Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2512.03199

Does Head Pose Correction Improve Biometric Facial Recognition?

Authors:

Biometric facial recognition models often demonstrate significant decreases in accuracy when processing real-world images, often characterized by poor quality, non-frontal subject poses, and subject occlusions. We investigate whether targeted, AI-driven, head-pose correction and image restoration can improve recognition accuracy. Using a model-agnostic, large-scale, forensic-evaluation pipeline, we assess the impact of three restoration approaches: 3D reconstruction (NextFace), 2D frontalization (CFR-GAN), and feature enhancement (CodeFormer). We find that naive application of these techniques substantially degrades facial recognition accuracy. However, we also find that selective application of CFR-GAN combined with CodeFormer yields meaningful improvements.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16026

In-Domain Supervised Pathology Report Classification: A Reproducible Pipeline from Data Curation to Production-Matched Evaluation

Authors:

Isaac Hands ↗Bin Huang ↗Adam Spannaus ↗John Gounley ↗Heidi Hanson ↗Eric Durbin ↗Sally R. Ellingson ↗

We introduce an in-domain supervised pipeline designed to counter the out-of-distribution performance drop that hampers supervised biomedical NLP models, a problem observed when models trained on pathology reports are moved across cancer registries. Our contribution is a reproducible recipe for training a supervised classifier from routinely collected cancer registry data. It describes how to build the in-domain training set and a production-matched holdout, and to choose operating points that keep the false-negative rate (FNR) very low while keeping reviewer workload manageable. The pipeline standardizes data curation with facility-stratified sampling and separate handling of reports linked to registry cases, and includes a blinded manual audit to estimate positive-case prevalence and label noise. On a 418k-report holdout set, the Kentucky model achieved FNR 0.003 and false-positive rate (FPR) 0.097, improving over the Seattle-trained MOSSAIC OncoID baseline (FNR 0.010, FPR 0.183) and raising F1 from 0.860 to 0.922. In a blinded manual review of 600 reports, estimated positive prevalence declined from 0.500 to 0.398, indicating substantial label noise with errors concentrated in rare primary sites.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19767

Contour-Constrained Deformable Registration with Parameter Characterization for Head and Neck Surgical Guidance

Authors:

Qingyun Yang ↗Jon S. Heiselman ↗Ayberk Acar ↗Morgan J. Ringel ↗Michael I. Miga ↗Matthieu Chabanas ↗Michael C. Topf ↗Jie Ying Wu ↗

With 890,000 annual new cases globally, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma has one of the highest recurrence rates among solid malignancies. Although frozen section analysis is the standard of care for intraoperative margin assessment, accurately relocating detected positive margins on the resection bed remains challenging due to imprecise alignment between resected specimens and their resection bed, compounded by post-resection mucosal tissue shrinkage. We present a biomechanics-driven deformable registration framework that corrects post-resection tissue deformation to provide intraoperative guidance. Our approach registers 3D specimen meshes to intraoperative resection bed point clouds using a deformable registration approach based on regularized Kelvinlet basis functions. The registration matches surface point clouds, fiducial landmarks, and boundary contour constraints that directly penalize perpendicular distance-to-agreement between specimen and resection bed boundaries. Across nine specimens from skin, buccal mucosa, and tongue sites, the overall mean target registration error was $11.11 \pm 4.07$ mm using rigid registration, which decreased to $8.20 \pm 2.68$ mm (26.19\% reduction) using deformable registration without contour constraint. The proposed contour-constrained deformable registration further reduced the error to $5.62 \pm 2.28$ mm, a 49.41\% reduction relative to rigid registration. We observed the largest reduction in the most clinically challenging tongue specimens. We also performed a systematic two-stage parameter search to characterize the relative importance of surface alignment, fiducial correspondences, contour constraint, and strain energy regularization. This search revealed that contour weighting dominates registration accuracy for tissue types with large lateral deformation, while the algorithm operates over a broad range of parameter combinations.

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04.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:adf92af8f70130253db113f31bf13770

Cucurbituril-based anion-conducting membranes with supramolecular nanopores

Authors:

Ziang Xu ↗

Nanoporous anion-conducting membranes have gained considerable interest for their potential to reduce resistance in electrochemical devices1–4. Current pore-forming methods, such as backbone engineering through polymers of intrinsic microporosity5,6 or covalent organic and metal–organic frameworks7,8, however, suffer from limited structural control, mechanical fragility or demanding synthesis. Here we establish a supramolecular strategy that overcomes these limitations by constructing uniform, dynamic nanopores. Co-assembly of the rigid macrocyclic host cucurbit[7]uril with the cationic polymer guest quaternized poly(piperidinium-terphenyl) yields a robust network of nanometre-scale channels while simultaneously enhancing mechanical and chemical stability. The dynamic host–guest interactions allow the pore structure to fluctuate on picosecond and angstrom scales. This transient environment supports low-friction hydroxide migration through a Grotthuss mechanism, producing a marked enhancement in ionic conductivity. This bottom-up design principle provides a versatile new tool for molecularly engineering transport pathways and promises to advance electrochemical reactors with respect to energy efficiency, operational stability and the production of high-purity products. A supramolecular strategy, in which uniform, dynamic nanopores are constructed, overcomes the limitations of limited structural control, mechanical fragility or demanding synthesis in nanoporous anion-conducting membranes, providing a versatile tool for molecularly engineering transport pathways.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17967

Learning task-specific subspaces via interventional post-training of speech foundation models

Authors:

Jack Cox ↗Jon Barker ↗

Speech foundation models, pre-trained on large corpora of unlabelled speech data, produce general-purpose representations which are useful across tasks. However, these representations encode information about salient speech variables in a distributed manner, while downstream speech tasks rely on only some of this variability. In this work, we propose a post-training refinement approach using interventional contrastive learning. By leveraging an interventional dataset and multi-part contrastive loss, we learn a transformation from the entangled representation space of speech foundation models into separate content and speaker subspaces. We evaluate the learnt representations on speaker verification and keyword spotting tasks, showing improved out-of-domain speaker verification performance and evidence that speaker and content information are separated across the learned subspaces.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12502

A Mathematical Theory of Value: a synthesis on goal-directed agency under resource constraints

Authors:

Cheng Qian ↗

arXiv:2606.12502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose that value – the quantity goal-directed agents create, destroy, and exchange – is a lawful structural quantity in the same category as information. Following Shannon's method, we make one ruthless abstraction: value is the rate at which an agent converts a resource into goal-progress, relative to a frame fixed by its goal. A scale-invariance axiom forces a logarithmic measure, $V=\sum_i k_i \ln e_i$; compounding of a reinvested resource forces the same form via the ergodicity argument of Peters (2019). The two routes are kin rather than independent; their agreement is a consistency check, not an over-determination. We derive a coding theorem of value: $\Delta G \le I(X;Y)$, achieved by Bayes-proportional allocation; realized value decomposes as $G=D(q\|r)-D(q\|p)$, identifying misalignment with measurable waste. For populations, value is frame-relative while price is frame-independent; a fleet that pools its resource and fuses its perception inherits the ceiling $G_{\mathrm{fleet}} \le I(X;Y_{1:m}) \le H(X)$ (a corollary; an earlier sum-form claim was wrong and is corrected in v5). A dynamical layer yields an is/ought asymmetry from which alignment emerges as a control-stability condition with a closed-form residual. We test the single-frame laws on live language models in a pre-registered scale-up: perception mutual information tracks realized capability rather than parameter count (Spearman $\rho = 0.977$ pooled over 30 model$\times$domain points), out-of-sample $\Delta G$ tracks $I(X;Y)$, and over-confidence is measurable dissipation; a further pre-registered test shows the bridge is shape-invariant across four task shapes ($n=42$, slope 0.953). None of the mechanisms is individually new – generalized Kelly, Armstrong & Mindermann (2018), classical control; the contribution is their unification and the governance mapping (incentive design over oversight) that follows.

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07.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14806

Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves $\mathsf{NP}$-Complete Problems

Authors:

Matthew Fox ↗Chaitanya Karamchedu ↗Sotirios Mygdalas ↗

arXiv:2606.14806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Assuming the gravitational field is classical and that it couples to quantum fields via the semiclassical Einstein field equations, we show that the weak-field dynamics of a massive and non-relativistic qubit can in principle be used to solve an $\mathsf{NP}$-complete problem in polynomial time. We attribute this vast computational power to the non-linear dynamics afforded by the semiclassical Einstein field equations. Consequently, the above two assumptions entail a violation of the Physical Extended Church–Turing Thesis, which we regard as evidence for the quantization of gravity.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14187

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

Authors:

Kaiwen Chen ↗Shuhai Zhang ↗Qiuwu Chen ↗Zimo Liu ↗Linxiao Li ↗Ying Sun ↗Yuchen Li ↗Yifan Zhang ↗Bo Han ↗Mingkui Tan ↗

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.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16845

Robust Dual-Signal Fusion: Hybrid Neuro-Symbolic Gating with Compressed Chain-of-Thought Refinement for Irony Detection in Social Media Texts

Authors:

Ankit Bhattacharjee ↗Krityapriya Bhaumik ↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) natively default to literal semantic interpretations, making zero-shot irony detection a persistent challenge. We introduce the Robust Dual-Signal (RDS) Fusion framework, a hybrid neuro-symbolic architecture that compresses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning trajectories without Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Evaluated on a strictly held-out TweetEval test set (N=734), RDS achieves 78.1% accuracy and a Macro F1 of 0.777, matching the absolute performance ceiling of the fine-tuned BERTweet. On the heavily imbalanced iSarcasm dataset, the frozen CoT pipeline filters 22.5% of out-of-distribution hallucinations, yielding a zero-shot Macro F1 of 0.6726 and Ironic F1 of 0.4821, outperforming multiple heavily supervised SemEval transformer ensembles. A statistical ablation confirms this structural synergy: adding the symbolic prior to the neural baseline yields no significant gain (p = 0.242), and the marginal benefit of adding the CoT pipeline to that prior is heavily compressed (p = 0.149). Only the complete, concurrent fusion of all three signals achieves a statistically validated improvement over the baseline (p = 0.005).

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10.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2601.03792

VietMed-MCQ: A Consistency-Filtered Data Synthesis Framework for Vietnamese Traditional Medicine Evaluation

Authors:

Huynh Trung Kiet ↗Dao Sy Duy Minh ↗Nguyen Dinh Ha Duong ↗Le Hoang Minh Huy ↗Long Nguyen ↗Dien Dinh ↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in general medical domains. However, their performance significantly degrades in specialized, culturally specific domains such as Vietnamese Traditional Medicine (VTM), primarily due to the scarcity of high-quality, structured benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce VietMed-MCQ, a novel multiple-choice question dataset generated via a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline with an automated consistency check mechanism. Unlike previous synthetic datasets, our framework incorporates a dual-model validation approach to ensure reasoning consistency through independent answer verification, though the substring-based evidence checking has known limitations. The complete dataset of 3,190 questions spans three difficulty levels and underwent validation by one medical expert and four students, achieving 94.2 percent approval with substantial inter-rater agreement (Fleiss' kappa = 0.82). We benchmark seven open-source models on VietMed-MCQ. Results reveal that general-purpose models with strong Chinese priors outperform Vietnamese-centric models, highlighting cross-lingual conceptual transfer, while all models still struggle with complex diagnostic reasoning. Our code and dataset are publicly available to foster research in low-resource medical domains.

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11.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2505.16898

Active Quantum Reservoir Engineering: Using a Qubit to Manipulate its Environment

Authors:

Marcelo Janovitch ↗Matteo Brunelli ↗Patrick P. Potts ↗

arXiv:2505.16898v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum reservoir engineering leverages dissipative processes to achieve desired behavior, with applications ranging from entanglement generation to quantum error correction. Therein, a structured environment acts as an entropy sink for the system and no time-dependent control over the system is required. We develop a theoretical framework for active reservoir engineering, where time-dependent control over a quantum system is used to manipulate its environment. In this case, the system may act as an entropy sink for the environment. Our framwork captures the dynamical interplay between system and environment, and provides an intuitive picture of how finite-size effects and system-environment correlations allow for manipulating the environment by repeated initialization of the quantum system. We illustrate our results with two examples: a superconducting qubit coupled to an environment of two-level systems and a semiconducting quantum dot coupled to nuclear spins. In both scenarios, we find qualitative agreement with previous experimental results, illustrating how active control can unlock new functionalities in open quantum systems.

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12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11480

Accurate and Resource-Efficient Federated Continual Learning

Authors:

Jebacyril Arockiaraj ↗Dhruv Parikh ↗Jayashree Adivarahan ↗Rajgopal Kannan ↗Viktor Prasanna ↗

arXiv:2606.11480v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated continual learning (FCL) must learn from distributed task streams under limited resources, such as communication, computation, memory, and label availability. Existing FCL methods often rely on repeated local optimization, replay, and full supervision. Analytic alternatives avoid iterative training and replay, but using high-dimensional random features to improve accuracy requires a second-order feature statistic, the Gram matrix, which has a quadratic communication cost in the random feature size $M$. We propose FedRAN, a resource-aware analytic FCL framework that replaces gradient-based updates with compact random feature statistics. Each client transmits a truncated-SVD summary of its Gram matrix, reducing the dominant second-order upload from quadratic to linear in $M$ for fixed rank. The server performs a two-level QR-SVD subspace merge, spatially across clients and temporally across tasks, and solves a ridge classifier in closed form. FedRAN further supports label scarcity through prototype-based pseudo-labeling. Across CIFAR-100, ImageNet-R, and VTAB datasets, FedRAN improves average accuracy by up to 4.8 percentage points over the strongest baseline, uses 30.6-121.8$\times$ less per-client communication than optimization-based FCL, and is 190.3$\times$ faster on average than gradient-based baselines; with only 20% labels, pseudo-labeling improves average accuracy by up to 6.61 points. These results show that FedRAN enables accurate and resource-efficient FCL under communication, computation, and label constraints. The source code is available at https://github.com/JebacyrilArockiaraj/Fed-RAN-SSL.

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13.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:662edec7f3ddce59e18d86871a86c492

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

Authors:

Raymond ↗J. D ↗Hu ↗Solomon ↗B. D ↗Duong ↗

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.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18885

LARE: Low-Attention Region Encoding for Text-Image Retrieval

Authors:

Image retrieval in crowded scenes is particularly challenging due to the salience bias of conventional visual encoders, which tend to focus on dominant objects while neglecting low-attention regions that are often crucial for fine-grained retrieval. We propose LARE (Low-Attention Region Encoding), a framework that explicitly models these overlooked regions. LARE adopts a dual-encoding strategy that encodes low-attention regions of an image and the full image in parallel, leading to more diverse and informative image embeddings. To evaluate image retrieval performance in challenging crowded scenes, we introduce Dense-Set, a challenging subset derived from COCO and Flickr30K. In this subset, images are re-captioned to provide richer descriptions of low-attention or previously overlooked regions. This dataset highlights the limitations of existing retrieval models and enables a more rigorous evaluation under densely crowded scene conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework improves retrieval performance by preserving subtle, non-dominant visual cues within the shared latent space.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16905

Speaking the Language of Science: Toward a General-Purpose Generative Foundation Model for the Natural Sciences

Authors:

Mingyang Li ↗Yurou Liu ↗Jieping Ye ↗Bing Su ↗Ji-Rong Wen ↗Zheng Wang ↗

In this report, we present LOGOS (Language Of Generative Objects in Science), a scientific generative language model that unifies heterogeneous tasks across the natural sciences within a single autoregressive framework based on a shared scientific grammar. It encodes diverse scientific objects and their spatial interactions as token sequences over a common vocabulary. By representing spatial contact and constraint patterns as discrete tokens, the model captures complex structural interactions in a purely sequential manner, without relying on explicit coordinates or geometric neural networks. This unified representation enables a wide range of downstream tasks to be formulated consistently as next-token prediction in the same grammar space, creating strong alignment between continued multi-domain pre-training and downstream objectives. Across diverse tasks, LOGOS consistently matches or outperforms domain-specific baselines, providing preliminary evidence for the feasibility of "one model fits all" in the natural sciences. We train LOGOS models at different scales (1B, 3B, and 8B parameters) and find a consistent positive correlation between model size and performance. This suggests that the future of AI for Science (AI4S) may not lie in building an independent technical stack that is separated from large language models (LLMs). Instead, it may depend on deeply aligning scientific foundation models with LLMs through shared architectures, shared training paradigms, and shared inference infrastructure, so that LLMs can truly become a new entry point for AI4S. We release the model weights and associated resources to facilitate further research.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14025

GarmentSketch: Large-scale Sketch-to-Fashion Benchmark

Authors:

Duong-Duy-Khang Bui ↗Minh-Tan Pham ↗Tam V. Nguyen ↗Minh-Triet Tran ↗Trung-Nghia Le ↗

Fashion sketching is a cornerstone of design workflows, allowing rapid visualization of creative concepts prior to physical prototyping. Yet, progress in sketch-based fashion image synthesis has been hindered by the absence of large-scale, high-quality paired resources. To bridge this gap, we present GarmentSketch, a novel dataset comprising 26,249 fashion sketches across 21 garment categories, each paired with detailed textual descriptions. Captions were produced through a multi-stage pipeline that integrates multiple multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with human-in-the-loop refinement, ensuring both semantic accuracy and descriptive richness. We benchmark GarmentSketch on state-of-the-art generative models, providing baseline performance for sketch-guided text-to-image generation. Our experiments reveal both the promise and the current limitations of existing methods. By offering a comprehensive and richly annotated resource, GarmentSketch establishes a foundation for advancing sketch understanding, fine-grained fashion image generation, and creative human-AI collaboration in design. The dataset will be available at: https://khangbdd.github.io/garmentsketch.

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17.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2401.14283

Information Leakage Detection through Approximate Bayes-optimal Prediction

Authors:

Pritha Gupta ↗Marcel Wever ↗Eyke H\"ullermeier ↗

arXiv:2401.14283v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In today's data-driven world, the proliferation of publicly available information raises security concerns due to the information leakage (IL) problem. IL involves unintentionally exposing sensitive information to unauthorized parties via observable system information. Conventional statistical approaches rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between observable and secret information for detecting ILs, face challenges of the curse of dimensionality, convergence, computational complexity, and MI misestimation. Though effective, emerging supervised machine learning based approaches to detect ILs are limited to binary system sensitive information and lack a comprehensive framework. To address these limitations, we establish a theoretical framework using statistical learning theory and information theory to quantify and detect IL accurately. Using automated machine learning, we demonstrate that MI can be accurately estimated by approximating the typically unknown Bayes predictor's log-loss and accuracy. Based on this, we show how MI can effectively be estimated to detect ILs. Our method performs superior to state-of-the-art baselines in an empirical study considering synthetic and real-world OpenSSL TLS server datasets.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2510.23798

A geometric and deep learning reproducible pipeline for monitoring floating anthropogenic debris in urban rivers using in situ cameras

Authors:

Gauthier Grimmer ↗Romain Wenger ↗Cl\'ement Flint ↗Germain Forestier ↗Gilles Rixhon ↗Valentin Chardon ↗

The proliferation of floating anthropogenic debris in rivers has emerged as a pressing environmental concern, exerting a detrimental influence on biodiversity, water quality, and human activities such as navigation and recreation. The present study proposes a novel methodological framework for the monitoring the aforementioned waste, utilising fixed, in-situ cameras. This study provides two key contributions: (i) the continuous quantification and monitoring of floating debris using deep learning and (ii) the identification of the most suitable deep learning model in terms of accuracy and inference speed under complex environmental conditions. These models are tested in a range of environmental conditions and learning configurations, including experiments on biases related to data leakage. Furthermore, a geometric model is implemented to estimate the actual size of detected objects from a 2D image. This model takes advantage of both intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of the camera. The findings of this study underscore the significance of the dataset constitution protocol, particularly with respect to the integration of negative images and the consideration of temporal leakage. In conclusion, the feasibility of metric object estimation using projective geometry coupled with regression corrections is demonstrated. This approach paves the way for the development of robust, low-cost, automated monitoring systems for urban aquatic environments.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15508

ToolMenuBench: Benchmarking Tool-Menu Filtering Strategies for Reliable and Efficient LLM Agents

Authors:

Rahul Suresh Babu ↗Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer ↗

arXiv:2606.15508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented large language model agents increasingly operate over large tool libraries, but existing evaluations often focus on whether a model can call a tool correctly rather than how the visible tool menu shapes reliability, efficiency, and safety-relevant risk exposure. We introduce ToolMenuBench, a benchmark for evaluating tool-menu construction in multi-step LLM agents. ToolMenuBench varies tool-menu size, distractor type, state-dependent task structure, and risk exposure, and reports both filter-level and downstream agent metrics, including visible-tool count, risky-tool exposure, task success, wrong-tool calls, premature actions, and token usage. In a controlled evaluation across seven model backends, three tool-menu sizes, six filtering methods, and seven evaluation settings, CMTF improves task success from 32.1% under all-tools exposure to 85.7%, while reducing average token usage by roughly 98%. Causal minimal tool filtering achieves the strongest overall tradeoff, reducing visible tools, wrong-tool calls, premature actions, and risky-tool exposure relative to unfiltered exposure, lexical filtering, state-aware filtering, and broader causal-path baselines. ToolMenuBench provides a reusable evaluation framework for studying the agent-interface problem: which tools should be visible, when they should be visible, and under what cost or risk constraints.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13811

Aligning Quantum Operators with Large Language Models

Authors:

Rogerio Feris ↗Yunchao Liu ↗Pengyuan Li ↗Hang Hua ↗David Kremer ↗

arXiv:2606.13811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) understand and reason about quantum operators? Despite their remarkable capabilities in mathematics and symbolic reasoning, LLMs remain inherently blind to quantum representations such as unitary matrices. In this work, we take a step toward bridging this gap by introducing an approach that maps unitary operators into the latent space of an LLM, enabling unified modeling over quantum and linguistic inputs. We instantiate this idea on Clifford+T circuit synthesis over a Pauli rotation gate set, where our model achieves results competitive with state-of-the-art methods and scales consistently with training data, with no signs of saturation. Our approach further enables language-conditioned synthesis, allowing gate constraints unseen during training to be specified directly in natural language. This work suggests a path toward quantum–aware foundation models that can natively interpret and reason about quantum operations, which could have broader implications reaching across quantum compilation and algorithm discovery.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14975

Harnessing cortical geometry, wiring, and function as inductive biases for recurrent neural networks

Authors:

Mo Shakiba ↗Rana Rokni ↗Mohammad Mohammadi ↗Nima Dehghani ↗

arXiv:2606.14975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How the wiring and functional organization of cortex shape recurrent computation remains a central question in both neuroscience and machine learning. Here, we leverage data released through the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program–a functional connectomics resource spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex, in which dense calcium imaging is co-registered with high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction from the same animal–to build biologically grounded recurrent neural networks. Using neuronal spatial coordinates, anatomical connectivity, and function-derived relationships from nearly 12,000 coregistered excitatory neurons, we initialize recurrent weights and impose communication-aware spatial constraints during learning. Across three cognitive decision-making tasks, networks constrained by cortical structure and function consistently outperform baseline and partially constrained models. Functional weight initialization provides the largest gain, while real spatial embedding yields robust additional improvements across conditions. These biologically grounded networks also develop low-entropy, modular, and small-world organization, and retain strong performance even when recurrence is restricted to positive weights. Together, our results show that the machinery of cortex–its geometry, wiring, and functional structure–can be harnessed as a powerful inductive basis for building recurrent networks that learn more effectively while converging toward key organizational principles of biological computation.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2602.00845

Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward

Authors:

Senkang Hu ↗Yong Dai ↗Yuzhi Zhao ↗Yihang Tao ↗Yu Guo ↗Zhengru Fang ↗Sam Tak Wu Kwong ↗Yuguang Fang ↗

arXiv:2602.00845v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning enables large reasoning models (LRMs) to dynamically acquire external knowledge, but yet optimizing the retrieval process remains challenging due to the lack of dense, principled reward signals. In this paper, we introduce InfoReasoner, a unified framework that incentivizes effective information seeking via a synthetic semantic information gain reward. Theoretically, we redefine information gain as uncertainty reduction over the model's belief states, establishing guarantees, including non-negativity, telescoping additivity, and channel monotonicity. Practically, to enable scalable optimization without manual retrieval annotations, we propose an output-aware intrinsic estimator that computes information gain directly from the model's output distributions using semantic clustering via bidirectional textual entailment. This intrinsic reward guides the policy to maximize epistemic progress, enabling efficient training via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments across seven question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that InfoReasoner consistently outperforms strong retrieval-augmented baselines, achieving up to 5.4% average accuracy improvement. Our work provides a theoretically grounded and scalable path toward agentic reasoning with retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/dl-m9/InfoReasoner

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12371

A Turbo-Inference Strategy for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation

Authors:

Zhen Zhao ↗Gang Zhang ↗Xiaolin Hu ↗Liang Tang ↗

Object detection and instance segmentation tasks are closely related. Existing top-down instance segmentation methods usually follow a detect-then-segment paradigm, where an initial detector is used to recognize and localize objects with bounding boxes, followed by the segmentation of an instance mask within each bounding box. In such methods, the detection accuracy directly influences the subsequent segmentation performance. However, previous research has seldom explored the impact of the instance segmentation task on object detection. In this paper, we present a turbo-inference strategy for the top-down methods that leverages the complementary information between detection and segmentation tasks iteratively. Specifically we design two modules: turbo-detection head and turbo-segmentation head, which facilitate communication between the tasks. The two modules form a closed loop that interlaces the detection and segmentation results without retraining the model. Comprehensive experiments on the COCO, iFLYTEK, and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that our method substantially enhances both detection and segmentation accuracies with a certain increase in computational cost. The proposed method represents a tradeoff between prediction accuracy and inference speed. Codes are available at https://github.com/zhaozhen2333/Turbo-Learning.git.

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24.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2512.11784

Softmax as Linear Attention in the Large-Prompt Regime: a Measure-based Perspective

Authors:

Etienne Boursier ↗Claire Boyer ↗

arXiv:2512.11784v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Softmax attention is a central component of transformer architectures, yet its nonlinear structure poses significant challenges for theoretical analysis. We develop a unified, measure-based framework for studying single-layer softmax attention under both finite and infinite prompts. For i.i.d. Gaussian inputs, we lean on the fact that the softmax operator converges in the infinite-prompt limit to a linear operator acting on the underlying input-token measure. Building on this insight, we establish non-asymptotic concentration bounds for the output and gradient of softmax attention, quantifying how rapidly the finite-prompt model approaches its infinite-prompt counterpart, and prove that this concentration remains stable along the entire training trajectory in general in-context learning settings with sub-Gaussian tokens. In the case of in-context linear regression, we use the tractable infinite-prompt dynamics to analyze training at finite prompt length. Our results allow optimization analyses developed for linear attention to transfer directly to softmax attention when prompts are sufficiently long, showing that large-prompt softmax attention inherits the analytical structure of its linear counterpart. This, in turn, provides a principled and broadly applicable toolkit for studying the training dynamics and statistical behavior of softmax attention layers in large prompt regimes.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2409.17502

Broadcast Product: Redefining Shape-aligned Element-wise Multiplication and Beyond

Authors:

Yusuke Matsui ↗Tatsuya Yokota ↗

arXiv:2409.17502v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Broadcast operations are widely used in scientific computing libraries, yet their mathematical formulation is often implicit and inconsistently represented in machine learning literature. This problem frequently leads to invalid equations when element-wise products are written despite mismatched tensor shapes. In this paper, we formalize such operations by introducing the broadcast product $\boxdot$, which explicitly extends the Hadamard product through shape-aligned element duplication. We provide a rigorous definition of the broadcast product, analyze its algebraic properties, and show how it can be expressed using standard linear algebra. Building on this framework, we formulate least-squares problems and sketch a proof-of-concept broadcast decomposition. As a preliminary illustration, we show that the formalism enables a new family of decompositions with distinct structural properties from conventional tensor decompositions. This work establishes a mathematical foundation for broadcast-aware tensor operations, connecting practical implementations with rigorous tensor analysis.

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