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) 2026-06-12

Neuro-Symbolic Agents for Regulated Process Automation: Challenges and Research Agenda

arXiv:2606.13405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based agents are entering regulated industries where they automate judgment intensive quality management processes. We argue that symbolic structures already embedded in these domains, including regulations, typed process models, and compliance constraints, should be treated not merely as external monitoring mechanisms but as core architectural components that shape the agent's decision-making and behavior. We propose compliance-by-construction as a complementary paradigm to guardrail-based monitoring: a structural foundation that prevents control-flow violations, while guardrails remain essential for catching semantic errors. We identify a structured set of neuro-symbolic research challenges on foundational and capability level and show that addressing them jointly enables compliance-by-construction. We call on the neuro-symbolic community to engage with regulated process automation as a high impact research domain.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Can Post-Training Turn LLMs into Good Medical Coders? An Empirical Study of Generative ICD Coding

Automated International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding is a core medical-coding task for billing, epidemiology, and clinical decision support. Generative large language models (LLMs) are often reported as weak medical coders, but this finding mainly comes from inference-time settings such as prompting, retrieval, reranking, or tool use, leaving the role of task-specific post-training underexplored. We present a controlled empirical study of post-training for generative ICD coding, comparing discriminative baselines with LLM coders across prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning under a common protocol and metric set. To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate RL-based post-training for generative LLM coders in ICD coding. We further introduce PHI, a diagnostic curriculum that extends GRPO to refine missed-code cases. Our results show that prompting-only evaluation substantially underestimates the potential of LLMs for ICD coding. SFT provides the main capability jump, GRPO further improves code-set prediction beyond SFT, and PHI provides targeted gains on macro-level performance. These findings suggest that the main bottleneck is not the generative formulation alone, but how the model is adapted and optimized for full-taxonomy recall. We release our code, data splits, and checkpoints at https://github.com/AlexandreWANG915/LLM4ICD.

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

The Faithfulness Gap: Certifying Semantic Equivalence Between Natural-Language and Formal Mathematical Statements

arXiv:2606.16541v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoformalization, translating natural-language mathematics into formal proof assistants, is bottlenecked not by translation fluency but by faithfulness: a formal statement can typecheck and be provable, yet still encode a different theorem than the source intended. We introduce Bidirectional Provability Fingerprinting (\bpf{}), a framework that certifies faithfulness by characterizing each candidate through its forward and backward consequence neighborhoods in the ambient theory and matching these against probes derived from the natural-language statement. We further introduce four novel components: (i) Counterfactual Probe Generation (\cpg{}), a contrastive procedure that synthesizes probes targeting specific drift directions; (ii) the Equivalence Spectrum, a continuous faithfulness score that replaces brittle binary verdicts; (iii) Adaptive Probe Budget Allocation (\apba{}), an information-theoretic budget router; and (iv) Faithfulness-Guided Decoding (\fgd{}), which uses \bpf{} signals as a reward during autoformalization. We prove a drift detection theorem and a PAC-faithfulness result establishing that the equivalence class of a natural language statement is learnable from $\mathcal{O}(\log(1/\delta)/\varepsilon)$ probes under mild assumptions. We release \driftbench{}, a benchmark of $2{,}183$ NL/Lean~4 pairs with controlled drift labels across six subfields of mathlib4. \bpf{}\,+\,\cpg{} detects $89.6\%$ of drifted formalizations at a $3.0\%$ false-positive rate-against $41.2\%$ for typecheck and $63.3\%$ for LLM-judge baselines, and \fgd{} reduces the rate at which a state-of-the-art autoformalizer emits drifted statements by $47\%$. https://pmlrbd.github.io/BPF/

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Convergence Rate Analysis of the AdamW-style Shampoo: Unifying One-Sided and Two-Sided Preconditioning

arXiv:2601.07326v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies AdamW-style Shampoo, an effective variant of the classical Shampoo that won the external tuning track of the AlgoPerf neural network training competition. Our analysis unifies one-sided and two-sided preconditioning. When the exponents of the two preconditioners sum to $1/2$, we establish the convergence rate $\frac{1}{K}\sum_{k=1}^KE\left[||\nabla f(X_k)||_*\right]\leq O(\frac{\sqrt{m+n}C}{K^{1/4}})$, where $K$ represents the number of iterations, $(m,n)$ denotes the dimensions of the matrix-valued parameters, and $C$ matches the constant appearing in the optimal convergence rate of SGD. Theoretically, the nuclear norm and Frobenius norm satisfy $||\nabla f(X)||_F\leq ||\nabla f(X)||_*\leq \sqrt{\min\{m,n\}}||\nabla f(X)||_F$, which suggests that our convergence rate is analogous to the optimal $\frac{1}{K}\sum_{k=1}^KE\left[||\nabla f(X_k)||_F\right]\leq O(\frac{C}{K^{1/4}})$ convergence rate of SGD in the ideal case where $||\nabla f(X)||_*= \Theta(\sqrt{\min\{m,n\}})||\nabla f(X)||_F$ and $m$ and $n$ are of comparable magnitude. Then, we extend our analysis to settings where the preconditioning exponents do not sum to 1/2, and establish convergence with an explicit but more involved rate.

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

TERMS-Bench: Diagnosing LLM Negotiation Agents Beyond Deal Rate

arXiv:2605.13909v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Negotiation is a central mechanism of economic exchange, shaping markets, procurement, labor agreements, and resource allocation. It is also a canonical testbed for agentic language models, requiring multi-turn interaction under hidden preferences, strategic communication, and binding constraints. These properties make negotiation hard to evaluate: unlike math or code, it has no intrinsic verifier. Existing LLM negotiation evaluations rely on LLM-vs.-LLM interaction or aggregate outcomes such as deal rate, leaving failures opaque. We introduce Terms-Bench, short for Testbed for Economic Reasoning in Multi-turn Strategy, a Bayesian-game framework that makes the environment itself the verifier by specifying the counterpart's latent type, policy, and payoff structure. We instantiate it in bilateral price negotiation, where the counterpart's private state and simulator policy are hidden from the agent but observable to the evaluator. This turns the counterpart from a black-box opponent into a diagnostic instrument, enabling agent-attributable failure analysis and oracle-reference optimality gaps. Evaluating 13 LLM agents spanning frontier systems from major providers, Terms-Bench turns negotiation evaluation from aggregate ranking into actionable diagnosis: where agents fail, why they fail, and what to strengthen. Empirically, frontier models saturate deal rate yet diverge in surplus extraction, cue use, belief calibration, and compliance, revealing agent-specific bargaining bottlenecks masked by prior benchmarks.

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

What Should a Streaming Video Model Remember?

Streaming video understanding models must answer queries at any moment during an ongoing stream, using only what they have observed so far and under fixed memory and computation budgets. Existing methods address this by adding memory banks, retrieval modules, or visual token compression to preserve long-range history. However, strong recent-window baselines show that indiscriminate history injection can dilute current-scene perception, suggesting that the key challenge is not whether to use memory, but how to allocate it selectively. We formulate this as budgeted online latent evidence allocation and propose SelectStream, a selective latent-memory framework that keeps the current observation directly visible to a frozen VLM while exposing historical information only through a compact, query-conditioned evidence budget. Three coordinated mechanisms govern when to write, what to preserve, and how to retrieve: surprise-driven adaptive windowing, priority-preserving consolidation, and query-conditioned graph reasoning over a fixed-capacity latent memory graph. Retrieved evidence is calibrated and injected as latent tokens for answer generation, without replaying frames or growing the context with stream length. Experimental results show that SelectStream achieves strong online streaming performance and preserves general video understanding, reaching 82.67\% on StreamingBench, 67.03\% on OVO-Bench, and 74.4\% average accuracy on offline video benchmarks, while outperforming strong recent-window baselines and prior streaming memory methods.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MirrorCheck: Efficient Adversarial Defense for Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly susceptible to sophisticated adversarial attacks, including adaptive strategies specifically designed to bypass existing defenses. To address this vulnerability, we propose MirrorCheck, a robust and model-agnostic detection framework that operates effectively in both unimodal and multimodal settings. MirrorCheck leverages Text-to-Image (T2I) models to regenerate visual content from captions produced by the target model and assesses semantic consistency by comparing feature-space embeddings between the original and synthesized images. To enhance robustness against adaptive attacks, MirrorCheck introduces a stochastic defense strategy that randomly selects T2I generators and image encoders from a diverse model zoo. Additionally, we incorporate a novel One-Time-Use (OTU) perturbation applied to the selected encoder embeddings, regulated by a scaling factor, which decreases the effectiveness of adaptive attacks. Extensive experiments across multiple threat scenarios demonstrate that MirrorCheck consistently outperforms baseline methods, and maintains its utility even under strong adaptive adversarial conditions.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Gradient Mean-Field Dynamics with Measure-Valued States: Well-Posedness, Chaos, and Long-Time Stability

arXiv:2606.24385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a stochastic mean-field interacting particle system whose state space is $\Y = \Tt^d \times \cP(U)$, where the first component represents a spatial variable and the second one is a probability measure over a compact metric space $U$. The dynamics are driven by locally Lipschitz drift operators: the spatial component evolves according to a Brownian diffusion, while the measure-valued component is perturbed by a projected cylindrical noise acting in the Arens–Eells space. We first establish existence and uniqueness of strong solutions for both the $N$-particle system and the associated nonlinear McKean–Vlasov equation under locally Lipschitz and linear growth assumptions on the drift coefficients. We then prove propagation of chaos: as $N\to\infty$, the empirical measure converges in expectation in Wasserstein–1 distance towards the unique McKean–Vlasov solution. Further, we investigate exponential convergence of the nonlinear McKean–Vlasov dynamics towards a unique invariant measure.

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

GridVQA-X: A Framework for Evaluating Multimodal Explainability Methods

With the increasing development of Vision-Language Models, it becomes imperative that their predictions are readily explainable to relevant stakeholders. However, the field of explainability has not kept pace with the multimodal surge. While recent Multimodal Explainable AI (MxAI) methods generate explanations to attribute the interaction between different modalities, current evaluation protocols lack the ground truth required to distinguish between true cross-modal reasoning (e.g., spatial composition) and shallow cross-modal shortcuts (e.g., Bag-of-Words attribute matching). It remains unknown whether MxAI methods faithfully capture synergistic interactions or merely hallucinate reasoning on models acting as simple feature detectors. In this paper, we introduce GridVQA-X, the first diagnostic framework specifically designed to evaluate cross-modal explainability. Unlike natural datasets, GridVQA-X leverages a closed-world synthesis logic to generate unique, mathematically guaranteed explanations. We utilize this controlled environment to train paired ground-truth models on identical architectures: $M_{pure}$, which learns robust spatial-relational reasoning and $M_{spur}$, which is structurally forced to rely on cross-modal shortcuts. This behavioral divergence creates a rigorous testbed: a faithful explainer must report distinct reasoning pathways for each model. Our findings reveal that widely used methods fail to distinguish between models relying on genuine spatial-relational reasoning and those exploiting cross-modal shortcuts, highlighting a critical gap in capturing true cross-modal synergy and misrepresenting how multimodal models actually make decisions.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Renewable Lasso without Batch-Number Constraints: A Gradient-Enhanced Approach

arXiv:2606.11738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study online estimation for high-dimensional generalized linear models with streaming data. First, for the non-distributed setting, we propose a gradient-enhanced surrogate loss that approximates the cumulative loss using only historical summaries, which modifies and improves upon the existing renewable estimation approach for the same model in the high-dimensional setting, and removes the batch-number constraint in previous studies. We then extend the method to distributed streaming data under the master-client architecture, where batches are partitioned across sites and only summaries (gradient vectors) are exchanged. Instead of directing applying the popular method of Jordan et al. (2019) to the surrogate quadratic loss, our adjusted approach does not require the clients to compute the full surrogate loss. We derive non-asymptotic error bounds under the high-dimensional scaling, without the stringent constraint on the number of batches in the previous studies. Simulation results under linear and logistic models, together with a real-data application, show improved accuracy over existing renewable estimators.

11.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-02

Proteomic signatures of early retinal neurodegeneration in type 2 diabetes mellitus

Authors:

by Huangdong Li, Ziyu Zhu, Shaopeng Yang, Weijing Cheng, Shaoying Tan, Zhuoyao Xin, Lei Zhang, Zhuoting Zhu, Shida Chen, Wenyong Huang, Wei Wang Background Retinal neurodegeneration is an early and independent feature of diabetic retinal disease and has been proposed as a window into the systemic neural consequences of diabetes, yet accessible molecular biomarkers and individualized prediction tools remain scarce. We aimed to identify circulating plasma protein signatures of diabetic retinal neurodegeneration (DRN) and to translate them into a clinically usable risk prediction system. Methods and findings In this multi-cohort prospective observational study, we integrated high-throughput plasma proteomics with longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) in two independent populations. The discovery cohort comprised 1,492 participants had baseline plasma proteomics and OCT, and 1,218 were followed with repeated OCT over 6 years in Guangzhou Diabetic Eye Study (GDES). DRN was quantified by the annualized OCT-derived retinal nerve fiber layer thinning rate. In multivariable analyses adjusted for age, sex, smoking, systolic blood pressure, HbA1c, and diabetes duration, we identified 71 plasma proteins associated with development and progression of DRN. These proteins mapped onto pathways governing inflammatory immune recruitment, extracellular matrix remodeling, and microvascular homeostasis, providing a plausible biological basis for DRN. We developed a proteomics-based DRN model (Pro-DRN) using eight machine learning (ML) algorithms, including XGBoost and LightGBM. In the independent test set, Pro-DRN achieved a C-index of 0.860, rising to 0.908 when integrated with clinical variables. Compared with six conventional models, Pro-DRN improved discrimination (ΔC-index 0.137 to 0.159; all P 

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

VrySure: A Multi-Task AI Scientific Fraud Detection Platform for Identifying Manipulated and AI-Generated Biomedical Research Images

Integrity of scientific data is critical in biomedical research, where images often serve as primary evidence for experimental observations and conclusions. Advances in image-editing technologies and generative artificial intelligence (AI) have increased the accessibility and realism of visual manipulation, making detection through manual review increasingly challenging. To empower our laboratory researchers to continuously monitor and uphold scientific rigor and data integrity, and serve the global scientific community, we developed VrySure, an easy-to-deploy, AI-driven multi-task platform for automated image-integrity screening in biomedical research. VrySure integrates four detection modules: cross-image transformation detection, within-image copy-move detection, splicing detection in blot and gel images, and AI-generated image detection. The system identifies potentially manipulated images and, when possible, localizes suspicious regions using bounding-box outputs to support downstream verification. To support development and evaluation, we constructed task-specific datasets by combining public biomedical image resources, curated manipulated examples, and synthetic images generated by multiple generative AI systems. We evaluated VrySure using region-level F1 score, recall, precision, false negative rate (FNR), and false discovery rate (FDR) across multiple manipulation categories and compared its performance with two commonly used commercial image-integrity screening platforms under a predefined benchmark protocol. Under the tested conditions, VrySure achieved a higher F1 score and recall, lower FNR, and maintained a low FDR for within-image copy-move detection, splicing detection, and AI-generated image detection, while showing comparable performance in transformation detection. Beyond automated screening, VrySure is designed to support source-data comparison and evidence-based assessment in scientific integrity investigations. By integrating multiple detection capabilities into a unified and scalable workflow, VrySure provides a practical framework to improve the efficiency and consistency of image-integrity screening in biomedical research.

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

Explainable Task-Oriented Token Communication for AI-Native 6G Networks

The integration of Foundation Models (FMs) and wireless communications is driving the evolution of image communication from bit-accurate transmission toward task-oriented transmission. However, existing task-oriented image communication methods still face three major challenges: insufficient task-oriented Token representation, inadequate collaboration between Visual Tokens and Task Tokens, and limited interpretability of task decisions. To address these challenges, we propose an Explainable Task-Oriented Token Communication (ET-TokenCom) framework. By treating Tokens as unified units for information representation and transmission, the proposed framework constructs an end-to-end communication link that spans visual perception, wireless transmission, and task reasoning. At the transmitter, the ET-TokenCom framework extracts Visual Tokens from images to preserve low-level visual information. Meanwhile, Task Tokens generated by the FM are introduced to represent the target information and decision intent required by the current task. A Cross-Modal Attention (CMA) fusion mechanism is further designed, enabling Task Tokens to explicitly guide the selection, weighting, and transmission of Visual Tokens. At the receiver, the framework integrates Token decoding with an explainable output mechanism, where attention heatmaps are generated to highlight critical perceptual regions under different task objectives and reveal the influence of Task Tokens on the outputs. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed ET-TokenCom framework.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Initial-state-dependent dephasing effect in non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger models

arXiv:2606.24185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the dynamical evolution of non-Hermitian systems under extra external dissipation is essential. Dephasing, a major realistic dissipation, is conventionally considered detrimental to information processing. However, its impact on non-Hermitian systems remains largely unexplored. Here, we focus on finite-sized non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) lattice models with alternating gain and loss in real space and examine the dynamical evolution of the trace distance under pure dephasing. By tuning system parameters, this model supports phases with either parity-time or anti-parity-time symmetries, enabling us to explore the interplay between dephasing and different non-Hermitian symmetries. While the trace distance exhibits distinct dynamical behaviors across the different phases in the absence of dephasing, its response to dephasing is largely symmetry-independent but instead initial-state dependent. By varying initial states, we observe that increasing the dephasing strength can either merely accelerate the decay of the trace distance or stabilize it. Interestingly, we reveal two kinds of dephasing-induced stabilization that differ in the strong dephasing limit: a partial stabilization, where the trace distance approaches a finite value smaller than its initial value in the long-time limit, and a complete stabilization, where the trace distance remains at its initial value throughout the entire evolution. By analyzing the equation of motion, we attribute the initial-state dependent dephasing effect to the alternating gain and loss in the system and confirm its absence in Hermitian counterparts. Furthermore, in the anti-parity-time symmetry unbroken phase, we identify a continuous suppression-upon increasing the dephasing strength-of the otherwise exponential decay of the trace distance seen in the absence of dephasing.

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

SPI: Query-Depth-Adaptive Indexing for Streaming RAG in Vector Databases

Vector databases (VecDBs) are increasingly deployed in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines where query processing and document ingestion occur concurrently. The index layer needs to provide low-latency search while incorporating new vectors without frequent global rebuilding. Existing VecDB pipelines typically operate within a uniform representation regime, despite substantial variation in the semantic granularity required across queries. This motivates an index design that supports incremental updates while adapting retrieval depth to query distribution and complexity. We propose Semantic Pyramid Indexing (SPI), a VecDB-layer indexing framework that organizes embeddings into $L$ semantically aligned resolution levels and selects retrieval depth per query via a lightweight uncertainty-aware controller. SPI supports progressive coarse-to-fine ANN search, level-wise streaming insertion without global rebuilds, and distributed execution through LSH partitioning with asynchronous gRPC coordination. Unlike hierarchical ANN structures with fixed traversal rules (e.g., SPANN), SPI adapts resolution at query time while remaining compatible with FAISS and Qdrant backends. On MS MARCO and Natural Questions, SPI achieves competitive Recall@10 with lower latency under the same dense encoder family, yielding a 1.4–2.3$\times$ average retrieval latency reduction under fixed Recall@10 targets relative to comparable approximate-ANN baselines. A prototype scaling study up to 8 nodes shows $6.2\times$ throughput scaling (${\approx}73\%$ efficiency); the 16-node configuration is included for completeness but shows diminishing efficiency. We provide a top-$K$ stability guarantee: queries with sufficient retrieval margin return an identical top-$K$ set at a shallower level. Code and configurations are available at https://github.com/FastLM/SPI_VecDB.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cardiac rhythm development: A wearable device index of risk for physical and mental illness in adolescence

Objective. The autonomic nervous system, which regulates cardiac rhythm, undergoes pronounced maturation across adolescence. How cardiac rhythm develops over this period, however, and whether individual differences in its development forecast mental and physical illness, remain open questions. We used three waves of Fitbit data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study to characterize the developmental trajectory of the cardiac rhythm and to test whether variation in that trajectory predicts onset of psychopathology and cardiometabolic disease. Methods. 8,301 adolescents contributed 242,811 valid Fitbit wear days across Waves 2 (Mage=12), 4 (Mage=14), and 6 (Mage=16). Cosinor mixed-effects models yielded three rhythm parameters per session: mesor (24-hour mean), amplitude (diurnal swing), and acrophase (peak timing). We first characterized age- and sex-specific trajectories, cross-wave stability, and factors shaping the rhythm. We then used parallel-process latent growth models to test whether within-person changes in rhythm tracked symptom trajectories, and hierarchical logistic models to test whether rhythm parameters predicted the first clinical onset of psychopathology and of obesity and hypertension. Results. The cardiac rhythm changed substantially across adolescence: mesor decreased, amplitude flattened, and acrophase shifted later. Within-person change in the rhythm tracked change in blood pressure, BMI, and trajectories of depression and ADHD symptoms. Higher mesor predicted incident onset of all five outcomes controlling for demographics, baseline symptoms, and behavior (ORs 1.36-1.54); amplitude, acrophase, and rhythm instability conferred additional risk. Conclusions. The 24-hour cardiac rhythm is a passively measurable substrate of adolescent autonomic development that indexes transdiagnostic risk for psychiatric and cardiometabolic illness.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

It's Complicated: On the Design and Evaluation of AI-Powered AAC Interfaces

arXiv:2606.24854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance what people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are able to do with their systems. However, evaluating AI-powered AAC interfaces can be difficult. People are intersectional beings and current evaluation metrics can struggle to capture the multifaceted and nuanced desires people may have for their AAC. We explore the complicated nature of six AAC problem spaces, explore how AI might be used in these spaces, and suggest more robust methods of evaluation that take the intersectional nuances of people into account. We also discuss broader issues that arise across these problem spaces and how they could be addressed using our proposed evaluation methods.

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

Multi-agent imitation learning with function approximation: Linear Markov games and beyond

arXiv:2602.22810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we present the first theoretical analysis of multi-agent imitation learning (MAIL) in linear Markov games where both the transition dynamics and each agent's reward function are linear in some given features. We demonstrate that by leveraging this structure, it is possible to replace the state-action level "all policy deviation concentrability coefficient" (Freihaut et al., arXiv:2510.09325) with a concentrability coefficient defined at the feature level which can be much smaller than the state-action analog when the features are informative about states' similarity. Furthermore, to circumvent the need for any concentrability coefficient, we turn to the interactive setting. We provide the first, computationally efficient, interactive MAIL algorithm for linear Markov games and show that its sample complexity depends only on the dimension of the feature map $d$. Building on these theoretical findings, we propose a deep MAIL interactive algorithm which clearly outperforms BC on games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect4.

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

A Tutorial on World Models and Physical AI

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12783v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World modeling is emerging as a central principle for building intelligent systems capable of prediction, reasoning, and decision making. A central distinction can be drawn between explicit world models, which learn structured dynamics for rollout-based reasoning and planning, and implicit world models, which encode predictive structure within scalable learned representations. These complementary paradigms provide a foundation for physical AI in domains such as robotics and autonomous driving, enabling intelligence beyond reactive control under real-world constraints. Recent foundation models further suggest a pathway toward unified systems integrating perception, prediction, and action. Despite rapid progress, major challenges remain in hierarchical reasoning, long-horizon planning, and autonomous goal formation, which are critical for advancing toward artificial general intelligence. This tutorial presents a coherent framework in which diverse world modeling approaches are unified through shared predictive structure and differentiated by how such structure is represented and exploited.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

UniDrive: A Unified Vision-Language and Grounding Framework for Interpretable Risk Understanding in Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2606.24759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for autonomous driving scene understanding, yet existing methods still face a fundamental trade-off between temporal reasoning and spatial precision. Models that rely on single-frame or low-resolution inputs often miss small, distant, or partially occluded hazards, while language-centric driving models frequently provide limited grounded evidence for their explanations. To address this gap, we propose UniDrive, a unified visual-language and grounding framework for interpretable risk understanding in autonomous driving. UniDrive combines a temporal reasoning branch that models scene dynamics from multi-frame visual input with a high-resolution perception branch that preserves fine-grained spatial details from the latest frame. The two branches are integrated through a gated cross-attention fusion module, enabling dynamic context to be aligned with precise spatial evidence. Based on the fused representation, UniDrive jointly generates natural-language risk descriptions and grounded bounding-box outputs for risk objects. Experiments on the DRAMA-Reasoning benchmark show that UniDrive outperforms representative image-based and video-based baselines in both captioning and risk-object grounding. In particular, UniDrive achieves the best overall performance on the validation split and demonstrates clear advantages in small-object localization, zero-shot generalization to NuScenes and BDD100K, and human-rated interpretability and trustworthiness. These results suggest that explicitly combining temporal semantics and high-resolution perception provides a stronger foundation for interpretable and safety-oriented autonomous driving systems. The code is available at https://github.com/pixeli99/unidrive-dev.

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

Policy-aware Vector Search: A Vision for Fine Grained Access Control in Vector Databases

arXiv:2606.19803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vector databases are increasingly used in security sensitive contexts with Retrieval Augmented Generation and organizational AI pipelines; however, their security capabilities remain limited. Specifically, Fine-grained Access Control (FGAC) which is required to ensure that data access adheres to user-specific policies is not fully supported in modern vector databases. Unlike relational databases, vector databases combine structured and unstructured attributes to provide semantic, approximate query results, which complicates FGAC implementation. This creates an inherent tension between enforcing FGAC policies correctly, achieving high ANN search recall and maintaining low query latency. In this paper, we present a vision for Policy-aware Vector Search by formalizing the FGAC policy model in vector databases as well as the enforcement problem. We compare various enforcement strategies, present preliminary findings, and identify key open challenges for future research in policy-aware vector search.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Decentralized SGD with Controlled Disagreement Finds Flatter Minima

arXiv:2602.02899v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized training is often regarded as inferior to centralized training because the consensus errors between workers are thought to undermine convergence and generalization. This work challenges this view by introducing decentralized SGD with Adaptive Consensus (DSGD-AC), which uses a time-dependent scaling mechanism to maintain consensus errors throughout the training. We show that adaptive consensus changes the stationary variance of disagreement modes by balancing two effects: it preserves consensus-error magnitude through weaker graph damping while still allowing curvature-dependent damping to shape the disagreement directions. This balance can produce a stronger Hessian-weighted loss-envelope penalty around the deployed model, even when normalized Hessian alignment is weaker than in standard DSGD. Empirical results on image classification show that DSGD-AC reaches flatter solutions and higher test accuracy than standard DSGD and even centralized SGD. Together, these results support consensus errors as a useful implicit regularizer and open a new perspective on the design of decentralized learning algorithms.

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

Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Chemotherapy Pharmacokinetics: Benchmarking the Clinical Estimator and Exposing Parameter Identifiability

arXiv:2606.12658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are an attractive tool for partial-observation problems in biology, where the governing dynamics are known but some compartments cannot be measured. Chemotherapy pharmacokinetics (PK) is a clean instance: drug concentration in plasma is routinely measured, but concentration in tissue – which determines tumour kill and off-target toxicity – is not. We benchmark a PINN against the standard clinical baseline (nonlinear least-squares on the analytical biexponential plasma solution, hereafter NLS) and a physics-agnostic neural baseline (a data-only MLP) on two PK problems. On the linear two-compartment problem, NLS is near-optimal; the PINN matches it to within a small constant factor while also producing the tissue curve in a single training pass, whereas the data-only MLP fails on tissue by roughly 10x. On a Michaelis-Menten extension (saturable elimination), the biexponential closed form no longer exists, so NLS is mis-specified and silently returns meaningless rate constants. The PINN instead exposes a deeper fact: the Michaelis-Menten two-compartment model is non-identifiable from plasma alone, and the PINN reports this honestly by converging to a basin with k12 -> 0. Adding two sparse tissue observations largely resolves identifiability: across five seeds the PINN recovers k21 to within 1% of truth and Vmax, Km to within one standard-deviation bar, while k12 moves in the correct direction (0.02 -> 0.82) but remains ~2 sigma below truth – a recovery the closed-form NLS estimator cannot attempt at all, because its biexponential ansatz describes only plasma. Our claim is not that PINNs beat NLS. It is that PINNs offer a uniform recipe that ties the textbook estimator on the textbook problem, exposes structural identifiability that the textbook estimator hides, and absorbs heterogeneous measurements within a single loss.

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

Landmark-free Assessment of Lower-limb Alignment with Implicit Neural Shape Functions from Knee Radiographs

Radiographic assessment of lower-limb alignment (LLA) is important for predicting joint health and surgical outcomes in total knee arthroplasty. Traditional measurement methods are manual and time-consuming, while recent machine learning approaches typically rely on locating a fixed set of anatomical landmarks. This dependence limits flexibility and may require re-annotation when clinical definitions change. To address this, we propose an automated workflow using Implicit Neural Shape Functions (INSF). Rather than relying on explicit landmark coordinates, we encode the anatomy into a compact latent space and regress clinical alignment measurements directly from these latent codes. This architecture allows for rapid extendability to new tasks without altering the backbone representation. We trained our method on an internal dataset of 566 knee radiographs, each annotated with the outline of the femur and tibia. We evaluated it on both an internal test dataset of 50 patients and a separate external set of 402 preoperative cases from the MRKR dataset. Manual clinical measurements are available for these data, and the MRKR measurements will be made publicly accessible. Performance was comparable to state-of-the-art landmark-based methods and manual agreement, while offering a flexible shape representation that can be extended to additional measurement tasks.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Fisher Width: A Geometric Measure of Complexity on Statistical Manifolds

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gaussian width is a central geometric complexity measure in high-dimensional probability, compressed sensing, convex optimization, and learning theory. It quantifies the average extent of a set along random directions, thereby capturing the effective dimension of constraint sets, hypothesis classes, and descent cones. However, this notion is intrinsically Euclidean. Statistical models instead carry a natural Riemannian geometry induced by the Fisher information metric, where directions are scaled according to statistical distinguishability rather than ambient Euclidean length. We introduce Fisher width, a Fisher-geometric analogue of Gaussian width for statistical manifolds. At a parameter point $\theta$, Fisher width replaces the Euclidean identity by the local metric tensor $G(\theta)^{1/2}$, measuring the Gaussian width of the Fisher-rescaled set. This makes the resulting quantity sensitive to local statistical curvature and invariant under smooth reparameterizations. We develop the basic theory of Fisher width, showing that it retains key structural features of Gaussian width, including concentration, metric perturbation stability, and spectral comparison bounds with the Euclidean baseline, while also capturing anisotropic geometric effects invisible to Euclidean measures. As an application, we prove a generalization bound for Fisher-Lipschitz hypothesis classes and propose computable estimators, which we evaluate empirically on MNIST across three model classes. Fisher width is to statistical manifolds what Gaussian width is to Euclidean convex bodies. This work lays the foundation for studying complexity and learning on curved statistical manifolds.