Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

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

01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

MASK: Multi-Agent Semantic K-Scheduling for Risk-Sensitive 6G Robotics

arXiv:2606.11249v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Realizing the vision of 6G connected robotics requires reconciling high-performance collaborative control with the rigid spectral limitations of physical wireless channels. In realistic collaborative sensing scenarios, spectral resources are quantized into finite physical resource blocks or orthogonal subcarriers, rendering simultaneous transmission by all agents infeasible. To address this, we propose Multi-Agent Semantic K-Scheduling (MASK), a control architecture designed to sustain robust, risk-aware coordination under strict instantaneous bandwidth caps. We introduce Arbiter-Assisted Semantic Information Gating (A-SIG), a lightweight coordination mechanism that enforces hard access constraints by scheduling only the top-K agents based on locally computed semantic importance scores. By aggregating these prioritized observations into a compact latent state, a self-supervised global encoder enables a distributional policy to mitigate tail risks despite data sparsity. We evaluate MASK across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating that it matches the performance of communication-unconstrained baselines even when channel access is restricted to a small fraction of the swarm size. Furthermore, the framework exhibits inherent resilience to packet erasures, validating semantic scheduling as a critical enabler for resource-constrained 6G systems.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

CheckMIABench: Firm Foundations For Membership Inference Attacks on Language Models

arXiv:2606.17464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Membership inference attacks (MIAs) are a canonical way to assess a machine learning model's privacy properties. Although several attempts have been made to evaluate MIAs on language models, the extant literature has suffered numerous difficulties in constructing clean evaluations to test new techniques. In particular, subtle distribution shifts between member and non-member sets can undermine the statistical validity of MIAs; recent work has underscored this by showing that "blind" methods with no access to the underlying model can perform far better than published methods on the same benchmarks. This paper constructs a benchmark for principled evaluation of MIAs against LLMs, by leveraging the insight that training data before and after a fixed point during training are drawn from the same distribution. Therefore, all open-source models with intermediate checkpoints and public training data can be converted into MIA testbeds. We apply our framework to a half-dozen published attacks on the Pythia and OLMo family of models, from 70M to 7B parameters. To facilitate further privacy research, we open-source a modular library for designing and implementing attacks in this setting: https://github.com/safr-ai-lab/pandora_llm.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

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

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

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FBSDiff++: Improved Frequency Band Substitution of Diffusion Features for Efficient and Highly Controllable Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation

With large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieving significant advancements in open-domain image creation, increasing attention has been focused on their natural extension to the realm of text-driven image-to-image (I2I) translation, where a source image acts as visual guidance to the generated image in addition to the textual guidance provided by the text prompt. We propose FBSDiff, a novel framework adapting off-the-shelf T2I diffusion model into the I2I paradigm from a fresh frequency-domain perspective. Through dynamic frequency band substitution of diffusion features, FBSDiff realizes versatile and highly controllable text-driven I2I in a plug-and-play manner (without need for model training, fine-tuning, or online optimization), allowing appearance-guided, layout-guided, and contour-guided I2I translation by progressively substituting low-frequency band, mid-frequency band, and high-frequency band of latent diffusion features, respectively. In addition, FBSDiff flexibly enables continuous control over I2I correlation intensity simply by tuning the bandwidth of the substituted frequency band. To further promote image translation efficiency, flexibility, and functionality, we propose FBSDiff++ which improves upon FBSDiff mainly in three aspects: (1) accelerate inference speed by a large margin (8.9$\times$ speedup in inference) with refined model architecture; (2) improve the Frequency Band Substitution module to allow for input source images of arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio; (3) extend model functionality to enable localized image manipulation and style-specific content creation with only subtle adjustments to the core method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify superiority of FBSDiff++ in I2I translation visual quality, efficiency, versatility, and controllability compared to related advanced approaches.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

TouchThinker: Scaling Tactile Commonsense Reasoning to the Open World with Large-scale Data and Action-aware Representation

arXiv:2606.11637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Touch is a key modality for embodied agents to understand the physical world. Although recent work has incorporated tactile signals into language systems for tactile commonsense reasoning, scaling such systems to realistic open-world settings remains challenging due to two key bottlenecks: (1) current tactile reasoning datasets remain limited in format and scale, providing insufficient supervision for reasoning from tactile observations to physical commonsense and hindering the learning of transferable tactile commonsense; (2) Tactile signals are inherently redundant and action-specific, yet existing methods often overlook these properties, resulting in inefficient representations with limited semantic expressiveness. To address these limitations, we propose TouchThinker, a tactile-language framework that scales tactile commonsense reasoning to the open world from both data and representation perspectives. First, we construct TouchThinker-1M, a million-scale, multi-source tactile reasoning dataset covering 415 objects, 8 scenarios, and 7 sensor types, providing a solid data foundation for open-world generalization. We further introduce TouchThinker-Bench, an open-world benchmark with more realistic and diverse tasks. Then, we propose action-aware modeling mechanism to improve tactile representation efficiency and enable efficient reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that TouchThinker achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art models across multiple datasets. Our code and dataset will be made available at: https://github.com/lvkailin0118/TouchThinker.

06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Actionable Interpretability Must Be Defined in Terms of Symmetries

arXiv:2601.12913v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper argues that interpretability research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamentally ill-posed as existing definitions of interpretability fail to describe how interpretability can be formally tested or designed for. We posit that actionable definitions of interpretability must be formulated in terms of *symmetries* that inform model design and lead to testable conditions. Under a probabilistic view, we hypothesise that four symmetries (inference equivariance, information invariance, concept-closure invariance, and structural invariance) suffice to (i) formalise interpretable models as a subclass of probabilistic models, (ii) yield a unified formulation of interpretable inference (e.g., alignment, interventions, and counterfactuals) as a form of Bayesian inversion, and (iii) provide a formal framework to verify compliance with safety standards and regulations.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

ScriptManager: a platform for scalable and reproducible high-resolution analysis of genomics datasets

Background: The growing diversity of genomic and epigenomic assays has driven a parallel expansion in data formats, analysis workflows, and figure-generation tools. However, tools for analyzing data and assembling publication-quality figures are often specialized to a specific assay, dramatically limiting their interoperability and reproducibility. Results: We present the v1.0 release of ScriptManager, a Java-based framework for modular and reproducible analysis and visualization workflows of genomics and epigenomics data. Unlike existing tools specialized for individual assay types, ScriptManager provides a unified and extensible framework for cross-assay visualization and workflow reproducibility. The v1.0 release adds novel analytical modules, GUI session logging, automated unit and integration testing, tutorials, and expanded documentation. It also integrates with the broader reproducibility ecosystem through Singularity containers, Anaconda packaging, and Galaxy XML wrappers. We demonstrate ScriptManager's TagPileup scaling from local single-core execution to a 10,305-job analysis distributed across the Open Science Grid (OSG), with the full workload completing in

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SAAS: Self-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Over-Search Mitigation in Agentic Search

Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack of self-awareness leads to severe over-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novel RL framework designed to cultivate dynamic self-awareness that precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) a search boundary modeling mechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) a boundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness into trajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) a stage-wise optimization strategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoiding reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reduces over-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code and implementation details are released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimal multi-spectral squeezing via deterministic 2D-phase optimization

arXiv:2606.20192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimization routines are ubiquitous in quantum information technologies and essential to reach the resource levels required by quantum protocols. Specifically, multi-spectral squeezing for use in such protocols requires that losses be kept minimal at every stage, including coherent detection, which is performed by interfering the signal with a classical local-oscillator beam. This in turn requires control over all optical degrees of freedom of the beam in order to optimize the detection. The most general framework for this optimization relies on agnostic, off-the-shelf machine-learning techniques. Here we take the opposite approach: by focusing on a physical description of the specific optical process, we develop a deterministic sequential algorithm that provably reaches the global maximum of the visibility in a pixel basis and scales linearly with the number of pixels, thereby offering an efficient and theoretically grounded alternative to black-box optimization. In our waveguide-based setup, the optimized mask increases the visibility from 76% to 84%, corresponding to a 20% gain in mode-matching efficiency. Multi-spectral squeezing measurements confirm that this improvement translates directly into quantum readout: for the most squeezed spectral mode, the squeezing increases from $-2.08$ dB to $-2.64$ dB, consistent with the inferred efficiency gain. These results establish deterministic spatial phase shaping as an effective, interpretable route to enhanced multimode squeezing in waveguide platforms.

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

BaltiVoice: A Speech Corpus and Fine-tuned Whisper ASR System for the Balti Language

Authors:

We present BaltiVoice, a 16.8-hour read-speech corpus for Balti (ISO 639-3: bft), a Tibetic language spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, with no prior publicly available ASR resources. The corpus contains 10,060 validated utterances in native Nastaliq script, derived from Mozilla Common Voice recordings. Fine-tuning OpenAI Whisper-small yields a Word Error Rate (WER) of 26.74% and a Character Error Rate (CER) of 8.67% on a 538-utterance speaker-disjoint validation set, down from a zero-shot baseline of 159.19% WER and 152.52% CER. A Whisper-base fine-tuned on the same data achieves 44.54% WER and 15.61% CER, confirming that model capacity matters for this low-resource setting. The dataset, fine-tuned model, and a live transcription demo are publicly available on HuggingFace.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human-like autonomy emerges from self-play and a pinch of human data

arXiv:2606.19370v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-play reinforcement learning has recently emerged as a way to train driving policies without any human data. It uses cheap, large-scale simulations to substitute expensive, large-scale human driving demonstrations. A key limitation of this approach is that policies trained through pure self-play can learn effective but alien driving conventions incompatible with people. Previous works attempt to mitigate such behavioral misalignments through extensive reward engineering and domain randomization, which are brittle and labor-intensive. Instead of completely discarding human demonstrations, our method treats them as a regularization objective on top of a minimal safe goal-reaching reward. Like the spice in a good stew, we find that a little human data goes a long way: our method uses only 30 minutes of human demonstrations, 2500x fewer than comparable imitation learning approaches. Resulting policies coordinate with held-out human trajectories and complete training in 15 hours on a single consumer-grade GPU. Videos and full source code are available at https://spiced-self-play.com/.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ViT-FREE: Efficient Face Recognition via Early Exiting and Synthetic Adaptation

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant attention in computer vision and shown strong potential for face recognition (FR). However, their high computational cost makes deployment on resource-constrained devices challenging, motivating the need for methods that balance efficiency and accuracy. In this work, we investigate early exiting in pretrained ViTs as a simple yet effective training-free strategy for efficient FR inference. Leveraging the uniform feature dimensionality across transformer encoder blocks, we introduce ViT-FREE, a multi-exit framework that enables face verification directly from intermediate representations without modifying or retraining the backbone model, and thus, reducing inference cost. Empirically, we show that patch embeddings and attention maps evolve progressively across depth, exhibiting high similarity between consecutive ViT blocks and increasing alignment with the final representation. This indicates gradual feature refinement and attention convergence, suggesting that intermediate layers already provide stable and discriminative representations suitable for early exiting. Through extensive experiments on multiple FR benchmarks, we systematically analyze the accuracy-efficiency trade-off across exit depths. Our results demonstrate that later exits achieve a highly favorable balance, with exiting at layer 10 yielding up to a 20% speedup while incurring only a 1.5 drop in verification performance on benchmarks such as IJB-C. Also, we propose ViT-FREE_FT, a lightweight exit-specific fine-tuning strategy that adapts only the projection layers using a small synthetic dataset while keeping the transformer backbone frozen. This approach improves the performance of shallow exits while preserving the efficiency benefits and leaving deeper exits largely unaffected.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Deep Sleep Classification via EEG Signal Criticality: A Passive BCI Approach for Sleep-Improvement Neurofeedback

arXiv:2606.13017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated sleep staging is a fundamental application of passive Brain-Computer Interfaces (pBCI), decoding spontaneous neural states to enable closed-loop interventions independent of user intent. This study evaluates criticality features derived from Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) for the specific identification of deep sleep (N3). We analyzed $347,232$ EEG epochs from $290$ older women using UMAP manifold learning to visualize state transitions. Subsequently, six classifiers were benchmarked via 10-fold cross-validation, using balanced accuracy to determine the optimal "state-sensing" engine for neurofeedback.Naive Bayes achieved the highest mean balanced accuracy ($87.17\% \pm 0.24\%$), significantly outperforming a fully connected deep neural network (FNN: $81.58\%$) and Random Forest ($80.97\%$). Linear models (LDA: $57.21\%$; SVM: $51.01\%$) performed poorly, indicating that DFA-derived criticality features reside on a distinct, non-linear manifold. Probabilistic decoding of EEG criticality provides a high-accuracy sensing mechanism for pBCIs. This robust classification pipeline supports the development of state-dependent neurofeedback, such as targeted auditory stimulation, to enhance cognitive recovery.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

The Importance of Phase in Neural Representations: An Internal Oppenheim-Lim Test of Image Classifiers

Oppenheim and Lim (1981) showed that natural images stay recognizable when reconstructed from their Fourier phase alone, while the magnitude carries little of their identity. We ask whether trained image classifiers reproduce this asymmetry inside their hidden layers, and we test it causally: given two images, we transplant the phase of one onto the magnitude of the other at a chosen layer and record which image the prediction follows. In PRISM2D, GFNet, and ViT-B/16 the prediction follows the phase or sign donor, and deleting all image-specific magnitude barely moves accuracy, so identity rides on phase while image-specific magnitude is largely dispensable to the readout. ResNet-50 at first seems to break the pattern, because transplanting sign after its ReLUs does nothing; a fair intervention before the ReLU reveals a strong latent sign code in the late blocks, and a DC-only control shows the readout consumes a channel-wise spatial average. Controls rule out the trivial case in which magnitude simply stops depending on the image. The architectures therefore share a phase/sign identity code but expose it in different bases, set by rectification and readout geometry, which gives a mechanistic account of the texture–shape gap between CNNs and attention models.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

AfroScope: A Framework for Studying the Linguistic Landscape of Africa

Language Identification (LID), the task of determining the language of a given text, is a fundamental preprocessing step that shapes the reliability of downstream NLP applications. While recent work has expanded African LID, existing systems remain limited in both language coverage and fine-grained discrimination among closely related languages and varieties. We introduce AfroScope, a unified framework for African LID that includes AfroScope-Data, a dataset covering 640 languages, and AfroScope-Models, a suite of strong LID models with broad African language coverage. To address persistent confusions among closely related languages, we propose a hierarchical classification approach that leverages AfroScope-Mirror, a specialized embedding model for targeted disambiguation, improving macro-F1 by 1.57 points on the confusable subset compared to our best base model. We further analyze cross-lingual transfer and domain effects, showing how language-family structure, script compatibility, and domain coverage shape LID performance. We position African LID as an enabling technology for large-scale measurement of Africa's linguistic landscape in digital text, and release AfroScope-Data and AfroScope-Models online.

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

Kinematic properties of the Pauli equation

arXiv:2606.17548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Based on the Wigner-Vlasov formalism, this paper investigates the kinematic properties of the Pauli equation. It is shown that the probability current associated with the Pauli equation can be represented as a superposition of two currents with certain expansion coefficients. Each of these currents corresponds to a particular component of the spinor. The expansion coefficients effectively serve as weighting functions that determine the probability contribution of the corresponding spinor component. Therefore, each spin projection corresponds to its own probability flux. A new system of the Hamilton-Jacobi equations and also a system of motion equations in electromagnetic fields are obtained, taking into account the interaction between the spin and the magnetic field. To illustrate how these equations can be applied we have investigated the quantum system kinematics in detail using an exact solution of the Pauli equation in the presence of a uniform magnetic field and an asymmetric quadratic potential.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Influence-solvability: a systematic theory of $(1+1)D$ solvability and its application to brickwork circuits

arXiv:2606.12538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: `Solvable' circuits, such as dual unitaries and its generalisations, have arisen as paradigmatic examples of tractable chaotic non-equilibrium dynamics, both in classical and quantum systems. However, while increasingly more complicated sufficient conditions have been proposed, a systematic theory classifying and understanding general features of solvable circuits is missing. We develop such a theory by introducing influence-solvable circuits, a class of $(1+1)D$ circuits whose influence matrix, which represents the `bath' generated by its own evolution, is given by a uniform MPS with finite bond-dimension $\chi$. This property allows for efficient computation of subsystem dynamics and essentially contains all known examples of solvable circuits. We derive a set of necessary and sufficient local conditions by using a version of the fundamental theorem of MPS for open boundary conditions. Next we apply our theory to brickwork circuits with $\chi=1$ influence-solvability and perform a systematic classification of classical brickwork circuits with local dimension up to $d=3$ and quantum brickwork circuits with $d=2$. Our search reveals new solvable circuits that are not captured by known solvability conditions.

18.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Statistics of cortical representational drift can enable robust readout

Authors:

by Charles Micou, Timothy O’Leary Representational drift of fixed stimuli, learned tasks and familiar environments is observed in many brain areas, leading to reconfiguration of population codes over days to weeks. This raises the question of whether downstream brain regions employ mechanisms to track changes in population activity and thus preserve the fidelity of the information they extract. We show that the statistical properties of drift have a significant impact on such mechanisms. Over an extended period, a net change in population tuning due to drift can arise from an accumulation of small changes distributed across the population, or via abrupt jumps that affect smaller subsets of cells at each time point. We demonstrate that an adaptive readout can exploit the heavy-tailed statistics of abrupt jumps to maintain a more stable readout using a simple inference mechanism. Using experimental data, we investigate the extent to which heavy-tailed drift statistics are observed during representational drift in the posterior parietal cortex and visual cortex. We find that experimentally measured drift does not conform to a Gaussian random walk. Instead, we find sudden jumps in neural tuning that would be advantageous for a downstream observer adapting to changes in representation. These observations motivate future study to determine whether adaptive decoding mechanisms exist in the brain and to determine the physiological mechanisms that shape the statistics of representational drift.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

CAPED: Context-Aware Privacy Exposure Defense for Mobile GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.12666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Screenshot-based mobile GUI agents can operate ordinary smartphone apps through the same visual interface as a human user, but this capability also turns every screen observation into a privacy boundary. During normal task execution, screenshots may expose contacts, messages, photos, files, recommendations, health cues, and other sensitive context that is unrelated to the user's request. We call this problem incidental visual privacy exposure. It is difficult to address with existing defenses: text anonymization misses many visual and inferential cues, while generic privacy masking can remove the evidence and controls that a GUI agent needs to complete the task. This paper presents CAPED, a context-aware pre-upload exposure control layer for mobile GUI agents. CAPED is designed as a phone-side protection layer: before screenshots are released to a remote multimodal agent, it extracts task requirements, uses screen context as a privacy prior, parses visible UI elements, and selectively exposes only content needed for the current task while masking incidental private content. We evaluate CAPED on AndroidWorld for broad task utility and with a controlled 28-task seeded privacy evaluation used as a measurement instrument for trajectory-level incidental leakage. In this seeded evaluation, Full CAPED reduces success-conditioned weighted seeded leakage from 0.766 under raw screenshots to 0.268 while preserving high task utility. A broader AndroidWorld run shows a remaining prototype-level utility cost, but the results support the central claim that screenshot upload should be treated as an explicit device–cloud boundary decision, governed by task-driven selective exposure rather than all-or-nothing screen sharing.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Investigating Faithfulness in Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2509.22363v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) integrate audio encoders with pretrained Large Language Models to perform complex multimodal reasoning tasks. While these models can generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations, the faithfulness of these reasoning chains remains unclear. In this work, we propose a systematic framework to evaluate CoT faithfulness in LALMs with respect to both the input audio and the final model prediction. We define three criteria for audio faithfulness: hallucination-free, holistic, and attentive listening. We also introduce a benchmark based on both audio and CoT interventions to assess faithfulness\footnote{The benchmarking interface and evaluation results are available at https://poonehmousavi.github.io/faithfulness/. Experiments on Audio Flamingo 3 and Qwen2.5-Omni suggest a potential multimodal disconnect: reasoning often aligns with the final prediction but is not always strongly grounded in the audio and can be vulnerable to hallucinations or adversarial perturbations.

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

Equivariant Graph Neural Networks Improve Optical Spectra Prediction for Materials Screening

arXiv:2606.19133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scalable prediction of optical spectra is a critical component of high-throughput materials screening for optoelectronic applications such as solar cells. Existing surrogate models are trained on spectra computed from lower levels of theory or rely on rotation-invariant scalar features, limiting their geometric expressiveness. We explore the use of equivariant graph neural networks for optical spectra prediction, adapting GotenNet to this task and evaluating it on multiple datasets including a recently published collection of 10,533 structures with spectra computed at the level of the random phase approximation (RPA). The proposed model outperforms the current state of the art, with the largest gains in the 0-8 eV range and on predicting the static real permittivity, both of particular relevance for thin-film optics.

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

Selective Synergistic Learning for Video Object-Centric Learning

Typical video object-centric learning (VOCL) approaches employ slot-based frameworks that rely on reconstruction-driven encoder-decoder architectures, where learning is mediated by two spatial maps: attention maps from the encoder and object maps from the decoder. As these two distinct maps exhibit different properties, a recent dense alignment strategy attempted to reconcile this discrepancy by enforcing agreement across all spatio-temporal patches via contrastive learning. However, this indiscriminate alignment inadvertently propagates the inherent weaknesses of each module, such as noisy encoder predictions and blurred decoder boundaries. Moreover, computing dense similarities across all pairs incurs a computational cost quadratic in the total number of spatio-temporal patches, severely limiting scalability. Motivated by this, we propose Selective Synergistic Learning (SSync). Instead of exhaustive patch-to-patch alignment, SSync prevents error propagation by selectively distilling only the most reliable cues: leveraging the encoder strictly for boundary refinement and the decoder for interior denoising. This is realized via a pseudo-labeling with linear complexity, eliminating the need for quadratic spatial comparisons. Also, to prevent the reinforcement of architectural biases like slot redundancy, we introduce a transitive pseudo-label merging that consolidates overlapping slots based on spatio-temporal activation consistency. Extensive studies demonstrate that SSync improves decomposition quality and serves as a versatile, plug-and-play module while also exhibiting exceptional robustness to slot configurations. Code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SSync.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Multimodal LLM-Empowered Re-Ranking for Generalizable Person Re-Identification

Domain Generalizable (DG) person re-identification (Re-ID) has attracted growing research interest due to its potential for deployment in unseen real-world scenarios. Most existing approaches address DG Re-ID by focusing on training domain-generalizable encoders but ignore the possible refinements in inference stage. In contrast, this work explores an alternative direction which improves inference re-ranking to enhance DG Re-ID. Conventional re-ranking methods typically rely on neighborhood-based distances to refine the initial ranking list, inherently depending on features produced by the Re-ID encoder. However, they deteriorate on target domains since the encoder lacks sufficient generalizability to produce reliable feature distances on unseen scenarios. Inspired by the remarkable generalization capabilities of recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we propose an MLLM-empowered distance metric to improve re-ranking in DG Re-ID. Specifically, we first adapt an MLLM to Re-ID data through supervised fine-tuning, which incorporates a domain-agnostic prompt and a query-candidate hard mining scheme. Then, the adapted MLLM is employed to compute a $\mu$-distance during inference, which is robust to domain gap and significantly enhances subsequent re-ranking performance. Our approach is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into previous re-ranking frameworks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently yields substantial performance improvements across multiple DG Re-ID benchmarks. The code of this work will be released at https://github.com/RikoLi/MUSE soon.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Mathematical analysis of the overall survival after chemoradiotherapy of limited-stage small cell lung cancer and the effect of dose/fractionation

The purpose of this work is to analyze the 2-year overall survival (OS2y) of limited-stage small cell lung cancer (LS-SCLC) treated with chemoradiotherapy (CRT), aiming at characterizing the response of LS-SCLC, and in particular the /{beta} value and proliferation parameters. Through a systematic analysis of the literature, we collated a dataset containing 57 entries (3363 patients) of response of LS-SCLC treated with CRT. Radiotherapy schedules ranged from hyper- to hypofractionation. Four radiobiological models to describe the OS2y were investigated, with progressive levels of complexity including the effect of radiotherapy, chemotherapy, treatment year and toxicity. The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) was used to compare models, and the profile likelihood methodology to compute confidence intervals. Model 4, which includes the effect of radiotherapy, chemotherapy, treatment year and dose-dependent toxicity, provided the best fits of the experimental data (lowest AIC value). While being the best model, model 4 still fails to provide a good prediction of the OS2y, in particular failing to predict the survival of the schedules achieving the lower/higher survivals. The radiobiological analysis of the dose-response of LS-SCLC to CRT does not allow to narrowly constrain the value of response parameters. We attribute this limitation to the large heterogeneity of this disease. Nonetheless, our analysis shows a large /{beta} value (>9 Gy, 95% CI), which implies a low fractionation effect in the radiotherapy of LS-SCLC. and an accelerated proliferation of tumor cells, {lambda}' > 1.6 Gy/day (95% CI), after a kick-off time of ~4-5 weeks, which supports the use of accelerated protocols to avoid the effect of tumor proliferation on the clinical outcome.

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

SAG: SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation with Query-Time Dynamic Hyperedges

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective approach for large language models to access external knowledge. However, existing methods rely on dense similarity retrieval and face inherent limitations in handling structured constraints and multi-hop reasoning. Incorporating knowledge graphs partially alleviates these issues, but at the cost of semantic fragmentation, high maintenance overhead, and difficult incremental updates. This paper introduces SAG (SQLRetrieval Augmented Generation), a structured architecture for retrieval and agent systems. Instead of pre-building a global static graph, SAG converts each chunk into one semantically complete event and a set of indexing entities, then uses SQL join queries to dynamically link events that share entities into local hyperedges,constructing, at query time, a dynamically instantiated local index structure. This design avoids the need for global graph rebuilding and ongoing maintenance; the system naturally supports incremental writes, concurrent processing, and continuous scaling through its reliance on standard database infrastructure. Across HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHop, and MuSiQue, three standard multi-hop benchmarks,SAG achieves the best results on 8 out of 9 Recall@K metrics, reaching 80.0% Recall@5 on MuSiQue, the benchmark with the highest multi-hop reasoning demands.SAG has also been deployed at a production scale of hundreds of millions of data items, with online retrieval latency kept within seconds. Project site and code are available at https://github.com/Zleap-AI/SAG-Benchmark.