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) 2026-06-16

Diffusion Offline Reinforcement Learning for Fair and Energy-Efficient UAV-Assisted Wireless Networks

arXiv:2606.16331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of generative artificial intelligence with wireless communication and signal processing systems has opened new avenues for intelligent, data-driven decision-making in future 6G networks. This work proposes a diffusion soft actor-critic (Diffusion-SAC) approach that leverages offline reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced by denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) to optimize trajectory and scheduling control in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks. While offline RL methods, such as conservative Q-learning (CQL), can learn from static datasets, they often struggle to generalize in low-data or dynamic conditions. To address this, we combine the robustness of CQL with the generative power of diffusion models, enabling expressive and signal-aware policy learning that generalizes beyond behavior policies. Applied to a UAV-assisted wireless network, the proposed framework minimizes transmission energy and improves fairness among devices. Simulations show that Diffusion-SAC outperforms standard offline RL baselines, achieving more stable convergence and higher rewards even with limited datasets. The method enhances data efficiency, reduces energy consumption, and increases throughput by more than 35 % compared to existing algorithms, demonstrating its potential for robust policy learning in next-generation wireless control systems.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Toward a National Registry for Inborn Errors of Immunity in Peru: A Qualitative Implementation Study

Background: Peru lacks an integrated information system for patients with Inborn Errors of Immunity (IEI). Although disease registries are essential tools for data management and health planning, their success depends on implementation science approaches that account for local contextual factors. This study reports Phase I of a three-phase mixed-methods implementation project to design and develop a national IEI registry. Methods: Phase I consisted of a phenomenological qualitative study exploring stakeholder perspectives. Semi-structured focus groups and in-depth interviews were conducted with 29 key stakeholders across four groups: policy-makers, clinical experts, end-users (immunologists, residents, allied health personnel), and patient organization representatives. Interviews followed a guide structured around four a priori domains (structure, navigation, feasibility, and perception of existing systems). Discussions were conducted in Spanish, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and coded using ATLAS.ti. A hybrid thematic analysis combining deductive and inductive coding was performed. Data elements proposed for the registry were triangulated with qualitative findings. Results: Thirty-six initial codes were consolidated into 15 categories, which were further integrated into four overarching themes conceptualized as pathways toward intention to use: (1) Environment, where governance, regulatory backing, and sustainable financing were identified as key enablers, while limited interoperability emerged as a structural barrier; (2) Technical Dimension, emphasizing usability, alignment with clinical workflow, and a hierarchical data architecture (demographic, clinical, therapeutic); (3) Users, highlighting clinical leadership, protected time, digital readiness, and perceived usefulness as stronger motivators than financial incentives; and (4) Patients, underscoring data protection, transparency, trust, and advocacy as essential for legitimacy and sustainability. Conclusions: A national IEI registry in Peru is perceived as necessary and feasible if implemented with strong regulatory foundations, interoperable design, robust data security, and user-centered architecture. These findings informed the development of an initial functional prototype and the operational plan for Phase II, focused on usability evaluation.

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

A Benchmark and Framework for Evaluating Next Action Predictions in Spreadsheets

arXiv:2606.13802v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive code completion greatly accelerates how quickly developers work. In spreadsheets, despite being much more common, such auto-completion features are virtually non-existent. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark for systems that observe a sequence of user actions in a spreadsheet and predict future actions. Two challenges are (1) the absence of edit histories in public spreadsheet corpora and (2) the complex space of spreadsheet actions (spatial, temporal, composite). To address (1), we manually curate 52 sequences of 12K actions that recreate spreadsheets from public corpora, seeded by parametrized heuristics and LLM refinement. To address (2), we propose an online evaluation that expects a prediction after each user action, accepts or rejects that prediction, updates the future actions upon acceptance, and repeats this until the target spreadsheet is obtained. We use multiple baseline predictors (including zero-shot LLMs, fine-tuned SLMs, and classical models) and analyze different properties that our benchmark teaches us, including but not limited to: properties of saved actions and false positives, efficiency, effect of user profiles, effect of triggers, and effect of context.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Super-Arrhenius relaxation of the triangular plaquette model in any dimension

arXiv:2606.16259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consider the following plaquette model from statistical physics: a lamp lies at every vertex of the triangular lattice and a switch lies at every even vertex of the (bipartite) dual hexagonal lattice. Each switch toggles the three lamps on its face. The energy of a configuration is the number of ON lamps. For the Glauber dynamics associated with the Gibbs measure defined by this Hamiltonian at any inverse temperature $\beta>0$, we show that, in any dimension $d\ge 2$, the infinite volume relaxation time satisfies \[e^{\beta^2/C}/C \le T_{\mathrm{rel}}\le Ce^{e^{C\beta}}\] for some $C>0$. Our result entails that the Gibbs measure is unique. The $e^{\beta^2}$ scaling was conjectured by Newman and Moore in 1999 and matches the behaviour of supercritical rooted kinetically constrained models such as the East model, thus recovering fragile glass phenomenology in the absence of kinetic constraints. More precisely, we show that, on a torus of side length $2^k$, when $\beta\to\infty$ and $k/\beta\to0$, we have $T_{\mathrm{rel}}=e^{2\beta k(1+o(1))}$. Quite surprisingly, however, we also prove that, on non-periodic finite domains of size $n\le e^{\beta/C}$ for large $C>0$, we have the much larger asymptotics $\ln T_{\mathrm{rel}}=\beta n^{\Theta(1)}$. The main ingredients of the proofs are new results in extremal and enumerative combinatorics and rely on renormalisation ideas for the dynamics and its groundstates also known as the Ledrappier subshift. We note consequences of our results to geometric group theory (more precisely to the complexity of the word problem for the Baumslag finitely presented group) and to ergodic theory.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Approach for Melt Pool Prediction in Laser Powder Bed Fusion

arXiv:2606.23719v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a promising additive manufacturing technique that suffers from quality assurance concerns. Predicting melt pools from process parameters is crucial for assessing quality prior to manufacturing but remains a difficult problem because of the complex physical processes underlying LPBF. Quantum computers present a new computing paradigm, providing a new approach to information processing using quantum entanglement and superposition. This paper presents a practical demonstration of a hybrid quantum-classical model that leverages quantum computing to improve process parameter feature extraction with a quantum feature encoder. To make the quantum approach computationally feasible for large datasets, we first employ a clustering algorithm to reduce the number of expensive quantum computations. These quantum features are then processed by a classical neural network to predict the melt pool morphology, allowing for more accurate predictions of melt pools. We demonstrate the method using a quantum simulator, analyze the effect of measurement shot noise on the predictive performance of the network, and verify the results using quantum hardware. Finally, by examining which quantum features are most important, we provide insights that can inform the future design of more effective quantum encoding circuits. Ultimately, the performance improvement over purely classical networks validates the hybrid approach, demonstrating an engineering application of quantum computing using noisy and intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices.

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

Hybrid Open-Ended Tri-Evolution Makes Better Deep Researcher

arXiv:2606.13710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research and agent evolution serve as de-facto tasks for AI agents in real-world applications toward artificial general intelligence. The former enables autonomous retrieval and integration of information in open-ended environments to tackle open-ended research tasks, yet it is constrained by the static parametric deep research capabilities of agent systems. The latter allows agents to autonomously interact with the environment to gain experiences that evolve model capabilities. However, its effectiveness has been widely validated only on verifiable tasks with standard answers, leaving a gap with open-ended research tasks. To bridge these two critical tasks, we propose the Hybrid Open-Ended Tri-Evolution (HOTE) framework, which leverages hybrid-mode reinforcement learning to facilitate the collaborative evolution of a proposer, solver and judge based on web-scale knowledge, moving toward autonomous evolving agents in open-ended tasks and environments. Extensive experiments on three long-form deep research benchmarks demonstrate that the 8B model trained via HOTE surpasses the strongest static open 8-32B models as well as those trained by state-of-the-art deep research training methods with less time overhead, and further verify that the evolution of all three modules in HOTE is indispensable.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Representation-Induced Symmetry Trapping in Adaptive Variational Quantum Simulations of Multi-Reference Topologies

arXiv:2606.13387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the trainability of adaptive quantum chemistry algorithms under multi-reference static correlation requires understanding how representation topologies intertwine with molecular geometry. We systematically expose a deep physical dependence on point-group symmetry by evaluating a spin-conserved SUSD operator pool across highly stretched configurations (2 x Re) of asymmetric LiH, symmetric BeH2, and asymmetric H2O. Under asymmetric distortions, the non-local mapping constraints of the Bravyi-Kitaev transformation create an optimization trapping effect–an encodement-locked manifestation of the broader barren plateau crisis. Crucially, by comparing these to the symmetrical stretching baseline of BeH2, we demonstrate that the preservation of point-group symmetry structurally protects the optimization landscape, proving that ansatz symmetry restrictions are necessary but insufficient without accounting for the underlying fermion-to-qubit representation. While current methods rely on numerical pruning to throttle pool sizes, our structural approach establishes that the mapping representation remains a critical factor in maintaining landscape trainability. Furthermore, exploiting structural overlap within our pool, we introduce a covariance-driven, adaptive shot-allocation filter. Diverging from static energy-variance minimization frameworks, our allocation engine operates as a dynamic runtime diagnostic tool. By continuously monitoring the gradient precision threshold epsilon, it aggressively prunes dead symmetry channels and triggers an automated circuit-termination sequence upon detecting representation-induced flat-lined states (dE/dtheta approx 0). This integration of algebraic measurement reuse with topology-aware statistical filtering provides a promising, resource-efficient strategy for executing deep variational algorithms on early fault-tolerant architectures.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Cross-Lingual Exploration for Parametric Knowledge

Parametric knowledge in Large Language Models is not equally accessible across languages. As a result, standard inference techniques often struggle to surface localized facts, leading to failures in cross-lingual knowledge transfer and consistency. In this work, we investigate techniques for accessing hidden factual knowledge by exploring cross-lingual prompting strategies. We identify four inherent dimensions of cross-lingual exploration that directly govern parametric knowledge retrieval and evaluate them on multilingual factual benchmarks covering 17 typologically diverse languages. Our results demonstrate that cross-lingual exploration significantly improves knowledge transfer and factual recall, representing a more efficient compute Pareto frontier than native-language scaling. Furthermore, we observe corresponding improvements in cross-lingual consistency, exceeding what can be explained by accuracy gains alone. Overall, our work establishes multilingual prompt exploration as a highly effective inference-time strategy for unlocking latent parametric knowledge.

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

When to Trust, How to Distill: Multi-Foundation Model Guidance for Lightweight, Robust Scientific Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) in physical sciences is hindered by a critical trade-off: while these models encode rich, universal temporal dynamics, they suffer from severe distributional misalignment when applied zero-shot to specific scientific domains, and their computational cost prohibits deployment in edge-computing sensor networks. We address a fundamental challenge: How can we extract latent structural knowledge from misaligned foundation models (FM) to train lightweight, specialized forecasters? We propose Gated Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Distillation (Guard), a novel framework that reframes multiteacher distillation as an instance-wise decision process with two adaptive mechanisms: (1) a Contextual Router that dynamically selects the most relevant teacher based on local input statistics, exploiting complementarity across diverse foundation models; and (2) an Uncertainty-Gated Temperature mechanism that acts as a "circuit-breaker," automatically attenuating distillation strength when teacher confidence diverges from domain reality. We evaluate our proposed lightweight framework on four climate-critical domains: meteorology, ecosystem carbon flux, soil moisture, and energy grids. Our method significantly reduces RMSE relative to a fixed-weight multi-teacher distillation baseline, successfully distilling knowledge from pretrained FMs (teachers) even when they exhibit suboptimal zero-shot accuracy due to distribution shift between the original and target data domains. We demonstrate that these domain-misaligned teachers can still serve as critical correctives, outperforming the globally superior FMs on 28.5% of the hardest instances. Ultimately, this enables high-precision scientific forecasting suitable for resource-constrained edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/RupasreeDey/GUARD-KDD2026.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Trainable Quantum Channels as Computational Primitives for Quantum Learning

arXiv:2606.15808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational quantum learning is traditionally constrained to unitary dynamics, often treating quantum channels as detrimental noise. In this work, we reformulate the quantum channels as trainable computational primitives and establish a non-unitary quantum machine learning framework grounded in open-system dynamics. We demonstrate that the outputs of channel-enhanced quantum models form a structured superposition of multiple functional components. Each component is governed by an effective observable whose spectrum can be adaptively modulated during training, a significant departure from the spectral invariance in unitary transformations. Moreover, the proposed framework generalizes conventional unitary quantum models by retaining them as a special case while introducing additional non-unitary degrees of freedom. Furthermore, we reveal that trainable quantum channels enrich the optimization geometry through ensemble-averaged gradient and additional optimization directions induced by the Kraus operators. Empirical evaluations on classification tasks using trainable amplitude-damping and phase-damping channels confirm enhanced optimization dynamics and predictive performance. Our work provides a principled approach for leveraging quantum channels as trainable resources and advances the design of high-performance quantum learning architectures.

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

Beyond Uniform Forgetting: A Study of Sequential Direct Preference Optimization Across Preference Settings

Aligning language models with human preferences often requires optimising multiple behavioural objectives. A practical approach is to apply these objectives sequentially using preference optimisation methods such as Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO), but it remains unclear whether later training uniformly degrades preferences learned earlier or whether the effect depends on the relationship between objectives. We study sequential DPO across four preference settings covering distributional conflict, multi-attribute interaction, strong safety signal, and compatible response-quality objectives. Using Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with LoRA adapters, we evaluate all objectives after every stage with a fixed base-model reference. We find that sequential DPO does not produce a single forgetting pattern; preference change ranges from partial degradation to stability, pair-level redistribution, or positive transfer depending on objective relationship, signal strength, and training order. Pair-level analysis using length-normalised policy margins shows that aggregate metrics can mask heterogeneous changes across preference pairs, whereas quartile decomposition reveals that high-confidence pairs can either degrade or improve depending on the setting. Mechanistic diagnostics show that Stage~2 gradients and adapter updates are near-orthogonal to the previous objective across all settings, providing little evidence that direct gradient opposition is the primary driver. These findings suggest that future sequential alignment pipelines should account for objective compatibility and signal strength, rather than assuming that later objectives affect earlier preferences uniformly.

12.
Science (Express) 2026-04-23

Structural N- and O-glycans revealed by high-resolution cryo-EM analysis of tubular mastigonemes | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

The chemical complexity and non-templated biosynthesis of glycans have posed significant challenges for establishing sequence-structure relationships. Here we report cryo-EM structures of tubular mastigonemes from a golden alga species, Ochromonas danica , in which a large number of N- and O-glycans are resolved at 1.8-2.2 Å resolution. Beyond high-mannose and complex N-glycans, we identify a non-canonical N-glycan on the Ala- Asn -Asp (A N D) motif. The surface spikes comprise dense O-glycans coating PSXX tetrapeptide repeats, with two glycans linked on trihydroxylated proline and one on serine per repeat. In addition to various types of sugars and their covalent modifiers, water molecules (>10% of resolved volume) and cations are clearly resolved and mediate the structural assembly. Our study establishes a framework for investigating glycan folding in high-order biological assemblies.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AlignCoder: Aligning Retrieval with Target Intent for Repository-Level Code Completion

arXiv:2601.19697v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Repository-level code completion remains a challenging task for existing code large language models (code LLMs) due to their limited understanding of repository-specific context and domain knowledge. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches have shown promise by retrieving relevant code snippets as cross-file context, they suffer from two fundamental problems: misalignment between the query and the target code in the retrieval process, and the inability of existing retrieval methods to effectively utilize the inference information. To address these challenges, we propose AlignCoder, a repository-level code completion framework that introduces a query enhancement mechanism and a reinforcement learning based retriever training method. Our approach generates multiple candidate completions to construct an enhanced query that bridges the semantic gap between the initial query and the target code. Additionally, we employ reinforcement learning to train an AlignRetriever that learns to leverage inference information in the enhanced query for more accurate retrieval. We evaluate AlignCoder on two widely-used benchmarks (CrossCodeEval and RepoEval) across five backbone code LLMs, demonstrating an 18.1% improvement in EM score compared to baselines on the CrossCodeEval benchmark. The results show that our framework achieves superior performance and exhibits high generalizability across various code LLMs and programming languages.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Wigner Cat Phases: A finely tunable system for exploring the transition to quantum chaos

Authors:

arXiv:2512.22169v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A quantum mechanical setting consisting of a frozen qubit composed with a fully thermalized chaotic system of N states is proposed, with potential relevance to quantum control. Observing the states of the composed system selectively retaining the states leads to the observation of novel localization in the subsystem. At a tuning parameter of 1.0, implying no selection, the system exhibits Wigner-Dyson level spacing statistics, indicative of quantum chaos. As the tuning parameter is reduced and selection occurs at a cutoff, the nearest-neighbor level spacing distribution develops heavier tails, a signature of suppressed spectral mixing and the emergence of non-thermal dynamics. In these regimes, the eigendensity develops a pronounced "cat-ears" structure, reflecting the formation of spatially localized bimodal eigenstates. These topological features persist without transitioning to Poisson statistics, indicating a transition from quantum chaos to a non-thermal, novel many-body localized (MBL) regime-referred to as Wigner Cat Phases. The proposed mixed random matrix ensemble offers a practical probe for sustaining this novel quantum localization setting. Results from our rigorous spectral statistics analysis show how "cat-ears" form in spectral densities based on the degree of selection or disorder and indicate that gap ratio statistics must be used with caution in detecting the full integrable limit due to the possibility of heavy-tailed Wigner-Dyson distributions.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NEST: Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding

Recent progress in vision-language models has enabled the processing of increasingly long video sequences, but the ability to handle extended token streams does not translate to understanding of narrative structure in long videos. Existing long video benchmarks focus on needle-in-a-haystack retrieval rather than evaluating how low-level actions form events, how events interact across time, and how narratives progress, for example, whether a model can connect an early setback, such as a job loss to a later relationship breakup, despite long gaps, intervening scenes, or flashbacks that reframe what occurred. We introduce NEST (Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding), a dataset of 1005 full-length movies (avg. 98 minutes), each annotated with 102 multimodal narrative events grounded in visual content, dialogue, and audio. NEST captures multimodal narrative events with structured annotations grounded in visual content, dialogue, and audio, and links them through relations that reflect narrative structure, including temporal ordering, hierarchical composition, and long-range dependencies. We introduce baselines for event trigger detection (ETD), event localization (EL), event argument extraction (EAE), and event relation extraction (ERE). The benchmark is highly challenging for grounded event discovery, with ETD below 8%, EL under 6%, and EAE below 11%. In contrast, ERE is more tractable once events are given, reaching 35.45% F1 zero-shot and 44.42% F1 after fine-tuning.

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

Connecting entanglement growth with local integrals of motion in the disordered Fermi-Hubbard model

arXiv:2606.15481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generically a quantum system initialized in an unentangled state will, under unitary dynamics, rapidly become entangled, a process closely related to information transport and to thermalization. Disorder can suppress the growth of entanglement and result in memory of initial conditions. In non-interacting systems this arises from localization of single-particle states, the occupancy of which is fixed by the initial condition. In interacting systems similar localized conserved quantities persist, but with the added feature that they are coupled, resulting in entanglement growth which is distinct from both non-interacting localized systems and from generic ergodic systems. The Fermi-Hubbard model has two degrees of freedom per site – charge and spin – and disorder may be present in both of these. We study the growth of entanglement in two scenarios – disorder in charge equal and unequal to that in spin, and determine the distinct contributions of charge and spin degrees of freedom by expanding the Hamiltonian in terms of a set of optimally localized conserved quantities with separate charge and spin character. We find that coupling between charge and spin is significantly weaker than charge-charge and spin-spin coupling. While this decoupling is present in all our results, it is only apparent when the strength of the disorder in the two sectors is different such that there is a separation between the characteristic timescales of the contributions to entanglement made by charge and by spin.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Few-Shot Classification of C. elegans Developmental Stages via Explainable Hierarchical Hyperbolic Graph Embeddings

Automated, accurate, and fast developmental-stage classification of C. elegans from microscopy-based morphological images is essential for aging research, drug screening, and disease modeling. However, it remains challenging due to morphological similarities between stages and the limited annotated data. In this work, we propose HyperDev, a hyperbolic few-shot learning framework that addresses these limitations by directly encoding developmental hierarchies in the embedding space, unlike conventional Euclidean approaches that treat stages as independent classes. HyperDev uses Poincare ball geometry, combined with a biologically informed developmental prior, to naturally represent stage relationships. We introduce our selfcurated C. elegans dataset spanning seven developmental stages (Egg, L1-L4, Adult, Dauer) with extreme class imbalance (6-8 samples per minority class). HyperDev achieves competitive classification accuracy (76.9-88.3%) while providing intrinsic explainability across nine 7-way few-shot evaluation settings. The learned embeddings exhibited strong biological alignment (Pearson r = 0.669, p < 0.001), while significantly outperforming ProtoNet (r = 0.187), MatchingNet (r = 0.235), and RelationNet (r = 0.464). These results establish hyperbolic geometry as a principled approach to explainable few-shot learning in biological imaging, where understanding learned representations is as critical as predictive performance. Clinical Relevance–By enabling explainable, data-efficient developmental staging from scarce samples, HyperDev supports improved phenotype quantification for aging research, disease modeling, and drug screening. Index Terms–Hyperbolic learning, few-shot classification, developmental staging, Caenorhabditis elegans, interpretability, explainability.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gen Z scepticism towards AI is a wake-up call — universities must take it seriously

Authors:

The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust. The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust.

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

OmniSapiens: A Foundation Model for Social Behavior Processing via Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv:2602.10635v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Socially intelligent AI systems must reason across diverse human behavioral tasks and generalize to new social contexts. However, behavioral data is inherently heterogeneous, comprising diverse modalities and prediction targets that produce uneven training signals across samples, creating imbalanced learning dynamics that challenge existing AI models. To address this, we develop Omnisapiens-7B 2.0, a foundation model for social behavior processing that explicitly addresses learning from heterogeneous behavioral data. This is enabled through Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization, a new RL method that rebalances learning signals across samples by approximating each sample's contribution to the policy update and using these estimates to drive geometrically centered, inertially smoothed advantage modulation for stable training. Omnisapiens-7B 2.0 achieves the best and most consistent performance across 10 behavioral tasks, while also attaining the best performance on all five held-out benchmarks, with gains of up to +12.02% and +9.37% respectively. Furthermore, it demonstrates more consistent and interpretable reasoning traces, supporting reliable real-world behavioral applications. Our model is available at https://github.com/MIT-MI/human_behavior_atlas.

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

From Noise to Order: Learning to Rank via Denoising Diffusion

arXiv:2602.11453v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning-to-rank (LTR) methods have traditionally been limited to discriminative machine learning approaches that model the probability of the document being relevant to the query given some feature representation of the query-document pair. We propose an alternative denoising diffusion-based generative approach to LTR that instead models the full joint distribution over features and relevance labels. While in discriminative LTR, an over-parameterized ranking model may find different ways to fit the training data, we posit that candidate solutions that can explain the full data distribution under the generative setting maybe better at estimating relevance. Thus, we propose DiffusionRank that extends TabDiff, an existing diffusion model for tabular datasets, to create generative alternatives to classical discriminative pointwise and pairwise LTR objectives. Our work demonstrates improvements from DiffusionRank over discriminative counterparts on four standard LTR datasets and points to a rich space for future exploration to leverage ongoing advancements in deep generative models for LTR. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sadjadeb/DiffusionRank.

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

CacheWeaver: Cache-Aware Evidence Ordering for Efficient Grounded RAG Inference

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves factual grounding, but it also lengthens prompts and raises prefill cost. Prefix caching in serving engines such as vLLM reduces this cost only when requests share the same token prefix. In grounded generation, however, adjacent queries may retrieve overlapping evidence in different orders, so set overlap does not become reusable prefix overlap. We present CacheWeaver, a lightweight prompt-layer method for cache-aware evidence ordering. The method keeps a prefix tree over recently served evidence sequences and uses a greedy walk to place the most reusable prefix first, while leaving the serving engine and retrieved evidence set unchanged. Across three vLLM configurations, the method lowers median time-to-first-token (TTFT) by about 20-33 percent relative to retrieval-order prefix caching, without hurting answer quality in our QA tests. The greedy policy reaches 97.5 percent of the median TTFT gain from oracle ordering, indicating that most reusable prefix locality can be recovered by a simple scheduling layer between retrieval and inference.

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

From Awareness to Action: Understanding and Overcoming the Research-Practice Gap in Algorithmic Fairness for Public Health

arXiv:2606.11214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Algorithmic fairness is essential for responsible ML-driven public health research, yet its practical implementation remains limited. To investigate this awareness-action gap, we conducted a sequential mixed-methods study comprising expert interviews, an online survey, and systematic mapping. The expert interviews informed the design of the survey, which in turn revealed fragmented definitions of fairness, limited training and guidance, reliance on external sources, and rare use of formal assessment, mitigation, or monitoring. These findings were subsequently mapped onto three established research-practice gap lenses: the Knowledge-Practice Gap, the Knowledge-to-Action Cycle, and the Knowing-Doing Gap, each offering complementary perspectives. Building on this synthesis, we introduce the Fairness-to-Action framework, which integrates methodological, organizational, and systemic dimensions to identify where translation of algorithmic fairness knowledge stalls. Our analysis shows that fairness remains weakly institutionalized, translation mechanisms are externally driven, and system-level priorities continue to emphasize accuracy over fairness. These insights suggest critical leverage points for advancing safe, fair, and ethical ML-driven public health research practice.

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

Beyond a Single Light: A Large-Scale Aerial Dataset for Urban Scene Reconstruction Under Varying Illumination

Recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting have demonstrated strong potential for large-scale UAV-based 3D reconstruction tasks by fitting the appearance of images. However, real-world large-scale captures are often based on multi-temporal data capture, where illumination inconsistencies across different times of day can significantly lead to color artifacts, geometric inaccuracies, and inconsistent appearance. Due to the lack of UAV datasets that systematically capture the same areas under varying illumination conditions, this challenge remains largely underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduceSkyLume, a large-scale, real-world UAV dataset specifically designed for studying illumination robust 3D reconstruction in urban scene modeling: (1) We collect data from 10 urban regions data comprising more than 100k high resolution UAV images (four oblique views and nadir), where each region is captured at three periods of the day to systematically isolate illumination changes. (2) To support precise evaluation of geometry and appearance, we provide per-scene LiDAR scans and accurate 3D ground-truth for assessing depth, surface normals, and reconstruction quality under varying illumination. (3) For the inverse rendering task, we introduce the Temporal Consistency Coefficient (TCC), a metric that measuress cross-time albedo stability and directly evaluates the robustness of the disentanglement of light and material. We aim for this resource to serve as a foundation that advances research and real-world evaluation in large-scale inverse rendering, geometry reconstruction, and novel view synthesis.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Midwifery Practice in Conflict Contexts: Lived Experiences from Somalia and Nigeria

Background: Midwives are a central cadre in the health system, particularly in conflict-affected settings where they are sometimes the primary or even only skilled providers available. Yet, despite their critical role, there is limited qualitative evidence capturing their lived experiences and how these shape workforce entry, retention, and overall well-being. Methods: Drawing on a phenomenological research methodology, this qualitative study was embedded within a larger prospective longitudinal cohort of midwifery students and graduates in Somalia and Nigeria. We conducted focus group discussions with graduate midwives (n=48 in Nigeria; n=63 in Somalia) to explore their experiences transitioning into the workforce and their realities working in health systems impacted by conflict and violent insecurity. Data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Results: Five themes emerged from the data: (1) job search and workforce entry, which was described as fraught with challenges and shaped by a set of formal systems in Nigeria but informal networks and structural barriers in Somalia (2) working conditions that were marked by resource scarcity, infrastructural challenges, and heavy and unreasonable workloads, (3) safety, security and coping strategies that differed across the two contexts but reflected persistent exposure to violence and a reliance on ad hoc and personal coping in lieu of systematic protection, (4) community perceptions of midwives, shaped and constrained by social and gender norms and (5) mental health and emotional wellbeing, highlighting stress, burnout and moral injury experienced by this cadre. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the profound challenges faced by midwives working in conflict-affected settings, and they shine a light on the urgent need to support and invest in this critical and predominantly female health workforce.

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

ReGenHuman: Re-Generating Human Appearances for Realistic Full-Body Video Anonymization

Anonymizing human-centric video data is an understudied problem. Prior anonymization techniques either blur or redact pixels at the cost of realism and downstream utility, or generate frame-by-frame at the cost of temporal coherence. We introduce ReGenHuman, the first full-body video anonymization pipeline that is simultaneously realistic, temporally consistent, and anonymous by construction. Contrary to past approaches which redact or edit the inputs directly, we propose a regenerate, don't edit paradigm. Our approach composites 2D pose, segmentation, and monocular depth into two complementary conditioning streams - StructAll and StructHuman, which are used to fine-tune a video-to-video diffusion backbone on in-the-wild human videos, synthesizing the human regions entirely from identity-free structural cues. We evaluate our model on privacy, quality, and utility, and show that our ReGenHuman achieves the best tradeoff across all three axes against current baselines. We further show that our anonymized videos remain effective for downstream tasks, including video question answering.