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.CV) 2026-06-16

EdgeZSAD: Practical Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection on Edge Devices

Industrial inspection needs zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) that remains useful under edge deployment constraints. Recent methods often rely on ViT-L foundation backbones (~300M parameters), which exceed the memory and operator budget of typical embedded hardware. We study this regime through EdgeZSAD, a compact reference system built around a TinyViT-21M-512 backbone, an asymmetric global-local readout (EdgeGLR), and a reproducible source-side training recipe (Real-IAD-DR). We train a single checkpoint in a source-trained, target-unseen protocol and evaluate it across six industrial benchmarks. Across three independent runs, the resulting model reaches an average image AUROC of 91.6 on MVTec-AD and 88.2 on VisA, while remaining directly deployable on Jetson Orin Nano Super (TensorRT FP16) and RB5 Gen2 (QNN GPU FP16). Across the six device-rescored benchmarks, image-AUROC drift stays below 0.2 points, indicating that the exported graph preserves host-side ranking behavior in the evaluated deployment setting.

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

C-MambaPose: A Physics-Informed Complex Mamba Framework for Cross-Environment WiFi Human Pose Estimation

Authors:

Human pose estimation (HPE) utilizing wireless WiFi signals has emerged as a promising technology owing to its device-free nature, privacy preservation, and robustness against occlusion and poor lighting. However, existing methods often overlook the physical complex phase information of WiFi signals and fail to generalize across diverse environments due to severe domain shifts. In this paper, we present C-MambaPose, a physics-informed complex-valued Mamba-GraFormer hybrid framework for robust cross-environment WiFi-based 3D HPE. Our framework first sanitizes raw WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) phase errors and constructs a phase-preserving complex-valued representation. We then employ a Spatiotemporal Complex Mamba encoder with a dynamic selective receptive field to capture fine-grained phase dynamics. A cross-attention joint-query mapper maps the unstructured sequence tokens to human joints, which are decoded by a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to predict anatomically coherent 3D coordinates. Extensive evaluations on the MM-Fi dataset show that C-MambaPose achieves competitive or superior performance to state-of-the-art baselines across all settings, setting a new state-of-the-art specifically on the challenging cross-environment split, requiring only 3.78 M parameters-an 83.1\% reduction compared to GraphPose-Fi[chen2026graph] and an 85.7\% reduction compared to MetaFi++[zhou2023metafi++], while maintaining a comparable size to DT-Pose[chen2025towards] (which is only 18\% smaller) but achieving significantly superior performance without requiring any pretraining. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/phucngvinuni/cmampose.git.

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

A Complexity Measure for Active Learning in Multi-group Mean Estimation

arXiv:2606.14690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a max-risk objective for active learning in a multi-group mean estimation $d$-armed bandits: a learner adaptively allocates a budget of $T$ samples across $d$ groups to minimize the worst-case uncertainty index $\max_{k\in[d]}\sigma_k^2/n_k$, where $\sigma_k$ is the standard deviation of the distribution of arm $d$, and $n_k$ is the number of times arm $d$ is sampled. We develop a local minimax framework and prove the first general lower bound for this objective, valid for any finite-variance hypothesis class. The bound separates difficulty into three orthogonal factors: a budget term, a heteroscedasticity index measuring how unevenly the uncertainty is spread across arms, and a model-dependent complexity measure, the Variance Local Curvature ($\mathrm{VLC}$), which captures how much information a local change of variance creates inside the hypothesis class. For smooth classes, the $\mathrm{VLC}$ is a reparametrization of a variance–Fisher information, with closed-form values for common families. Benchmarking against the strongest available upper bound shows near-optimality up to logarithmic factors in broad regimes, and pinpoints a systematic gap in highly heterogeneous instances. Our proof introduces two key ingredients: a loss-induced $\ell_1$ geometry on the decision space, and a representation-based instance generator that reduces hard-instance construction to an explicit random matrix calculation.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Reporting patterns of adverse drug withdrawal events using individual case safety reports in United States and European databases

Introduction: Adverse drug withdrawal events (ADWEs) are a key safety concern with deprescribing but are infrequently reported in trials. Although pharmacovigilance systems have advanced our understanding of medication-related harms, it is unclear how extensively these systems have been used for ADWEs. Objectives: To examine the reporting patterns of ADWEs for all drugs recorded in United States and European pharmacovigilance databases between 2004 and 2023. Methods: A retrospective study was conducted using two pharmacovigilance databases, the publicly available FDA-FAERS dataset and EMA-EV Level 2A (individual-level) dataset. ADWE cases were identified using relevant MedDRA preferred terms. Data on patient characteristics, reporter type, drugs, indication, ADWE outcomes, dechallenge/rechallenge, seriousness criteria, time to onset, duration, and causality were summarised. Results: A total of 158,505 ADWE reports were analysed (FDA-FAERS: 145,514; EMA-EV: 12,987), with mean ages of 46.1 (FDA; 55.3% female) and 45.5 years (EMA; 57.1% female). The frequently reported drug classes were opioids (FDA: oxycodone, 29.8%; EMA: buprenorphine, 19%), antidepressants (FDA: duloxetine, 32%; EMA: venlafaxine, 25.9%) and gabapentinoids (FDA: pregabalin, 6.7%; EMA: pregabalin, 6.0%). The most common adverse outcomes were other serious medical conditions (FDA=63.9%; EMA=46.0%), hospitalisation (FDA=15.9%; EMA=28.3%), and disability (FDA=13.3%; EMA=6.2%) and these outcomes varied significantly based on sex and age group (p

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Diffusion Policy Optimization without Drifting Apart

arXiv:2606.13795v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RL post-training has become increasingly pivotal for improving diffusion policies, but existing diffusion policy-gradient methods are often unstable and cannot achieve reliable policy improvement. We identify the cause as the double-drift phenomenon: optimizing a variational surrogate can let the ELBO separate from the true log-likelihood, which then makes the resulting proxy policy gradient misaligned with the true policy gradient of expected return. We propose DiPOD, a diffusion policy optimization framework that maintains tight-bound behavior throughout training by interleaving self-distillation with policy-improving gradient updates. This leads to a simple and practical algorithm: augmenting each diffusion policy-gradient update with an on-policy ELBO regularizer. Across diffusion language model post-training and continuous-control diffusion policies, DiPOD substantially stabilizes training and reaches higher rewards than previous methods.

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

Where Do Backdoors Live? A Component-Level Analysis of Backdoor Propagation in Speech Language Models

Speech language models (SLMs) are systems of systems: independent components that unite to achieve a common goal. Despite their heterogeneous nature, SLMs are often studied end-to-end; how information flows through the pipeline remains obscure. We investigate this question through the lens of backdoor attacks. We first establish that backdoors can propagate through the SLM, leaving all tasks highly vulnerable. From this, we design a component analysis to discover the role each component takes in backdoor learning. We find that backdoor persistence or erasure is highly dependent on the targeted component. Beyond propagation, we examine how backdoors are encoded in shared multitask embeddings, showing that poisoned samples are not directly separable from benign ones, challenging a common separability assumption used in filtering defenses. Our findings emphasize the need to treat multimodal pipelines as intricate systems with unique vulnerabilities, not solely extensions of unimodal ones.

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

HalluJudge: A Reference-Free Hallucination Detection for Context Misalignment in Code Review Automation

arXiv:2601.19072v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in code review automation, such as review comment generation, yet they suffer from hallucinations – where the generated review comments are ungrounded in the actual code – poses a significant challenge to the adoption of LLMs in code review workflows. To address this, we explore effective and scalable methods for a hallucination detection in LLM-generated code review comments without the reference. In this work, we design HalluJudge that aims to assess the grounding of generated review comments based on the context alignment. HalluJudge includes four key strategies ranging from direct assessment to structured multi-branch reasoning (e.g., Tree-of-Thoughts). We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of these assessment strategies across Atlassian's enterprise-scale software projects to examine the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of HalluJudge. Furthermore, we analyze the alignment between HalluJudge's judgment and developer preference of the actual LLM-generated code review comments in the real-world production. Our results show that the hallucination assessment in HalluJudge is cost-effective with an F1 score of 0.85 and an average cost of $0.009. On average, 67% of the HalluJudge assessments are aligned with the developer preference of the actual LLM-generated review comments in the online production. Our results suggest that HalluJudge can serve as a practical safeguard to reduce developers' exposure to hallucinated comments, fostering trust in AI-assisted code reviews.

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

Imbalanced Classification under Capacity Constraints

arXiv:2605.03289v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detecting observations from a minority class under severe class imbalance is a central challenge in applications such as fraud detection, medical screening, and industrial quality control. In these settings, each positive prediction triggers a costly follow-up action, an MRI scan, a transaction audit, whose execution is subject to real operational constraints. This paper proposes a formal classification framework under capacity constraints: given a user-defined bound limit $b$ on the proportion of observations that can be labeled as belonging to the minority class, the goal is to find the classifier that maximizes sensitivity on that class. We characterize the optimal classifier under this constraint and establish its equivalence with the classical Bayes classifier under a reweighting of the prior probabilities. We also introduce a capacity-adjusted performance metric $M$ that accounts for the effective detection rate when the capacity constraint is binding. The framework is implemented on top of standard learning methods, k-NN, SVM, random forests, and neural networks, and statistical consistency is established for each. We further show that these methods reduce to post-hoc thresholding when no hyperparameters are oriented toward the capacity-constrained objective, and introduce a capacity-aware support vector machine that exploits the constraint during training and achieves the strongest empirical performance. Experiments on the Taiwanese credit card default dataset confirm that capacity-constrained classifiers substantially outperform both classical approaches and SMOTE under high imbalance regimes. The framework extends naturally to multiclass settings and online environments.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

SEAGAN: domain-Specific and Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Dynamic Plant Processes

arXiv:2606.19623v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) provide a flexible framework for learning from scientific data linked through physical, biological, or functional relationships. One promising domain is plant physiology, where measured responses often arise from multiple interacting processes whose exact separation remains difficult even with manual intervention. In plant physiology, a key example is the A-Ci curve, which relates net CO2 assimilation rate (Anet) to leaf intercellular CO2 concentration (Ci) and is used to estimate photosynthetic parameters in leaf and crop-canopy models. However, reliable estimation requires identifying the active biochemical limitation state at each curve point, which remains a major source of uncertainty. Here, we formulate limitation-state identification along A-Ci curves as a graph-based node classification problem, with curve points as nodes. Domain-specific graph representations are created using distance-based k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) and auxiliary-signal-guided (ASG) connectivity, with edge attributes encoding pairwise relations. The framework was evaluated against conventional learning baselines, graph-based architectures, and an automated fitting-based benchmark. Results on a large synthetic dataset with known ground-truth limitation states show that graph-based models improve classification, particularly near biochemical transition regions. The best-performing configuration, SEAGAN (domain-Specific and Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Dynamic Plant Processes), integrates process-aware node features, edge attributes, kNN connectivity, and graph attention with weighted cross-entropy loss, achieving an F1-score of 0.857 and an accuracy of 0.882. The results show that representing A-Ci curves as graphs improves biochemical limitation-state analysis, with edge-aware attention over local kNN neighborhoods providing the most effective strategy.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Bridging Functional Correctness and Runtime Efficiency Gaps in LLM-Based Code Translation

While large language models (LLMs) have greatly advanced the functional correctness of automated code translation systems, the runtime efficiency of translated programs has received comparatively little attention. With the waning of Moore's law, runtime efficiency has become increasingly important for program quality, alongside functional correctness. Our preliminary study reveals that LLM-translated programs often run slower than human-written ones, and this issue cannot be remedied through prompt engineering alone. Therefore, our work proposes SwiftTrans, a code translation framework comprising two key stages: (1) Multi-Perspective Exploration, where MpTranslator leverages parallel in-context learning (ICL) to generate diverse translation candidates; and (2) Difference-Aware Selection, where DiffSelector identifies the optimal candidate by explicitly comparing differences between translations. We further introduce Hierarchical Guidance for MpTranslator and Ordinal Guidance for DiffSelector, enabling LLMs to better adapt to these two core components. To support the evaluation of runtime efficiency in translated programs, we extend existing benchmarks, CodeNet and F2SBench, and introduce a new benchmark, SwiftBench. Experimental results across all three benchmarks show that SwiftTrans achieves consistent improvements in both correctness and runtime efficiency.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Causal Object-Centric Models for Planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search

arXiv:2606.14418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce COMET (Causal Object-centric Model for Efficient Tree search), a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm that performs Monte Carlo Tree Search in a slot-structured latent space. COMET pairs a frozen unsupervised object-centric encoder with a transformer-based world model, in which actions are bound to objects through a novel action-slot fusion mechanism that is used in slot transition prediction. Policy and value heads use object-causal attention, modulating token interactions by learned per-slot relevance scores so that decision-making concentrates on task-relevant entities. COMET adds an explicit object-level inductive bias to MuZero-style latent planning. Across eight visually and dynamically diverse tasks from the Object-Centric Visual RL benchmark, ManiSkill, Robosuite, and VizDoom, COMET achieves a higher mean normalized score during the early stages of training compared to object-centric and monolithic baselines.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Stable Menus of Public Goods: AI-Enabled Progress

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using an open problem from the EC 2025 paper "Stable Menus of Public Goods" as a testbed, we conduct experiments to understand the effectiveness of different AI-for-EconCS research workflows. Specifically, we study three questions: Does providing human intuition in the prompt help? Does automated multi-turn interaction help? And, does an LLM outperform a first-year PhD student? Regarding the first two questions, we provide evidence for the following workflow suggestions: (1) prompting with human intuition can encourage the LLM to have better "taste", (2) multi-turn workflows help when the pipeline encourages "ambitious" steps. Regarding the third question, using an unpublished manuscript written by the paper's senior authors prior to collaborating with the first-year PhD student, we compare the effectiveness of the LLM with that of the first-year PhD student, and find that the LLM is slightly less effective.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Mechanical Field Networks: Structured Neural Dynamics for Multivariate Systems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many multivariate dynamical systems are observed only through trajectories, leaving the mechanisms governing their joint dynamics hidden. Existing approaches can impose interpretable dynamics or learn flexible state transitions, yet the resulting interaction structure is typically either specified in advance or left implicit within the learned dynamics. We introduce MF-Net, a recurrent dynamical model that represents all variables in a shared field state and updates this state through a learned relation law. Each variable carries a field component, and these components evolve jointly through a learnable mechanical transition. Here, mechanical refers to the relation-to-motion organization of the transition, where learned relations shape state-dependent flows, field responses, and motion tendencies that move the field state forward. The resulting structure is part of the rollout itself: learned relations influence how the field moves, and the same internal quantities support both forecasting and structural readout. Across known-law interaction systems, chaotic benchmarks, real neural recordings, and ecological time series, MF-Net achieves competitive short- and medium-horizon forecasting while retaining inspectable structural readout. On the 40-dimensional Lorenz–96 testbed, MF-Net achieves an eight-step $R^2$ of $0.798\pm0.018$; across five seeds, its learned relation matrix recovers the local coupling support with a local/nonlocal strength ratio of $19.80\pm1.00$ and Precision@$K$ of $1.000\pm0.000$. MF-Net provides a structure-readable dynamical modeling framework in which learned relations are trained through forward evolution and, on real data, interpreted as functional predictive couplings under appropriate observational limits.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Delta-Epsilon-Common Knowledge and Quantitative Agreement Theorems

arXiv:2606.11902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aumann defined common knowledge mathematically and established his now famous Agreement Theorem. We present a novel approach to quantifying how close individuals are to commonly knowing events, $(\delta,\epsilon)$-common knowledge, which is defined for any (and not just countable) probability spaces, and provide quantitative versions of the key results in this field. Specifically, we do this for Aumann's Agreement Theorem and Nielsen's extension thereof to random variables, as well as for the setting in which posteriors are communicated back and forth between individuals. Our results apply in particular to noisy communication settings.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Continuous Audio Thinking for Large Audio Language Models

Large audio language models (LALMs) have shown impressive capabilities on diverse audio understanding tasks, ranging from speech transcription to music analysis. However, because LALMs are typically trained to produce text-aligned responses, their hidden states are progressively shaped for text generation rather than for preserving acoustic information. As a result, the diverse acoustic content that audio carries, such as phonetic detail, prosody, sound events, affect, and pitch, is lost along the way and difficult to leverage in the response. We introduce Continuous Audio Thinking (CoAT), a framework that equips audio language models with a continuous latent workspace for organizing acoustic information prior to response generation, grounded by distillation from audio experts. Within the thinking space, the model can utilize the rich acoustic information provided by expert distillation when generating its response. Furthermore, the proposed continuous thinking block can be processed in a single prefill, so CoAT does not require additional autoregressive decoding cost over the baseline. Across three LALMs, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and Audio Flamingo~3, performance gains on a broad benchmark suite spanning audio reasoning, audio understanding, music classification, speech emotion, and speech transcription demonstrate the effectiveness of CoAT. Further analysis confirms that the auxiliary supervision propagates from the thinking positions to the model's textual responses.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

SPARK: A Systems-level Computational Framework for Reconstructing Transcriptomic State Organisation in Lung Adenocarcinoma

Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) exhibits substantial molecular heterogeneity, which complicates tumour stratification and limits the ability of mutation-centric models to capture tumour behaviour and predict patient outcomes. This study investigates whether coordinated transcriptomic programs can provide a systems-level representation of tumour states. Bulk RNA-sequencing data from the TCGA-LUAD cohort were analysed to reconstruct pathway-level transcriptomic organisation using a stability-optimised network framework (SPARK). This analysis identified eight transcriptomic modules representing coordinated biological processes active across tumours. Module activity scores were subsequently used to derive a composite Transcriptomic Risk Score through elastic-net Cox proportional hazards modelling. The resulting risk score showed a significant association with overall survival in the discovery cohort and improved prognostic discrimination beyond clinical variables. An independent evaluation in the CPTAC-LUAD cohort confirmed the prognostic signal and preserved risk stratification across patient groups. Unsupervised clustering of module activity further revealed three transcriptomic patient groups characterised by distinct biological programs, genomic alteration patterns, and survival outcomes. Single-cell analysis also demonstrated that the identified transcriptomic modules reflect coordinated organisation of the tumour-immune-stromal ecosystem across cellular compartments. Together, these findings suggest that LUAD heterogeneity can be organised into coordinated transcriptomic programs with measurable clinical relevance, providing a systems-level framework for representing tumour molecular states.

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

The Implicit Bias of Steepest Descent with Mini-batch Stochastic Gradient

arXiv:2602.11557v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A variety of widely used optimization methods like SignSGD and Muon can be interpreted as instances of steepest descent under different norm-induced geometries. In this work, we study the implicit bias of mini-batch stochastic steepest descent in multi-class classification, characterizing how batch size, momentum, and variance reduction shape the limiting max-margin behavior and convergence rates under general entry-wise and Schatten-$p$ norms. We show that, without momentum, worst-case convergence and successful classification can only be guaranteed with full-batch gradient. In contrast, momentum enables small-batch convergence to an approximate max-margin solution through a batch-momentum trade-off, though it slows convergence. This approach provides fully explicit, dimension-free rates that improve upon prior results. Moreover, we prove that variance reduction can recover the exact full-batch implicit bias for any batch size, albeit at a slower convergence rate. Finally, we further investigate the batch-size-one steepest descent without momentum, and reveal its convergence to a fundamentally different bias via a concrete data example, which reveals a key limitation of purely stochastic updates. Overall, our unified analysis clarifies when stochastic optimization aligns with full-batch behavior, and paves the way for perform deeper explorations of the training behavior of stochastic gradient steepest descent algorithms.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimal Calibration of Quantum Network Links

arXiv:2606.18167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The reliable distribution of entanglement is essential for the effective operation of quantum networks. Due to fundamental differences between quantum and classical communication systems, it is necessary to develop specialised algorithms and protocols that also account for quantum-specific constraints. In this work, we focus on the issue of recalibration. As suggested by recent experimental studies, the process of local entanglement generation in a quantum link degrades over time due to environmental changes that have to be estimated and compensated via a calibration operation, during which the link is not available. Therefore, in such a quantum network, every link alternates between an activation period, during which it operates normally, and a calibration period, during which it cannot participate in the end-to-end entanglement distribution, thereby creating a trade-off between link quality (the fidelity of generated pairs, which decays during activation) and availability (the fraction of time the link is usable, which calibration reduces). We develop analytically a protocol for optimally assigning activation periods to each link in linear quantum repeater chains, subject to any general end-to-end fidelity requirements and local initial fidelity thresholds. Building on this foundation, we extend to general quantum networks, where multiple paths may cross at common links, proposing a heuristic approach evaluated in simulations and compared with a benchmark, numerical approach, and theoretical bounds.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

MENTOR: Reinforcement Learning via Flexible Teacher-Optimized Rewards for Tool-Use Distillation

Distilling the tool-use capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into small language models (SLMs) is essential for their practical application. The predominant approach, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), suffers from poor out-of-domain (OOD) generalization due to its rigid alignment with static teacher trajectories. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers an alternative, the capacity limitations of SLMs pose a severe dilemma: sparse outcome rewards provide insufficient guidance, whereas strict trajectory matching imposes overly restrictive constraints. To bridge this capacity-driven gap, we propose MENTOR, which introduces a flexible yet process-aware reward structure. Instead of enforcing rigid replication, MENTOR uses the teacher's reference to guide tool-use behavior, balancing behavioral alignment with downstream performance. Extensive experiments on controlled executable-tool benchmarks demonstrate that MENTOR improves OOD tool-use performance compared to SFT and strict RL baselines. Our findings suggest that within verifiable tool-use environments, flexible tool-use alignment offers a more effective approach than strict trajectory replication for developing adaptable small models.

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

Learning-Based Decision Making for Combustion Phasing Control in Multi-Fuel CI Engines with Latent Fuel Reactivity Estimation

arXiv:2606.18393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression-ignition engines offer fuel flexibility but introduce uncertain, time-varying fuel reactivity, represented by cetane number (CN), which complicates cycle-to-cycle combustion-phasing control. This work formulates CA50 regulation under latent CN variation as a partially observable sequential decision problem and systematically evaluates controllers with increasing temporal and representational capacity, including LinUCB, history-augmented contextual bandits, observation-only DDPG, recurrent DDPG, and a proposed GRU-guided RL framework. A Gaussian-process surrogate trained on experimental multi-fuel engine data provides a controlled and reproducible evaluation environment. Results show that myopic and fixed-history bandit methods degrade under CN variation, observation-only RL suffers from latent-state aliasing, and generic recurrence is insufficient when CN evolves rapidly. The proposed framework learns a compact GRU-based representation of fuel reactivity from combustion history and conditions both actor and critic on this estimated signal rather than oracle CN. By training the policy on the same imperfect fuel-reactivity information available at deployment, the controller avoids train-deploy inconsistency in conventional online estimate-then-control pipelines. Across unseen CN trajectories, the policy achieves stable CA50 regulation with mean absolute tracking error below 0.25{\deg} CA at the training setpoint, while producing smooth, physically consistent SOI and glow-plug-power actuation. These results show that combustion control under latent, continuously evolving fuel dynamics requires more than standalone estimation or generic recurrence. By aligning fuel-reactivity inference with control policy learning, the proposed framework enables reactivity-aware decision-making using the same estimated state available during deployment.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Reward Hacking in Language Model Agents: Revisiting AI Safety Gridworlds

arXiv:2606.15385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reward hacking, where AI systems exploit misspecified objectives to achieve high reward without satisfying intended goals, remains a central challenge in AI safety. Yet most known instances have been discovered post hoc in frontier systems where controlled study is impractical. We adapt the AI Safety Gridworlds framework into a text-based evaluation suite that reformulates classic reinforcement learning safety tasks for language-based agents. Across frontier and mid-scale models, we find that specification gaming emerges zero-shot: models systematically achieve high observed reward while underperforming on hidden safety objectives, and even apparently safe behaviors can reflect misunderstanding rather than principled safety. Reinforcement learning does not correct these failures: direct reward optimization widens the gap between observed and hidden reward, as the model's initial competence causes it to lock into locally rewarding strategies before discovering safer alternatives. This pattern persists across model scales (1.5B–14B) and is not resolved by finer credit assignment, exploration prompts, or entropy regularization. Our results show that reward hacking arises naturally when optimizing proxy objectives with capable language model agents and resists standard mitigations, suggesting that proxy-reward failures in agentic settings may require approaches beyond standard exploration and credit-assignment fixes. To facilitate reproducibility, the code for this work is available at \href{https://github.com/asparius/verl-agent-safety}{our public repository}.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Modeling Complex Behaviors: Multi-Personality Composition and Dynamic Switching in Vision-Language Models

With the widespread deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in social interaction, understanding and controlling their behavior under complex personality conditions is essential. This paper introduces explicit personality conditioning and establishes a systematic evaluation framework encompassing single-personality induction, multi-personality induction, and personality switching. Experiments show that personality induction improves image captioning performance but can impair performance on tasks requiring precise reasoning, such as visual question answering (VQA). Balancing and residual effects are observed during multi-trait composition and dynamic switching, indicating that model behavior is co-modulated by both previous and current personality constraints. Existing prompt-based personality induction methods show limited transferability to multimodal settings. Our work reveals the dynamic and complex nature of personality modeling in MLLMs and underscores the need for robust, tailored methods for personality induction and evaluation. The code will be released when the paper is accepted.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Extracting the physical content of Liouvillian eigenmodes: Semiclassical quantization

arXiv:2606.20271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unlike in closed quantum systems where individual energy eigenstates are understood as physical excitations, open quantum systems have distinct right and left eigenstates of the Liouvillian that decay with time and are difficult to interpret. Here we introduce a physically motivated quasiprobability measure combining the two types of eigenstates that interprets a Liouville eigenmode as a set of coherences. This coherence measure is intimately connected to the return probability and allows one to visualize the modes as quasiprobability distributions in a "doubled" phase space. Using this measure we show that, remarkably, an oscillator retains its quantized "orbits" in phase space for a large class of linear and nonlinear damping, thus providing a formulation of semiclassical quantization for open systems. The orbits have measurable dynamical signatures and are broadened in the presence of a thermal bath, similar to energy levels. For quadratic systems, our results yield an extension of the concept of invariant tori, which play a central role in Hamiltonian systems.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

How Much Capacity Does EEG Denoising Need? Ultra-Compact Networks reveal Benchmark Saturation and Metric-Utility Gap

arXiv:2606.08594v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep learning EEG denoising architectures have scaled from tens of thousands to tens of millions of parameters, yet no prior study has isolated model capacity as the experimental variable or tested whether reconstruction metrics predict downstream neural-signal utility. We address both gaps by fixing architecture, loss, data split, and training recipe while sweeping only channel width from 1.05K to 40.26K parameters in a minimal depthwise-separable convolutional U-Net. Models were evaluated on the EEGDenoiseNet benchmark, cross-dataset BCI transfer tests, controlled baseline retraining, and downstream motor-imagery classification with five decoder families across all nine BCI Competition IV-2a subjects. Reconstruction performance saturated by 3-6.5K parameters, with post-elbow gains of at most 0.015 correlation coefficient per log10-parameter unit. An 8.46M-parameter baseline retrained under the same pipeline matched the 40.26K compact variant on EOG–a 200x parameter gap yielding no advantage–while a Patch-Transformer control reproduced the same diminishing-return shape. Downstream evaluation exposed a classifier-dependent metric-utility gap: reconstruction-optimized denoising significantly degraded CSP+LDA classification across all nine subjects and three artifact types (best denoised accuracy 0.547 vs. 0.612 noisy baseline; Bonferroni p=0.0488), persisting on naturally recorded trials (Delta=-0.047; BH-FDR q=0.0049). End-to-end neural decoders showed variable or neutral effects. Standard EEG denoising benchmarks are saturated far below current model capacity, and reconstruction metrics do not predict BCI utility. Ultra-compact models at 33-46 KB and 1.27-2.61M FLOPs/segment are practical for edge deployment. These findings argue for capacity-controlled evaluation, harder task-aware benchmarks, and mandatory downstream validation.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Toward less intrusive pubertal assessment: longitudinal evaluation of tanner and non-tanner metrics in East African adolescents

Background: Accurate pubertal assessment is essential in pediatric endocrinology and adolescent health research. While Tanner staging remains the gold standard, its subjective nature and invasive genital examination limit feasibility and acceptability, especially in longitudinal studies and culturally sensitive settings. This study evaluated less intrusive pubertal assessment combinations that maintain discriminative accuracy. Methods: We conducted a longitudinal study among 200 uncircumcised, sexually naive males aged 15-17 years in Southwestern Uganda, with quarterly follow-up over three years. Clinicians assessed Tanner staging metrics (pubic hair, testicular volume, penile length, scrotal color), axillary hair, and serum testosterone. Markov transition models estimated Tanner stage progression. Ordinal logistic regression and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) analyses quantified discriminative performance of individual and combined metrics. Results: At baseline, participants were distributed across Tanner stages II (6.0%), III (13.5%), IV (55.0%), and V (25.5%). Among individual metrics, pubic hair distribution best predicted overall Tanner stage (AUC=0.867), while penile length was least predictive (AUC=0.833). The full four-metric Tanner model achieved high discrimination (AUC=0.993). However, a less intrusive combination of pubic hair and scrotal color achieved comparable discrimination (AUC=0.942), improving to AUC=0.953 with axillary hair and age. Markov modeling demonstrated frequent bidirectional transitions between Tanner stages IV and V, reflecting variability in longitudinal staging. Conclusions: A minimally intrusive assessment combining pubic hair, scrotal color, axillary hair, and age reliably predicts pubertal stage, offering an acceptable alternative to traditional Tanner staging for research and surveillance contexts where genital manipulation is impractical or unethical.