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.AI) 2026-06-15

FPGA-Based Neural Network Accelerators for Space Applications: A Survey

arXiv:2504.16173v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Space missions are becoming increasingly ambitious, necessitating high-performance onboard spacecraft computing systems. In response, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have garnered significant interest due to their flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and radiation tolerance potential. Concurrently, neural networks (NNs) are being recognized for their capability to execute space mission tasks such as autonomous operations, sensor data analysis, and data compression. This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers aiming to implement FPGA-based NN accelerators in space applications. By analyzing existing literature, identifying trends and gaps, and proposing future research directions, this work highlights the potential of these accelerators to enhance onboard computing systems.

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

Half a Link can Be Enough to Predict a Whole Link: Understanding Generalization in Knowledge Graph Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.18001v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graph (KG) foundation models (KGFMs) are zero-shot generalizers: trained once, they can predict links on unseen graphs without retraining. However, understanding when and how they can robustly generalize across KGs is still an open question. In this paper, we shed some light on their generalization mechanisms highlighting how their performance on unseen KGs is not uniform when it comes to partially seen links, which we call half-links. In fact, we show that to predict a test triple $(h,r,t)$ it might suffice in practice to have observed the half-link $(h,r)$ or $(r,t)$ in the inference graph. This yields a taxonomy of four scenarios when combinations of these half-links are observed or not. In a rigorous stratified analysis over these scenarios, we reveal that SoTA KGFMs use seen half links for predictions, while unseen half-links pose different challenges. As such, our finer-grained taxonomy can be a diagnostic protocol for robust KGFM generalization and highlights where novel KGFMs can improve.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Canonical regularization of the stationary Coulomb problem and an Aufbau-like spectral ordering

arXiv:2606.17359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The stationary hydrogen atom has Coulomb degeneracy across orbital levels, whereas the Aufbau/Madelung ordering is an empirical, many-electron rule established in atomic physics. We examine the hydrogen atom through a regularized de Broglie–Bohm representation, in which stationary amplitude current constraints generate separable Sturm–Liouville branches. In this formulation, the radial, orbital, and magnetic sectors acquire canonical Langer-like inverse square corrections. The modified boundary value problems allow analytical solutions and produce a hydrogen-like spectrum with regularized radial and angular indices. Consequently, radial Coulomb quantization acquires an orbital dependent shift, lifting the Coulomb degeneracy and producing a spectral ordering that follows the Aufbau/Madelung sequence. On this basis, we construct the ordering of the regularized de Broglie–Bohm states and show that the spectral structure retains the standard degenerate Rydberg sequence in the l=0 sector. The separated amplitudes are represented by generalized special function branches, including the associated Laguerre, Legendre, and Bessel functions with non-integral parameters arising from regularized separation. Therefore, the treatment is intended as an analytical examination of spectral ordering in a regularized one center Coulomb problem rather than as a replacement for the many electron atomic structure theory. Keywords: de Broglie–Bohm representation; Coulomb spectrum; canonical regularization; Langer correction; Sturm–Liouville equations; Aufbau principle; Madelung ordering; associated Legendre functions; associated Laguerre functions; Bessel functions.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DART: A design-aware microfluidic chip paradigm for real-time live-cell image analysis

High-throughput microfluidic live-cell imaging generates rich single-cell data. Yet semi-automated procedures for locating regions of interest (RoIs), each containing one cell population, and removing surrounding microfluidic structures from recorded images, scale with the number of RoIs. This prevents real-time image analysis and delays time-to-insight by hours to days. We introduce the Design-Aware and Real-Time capable (DART) paradigm for microfluidic cultivation chips, which aligns the CAD blueprint with the physical chip and thereby enables throughput-independent localization of all RoIs and fully automated image processing across diverse RoI geometries and chip layouts. DART establishes this alignment through embedded fiducial markers and deep-learning-based marker detection. We validate DART using the Swiss Army Knife chip, which combines eight structurally distinct RoI designs across 1164 RoI locations. DART localizes all RoIs in five minutes, removes microfluidic structures from raw microscopy images in 40 ms, and performs fully automated image analysis, including cell segmentation, in under 1.1 s per image. Together, these capabilities establish DART as an end-to-end hardware-software paradigm with real-time-capable analysis that paves the way toward closed-loop and outcome-driven smart microscopy.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Optimal Coarse Correlated Equilibria in Mean Field Games: Linear Programming and No-Regret Learning

arXiv:2606.20062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce optimal coarse correlated equilibria for continuous-time mean field games. A coarse correlated equilibrium is a randomized recommendation scheme from which no player can gain by ignoring the recommendation and switching to an alternative strategy. The problem is as follows: a moderator selects, among all mean-field coarse correlated equilibria, one that optimizes a prescribed performance criterion, which may differ from the representative player's objective. After formulating the problem, we develop a linear programming (LP) formulation, prove the existence of optimal LP coarse correlated equilibria, and relate the LP characterization to the original probabilistic setting. Building on this characterization, we design a no-regret primal-dual algorithm, based on an equivalent Lagrangian formulation of the external-regret constraint, for learning such equilibria. We provide explicit convergence rates for the learning algorithm, and numerical examples illustrate the method.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

A Three-Tier Operational Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Hospital Medication Safety

Objective. To introduce PsiBench, a clinically validated medication-safety benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) against the standards used to certify hospital computerized provider order entry (CPOE) and electronic health record (EHR) systems, and a non-overlapping three-tier evaluation framework separating highest-stakes discrimination, the operational CDS regime, and category-correct alerting. Materials and Methods. PsiBench comprises 492 medication-safety scenarios across 11 safety categories, created by clinical pharmacology experts whose work underpins an annualized testing procedure used by more than 2,000 U.S. hospitals. The three-tier framework partitions the scenarios non-overlappingly: Discrimination (98 scenarios, 50 fatal vs 48 deception, near-balanced 51%/49%); Operational (394 scenarios, 261 serious unsafe plus 133 safe including 41 Excessive Alerts reclassified as operational negatives); and Attribution (311 alert-required scenarios). We evaluated 40 frontier LLMs from 10 providers over 3 runs per scenario at temperature 0.2 (or the provider default where temperature is not configurable), yielding 59,040 evaluations conducted April 21-23, 2026. Results. Headline binary performance on the full benchmark spans a wide range across the 40 models: F1 78.5%-92.3%, accuracy 65.4%-89.8%, sensitivity 81.4%-100.0%, specificity 6.1%-81.8%. Leading models by F1 (o4-mini 92.3%; o3 92.2%) pair high sensitivity with meaningful specificity; three models saturate sensitivity at 100% but fall below 25% specificity, indistinguishable from a naive always-alert classifier. The wide spread on a single headline metric motivates tier-specific analyses, developed in a separate clinical paper. Discussion and Conclusion. PsiBench and the three-tier framework operationalize a rigorous evaluation rubric for LLM medication safety, grounded in two decades of national hospital audit experience. The framework generalizes to any binary medication-safety classifier (rule-based, conventional ML, or LLM-driven), supporting tier-aware model selection and post-deployment surveillance.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

M-CTX: Exact and Scalable Spatial Context Retrieval for Trajectory Analytics

arXiv:2606.15244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern trajectory predictors increasingly condition on external spatial context, such as map geometry, signed distance fields (SDFs), and nearby moving agents. While this context improves prediction quality, constructing it for every training anchor has become a hidden systems bottleneck. In a representative maritime AIS pipeline, spatial context construction requires roughly 17 CPU-days for a 5.48M-anchor corpus, dominating the cost of the downstream predictor. We present M-CTX, an exact and scalable spatial context-retrieval framework for trajectory analytics. M-CTX recasts context construction as an ingest-once, query-many spatial database workload and replaces three brute-force stages – OSM range retrieval, SDF computation, and moving-vessel neighbour lookup – with composable, index-backed operators. Its learned range-index backend, BR-LZ, provides recall-complete MBR-overlap range retrieval and reduces candidate amplification by 1.1x–2.7x relative to global-expansion one-curve baselines. Across four maritime regions, eight baseline systems, synthetic workloads with up to 40M spatial features, and 10^7-record AIS streams, M-CTX reproduces the reference context exactly. On the 5.48M-anchor corpus, it reduces context construction from about 17 CPU-days to 1.8 hours, a measured 226x end-to-end speed-up. An optional storage mode further compresses SDF context by 64x with only a 0.04 m ADE change. These results establish exact spatial context retrieval as a first-class database problem in modern trajectory analytics. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/mark000071/M-CTX-Traj.

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

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

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

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Evaluation Sovereignty in Metadata-Driven Classification: A Multi-Track Framework for Weakly Supervised Information Systems

arXiv:2606.13436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation in machine learning is typically treated as a neutral measurement process. However, in operational information systems, evaluation outcomes are often conditioned by the processes used to generate labels. This paper does not seek to improve classification performance. Instead, it examines the validity of performance measurement under differing label-authority regimes. This issue is particularly relevant in large-scale metadata-driven systems, where labels are often incomplete, inconsistent, or weakly supervised. We introduce evaluation sovereignty, defined as the degree to which performance metrics are independent of label authority and supervision regime, and propose a multi-track evaluation framework that systematically varies training and evaluation label sources. Using hierarchical multi-label classification on large-scale scientific metadata, we demonstrate that models exhibiting strong performance under operational ("silver") evaluation degrade substantially under independent ("gold") evaluation, particularly for fine-grained classification. For example, Micro-F1 decreases from approximately 0.54 to 0.03. Notably, ranking-based metrics remain above baseline, revealing a divergence between latent model signal and classification validity. These findings suggest that commonly reported performance metrics may reflect alignment with labeling processes rather than true predictive capability. We therefore reconceptualize evaluation validity as a system-level property shaped by label governance and provide a practical methodology for auditing intelligent systems operating under weak supervision.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Graph Instance Landscapes: When Structural Similarity Does (Not) Reflect Shortest-Path Performance

arXiv:2606.18267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarking shortest-path algorithms is commonly based on aggregate performance over heterogeneous graph sets, which limits insight into how different search paradigms react to instance structure. We adopt an instance-landscape view of graph benchmarking by embedding graphs into a low-cost structural feature space and clustering them into regions of similar structure. Three benchmark suites are studied: weighted Erdős–Rényi graphs, random geometric (wireless) graphs, and real-world road networks. We evaluate four representative shortest-path solvers spanning uninformed exact search (Dijkstra), bidirectional exact search (bidirectional Dijkstra), heuristic-guided exact search (A$^{*}$), and deque-based strategies (DEQ). Clustering robustness is analyzed under multiple feature-selection schemes, and runtime distributions are compared across landscape regions using non-parametric tests. While generator parameters induce stable structural regions, we find that feature-space similarity does not necessarily imply performance similarity: significant runtime shifts are frequently observed even within the same landscape region. A merged-suite analysis further shows that different benchmark families occupy largely disjoint regions. These results highlight both the potential and the limits of structural landscapes for the structure-aware benchmarking of shortest-path algorithms.

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

From Prompts to Tokens: Internalizing Causal Supervision in Vision-Language Model for Multi-Image Causal Reasoning

Visual causal reasoning is essential for understanding and intervening in the physical world, requiring identification of causal variables from visual inputs and reasoning over intervention effects. Despite recent progress, large vision–language models (VLMs) remain brittle at such tasks, especially for interventional and counterfactual queries over multi-image inputs. Most existing explorations inject causal knowledge via textual prompts, leaving causal mechanisms external to model execution and limiting reliable control during inference. To address this problem, we propose BridgeVLM, which internalizes visual causal reasoning by inducing a causal graph from multi-image inputs and converting it into structured Causal Tokens executed by RAMP layers injected into the LLM decoder for causal message passing. We further introduce a unified training interface M3S for fine-grained causal supervision from different granularities (local/global level). BridgeVLM achieves 54.4% accuracy on intervention tasks on CausalVLBench (vs. 33.2% with prompt-level supervision), improves results on Causal3D from 43.6% to 49.0%, and substantially improves causal structure learning on CausalVLBench ($F_1$: 33.4% $\rightarrow$ 75.1%).

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

Where a Quantum Reservoir Works: A Transferable Operating Band

arXiv:2606.13284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In quantum reservoir computing, a fixed quantum system transforms an input signal, while learning reduces to training a simple linear readout on its measured outputs. Since the quantum dynamics themselves are never optimized, the method is well suited to today's hardware. Yet these dynamics must still be chosen carefully, because their settings remain fixed throughout training and inference. It therefore remains an open question where, in its control space, a fixed quantum system learns well. We address this question for a dissipative reservoir by mapping performance over three central physical controls: the strength of the input drive, the coupling between neighboring qubits, and the rate of dissipation. Good performance concentrates in a single, well-defined operating region of this control space. This region transfers across tasks and reservoir initializations, and the same memory-defined regime persists under architectural changes. It is also mechanistically grounded, since it disappears whenever any of the mechanisms that create it is removed. Finally, the region can be located cheaply before any task is run, using a simple memory diagnostic.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Lifted Schrödinger Bridges for Gaussian Mixture Endpoints: Projection Gaps and Path-Space Obstructions

arXiv:2605.24795v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study stochastic density control between Gaussian-mixture endpoint distributions under Brownian prior dynamics. Since the direct Schrödinger bridge between Gaussian mixtures is generally not available in closed form, we introduce a lifted path-space construction in which each trajectory is augmented with a source–target component label. Consequently, the problem decomposes into Gaussian component-to-component Schrödinger bridges with explicit marginal, drift, and cost formulas, while the mixture-level assignment reduces to a finite-dimensional entropic coupling problem with a Sinkhorn scaling form. We then analyze the projection obtained by discarding or forgetting the label. By construction, the projected law satisfies the original Gaussian-mixture endpoint constraints, but its relative entropy generally differs from the lifted relative entropy by a nonnegative conditional label-information gap. This gap reveals a path-space obstruction: the lifted optimizer cannot, in general, be identified with the direct unlabeled Schrödinger bridge after projection. We also derive the posterior-averaged Markov drift associated with the projected marginal flow, prove a kinetic-energy upper bound, and identify a common path-potential condition under which the projection gap vanishes. Several numerical illustrations showing density and shape control are recorded for a self-contained exposition.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

S-Agent: Spatial Tool-Use Elicits Reasoning for Spatial Intelligence

Real-world spatial intelligence requires reasoning over a continuous and evolving 3D world, yet existing VLMs and tool-augmented agents largely remain tied to static, stateless inference from isolated visual observations. We introduce \textsc{S-Agent}, a spatial tool-use agentic paradigm for understanding and reasoning over continuous multi-view images and videos. By formulating spatial reasoning as spatio-temporal evidence accumulation rather than isolated frame-level prediction, \textsc{S-Agent} reshapes spatial perception into scene-centric understanding beyond frame-centric recognition. Specifically, \textsc{S-Agent} casts the VLM as a semantic planner that decides what evidence is needed, while a hierarchy of spatial tools and experts grounds objects in 2D, lifts them into 3D geometric evidence, and aggregates this evidence into high-level spatial knowledge (e.g., counting, measurement, orientation, and relative position). Additionally, a temporal memory mechanism, including Scene Memory for maintaining the evolving scene state and Agent Memory for accumulating reasoning context, enables evidence integration across frames and reasoning steps. Comprehensive experiments on multi-view and video spatial reasoning benchmarks show that \textsc{S-Agent} consistently improves both open-source and closed-source VLMs in a training-free manner. Beyond inference-time augmentation, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on \textsc{S-Agent}-generated spatial trajectories \textsc{S-300K} yields \textsc{S-Agent-8B}, a compact spatial agent that significantly surpasses similar-scale baselines (e.g., Qwen3-VL-8B) and performs comparably to advanced closed-source models (e.g., GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3).

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Impact of Network Constraints on Fault-Tolerant Distributed Quantum Computing

arXiv:2606.17495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As we move towards scalable and modular quantum computing, quantum data centres become imperative. Existing analyses typically treat network constraints in isolation or through simplified models, leaving the interplay between error correction operations and communication resources underexplored. In this work, we present an end-to-end simulation framework that jointly models surface-code operations, internal QPU connectivity, and realistic network constraints including finite entanglement generation rates, limited communication qubits, and bandwidth contention, producing execution latency, from which logical error rate estimates are obtained. The framework is modular by design, allowing individual components such as routing heuristics, scheduling policies, and network topologies to be independently replaced. Numerical evaluation reveals distinct operating regimes in which the optimal resource allocation and code distance selection shift depending on the network characteristics. These results point to tradeoffs in the design of distributed quantum computing architectures that are not visible when computation and communication are modeled separately.

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

Steering Where to Listen: Instruction-Based Activation Steering Redirects Temporal Attention in Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at audio understanding but expose little about where in an audio signal they attend. We introduce instruction-based vector steering, which constructs a steering vector by contrasting activations from differently instructed prompts while keeping the audio fixed. Through a systematic probe of LALM attention, we find that - unlike standard prompting or audio-based steering - this intervention significantly redistributes the temporal attention allocated to audio tokens, concentrating it on acoustically relevant regions. We then show that this attention shift is behaviorally meaningful: in a controlled three-event setting, reading out the temporal position of maximal steering-induced attention change recovers the location of a queried sound event without any training, attaining 60.87% and 68.72% overlap with ground-truth intervals on Qwen2-Audio and Audio Flamingo 3, far above direct prompting (31.84%, 46.75%) and random baselines (27.74%). Our results characterize a mechanistic property of instruction-based steering in LALMs and provide a training-free probe for the latent temporal structure these models encode.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

3D Scene Graphs: Open Challenges and Future Directions

3D Scene Graphs (3DSGs) have emerged as a powerful representation for spatial AI by combining geometric grounding with semantic and relational abstractions of the environment. Their expressiveness has made them relevant to a broad range of problems in robotics and computer vision, including manipulation, navigation, task planning, scene understanding, and many others. However, the field remains fragmented: different communities adopt distinct formulations, construction pipelines, and evaluation protocols, making it difficult to compare methods, identify common assumptions, and assess remaining challenges for robust real-world deployment. This survey provides a unified and critical review of 3DSGs, with particular emphasis on open challenges and future directions. We first formalize 3DSGs under a common definition and analyze the principal modeling choices that characterize existing formulations, including node and edge attributes, hierarchical structure, dynamic scene representations, and affordance-aware extensions. We then review how 3DSGs are built from raw sensory observations, discussing the most common terminologies, conventions, and techniques. Finally, we examine downstream applications and evaluation strategies, from intrinsic graph quality to task-level performance. To support the community, we also provide a dedicated website that organizes and extends the surveyed content, accessible at https://3dscenegraphs.com/.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Examining the Cognitive Gap Between Authors and Peer Reviewers on Academic Paper Novelty

Novelty is a crucial metric for assessing the quality of academic papers. Scholars strive to highlight the novel aspects of their work, particularly in the title, abstract, and introduction. Peer review, serving as the gatekeeper of scientific rigor, rigorously evaluates the novelty of papers, yet a cognitive gap may exist between author self-promotion and reviewer evaluation. To investigate this, we analyzed 15,328 academic papers published in Nature Communications from 2016 to 2021, along with their peer-review comments. We found that both reviewers and authors emphasize result-oriented innovation, with reviewers adopting a more comprehensive evaluation perspective. Furthermore, by examining promotional intensity against inherent paper novelty, we found that its effect depends on the paper's actual innovation level. Highly innovative papers benefit from stronger promotional language, receiving more positive evaluations. We also found that promotional language significantly correlates with reviewer disagreement on novelty specifically for papers of moderate innovativeness, whereas it has negligible impact for papers with either very high or very low novelty. This reveals how promotional language operates most prominently in the gray area of academic evaluation.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Lean4Agent: Formal Modeling and Verification for Agent Workflow and Trajectory

arXiv:2606.06523v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) to execute reliable multi-step workflows has become a central challenge in artificial intelligence. Despite recent advances in LLMs' agentic capabilities, most agent systems still lack formal methods for specifying, verifying, and debugging their workflow and execution trajectories. This challenge mirrors a long-standing problem in mathematics, where the ambiguity of natural languages (NLs) motivates the development of formal languages (FLs). Inspired by this paradigm, we propose **Lean4Agent**, to the best of our knowledge, the first framework that uses Lean4, a dependent-type FL to model and verify agent behavior. **Lean4Agent** launches **FormalAgentLib**, an extensible Lean4 library for formally modeling and verifying agent workflows' semantic consistency under explicit assumptions, and enabling localization of execution-time failures revealed by trajectories. Building on **FormalAgentLib**, we further develop **LeanEvolve**, which applies results in **FormalAgentLib** to revise workflows to enhance its capability. Extensive experiments on a hard problem subset of SWE-Bench-Verified and a subset of ELAIP-Bench across 5 leading LLMs indicate that the verification-passing workflows outperform the failing ones by an average of **11.94%**, and **LeanEvolve** further improves SWE performance by **7.47%** on average. Furthermore, **Lean4Agent** establishes a foundation for a new field of using expressive dependent-type FL to formally model and verify agent behavior.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Measuring Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing: A Rubric, Its Validation, and an Application to Thirteen Vendor Stacks

arXiv:2605.15233v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Public access to pulse-level and control-electronics interfaces in commercial quantum computing has bifurcated. This paper proposes a six-axis rubric for measuring control-plane openness, the layer between gate-level circuit specification and physical control electronics, defined operationally so that the same evidence produces the same grade across vendors. The rubric is validated three ways: a blinded re-grading pass, thirty-nine days after the evidence cutoff, that tests whether the cited evidence and the level definitions alone reproduce the recorded grades; a boundary-case methodology that fixes where each level begins and ends; and a published grading protocol that lets others reproduce and contest any cell. We establish that the rubric measures change rather than describing a snapshot by comparing the catalog against the documented control plane before the February 2025 removal of pulse-level access from IBM hardware, and reporting the cells that moved. The rubric is applied to thirteen commercial vendors across superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and photonic modalities as of May 1, 2026, as its first application, and one of the three harms the rubric is designed to detect is demonstrated through a reproduction-access audit of five pre-2025 IBM Qiskit Pulse experiments against the access available on current hardware, carried through to a client-side structural port of the audit's selected target to Rigetti Quil-T. The catalog ships as a separate machine-readable artifact under CC-BY-4.0 with per-cell source URLs (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20163276). The catalog readings will change as vendor policies shift; the rubric is the contribution that survives them.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Hierarchical ODE: Learning Continuous-Time Physical Prototypes for Early Link Failure Detection

arXiv:2606.14284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Time series prototype learning is fundamentally challenged by observational ambiguity. Discrete architectures fail to resolve this, as they lack the capacity to decouple stochastic noise from continuous dynamics. Furthermore, rigid closed-set assumptions fail to capture unseen diversity. To address these limitations, we propose a hierarchical ordinary differential equation clustering network, which utilizes neural ordinary differential equation to model latent state evolution as a continuous integral curve. This formulation enforces temporal continuity to effectively disentangle smooth feature trends from stochastic noise, while our adaptive hierarchical mechanism autonomously determines the appropriate number of prototypes without rigid prior constraints. Validated on the early link failure detection task with irregularly sampled time series, the proposed method effectively extracts underlying physical prototypes, thereby enabling robust failure detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJ-LNN/Hierarchical-ODE.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

I'm Sorry Driver, I'm Afraid I Can't Do That: Appraising the Safety of LLMs within Automotive Contexts

arXiv:2606.14327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper appraises recent frameworks within AI development to integrate LLMs into control tasks in automotive contexts from the perspective of safety assurance. This work has built upon the rapid integration of LLMs across automotive settings. However, we find that at present, these frameworks face significant challenges, limiting their efficacy in real-time safety-critical contexts. Firstly, we consider conceptual challenges, including the fact that deployers are faced with a dual challenge, wherein they must assure a model which has been developed upstream, i.e. as general-purpose tools by the large AI labs, in a downstream context, i.e. into specific vehicle architectures. Secondly, we consider concrete challenges from across existing standards. We show that there are currently both fundamental engineering constraints covered in ISO21448, such as latency, and novel LLM-specific issues, such as alignment-related issues covered in ISO/PAS8800. We ground both examples in a concrete introductory, experimental case study exploring an existing open-source repository, Talk2Drive. We present a safety argument in order to make explicit the limitations of existing solutions. Nonetheless, given that the use of LLMs in automotive contexts is being explored at a technical level and operationalised, we propose potential assurance mechanisms for LLM-related hazardous events going forward.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity in Germany: A repeated cross-sectional analysis from 1998 to 2024

Background: Smoking inequalities by socioeconomic status have widened consistently in Germany, but sex-specific trends after 2013 and inequalities in daily cigarette consumption among smokers (intensity) are unknown. We analyzed trends in absolute and relative socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity among German adults across three decades. Methods: We used 14 waves (1998-2024) of population-representative cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate sex-specific trends in smoking prevalence and intensity in adults aged 25-64. Inequalities were quantified across strata of education, occupation, and equivalized household income using the absolute and relative concentration index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Results: Overall smoking prevalence declined from 35.05% (CI: [33.90%, 36.20%] in 1998 to 22.19% (CI: [21.15%, 23.24%]) in 2024, and mean intensity from 17.49 (CI: [17.09,17.90]) to 13.33 (CI: [12.88, 13.79]) cigarettes/day. Over this period sex-differences in both outcomes narrowed almost completely. Absolute and relative inequalities in smoking prevalence widened across all SES dimensions, particularly for education and occupation. By 2024, inequalities were larger among women than men driven by a stagnating or rising smoking prevalence among low-SES women at least until 2018 alongside continued declines in higher-SES women and for men. Inequalities in smoking intensity, particularly related to income, were generally smaller than those in prevalence. Conclusion: Socioeconomic smoking inequalities in Germany widened from 1998 to 2024 primarily driven by reductions among higher-SES groups and increases in low-SES women. However, recent reductions in low-SES women may indicate a new phase in the smoking epidemic. Health equity considerations should be integrated into a targeted German tobacco control strategy.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

IB-HFN: Information Bottleneck-Driven SAR-Optical Fusion Network for High-Fidelity Cloud Removal

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-assisted optical cloud removal aims to recover surface information obscured by clouds in optical remote sensing images by exploiting complementary SAR observations. Existing multimodal fusion methods typically rely on direct spatial concatenation and pixel-wise supervision, which can propagate SAR speckle noise into optical reconstruction and lead to over-smoothed results. To address these limitations, we propose an Information Bottleneck-driven High-Fidelity Network (IB-HFN) for SAR-assisted optical cloud removal. IB-HFN employs a dual-stream backbone to preserve modality-specific representations before deep semantic fusion, thereby mitigating premature cross-modal contamination. At the fusion stage, we introduce a Spatial Information Bottleneck Fusion module that compresses SAR features through a channel-wise variational information bottleneck to suppress unstructured speckle noise. In parallel, a local-global gating mechanism predicts clear-sky regions and routes reliable optical details through a Dirac-initialized skip connection, decoupling noise suppression from texture preservation. We further develop a joint optimization strategy that integrates feature-level bottleneck regularization with image-level constraints on reconstruction accuracy, structural consistency, spectral fidelity, and contrastive sharpness. A dynamic weighting schedule balances these objectives to stabilize training and reduce hazy artifacts. Experiments on the SEN12MS-CR dataset under challenging spatio-temporal splits demonstrate that IB-HFN achieves superior structural preservation and spectral fidelity over existing methods.

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

FlowMPC: Improving Flow Matching policies with World Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) is a powerful approach for behavior cloning in multimodal action spaces [Jiang et al., 2025], but because it is not trained to directly maximize expected return, there is still room to improve how FM policies act at test time. This work investigates whether a learned world model can improve FM policies by enabling Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning over candidate action sequences proposed by the policy. Building on TD-MPC2 [Hansen et al., 2024], I introduce FlowMPC, a framework that combines an imitation-learned FM policy with a learned world model for test-time planning in ManiSkill manipulation tasks [Tao et al., 2025]. Across PickCube and PickSingleYCB, adding the world model improved performance over the FM policy alone, with especially clear gains in end-of-episode success. These results suggest that world-model-based planning can effectively complement flow-based imitation policies without modifying the FM training objective.