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.AI) 2026-06-16

Hybrid NARX-LLM for Greenland Iceberg Discharge: Prompt-Driven Residual Correction

arXiv:2606.15288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Greenland iceberg discharge exhibits complex nonlinear dynamics with limited observability, challenging traditional predictive models. We present a Hybrid NARX-LLM framework that combines a nonlinear autoregressive model with exogenous inputs (NARX) and a large language model (LLM) for residual correction. We further propose a Physics-Informed Prompt (PIP) method that transforms unstructured physical knowledge into structured prompts for zero-shot in-context reasoning. The primary objective is to explore the corrective potential of this framework for modeling Greenland iceberg discharge, rather than merely optimizing predictive accuracy. The NARX component captures intrinsic temporal dependencies, while the LLM, guided by PIP, encodes glacier dynamics and environmental drivers and perceives key trend patterns to correct systematic prediction errors. This integration allows the model to reason about unmodeled factors and produce interpretable residuals, enhancing overall predictive accuracy. Applied to Greenland iceberg discharge time series, our approach addresses extreme events that are difficult to predict due to rare variations and nonstationary trends, a limitation often overlooked by traditional methods. By fusing structured time-series modeling with knowledge-driven foundation AI, the framework offers a scalable and interpretable pathway to bridge data-limited climate forecasting with physics-informed LLM reasoning. The code is available.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Feature-Aligned Speech Watermarking for Robustness to Reconstruction Distortions

arXiv:2606.11828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio watermarking aims to embed identifiable information into audio while remaining imperceptible. Existing methods adopt high-fidelity, low-energy designs to preserve perceptual quality, but the resulting watermarks lack robustness under suppression by speech reconstruction models. Improving robustness is challenging due to the inherent robustness-fidelity trade-off in existing designs, where increasing watermark energy improves robustness but reduces fidelity. To address this problem, we propose a feature-aligned watermarking method that aligns the watermark with the original speech feature distribution, allowing higher watermark energy to improve robustness while preserving imperceptibility. We use a pretrained speech codec to generate a pseudo-speech watermark and fuse it into the spectrogram of the input audio, with VAD loss and perceptual losses guiding embedding within voiced regions. Experiments show that our method maintains imperceptibility comparable to existing approaches while substantially improving robustness under both seen and unseen speech reconstruction models.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroQubit: a lightweight, honesty-first de-novo design platform for geroscience-native small molecules with calibrated uncertainty

Authors:

Computational molecule generation has outpaced its own credibility. We present GeroQubit, a GPU-free de-novo design platform that organizes candidates along a target x tissue x hallmark model and reports every signal alongside its measured baseline. We treat our tissue aging-signature readout as a mechanistic structural prior that we explicitly disclose is not validated against lifespan, and we surface efficacy only through a structure-to-lifespan k-NN whose weak but real signal (leave-one-out rho ~ 0.145) is wrapped in empirically-calibrated conformal intervals (90% target, 90.3% measured coverage). On a held-out retrospective recovery of ~1,940 ChEMBL binders against decoys, the score reaches ROC-AUC 0.945 with ~20x enrichment at 1% (BEDROC 0.91) and survives a scaffold-disjoint split - yet we report that it collapses to near-random (AUC 0.62) on genuinely novel chemotypes. Molecules are assembled reaction-first, so every candidate carries a verified synthetic route and atom-level synthon provenance; ADMET is handled as a multi-objective Pareto problem. We frame the disclosed weak signals and the hard-case failures not as flaws but as the honest, decision-useful output the field's own critics demand.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Privacy-Preserving Federated Autoencoder for ECG Anomaly Detection on Edge Devices

arXiv:2606.11556v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continuous electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring could surface rhythm abnormalities before they escalate into cardiovascular events. However, a deployable system must satisfy three requirements simultaneously: legal-grade privacy (GDPR, HIPAA), real-time inference on constrained edge hardware, and detection quality under non-IID cross-hospital data. We design and evaluate an end-to-end federated system addressing all three for unsupervised 12-lead ECG anomaly detection on PTB-XL dataset, combining three autoencoder families (VanillaAE, ConvAE, VAE), Flower-based federated averaging (FedAvg) across ten simulated hospitals, client-side differentially private SGD (DP-SGD) with a Rényi-DP accountant, and 8-bit integer (INT8) post-training quantization with Raspberry Pi 4 benchmarking. Our main contributions are: an empirical characterization of how these mechanisms compose, practical DP-specific recommendations, and technical and security insights for a clinically sensitive setting. Federated learning matches or exceeds the centralized baseline across all architectures (ConvAE federated area under the ROC curve, AUROC, $0.782$), and an $\varepsilon$ sweep identifies $\varepsilon=4$ as the recommended clinical operating point. INT8 quantization roughly halves model size and cuts Pi 4 latency by up to $44%$ with $

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

PCRAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for Transforming Noisy clinical conversations into Structured Pre-Consultation Medical Records and Reusable Clinical Data Resources

In primary care and outpatient settings, clinically important patient information is often embedded in fragmented, ambiguous, repetitive, and noisy communication between physicians and patients. This limits physicians ability to obtain a clear preconsultation overview of symptoms, history of present illness, and visit intent, while also preventing real world clinical dialogues from being reused in hospital information systems and medical artificial intelligence applications. To address this challenge, we developed PCRAgent, a centrally coordinated multi agent framework for preconsultation clinical information organization. Guided by physician inquiry logic, PCRAgent identifies, extracts, corrects, and standardizes patient-reported information from noisy consultations. Its coordinated modules including error detection, semantic editing, output control, contextual memory, and intent recognition enable robust parallel handling of spelling errors, repetitions, grammatical inconsistencies, medical ambiguities, and non-medical interference. A traceable edit list records intermediate corrections and context, allowing iterative refinement without redundant modifications. PCRAgent generates two complementary outputs. One is a PreConsultation Clinical Report for rapid physician review. The other is a Structured Clinical Conversation Dataset for hospital data construction and downstream AI applications. In evaluations using 220000 strongly perturbed consultations, PCRAgent maintained high robustness, achieving a clinical information accuracy of 4.99 out of 5 and key element completeness of 5 out of 5, outperforming GPT4o. Expert review of Chinese and English dialogues confirmed high clinical accuracy of 4.85 out of 5 and high safety of 4.79 out of 5. Multicenter validation in real-world outpatient workflows further demonstrated practical utility. These findings indicate that PCRAgent can efficiently transform noisy and unstructured consultations into physician ready reports and AI ready structured data, improving outpatient efficiency, reducing cognitive burden, ensuring information completeness, supporting precise decision-making, and enabling high-quality reuse of clinical data.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Poisson approximation by coupling

arXiv:2605.01894v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is well known that a binomial $(n,p)$ can be approximated by a Poisson distribution with parameter $np$. The typical approach in undergraduate probability texts is to show a convergence result for the distribution of the binomial as $n$ goes to infinity and $np$ converges to some $\lambda$. In this note we use instead the coupling technique to show a much more general result. Moreover, we only use elementary results from probability.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Simulating Hate Speech Cascades with Multi-LLM Agents: Empirical Grounding, Modeling Fidelity, and Intervention Strategies

Authors:

Faithful modeling of hateful content propagation on online platforms remains an open problem for moderation research. Classical cascade models that do not explicitly represent the profile, community, and content factors associated with hateful-content propagation may yield moderation strategies that behave less effectively when deployed in real-world scenarios. Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems can, in principle, make each reshare decision depend on the user's profile, the surrounding community, and the post's content, but it remains unclear whether this added flexibility actually reproduces real hateful cascades more faithfully than classical baselines. We study three hateful Bluesky cascades and a size-matched benign control. In the empirical Bluesky data, we found that: 97.4–99.7\% of reposters take a hostile stance; toxicity-engagement homophily is higher on the diffusion tree than on the follower graph for hateful cascades; topology is star-like for the hateful cascades (most reposts come directly from the root) versus tree-like for the benign cascade (reposts propagate through multi-hop chains). In simulation, a multi-LLM-agent simulator reproduces the stance monoculture and the toxicity-delta direction. A structured ablation identifies agent heterogeneity as the leading fidelity factor, and amplifier targeting on dense networks yields 7.5–12.9\% reduction at 5.7\% benign collateral.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ClawEnvKit: Automatic Environment Generation for Claw-Like Agents

Constructing environments for training and evaluating claw-like agents remains a manual, human-intensive process that does not scale. We argue that what is needed is not just a dataset, but an automated pipeline capable of generating diverse, verified environments on demand. To this end, we introduce ClawEnvKit, an autonomous generation pipeline that instantiates this formalism from natural language descriptions. The pipeline comprises three modules: (1) a parser that extracts structured generation parameters from natural language input; (2) a generator that produces the task specification, tool interface, and scoring configuration; and (3) a validator that enforces feasibility, diversity, structural validity, and internal consistency across the generated environments. Using ClawEnvKit, we construct Auto-ClawEval, the first large-scale benchmark for claw-like agents, comprising 1,040 environments across 24 categories. Empirically, Auto-ClawEval matches or exceeds human-curated environments on coherence and clarity at 13,800x lower cost. Evaluated across 4 model families and 8 agent harness frameworks, we find that harness engineering boosts performance by up to 15.7 percentage points over a bare ReAct baseline, completion remains the primary axis of variation with no model saturating the benchmark, and automated generation enables evaluation at a scale previously infeasible. Beyond static benchmarking, ClawEnvKit enables live evaluation: users describe a desired capability in natural language and obtain a verified environment on demand, turning evaluation into a continuous, user-driven process. The same mechanism serves as an on-demand training environment generator, producing task distributions that adapt to an agent's current weaknesses rather than being bounded by existing user logs.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

The Standard Model, The Exceptional Jordan Algebra, and Triality

Authors:

arXiv:2006.16265v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Jordan, Wigner and von Neumann classified the possible algebras of quantum mechanical observables, and found they fell into 4 "ordinary" families, plus one remarkable outlier: the exceptional Jordan algebra. We point out an intriguing relationship between the complexification of this algebra and the standard model of particle physics, its minimal left-right-symmetric $SU(3)\times SU(2)_{L}\times SU(2)_{R}\times U(1)$ extension, and $Spin(10)$ unification. This suggests a geometric interpretation, where a single generation of standard model fermions is described by the tangent space $(\mathbb{C}\otimes\mathbb{O})^{2}$ of the complex octonionic projective plane, and the existence of three generations is related to $SO(8)$ triality.

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

Pushing the Boundaries of Natural Reasoning: Interleaved Bonus from Formal-Logic Verification

arXiv:2601.22642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities, yet their stochastic next-token prediction creates logical inconsistencies and reward hacking that formal symbolic systems avoid. To bridge this gap, we introduce a formal logic verification-guided framework that dynamically interleaves formal symbolic verification with the natural language generation process, providing real-time feedback to detect and rectify errors as they occur. Distinguished from previous neuro-symbolic methods limited by passive post-hoc validation, our approach actively penalizes intermediate fallacies during the reasoning chain. We operationalize this framework via a novel two-stage training pipeline that synergizes formal logic verification-guided supervised fine-tuning and policy optimization. Extensive evaluation on six benchmarks spanning mathematical, logical, and general reasoning demonstrates that our 7B and 14B models outperform state-of-the-art baselines by average margins of 10.4% and 14.2%, respectively. These results validate that formal verification can serve as a scalable mechanism to significantly push the performance boundaries of advanced LLM reasoning.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The proteins that protect us from deadly mutations

Authors:

Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States. Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States.

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

Detecting Hate and Inflammatory Content in Bengali Memes: A New Multimodal Dataset and Co-Attention Framework

Internet memes have become a dominant form of expression on social media, including within the Bengali speaking community. While often humorous, memes can also be exploited to spread offensive, harmful, and inflammatory content targeting individuals and groups. Detecting this type of content is exceptionally challenging due to its satirical, subtle, and culturally specific nature. This problem is magnified for low-resource languages like Bengali, as existing research predominantly focuses on high-resource languages. To address this critical research gap, we introduce Bn-HIB (Bangla Hate Inflammatory Benign), a novel dataset containing 3,247 manually annotated Bengali memes categorized as Benign, Hate, or Inflammatory. Significantly, Bn- HIB is the first dataset to distinguish inflammatory content from direct hate speech in Bengali memes. Furthermore, we propose the MCFM (Multi-Modal Co-Attention Fusion Model), a simple yet effective architecture that mutually analyses both the visual and textual elements of a meme. MCFM employs a co-attention mechanism to identify and fuse the most critical features from each modality, leading to a more accurate classification. Our experiments show that MCFM significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art models on the Bn-HIB dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in this nuanced task. To facilitate reproducibility and future research, the Bn-HIB dataset has been made publicly available through Mendeley Data. Warning: This work contains material that may be disturbing to some audience members. Viewer discretion is advised

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

A mathematical study of the excess growth rate

arXiv:2510.25740v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The excess growth rate, defined as the gap in Jensen's inequality for the logarithm, is a fundamental functional in portfolio theory. In this paper, we present a mathematical study motivated by information theory. We begin by establishing its properties and showing that it has rich connections with information theoretic concepts such as the Helmholtz free energy, L. Campbell's measure of average code length and large deviations. Our main results consist of three axiomatic characterization theorems of the excess growth rate, in terms of (i) the relative entropy, (ii) the gap in Jensen's inequality, and (iii) the logarithmic divergence that generalizes the Bregman divergence. Furthermore, we study maximization of the excess growth rate and compare it with the growth optimal portfolio. Our results not only provide theoretical justifications of the significance of the excess growth rate, but also establish new connections between information theory and quantitative finance.

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

FactoryLLM: A Safe and Open-Source AI Playground for Evaluating LLMs in Smart Factories

arXiv:2606.14119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault diagnostics and recovery in smart factories is challenging because critical information is dispersed across manuals of multiple machines which are interconnected through the manufacturing process. Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide a promising approach. In this paper, we propose FactoryLLM, a safe and open-source AI playground designed for evaluating different LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models by analysing documents from multiple machines across the manufacturing process. FactoryLLM enables the user to configure the LLM, and assess performance when reasoning over multiple documents, through a dual evaluation setup using both RAGAS and NVIDIA's LLM-as-a-Judge metrics. FactoryLLM is safe because it allows users to run local or open-source LLMs without sharing sensitive industrial data, providing a controlled environment for experimentation. We demonstrate the efficacy of FactoryLLM through a case study which involves an Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle and its Mobile Planner software, evaluating three LLMs across 30 maintenance queries derived from approximately 600 pages of cross-machine documentation. The results suggest that FactoryLLM is effective in cross-machine document reasoning: every model achieved a groundedness score above 0.88. The full code and documentation for community to test FactoryLLM with their manufacturing specific scenarios are publicly available.

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

A Unified Definition of Hallucination: It's The World Model, Stupid!

Despite numerous attempts at mitigation since the inception of language models, hallucinations remain a persistent problem even in today's frontier LLMs. Why is this? We review existing definitions of hallucination and fold them into a single, unified definition wherein prior definitions are subsumed. We argue that hallucination can be unified by defining it as simply inaccurate (internal) world modeling, in a form where it is observable to the user. For example, stating a fact which contradicts a knowledge base OR producing a summary which contradicts the source. By varying the reference world model and conflict policy, our framework unifies prior definitions. We argue that this unified view is useful because it forces evaluations to clarify their assumed reference "world", distinguishes true hallucinations from planning or reward errors, and provides a common language for comparison across benchmarks and discussion of mitigation strategies. Building on this definition, we also connect our framework to HalluWorld, a complementary benchmark that instantiates fully specified reference world models for stress-testing model hallucinations.

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

Learning Sparse Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Multimodal Neuroimaging

Brain MRIs are routinely acquired as multiple complementary sequences with unique contrast weighting, including T1-weighed imaging (T1w) anatomic and fluid-sensitive T2-weighted (T2w) contrasts. However, methods for learning unified representations across the multitude of MRI contrast mechanisms at health-system scale are lacking. In this study, we introduce Neuro-JEPA, a sparse multimodal neuroimaging foundation model that combines a latent predictive objective with a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to encode brain MRI across core T1w, T2w, and fluid-suppressed FLAIR imaging (FLAIR). We further provide a systematic methodological study of architectural, masking, objective, and sparsity design choices beneficial for robust neuroimaging multimodal representation learning. Neuro-JEPA was pretrained on 1,551,862 scans from 428,647 studies after modality-specific preprocessing with data curation across three core structural brain MRI sequences. We evaluated the learned representations across clinical and research settings, including 25 tasks from three health systems: NYU Langone, NYU Long Island, and Massachusetts General Hospital, and 22 tasks from 12 public datasets, covering unimodal, multimodal and cross-domain evaluation configurations. Across these benchmarks, existing neuroimaging foundation models showed inconsistent gains over a simple convolutional neural network (CNN) baseline, whereas Neuro-JEPA achieved stronger and more consistent performance across all evaluated settings. These results establish a scalable methodological framework for multimodal neuroimaging representation learning and highlight the need for foundation model evaluation protocols that include simple baselines, clinically heterogeneous cohorts and controlled multimodal comparisons.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Evaluation of Trypanosoma brucei Phosphofructokinase Allosteric Inhibition: An In-Silico Study

Human African trypanosomiasis, caused by a protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei, is a neglected tropical disease for which well-tolerated, conveniently administered, and highly efficacious medicines are still missing. Previously, T. brucei Phosphofructokinase was targeted by small-molecule inhibitor development efforts. This approach has shown promise both in vitro and in vivo. In this study, we have used these wet-lab results, evaluated the compounds already characterised by Molecular Dynamics simulations, found relationships between in silico and wet-lab data and used these observations to evaluate compounds that we selected through several different approaches of virtual screens. We observed that inhibitor-ATP interactions are highly predictive of the inhibitory activity. Several compounds selected through virtual screens have outperformed previously characterised compounds.

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

When AUC Misleads: Polarization-Aware Evaluation of Deepfake Detectors under Domain Shift

Recent advances in generative AI, such as diffusion models and face-swapping tools, have enabled the creation of highly realistic deepfakes, leading to real-world harms including financial fraud and non-consensual explicit content. In response, deepfake detection has become an active research area, with recent methods increasingly focusing on improving generalization to unseen manipulations. This is typically evaluated using the Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) measured separately across multiple datasets. However, such an evaluation fails to reflect real-world scenarios where detectors face a mixture of data sources and varying artifact types. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel metric, Cross-dataset AUC (Cross-AUC) that averages per-domain AUCs with a measure of prediction polarization for taking into account the robustness to domain shift. The polarization extent is quantified by the Wasserstein Distance between class score distributions. Cross-AUC not only assesses the generalization capabilities of deepfake detectors under domain shifts more realistically, but it is also interpretable as it better explains the reason behind a drop in performance. Experiments performed on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate its practical relevance.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Boltzmann-Like Occupation of Nonequilibrium Steady States on Dense Networks

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central problem in statistical physics is to extend the Boltzmann distribution to nonequilibrium steady states (NESS). We prove that NESS on large dense networks have Boltzmann-like occupation despite extensive entropy production. We further show that the active-matter heuristic of "low rattling" is asymptotically exact. Intuitively, these NESS spend a greater fraction of their time in states they leave more slowly. This explanation extends to the broader class of "equiaccessible" steady states, which play a role in our analysis akin to that of equilibrium in linear response.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Neighborhood socioeconomic status associated with post-stroke cognitive impairment: a retrospective cohort study

Background: Late complications after stroke (LCAS), including cognitive symptoms, impact quality of life and recovery. It is not known if neighborhood-level measures of socioeconomic status (SES) influence LCAS. This study assessed associations between SES measures, including neighborhood income inequality (Gini) and area deprivation index (ADI), and cognitive symptoms after acute ischemic stroke (AIS) in a hospital leveraging active surveillance of LCAS. Methods: This retrospective cohort study included 512 patients hospitalized with AIS at Tufts Medical Center with subsequent follow-up (between zero and three months or between three and twelve months) in the Stroke Clinic from 1/1/2018 - 12/31/2022. Using ZIP code data, patients were characterized as low Gini (low inequality) and high ADI (high deprivation) (Gini = 5) by state medians. These variables were combined, indicating patients who were living in both a low Gini and high ADI neighborhood to evaluate the effects of living in a homogeneously deprived area. There were 206 and 281 patients in the low Gini and high ADI groups respectively. 140 patients lived in a low Gini and high ADI neighborhood. The multivariable logistic analysis assessed the likelihood of cognitive symptoms, adjusting for age, race, ethnicity, sex, NIH Stroke Scale (NIHSS), thrombolysis, active LCAS surveillance, poverty, and ADI-Gini combination. Results: There were no associations between high ADI (OR: 1.03, 95% CI: 0.67 ? 1.57) or low Gini (OR: 1.74, 95% CI: 0.98 ? 3.07) alone and cognitive symptoms after AIS. However, the combined variable demonstrated increased likelihood of cognitive symptoms in the high ADI-low Gini group (OR: 1.82, 95% CI: 1.08 ? 3.06). Conclusions: This study suggests that individuals living in homogeneously deprived neighborhoods report higher likelihood of cognitive symptoms after AIS. Further studies with increased power are needed to investigate the underlying causes of these disparities and to develop interventions to reduce these complications.

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

FOCUS on Contamination: Hydrology-Informed Noise-Aware Learning for Geospatial PFAS Mapping

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent environmental contaminants with significant public health impacts, yet large-scale monitoring remains severely limited due to the high cost and logistical challenges of field sampling. The lack of samples leads to difficulty simulating their spread with physical models and limited scientific understanding of PFAS transport in surface waters. Yet, rich geospatial and satellite-derived data describing land cover, hydrology, and industrial activity are widely available. We introduce FOCUS, a geospatial deep learning framework for PFAS contamination mapping that integrates sparse PFAS observations with large-scale environmental context, including priors derived from hydrological connectivity, land cover, source proximity, and sampling distance. These priors are integrated into a principled, noise-aware loss, yielding a robust training objective under sparse labels. Across extensive ablations, robustness analyses, and real-world validation, FOCUS consistently outperforms baselines including sparse segmentation, Kriging, and pollutant transport simulations, while preserving spatial coherence and scalability over large regions. Our results demonstrate how AI can support environmental science by providing screening-level risk maps that prioritize follow-up sampling and help connect potential sources to surface-water contamination patterns in the absence of complete physical models.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

CuMA: Aligning LLMs with Sparse Cultural Values via Demographic-Aware Mixture of Adapters

As Large Language Models (LLMs) serve a global audience, alignment must transition from enforcing universal consensus to respecting cultural pluralism. We demonstrate that dense models, when forced to fit conflicting value distributions, suffer from Mean Collapse, converging to a generic average that fails to represent diverse groups. We attribute this to Cultural Sparsity, where gradient interference prevents dense parameters from spanning distinct cultural modes. To resolve this, we propose \textsc{CuMA} (Cultural Mixture of Adapters), a framework that frames alignment as a conditional capacity separation problem. By incorporating demographic-aware routing, \textsc{CuMA} internalizes a Latent Cultural Topology to explicitly disentangle conflicting gradients into specialized expert subspaces. Extensive evaluations on WorldValuesBench, Community Alignment, and PRISM demonstrate that \textsc{CuMA} achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming both dense baselines and semantic-only MoEs. Crucially, our analysis confirms that \textsc{CuMA} effectively mitigates mean collapse, preserving cultural diversity. Our code is available at https://github.com/Throll/CuMA.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Input-Dependent Fisher Information for Local Sensitivity Analysis of Medical Image Classifiers

arXiv:2606.16362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep neural networks have achieved strong performance in medical image classification, but often work like black-box. Commonly used post-hoc interpretation methods often provide heuristic visualizations whose relationship to the classifier's predictive distribution is indirect. This work introduces a local sensitivity analysis framework based on the input-dependent Fisher Information Matrix (iFIM) of a trained classifier. The iFIM characterizes how the classifier's predictive distribution changes under infinitesimal perturbations of the input image. By using a Gram-matrix formulation, the nonzero eigenspectrum of the iFIM can be recovered without explicitly forming the full image-dimensional Fisher matrix. The leading iFIM eigenspace is then used to project an input image into a high local-sensitivity component and its orthogonal component. These components provide a model-intrinsic description of local predictive sensitivity, rather than a conventional pixel-wise attribution heatmap or a causal segmentation of task-relevant anatomy. The framework is evaluated on controlled and clinical medical image classification tasks using multiple classifier architectures. Perturbation-based experiments show that high-sensitivity iFIM components are more strongly coupled to changes in predictive confidence and classification performance than lower-sensitivity complementary components. The results support the iFIM framework as a principled tool for analyzing local decision sensitivity and for complementing existing attribution-based interpretability methods in medical imaging.

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

Beyond the Smile: A Hybrid Convolutional VAE for Crypto Volatility Surfaces

arXiv:2606.16961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a convolutional variational autoencoder for cryptocurrency implied-volatility surfaces, together with a deployable predictor that combines it with a quadratic smile re-fit through a deterministic per-tenor routing rule. Trained on 6,034 fully-filled hourly Binance Options surfaces of BTC and ETH spanning May-October 2023 and parameterised on a common $6 \times 7$ tenor-delta grid, the model attains a hidden-cell surface-completion RMSE in the 0.94-1.56 vol-point range across both markets and mask rates 10-50%. The hybrid predictor attains 0.83 vol points at 50% masking against 7.00 for the smile re-fit alone, an eightfold reduction obtained at no additional inference cost. Under structurally-correlated hole patterns that emulate the withdrawal of an entire tenor of strikes, the smile re-fit incurs 9.6-13.1 vol points of error while the learned model remains at 1.5-1.9, isolating a regime in which the generative model is the only viable predictor. Joint training on BTC and ETH improves the in-distribution model on both markets by 9-27% relative to the better-performing single-symbol counterpart, indicating a substantially shared vol-surface manifold across the two largest cryptocurrencies over the observation window. The hybrid is calendar- and butterfly-arbitrage-free at the listed strikes, a property that the parametric smile re-fit alone fails at high mask rates. The per-snapshot reconstruction error of the trained model flags the late-October ETF-anticipation rally and the August $17$, $2023$ flash crash as elevated-error periods without supervision. All training and evaluation infrastructure is released to support reproducible follow-on work.