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.CL) 2026-06-16

FraudSMSWalker: Benchmarking Agentic Large Language Models for SMS-to-Webpage Fraud Detection

SMS fraud is increasingly cross-channel: a message directs the user to a webpage, and the final risk depends on how the SMS claim aligns with the page content and requested user action. However, existing evaluations either focus on message-only smishing classification or expose URL and domain cues that allow models to rely on reputation shortcuts. To address this gap, we introduce FraudSMSWalker, a controlled benchmark for URL-masked SMS-to-webpage fraud judgment. FraudSMSWalker contains 699 bilingual chains, including 332 fraudulent and 367 benign cases, across ten service scenarios. The model-visible input consists of the SMS context and sanitized webpage evidence, while raw URLs, hosts, domains, IPs, redirects, and reputation metadata are withheld. The benchmark further includes hard benign cases whose pages contain login, payment, verification, or account-management elements that are plausible under the service context but also appear in scam flows. We evaluate nine web agents under masked browser-agent protocols and conduct URL-visibility ablations. The results show that current agents can detect suspicious cues, but struggle to preserve benign recall and often produce positive predictions that are weakly supported by the observed evidence. These findings position FraudSMSWalker as a benchmark for measuring whether web agents can make fraud judgments that remain both accurate and evidence-grounded when direct reputation shortcuts are suppressed. The associated code and dataset are accessible at the \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/w/FraudMessageWalker-Bench}{anonymous link}.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

UST-GNN: A Unified Spatial–Topological Graph Neural Network Framework for Urban Analytics–Demonstrated through a Case Study on Urban Health Prediction

arXiv:2504.04739v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how social, demographic, environmental, and spatial factors jointly shape urban outcomes is essential for sustainable urban development and evidence-based policy. Traditional statistical approaches often struggle to capture complex non-linear relationships, while many machine learning methods overlook the joint roles of spatial autocorrelation and network topology in urban systems. Recent advances in GeoAI have addressed these challenges only partially, often treating spatial effects, graph structure, evaluation, and interpretability separately. We present UST-GNN, a unified spatial–topological graph neural network framework that integrates neighbourhood connectivity, heterogeneous urban features, and positional/locational embeddings into a single representation. Using the MedSAT dataset, which contains over 150 environmental and socio-demographic variables and six prescription outcomes across 4,835 neighbourhoods in Greater London, UST-GNN outperforms strong statistical, geographically enhanced, and graph Machine Learning baselines, improving out-of-sample $R^2$ by 8.4–13.2\% under strict spatial cross-validation. We further introduce a lightweight principal-component module to interpret learned node embeddings geographically and relate them to policy-relevant covariates. The resulting analyses recover established patterns, offer new perspectives on debated associations, and reveal novel predictors warranting further causal investigation. Together, these findings demonstrate the value of graph-based spatial machine learning for urban health analytics, environmental inequality assessment, and evidence-based urban policy. Beyond predictive gains, UST-GNN provides a unified GeoAI analytical pipeline that can be embedded into urban digital twin workflows for scenario testing, monitoring, and data-informed decision-making for healthier, more sustainable cities.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration

All-in-One image restoration aims to develop a unified restoration framework for handling diverse degradation types. Existing end-to-end methods usually regard the restoration process as a black-box mapping, lacking an explicit optimization interpretation. Although deep unfolding provides an interpretable iterative modeling paradigm for image restoration, existing methods mostly rely on fixed degradation assumptions or predefined degradation information, making them difficult to adapt to unified restoration requirements under complex degradations and locally damaged content. This limitation restricts their performance in degradation suppression and structural detail recovery. To address these issues, this paper proposes DVANet, a deep unfolding network inspired by the half-quadratic splitting optimization algorithm, which formulates unified image restoration under complex degradations as a collaborative unfolding process between degradation-aware observation consistency and visual-prior-guided reconstruction. Specifically, in the degradation-aware observation consistency branch, a degradation representation module is employed to extract global degradation attributes and local degradation cues, and degradation-conditioned mapping is used to enhance the model's adaptability to different degradation types. In the visual-prior-guided reconstruction branch, DINOv3 is introduced to provide structural and semantic information as hierarchical visual priors, thereby complementing the missing structural information in damaged regions and improving detail recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVANet achieves superior or competitive performance on multi-scenario degradation and cross-domain image restoration tasks, showing favorable degradation adaptability and generalization ability.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Beyond Continuity: Simulation-free Reconstruction of Discrete Branching Dynamics from Single-cell Snapshots

arXiv:2605.00545v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inferring cellular trajectories from destructive snapshots is complicated by the challenges of stochasticity and non-conservative mass dynamics such as cell proliferation and apoptosis. Existing unbalanced Optimal Transport (OT) methods treat mass as a continuous fluid, performing inference at the population level. However, this macroscopic view often fails to capture the discrete, jump-like nature of birth-death events at single-cell resolution, which is essential for understanding lineage branching and fate decisions. We present Unbalanced Schrödinger Bridge (USB), a simulation-free framework for learning underlying dynamics that effectively integrates both stochastic and unbalanced effects which also models the discrete, jump-like birth-death dynamics at single-cell resolution. Theoretically, USB provides a tractable solution to the Branching Schrödinger Bridge (BSB) problem, offering a rigorous microscopic interpretation where individual cells undergo both Brownian motion and discrete birth-death jumps. Technically, the method implements an efficient solver by introducing a simulation-free training objective that effectively scales to high-dimensional omics data. Empirically, we demonstrate on both simulated and real-world datasets that USB not only achieves trajectory reconstruction performance better than or comparable to deterministic baselines but also uniquely enables realistic discrete simulation of birth-death dynamics at single-cell resolution.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Unraveling the Mechanism of Drug Binding to SARS-CoV-2 RNA Pseudoknot with Thermodynamics-Driven Machine Learning

arXiv:2604.14906v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pseudoknot secondary structure in SARS-CoV-2 RNA is essential for regulating protein synthesis through $-$1 programmed ribosomal frameshifting ($-1$ PRF), a mechanism that allows the virus to generate both structural and non-structural proteins from overlapping reading frames. This pseudoknot exhibits both threaded and unthreaded long-lived topologies. The influence of ligand binding on its folding is a process critical for the development of $-$1 PRF small-molecule inhibitors. Understanding this process through unbiased molecular dynamics (MD) simulations can be facilitated by introducing collective variables (CVs) that capture the corresponding slowest dynamical modes. Here, we use spectral map (SM), a thermodynamics-driven machine learning technique, to learn such CVs directly from all-atom MD trajectories of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA pseudoknot in complex with the $-$1 PRF inhibitor merafloxacin and its two structural analogs in neutral and ionized forms. Free-energy landscapes (FELs) derived from the learned CVs indicate that ligand-induced destabilization is topology-selective. In the threaded pseudoknot, the inhibitors destabilize the S2 stem, while in the unthreaded pseudoknot, destabilization occurs in the S1 and S3 stems. Furthermore, the extent to which each ligand reshapes the FEL matches experimentally reported antiviral potency, whereas the protonation state qualitatively alters dynamics within the same RNA topology. Overall, our results show how pseudoknot topology, ligand type, and protonation state collectively influence the slow conformational dynamics of viral RNA and establish physiological protonation as a critical factor for modeling RNA-targeted drug action.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Validation of an Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Mobile Application for Dietary Oxalate Assessment in Kidney Stone Prevention

Background: Calcium oxalate nephrolithiasis is the most common type of kidney stone disease. Dietary oxalate intake is an important modifiable factor. Assessing dietary oxalate exposure in clinical practice poses challenges due to limitations of traditional dietary recall tools and variability in food composition data. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in mobile health may offer scalable solutions for better dietary monitoring and kidney stone prevention. We examined the ability of StoneFree AI to estimate dietary oxalate from verbal and image-based food inputs. Objective: To evaluate the accuracy and limitations of StoneFree AI, for estimating dietary oxalate intake from verbal food descriptions and meal images, and to evaluate errors from entries that may inform future clinical use in kidney stone prevention. Methods: StoneFree AI is a cross-platform mobile application that uses a multimodal large language model (Google Gemini) to interpret verbal food descriptions and visual food images. The identified foods were mapped to oxalate values using the Harvard Oxalate Database. System performance was evaluated using 804 verbal food entries and 276 portion-size food images obtained from the ASA24 dietary assessment database. Verbal inputs were compared with reference oxalate values using absolute error and predefined agreement thresholds ({+/-}1, {+/-}5, {+/-}10 mg). Image-based inputs were evaluated against mutually exclusive primary error categories, including food identification, portion estimation, ingredient recognition, oxalate reference selection, and non-analyzable cases. Results: For verbal food entries, the AI system showed strong agreement with reference oxalate values. Overall, 82.1% of estimates were within {+/-}1 mg, 91.5% within {+/-}5 mg, and 94.5% within {+/-}10 mg of reference values. The mean absolute error was 3.32 mg, the median absolute error was 0.10 mg, and the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) was 0.860. Image-based inputs showed a higher overall error rate of 63.0%, primarily due to food identification errors (33.0%), inaccurate portion estimation (11.0%), and ingredient recognition errors (9.8%). Most errors occurred with visually complex meals, such as mixed dishes and grain-based foods. Conclusions: AI-assisted estimation of dietary oxalate intake demonstrated high accuracy when structured verbal inputs were used but was less reliable for image-based meal analysis. These findings suggest AI-enabled mobile tools may support dietary monitoring for kidney stone prevention, particularly when user input is structured. Further refinement of computer vision models and prospective clinical validation are required before widespread clinical implementation.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

PCR-CA: Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment for Multiple-Category App Recommendation

arXiv:2508.18166v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern app store recommender systems struggle with multiple-category apps, as traditional taxonomies fail to capture overlapping semantics, leading to suboptimal personalization. We propose PCR-CA (Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment), an end-to-end framework for improved CTR prediction. PCR-CA first extracts compact multimodal embeddings from app text, then introduces a Parallel Codebook VQ-AE module that learns discrete semantic representations across multiple codebooks in parallel – unlike hierarchical residual quantization (RQ-VAE). This design enables independent encoding of diverse aspects (e.g., gameplay, art style), better modeling multiple-category semantics. To bridge semantic and collaborative signals, we employ a contrastive alignment loss at both the user and item levels, enhancing representation learning for long-tail items. Additionally, a dual-attention fusion mechanism combines ID-based and semantic features to capture user interests, especially for long-tail apps. Experiments on a large-scale dataset show PCR-CA achieves a +0.76% AUC improvement over strong baselines, with +2.15% AUC gains for long-tail apps. Online A/B testing further validates our approach, showing a +10.52% lift in CTR and a +16.30% improvement in CVR, demonstrating PCR-CA's effectiveness in real-world deployment. The new framework has now been fully deployed on the Microsoft Store.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Low-Burden LLM-Based Preference Learning: Personalizing Assistive Robots from Natural Language Feedback for Users with Paralysis

arXiv:2604.01463v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Physically Assistive Robots require personalized behaviors to ensure user safety and comfort. However, traditional preference learning methods, like exhaustive pairwise comparisons, cause substantial physical and cognitive fatigue for users with severe motor impairments. To solve this, we propose a low-burden, offline framework that translates unstructured natural language feedback directly into deterministic robotic control policies. To safely bridge the gap between ambiguous human speech and robotic code, our pipeline uses Large Language Models (LLMs) grounded in the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework. This clinical reasoning decodes subjective user reactions into explicit physical and psychological needs, which are then mapped into transparent decision trees. Before deployment, an automated "LLM-as-a-Judge" verifies the code's structural safety. We validated this system in a simulated meal preparation study with 10 adults with paralysis. Results show our natural language approach significantly reduces user workload compared to traditional baselines. Additionally, occupational therapists confirmed the generated policies are safe and accurately reflect user preferences.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Explicit Context-Driven Neural Acoustic Modeling for High-Fidelity RIR Generation

arXiv:2509.15210v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Realistic sound simulation plays a critical role in many applications. A key element in sound simulation is the room impulse response (RIR), which characterizes how sound propagates within a given space. Recent studies have applied neural implicit methods to learn RIR using context information collected from the environment, such as scene images. However, these approaches do not effectively leverage explicit geometric information from the environment. To further exploit neural implicit models with direct geometric features, we present MiNAF, which queries a rough room mesh at given locations and extracts distance distributions as an explicit representation of local context. Our approach demonstrates that incorporating explicit local geometric features can better guide the model in generating more accurate RIR predictions. Through comparisons with conventional and state-of-the-art methods, we show that MiNAF performs competitively across various evaluation metrics.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DDI_single: Single-Sequence-Based Protein Domain Assembly

Authors:

Domains are the basic units of protein structure and function. Appropriate inter-domain organization is critical to enable cooperative execution of multiple related functions. It is thus a crucial step to determine the full-length structure of multi-domain proteins for the purpose of elucidating their functions and designing new drugs to regulate these functions. Existing structure prediction algorithms are generally better at solving the internal conformation of domains, rather than modeling the relative positions between domains. To address the challenge of accurately determining multi-domain protein conformations, we develop a single-sequence-based domain assembly algorithm called DDI_single. DDI_single directly extracts features from the amino acid sequence using the protein language model ESM-1b, and accurately predicts the interactions between residue pairs of structural domains through a novel gated cross-attention module, thus achieving the correct assembly of structural domains. With the knowledge of domain definition, DDI_single achieves more than 20% higher accuracy in the task of predicting the relative distances of residue pairs between domains than that of the single-sequence-based structure prediction algorithm trRosettaX_single. When assembling domains with known spatial conformations, DDI_single correctly assembles 74.4% of the samples in the test set (TM-score>0.5). When assembling domains with unknown spatial conformations, in cases where the internal spatial conformations of domains are correctly modeled, DDI_single correctly assembles 73.9% of the samples.

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

The Data Manifold under the Microscope

arXiv:2606.15760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A significant gap exists between theory and practice in deep learning. Generalization and approximation error bounds are often derived for simplified models or are too loose to be informative. Many rely on the manifold hypothesis and on geometric regularity such as intrinsic dimension, curvature, and reach. Progress requires insight into data-manifold geometry and suitable benchmarks, yet existing options are polarized: analytic manifolds with known geometry but limited applicability, or real-world datasets where geometry is only coarsely estimable. We introduce a benchmarking framework for studying data geometry. We repurpose and extend dSprites and COIL-20 with additional transformation dimensions and dense, axis-aligned sampling, and pair them with finite-difference estimators that recover curvature, reach, and volume at near-ground-truth accuracy in a regime where general-purpose estimators are unreliable or difficult to deploy. The framework is intended as a controlled testbed, useful as a calibration environment for geometric estimators and a sandbox for probing theoretical assumptions. To illustrate its use, we present two application studies, namely assessing the scaling behavior of the bounds of Genovese et al. and Fefferman et al., and tracking the layer-wise geometry of a $\beta$-VAE, highlighting the behavior of current bounds and the value of controlled benchmarks for guiding and validating future theory. A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/koulakis/manifold-microscope.

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

Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease Risk Factors from Retinal Images via Deep Learning: Development and Validation of Biologically Relevant Morphological Associations in the UK Biobank

The systemic, metabolic, lifestyle factors have established associations with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) through epidemiologic and AD-specific biomarker studies. Whether colored fundus photography (CFP) contains retinal structural signatures corresponding to these AD-related risk domains remains unclear. To determine whether deep learning (DL) models can predict 12 AD-related risk factors from CFP and to characterize the retinal structures underlying these predictions, thereby assessing whether CFP reflects pathways to AD vulnerability. Using 62,876 CFPs from 44,501 unique participants from the UK Biobank, DL models were trained to predict 12 factors linked to AD incidence: 6 categorical (sex, smoking, sleeplessness, economic status, alcohol use, depression) and 6 continuous (age, age at completing education, BMI, systolic, diastolic blood pressure, HbA1c). Model performance, model saliency, and saliency-derived scores (CAM-Score) were evaluated and compared to retinal morphometry. The scores were also compared between incident-AD cases (average 8.55 years before onset) and matched controls. Performance of DL ranged from AUROC= 0.5654-0.9480 for categorical and R2=-0.0291-0.7620 for continuous factors, outperforming most of the morphometry-machine learning models. Saliency-based score consistently highlighted biologically meaningful regions, particularly the optic nerve head and retinal vasculature. It also aligned with present morphometric variations. Several saliency-based scores differed significantly between incident AD and matched controls, suggesting potential overlap between retinal correlates of risk factors and preclinical AD-associated changes. CFP encodes retinal signatures linked to AD risk factors. Although not diagnostic, DL-derived retinal representations may uncover biologically meaningful risk-related structural changes mirroring the potential AD vulnerability.

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

GRIP: Feedback-Guided Prompt Retrieval for Large Multimodal Models

In-Context Learning (ICL) has become a powerful mechanism for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to new tasks without fine-tuning. Extending this concept to Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL) relies on retrieving relevant examples, such as images, captions, or question-answer pairs, to guide predictions across tasks like classification, captioning, and visual question answering (VQA). Most existing approaches select in-context examples based on feature-space similarity, assuming that semantically similar samples provide the most useful context. However, our systematic analysis reveals that this assumption does not always hold: visually similar examples are not necessarily those that most effectively enhance in-context learning performance. To address this, we propose the Guided Retrieval of In-context Prompts (GRIP), a learnable vision-only retrieval framework that leverages feedback from LMMs to identify examples that truly improve model predictions. GRIP learns to distinguish beneficial from detrimental in-context examples through contrastive training, refining retrieval beyond pure similarity. Across three multimodal tasks, namely classification, captioning, and VQA, GRIP improves consistently over similarity-based retrieval on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, with its strongest gains in classification on Idefics2-8B. Moreover, we demonstrate that retrievers trained with feedback from one open LMM can be transferred to other models without retraining, including closed-source GPT-4o and Gemini, enabling scalable and cost-efficient deployment of M-ICL. Code will be published upon acceptance.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Hierarchical symmetry selects log-Poisson cascades: classification, uniqueness, and stability

arXiv:2604.01632v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Within i.i.d. multiplicative cascades, a single axiom – the hierarchical symmetry, a linear contraction on incremental scaling exponents – is shown to be necessary and sufficient for the cascade multiplier to be log-Poisson. We prove: (1) a characterization theorem determining the log-Poisson law with explicit parameters, within the class of all multipliers with finite lattice moments; (2) a classification theorem locating the log-Poisson class inside the log-infinitely-divisible family and identifying the mechanism by which every rival sub-family fails the symmetry; (3) a stability theorem with sharp constants – $(1+\beta)^{1/2}$ when the limiting increment is known, $\sqrt{2}$ when it is fitted – and (4) an unconditional propagation theorem transferring the bound to the multiplier distribution at the sharp rate $\Theta(\sqrt{\varepsilon})$, with a matching lower bound. Beyond independence, the classification extends exactly at the level of asymptotic statistics (limiting cumulant generating function, large deviations, multifractal spectrum) and provably not at the level of laws: an explicit stationary ergodic Markov multiplier satisfies the symmetry exactly with a non-log-Poisson marginal, while exchangeable multipliers collapse to the i.i.d. log-Poisson cascade and finite-state Markov multipliers cannot satisfy the symmetry at all. In the continuous category of exactly scale-invariant log-infinitely-divisible multifractal random measures, no finite moment window of structure-function exponents identifies the cascade class, whereas at the level of the scale-invariance generator the symmetry selects exactly the Barral-Mandelbrot compound Poisson cascade, with scale-ratio-free stability constants. The proofs reduce to second-moment identities on [0,1] via the change of variables $u = e^{kx}$, boundedness of the multiplier, and multiplicative couplings.

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

Density Ridge Selective Prediction for LLM and VLM Hallucination Detection under Calibration Label Scarcity

Hallucination detection in large language and vision-language models is increasingly framed as selective prediction, where a detector assigns a confidence score and abstains when confidence is low. Unsupervised sampling detectors (Semantic Entropy) avoid labels but plateau in quality, while supervised probes attain stronger in-distribution scores yet degrade sharply when calibration labels are scarce. We recover the response manifold of an LLM as the density ridge of a kernel density estimate built on a six-dimensional kinematic feature map of hidden state generation trajectories. A test generation is scored by the negated Euclidean distance from its projected feature point to the nearest ridge vertex, yielding a low-dimensional geometric skeleton of the stochastic output distribution. We evaluate against Semantic Entropy, topological methods, and log-probability on six QA benchmarks (HaluEval-QA, TriviaQA, GSM8K, POPE, ScienceQA, A-OKVQA) using eight text and vision LLMs in a deliberately label-scarce protocol ($n_{cal}{=}200$ queries, $N{=}5$ generations). Our ridge-based score beats on AUROC with 5-20 points gain, while demonstrating tempered degradation under calibration-label scarcity.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Experiment-compatible measurement–feedback quantum state preparation with reinforcement learning

arXiv:2606.13005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ground-state preparation is a critical task in quantum simulation and quantum computing, as it enables the study of correlated phases and the generation of entangled resource states. While measurement–feedback control has emerged as a promising route to state preparation, existing schemes either rely on handcrafted, task-specific policies or are designed using full quantum-state information that is unavailable in real experiments and becomes impractical for large many-body systems. Here we develop an adaptive measurement–feedback protocol based on reinforcement learning under partial observability. The controller uses only the history of experimentally accessible measurement outcomes to choose both the measurement operator and the feedback action in real time. To make training compatible with experiments, we introduce a stochastic terminal reward built from one-shot measurements of randomly sampled Hamiltonian components, avoiding unphysical full-state reconstruction while remaining an unbiased estimator of the target energy. We demonstrate the method by preparing ground states of the Bose–Hubbard model and by generating GHZ states, establishing a scalable and hardware-compatible route to quantum state preparation.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Mapping Scientific Literature with Large Language Models and Topic Modeling

Scientific literature is increasingly fragmented by disciplinary boundaries, specialized terminology, and potentially sparse keyword systems, making it difficult to capture the evolving structure of modern science. This study introduces a large language model (LLM)-driven framework for mapping scientific literature from a topic modeling perspective. The approach is demonstrated on a 20-year corpus of more than 1,500 engineering-related articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). A two-stage classification pipeline first assigns a primary thematic category to each article based on its abstract, followed by full-text analysis to identify secondary classifications that reveal latent cross-topic connections within the corpus. Unlike conventional topic models, the LLM-based framework produces semantically interpretable topics while maintaining strong quantitative performance. Comparative evaluation against established topic modeling methods shows higher topic diversity and lower overlap with competitive coherence metrics. Manual validation on a randomly sampled subset of abstracts yields an accuracy of 75.9%. Additional traditional natural language processing analyses confirm that the generated topics correspond to meaningful linguistic patterns in the corpus. A bipartite network linking primary and secondary classifications further reveals implicit thematic relationships that are not readily observable through abstracts or keyword systems alone. The findings indicate that the framework independently recovers much of the journal's editorial dual-classification structure without prior knowledge of its schema. Overall, the proposed approach offers a powerful tool for mapping science and identifying emerging cross-topic connections in research.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Reconfigurable Computing Challenge: Transformer for Jet Tagging on Versal AI Engines

arXiv:2606.17500v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer-based models achieve strong performance for jet tagging at the CERN LHC, but deploying them in low-latency, resource-constrained trigger systems is challenging. We present an initial implementation of a quantized, integer-only transformer for jet tagging on the AMD Versal AI Engine (AIE), mapping dense and multi-head attention (MHA) layers to AIE tiles. The main contribution is a reusable software framework that represents transformer layers as composable AIE building blocks and automatically generates the corresponding Vitis graph code from a high-level Python model description. This framework provides a foundation for future research and is released as open-source software at https://github.com/KastnerRG/particle_transformer_aie.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Wavelength-Multiplexed 2D Beam Steering via a Passive Diffractive Network

We introduce a wavelength-addressable diffractive optical network that transforms illumination wavelength into a high-dimensional control parameter for arbitrarily programmable 2D beam steering. The proposed passive architecture comprises cascaded spatially optimized diffractive layers, jointly designed using deep learning, to rapidly map distinct wavelengths to predefined/desired output angles. Unlike conventional single-layer dispersive optical elements, which are physically restricted to 1D linear mapping, this framework harnesses complex wavefront transformations to utilize the illumination wavelength as an intrinsic addressing key for arbitrary 2D beam steering, eliminating the need for mechanical scanning or electronic phase control. We numerically demonstrate wavelength-controlled beam steering across 625 wavelength channels spanning 400-750 nm, realizing a 25 x 25 array of independently addressable beam positions with subwavelength positioning accuracy and high channel fidelity. Unlike conventional gratings, which constrain wavelength routing to a linear trajectory, the proposed diffractive network performs nonlocal wavefront transformations, enabling arbitrary wavelength-to-angle mappings across a 2D field of view. We further validate the proposed framework experimentally in both the terahertz and visible spectral regimes, demonstrating wavelength-multiplexed beam steering using 3D fabricated passive diffractive layers at terahertz frequencies and phase-only spatial light modulators in the visible spectrum. This wavelength-addressable diffractive architecture establishes a compact and scalable paradigm for high-speed programmable beam steering, with potential applications in optical communications, routing, imaging, sensing, and emerging photonic information-processing systems.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Another Look at Log-PCA for Probability Measures: A Dynamical Formulation and Statistical Convergence

arXiv:2606.17196v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper is concerned with learning principal variations of random probability measures on $\mathbb{R}^m$ under the Wasserstein geometry. We introduce a new dynamical formulation to interpret the log-PCA, a linearized principal geodesic analysis, as a variational approach. Our differentiable version, termed as the Wasserstein Tangential PCA (WT-PCA), captures the local principal modes of geodesic variations of a (weighted) probability measure on the Wasserstein space via its covariance operator at barycenter. Based on the dynamical perspective and leveraging parallel transport structure of the optimal transport problems, we derive a general statistical convergence rate of the empirical WT-PCA when estimated from data in terms of the 2-Wasserstein distance between the population and empirical barycenter reference measures.

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

Conflict-Aware Retriever Editing for Knowledge Injection Attacks on LLM-Based RAG Systems

arXiv:2606.18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Injecting malicious knowledge into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can manipulate retrieved evidence and mislead downstream generation, posing a serious security threat for AI applications. Existing RAG injection attacks mainly rely on manipulating external knowledge bases, such as crafting malicious corpus. However, the synthetic text crafted by such data-centric methods could be detectable, leading to the failure of attacks. Beyond corpus manipulation, open-source retrievers are increasingly exposing RAG systems to model-centric attacks. In this paper, we propose conflict-aware retriever editing, i.e., CAREATTACK, a model-centric retriever attack framework for malicious knowledge injection in RAG. Specifically, CAREATTACK consists two stages of conflict-aware retriever editing and attack-preserving anchor repair. Conflict-aware retriever editing adapts efficient closed-form parameter editing to the dense retrieval model, promoting malicious knowledge above benign competing passages and resolving potential parameter conflicts through graph-based conflict detection and parameter editing projection. Then, attack-preserving anchor repair performs lightweight calibration on the edited retriever to further eliminate the impact on non-target prompts while preserving the attack effectiveness for target prompts. We instantiate CAREATTACK on Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B and BGE-M3, and conduct evaluation on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate our method substantially promote malicious passages into the retrieved knowledge of RAG systems and can perform attacks for batches of target prompts and passages, given the access of retrieval model parameters. Since most RAG systems are built upon open-source retrieval models, this work reveals a practical attack surface in RAG systems. Codes are public accessible at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CareAttack-3F1C.

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

PISA: A Pragmatic Psych-Inspired Unified Memory System for Enhanced AI Agency

arXiv:2510.15966v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Memory systems are fundamental to AI agents, yet existing work often lacks adaptability to diverse tasks and overlooks the constructive and task-oriented role of AI agent memory. Drawing from Piaget's theory of cognitive development, we propose PISA, a pragmatic, psych-inspired unified memory system that addresses these limitations by treating memory as a constructive and adaptive process. To enable continuous learning and adaptability, PISA introduces a trimodal adaptation mechanism (i.e., schema updation, schema evolution, and schema creation) that preserves coherent organization while supporting flexible memory updates. Building on these schema-grounded structures, we further design a hybrid memory access architecture that seamlessly integrates symbolic reasoning with neural retrieval, significantly improving retrieval accuracy and efficiency. Our empirical evaluation, conducted on the existing LOCOMO benchmark and our newly proposed AggQA benchmark for data analysis tasks, confirms that PISA sets a new state-of-the-art by significantly enhancing adaptability and long-term knowledge retention.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Layer-wise Probing of wav2vec 2.0 and Whisper for Consonant Cluster Reduction in African American English

Self-supervised and supervised speech models are increasingly used to investigate which linguistic information their internal representations encode, and at what level of abstraction they encode it. One underexplored phenomenon is consonant cluster reduction (CCR) in African American English (AAE), a widespread phonological process and a source of automatic speech recognition (ASR) disparity. To examine how CCR is represented, we conduct speaker-independent layer-wise probing of wav2vec2-base and Whisper-small using two tasks: segmental reduction detection and segmental restoration of underlying cluster identity. Both models distinguish reduced and canonical forms with high accuracy. Crucially, reduced segments retain cues to their underlying stops, indicating that CCR is encoded as structured gradient phonological variation rather than simple segmental deletion. These results demonstrate structured phonological encoding of AAE CCR patterns in modern speech models.

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

Risk-Aware LLM Agents for Geospatial Data Retrieval: Design and Preliminary Adversarial Evaluation

We present an LLM-driven framework for retrieving remote sensing data from cloud-based geospatial catalogues using natural language queries. The system converts user intent into structured API calls, enabling efficient access to satellite imagery and environmental datasets. The architecture integrates three agents: Guardrail for safety and policy enforcement, General-QA for intent interpretation, and Recommender-Analyst for schema-aware API call generation. This coordinated design ensures reliable, semantically aligned interaction with external data services. The modular framework is portable across platforms through API schema substitution and supports applications in environmental monitoring, disaster response, and climate analysis. It establishes a scalable interface between user intent and geospatial infrastructure, enabling streamlined and automated Earth observation workflows. Preliminary experiments under adversarial multi-turn settings show that prompt-level safety instructions improve robustness, although rare high-impact failures persist in API manipulation scenarios and highlight the need for adaptive, system-level defenses that balance safety, usability, and cost efficiency, which motivates the use of our intercept-level Guardrail agent.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Gendered pathways to adolescent mental health: An empirical assessment of a new conceptual framework

Introduction Gender norms and roles are important determinants of physical and mental health in the key period of adolescence. Yet, the gendered pathways to mental health in adolescents are not fully understood. Using a conceptual framework for global adolescent mental health that we developed based on a Delphi process, we empirically investigated the associations between six gender-related constructs and adolescent mental health. Methods We used cross-sectional Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) data from Ethiopia (2020) to explore the associations between sex, gender norms, psychological competencies, gender attitudes, gender roles, with the latter two also serving as mediators, and psychological distress (GHQ-12), using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Results The SEM model contained measurements from 1,584 adolescents, including 843 girls and 741 boys, with a median age of 13 years. Out of 14 pathways tested, we found statistically significant associations between psychological competencies and psychological distress; sex and gender attitudes; and between gender norms and psychological competencies, gender attitudes, and gender roles. Hence, the gender-related constructs were mostly associated with each other, rather than with psychological distress. Conclusion The gender-related constructs are strongly interrelated, thereby attenuating their individual effects on psychological distress. The interplay of gender-related constructs should be considered when developing interventions to promote mental health in adolescents.