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

MODE-RAG: Manifold Outlier Diagnosis and Energy-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation Evaluation

Authors:
Zehang Wei↗Jiaxin Dai↗Jiamin Yan↗Xiang Xiang↗

While Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (M-RAG) enhances Large Vision-Language Models, it remains highly susceptible to cross-modal hallucinations, causal fabrications, and sycophancy. Furthermore, existing mitigation pipelines often face an intervention paradox: static rules tend to unnecessarily disrupt accurate generations, whereas leaving the multi-modal reasoning completely unguided allows existing mismatches to cascade into severe logical fabrications. To quantify and mitigate these hallucinations, we propose a Multi-Agent system, MODE-RAG, driven by Variational Free Energy (VFE) and internal attention states to dynamically gate interventions. High-risk queries are routed to five stage-specific agents, integrating Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for rigorous causal derivation and logit perturbations to penalize sycophancy. Dedicated Correction and Overseer agents ensure formatting stability and perform post-hoc factual verification. To objectively evaluate our approach, we introduce ModeVent, a challenging subset derived from the MultiVent dataset. Extensive experiments indicate that our system effectively reduces hallucination rates and logical fabrication, significantly improving the robustness of M-RAG systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Statistical and Numerical Convergence in Stochastic Equilibrium

Authors:
David Staines↗

arXiv:2606.07469v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper sets out the most general computational and econometric implications of the rigorous stochastic equilibrium theory from SELCKE (Staines (2024a)) arXiv:2312.16214. The analytical backbone is the discovery that the system converges geometrically to long-run equilibrium, at a rate given by the greater of the eigenvalue or inverse eigenvalue (from outside) closest to the unit circle and the maximum shock persistence. High-order shocks converge faster. I develop a simulation procedure to test, with asymptotic power, whether stochastic equilibrium exists for a particular model. The fundamental approximation result asserts that, whatever the order of expansion or loss function, the stochastic steady state delivers the most accurate perturbation solution. I also show that super-consistent parameter estimators $O(1/T)$ arise whenever second-order terms vanish. Besides Calvo, I study stochastic equilibrium in two alternative pricing models. Dynamics simplify considerably. I bound the time the impulse response peaks, by the maximum lag in the errors. This lends empirical support to Taylor contracts, although there are issues surrounding unit roots and the strong cost-channel. For menu costs, I demonstrate that the initial price distribution decays away super-exponentially, producing a system equivalent to Calvo with an endogenous reset probability. The impact of idiosyncratic disturbances appears as an additional wedge between actual and efficient output. Blow-up of the objective function at the boundary is proven, with the help of new distributional arguments, so the model meets existing eigenvalue existence conditions for the recursive equilibrium. Along the way, new light is shone on existing theoretical models and statistical procedures.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Context-Aware Optimization of Follow-Up Intervals for Type 2 Diabetes Care Using Markov Decision Processes

Authors:
Parisa Lotfibagha↗Kristen Miller↗William J. Gallagher↗Elizabeth B. Selden↗Muge Capan↗

arXiv:2606.19092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chronic disease management relies on regular patient-provider interactions to follow-up on disease progression and control. For Type 2 Diabetes (T2D), current guidelines prescribe fixed time intervals between subsequent primary care visits for all patients, overlooking heterogeneity in clinical trajectories and patient characteristics. This study introduces a Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDP) model to optimize subpopulation-specific follow-up interval decisions using Electronic Health Record (EHR) data from 22,154 T2D patients across 10 primary care clinics. Contexts are identified by: i) dimensionality reduction of variables representing the individual health trajectories utilizing Principal Component Analysis, and ii) assigning patients to contexts via principal components and additional patient-level features using clustering. Two distinct contexts emerged, representing a lower- and a higher-risk subpopulation. CMDP-derived policies recommend: (i) follow-up within 1 month if lab value at current visit is unmeasured; (ii) up to 3 months for elevated lab values or recent hospitalizations; and (iii) 6 to 12 months for sustained glycemic control, with shorter follow-up intervals for patients in high-risk context. The optimal policies achieved lower expected cumulative cost than benchmarks (e.g., in the higher-comorbidity context, the CMDP policy reduced cost by about 34.8%, and in the lower-comorbidity context by about 6.4%, relative to an American Diabetes Association-like fixed interval follow-up policy. These findings demonstrate how context-aware approaches can inform adaptive follow-up strategies, and have the potential to advance chronic care management in primary care by synthesizing machine learning and probabilistic decision models.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Biopsychosocial determinants of HPV vaccine perception in university students of both sexes in Cucuta, Colombia, 2024: a cross-sectional study

Authors:
ARIAS-SANCHEZ↗Florez↗Pereira↗Caceres-Penaloza↗D. Y↗Dallos Rivera↗L. S↗Nunez-Villamizar↗K. G↗Beltran - Arroyave↗

Colombia has been internationally recognised as a paradigmatic case of vaccine confidence crisis since the 2014 Carmen de Bolivar event, and national HPV vaccination coverage remains far below the World Health Organization 2030 target. Most published evidence focuses on female adolescents and on cervical cancer; the perception of the HPV vaccine in university-age populations of both sexes–and across the broader spectrum of HPV-attributable disease–remains comparatively understudied. We aimed to describe the influence of biopsychosocial determinants on HPV vaccine perception among university students of both sexes in Cucuta, Norte de Santander, Colombia. We conducted a cross-sectional study with a mixed quantitative-qualitative approach in 2024 among four universities (Universidad de Santander, Universidad Francisco de Paula Santander, Universidad de Pamplona and Universidad Libre; combined enrolment 21,033 students). Using convenience sampling stratified by institution, 750 actively enrolled undergraduate students of both sexes (18-60 years) completed a structured online questionnaire adapted from previously validated instruments. The instrument captured sociodemographic information, HPV knowledge and HPV vaccine perception. Data were analysed using Students t-test, one-way analysis of variance, Tukey post-hoc tests, effect sizes and 95% confidence intervals, with a 0.05 significance threshold. Of 750 respondents, 54.2% were women, 61.3% were under 20 years of age, and 75.1% attended public universities. HPV knowledge was high in 39.2%, intermediate in 42.4% and low in 18.4%; women and students aged 26 years or older displayed higher knowledge. Although 91.2% had heard of HPV and 82.5% knew that both sexes could acquire it, recognition of clinical manifestations and complications was uneven: cervical cancer 51.7%, penile cancer 30.5%, vaginal warts 45.9% and warts in the penis, larynx, anus or rectum 34.0%. Vaccine-specific knowledge was low in 77.1%, with men disproportionately represented (85.9% versus 69.5% in women). Overall positive perception of HPV vaccination was 66.6%, slightly higher in women (68.8%) than men (63.9%), in students aged 26 years or older (70.1%) and in students from private universities (68.1% versus 65.9%). Inferential analysis identified sex (Cohens d = -0.357), type of university (d = 0.189) and HPV knowledge (partial eta-squared = 0.096) as the only significant determinants. Age, socioeconomic stratum, age at sexual debut and vaccine-specific knowledge did not reach meaningful significance. HPV vaccine perception was predominantly positive but conditioned by three biopsychosocial determinants, with HPV knowledge as the primary driver. The persistent gender gap reflects historical anchoring of HPV messaging in cervical disease and female-targeted campaigns. Public-health strategies should adopt comprehensive, gender-inclusive educational interventions that explicitly visibilise non-cervical HPV-related cancers and address both sexes from a common evidence base.

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

Frequency-Division Multiplexed CV-QKD System

Authors:
Jaehyeok Han↗Donghyeok Le↗Minseok Ryu↗Syed Assad↗Yong-Su Kim↗Sunghyun Bae↗

arXiv:2603.20718v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a frequency-division multiplexed (FDM) continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) system with enhanced spectral efficiency through optimized channel spacing of low-symbol-rate signals. A four-channel 10-Mbaud FDM-CV-QKD system was experimentally demonstrated using Gaussian modulation, a transmitted local oscillator, and homodyne detection. Despite the inter-channel interference, under a finite-size scenario (m=1.25x10^6), the system achieved a 3.6-fold back-to-back secret key rate gain and outperformed the single-channel frequency-upconverted signal up to 26.8 km.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

MortarBench: Evaluating Mortgage Loan Origination Agents

Authors:
Matthew Toles↗Yunan Lu↗Manav Munjal↗Bojun Liu↗Yuanhao Deng↗Stephanie Selig↗Derek Rindner↗Cheng Li↗Zhou Yu↗

arXiv:2606.19416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Loan origination is the process by which a lender creates a new loan, from application and underwriting through approval and funding. This process serves a critical role in evaluating the eligibility and level of risk posed by an applicant. Recently, firms have begun using mortgage loan agents to augment human loan officers, despite a lack of any public benchmark. To fill this gap, we present MortarBench, a loan origination agent benchmark. MortarBench uses a financial data synthesis and mutation pipeline to generate examples with broad edge case coverage that match real-world distributions and questions. We find that state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) perform poorly, with closed-source models achieving at most 77.1\% exact match accuracy. We also discover systematic biases in LLM perception of foreignness related to non-English names. Noting these weaknesses, we introduce CRIT, a confidence calibration framework. Our method increases accuracy to 80.5\% while improving risk management steering and reducing bias.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Reframing AI Loss of Control: What It Is, How to Have It, How to Lose It

Authors:
Ze Shen Chin↗Maurice Chiodo↗Dennis M\"uller↗Coleman Snell↗

arXiv:2606.12442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: At present, loss of control risks have gained much prominence in public discussion, particularly in relation to AI, with extensive discourse present among academics, frontier labs, and even governments. However, in the existing literature, the concept seems to rest on surprisingly weak foundations, where even those that discuss loss of control extensively do not first establish what control is and what exactly is being lost. Our paper aims to address these gaps. We establish a working definition of control by anchoring it to the "setting and getting of goals". Then, we discuss various aspects of control, built on foundational concepts from related fields like cybernetics, management control, and control theory. This includes who (or what) can be in control, and the things they require to be in control, such as the ability to set goals, having a functional control loop, having requisite variety, and having sufficient goal alignment. Once a framework for control is established, we then discuss how control can be lost, how AIs can contribute to such loss of control, and offer relevant recommendations for how one can maintain control. One interesting consequence of our work is that humanity, as individuals and as groups, can lose varying degrees of control as a result of AI behaviour that is far below the level of superintelligence; the potential for loss of control scenarios (as we define them) already exist, and have existed for a long time.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

ARIA: Adaptive Region-Based Importance Allocation for Conditional Diffusion Distillation

Authors:
Loay Mualem↗Vinh Tong↗Samir Darouich↗Mathias Niepert↗

arXiv:2606.23898v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distilling conditional diffusion models aims to transfer the behavior of a large teacher to a smaller student while preserving alignment across conditioning inputs. Unlike recognition tasks, knowledge distillation in conditional diffusion often struggles to transfer knowledge beyond the training distribution, since the predicted noise strongly depends on the conditioning signal. As a result, effective distillation requires exploring a large conditioning space. In practical settings, this creates a major bottleneck. Paired image-condition data may be limited, and generating synthetic images for every available condition is often computationally infeasible, while the pool of conditions, such as text prompts, can be extremely large. Recent work addresses this issue by switching conditions during training, exposing the student to a broader conditioning space without changing the distillation objective. Yet this raises a complementary question: once a large conditioning corpus is available, how should the training effort be allocated? In this work, we introduce ARIA, a framework that adaptively allocates training effort across coarse regions of the conditioning space. By maintaining online estimates of teacher-student discrepancy at the region level, ARIA focuses updates where misalignment persists while preserving the original distillation objective. Empirically, ARIA improves over RC across most architectures and settings, with the clearest gains observed in unseen and underrepresented regimes. We also provide a theoretical analysis showing that the proposed tracking mechanism follows the evolving discrepancy during training under bounded variance and drift assumptions.

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

VikingMem: A Memory Base Management System for Stateful LLM-based Applications

Authors:
Jiajie Fu↗Junwen Chen↗Mengzhao Wang↗Aoxiang He↗Maojia Sheng↗Xiangyu Ke↗Yifan Zhu↗Yunjun Gao↗

arXiv:2605.29640v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models have revolutionized interactive applications; however, their finite context windows pose a critical data management challenge for maintaining stateful, long-term interactions. Existing memory approaches often rely on simplistic extraction methods that lead to incomplete memories or use rigid, single-purpose memory extraction prompts tailored to a single use case, such as chatbots. Consequently, they lack generalizability and perform poorly across diverse downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Memory Base, a novel data management paradigm for managing the persistent state of long-term interactions. It is characterized by three core principles: selective extraction of high-value memories from raw information streams; inherent statefulness and evolution, where memory content is progressively summarized, corrected, and temporally weighted to prioritize recent interactions; and a generalizable abstraction paradigm designed for robust transferability across diverse applications, including education, recommendation, and agent memory. Building on this foundation, we present VikingMem, an end-to-end Memory Base Management System implemented on the VikingDB vector engine. VikingMem materializes this paradigm through interconnected event and entity abstractions. It features event-centric memory extraction to selectively handle complex information streams, while entities are dynamically updated by events to achieve stateful evolution. Using temporal compression via a topic-wise timeline and time-weighted recall, the system progressively produces high-level summary memories, prioritizes recent items, and compresses and fades older ones. Extensive evaluations on long-term memory benchmarks demonstrate that VikingMem outperformes baselines by up to 30% in memory retrieval effectiveness while maintaining the low latency essential for interactive applications.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Daily briefing: Iron-Age human bones were made into tools before interment

Authors:
Flora Graham↗

Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools. Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Reroute, Don't Remove: Recoverable Visual Token Routing for Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Cheng-Yu Yang↗Shao-Yuan Lo↗Yu-Lun Liu↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) project images into hundreds to thousands of visual tokens, making decoder inference expensive in both attention computation and KV-cache memory. Existing visual-token reduction methods largely follow a rank-and-remove paradigm: they score visual tokens, keep a compact subset, and permanently discard the rest. We show that this irreversible action is fragile because visual-token importance changes across decoder depth; tokens ranked low at one stage may become relevant in later layers, especially for grounding-sensitive queries. We propose Reroute, a training-free plug-in that replaces removal with recoverable routing. At each routing stage, selected vision tokens pass through decoder blocks, while deferred tokens bypass the stage and re-enter the candidate pool at the next routing decision. Reroute reuses existing attention-score ranking rules and stage-wise schedules, preserving the theoretical TFLOPs and KV-cache budget class of the pruning method it augments. Across FastV, PDrop, and Nüwa variants on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen backbones, reroute improves grounding under aggressive token reduction while maintaining general VQA performance. These results suggest that VLM token reduction should not be viewed only as irreversible pruning, but also as recoverable routing. The code can be found here: https://github.com/elmma/mllm-reroute/

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

LLM-Powered Virtual Population for Demand Simulation and Pricing

Authors:
Chengpiao Huang↗Kaizheng Wang↗

We develop an LLM-powered virtual population model that simulates demand for pricing decisions, in settings where products are described by rich unstructured information, such as text descriptions and images, and where decision makers need not only mean-demand predictions but also uncertainty estimates for counterfactual prices. Our model represents exposed customers as draws from a finite mixture of customer personas. For each persona, product, and candidate price, an LLM elicits a persona-level purchase probability using both structured persona information and unstructured product information. These probabilities are aggregated through calibrated mixture weights to form a predictive distribution of aggregate demand. The resulting simulator can evaluate counterfactual prices under various pricing objectives, including expected revenue and risk-aware criteria such as conditional value at risk. We test the framework on an online H&M fashion dataset with product descriptions and images. The calibrated LLM-based simulator achieves the best overall predictive performance among the models considered, and supports sample-efficient pricing decisions. Our framework provides a practical way to use LLMs as demand simulators for products with limited historical demand data but rich product information. By producing a full predictive demand distribution rather than only a point forecast, it enables managers to compare candidate prices, quantify demand uncertainty, and choose prices that target either average-case revenue or risk-aware objectives.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Order Is Not Control

Authors:
Gareth Seneque↗Lap-Hang Ho↗Nafise Erfanian Saeedi↗Jeffrey Molendijk↗Tim Elson↗

AI alignment, interpretability, steering, and neural perturbation studies identify order-inducing objects. We argue that order is not control. Control requires a receiver-gated response law: a denominator-indexed operator mapping material state, action/drive, bath, and receiver state to response displacement, sinks, effort, and basin projection. We identify it across biological, LLM, adapter, and stochastic-operator panels. The laws are local: an intervention can be admitted, saturated, sign-changing, leaky, or overdriven depending on medium, bath, receiver state, action port, and comparator. Control is assigned when finite effort moves a target or outcome-readout class under the same denominator while damage, null/evasive, invalid format, overdrive, and unnecessary effort stay bounded. Mouse ALM, C. elegans, and zebrafish panels provide physical response-operator evidence while excluding coordinate identity and controller conclusions. LLM panels show generated-output response laws: across four material conditions, response vectors are predictable at 72.8-73.7% component-sign accuracy, rising to 84.3-84.8% on nonzero components; held-out observers predict system-effect and target/oracle families at 93.6% and 91.7% accuracy. Constitution-conditioned adapters reshape susceptibility as prepared media, and stochastic-operator panels separate measured opportunity from deployable action policies. This gives a driven-dissipative response-system account at the mesoscopic control level: drives act through prepared media, baths, and receivers, producing admitted movement, impedance, sinks, or overdrive. The evidence supports local admitted control and measurable stochastic response operators, while leaving deployable pre-generation control, hidden/logit causal sufficiency, biological-to-LLM coordinate identity, and literal thermodynamic quantities outside scope.

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

R2D-RL: A RoboCup 2D Soccer Environment for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Haobin Qin↗Baofeng Zhang↗Hidehisa Akiyama↗Keisuke Fujii↗

arXiv:2606.18786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot soccer is a challenging testbed for multi-agent reinforcement learning because it combines partial observability, cooperative and adversarial interaction, sparse rewards, and long-horizon tactical behavior. RoboCup 2D Soccer Simulation (RCSS2D) provides a mature robot-soccer platform, but its competition-oriented server-client architecture is difficult to use directly with modern Python-based MARL workflows. We introduce R2D-RL, a reinforcement learning environment that connects RCSS2D and HELIOS-based player clients to a Python MARL interface through shared-memory communication and cycle-level synchronization. R2D-RL supports full-field and scenario-based training with configurable opponents, Base discrete and Hybrid parameterized action spaces, action masks, expected possession value (EPV)-based reward shaping, and parallel execution. We provide front-goal scenarios and an 11-vs-11 full-field benchmark, together with baseline results.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Long-sought chemical inhibitors of β-arrestin proteins

Authors: Unknown Author

Proteins called β-arrestins regulate signalling through members of the G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) superfamily. Small molecules that bind directly to the β-arrestins and inhibit their activities are the first chemical tools to probe their biology, opening avenues for transducer-targeted, pathway-specific GPCR therapeutics. Three small molecules disrupt the engagement of β-arrestins with G-protein-coupled receptor proteins.

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

OmniBioTwin: A System-of-Twinned-Systems Framework for Health Digital Twins

Authors:
Zhaohui Wang↗Yu Huang↗Jiang Bian↗

arXiv:2606.11264v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Health digital twins (HDTs) promise patient-specific modeling and decision support but current approaches remain structurally fragmented: monolithic models that address a single organ or task lack cross-scale fidelity, while system-level twins lack generalizable architectural frameworks. We propose OmniBioTwin, a System-of-Twinned-Systems (SoTS) framework that organizes HDTs as modular computational entities coupled through explicit interaction operators within a multi-layer network architecture. The framework comprises seven coordinated layers - spanning data integration, autonomous twin modeling, cross-scale coupling, temporal synchronization, and human-in-the-loop decision support. We demonstrate OmniBioTwin by instantiating a multiscale twin for glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) signaling pathways in Alzheimer's disease, illustrating how molecular, cellular, and organ-level twins can be composed and coupled within a unified system.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

A 3D-Printable Dataset for Fair Testing and Comparisons of Tactile Sensors

Authors:
Dexter R. Shepherd↗Nicolas Herzig↗Phil Husbands↗Andrew Philippides↗Chris Johnson↗William Kimbell↗

arXiv:2606.25886v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing texture datasets for tactile sensing primarily consist of sensor readings from a specific sensor interacting with available surfaces/objects rather than describing the textures themselves, limiting fair comparison between tactile sensors and hindering reproducible research. In this work, we introduce a 3D-printable dataset of mathematically defined textures designed to be fabricated reliably across different printers and filament types. The dataset consists of six parametrically generated surface patterns derived from combinations of sine-wave and Fourier-based functions, giving controlled variation in spatial frequency, amplitude, and directional structure. We evaluate the reproducibility of these textures across three popular 3D printers and multiple filament types by measuring variance in images captured using an optical TacTip sensor under controlled contact conditions. Our results show that print quality, particularly peak sharpness and stringing, affects tactile variance, with higher-end printers producing significantly more consistent signatures. Classification experiments using neural networks and PCA-based models further demonstrate that high-quality prints support strong within-printer generalisation, while cross-printer generalisation remains challenging due to geometric inconsistencies. This work establishes the first openly available, physically reproducible 3D-printed texture benchmark, providing a foundation for fair comparison of tactile sensors.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

An Ontology-Guided Multi-Anchor Graph Retrieval Framework for Traffic Legal Liability Determination

Authors:
Xu Li↗Shuqi Tian↗Xun Han↗Kuncheng Zhao↗Xinyi Li↗

Traffic law liability determination is critical for assigning legal penalties, requiring the simultaneous identification of interdependent statutory provisions across multiple legal dimensions. However, existing retrieval-augmented generation methods suffer from a multi-dimensional retrieval bottleneck: single axis architectures compress complex legal queries into a single pathway, causing interdependent statutory dimensions to be overlooked. To address this, we propose OMAGR, an ontology-guided framework that decomposes queries into ontology-aligned anchors and executes parallel graph retrieval across each dimension, ensuring independent retrieval across dimensions before fusion. To evaluate the proposed method, we created the TrafficLaw-QA dataset, an expert-validated benchmark dataset containing 200 questions and 527 legal provisions. Results show that TrafficOmni-RAG outperforms baselines on Context Precision and Faithfulness metrics. The findings demonstrate that parallel multi-anchor retrieval effectively resolves the multi-dimensional retrieval bottleneck, offering a promising direction for traffic law liability determination research.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarks

Authors:
Kexin Ding↗Yang Zhou↗Can Jin↗Feng Tong↗Mu Zhou↗Dimitris N. Metaxas↗

The growth of agent skills has transformed how agentic systems are built, evaluated, and deployed. As skill libraries continue to scale, rigorous evaluation becomes critical to ensuring their utility, quality, and safety in real-world applications. Consequently, the field is undergoing an emerging paradigm shift from isolated skill creation to automated, evaluation-driven skill evolution. In this survey, we systematically examine the landscape of skill evolution and evaluation beyond foundational skill creation. We categorize evolution into four distinct paradigms, spanning execution feedback, trajectory distillation, compression, and reinforcement learning, showing how each element contributes to improving skill utility and reliability. We also provide an analysis of six skill-centric benchmark categories, identifying structural gaps in benchmark coverage, trade-offs, and metric richness to advance skill research. Finally, we identify open directions for building skill ecosystems that are generalizable, efficient, and verifiably safe. The project URL is https://github.com/Cassie07/AgentSkill_Survey

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Fine-tuning Multi-modal LLMs with ART: Art-based Reinforcement Training

Authors:
Michal Chudoba↗Sergey Alyaev↗Petra Galuscakova↗Tomasz Wiktorski↗

There are two main Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs). While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) introduces additional weights between the LLM layers, Soft Prompting introduces additional fine-tuning-specific raw tokens to an LLM input. However, both require modification to the computational graphs of precompiled, preoptimized LLMs. As a result, neither is fully supported in high-throughput engines like vLLM. We propose fine-tuning with ART (Art-based Reinforcement Training). The method injects information into a frozen Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) by optimizing only its raw visual input, thus enabling the soft-token approach on pre-compiled computational graphs. It relies on backpropagation of gradients back into a plain pixel array and thus supports any fine-tuning objective. Moreover, the optimized visual input can be stylized as task-relevant computational artworks. The approach's effectiveness is confirmed for different sizes of a popular open Qwen architecture and for several textual benchmarks. Specifically, ART reaches accuracy competitive with LoRA across mathematics and structured-tool-use benchmarks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

A Self Consistency Based Reranking for Narrative Question Answering

Authors:
Molham Mohamed↗Ali Hamdi↗

Narrative question answering (NQA) is a challenging task in natural language processing that requires models to understand long textual contexts, capture relationships across events, and generate coherent responses. Despite recent advances in pretrained language models, most existing approaches rely on a single decoding output during inference, making them sensitive to generation variability and often resulting in incomplete or inconsistent answers .To address this limitation, we propose a self-ensemble Self-Consistency-Based reranking framework for narrative question answering. The proposed method generates multiple candidate answers for each story-question pair and selects the final answer based on semantic agreement among the generated responses. This allows the model to explore diverse answer formulations while improving robustness through consensus-based selection without requiring modifications to the underlying architecture .The framework combines pretrained and fine-tuned language generation with multi-answer inference and similarity-based reranking. We evaluate the proposed approach on the NarrativeQA dataset using multiple models, including FLAN-T5 (Base and Small) and Pegasus-Large, under both baseline and fine-tuned settings .Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves performance across all models. In particular, FLAN-T5-Base achieves the best overall performance, improving from 82.32% to 86.66% (+4.34%) when combined with self-ensemble inference. Additionally, the largest improvement is observed with Pegasus-Large, which increases from 72.50% to 87.07% (+14.57%), highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Keeping the Evidence Chain: Semantic Evidence Allocation for Training-Free Token Pruning in Video Temporal Grounding

Authors:
Jiaqi Li↗Shuntian Zheng↗Yixian Shen↗Jia-Hong Huang↗Xiaoman Lu↗Minzhe Ni↗Yu Guan↗

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) localizes the temporal boundaries of query-relevant moments in long, untrimmed videos, making video-language-model prohibitively expensive. While recent training-free token pruning has shown success in video question answering, naively applying these objectives to VTG causes drastic degradation, as VTG crucially depends on boundary-sensitive evidence and cross-frame reasoning chains. We therefore identify two VTG-specific pruning principles: evidence retention, which keeps query-critical patches especially around event boundaries, and connectivity strength, which preserves cross-frame connectivity for long-range evidence aggregation. Building on these insights, we propose SemVID, a training-free pruning framework that constructs a compact yet coherent token subset with complementary semantic roles. SemVID first allocates per-frame budgets by balancing query relevance and inter-frame variation to avoid over-pruned segments, and then selects three types of tokens: object tokens for diverse query-critical evidence, motion tokens to capture meaningful transitions and serve as cross-frame relays, and context tokens for scene continuity. Extensive experiments show that SemVID achieves a strong accuracy-efficiency trade-off, retaining up to 95.4% mIoU with only 12.5% visual tokens and delivering up to a 5.8x prefill speedup, consistently outperforming prior methods under the same budgets. Our code is available at https://github.com/JiaqiLi404/SemVID

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Comparative impacts and cost-effectiveness of tuberculosis systematic screening strategies in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru: A mathematical modeling study

Authors:
Yiran E. Liu↗

by Yiran E. Liu, José Victor Bortolotto Bampi, Ronan F. Arthur, Argita D. Salindri, Caroline Busatto, Pedro Avedillo Jiménez, Daniele Maria Pelissari, Fernanda Dockhorn Costa Johansen, Robert Arana-Narvaez, Alvaro Fernando Moreno Roca, Wilfredo Santos Solís Tupes, Esther Mori Jiu, Christian Alfredo Moreno Roca, Erika Albertina Abregú Contreras, Valentina Antonieta Alarcón Guizado, Julián Trujillo Trujillo, Belkys Marcelino, Mónica Alonso Gonzalez, Mayra Cecilia Córdova Ayllon, Ted Cohen, Moises A. Huaman, Jeremy D. Goldhaber-Fiebert, Julio Croda, Jason R. Andrews Background Incarceration is a leading driver of tuberculosis in Latin America. Systematic screening in prisons may reduce tuberculosis burden, but optimal strategies and cost-effectiveness remain uncertain. We examined the population-wide health impacts and cost-effectiveness of systematic screening in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, comparing different timepoints, frequencies, and screening algorithms. Methods and findings Using dynamic transmission models calibrated to Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, we simulated annual or biannual (twice-yearly) prison-wide screening, alone or combined with entry and exit screening from 2026 to 2035. We evaluated four algorithms: (1) symptom screening, (2) chest X-ray with computer-aided detection (CXR-CAD), (3) symptoms and CXR-CAD (follow-up testing if either is positive), and (4) GeneXpert Ultra (Xpert) with pooled sputum. Individuals screening positive then received individual Xpert. We projected impacts on within-prison and population-level tuberculosis incidence in 2035, along with discounted costs (2023 US dollars) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Model projections showed that combined entry, exit, and biannual screening with CXR-CAD was highly impactful and cost-effective across countries, reducing tuberculosis incidence by 61%–87% in prisons and 18%–28% population-wide. Compared to only biannual CXR-CAD (the next best strategy), the incremental cost per DALY averted of adding entry and exit screening was $2,984 (Brazil), $2,925 (Colombia), and $645 (Peru). Adding symptom screening to CXR-CAD marginally increased benefit and was only cost-effective in Peru’s higher-incidence prisons. Biannual screening alone remained cost-effective at prison incidence levels well below national averages, as well as at far lower willingness-to-pay thresholds. In settings without CXR-CAD, pooled Xpert was an impactful, cost-effective alternative. Key limitations include the model’s simplified representation of tuberculosis disease states and lack of stratification by age, gender/sex, HIV, or drug resistance. Conclusions These modeling results support immediate national-level adoption of prison-wide tuberculosis screening twice-yearly and at entry and exit, using CXR-CAD or pooled Xpert.

Read & Discuss → View Source →