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.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-29

Availability, appeal, and addictiveness by design: Tobacco and nicotine industry deliberate targeting of youth

Authors:
Raglan Maddox↗

by Raglan Maddox, Becky Freeman, Charlotta Pisinger, Emily Banks Contemporary tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed, marketed, and distributed to maximize youth appeal, uptake, dependence, and use. Youth uptake is a predictable outcome of systems designed to maximize product availability, appeal, and addictiveness. In recognition of the World No Tobacco Day 2026 theme, "unmasking the appeal", this Perspective by Raglan Maddox and colleagues discusses how tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed and marketed to maximize youth appeal, and highlight the need for policies to ensure greater industry accountability and to tackle concerning uptake trends.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

TimeProVe: Propose, then Verify for Efficient Long Video Temporal Reasoning in Activities of Daily Living

Authors:
Arkaprava Sinha↗Dominick Reilly↗Siddharth Krishnan↗Hieu Le↗Srijan Das↗

Long Video Question Answering (LVQA) requires identifying sparse, query-relevant evidence within hours-long untrimmed videos. Existing approaches either process videos densely with large vision-language models (VLMs), incurring prohibitive computational cost, or rely on sparse caption-based reasoning, which often misses temporally localized and motion-centric evidence. We introduce TimeProVe, a cost-efficient hybrid framework for temporally grounded reasoning in long videos. TimeProVe first employs lightweight modules to generate action-grounded answer–evidence hypotheses and subsequently invokes an expensive VLM only for targeted verification. The core of our framework lies in the Action-based Candidate Evidence (ACE) module, which converts temporally localized actions into query-conditioned candidate answers and supporting evidence windows through lightweight LLM reasoning. We further introduce OpenTSUBench (OTB), an open-ended benchmark designed to evaluate temporally grounded reasoning in real-world Activities of Daily Living (ADL) scenarios. Experiments show that TimeProVe outperforms the strongest baseline on OTB by 7.3%, while reducing VLM calls by 75% and inference cost by 93%. Furthermore, without explicit temporal grounding training, TimeProVe achieves competitive performance on Charades-STA, and reaches state-of-the-art results when enhanced with grounding VLMs.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

"Did you lie?" Evaluating Lie Detectors across Model Scale and Belief-Verified Model Organisms

Authors:
Alan Cooney↗David Africa↗Geoffrey Irving↗

arXiv:2606.12618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust lie detectors for language models could enable powerful techniques for auditing, monitoring, and post-hoc investigation of model behaviour, but evaluating them requires testbeds where models verifiably believe the opposite of what they say. We show that existing trained model organisms often fail this requirement, leaving prior positive and negative detection results difficult to interpret. We address this with 13 reasoning model organisms whose hidden beliefs are verified in chain-of-thought and shown to generalise to held-out tasks, alongside Varied Deception, a prompted-lying testbed covering a broad range of lie-inducing motivations. On these testbeds we evaluate four detectors: a chain-of-thought judge, a logprob classifier, and two activation probes, including Did-You-Lie (DYL), a new method for training follow-up probes. On prompted lying, across 31 open-weight models spanning 2B to 1T parameters, all four detectors show positive scaling with model capability. However, every activation- and logprob-based detector drops sharply on our trained model organisms, with DYL retaining the most signal; only the chain-of-thought judge remains strong, with 0.82 balanced accuracy, partly as an artefact of our verification process favouring CoT-readable beliefs. Current lie detectors therefore cannot support high-confidence claims about model beliefs, and we suggest research directions that may address some of their current limitations. We release our datasets, model organisms, and trained detectors.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Bridging the Gap: Enabling Natural Language Queries for NoSQL Databases through Text-to-NoSQL Translation

Authors:
Jinwei Lu↗Jiawei Lu↗Chen Zhang↗Zhiqian Qin↗Haodi Zhang↗Yuanfeng Song↗Raymond Chi-Wing Wong↗

arXiv:2502.11201v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: NoSQL databases are core data infrastructure, yet natural-language access to them remains underdeveloped: correct query generation must recover how a non-relational data model represents entities, nested paths, arrays, missing fields, and dynamic keys. This paper studies Text-to-NoSQL, translating natural-language requests into executable NoSQL queries, instantiated with MongoDB aggregation pipelines over schema-less document stores. We present TEND, short for Text-to-NoSQL Dataset, an execution-verified benchmark with 1,210 MongoDB-native tasks across 11 databases. To our knowledge, TEND is the first Text-to-NoSQL benchmark whose database worlds are MongoDB-native by design: experts manually define collection boundaries, nested arrays, optional and sparse paths, polymorphic shapes, and dynamic-key conventions; these worlds are populated with real data and verified through frozen MongoDB execution, so TEND evaluates schema-less document reasoning rather than SQL-to-MQL transfer. We further introduce SAG, a Schema-as-Data Grounding solver that induces path and value grounding from stored-document evidence before bounded MQL generation, execution-grounded repair, and result-consistency selection. Evaluation uses bounded column-tolerant execution accuracy (EXC) as the headline metric, complemented by a graded result-set F1 and a mutually exclusive execution-outcome decomposition. Experiments show that LLMs with strong NL2SQL performance degrade substantially on TEND, validating Text-to-NoSQL as a distinct schema-less document reasoning problem.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Some Complexity Results for Robustness Verification for Binarized Neural Networks

Authors:
Harshit Goyal↗Sudakshina Dutta↗

arXiv:2606.18918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies the computational complexity of verification problems for Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs), where activations (and sometimes weights) are binary. We analyze two problems: satisfiability and robustness under uniform image occlusion. We show that BNN satisfiability is NP-complete via a reduction from Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT), and that uniform occlusion induces a piecewise-constant structure in the network output, enabling a polynomial-time robustness-checking algorithm.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Drug-Prot: A query system for statistical inference of drug effects and interactions in dynamic proteomic networks

Authors:
Ulmer↗Sun↗Qian↗Aebersold↗Guo↗Buehlmann↗

Understanding drug effects and drug-drug interactions is essential for developing combination therapies. We present Drug-Prot, a computational framework that leverages large-scale perturbation proteomics to quantify causal drug effects, drug-drug interactions, and dynamic protein relationships. Using data from 63 single drugs and 59 drug combinations applied to 18 breast cancer cell lines at 6, 24, and 48 hours, Drug-Prot estimates drug effects on protein expression and reconstructs directed temporal protein dependency networks. The publicly available software enables targeted analyses of user-defined protein sets, substantially reducing the multiple-testing burden. Through an interactive web application, users obtain corrected p-values for single-drug and combination effects, directed temporal dependency networks, and downloadable results without requiring access to the underlying proteomic dataset. As a use case, we apply invariance-regularized Random Forests to triple-negative breast cancer cell lines to identify proteins associated with drug response. Querying these proteins in Drug-Prot reveals drug-specific and interaction effects at the protein-network level, illustrating how the framework links candidate causal protein features to actionable drug combinations.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Architectural Wisdom: A Framework for Governing Optimization in AI Systems

Authors:
Edward Y. Chang↗

arXiv:2606.16319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern AI systems exhibit structural failures that capability scaling alone does not reliably fix: they optimize under-specified objectives with no architectural mechanism to question whether the objective should be optimized at all. Engagement maximization can amplify harmful pathways; tool-using agents can commit irreversible actions; preference-trained language models can become sycophantic. We argue that this failure is a wisdom problem, not an intelligence problem. We use "wisdom" in a deliberately architectural sense, not as a claim about virtue, consciousness, or moral omniscience. Intelligence accepts a goal and optimizes within it; wisdom interrogates whether the goal should be optimized at all. The two are separable architectural properties. We propose architectural wisdom as a corrigible objective-governance layer above the optimization substrate. The layer makes three structural commitments explicit and nondegenerate before any action: temporal horizon, relational boundary, and irreversibility. It is realized by four components (Structural Utility Transform, Moral Admissibility Interface, Arbitration and Escalation Controller, Value Revision Channel) that compute a six-coordinate wisdom tuple over horizon, relational coverage, irreversibility, admissibility, value revision, and auditability. We motivate the architecture by eight cases drawn from contemporary AI failures, secular wisdom traditions, and hard ethical situations, and defend the distinction against the intelligence-completeness thesis using goal-questioning over goal-taking, Bostrom's orthogonality, structural separation in our exemplar cases, and persistent failure modes despite capability scaling. The framework is the conceptual contract for a larger architecture whose formal specifications and empirical validation are developed in subsequent work.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
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 →
09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

GraphWorld: Long-Horizon Planning with World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Authors:
Ziying Song↗Caiyan Jia↗Lin Liu↗Lei Yang↗Shengkai Zhang↗Feiyang Jia↗Fengda Zhao↗Peiliang Wu↗Shaoqing Xu↗Chen Lv↗Yadan Luo↗

End-to-end autonomous driving has made significant progress by unifying perception, prediction, and planning within a single learning framework, achieving strong performance in short-horizon decision making. However, most existing E2E-AD methods remain confined to short-horizon planning and lack the ability to model long-term temporal dependencies, which severely limits their generalization and security in complex and highly interactive driving scenarios. In this work, we propose GraphWorld, an E2E-AD framework that explicitly enhances long-horizon planning through latent world modeling. We introduce an Ego-Centric Interaction Graph, which adaptively models critical neighboring agents based on spatial proximity, and propagates relational context to planning queries via cross-node cross-attention. We present a World-State-Conditioned Planning that learns ego-centric latent world representations by modeling interactions between an ego vehicle and surrounding agents. This latent world state captures key interaction dynamics and safety-relevant semantics, and serves as a conditioning signal to guide long-horizon, safety-aware trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on Bench2Drive, NAVSIMv1/2, and nuScenes demonstrate that GraphWorld significantly reduces collision rates and improves long-horizon planning performance, validating its effectiveness in complex driving environments.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

GraphPO: Graph-based Policy Optimization for Reasoning Models

Authors:
Yuliang Zhan↗Xinyu Tang↗Jian Li↗Dandan Zheng↗Weilong Chai↗Jingdong Chen↗Jun Zhou↗Ge Wu↗Wenyue Tang↗Hao Sun↗

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for enhancing the capability of large reasoning models. RLVR typically samples responses independently and optimizes the policy using from final answers. This paradigm has two limitations. First, independently responses often contain similar intermediate reasoning steps, causing redundant exploration and wasted computation. Second, sparse final-answer rewards make it hard to identify useful steps. Tree-based methods partly address this problem by sharing prefixes and comparing branches from the same prefix to provide fine-grained signals. However, tree branches are still expanded independently. When different branches reach similar reasoning states, they cannot share information and repeat similar exploration. Moreover, tree-based methods ignore such dispersion and only perform local comparisons within separate branches, which can lead to higher variance in advantage estimation. To address this challenge, we propose GraphPO (Graph-based Policy Optimization), a novel RL framework that represents rollouts as a directed acyclic graph, with reasoning steps as edges and semantic states summarized from the reasoning paths as nodes. GraphPO merges semantically equivalent reasoning paths into equivalence classes, allowing them to share suffixes and reallocating budget away from redundant expansions to diverse exploration. Furthermore, we assign efficiency advantages to incoming edges and correctness advantages to outgoing edges, thereby improving inference efficiency while deriving process supervision from outcome. Theory shows that GraphPO reduces advantage-estimation variance and enhances reasoning efficiency. Experiments on three LLMs across reasoning and agentic search benchmarks show that GraphPO consistently outperforms chain- and tree-based baselines with the same token budgets or response budgets.

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

WISE: A Long-Horizon Agent in Minecraft with Why-Which Reasoning

Authors:
Renmin Cheng↗Changhao Chen↗

arXiv:2606.12852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rapid advances have been made in developing general-purpose embodied agent in environments like Minecraft through the adoption of LLM-augmented hierarchical approaches. Despite their promise, low-level controllers often become performance bottlenecks due to repeated execution failures. We argue that a key limitation is not only the lack of episodic memory, but also the decoupling of what-where-when memory from which-why reasoning. To address this, we propose WISE (Which-Why Informed Semantic Explorer), a long-horizon agent framework with an enhanced low-level controller equipped with a Causal Event Graph that augments episodic memory with explicit causal structure linking observations to task relevance. Unlike prior work such as MrSteve, which relies on feature similarity for retrieval, WISE enables robust recall under viewpoint changes and supports opportunistic task reordering through causal reasoning. Building on this memory, we propose an Opportunistic Task Scheduler that dynamically re-prioritizes subtasks when causally relevant opportunities are detected. We further equip WISE with a multi-scale progressive exploration strategy to provide spatially comprehensive observations for downstream reasoning. Experiments show that WISE largely improves task success and efficiency on long-horizon sparse tasks, particularly in settings requiring adaptive decision-making.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A simple approach to the L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy for absolutely continuous dividend strategies

Authors:
Tommy Mastromonaco↗Nacer Fendri↗Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Renaud↗Clarence Simard↗

arXiv:2604.13302v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We revisit the optimization problem solved in L{\o}kka & Zervos (2008), i.e., the maximization of dividends, in a Brownian risk model, with the possibility (not the obligation) of making capital injections. Following the approach introduced in Alvarez & Shepp (1998), Renaud & Simard (2021), Renaud et al. (2023), we consider instead absolutely continuous (AC) dividend strategies with an affine bound on the payment rates, while singular capital injections are still allowed. In addition, we incorporate a parameter for the cost of ruin or, said differently, a penalty at ruin in the performance function. We show that the solution is a so-called L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy: the surplus is never ruined by making bail-out payments, or no capital is injected and bankruptcy can occur; in either case, dividends are paid at full rate when the surplus is above a threshold. Our framework allows us to provide explicit conditions to express the dichotomy, either using the cost of capital injections or the cost of ruin as a criterion, which also exposes the underlying structure of the solution. In particular, for some values of the parameters, we show that it is optimal to liquidate. Moreover, we perform a numerical analysis highlighting the range of values generated under this AC affine-bound structure.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Closing the Feedback Loop: From Experience Extraction to Insight Governance in Verbal Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Yanwei Cui↗Xing Zhang↗Yulong Zhang↗Li Shao↗Xiaofeng Shi↗Guanghui Wang↗Peiyang He↗

arXiv:2606.17591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training-free verbal reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn from world feedback – objective signals such as dynamic task outcomes, market returns, or demand forecasts – by extracting verbal rules from experience and injecting them as context, updating the agent's behavior without parameter changes. However, in non-stationary environments these agents face a retention-forgetting dilemma: retaining stale insights causes negative transfer, while discarding them causes catastrophic forgetting when conditions recur. We identify four requirements for navigating this dilemma – outcome-driven evaluation, persistent structured evidence, non-monotonic knowledge lifecycle, and compositional governance – and show that existing methods invest heavily in experience extraction while underinvesting in insight governance. We propose a three-layer architecture – rules, evidence, and skills – connected by a feedback-driven curation loop that closes the governance gap. Rules capture distilled experience from world outcomes; evidence logs track each rule's reliability across episodes; skills govern which rules to apply, how to resolve conflicts, and when to abstain. On financial forecasting as a case study, where world feedback is naturally abundant, noisy, and non-stationary, we show that the same accumulated experience either degrades performance below the zero-shot baseline or dramatically improves accuracy and risk-adjusted returns, depending on whether the curation loop is present.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Academic Concept Index

Authors:
Jeyun Lee↗Junhyoung Lee↗Wonbin Kweon↗Bowen Jin↗Yu Zhang↗Susik Yoon↗Dongha Lee↗Hwanjo Yu↗Jiawei Han↗Seongku Kang↗

arXiv:2601.00567v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adapting general-domain retrievers to scientific domains is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale domain-specific relevance annotations and the substantial mismatch in vocabulary and information needs. Recent approaches address these issues through two independent directions that leverage large language models (LLMs): (1) generating synthetic queries for fine-tuning, and (2) generating auxiliary contexts to support relevance matching. However, both directions overlook the diverse academic concepts embedded within scientific documents, often producing redundant or conceptually narrow queries and contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce an academic concept index, which extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them guided by an academic taxonomy. This structured index serves as a foundation for improving both directions. First, we enhance the synthetic query generation with concept coverage-based generation (CCQGen), which adaptively conditions LLMs on uncovered concepts to generate complementary queries with broader concept coverage. Second, we strengthen the context augmentation with concept-focused auxiliary contexts (CCExpand), which leverages a set of document snippets that serve as concise responses to the concept-aware CCQGen queries. Extensive experiments show that incorporating the academic concept index into both query generation and context augmentation leads to higher-quality queries, better conceptual alignment, and improved retrieval performance.

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

Beyond Nearest Neighbor Interpolation in Data Augmentation

Authors:
Olivier Rukundo↗

Avoiding the risk of undefined categorical labels using nearest neighbor interpolation overlooks the risk of exacerbating pixel level annotation errors in augmented training data. Additionally, the inherent low pass filtering effects of interpolation algorithms exacerbate the risk of degrading high frequency structural details within annotated regions of interest. To avoid these risks, the author modified convolutional neural networks data transformation functions by incorporating a modified geometric transformation function, removing reliance on nearest neighbor interpolation, and integrating a mean-based class filtering mechanism to handle undefined categorical labels with alternative interpolation algorithms. The author also implemented an offline data augmentation pipeline to generate interpolation specific augmented training data, enabling quantitative assessment of interpolation specific low pass filtering effects on augmented training data. Experimental evaluation on three medical image segmentation datasets and the XBAT+ datasets demonstrated performance gains across multiple quantitative metrics.

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

Can Agents Read the Room? Benchmarking Visual Social Intelligence in Multimodal Simulation

Authors:
Shijun Wan↗Xuehai Wu↗Jiwen Zhang↗Siyuan Wang↗Zhongyu Wei↗

Social interaction depends on both language and visible social signals, such as facial expressions, posture, gaze, and emotional shifts. Yet existing social-agent benchmarks are largely text-based and rarely test whether multimodal agents can use visual cues to guide interaction. We introduce \textsc{\benchmarkname{}}, a benchmark evaluating visual social intelligence in multimodal social simulation. It contains 240 scenarios, 585 role instances, and 2,340 role-task instances, combining aligned textual-visual evidence, structured role profiles, and four role-level tasks: expression task, characteristic task, interaction regulation task, and interaction outcome task. Evaluating seven recent MLLMs under verbalized-vision and direct-vision reveals a clear gap between local role enactment and interaction management: role-specific expression and conflict handling are near saturation, whereas interaction regulation and visually grounded outcome achievement remain substantially more difficult. The code is released at https://github.com/JunsWan/AgentViSS, and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/JunsWan/AgentViSS.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Holo-World: Unified Camera, Object and Weather Control for Video World Model

Authors:
Xiangchen Yin↗Wenzhang Sun↗Jiahui Yuan↗Zijie Liu↗Yinda Chen↗Wei Li↗Dachun Kai↗Chunfeng Wang↗Xiaoyan Sun↗

Video world models are moving toward preserving an observed world under controllable camera and object motion while allowing its environmental state to change. Yet these controls remain isolated, and weather generation typically relies on a source video or reconstructed scene that already specifies future structure. We study a first-frame-anchored source-to-state setting, where the model starts from a single image and follows explicit camera and object controls and an optional weather instruction, then generates a video that either preserves the source world or transfers it to a target weather state. To address these challenges, we first build HoloStateData, a state video dataset that turns diverse videos into unified control samples for camera, object, and weather supervision. Second, we introduce Holo-World, a unified controllable video world model that jointly controls scene from a single image. Its Unified Scene Adapter factorizes world preservation and weather transfer into distinct parameter subspaces, using rendered background, geometry buffers, and object controls to maintain controlled scene structure while modeling weather-dependent appearance and particle effects. Additionally, Scene-Weather Decomposed CFG guides scene and weather residuals separately, strengthening target weather effects without over-amplifying the full condition. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Holo-World maintains precise camera and object control with consistent scene structure while transferring scenes into diverse target weather state, outperforming video-to-video weather editing baselines on weather-state generation. Our project page is available at \url{https://xiangchenyin.github.io/Holo-World/}.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Can LLM Agents Infer World Models? Evidence from Agentic Automata Learning

Authors:
Reef Menaged↗Gili Lior↗Shauli Ravfogel↗Roee Aharoni↗Gabriel Stanovsky↗

We propose agentic automata learning to evaluate the extent to which tool-calling LLM agents can uncover hidden environments through interaction. In our setup, an agent should uncover a hidden deterministic finite automaton (DFA) by interacting with an oracle through (1) membership queries ("Does this string belong to the target language?") and (2) equivalence queries ("Is this the target DFA?"). This yields a scalable testbed with controlled task complexity, measurable interaction efficiency, and strong baselines (classic automata-learning algorithms). Evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that performance drops sharply as DFA size increases. Reasoning models are markedly stronger than non-reasoning models, yet trajectory analyses reveal recurring failures in query planning, evidence integration, and hypothesis construction. Overall, our results show that current LLM agents can sometimes perform non-trivial interactive discovery, but remain far less robust and efficient than classic algorithms for the task.

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

Conditional Multi-Event Temporal Grounding in Long-Form Video

Authors:
Yuanhao Zou↗Arthad Kulkarni↗Lucas Tonanez↗Lincoln Spencer↗Guangyu Sun↗Tianxingjian Ding↗Andong Deng↗Yi Li↗Shuangjun Liu↗Yuan Li↗Dashan Gao↗Ning Bi↗…

Multimodal large language models have made rapid progress in video temporal grounding, yet real-world applications routinely require localizing every event that satisfies compositional temporal and spatial conditions. Existing benchmarks fall short: they localize only a single moment per query, count without temporal conditions, or treat grounding and counting as disjoint tasks. We introduce CoMET-Bench for Conditional Multi-Event Temporal Grounding in long-form video, comprising 2789 queries over 600 videos averaging 33.8 minutes across five real-world domains, with each query composed from 4 temporal conditions, 3 spatial conditions, and a dedicated negative-query subset. We further propose a unified evaluation protocol jointly measuring counting, grounding, and negative-query recognition, including a new Rejection-F1 metric that prevents trivial gaming by lazy "always-empty" models. Benchmarking a broad suite of MLLMs, agent-based, and grounding-specialized methods reveals that existing approaches remain far from solving this task. Building on these findings, we propose CoMET-Agent, a training-free agentic framework that reformulates the task as structured search-and-aggregate, improving F1@0.5 by 6.1% over GPT-5 purely through structural reasoning. Failure analysis further surfaces three open directions: fine-grained entity tracking, position-uniform retrieval, and causal event pairing.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

WebSP-Eval: Evaluating Web Agents on Website Security and Privacy Tasks

Authors:
Guruprasad Viswanathan Ramesh↗Asmit Nayak↗Basieem Siddique↗Kassem Fawaz↗

arXiv:2604.06367v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Web agents automate browser tasks, ranging from simple form completion to complex workflows like ordering groceries. While current benchmarks evaluate general-purpose performance~(e.g., WebArena) or safety against malicious actions~(e.g., SafeArena), no existing framework assesses an agent's ability to successfully execute user-facing website security and privacy tasks, such as managing cookie preferences, configuring privacy-sensitive account settings, or revoking inactive sessions. To address this gap, we introduce WebSP-Eval, an evaluation framework for measuring web agent performance on website security and privacy tasks. WebSP-Eval comprises 1) a manually crafted task dataset of 200 task instances across 28 websites; 2) a robust agentic system supporting account and initial state management across runs using a custom Google Chrome extension; and 3) an automated evaluator. We evaluate a total of 8 web agent instantiations using state-of-the-art multimodal large language models, conducting a fine-grained analysis across websites, task categories, and UI elements. Our evaluation reveals that current models suffer from limited autonomous exploration capabilities to reliably solve website security and privacy tasks, and struggle with specific task categories and websites. Crucially, we identify stateful UI elements are a primary reason for agent failure, with toggles causing more than 45% task failure across many models.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Symmetry-Accelerated Classical Simulation of Clifford-Dominated Circuits

Authors:
Giulio Camillo↗Filipa C. R. Peres↗Markus Heinrich↗Juani Bermejo-Vega↗

arXiv:2510.18977v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Classical simulation of quantum circuits plays a crucial role in validating quantum hardware and delineating the boundaries of quantum advantage. Among the most effective simulation techniques are those based on the stabilizer extent, which quantifies the overhead of representing non-Clifford operations as linear combinations of Clifford unitaries. However, finding optimal decompositions rapidly becomes intractable as it constitutes a superexponentially large optimization problem. In this work, we exploit symmetries in the computation of the stabilizer extent, proving that for real, diagonal, and real-diagonal unitaries, the optimization can be restricted to the corresponding subgroups of the Clifford group without loss of optimality. This ``strong symmetry reduction'' drastically reduces computational cost, enabling optimal decompositions of unitaries on up to seven qubits using a standard laptop – far beyond previous two-qubit limits. Additionally, we employ a ``weak symmetry reduction'' method that leverages additional invariances to shrink the search space further. Applying these results, we demonstrate exponential runtime improvements in classical simulations of quantum Fourier transform circuits and measurement-based quantum computations on the Union Jack lattice, as well as new insights into the nonstabilizer properties of multicontrolled phase gates and unitaries generating hypergraph states. Our findings establish symmetry exploitation as a powerful route to scale classical simulation techniques and deepen the resource-theoretic understanding of quantum advantage.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Excess mortality in Germany during 2020-2023: A descriptive age-stratified analysis

Authors:
Sauter↗

This study investigates excess mortality in Germany in the years from 2020 to 2023 and its temporal alignment with reported COVID-19 deaths. The analysis uses annual and weekly all-cause mortality data and linear baseline trends derived from pre-pandemic years. Possible effects of demographic and population changes on baseline trends were also examined. Excess mortality was analysed over time and across age groups. Excess mortality was observed in all investigated years, rising from 2020 to its highest value in 2022. In absolute terms, the age group [≥]80 years accounted for the largest proportion of excess deaths throughout the study period. After 2021, elevated mortality relative to baseline was also observed in younger age groups down to 15 years of age, although absolute numbers remained substantially lower than in older groups. No evidence of excess mortality was observed for individuals younger than 15 years. Periods of excess mortality were temporally aligned with waves of reported COVID-19 deaths. In 2020, cumulative excess mortality after calendar week 11 closely matched reported COVID-19 deaths (43 876 vs. 41 835 deaths). Weekly excess mortality, reported COVID-19 deaths and wastewater viral load, when available showed strong temporal synchrony, although excess mortality increasingly exceeded reported COVID-19 deaths during later pandemic waves. Temporal patterns differed from the typical seasonal mortality peaks commonly associated with influenza epidemics during the early months of the year. In 2023, excess mortality declined substantially, possibly indicating a return to mortality levels before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

APPO: Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization

Authors:
Xucong Wang↗Ziyu Ma↗Yong Wang↗Yuxiang Ji↗Shidong Yang↗Guanhua Chen↗Pengkun Wang↗Xiangxiang Chu↗

arXiv:2606.12384v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) have substantially improved the multi-turn tool-use capabilities of large language model agents. However, most existing methods assign credit over coarse heuristic units, such as tool-call boundaries or fixed workflows, making it difficult to identify which intermediate decisions influence downstream outcomes. In this work, we study agentic RL from two perspectives: where to branch and how to assign credit after branching. Our pilot analysis shows that influential decision points are broadly distributed throughout the generated sequence rather than concentrated at tool calls, while token entropy alone does not reliably reflect their impact on final outcomes. Motivated by these observations, we propose Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization (APPO), which shifts branching and credit assignment from coarse interaction units to fine-grained decision points in the sequence. APPO selects branching locations using a Branching Score that combines token uncertainty with policy-induced likelihood gains of subsequent continuations, enabling more targeted exploration while filtering out spurious high-entropy positions. It further introduces procedure-level advantage scaling to better distribute credit across branched rollouts. Experiments on 13 benchmarks show that APPO consistently improves strong agentic RL baselines by nearly 4 points, while keeping efficient tool-calls and maintaining behavior interpretability.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Reasoning Models Know What's Important, and Encode It in Their Activations

Authors:
Yaniv Nikankin↗Martin Tutek↗Tomer Ashuach↗Jonathan Rosenfeld↗Yonatan Belinkov↗

Language models often solve complex tasks by generating long reasoning chains, consisting of many steps with varying importance. While some steps are crucial for generating the final answer, others are removable. Determining which steps matter most, and why, remains an open question central to understanding how models process reasoning. We investigate if this question is best approached through model internals or through tokens of the reasoning chain itself. We find that model activations contain more information than tokens for identifying important reasoning steps. Crucially, by training probes on model activations to predict importance, we show that models encode an internal representation of step importance, even prior to the generation of subsequent steps. The internal representations of importance in different models yield high agreement on which steps are important. The representation is distributed across layers, and does not correlate with surface-level features, such as a step's relative position or its length. Our findings suggest that analyzing activations can reveal aspects of reasoning that surface-level approaches fundamentally miss, indicating that reasoning analyses should look into model internals.

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

Enhancing Fatigue Detection through Heterogeneous Multi-Source Data Integration and Cross-Domain Modality Imputation

Authors:
Luobin Cui↗Yanlai Wu↗Tang Ying↗Weikai Li↗

arXiv:2507.16859v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fatigue detection for human operators is important in safety-related applications such as aviation, mining, and long-haul transport. Reliable estimation of operator fatigue can support timely warnings, adaptive task scheduling, takeover reminders, and other safety-management decisions in human-machine systems. However, the effectiveness of these functions depends on whether fatigue-related signals can be reliably captured in the deployment environment. While many studies have shown the value of high-fidelity sensors in controlled laboratory environments, their performance often degrades when used in real-world settings because of noise, lighting conditions, and field-of-view constraints, thereby limiting their practical use. This paper formalizes a deployment-oriented setting for real-world fatigue detection, where high-quality sensors are often unavailable in practical applications. To address this issue, we use knowledge from heterogeneous source domains, including high-fidelity sensors that are difficult to deploy in the field but commonly used in controlled environments, to assist fatigue detection in the real-world target domain. Based on this idea, we design a heterogeneous and multi-source fatigue-detection framework that uses the available modalities in the target domain while leveraging diverse configurations in the source domains through cross-domain modality imputation based on shared modalities.

Read & Discuss → View Source →