real-world deployment, leaving the practical utility of such techniques unknown. Here, we introduce the Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net), a method for faithfully explaining the behavior of machine-learning-based planners that causally grounds their reasoning in human-interpretable concepts without sacrificing performance. We deploy CW-Net on a real self-driving car and show that the resulting explanations improve the human driver's mental model of the vehicle, allowing them to better predict its behavior, particularly in surprising situations. This demonstrates that explainable deep learning integrated into self-driving cars can be both understandable and useful in a realistic deployment setting. We anticipate our method could be applied to other safety-critical systems, such as autonomous drones and robotic surgeons, as well as to other architectures, such as end-to-end learning systems and vision-language-action models. Overall, our study establishes a deployment-validated pathway to interpretability for autonomous agents, which could help make them more transparent and safe.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

iTRIALSPACE: Programmable Virtual Lesion Trials for Controlled Evaluation of Lung CT Models

We introduce iTRIALSPACE, a programmable evaluation framework for controlled assessment of lung CT models. Standard benchmarks are static retrospective collections that entangle lesion size, lobe prevalence, anatomy, and acquisition context, making it difficult to determine what structurally drives model accuracy. iTRIALSPACE addresses this limitation by composing real clinical CTs and lesion profiles into controlled virtual lesion trials through a four-stage pipeline: multidataset nodule profiling, explicit trial specification, anatomy-aware mask insertion, and ControlNet-conditioned CT synthesis. The framework is built on a unified 54-attribute nodule-profile dataset spanning 13,140 annotated nodules from seven public CT sources and instantiated as 13 trial modes. We evaluate iTRIALSPACE in a 55,469-sample Virtual Lesion Study spanning three medical VLMs, four spatialguidance conditions, and three clinical tasks. Across all 13 modes, the synthetic substrate remains within the real-to-real FID baseline, and synthetic performance rankings transfer strongly to real clinical data ($\rho$ = 0.93, p < 10$^{-15}$). Controlled trial modes expose findings unavailable to fixed-distribution benchmarks, including shortcut-driven size prediction collapse under lobe-equalized sampling and hostto-donor variance ratios of 8.9x and 3.3x in twin-cross analysis. These results position iTRIALSPACE as an auditable evaluation infrastructure for controlled, falsifiable testing beyond static retrospective benchmarks.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

ChiKhaPo: A Large-Scale Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Lexical Comprehension and Generation in Large Language Models

Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are largely restricted to high- or mid-resource languages, and often evaluate performance on higher-order tasks in reasoning and generation. However, plenty of evidence points to the fact that LLMs lack basic linguistic competence in the vast majority of the world's 3800+ written languages. We introduce ChiKhaPo, consisting of 8 subtasks of varying difficulty designed to evaluate the lexical comprehension and generation abilities of generative models. ChiKhaPo draws on existing lexicons, monolingual data, and bitext, and provides coverage for 2700+ languages for 2 subtasks, surpassing any existing benchmark in terms of language coverage. We further show that 6 SOTA models struggle on our benchmark, and discuss the factors contributing to performance scores, including language family, language resourcedness, task, and comprehension versus generation directions. With ChiKhaPo, we hope to enable and encourage the massively multilingual benchmarking of LLMs.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

EventVLA: Event-Driven Visual Evidence Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies

Memory remains a critical bottleneck for long-horizon robotic manipulation, as standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often fail when task-relevant cues become occluded or unobservable over time. While existing memory-augmented methods utilize historical context, they either suffer from severe information bottlenecks, incur high latency via decoupled dual systems, or rely on unselective buffers that accumulate massive visual redundancies. To address these limitations, we introduce EventVLA, an end-to-end framework founded on the concept of sparse visual evidence memory that comprises two core components: foundational visual anchors to retain initial and short-term contexts, and a dynamic Keyframe Evidence Memory (KEM) module. Specifically, KEM directly predicts future keyframe probabilities from the VLA's latent embeddings to autonomously capture and store sparse, task-critical visual events. This foresight-driven mechanism empowers the policy to dynamically evaluate the future causal utility of current observations, preserving transient visual evidence before it becomes unobservable. Furthermore, we propose RoboTwin-MeM, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate non-Markovian manipulation tasks with interactive visual evidence. Extensive evaluations show that across 17 memory-requiring simulation tasks and 4 real-world bimanual tasks, EventVLA achieves an average success rate improvement of +40% over state-of-the-art memory-augmented VLAs.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Navigating the Safety-Fidelity Trade-off: Massive-Variate Time Series Forecasting for Power Systems via Probabilistic Scenarios

arXiv:2606.13338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Probabilistic forecasting models are increasingly deployed on multivariate systems with distinct channel physics and operational constraints, but existing benchmarks evaluate neither property at scale. Public canonical multivariate benchmarks cap out at 2,000 channels, while power-system benchmarks either lack temporal structure or probabilistic evaluation. We introduce PowerPhase, a probabilistic forecasting benchmark built on six transmission grids ranging from 2,000 to 36,964 jointly forecasted channels, more than an order of magnitude beyond popular canonical multivariate benchmarks. Each target trajectory is the output of an AC power-flow solve, and PowerPhase ships with constraint-aware metrics, including Safety_mBrier, NECV, and CVaR-alpha, that complement CRPS and Distortion. Across eight baselines and three seeds, distributional accuracy and constraint satisfaction rank models differently, a trade-off we term safety-fidelity. We further propose PowerForge, a scenario-based quantile forecaster with type-specific decoding heads and a causal bridge between variable groups, which achieves the best average rank on every grid.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

OneFocus: Enabling Real-World X-ray Security Screening with a Unified Vision-Language Model

X-ray contraband detection is critical for security in large-scale logistics and transportation, yet conventional detectors struggle to adapt to emerging contraband types and lack fundamental visual understanding. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer strong generalization but are hindered by the scarcity of high-quality X-ray image-caption data. To bridge this critical gap, we present MMXray, a meticulously curated benchmark of 52,124 image-caption pairs spanning 28 fine-grained classes of X-ray contraband. To enrich MMXray with realistic occlusion patterns, we further introduce CleanDET, a dedicated synthesis dataset containing clean foreground contraband images from 28 categories and background images with diverse density levels, together with AnyContraSyn, a controllable synthesis method designed to operate on CleanDET. We also develop OnePipe, an extensible pipeline for systematic data curation. Built on MMXray, we propose OneFocus, a unified VLM that supports four core tasks: visual question answering, contraband localization, classification, and image understanding. OneFocus achieves state-of-the-art performance in X-ray contraband understanding and demonstrates robust cross-domain generalization, establishing a strong vision-language baseline for security screening.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Generalisable tissue-wide molecular reconstruction from histology

Spatial transcriptomics technologies measure gene expression within intact tissues but remain difficult to scale across large tissue sections and patient cohorts. Consequently, many studies rely on tissue microarrays (TMAs) or sparse spatial profiling designs, where molecular measurements are available for only limited tissue regions and are often generated using heterogeneous gene panels. Existing H&E to spatial gene expression prediction methods remain challenged by sparse molecular measurements, partially overlapping gene panels and tissue-wide reconstruction across heterogeneous spatial datasets. Here, we present GHIST+, a framework for tissue-wide reconstruction of single-cell molecular states from H&E histology. GHIST+ integrates cellular morphology, local tissue context and shared tissue representations to extend sparse molecular measurements into tissue-wide molecular maps across heterogeneous spatial datasets. Across multiple cancer types and GTEx breast tissues, GHIST+ reconstructs biologically meaningful tissue-wide molecular organisation from sparse TMA-derived measurements while preserving spatial tissue structure, cell-type organisation and age-associated tissue states across cancer and non-cancer settings. GHIST+ establishes a scalable framework for transforming sparse spatial profiling experiments into tissue-wide molecular maps, enabling cohort-scale molecular reconstruction from routine histology under heterogeneous spatial transcriptomic settings.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Risk beliefs, intensive digital information and demand for a new preventative health product in public clinics: Evidence from an experiment in Zimbabwe.

Demand for preventative health care is weak in low-income settings. In a field experiment in a low-income, high-risk setting, we evaluated whether demand for a new bio-medical preventative health product, offered free at public health clinics, responds to digital feedback-based intensive information on health risks and benefits of prevention along with a clinic referral enabling access to the product. In our sample of women aged 18-24 years, we find a large correction in risk beliefs sustained six months after the intervention. Against a background of very low baseline usage, within six months we find a 5.8 percentage point increase in take up of the prevention method, a level of uptake which is very large relative to the control group. Reassuringly, there is no meaningful difference in up-take amongst baseline high- risk and low-risk individuals.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Tail-Respecting Splitting Numerical Scheme for Lévy-Driven SDEs With Superlinear Drifts

arXiv:2504.07255v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present an explicit numerical approximation scheme, denoted by $\{X^n\}$, for the effective simulation of solutions $X$ to a multivariate stochastic differential equation (SDE) with a superlinearly growing $\kappa$-dissipative drift, where $\kappa>1$, driven by a multiplicative heavy-tailed Lévy process that has a finite $p$-th moment, with $p>0$. We show that the strong $L^{p_X}$-convergence $\sup_{t\in[0,T]}\mathbf E \|X^n_t-X_t\|^{p_X}=\mathcal O (h_n^{\gamma})$ holds for any $p_X\in (0,p+\kappa-1)$, which is exactly the range where the $p_X$-moment of the solution is known to be finite. Additionally, for any $p_X\in (0,p)$ we establish strong uniform convergence: $\mathbf E\sup_{t\in[0,T]} \|X^n_t-X_t\|^{p_X}=\mathcal{O} ( h_n^{\delta} )$. In both cases we determine the convergence rates $\gamma$ and $\delta$. In the special case of SDEs driven solely by a Brownian motion, our numerical scheme preserves super-exponential moments of the solution. The scheme $\{X^n\}$ is realized as a combination of a well-known Euler method with a Lie-Trotter type splitting technique.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Variational autoencoders with latent high-dimensional steady geometric flows for dynamics

Authors:

arXiv:2410.10137v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop Riemannian approaches to variational autoencoders (VAEs) for PDE-type ambient data with regularizing geometric latent dynamics, which we refer to as VAE-DLM, or VAEs with dynamical latent manifolds. We redevelop the VAE framework such that manifold geometries, subject to our geometric flow, embedded in Euclidean space are learned in the intermediary latent space developed by encoders and decoders. By tailoring the geometric flow in which the latent space evolves, we induce latent geometric properties of our choosing, which are reflected in empirical performance. We reformulate the traditional evidence lower bound (ELBO) loss with a considerate choice of prior. We develop a linear geometric flow with a steady-state regularizing term. This flow requires only automatic differentiation of one time derivative, and can be solved in moderately high dimensions in a physics-informed approach, allowing more expressive latent representations. We discuss how this flow can be formulated as a gradient flow, and maintains entropy away from metric singularity. This, along with an eigenvalue penalization condition, helps ensure the manifold is sufficiently large in measure, nondegenerate, and a canonical geometry, which contribute to a robust representation. Our methods focus on the modified multi-layer perceptron architecture with tanh activations for the manifold encoder-decoder. We demonstrate, on our datasets of interest, our methods perform at least as well as the traditional VAE, and oftentimes better. Our methods can outperform this and a VAE endowed with our proposed architecture, frequently reducing out-of-distribution (OOD) error between 15% to 35% on select datasets. We highlight our method on ambient PDEs whose solutions maintain minimal variation in late times. We provide empirical justification towards how we can improve robust learning for external dynamics with VAEs.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

In silico characterization of lysis and host-recognition modules in Staphylococcus aureus bacteriophage genomes

Background/aim: Antimicrobial resistance in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) requires precision non-antibiotic therapeutics, yet phage lytic efficacy is poorly predicted by phenotypic assays, as shown by paradoxical biofilm responses. This study characterized the genomic architecture of lytic S. aureus bacteriophages, focusing on the conservation of the lysis module and the variability of host-recognition modules, to provide a rational basis for phage candidate selection. Materials and methods: Twenty-two complete S. aureus phage genomes were retrieved from NCBI GenBank. Genomic features were extracted with custom Biopython scripts. Lysis (endolysin, holin) and host-recognition (tail fiber/receptor-binding protein) modules were annotated and validated by InterPro domain analysis, with disrupted endolysins resolved by tBLASTn. Phylogeny was reconstructed from large terminase subunit (TerL) sequences using maximum likelihood. Results: Genome size spanned three classes, from 17.5 to 148.6 kb. The LysK-type endolysin (CHAP, Amidase, SH3b) was highly conserved, whereas tail fiber/RBP genes were detected in only 14 of 22 phages. Domain analysis reclassified two proteins annotated as endolysins as virion-associated peptidoglycan hydrolases, and identified two independent mechanisms, HNH endonuclease insertion and intron splitting, that interrupt lysis-module genes and confound automated annotation. Maximum likelihood analysis recovered a strongly supported, highly conserved core clade with EW and SA13 as divergent lineages. Conclusion: Lysis modules are conserved whereas host-recognition modules are variable, indicating that host recognition rather than the lytic enzyme is the principal determinant of host range and the more rational target for phage selection and engineering.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Beyond Native Success: Auditing Deployment-Interface Exposure of CLIP Backdoors

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training models are widely reused across downstream interfaces, including feature extraction, retrieval, reranking, and selection. Existing CLIP backdoor, however, usually validate attacks on a small attack-native task, leaving unclear whether the same poisoned checkpoint remains exposed, weakens, or becomes not applicable when reused through other interfaces. We introduce DIFE, a Deployment-Interface Footprint Evaluation framework that audits backdoored CLIP checkpoints across deployment interfaces. DIFE makes various evaluations comparable by specifying each interface's component readout, trigger channel, target event, reference condition, and metric. DIFE also introduces effective-footprint diagnosis to identify the reusable CLIP component or component combination that carries exposure and explains where risk transfers. Auditing reproduced CLIP backdoors with DIFE reveals a structured landscape: native success is not a checkpoint-level risk certificate, exposure follows component footprints, text-side poisoning does not yield textual-encoder control, and some coupled attacks remain mechanism-bound. This audit reveals a import gapin existing CLIP backdoors: a textual encoder that itself becomes a reusable carrier of adversarial behavior. We therefore introduce BadTextTower to fill this gap. BadTextTower produces strong text-conditioned retrieval, reranking, and selection exposure while leaving visual-only reuse nearly clean.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Longest weakly increasing subsequences of discrete random walks on the integers with heavy tailed distribution of increments

arXiv:2603.29047v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the behavior of the length of the longest weakly increasing subsequences (weak LIS) of $n$-step random walks with nonzero integer increments $k = \pm 1, \pm 2, \dots$ given by a symmetric heavy tailed mass distribution proportional to $|k|^{-1-\alpha}$ for several values of the real parameter $\alpha > 0$ together with that of the simple random walk ($k=\pm 1$), to which the $n$-step heavy tailed walks reduce when $\alpha$ grows large enough that step jumps beyond $\pm 1$ become essentially absent on the scale of $n$. By means of exploratory fits, weighted nonlinear least squares, and nested-model comparisons, we found that the sample average length $\langle{L_{n}}\rangle$ scales like $\langle{L_{n}}\rangle \sim \sqrt{n}\log{n}$ when the distribution of increments has finite variance ($\alpha > 2$) and $\langle{L_{n}}\rangle \sim n^{\theta}$ with a varying exponent $\theta > 0.5$ when the variance is infinite ($\alpha \leq 2$). Distributional diagnostics indicate that the bulk of the $L_{n}$ distribution is very well-approximated by a lognormal model, though systematic deviations are observed in the tails. Our results corroborate and expand upon previous results for the LIS of other types of heavy-tailed random walks and raise a conjecture as to whether the distribution of $L_{n}$ is given, or can be effectively described, by a lognormal distribution.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Probe-and-Refine Tuning of Repository Guidance for Coding Agents

arXiv:2606.20512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based coding agents need higher-level operational knowledge about a repository (which files house which subsystems, how to run the test suite, which workflows have historically led to wrong fixes) that does not exist in the code itself. Engineers typically maintain \texttt{AGENTS.md} files to supply this context as instructions for coding agents, but whether they help is contested: recent studies disagree on whether LLM-generated guidance improves or harms agent performance. In this paper we show that how the guidance is produced is the decisive variable, and introduce probe-and-refine tuning: a procedure that uses synthetic bug-fix probes to iteratively diagnose and patch a repository's guidance file through single-shot LLM calls, with no agent loop or tool use during tuning. On SWE-bench Verified across four independent trials with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at 200 steps, probe-and-refine achieves 33.0\,\% mean resolve rate vs.\ 28.3\,\% for the static knowledge base used to initialize it and 25.5\,\% for an unguided baseline ($p < 0.001$ for both probe-and-refine contrasts). The improvement comes from coverage rather than precision: refined guidance produces evaluable patches for 14.5 percentage points (pp) more instances while per-patch precision remains statistically constant ($\sim$59\,\%, $p = 0.119$), showing that improved guidance helps agents reach the correct file rather than improving the quality of the changes they make. Further, a step-budget experiment shows that guidance is what lets the agent use a larger step budget productively, and a cross-model experiment with NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B finds that the tuning loop degrades when the model cannot generate sufficiently diagnostic output, though per-patch precision remains constant even then.

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

Positional Encoding in the Context of Memristor-Based Analog Computation for Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv:2606.13379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memristors provide a new chance for resource-efficient computation of neural models for natural language processing by enabling analog execution of vector-matrix-multiplication. Yet, computations on these devices are currently subject to larger distortion, both in weight programming and execution. In this work, we identify large output values of transformed positional encodings to cause major degradation within analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) as part of memristor-based computation. By adjusting the proportion of weight and precision bits of the ADC of specific memristor layers, we reduce the degradation of the execution by ~50% relative, while keeping the estimated energy consumption stable. Additionally, we investigate scenarios where the ADC cannot be modified. In that case the degradation can be reduced by ~30% relative after removing encoding-related linear transformations.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Useful is Causal Invariance for Domain Adaptation in Finite-Sample Settings?

arXiv:2606.12680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models often degrade when they are deployed on a target distribution that differs from the source distributions they were trained on. Recent work in causality-based domain generalization has shown how shared causal structure between domains can induce invariant predictors, e.g., models on a subset of features which have stable risk across structured domain shifts. However, the extent to which such population-level causal invariances can lead to gains in finite-sample settings remains underexplored. In particular, in practice we often have access to a few labeled target samples, a setting called supervised domain adaptation (sDA). In this paper, we explore when (full or partial) causal knowledge can provably improve supervised domain adaptation. As a first step, we study linear regression, where full or partial causal knowledge specifies a collection of invariant or possibly invariant feature subsets, each yielding a source-trained candidate predictor. We derive matching upper and lower bounds showing that finite-sample gains are governed by the target-risk margins separating the candidates, together with the finite-source estimation error. When these margins are sufficiently large relative to $n_Q$, an adaptive aggregation procedure can match the best candidate predictor while avoiding negative transfer relative to target-only learning. On the other hand, when the margins are too small, no algorithm can reliably exploit the candidate collection to obtain faster finite-sample rates. We further connect these margins to structural shift magnitude in linear SCMs and validate the theory on real-world causal benchmarks.