Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

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

01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Multi-Adapter PPO: A Cross-Attention Enhanced Wavelength Selection Framework for LIBS Quantitative Analysis

arXiv:2606.17476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) quantitative analysis faces critical challenges in wavelength selection due to high-dimensional spectral data and the fundamental trade-off between prediction accuracy and feature efficiency. This paper presents a novel Multi-Adapter PPO framework that transforms wavelength selection into a reinforcement learning problem, leveraging cross-attention mechanisms and multiple specialized adapters to capture complex spectral relationships. Our approach outperforms traditional Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by an average of 28.4\% in comprehensive score and 45.2\% in prediction accuracy across steel and coal datasets. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in balancing prediction accuracy with feature efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art results in LIBS quantitative analysis while maintaining interpretability and computational efficiency. We released our code and dataset here: https://github.com/Hflying/MAPPO

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A New Definition of Quantum Superposition

arXiv:2606.15607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The usual description of the superposition of two (pure quantum) states is ambiguous, since the binary operation of summation in a Hilbert space does not pass down to the quotient projective space. Even though Dirac noted this as early as 1930, it is often asserted that the superposition is a binary operation acting on two states with a value that is a unique state. The goal for this note is to motivate a rigorous, geometrical definition of the superposition of states in the setting of complex projective space, which has been argued elsewhere to be the natural geometric phase space for quantum theory. The upshot is that the new definition of the superposition of two pure states, viewed as two distinct points in the projective space, is the unique (complex) line on which those two points lie. Finally, a comparison is given between superposition and expansion in an orthonormal basis.

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

Zeta: Dual Whitening for Matrix Optimization via Coordinate-Adaptive Preconditioning

arXiv:2606.14187v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale neural network training increasingly relies on matrix-aware optimizers that exploit the structure of weight parameters beyond element-wise adaptation. However, existing matrix-aware methods such as Muon have an underappreciated vulnerability: their core operation, Newton-Schulz iteration, depends critically on input conditioning, yet the raw momentum matrices exhibit severe coordinate-wise scale heterogeneity. In this paper, we first verify this scale heterogeneity through a chi-square uniformity test, showing that intra-matrix scale imbalance is prevalent across Transformer layers and that coordinate whitening effectively corrects it. Motivated by this finding, we propose Zeta, a dual whitening optimizer that applies coordinate whitening and spectral whitening in a strictly ordered pipeline. The ordering is not a tunable choice but follows from a mathematical dependency: coordinate whitening establishes the statistical isotropy that spectral whitening requires to function reliably. We further prove that this dual pipeline strictly reduces orthogonalization error relative to pure spectral methods by improving the condition number of the input. Empirically, Zeta matches or surpasses strong baselines across language modeling (0.6B to 8B parameters), mixture-of-experts architectures, and vision tasks, demonstrating that resolving scale imbalance before orthogonalization leads to faster convergence and better generalization. Code is available at https://gitcode.com/kevin259/MindSpeed.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SAM-Deep-EIoU: Selective Mask Propagation for Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking has a heavy-tailed difficulty distribution: most frames are easy for a lightweight base tracker, while a small fraction are intrinsically hard. Video object segmentation (VOS) models can often preserve identity through the hard frames where the base tracker fails, but they are much more expensive in compute and memory. We propose selective mask propagation, a tracking algorithm that dispatches from a base tracker to a VOS model only on windows where an assignment-uncertainty signal fires. The base tracker's output is modified only when the VOS model makes a confident prediction that contradicts the base tracker's identity assignment; weak or inconclusive predictions preserve the base output. The method is training-free, treats both the base tracker and the VOS model as black boxes, and can benefit from replacing the VOS component with a more capable model. On DanceTrack, selective mask propagation improves three different base trackers. On SportsMOT, where identity preservation is central to sports analytics, SAM3-Deep-EIoU with global track association achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark with 86.8 HOTA.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Business as Rulesual: A Benchmark and Framework for Business Rule Flow Modeling with LLMs

Extracting structured procedural knowledge from unstructured business documents is a critical yet unresolved bottleneck in process automation. While prior work has focused on extracting linear action flows from instructional texts, such as recipes, it has insufficiently addressed the complex logical structures, including conditional branching and parallel execution, that are pervasive in real-world regulatory and administrative documents. Furthermore, existing benchmarks are limited by simplistic schemas and shallow logical dependencies, restricting progress toward logic-aware large language models.To bridge this Logic Gap, we introduce BREX, a carefully curated benchmark comprising 409 real-world business documents and 2,855 expert-annotated rules. Unlike prior datasets centered on narrow service scenarios, BREX spans over 30 vertical domains, covering scientific, industrial, administrative, and financial regulations. We further propose ExIde, a structure-aware reasoning framework that investigates five distinct prompting strategies, ranging from implicit semantic alignment to executable grounding via pseudo-code generation. This enables explicit modeling of rule dependencies and provides an out-of-the-box framework for different business customers without finetuning their own large language models. We benchmark ExIde using 13 state-of-the-art large language models. Our extensive evaluation reveals that executable grounding serves as a superior inductive bias, significantly outperforming standard prompts in rule extraction. In addition, reasoning-optimized models demonstrate a distinct advantage in tracing long-range and non-linear rule dependencies compared to standard instruction-tuned models.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Validity and Limitations of the Empatica E4 Wristband for Autonomic and Thermoregulatory Sleep Monitoring Against Concurrent Polysomnography: A Wearanize+ Dataset Study

The Empatica E4 wristband provides continuous multi-modal physiological monitoring including blood volume pulse (BVP), electrodermal activity (EDA) and skin temperature (TEMP) but its validity for sleep-stage-specific autonomic and thermoregulatory monitoring has not been systematically evaluated against concurrent polysomnography (PSG). Using the Wearanize+ dataset which provides synchronised PSG, Empatica E4, and Zmax EEG recordings from 100 home-recorded participants; a systematic validation of Empatica E4 physiological signals against PSG ground truth across five sleep stages was conducted. Of 100 participants, 92 had Empatica data; 69 met Zmax EEG signal quality criteria and formed the analysis sample. Heart rate (HR) from the pre-computed Empatica HR channel showed valid stage-specific patterns (Wake: 70.9 bpm, N3: 61.2 bpm) and moderate inter-device MeanNN correspondence with PSG ECG (Spearman r=0.35-0.42 across stages). Skin temperature showed the expected thermoregulatory pattern (Wake: 33.92C, N3: 35.48C) and is recommended for downstream analyses. Tonic EDA showed an inverted stage pattern attributable to wrist sweat accumulation during deep sleep, representing a known confound for wrist-worn EDA during sleep. Phasic EDA showed plausible patterns and may be used with caution. These findings establish a validated feature set for Empatica E4 sleep research and directly inform multimodal psychiatric biomarker studies using the Wearanize+ dataset.

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

The Art of Mixology: Mixup-based Obfuscation for Privacy-Preserving Split Learning in Large Language Models

Split learning provides a practical paradigm for resource-constrained users to train Large Language Models (LLMs) by offloading computation-intensive layers to a server while keeping raw data local. However, existing privacy-preserving split learning methods still face a difficult trade-off among utility, privacy, efficiency, and stability. Specifically, these methods often suffer from substantial utility degradation, remain vulnerable to advanced data reconstruction attacks, incur prohibitive computational and communication overhead, or exhibit unstable performance across different tasks. In this paper, we propose MIXGUARD, a novel mixup-based privacy-preserving split learning framework for LLMs. MIXGUARD introduces token-level obfuscation, representation-level obfuscation, and adaptive gradient perturbation mechanisms, which operate jointly to preserve useful learning signals while preventing privacy leakage to the server. Technically, MIXGUARD first constructs a lightweight calibration model on a public dataset to refine the approximated target representation, and then applies this model during privacy-preserving fine-tuning on private data. We conduct extensive experiments on four classification tasks and four text generation tasks across multiple LLM families, model sizes, architectures, and fine-tuning strategies. The results show that MIXGUARD preserves model utility comparable to non-split training baselines, consistently achieves stronger privacy protection than existing split learning defense methods against state-of-the-art data reconstruction attacks, and remains robust under adaptive attack settings.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Approximate Structured Diffusion for Sequence Labelling

Sequence labelling, a core task of Natural Language Processing (NLP), consists in assigning each token of an input sentence a label. From a Machine Learning point of view, sequence labelling is often cast as a Linear-Chain Conditional Random Field (CRF) parametrised by a neural network. While this approach gives good empirical results, CRFs assume a finite decision span (eg label bigrams) which can limit their expressivity and hurt performance when long-range dependencies are required. We show we can leverage diffusion to train a CRF conditioned on an entire label sequence, with the caveat that the condition is on a noisy version of labels. We show experimentally that this method, in conjunction with approximate CRF inference, improves label accuracy with a 16.5% error reduction for POS-tagging.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Building Customer Support AI Agents at 100M-User Scale: An Evaluation-Driven Framework

The rapid rise in LLM capabilities has made AI agents increasingly viable across a broad range of tasks. Among the most promising applications is building production-ready customer-facing agents, a challenge that demands coordinated excellence in evaluation methodology, context engineering, training, and online measurement. Yet these critical pillars are typically developed in isolation, creating blind spots that only surface after deployment. In this paper, we present a unified framework that bridges offline development with online impact for customer support AI agents at Nubank, a company with 100M+ users. Our approach integrates several key components: (1) structured context engineering tailored to customer support agents, (2) systematic human-in-the-loop prompt iteration, (3) rigorous LLM judge evaluation with measured inter-rater agreement and GEPA optimization for consistency, and (4) ideation-to-production validation. A central insight is that evaluation-pipeline quality directly determines iteration velocity. We present results from five production deployments spanning distinct domains: card delivery, debt management, credit-limit support, card management, and product explanation. These deployments deliver consistent customer-satisfaction gains while substantially accelerating iteration. In our card-delivery deployment, large-scale A/B testing yields a 37 percentage-point improvement in AI transactional Net Promoter Score and a 29 percentage-point gain in self-service rate over prior agent variants, alongside a strong correlation between offline simulation metrics and online outcomes, demonstrating that eval-driven development reliably predicts production impact. On most use cases, AI satisfaction reaches within a few percentage points of expert human agents.

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

AMALIA-VL: A Native European Portuguese Open-Source Vision and Language Model

Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet European Portuguese (pt-PT) remains systematically underserved by existing open-source multimodal models, which either conflate it with Brazilian Portuguese or severely under-represent it in their training data mixes. We introduce AMALIA-VL, the first open-source instruction-tuned LVLM built natively for pt-PT, pairing a high-resolution vision encoder with dynamic image tiling and a fully open pt-PT-optimized language model via a learned connector. We contribute with a purposefully designed three-stage training process - vision-language alignment, general visual instruction tuning, and preference optimization - together with a pt-PT-centric multimodal data mix combining curated and translated public datasets with novel datasets that address the near-total absence of European Portuguese multimodal resources. Our evaluation shows that AMALIA-VL establishes a strong baseline for open-source pt-PT LVLMs.We will release model weights, training data, and construction pipelines along with machine-translated pt-PT evaluation benchmarks to help democratize pt-PT LVLM development.

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

Self-Attention as Transport: Limits of Symmetric Spectral Diagnostics

When a language model processes a hallucinated response, its attention routing tends to fail in one of two shapes: over-concentrating on a narrow set of positions, or spreading so diffusely that relevance is diluted, and the shape of the failure carries diagnostic signal. We study these shapes as a diagnostic characterization, computed from attention matrices under forced scoring of benchmark-labeled responses rather than during live generation. A widely used family of spectral methods analyzes the symmetric component of the degree-normalized attention operator, which governs transport capacity; we prove that every transpose-invariant spectral diagnostic of this operator is structurally orientation-blind (it cannot distinguish an operator from its transpose, and therefore cannot detect information-flow direction), with a converse to the blindness theorem bounding any Lipschitz diagnostic's transpose sensitivity by the asymmetry coefficient $G$. Pairing this with a closed-form bipartite-Cheeger landscape for canonical causal architectures, we show that uniform causal attention satisfies an $n$-independent floor $\phi \ge 1/5$, while window attention pierces the floor as $O(w/n)$; failure modes are shape-different, not just value-different. This floor is an idealized-architecture benchmark, not an empirical attractor: the fraction of real attention heads that pierce it is itself an architectural signature. The resulting two-axis diagnostic ($\phi$ for capacity, $G$ for direction) yields a falsifiable polarity prediction: bottleneck- and diffuse-dominated benchmarks should exhibit opposite polarity. Under length-controlled evaluation, transport features retain interpretable signal (0.62-0.84 LC-AUROC) across the tested decoder-only, encoder-only, and encoder-decoder models, with polarity reversing as predicted between HaluEval and MedHallu.

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

Sustainable Materials Discovery in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2601.21527v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed materials discovery, enabling rapid exploration of chemical space through generative models and surrogate screening. Yet current generative AI models for materials discovery, which now drive exploration of vast chemical and structural spaces, optimize candidates exclusively for structural stability and functional properties, with no integration of environmental assessment at any stage of the design loop. Prospective and ex-ante life cycle assessment methods exist and have been applied to emerging technologies, but they operate as standalone downstream analyses, not as active constraints within generative or active-learning pipelines. The result is that environmental feedback, even when produced, arrives after design decisions have been made rather than informing them. The disconnect between atomic-scale design and lifecycle assessment (LCA) reflects fundamental challenges: (i) data scarcity across heterogeneous sources, (ii) scale gaps from atoms to industrial systems, (iii) uncertainty in synthesis pathways, and (iv) the absence of frameworks that co-optimize performance with environmental impact. In this Perspective, we propose integrating upstream ML-assisted materials discovery with downstream LCA into the ML-LCA framework, comprising five components: information extraction for building materials-environment knowledge bases, harmonized databases linking properties to sustainability metrics, multi-scale models bridging atomic properties to lifecycle impacts, ensemble prediction of manufacturing pathways with uncertainty quantification, and uncertainty-aware optimization enabling simultaneous performance-sustainability navigation. Case studies spanning polymers, glass, photoresists, and cement demonstrate both necessity and feasibility while identifying material-specific integration challenges.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Neural Architectures as Functional Priors in Physics-Informed Control Problems

arXiv:2606.19368v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work we investigate the role of neural architectures as implicit functional priors in control problems governed by ordinary differential equations. Rather than focusing on highly complex problems, our objective is to investigate architecture-dependent effects in controlled dynamical systems within the simplest physically interpretable settings possible. In particular, we study a controlled linear RLC electrical circuit and a nonlinear Duffing-type dynamical system. Both systems are analyzed first through classical optimal-control formulations and later through PINN-based approaches. We compare different combinations of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and Fourier-based KAN-like architectures, and analyze their influence on the resulting controls. The numerical experiments suggest that different architectural choices systematically generate qualitatively distinct controls, even under identical governing equations, loss functionals, initial and target states, training parameters and physical constraints. Significant differences appear in the spectral structure, smoothness, energy distribution, and phase-space behavior of the learned solutions. A central observation of this work is the emergence of a functional specialization phenomenon when the neural architectures are allowed sufficient freedom to shape the structure of the learned controls. More specifically, in the systems considered here, Fourier-based architectures tend to produce trajectories with richer oscillatory content, whereas smoother low-frequency-biased architectures tend to generate more regular and energetically efficient controls. This suggests that different functional components of the control problem may be handled more efficiently by different neural architectures, leading to an implicit specialization between state representation and control generation.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Block algebra for morphing circuits

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Morphing circuits are a new paradigm for quantum error correction that relaxes hardware requirements. We present four constructions for CNOT-based CSS morphing circuits with explicit qubit connectivity degrees. All four constructions are specified in block algebra notation, with entries in algebras generated by permutation matrices. The first three are obtained by rewriting existing surface- and color-code morphing circuits; the fourth is a new three-round construction modeled on the 6.6.6 color code. The surface-code construction recovers the morphing circuit of Ref. [ST25] for two-block group algebra codes. Numerical search then instantiates these permutation matrices using regular representations of finite groups. [ST25] M. H. Shaw and B. M. Terhal, Phys. Rev. Lett. 134(9), 090602 (2025).

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

From Proteome Mining to Structural Validation: Phosphopyruvate Hydratase as a Structurally Tractable Drug Target in Kinetoplastid Parasites

Chagas disease, caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, demands novel therapeutic strategies that overcome the toxicity and limited efficacy of current treatments. To address this need, herein we report an integrative, target-centric strategy that combines parasite proteome mining, structural modeling, and experimental validation. Functional enrichment and druggability analyses identified phosphopyruvate hydratase (PPH) as a promising candidate due to its essential metabolic role and limited similarity to human homologs. Notably, proteome mining revealed the presence and conservation of PPH across kinetoplastid parasites, including Leishmania donovani, supporting its evaluation beyond T. cruzi. For the selected PPH sequences, AlphaFold-derived three-dimensional models underwent extensive molecular dynamics refinement, yielding stable conformational ensembles suitable for structure-based studies. Using this validated model, virtual screening of the Latin American Natural Products Database - LANaPDB - identified aptosimon as a top-ranked compound candidate. Molecular dynamics simulations further showed ligand-dependent binding behavior, suggesting alternative binding modes distinct from the canonical substrate configuration. In vitro assays demonstrated consistent antiparasitic activity against intracellular T. cruzi amastigotes (IC50 = 3.52 ug/mL) and Leishmania donovani promastigotes (IC50 = 13.06 ug/mL), supporting the biological relevance of the aptosimon-related lignan chemotype, hinokinin, across two kinetoplastid parasite models. Together, these results support PPH as a structurally tractable and biologically relevant candidate target, while identifying an aptosimon-related lignan chemotype, represented experimentally by hinokinin, as a cross-species antiparasitic scaffold that warrants further biochemical target-validation studies.

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

Cross-Model Disagreement as a Label-Free Correctness Signal

arXiv:2603.25450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting when a language model is wrong without ground truth labels is a fundamental challenge for safe deployment. Existing approaches rely on a model's own uncertainty – such as token entropy or confidence scores – but these signals fail critically on the most dangerous failure mode: confident errors, where a model is wrong but certain. In this work we introduce cross-model disagreement as a correctness indicator – a simple, training-free signal that can be dropped into existing production systems, routing pipelines, and deployment monitoring infrastructure without modification. Given a model's generated answer, cross-model disagreement computes how surprised or uncertain a second verifier model is when reading that answer via a single forward pass. No generation from the verifying model is required, and no correctness labels are needed. We instantiate this principle as Cross-Model Perplexity (CMP), which measures the verifying model's surprise at the generating model's answer tokens, and Cross-Model Entropy (CME), which measures the verifying model's uncertainty at those positions. Both CMP and CME outperform within-model uncertainty baselines across benchmarks spanning reasoning, retrieval, and mathematical problem solving (MMLU, TriviaQA, and GSM8K). On MMLU, CMP achieves a mean AUROC of 0.75 against a within-model entropy baseline of 0.59. These results establish cross-model disagreement as a practical, training-free approach to label-free correctness estimation, with direct applications in deployment monitoring, model routing, selective prediction, data filtering, and scalable oversight of production language model systems.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

What Do Flow-Based Inverse Solvers Approximate? A Posterior-Transport View

A growing family of training-free solvers – FlowDPS, FLOWER, PnP-Flow and their diffusion ancestors (DPS, DAPS) – repurpose a pretrained flow-matching prior to solve imaging inverse problems by adding a measurement-guidance term to the deterministic probability-flow ODE. Despite strong empirical results, what these per-step corrections actually approximate – and how far the resulting samples are from the true posterior $p(x\mid y)$ – has not been characterized. We give a posterior-transport account of flow-based inverse problem solving. Our starting point is a simple but consequential fact: for a deterministic flow prior, Bayesian conditioning is realized entirely by a reweighting of the source distribution, not by a drift correction; pushing the reweighted source through the unmodified velocity field yields exact posterior samples. From this we show that trajectory-guidance solvers can be read as the minimum-kinetic-energy correction field needed to morph the unconditional source into the posterior, and that FlowDPS / FLOWER / PnP-Flow correspond to distinct zeroth-order / Gaussian / proximal approximations of this single object; we bound the resulting posterior bias in Wasserstein distance. A controlled $2$D study with a closed-form posterior confirms the theory decisively: source reweighting matches the true posterior to the Monte-Carlo floor on every metric, whereas trajectory guidance incurs $200$–$800\times$ larger error and collapses posterior modes, regardless of guidance strength. Guided by the analysis we propose a cheap, principled velocity-correction solver that is competitive across two in-domain priors (AFHQ, CelebA) and two out-of-distribution settings while, unlike point-estimate source-space optimizers, producing diverse posterior samples with uncertainty that correlates with reconstruction error.

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

Vanishing Depth: Training Generalized Depth Adapters with Sinusoidal Depth Preprocessing for Pretrained RGB Encoders

Generalized metric depth understanding is critical for precise vision-guided robotics, which current state-of-the-art (SOTA) vision-encoders do not support. To address this, we propose a self-supervised training approach that extends pretrained RGB encoders with a depth adapter to incorporate and align metric depth into a combined latent space without interfering with the pretrained RGB feature extraction. In combination with our sinusoidal depth encoding, the depth adapter enables generalized and robust depth density and distribution invariant feature extraction. Our depth adapters improve a wide set of generalized RGB baselines across a spectrum of relevant RGBD downstream tasks in segmentation, pose estimation, and depth completion – without the necessity of finetuning. Most importantly, we achieve 56.05 mIoU in the SUN-RGBD segmentation, while outperforming SOTA depth-aware and multi-modal encoders in our experiments. When no depth is present, one can activate our depth adapter with an empty map, use single pixel depth clues, or monocular depth estimation to include the depth aware feature extraction into subsequent downstream tasks.

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

Recursive Learning Without Collapse: A Weighting-Based Stabilization Framework

arXiv:2502.18049v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent studies identified an intriguing phenomenon in recursive generative model training known as model collapse, where models trained on data generated by previous models exhibit severe performance degradation. Addressing this issue and developing more effective training strategies have become central challenges in generative model research. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon within a novel framework, where generative models are iteratively trained on a combination of newly collected real data and synthetic data from the previous training step. To develop an optimal training strategy for integrating real and synthetic data, we evaluate the performance of a weighted training scheme in various scenarios, including Gaussian distribution estimation, generalized linear models, and nonparametric estimation. We theoretically characterize the impact of the mixing proportion and weighting scheme of synthetic data on the final model's performance. Our key finding is that, across different settings, the optimal weighting scheme under different proportions of synthetic data asymptotically follows a unified expression, revealing a fundamental trade-off between leveraging synthetic data and model performance. In some cases, the optimal weight assigned to real data corresponds to the reciprocal of the golden ratio. Finally, we validate our theoretical results on extensive simulated datasets and a real tabular dataset.

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

Efficient Hallucination Detection for LLMs Using Uncertainty-Aware Attention Heads

While large language models (LLMs) have become highly capable, they remain prone to factual inaccuracies, commonly referred to as "hallucinations." Uncertainty quantification (UQ) offers a promising way to mitigate this issue, but most existing methods are computationally intensive and/or require supervision. In this work, we propose Recurrent Attention-based Uncertainty Quantification (RAUQ), an unsupervised and efficient framework for identifying hallucinations. The method leverages an observation about transformer attention behavior: when incorrect information is generated, certain "uncertainty-aware" attention heads tend to reduce their focus on preceding tokens. RAUQ automatically detects these attention heads and combines their activation patterns with token-level confidence measures in a recurrent scheme, producing a sequence-level uncertainty estimate in just a single forward pass. Through experiments on twelve datasets spanning question answering, summarization, and translation across nine different LLMs, we show that RAUQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art UQ baselines. Importantly, it incurs minimal overhead, requiring less than 1\% additional computation. Since it requires neither labeled data nor extensive parameter tuning, RAUQ serves as a lightweight, plug-and-play solution for real-time hallucination detection in white-box LLMs.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

From 50K to 8.2 Million in 24 Hours: Vozinha's Algorithmic Consecration and the Multilingual Making of World Cup Visibility

We present a multilingual computational discourse analysis of how language constructed the algorithmic consecration of Vozinha, the 40-year-old Cape Verde goalkeeper, after Spain 0-0 Cape Verde at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The study contributes a multilingual corpus in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French; a nine-frame narrative taxonomy with cue-based frame annotation; a reproducible annotation pipeline combining LLM-assisted suggestion with human validation; and an analysis of cross-lingual narrative diffusion across discourse phases. We treat the platform follower count itself, narrated as "50k to 8M", as a linguistic object: a circulating and narratable proof of visibility rather than a mere measurement. The follower-growth timeline is used only as contextual metadata: we reconstruct a conservative phase structure, not a continuous API-native series, and type every datapoint by value class, confidence, and evidence type. The only exact primary scraper anchor is 8,235,652 followers at 2026-06-16 15:47 UTC; all other figures are reported as estimated ranges or thresholds, including an estimated pre-match baseline of 45k-56k. Findings suggest that distinct languages carried distinct frames: Portuguese mobilization, Spanish crisis, English nation-making, and a shared platform-metric spectacle through which peripheral athletic performance became globally visible. As a v0.1 pilot, the paper releases the corpus schema, frame taxonomy, annotation guidelines, hashed visual-evidence log, and typed timeline, while flagging full double annotation and inter-annotator agreement as planned work.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Parallel Manifold Steering: Efficient Adaptation of Large Associative Memories via Residual Energy Shaping

arXiv:2606.24396v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Transformer models function as Dense Associative Memories (DAMs), retrieving knowledge via high-dimensional attractor dynamics driven by the self-attention mechanism \citep{ramsauer2020hopfield, wu2024attention}. However, adapting these frozen memory systems to new tasks presents a fundamental ``Plasticity-Stability'' dilemma. Current methods either risk catastrophic interference by modifying synaptic weights directly (e.g., LoRA) \citep{hu2021lora} or degrade associative capacity by clogging the retrieval buffer with static prompt tokens (e.g., VPT) \citep{jia2022vpt}. In this work, we propose H-Res (Hierarchical Residual Steering), a mechanism that modulates the effective energy landscape of the Transformer without altering its global equilibrium or expanding its sequence length. By formulating adaptation as a control problem on the activation manifold \citep{chen2018neuralode}, H-Res learns a state-dependent vector field that steers token trajectories into task-specific basins of attraction. We formally prove that H-Res preserves the attention entropy of the foundation model and facilitates Neural Collapse \citep{papyan2020prevalence}. Empirically, Manifold Steering outperforms global weight modification by 26\% on associative retrieval tasks and eliminates the computational overhead of prompt-based methods, scaling effectively to structured domains \citep{zha2023vtab}.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Plug-and-Adapt: Multimodal Coreference Resolution at First Sight with a Pretrained Alignment Model

Visual information helps resolve ambiguity in coreference resolution, leading to notable performance gains. However, existing Multi-modal Coreference Resolution (MCR) methods require training with (partially) annotated data from the target dataset before they can be applied, preventing their direct usability and raising concerns about generalization. While Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) with billions of parameters offer promising zero-shot capabilities, they remain largely inaccessible. Their massive size limits deployability, and many are only accessible through paid APIs. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-adapt method that strategically adapts a carefully pre-trained alignment model for immediate use in MCR tasks, designed to eliminate the need for training on scarce benchmark datasets or relying on resource-intensive VLLMs. Specifically, we first pre-train a fine-grained alignment model between textual and visual contextual information using vision-language alignment datasets. We then repurpose the alignment model to MCR through similarity aggregation by fusing visual and categorical cues with evidence theory, thereby enhancing effectiveness. Experiments on the Coreference Image Narratives (CIN) benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a 5.31\% and 2.12\% improvement in CoNLL F1 over SOTA dedicated methods and popular VLLMs, respectively. We further evaluate our method on a masked CIN dataset for robustness testing and on a specially constructed VCR-MCR dataset for generalization assessment, with results confirming both capabilities.

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

Evaluation Metrics as Averaged Outcomes of Fair Gambles

arXiv:2401.14483v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the current practices of machine learning, the evaluation of forecasts has become a cornerstone of scientific progress. A multitude of evaluation metrics have been suggested and used to qualify "good" forecasts. What do those metrics share? How are they related? In this work, we use a protocol borrowed from game-theoretic probability to show that a large part of evaluation metrics can be viewed as averaged outcomes of fair gambles. Intuitively, a fair gambler is one which a forecaster would expect to fail. Hence, the gambler's ability to gain disproves the quality of the forecast. Standard evaluation metrics are then variants of choices of such fair gambles. In particular, this choice is structured along two dimensions, one of which separates calibration-type and regret-type metrics. In particular, this framework sheds light on the relationship of calibration and regret showing a theoretical equivalence in their ability to evaluate when being scaled appropriately, but the incomparability of obtained scores.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

q-Askey Deformations of Double-Scaled SYK

arXiv:2605.13956v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We construct families of deformations of the double-scaled SYK (DSSYK) model and investigate their bulk interpretation. We introduce microscopic deformations of the SYK model which, after ensemble averaging and in the double-scaling limit, are described by a transfer matrix encoding the recurrence relations of basic orthogonal polynomials in the q-Askey scheme. For certain families of deformations in the semiclassical limit at finite temperature, the chord number (encoding Krylov complexity) corresponds to the length of an Einstein-Rosen bridge connecting an End-Of-The-World brane to an anti-de Sitter asymptotic boundary. By increasing one of the deformation parameters, the models eventually exhibit discrete energy levels, signaling a new geometric transition in sine dilaton gravity. Via the SYK-Schur duality, Krylov complexity also admits a representation-theoretic interpretation as the spread of the SU(2) spin in the index of an $\mathcal{N}=2$ SU(2) gauge theory. We study the operator algebras of the deformed theories. The algebras can be type II$_1$ or type I$_\infty$ factors, depending on the operators that are included. The entanglement entropy between the type II$_1$ algebras for a pure state manifests as an extremal surface through the Ryu-Takayanagi formula. We discuss connections between our results and the emergence of baby universes in the bulk.