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.CV) 2026-06-16

SP$^3$: Spherical Priors for Plug-and-Play Restoration

In this paper, we introduce SP$^3$, a novel Plug-and-Play algorithm that accelerates maximum a posteriori image restoration by replacing denoisers with Spherical Encoders (SE) as generative priors. SP$^3$ approximates the intractable proximal prior step by utilizing the SE tightly structured latent space as a robust projection onto the natural image manifold. Alternating this projection with a closed-form data-consistency step, via Half-Quadratic Splitting, achieves stable convergence without requiring gradient computation during inference. This unique formulation unlocks "anytime" restoration capabilities, producing sharp, plausible images from the first iteration. Evaluations across a variety of image restoration tasks demonstrate that SP$^3$ achieves perceptual quality comparable to state-of-the-art zero-shot diffusion and flow methods while being $3$-$630\times$ faster.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Learning Policy from a Single Trajectory in Average-Reward Markov Decision Process

arXiv:2606.16729v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While there is an extensive body of work characterizing the sample complexity of discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, finite sample analyses for average-reward MDPs have been limited, and most existing works rely on restrictive assumptions such as ergodicity or access to a generative model. In this work, we establish the first finite sample complexity guarantees from a single trajectory for weakly communicating average-reward MDPs. To this end, we study the dynamics of a single trajectory in weakly communicating MDPs and based on this analysis, we develop novel model-free methods. Notably, our value-based and policy-based methods provide finite sample complexity guarantees of $\widetilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ and $\widetilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^4)$ from a single trajectory in weakly communicating MDPs, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce the first model-free method that requires no prior knowledge of problem-dependent quantities for communicating MDPs.

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

QualiaNet: An Experience-Before-Inference Network

Authors:

Human 3D vision involves two distinct stages: an Experience Module, where stereo depth is extracted relative to fixation, and an Inference Module, where this experience is interpreted to estimate 3D scene properties. Paradoxically, although stereo vision does not provide us with absolute distance information, it nonetheless affects our inferences about distance. We propose the Inference Module exploits a natural scene statistic: near scenes produce vivid disparity gradients, while far scenes appear comparatively flat. QualiaNet implements this two-stage architecture computationally: disparity maps simulating human stereo experience are passed to a CNN trained to estimate distance. The network can recover distance from disparity gradients alone, validating this approach.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Rethinking Groups in Critic-Free RLVR

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for post-training large language models. Existing critic-free RL methods typically generate a group of rollouts for the same question to estimate value baselines for advantage computation. However, this design suffers from data inefficiency, group synchronization barriers, and inflexibility with structured rollouts. In this work, we revisit the role of the ``group'' and show that its underlying function is not merely to estimate baselines but to prevent false penalties on negative samples. Building on this insight, we propose negative token filtering, a simple and effective strategy that enables stable single-rollout training. We apply it to two batch-level advantage methods, achieving comparable performance on reasoning tasks and stronger performance on agentic tasks relative to group-based RL techniques.

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

Impatient Bandits: Optimizing for the Long-Term Without Delay

arXiv:2501.07761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in choosing the learning signal: waiting for the full reward to become available might take several weeks, slowing the rate of learning, whereas using short-term proxy rewards reflects the actual long-term goal only imperfectly. First, we develop a predictive model of delayed rewards that incorporates all information obtained to date. Rewards as well as shorter-term surrogate outcomes are combined through a Bayesian filter to obtain a probabilistic belief. Second, we devise a bandit algorithm that quickly learns to identify content aligned with long-term success using this new predictive model. We prove a regret bound for our algorithm that depends on the Value of Progressive Feedback, an information-theoretic metric that captures the quality of short-term leading indicators that are observed prior to the long-term reward. We apply our approach to a podcast recommendation problem, where we seek to recommend shows that users engage with repeatedly over two months. We empirically validate that our approach significantly outperforms methods that optimize for short-term proxies or rely solely on delayed rewards, as demonstrated by an A/B test in a recommendation system that serves hundreds of millions of users.

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

LoSoNA: A Benchmark for Local Social Norm Adaptation in Group Conversations

Online group chats are social spaces with local conversational norms that are rarely stated explicitly. The ability and willingness of LLM-based agents to recognize and adapt to these norms remains mostly unexplored. We introduce LoSoNA, a benchmark for local social norm adaptation in multi-party chat. Each scenario gives a subject model a curated group-chat transcript in which non-subject participants demonstrate a hidden local norm, followed by a final elicitor turn that forces a response revealing whether the subject has inferred that norm. We evaluate eight frontier and open-weight models under four prompting conditions that vary how explicitly the model is told to treat the prior conversation as evidence for how it should answer. Naive prompting remains limited for most models; explicit norm-aware prompting helps unevenly, with Gemini 3.1 Pro reaching $84.2\%$ and Claude Fable 5 reaching $81.6\%$, while several other models show small gains or regressions. LoSoNA contributes to recent calls for evaluating LLM social capabilities by testing whether models can infer local conversational norms from precedent and use them in a one-turn group-chat response.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Fine-Tuning SAM2 for Coronary Artery Segmentation in X-Ray Fluoroscopy

Authors:

SAM2 (Meta, 2024) provides a strong starting point for segmentation, but given the unique challenges in medical imaging (noise from patient movement, the projection-based nature of X-ray fluoroscopy, and low contrast between vessels and background), direct application is difficult. We fine-tune MedSAM2 on annotated coronary angiograms and apply it to video data for point-of-care use. On the ARCADE validation set (200 images), the fine-tuned model achieves Dice 0.767 compared to 0.033 zero-shot. On 10 fluoroscopic video studies from CoronaryDominance, it tracks vessels coherently and avoids falsely segmenting ribs, stents, and bypass grafts in 9 of 10 studies. Code is available at https://github.com/elakiyasivakumar/SAM2-Coronary-Angiography-VA and the fine-tuned checkpoint at https://huggingface.co/Elakiya17/CA-SAM2.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

A Benchmark for Omni-Modal Reasoning in Long Videos

Long-form omni-modal video understanding requires integrating vision, speech, and ambient audio with coherent long-context reasoning. Existing video benchmarks often trade off temporal scale, modality coverage, open-ended interaction, and interpretable scoring. To address this gap, we introduce LongShOTBench, a long video understanding benchmark designed around three coupled goals: holistic omni-modal integration, intent-driven open-ended interaction, and rubric-level diagnosis. It builds single- and multi-turn questions from real viewing scenarios, with systematic tasks probing visual, speech, ambient-audio, temporal, and cross-modal reasoning. Each item includes a reference answer and a weighted criterion-level rubric, letting evaluation identify which perceptual facts, temporal links, modality-grounding requirements, and reasoning steps are satisfied or missed. All samples are manually verified to improve grounding, clarity, and rubric reliability. We also introduce LongShOTAgent, a training-free omni-modal evidence-seeking agent coupling full-video preprocessing with targeted retrieval, query-adaptive segment refinement, and explicit claim verification over visual, speech, and non-speech audio evidence. Its iterative search-refine-verify loop exposes intermediate evidence and lets modality-specific specialists re-analyze relevant moments before answering. We evaluate 105 video-capable models spanning open-source omni-modal models, vision-language systems, audio LLMs, agentic pipelines and closed-source APIs. Current MLLMs remain far from saturating LongShOTBench, while our LongShOTAgent is the strongest training-free system, reaching 66.64% overall. By releasing the benchmark, leaderboard, and method, we provide a shared, interpretable testbed for advancing long-form omni-modal video reasoning. Code, data, and the leaderboard are available at https://longshot.cvmbzuai.com/.

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

A Spatio-Temporal Expert Prefetching Framework for Efficient MoE-based LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.15453v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based large language models (LLMs), such as Qwen and DeepSeek, have recently emerged as an effective approach to improving model capacity without proportionally increasing computational cost. By replacing the conventional feed-forward network in dense LLMs with a set of experts and activating only a subset of them for each input token, MoE models significantly increase the total number of parameters while keeping the per-token computation relatively manageable. However, this dynamic and irregular expert activation pattern also introduces substantial expert loading overhead during inference, since the required experts must be fetched on demand according to token-dependent routing results. As a result, expert loading latency becomes a major source of performance and energy inefficiency. To this end, we first perform a comprehensive analysis of expert selection behavior in various MoE-based LLMs and applications, including language understanding and code generation. Our analysis reveals that, within each application domain, expert requests exhibit strong correlation across both adjacent MoE layers and consecutive decoding tokens, making future expert activations predictable. Based on this insight, we propose ST-MoE, a spatio-temporal expert prefetching framework that proactively stages experts ahead of use to overlap expert loading with ongoing computation. ST-MoE combines a lightweight runtime prediction mechanism that preserves the original routing behavior with a reconfigurable hardware design that efficiently supports dynamic expert prefetching. The combined effect of the prediction mechanism with the supporting hardware significantly improves MoE inference performance and energy efficiency while preserving model inference accuracy.

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

From Noise to Intent: Anchoring Generative VLA Policies with Residual Bridges

arXiv:2604.21391v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bridging high-level semantic understanding with low-level physical control remains a persistent challenge in embodied intelligence, stemming from the fundamental spatiotemporal scale mismatch between cognition and action. Existing generative VLA policies typically adopt a "Generation-from-Noise" paradigm, which disregards this disparity, leading to representation inefficiency and weak condition alignment during optimization. In this work, we propose ResVLA, an architecture that shifts the paradigm to "Refinement-from-Intent." Recognizing that robotic motion naturally decomposes into global intent and local dynamics, ResVLA utilizes spectral analysis to decouple control into a deterministic low-frequency anchor and a stochastic high-frequency residual. By anchoring the generative process on the predicted intent, our model focuses strictly on refining local dynamics via a residual diffusion bridge. Extensive simulation experiments show that ResVLA achieves competitive performance, strong robustness to language and robot embodiment perturbations, and faster convergence than standard generative baselines. ResVLA also demonstrates strong performance in real-world robot experiments.

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

Where Do Backdoors Live? A Component-Level Analysis of Backdoor Propagation in Speech Language Models

Speech language models (SLMs) are systems of systems: independent components that unite to achieve a common goal. Despite their heterogeneous nature, SLMs are often studied end-to-end; how information flows through the pipeline remains obscure. We investigate this question through the lens of backdoor attacks. We first establish that backdoors can propagate through the SLM, leaving all tasks highly vulnerable. From this, we design a component analysis to discover the role each component takes in backdoor learning. We find that backdoor persistence or erasure is highly dependent on the targeted component. Beyond propagation, we examine how backdoors are encoded in shared multitask embeddings, showing that poisoned samples are not directly separable from benign ones, challenging a common separability assumption used in filtering defenses. Our findings emphasize the need to treat multimodal pipelines as intricate systems with unique vulnerabilities, not solely extensions of unimodal ones.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

AutoPass: Evidence-Guided LLM Agents for Compiler Performance Tuning

arXiv:2606.20373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for code compilation tasks, but applying them to runtime performance tuning is difficult due to complex microarchitectural effects and noisy runtime measurements. We present AutoPass, a multi-agent framework for compiler performance tuning that uses compiler and runtime evidence to guide LLM-generated optimization decisions. Rather than treating the compiler as a black box like prior auto-tuning schemes, AutoPass opens up the compiler to the LLM, enabling it to query compiler-internal optimization states and analyze the intermediate representation to orchestrate compiler options. The search process iteratively refines optimization configurations using measured runtime feedback to diagnose regressions and guide latency-improving edits. AutoPass operates in an inference-only, training-free setting and requires no offline training or task-specific fine-tuning, making it readily applicable to new benchmarks and platforms. We implement AutoPass on the LLVM compiler and evaluate it on server-grade x86-64 and embedded ARM64 systems. AutoPass outperforms expert-tuned heuristics and classical autotuning methods, achieving geometric-mean speedups of 1.043x and 1.117x over LLVM -O3 on x86-64 and ARM64, respectively.

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

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

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.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Giving AI a Headache: Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Computer Vision Applications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to automate a variety of real-world computer vision (CV) applications, such as autonomous vehicle control, facial recognition, and security cameras. Recent research has shown that acoustic vibration can induce real physical motion in cameras, interfering with their internal stabilization mechanisms. Because the motion falls outside the conditions the stabilization system was designed to handle, the system introduces artifacts into the frame, causing AI-based CV models to misclassify, miss targets, or hallucinate objects. Previous work used ultrasonic frequencies (>20 kHz) to perform short-range attacks, which limits them to short distances due to the attenuation exhibited by high frequencies. In this work, we investigate acoustic attacks using lower frequencies in the audible range (

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

A Neural Network Framework for Geodesic-Like Curve Computation on Parametric Surfaces

arXiv:2606.18759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The concept of geodesic-like curves was introduced by Chen in 2010 as a method for estimating shortest paths (geodesics) on parametric surfaces, with its convergence established theoretically. However, an efficient numerical computational framework has not yet been developed. In this paper, we propose an elegant and efficient approach for computing geodesic-like curves by leveraging deep learning and Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). Under the proposed framework, not only can single parametric surfaces be handled efficiently, but a broad class of complex parametric surfaces including multi-surface systems with $C^0$ or higher continuity and surfaces of revolution can also be robustly addressed.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Complexity Measure for Active Learning in Multi-group Mean Estimation

arXiv:2606.14690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a max-risk objective for active learning in a multi-group mean estimation $d$-armed bandits: a learner adaptively allocates a budget of $T$ samples across $d$ groups to minimize the worst-case uncertainty index $\max_{k\in[d]}\sigma_k^2/n_k$, where $\sigma_k$ is the standard deviation of the distribution of arm $d$, and $n_k$ is the number of times arm $d$ is sampled. We develop a local minimax framework and prove the first general lower bound for this objective, valid for any finite-variance hypothesis class. The bound separates difficulty into three orthogonal factors: a budget term, a heteroscedasticity index measuring how unevenly the uncertainty is spread across arms, and a model-dependent complexity measure, the Variance Local Curvature ($\mathrm{VLC}$), which captures how much information a local change of variance creates inside the hypothesis class. For smooth classes, the $\mathrm{VLC}$ is a reparametrization of a variance–Fisher information, with closed-form values for common families. Benchmarking against the strongest available upper bound shows near-optimality up to logarithmic factors in broad regimes, and pinpoints a systematic gap in highly heterogeneous instances. Our proof introduces two key ingredients: a loss-induced $\ell_1$ geometry on the decision space, and a representation-based instance generator that reduces hard-instance construction to an explicit random matrix calculation.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

On Regret Bounds of Thompson Sampling for Bayesian Optimization

arXiv:2603.09276v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a widely used Bayesian optimization method, Gaussian process Thompson sampling (GP-TS), under the assumption that the objective function is a sample path from a GP. Compared with the GP upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) with established high-probability and expected regret bounds, most analyses of GP-TS have been limited to expected regret. Moreover, whether the recent analyses of GP-UCB for the lenient regret and the improved cumulative regret upper bound can be applied to GP-TS remains unclear. To fill these gaps, this paper shows several regret bounds: (i) a regret lower bound for GP-TS, which implies that GP-TS suffers from a polynomial dependence on $1/\delta$ with probability $\delta$, (ii) an upper bound of the second moment of cumulative regret, which directly suggests an improved regret upper bound on $\delta$, (iii) expected lenient regret upper bounds, and (iv) an improved cumulative regret upper bound on the time horizon $T$. Along the way, we provide several useful lemmas, including a relaxation of the necessary condition from recent analysis to obtain improved regret upper bounds on $T$.

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

MMed-Bench-IR: A Heterogeneous Benchmark for Multilingual Medical Information Retrieval

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in clinical settings increasingly requires multilingual retrieval against predominantly English evidence corpora. Multilingual medical retrieval demands three capabilities: cross-lingual alignment, concept discrimination, and evidence retrieval. However, existing benchmarks evaluate these only in isolation, leaving the interaction between biomedical expertise and multilingual coverage unmeasured. We introduce MMed-Bench-IR, a benchmark designed to disentangle these axes across 6 languages and three structurally heterogeneous tasks: (1) cross-lingual medical QA retrieval with 6,127 queries grounded in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), (2) concept discrimination over 4,975 confusion sets at three difficulty tiers, and (3) multilingual evidence retrieval for RAG with 2,040 quality-assured queries. The three tasks share zero concept and query overlap by design, ensuring that aggregate scores reflect genuine capability breadth. Evaluation of ten systems across six paradigm families reveals severe cross-lingual failure: biomedical encoders that score 0.818 nDCG@10 in English drop to 0.056 in Japanese, a gap that English-only benchmarks cannot detect.

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

Deep Spectral Learning of Embedded Latent Transfer Operators for Stochastic Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.14079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a spectral learning method for stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems represented with embedded latent transfer operators in deep feature spaces. We instantiate the method as Deep Spectral Encoder (DSE), an operator-based latent state-space model in which a time-invariant neural encoder implements learnable nonlinear feature maps from observations, and these features define Markovian latent states whose temporal evolution and observation mapping are described by the transfer and observation operators, respectively. Functional canonical correlation analysis in a learnable Galerkin-projected feature space provides state coordinates from past and future observations, and the two linear operators are estimated on the state coordinates as ridge-regularized closed-form solutions that coincide with Galerkin projections of the associated covariance operators. On this representation, we generalize sequential Bayesian filtering and Koopman spectral mode decomposition in feature space. Experiments on several scenarios show stable and superior performance with sequential Bayesian filtering and dynamic mode decomposition baselines even under noise and partial observability.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Predicting Mergeability of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Updates

arXiv:2606.19549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) makes it cheap to train many domain- and task-specific language model adapters, but whether two adapters can be merged is usually discovered only after both have been fully trained and evaluated. This late feedback is costly: adapters that are strong in isolation can interfere destructively once their updates are combined. We ask whether this outcome can be anticipated. We formalize adapter mergeability as the degree to which an adapter preserves its single-task utility after merging, and show that it can be forecast from signals measured in the first few percent of training – chiefly how the low-rank updates and their gradients align across tasks and how much they disturb shared representations. We package these signals into MergeProbe, a lightweight predictor that estimates pairwise and set-level retention and turns the estimate into a concrete decision: merge directly, reweight, prune, or route. On MERGE-PEFT, a five-domain benchmark spanning math, code, science, instruction following, and safety, MergeProbe attains the best average and worst-case retention among strong interference-aware merge baselines while adding far less deployment overhead than full task routing. This turns LoRA merging from a post-hoc engineering step into an anticipatory measurement problem.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Graph Alignment for Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks and Learning Positional Encodings

arXiv:2505.13087v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a novel benchmarking methodology for graph neural networks (GNNs) based on the graph alignment problem, a combinatorial optimization task that generalizes graph isomorphism by aligning two unlabeled graphs to maximize overlapping edges. We frame this problem as a self-supervised learning task and present several methods to generate graph alignment datasets using synthetic random graphs and real-world graph datasets from multiple domains. For a given graph dataset, we generate a family of graph alignment datasets with increasing difficulty, allowing us to rank the performance of various architectures. Our experiments prove that there is an optimal task difficulty for having a statistically relevant ranking of different models and that, even on a structure-only task, anisotropic models perform better compared to isotropic ones. To further prove that our synthetic task capture meaningful information, we show its effectiveness for self-supervised GNN pre-training: the learned node embeddings can be leveraged as positional encodings by transformers for graph regression or can be used to reconstruct the full structure of the graph with $98\%$ accuracy. To support reproducibility and further research, we provide an open-source Python package to generate graph alignment datasets and benchmark new GNN architectures. The source code is available at https://github.com/adrien-lagesse/graph-alignment-benchmark.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Conservation Laws for Modern Neural Architectures

arXiv:2606.17816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding gradient descent dynamics is key to explaining the success of over-parameterized models, where implicit bias manifests through conservation laws in gradient flow. While such laws are well understood for linear and ReLU networks, they remain largely unexplored for modern architectures. This work develops a unified framework to characterize conservation laws for contemporary models, including feedforward networks with GELU, SiLU, and SwiGLU activations, multihead attention with sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings, and Mixture-of-Experts architectures under diverse gating designs. Our theoretical findings are supported by experiments that validate the predicted invariants.

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

BioPIE: A Biomedical Protocol Information Extraction Dataset for Experiment Understanding

arXiv:2601.04524v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding biomedical experiments provides a foundation for downstream tasks, e.g., laboratory automation, and facilitates effective cross-disciplinary communication. Two challenges, High Information Density (HID) and Multi-Step Reasoning (MSR), pose unique difficulties for precise experimental understanding. Extracting structured knowledge, e.g., Knowledge Graphs (KGs), is an effective approach to address the HID and MSR. However, existing biomedical datasets for structured knowledge information extraction are limited to a general or coarse-grained level, hindering fine-grained experimental understanding. To address this gap, we introduce Biomedical Protocol Information Extraction Dataset (BioPIE), a dataset providing procedure-centric KGs that capture entities, actions, and relations at a scale sufficient for reasoning across biomedical protocols. We evaluate information extraction methods on BioPIE and implement a question answering system leveraging the dataset for validation, demonstrating improved understanding performance on test sets as well as on the HID and MSR question sets.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Entanglement of Bethe States

arXiv:2606.14140v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the quantum entanglement of Bethe states across a family of integrable spin chains, including the XXX$_{\frac{1}{2}}$ model, its higher-spin generalizations (XXX$_s$), and the non-compact $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ chain. For on-shell eigenstates, we perform a comprehensive scan of the bipartite entanglement entropy across the entire spectrum of finite chains with periodic boundary conditions, and identify the Bethe solutions that minimize and maximize the entanglement. These extremal solutions follow systematic, spin-dependent patterns in the Bethe quantum numbers. In the XXX$_{\frac{1}{2}}$ spin chain, for the antiferromagnetic chain, the state with minimal entropy always coincides with the lowest-energy state (the ground state) within a given fixed-magnon sector. For the higher-spin XXX$_s$ model, however, the lowest-entropy state is not always identical to the ground state, and can even be the state of highest energy. By contrast, the Bethe roots that maximize entropy exhibit considerably more intricate structure. Our analysis further reveals how special Bethe root configurations, such as singular and strange solutions, affect entanglement, and it uncovers characteristic entanglement features in the non-compact $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ chain that are absent from compact spin chains. For off-shell Bethe states, we develop an optimization algorithm that extremizes the entanglement entropy over rapidity distributions, enabling us to explore the maximum entanglement achievable by a Bethe state without imposing the Bethe ansatz equations.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CombEval: A Framework for Evaluating Combinatorial Counting in Large Language Models

We present CombEval, a dynamic benchmark for evaluating combinatorial counting in large language models. CombEval represents each problem as a typed Cofola specification over entities, combinatorial objects, object dependencies, and constraints, enabling controlled generation of natural-language counting problems with exact solver-verified answers. Unlike static collections, CombEval supports systematic variation of object type, entity scale, constraint count, and reasoning depth. We evaluate 11 LLMs under direct and code-augmented settings and find that models remain brittle on ordered objects, indistinguishable elements, relatively positional constraints, and nested object dependencies. Error analysis further identifies failures in constraint interpretation and counting principles. CombEval provides a diagnostic testbed for studying when and why LLMs fail at combinatorial reasoning. The code and generated benchmark suites are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/YuxuZhou-CN/combination-problem-generation}.