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 (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Effects of interaction range on the mean-field dynamics of Bose polarons

arXiv:2606.20020v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the three-dimensional Bose polaron problem in the regime of finite range interactions and competing length scales. Working in the reference frame of the impurity, we study both static and out of equilibrium properties of the system, in particular the transfer of momentum between the impurity and the host gas. We find that relaxation dynamics can occur via damped oscillations of the impurity velocity with simple dependence on the interaction strength. Furthermore, the equilibration process is sensitive to the type of the impurity-bath interaction. Specifically, interatomic forces describing ion-atom systems lead to much longer timescales and more pronounced oscillations in the strong coupling regime with respect to local interaction potentials. We also find that the effective masses can differ by a large amount between the two scenarios, even if the number of atoms in the polaron cloud remains similar for both cases.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Fast formation to reinforce lithium-rich cathodes

Authors:

Formation in lithium-ion battery manufacturing typically involves low-rate charge–discharge cycles to establish stable electrode–electrolyte interfaces—a time-consuming process1–4. Here, our findings on lithium-rich layered oxide cathodes challenge the necessity of conventional formation, which can even shorten battery lifespan. Fast formation, on the other hand, reduces production cost and enhances capacity and stability. Multiscale synchrotron-based techniques show that residual lithium ions after the initial charge are critical for subsequent structural evolution and cycling performance. Deep lithium de-intercalation causes severe structural degradation and capacity loss due to the inherently fragile lithium-deficient matrix. By contrast, the residual lithium ions from fast formation enhance reversibility through a self-pinning effect, preventing pernicious lattice deformation and reinforcing the ion-storage framework. Adjusting the initial charge current density from 0.2 C to 2 C improves reversible capacity by 20% and extends cycle life by more than 36%. This approach can also be extended to other electrode systems, providing insights for more-efficient battery production. Fast formation in lithium-ion batteries outperforms conventional slow formation, lowering costs and improving battery capacity, stability and cycle life, offering broader application to electrode systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Comprehensive Survey of Medical Image Segmentation: Challenges, Benchmarks, and Beyond

Medical image segmentation plays a critical role in clinical diagnostics, treatment planning, disease monitoring, and neurological disorder identification. This article presents a comprehensive review of its systematic development, covering widely used public datasets, representative methods built on the U-Net, Transformer, and SAM architectures, and key evaluation metrics with their differences, followed by an analysis of major challenges from multiple perspectives. Unlike surveys that focus on a single model family or a specific clinical application, this review organizes U-Net-, Transformer-, and SAM-based methods within a unified analytical framework, with a particular focus on their effectiveness in improving segmentation accuracy and efficiency. This work aims to guide future research and support clinical translation of medical image segmentation, with all related resources publicly available in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/andrew-pengyu/Awsome_MedSeg/tree/main.

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

Multimodal Graph Negative Learning

arXiv:2606.12863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal attributed graphs (MAGs) integrate graph topology with heterogeneous modality attributes, such as text and images, thereby enabling richer modeling of complex relational systems. However, such expressiveness also makes learning on MAGs depend on multiple semantic sources, including structural topology, textual and visual attributes, each of which can be regarded as a branch for node representation. Node-level branch semantic imbalance arises when these branches differ across nodes in semantic informativeness and reliability: a branch that provides discriminative semantics for one node may mislead another due to bias in modality quality or structural context. Existing methods often mitigate such heterogeneity through cross-branch agreement or alignment, implicitly treating the dominant prediction as reliable supervision. When the dominant branch is biased, forced imitation may propagate its bias to other branches and suppress original semantics that are useful for classification. We propose GraphMNL, a graph-aware multimodal negative learning framework that addresses this issue by using Negative Learning as cross-branch guidance. Instead of forcing inferior branches to imitate a teacher prediction, the model teaches them which classes a node is unlikely to belong to. GraphMNL builds a branch library, identifies dominant and inferior branches via graph-aware reliability arbitration, gates unstable transfer, and applies target-preserving negative learning over non-target classes. This design decouples target supervision from branch guidance so that supervised losses learn the correct class, while Negative Learning suppresses unlikely alternatives when branch agreement is unreliable. Through the comprehensive experimental evaluation, GraphMNL achieves the best performance on Grocery datasets with 72.47% accuracy and 76.60 F1 score on Reddit M datasets.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

P3B3: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Measuring European and Brazilian Portuguese Variety Bias in LLMs

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become embedded in everyday communication, capturing regional linguistic variation is essential for reliable and equitable language use. In Portuguese, European (pt-PT) and Brazilian (pt-BR) varieties remain unevenly represented, with pt-BR dominating in data quantity, while LLM preference for Portuguese variants remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce P3B3, an expert-curated language variety agnostic benchmark of conversational prompts, along with an evaluation framework for measuring variety bias and controllability. Experiments on several models show that most LLMs exhibit a strong bias toward pt-BR, with variation in controllability across models. These results highlight the need for more balanced multilingual representation across language varieties.

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

The Geometry of Admissible Short Selling in Discrete-Time Stochastic Portfolio Theory

arXiv:2606.11191v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While discrete-time Stochastic Portfolio Theory (SPT) provides a robust framework for market analysis, existing work on functional generation has predominantly focused on long-only portfolios defined on the entire unit simplex. This paper extends the geometric framework of functional generation to the broader class of bankruptcy-proof long-short portfolios defined on local market state spaces. We establish that, within this admissible setting, pseudo-arbitrage is fully characterized by the concavity of the generating function on the market state space, thereby relaxing the usual global domain requirement. A central contribution of this work is a geometric characterization of the short-selling mechanism. We prove that the presence of short selling is equivalent to the negativity of the maximal concave extension of the generating potential. This phenomenon is linked to the steepness of the logarithmic gradient as the market approaches a zero boundary nested inside the simplex. To systematically exploit this mechanism, we introduce the barycentric scaling transformation, a constructive methodology that maps classical long-only generating functions onto restricted domains to engineer admissible strategies with controlled short-selling exposure. Finally, through the analysis of specific shrunken portfolios, we identify a geometric phase transition: under suitable boundary conditions, admissible strategies exhibit a long-only core and a short-selling region in a qualitative sense (without asserting an exact partition of the state space). This provides a unified geometric perspective on relative arbitrage beyond the long-only constraint.

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

SGFormer++: Semantic Graph Transformer for Incremental 3D Scene Graph Generation

In this paper, we propose SGFormer++, a novel Semantic Graph Transformer for 3D scene graph generation (SGG), which aims to parse point cloud scenes into semantic structural graphs, where nodes denote detected object instances and edges encode their pairwise relationships, with the core challenge lying in modeling complex global scene structure. While existing graph convolutional network (GCN)-based methods suffer from over-smoothing and limited receptive fields, SGFormer++ leverages Transformer layers as its backbone to enable global message passing. Specifically, we introduce two key components tailored for 3D SGG: (1) a Graph Embedding Layer++ that efficiently integrates edge-aware global context with linear computational complexity, and (2) a Semantic Injection Layer++ that enriches visual features with linguistic priors from large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), boosting semantic representation without introducing extra trainable parameters. To further address the practical challenge of incremental SGG (I-SGG), where new relationship categories arrive sequentially, we equip SGFormer++ with a novel Spatial-guided Feature Adapter, which calibrates predicate features using subject-object spatial geometry to counter scale variation, and a Cascaded Binary Prediction Head that mitigates catastrophic forgetting via task-incremental classifier expansion and logit distillation. Extensive experiments on the 3DSSG benchmark demonstrate that SGFormer++ achieves state-of-the-art performance in both standard and incremental settings: it yields a significant 4.49% absolute improvement in Predicate A@1 under the incremental setting. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Andy20178/SGFormer.

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

RGFVR: Reference-Guided Face Video Restoration with Flow Matching

Face video restoration from degraded observations is challenging, as it requires simultaneously recovering visual fidelity, temporal consistency, and subject identity. Existing approaches are often either reference-free, which can lead to identity loss when person-specific facial details are lost, or subject-specific, which limits generalization to unseen identities. We propose a subject-agnostic, reference-guided framework for identity-preserving face video restoration. Our method introduces bimodal perceptual-descriptive identity conditioning into a pretrained flow-based text-to-video generator and employs a two-stage training strategy to strengthen identity guidance during restoration. Experiments show that our approach improves restoration fidelity, temporal consistency, and identity preservation, achieving superior performance under challenging video degradations, including downsampling, blur, noise, and compression artifacts. The code is available under: https://github.com/batuhanntosun/RG-FVR.

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

Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation in LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct: A Mechanistic Interpretability Audit of Ethical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral audits of Large Language Models on moral prompts measure what the model says, not the internal computation producing it. We use Transluce, an AI-driven mechanistic-interpretability platform, to examine LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct on 54 moral prompts in four batteries: 17 dilemmas, policy, and meta-ethical questions (B1); 6 role-playing scenarios (B3); and a controlled trolley contrast varying the switching mechanism with people fixed (B4, 15 prompts) or identity attributes with mechanism fixed (B5, 16 prompts). Two complementary metric families, five cluster-level metrics and a six-metric neuron-level panel, converge on a Situational Anchor Effect: domain-specific representations dominate the top of the activation list across every battery. The model's ethics-labeled capacity stays essentially constant; its salience (rank, priority, top-of-list presence) is highly sensitive to the interpretive frame the prompt selects. The B4-vs-B5 contrast confirms the model attends to whichever surface feature varies: aggregate ethics metrics are indistinguishable, but the dominant non-ethics distractor mirrors the design. A multi-temperature audit identifies a candidate ethics neuron (L16/N3837) stable across temperatures; a cross-model behavioral proxy on two frontier models yields preliminary evidence of divergence in self-reported moral focus, consistent with an Alignment Wrapper in which RLHF re-orders surface text without removing underlying domain-first frames. We unify these as Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation: the prompt's surface vocabulary selects a feature manifold, and the moral conclusion is downstream of that selection. Behavioral alignment must be supplemented by Mechanistic Alignment: a research program asking whether ethics-related features can be shown causally privileged under controlled frame variation, not merely loud in the explanation.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CogCanvas: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Subject Reference-Based Image Generation

Multi-subject reference-based image generation requires jointly preserving multiple human identities, binding per-person objects and fashion items, and respecting a specified background scene, a regime where current diffusion models remain brittle. Existing benchmarks evaluate only one axis at a time and none jointly captures multi-identity composition with human-object interaction, background grounding, and spatial plausibility. We introduce CogCanvas, a benchmark of 1,952 curated reference images spanning 100 celebrity identities, 115 distinctive objects and fashion items, and 29 real-world background scenes including landmarks, from which we construct 1,361 compositional prompts covering 2-5 person group sizes. The curation pipeline combines DINOv2-based deduplication, two-stage aesthetic filtering, and automated derivation of structured interaction and position graphs that serve as ground-truth supervision. CogCanvas supports three tasks, reference-based multi-human-object generation (primary), text-to-image compositional generation, and reference retrieval, under a unified six-axis evaluation protocol. We introduce two metrics tailored to the multi-reference setting: BG-Sim, which scores background fidelity on SAM 3-masked regions via DINOv3 feature similarity, and Attr-VQA, which uses a multimodal LLM to verify per-subject attribute binding and inter-person interactions against the structured graphs. Benchmarking five SOTA methods reveals that every model degrades substantially as group size grows from 2 to 5, with near-complete failure on object/fashion binding beyond three subjects.

11.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-05-29

Structural and dynamic basis of NOD2 tandem CARD association and NOD1/2–RIP2 signaling complexes

by Jitendra Maharana, Aritra Bej, Debasish Biswal, Debashis Panda, Arjun Sharma NOD1 and NOD2, founding members of the NOD-like receptor (NLR) family, play a crucial role in host defense against bacterial infections. Recognition of peptidoglycan-derived ligands triggers ATP-dependent oligomerization of the NACHT domain, exposing the CARD domains that recruit the adaptor protein RIP2 via CARD–CARD interactions to activate the NF-κB signaling cascade. Although NOD1/2-RIP2 interactions and RIP2CARD filament assembly are established, the precise interfaces that stabilize hetero–CARD filaments remain poorly defined. Here, we integrate in silico structural modeling with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to elucidate structurally compatible arrangements of NOD1–RIP2 and NOD2–RIP2 hetero–CARD filaments. Our results reveal that NOD1CARD subunits form a structurally compatible homomeric scaffold via canonical (type-I–III) interfaces, accommodating multiple tiers of RIP2CARD rings at both filament termini. Meanwhile, the NOD2 tandem CARDs adopt multiple discrete conformations, reflecting a more intricate structural mechanism. In stable filament conformations, tandem CARDs converge at the type-II interface, with RIP2CARD rings stacking onto CARDa (top-down) and CARDb (bottom-up) interfaces, highlighting the structural role of NOD2CARDb in RIP2-mediated CARD–CARD interaction. In silico mutagenesis, involving charge-reversal and alanine scanning of key interfacial residues, disrupts NOD1–RIP2 and NOD2–RIP2 interactions at both top-down and bottom-up interfaces, leading to rapid interface destabilization within 0.1–0.4 μs of simulation. Together, these results reveal conserved and receptor-specific mechanisms governing NOD1/2–RIP2 CARD–CARD interactions and provide deeper structural and dynamic insights into the complex structural mechanisms for NLR-mediated inflammatory signaling.

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

DifferAD-R1: A Difference-Guided IndustrialAnomaly Localization with Multimodal LargeLanguage Models

Industrial anomaly localization aims to accurately identify and localize abnormal regions in industrial products, addressing the critical challenge of detecting unseen defect categories in real-world scenarios. Traditional closed-set methods often suffer from poor cross-scenario generalization, while existingMultimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approachesface two core limitations: they either adopt QA-style paradigmsmisaligned with the practical demands of localization, or relyon standard optimization techniques such as Group RelativePolicy Optimization (GRPO), which fails to deliver effectivelearning signals for subtle defects. To tackle these issues, thispaper proposes DifferAD-R1, an MLLM-augmented reinforcement learning framework tailored for industrial anomaly localization. We design a Difference-Guided dual-image paradigm,which reformulates the localization task as a one-shot difference grounding problem to effectively explore cross-scenarioanomalies. A Dual-Consistency Localization Reward is developedfor hard-to-detect anomalies, enhancing optimization stabilityand robustness. Additionally, we integrate a difficulty-awarestrategy with adaptive reweighting and group-wise resamplingto prioritize learning on challenging instances. To facilitateevaluations in real-world industrial settings, we construct theAD-DualDiff dataset, comprising 13K paired images across 20categories. Experimental results demonstrate that DifferADR1 significantly outperforms existing baselines and achievescompetitive performance compared to large-scale models likeQwen3-VL (235B parameters). Our code is publicly availableat: https://github.com/Rong2026/work-1.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of a symptom-based severity score anchored to health-related quality of life post-COVID-19 within the population-based EPILOC cohorts

Purpose Because simple symptom counts treat all symptoms as equally important and may not adequately capture the HRQoL impact of heterogeneous post-COVID-19 symptoms, we aimed to develop an HRQoL-anchored symptom severity score providing an interpretable measure of post-COVID-19 disease burden. Methods Baseline data from the population-based EPILOC and EPILOC Omicron surveys (adults aged 18-65 years) were used to develop a symptom-based severity score anchored to physical and mental HRQoL assessed with the SF-12. A two-stage modelling approach was applied to identify HRQoL-relevant symptoms and to derive symptom-specific weights for physical and mental component scores, incorporating 30 ordinal symptom severity variables. Symptom-specific weights were extracted to compute physical, mental, and composite severity scores. Score interpretation was examined using external reference measures, including EPILOC case status, self-reported health recovery, and functional consequences. Results A total of 19,004 participants (mean age 44.3 years, 59.6% female) were included. Sixteen symptoms contributed to the physical and eleven to the mental HRQoL score, with a limited subset accounting for most of the HRQoL loss. Severity scores were heavily right-skewed, with 50.6% of participants showing no measurable HRQoL impairment. Higher scores correlated with lower self-reported recovery, and increased probability of rehabilitation use and health-related changes in working time, supporting convergent and criterion-related validity. Conclusions This study introduces a transparent, HRQoL-anchored symptom severity score that measures graded post-COVID-19 burden beyond simple symptom counts. The score may be particularly suited for longitudinal assessment of recovery trajectories.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Excitation-Inhibition Balance in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: EEG Criticality Reflects Frontal Metabolites and a Potential Compensatory Mechanism

Background The excitation-inhibition (E-I) balance is essential for normal brain functioning, while deviations from this balance have been implicated in several psychiatric disorders. However, the extent to which electroencephalography (EEG) and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) E-I markers are altered in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), how they converge across modalities, and how they relate to cognitive performance and clinical symptoms remain insufficiently characterized. Methods We recruited 111 healthy controls (HC) and 113 individuals with SSD. All participants underwent resting-state EEG and 1H-MRS. Metabolites were measured either in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; NSSD = 63, NHC = 58) or in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC; NSSD = 50, NHC = 53), from which gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), glutamate + glutamine (Glx), and the Glx/GABA ratio were extracted. Extracted EEG E-I markers included oscillatory activity, aperiodic activity, functional E-I, microstates, multiscale entropy, and neuronal avalanche criticality. Results MRS results showed no group differences in GABA, Glx, or the Glx/GABA ratio. In contrast, most EEG-derived E-I markers indicated increased cortical inhibition in SSD, including steeper aperiodic exponents, prolonged microstate durations, and greater prevalence of subcritical states. However, functional E-I showed a divergent pattern, suggesting balanced dynamics in SSD and relatively inhibition-weighted dynamics in HC. Across groups, higher ACC and lDLPFC GABA predicted a lower kappa index, whereas a higher lDLPFC Glx/GABA ratio was associated with a higher kappa index. In SSD, reduced avalanche criticality was associated with better cognition and less severe symptoms. Conclusion Several EEG-derived E-I proxies, but not MRS measures, indicate an increased cortical inhibition in SSD. Criticality indices best capture frontal neurochemical metabolites and improvements in clinical symptoms, potentially reflecting inhibitory compensation mechanisms in SSD.

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

Cluster LOCO: Feature Importance For Interpreting Clusters

arXiv:2606.14592v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is widely used for exploratory analysis and scientific discovery, driving insights from market segmentation to biological data analysis, but its outputs can be difficult to interpret, audit, and reproduce as modern datasets become increasingly large and complex. Reliable use of clustering requires understanding which features drive the discovered structure, yet feature-level explanations for clustering remain scarce compared with methods in supervised learning. Furthermore, existing clustering feature importance scores are often tied to specific algorithms and data assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose Cluster LOCO (Leave-One-Covariate-Out), a family of model-agnostic feature importance scores for clustering. Cluster LOCO is built on feature occlusion and clustering generalizability, defined as whether cluster labels learned on one subset of the data can be accurately predicted on held-out samples. For any chosen clustering algorithm, Cluster LOCO quantifies a feature's importance by measuring how much its removal degrades generalizability. We first introduce Cluster LOCO-Split, which relies on data splitting, and then extend it to Cluster LOCO-MP, a minipatch ensemble-based version designed for large-scale data. Across synthetic simulations and an application to cell-type discovery in single-cell transcriptomics, we show that Cluster LOCO more reliably recovers informative features than existing clustering feature importance methods.

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

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

arXiv:2606.11652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Method comparisons for differentiation of Schizophrenia and Bipolar based on rs-fMRI Intrinsic and Functional Networks

Psychosis as a symptom manifests in schizophenia and bipolar disorder, two highly heterogeneous psychiatric illnesses with overlapping clinical manifestations. Resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rsfMRI), represents a promising tool for identifying objective biomarkers of functional brain alterations to aid differential diagnosis. In this work, we comparatively evaluate multiple rs-fMRI representations for differentiating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using intrinsic connectivity network (ICN) temporal profiles and several functional network connectivity (FNC) approaches, including static, dynamic, and high-order connectivity analyses. The study was conducted on a cohort of 371 subjects with psychosis, while evaluation was performed using a separate held-out cohort of 315 subjects. We investigated convolutional neural network architectures applied to ICN temporal profiles, spectrograms, and scalograms, alongside classical machine learning models trained on connectivity-derived features. Across the evaluated approaches, ICN temporal profiles provided the most consistent discriminative performance, with a 1D convolutional neural network achieving the strongest overall results under the benchmark protocol. Among connectivity-based methods, static functional connectivity generally outperformed dynamic and high-order representations, suggesting that increased representational complexity did not necessarily translate into improved generalization. Although the obtained classification performance remained modest, the results highlight the challenges of robust psychosis differentiation using rs-fMRI while emphasizing the relative stability of low-order connectivity representations and temporal ICN features. These findings contribute to ongoing efforts toward reproducible and interpretable neuroimaging biomarkers for psychiatric disorders.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Looked but didn't see: inattentional blindness and yes-bias confabulation in vision-language models

Previous work showed that many participants fail to notice a gorilla in a video of people playing basketball. Another study found that 83% of trained radiologists failed to report a gorilla figure inserted into a chest CT nodule-search task, even though eye-tracking revealed that most observers had foveated the figure. We ask whether a similar phenomenon exists in contemporary vision-language models (VLMs). We find that (i) VLMs are capable of spotting the gorilla in both still-frame images and videos of lung CT scans; (ii) models display inattentional blindness, which varies according to model generation and type of stimulus presented; (iii) Gemini-3.1-Pro outperforms most other flagship and open-weight VLMs at identifying the presence or absence of the gorilla. We additionally ran a segmentation experiment utilizing two different model classes: a generalist (SAM 3), which found the gorilla but produced little to no results for anatomy-based prompts; a medical specialist (BiomedParse), which produced more promising anatomy-based results but flagged "gorilla" on gorilla-free control videos on 82% of frames. The behavioral signature of inattentional blindness reproduces in VLMs, but a unique confabulation failure mode means that any "did the model see X" claim requires signal-detection analysis with a matched-control false-alarm baseline.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Data-driven sparse identification of governing PDEs via knockoff filters and multi-criteria trade-offs

arXiv:2605.26631v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose KO-PDE-IDENT, a data-driven framework for identifying parsimonious partial differential equations (PDEs) with false discovery rate (FDR) control. PDE discovery from noisy observations is often hindered by extreme multicollinearity among candidate terms, which causes typical sparse-regression methods to select spurious terms. To address this problem, KO-PDE-IDENT initially mines a support set of potential candidate terms via model-X knockoff filters with finite-sample FDR control, then refines and ranks the surviving PDE alternatives. The framework integrates three components. First, knockoff feature statistics are constructed by coupling $\ell_{0}$-constrained adaptive best-subset selection with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), yielding an effective and computationally efficient difference statistic. Second, a recursive feature elimination (RFE) procedure removes terms whose marginal contributions are dispensable and assesses statistical necessity through knockoff-perturbed hypothesis testing. Third, the final model selection is formulated as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, where the optimal governing equation is the alternative that best balances a wide range of criteria such as predictive accuracy, model complexity and coefficient uncertainty. We evaluate KO-PDE-IDENT on five canonical PDEs under severe noise corruption. Empirical results show that our framework can exactly recover the true PDE structure, eliminating false discoveries while retaining all true underlying terms, with low coefficient estimation error.

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

Code-Augur: Agentic Vulnerability Detection via Specification Inference

arXiv:2606.18619v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The advent of agentic vulnerability detection is already becoming a watershed moment for software security. Audits conducted entirely by autonomous LLM agents are uncovering critical vulnerabilities in fundamental software underpinning digital society. Many of these vulnerabilities remained masked for years, surfacing only now with AI agents. Yet the reasoning behind these discoveries remains alarmingly opaque and unvalidated. What assumptions did the agent make about a function's inputs when it deemed that function to be secure? Failures in reasoning and incorrect assumptions can lead to missed vulnerabilities and reduce trust in agentic analysis. We propose a security-specification-first paradigm that (1) exposes the agent's tacit assumptions explicitly as security specifications and (2) continuously refines those specifications via runtime falsification. We realize our approach in Code-Augur, a novel harness for agentic vulnerability detection. Given a codebase, Code-Augur analyzes each component of the system for vulnerable code. When it deems a component to be secure, it commits the local invariants behind that judgment as in-source assertions. In parallel, Code-Augur leverages a guided fuzzer to attempt to falsify those assumptions. When the fuzzer triggers an assertion, this either reveals a genuine vulnerability or a flawed specification to refine. In both cases, this process grounds the agent's understanding, aligning its view of code intent with how the code actually behaves. On real-world subjects, Code-Augur effectively leverages security specifications to detect more vulnerabilities than other state-of-the-art agents. Additionally, Code-Augur found 22 new vulnerabilities in key open-source projects. Compared to curated specialized models like Claude Mythos, Code-Augur offers effective agentic vulnerability detection built on widely available LLMs like Sonnet and DeepSeek.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MoSE: Mixture of Slimmable Experts for Efficient and Adaptive Language Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale large language models efficiently by sparsely activating experts, but once an expert is selected, it is executed fully. Hence, the trade-off between accuracy and computation in an MoE model typically exhibits large discontinuities. We propose Mixture of Slimmable Experts (MoSE), an MoE architecture in which each expert has a nested, slimmable structure that can be executed at variable widths. This enables conditional computation not only over which experts are activated but also over how much of each expert is utilized. Consequently, a single pretrained MoSE model can support a more continuous spectrum of accuracy-compute trade-offs at inference time. We present a simple and stable training recipe for slimmable experts under sparse routing, combining multi-width training with standard MoE objectives. During inference, we explore strategies for runtime width determination, including a lightweight test-time training mechanism that learns how to map router confidence/probabilities to expert widths under a fixed budget. Experiments on GPT-style models, various routing regimes, zero-shot downstream reasoning benchmarks, and continual pre-training adaptation of DeepSeek model show that MoSE matches or improves standard MoE at full width and consistently shifts the compute-quality frontier toward lower inference FLOPs. The code can be found at: https://github.com/tnurbek/mose.

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

An Attention-based Model for Robust Forecasting with Missing Modality

arXiv:2606.13970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning with missing modalities is a fundamental challenge in multimodal robot learning, as real-world robotic systems often operate in environments with incomplete sensor data. Attention-based models are appealing for processing multimodal data because they can handle multiple modalities with a single backbone network. However, most multimodal models assume that all modalities are available during both training and inference, limiting their applicability in robotic perception and decision-making. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal model designed to handle missing modalities during both training and inference. The model is formulated as a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) and incorporates a transformer-based architecture that leverages attention mechanisms to learn a unified, fixed-dimensional representation, even when some modalities are missing. We show that our proposed model can be trained with missing modalities while approximating a robust representation of all modalities. We evaluate our approach on five multimodal datasets across two robot learning tasks: human trajectory prediction and robot manipulation forecasting. Experimental results demonstrate that our model effectively learns from incomplete data and is superior to prior multimodal fusion approaches.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

FineDialFact: A benchmark for Fine-grained Dialogue Fact Verification

Large language models are known to produce hallucinations - factually incorrect or fabricated information - which poses significant challenges for many natural language processing applications, such as dialogue systems. As a result, detecting hallucinations has become a critical area of research. Current approaches to hallucination detection in dialogue systems primarily focus on verifying the factual consistency of generated responses. However, these responses often contain a mix of accurate, inaccurate or non-verifiable facts, making the use of a single factual label overly simplistic and coarse-grained. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark, FineDialFact, for fine-grained dialogue fact verification, which involves verifying atomic facts extracted from dialogue responses. To support this, we construct a dataset based on publicly available dialogue datasets and evaluate it using various baseline methods. Experimental results demonstrate that methods incorporating Chain-of-Thought reasoning can enhance performance in dialogue fact verification. Despite this, the best F1-score achieved on the HybriDialogue, an open-domain dialogue dataset, is only 0.74, indicating that the benchmark remains a challenging task for future research. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/XiangyanChen/FineDialFact.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Multi-Class Brain Tumor Classification Using Advanced Deep Learning Models: A Comparative Study

Despite recent advancements in deep learning, accurately classifying brain tumors from MRI images continues to pose challenges. In this research, we present a comprehensive evaluation of five different convolutional neural networks (CNN) architectures, including a customized baseline model and four pre-trained models - for use in classifying multi-class brain tumors using a clinically-sourced dataset of approximately 10,000 MRI images. We have utilized five different architectures; VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, and EfficientNetB0, which were all tested and trained within an identical experimental framework. Performance was measured by both overall accuracy and tumor-wise recall as a means to measure the clinically-relevant performance of each architecture. We found that EfficientNetB0 had the best overall classification accuracy at 95%, when compared to the other architectures tested; specifically VGG16 (94.37%), VGG19 (92.29%), DenseNet121 (90.91%) and the customized CNN (78.00%). An especially important finding of our research was the considerable improvement in detecting meningiomas; specifically, while simple CNNs could detect meningiomas with a recall rate of approximately 20%, EfficientNetB0 was able to detect meningiomas with a recall rate of 89%. Meningiomas are often difficult to detect because they can appear very subtly on MRI images. Additionally, an interesting finding was that the deeper VGG19 performed worse than the shallower VGG16. This indicates that in many cases the architectural efficiency of a CNN model may be more important than its depth when working with medical images. Overall, EfficientNetB0 appears to provide the optimal trade-off between classification accuracy, number of parameters used in the model and clinically meaningful performance.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CountZES: Counting via Zero-Shot Exemplar Selection

Object counting in complex scenes is particularly challenging in the zero-shot (ZS) setting, where instances of unseen categories are counted using only a class name. Existing ZS counting methods that infer exemplars from text often rely on off-the-shelf open-vocabulary detectors (OVDs), which in dense scenes suffer from semantic noise, appearance variability, and multi-instance proposals. Alternatively, random image-patch sampling is employed, which fails to accurately delineate object instances. Since counting is sensitive to exemplar quality, such selection strategies often yield poorly representative exemplars, leading to inaccurate count estimation. To address these issues, we propose CountZES, an inference-only approach for object counting via ZS exemplar selection. CountZES discovers diverse exemplars through three synergistic stages: Detection-Anchored Exemplar (DAE), Density-Guided Exemplar (DGE), and Feature-Consensus Exemplar (FCE). DAE refines OVD detections to isolate precise single-instance exemplars. DGE introduces a density-driven, self-supervised paradigm to identify statistically consistent and semantically compact exemplars, while FCE reinforces visual coherence through feature-space clustering. Together, these stages yield a complementary exemplar set that balances textual grounding, count consistency, and feature representativeness. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate CountZES superior performance among ZOC methods while generalizing effectively across domains.