中 EN
Sign In Register

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.

Sign In Register
01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Human migration has surged since 2000 — these maps reveal where people are going

Authors:
Miryam Naddaf↗

Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023. Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protection

Authors:
Shuwen Xu↗Zhitao He↗Yi R. Fung↗

Users rely on execution traces to observe agent behavior, diagnose failures, and ensure accountability. These traces contain rich procedural detail, including tool invocations, intermediate decisions, and error-recovery logic. Yet this detail can expose private procedural skills, allowing downstream methods to recover key formulas, thresholds, and strategies without access to model weights or skill files. To quantify this risk and evaluate protection, we construct \textsc{CapTraceBench}, a benchmark of 75 specialized long-horizon tasks and 154 curated skills across seven domains. We also introduce \textsc{RedAct} https://github.com/XuShuwenn/RedAct, a protected trace release framework that localizes protected key information, rewrites traces while preserving verifier-critical evidence, and embeds behavioral watermarks for downstream provenance analysis. Across representative trace reuse methods, \textsc{RedAct} reduces normalized skill transfer (NST) from 44.7–67.1\% on raw traces to below the no-skill baseline, while preserving audit evidence. Its standalone behavioral watermarks reach 93.6–100.0\% true detection with a false alarm rate of at most 1.9\%. These results frame public agent traces as security interfaces and show that selective redaction can reduce procedural capability leakage without removing audit evidence.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Do as the Romans Do: Learning Universal Behaviors from Heterogeneous Agents

Authors:
Caleb Chang↗Davin Win Kyi↗Natasha Jaques↗Karen Leung↗

arXiv:2606.18537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans often acquire new skills by observing others, since observed behaviors implicitly reveal how to act in an environment. However, observations drawn from a heterogeneous population introduce conflicting behavioral signals, making it difficult to determine which behaviors are worth imitating. We address this challenge with General Reward Inference and Disentanglement (GRID), a social learning method that extracts universally useful behaviors from a heterogeneous population of demonstrators pursuing different goals. GRID decomposes per-agent reward functions into a general reward, capturing behaviors shared across all agents, and specific rewards, capturing individual preferences and objectives. Training exclusively on the general reward provides a new paradigm of generalist pretraining. It yields a generalist agent that internalizes universal environmental competencies, such as safety and basic task proficiency, without the mode-averaging bias that afflicts standard learning from demonstration techniques. This generalist serves as a superior prior for fine-tuning to downstream tasks, including preferences unseen during training. Experiments across a synthetic basis function decomposition, multi-agent Craftax, and a continuous autonomous driving simulator (Highway-Env) confirm that GRID successfully disentangles reward structure in a semantically meaningful way, outperforms standard learning from demonstration baselines, and enables more efficient and stable specialization.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Perfect Detection, Failed Control: The Geometry of Knowing vs. Steering in Language Models

Authors:
Cosimo Galeone↗Anna Ettorre↗Minsu Park↗Giuseppe Ettorre↗Daniele Ligorio↗

A central aspiration of mechanistic interpretability is controllability: if we know where a behavior is represented in a model's activations, we should be able to modify it. This rests on a hidden premise – that the direction which detects a behavior and the direction which controls it are the same, or close. We test this geometrically: what is the angle between the direction that best detects a behavior and the one that best causes it? If detection implies control the cosine is near 1; otherwise it quantifies a detection-intervention gap. On Gemma 2-2B-it, output format (clean JSON vs markdown fencing) collapses both roles onto one axis. Hallucination does not: the model detects fake entities with perfect linear separability (AUC = 1.000 from layer 5), yet that direction sits at cos = 0.12 (about 83 degrees) from the direction producing a refusal – a small, reproducible alignment, far from the cos = 1 that "detection is control" would require. A detector built from activations, with no chosen tokens, likewise fails to align (cos = -0.06). The gap generalizes: across four models from three families and two scales (1B-9B), cos stays in [0.12, 0.20], identical before and after instruction tuning (0.1197 vs 0.1200), placing its origin in pretraining. A 15-degree rotation toward the refusal direction partially bridges it – 73% and 60% refusal on two held-out fake-entity categories at 1.8% false positives. We then ask whether this cosine predicts steerability, and it does not: detection is a high-dimensional class, not a single direction, and what separates the steerable case is functional, not readable from a static angle. The cosine is a weight-computable signature of the dissociation between knowing and steering, not a predictor of it.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Intrinsic Computational Functionalism and Simulated Consciousness

Authors:
Ryota Kanai↗Shuqin Ma↗

arXiv:2606.15348v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A common objection to artificial or simulated consciousness is that a simulated brain is no more conscious than simulated water is wet. We address this from the perspective of Intrinsic Computational Functionalism (ICF): if consciousness is computationally constituted, it depends not on externally imposed descriptions but on the computational structures a system physically realizes in virtue of its own causal-dynamical organization. In previous work we developed Canonical Functionalism as a mathematically precise special case of this anti-interpretivist program, identifying functional states by their complete future input-output roles under a fixed interface. Here we argue that this input-output construction, though important, is incomplete: as a behavioral boundary case of ICF, it makes lookup tables and unfolded systems that preserve the same boundary behavior canonically equivalent. A consciousness-relevant canonical representation must instead include internal mechanisms, interventions, and joint readouts belonging to the relevant intrinsic organization. We therefore define a mechanism-enriched canonical structure and use it to formulate Intrinsic Causal-Computational Realization (ICCR), a realization relation preserving physical implementation, intrinsic state individuation, transition structure, intervention profiles, and the relevant agent-body-world boundary. The central result is conditional: if conscious properties are invariants of intrinsic causal-computational organization, then any system satisfying ICCR realizes the same consciousness-relevant properties, whether biological, artificial, or simulated. We discuss objections including biological naturalism and integrated information theory. We conclude that to deny consciousness to a simulation, one must identify a consciousness-relevant intrinsic causal-computational structure that the simulation fails to realize.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Bengal-HP_RU: A Dataset of Bengal People For Head Pose Estimation

Authors:
Md. Ahanaf Arif Khan↗Md. Tawhidur Rahman↗Sangeeta Biswas↗Md. Iqbal Aziz Khan↗Subrata Pramanik↗Sanjoy Kumar Chakravarty↗Bimal Kumar Pramanik↗

Existing head pose datasets predominantly feature subjects of Western or East Asian origin, leaving South Asian populations, particularly Bengali individuals, largely underrepresented. We introduce Bengal-HP_RU, the first publicly available head pose dataset centred on Bengali subjects, comprising 12,894 labelled head images annotated with continuous yaw, pitch, and roll values. Images were collected from Wikimedia Commons under free licences and processed through an automated pipeline followed by manual label correction. The dataset is partitioned by Wikimedia uploader identity to prevent data contamination, yielding 10,494 training and 2,400 test images across 296 unique uploaders. Bengal-HP_RU exhibits substantial diversity in subject age, gender, occlusion, illumination, and background, reflecting realistic in-the-wild conditions. The dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.17632/xbw9kr37jb.2.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Plausible but Wrong: A case study on Agentic Failures in Astrophysical Workflows

Authors:
Shivam Rawat↗Lucie Flek↗

arXiv:2604.25345v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly being integrated into scientific workflows, yet their behavior under realistic conditions remains insufficiently understood. We evaluate CMBAgent across two workflow paradigms and eighteen astrophysical tasks. In the One-Shot setting, access to domain-specific context yields an approximately ~6x performance improvement (0.85 vs. ~0 without context), with the primary failure mode being silent incorrect computation - syntactically valid code that produces plausible but inaccurate results. In the Deep Research setting, the system frequently exhibits silent failures across stress tests, producing physically inconsistent posteriors without self-diagnosis. Overall, performance is strong on well-specified tasks but degrades on problems designed to probe reasoning limits, often without visible error signals. These findings highlight that the most concerning failure mode in agentic scientific workflows is not overt failure, but confident generation of incorrect results. We release our evaluation framework to facilitate systematic reliability analysis of scientific AI agents.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2026

Authors:
Sha Sajadieh↗Loredana Fattorini↗Raymond Perrault↗Yolanda Gil↗Vanessa Parli↗Lapo Santarlasci↗Juan Pava↗Nestor Maslej↗Russ Altman↗Erik Brynjolfsson↗Carla Brodley↗Jack Clark↗…

arXiv:2606.15708v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Welcome to the ninth edition of the AI Index report. As AI continues to advance rapidly, the question becomes whether the systems built around it can keep up. Governance frameworks, evaluation methods, education systems, and the data infrastructure needed to track AI's impact are struggling to match the pace of the technology itself. That gap between what AI can do and how prepared we are to manage it runs through every chapter of this year's report. New in this edition, the report tracks how AI is being tested more ambitiously across reasoning, safety, and real-world task execution, and why those measurements are increasingly difficult to rely on. It also features new estimates of generative AI's economic value alongside emerging evidence of its labor market effects, an analytical framework on AI sovereignty, and a science chapter developed in collaboration with Schmidt Sciences. For the first time, the report features standalone chapters on AI in science and AI in medicine, reflecting AI's growing impact across these two domains.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Unifying Quantum Smoothing Theories with Extended Retrodiction

Authors:
Mingxuan Liu↗Ge Bai↗Valerio Scarani↗

arXiv:2510.08447v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating the state of an open quantum system monitored over time requires incorporating information from past measurements (filtering) and, for improved accuracy, also from future measurements (smoothing). While classical smoothing is well understood within a Bayesian framework, its quantum generalization has been challenging, leading to distinct and seemingly incompatible approaches. In this work, we demonstrate that quantum state smoothing hinges on a uniquely quantum feature: the fundamental dependence of retrodiction on prior correlations. We introduce auxiliary systems into the prior belief to capture correlations formed during preparation and evolution and develop a comprehensive framework for quantum state smoothing based on extended Bayesian retrodiction. This framework identifies all previous approaches as different choices of the extended prior, and naturally extends it to other choices that have not been considered before. We also give an information-theoretic characterization of the choices of prior, in terms of the average entropy of the smoothed states. Our results establish quantum state smoothing as a fundamentally retrodictive process just like classical smoothing, with proper quantum features clearly identified.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

A Finite-Volume Scheme for the Continuum Extrapolation of Lattice Step-Scaling in (2+1)D Hamiltonian U(1) Gauge Theory

Authors:
Alessio Negro↗Emil Otis Rosanowski↗Lena Funcke↗Timo Jakobs↗Karl Jansen↗Paul Ludwig↗Carsten Urbach↗

arXiv:2606.20029v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a finite-volume scheme to perform controlled continuum extrapolations of the lattice step-scaling function, a key ingredient for determining the running coupling in a Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory in small volumes. As a testbed, we employ a dual Hamiltonian formulation of pure U(1) gauge theory in (2+1) dimensions and an operator basis that remains efficient toward weak coupling. We describe the implementation of static external charges on the spatial lattice and study, using matrix product states, the resulting confining string, from which we extract the static potential and a force-based renormalized coupling. Using the proposed finite-volume scheme, we demonstrate a stable continuum limit of the step-scaling function on the lattice sizes accessible to present Hamiltonian simulations. The method is readily extendable to other gauge groups and dimensions, providing a pathway toward Hamiltonian step-scaling studies in other theories.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

An Empirical Study on Learning Latent Representations for Emotional Speech Synthesis

Authors:
Vinh Dang Quang↗Huy Ngo Quang↗

For the last couple of years, the field of speech synthesis has improved dramatically thanks to deep learning. There are more and more deep learning-based TTS systems developed to make it possible to produce voices with high intelligibility and naturalness. Meanwhile, controlling the expressiveness is yet a big deal, generating speech in different styles or manners has received a lot of attention from community recently. This paper aims to give our solutions to deal with the task emotional speech synthesis (ESS) at VLSP 2022 which allows to generate humanlike natural-sounding voice from a given input text with desired emotional expression. By integrating speaker embedding, prosody bottleneck into FastSpeech 2, our systems can promisingly generate emotional speech of a single speaker (Sub-task 1), transfer speaking styles from another speaker to the target speaker with neutral non-expressive data while retaining the target speaker's identity (Sub-task 2).

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

FasterPy: An LLM-based Code Execution Efficiency Optimization Framework

Authors:
Yue Wu↗Minghao Han↗Ruiyin Li↗Peng Liang↗Amjed Tahir↗Zengyang Li↗Qiong Feng↗Mojtaba Shahin↗

arXiv:2512.22827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code often suffers from performance bugs. These bugs necessitate the research and practice of code optimization. Traditional rule-based methods rely on manually designing and maintaining rules for specific performance bugs (e.g., redundant loops, repeated computations), making them labor-intensive and limited in applicability. In recent years, machine learning and deep learning-based methods have emerged as promising alternatives by learning optimization heuristics from annotated code corpora and performance measurements. However, these approaches usually depend on specific program representations and meticulously crafted training datasets, making them costly to develop and difficult to scale. With the booming of Large Language Models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities in code generation have opened new avenues for automated code optimization. In this work, we proposed FasterPy, a low-cost and efficient framework that adapts LLMs to optimize the execution efficiency of Python code. FasterPy combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), supported by a knowledge base constructed from existing performance-improving code pairs and corresponding performance measurements, with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enhance code optimization performance. Our experimental results on the Performance Improving Code Edits (PIE) benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms existing models on multiple metrics. The FasterPy tool and the experimental results are available at https://github.com/WuYue22/fasterpy.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Uncertainty Estimation for Molecular Diffusion Models

Authors:
Paul Seij↗Christian A. Naesseth↗Stephan Mandt↗Metod Jazbec↗

arXiv:2606.13451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have seen wide adoption for 3D molecular generation, yet they offer no principled signal of when a generated molecule is likely to be of low quality. We propose a post-hoc method for estimating per-sample uncertainty in pretrained molecular diffusion models. Building on a Laplace approximation of the denoising network, we measure the variability of the noise prediction across the generation trajectory. Empirically, we show that the resulting uncertainty score is informative of sample quality, exhibiting a negative correlation with established sample-level quality metrics. We further study how the proposed uncertainty score can be used to filter generated samples, improving model performance via test-time scaling.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Closing the Calibration Gap in Semantic Caching

Authors:
Aditeya Baral↗Radoslav Ralev↗Iliya Sotirov Zhechev↗Srijith Rajamohan↗Jen Agarwal↗

Semantic caching cuts LLM inference costs by serving a cached response to semantically similar queries. Standard practice evaluates these systems using PR-AUC, a metric that only measures how well scores rank and ignores whether they are usable at a fixed threshold. We show this mismatch leads to systematically poor deployment choices, as models with the highest PR-AUC are often the worst in operation. We introduce Precision-Cache Hit Ratio (P-CHR) AUC, a cache-aware metric that measures precision across cache utilization levels, and Calibration Retention Rate (CRR), which captures how much offline ranking quality survives at deployment. We decompose the operational gap between offline and deployed quality into a recoverable calibration component and an irreducible structural component fixed by the dataset's positive rate. Our experiments show that the calibration gap is governed by the training objective rather than data scale, and post-hoc calibration only partially closes it. Ultimately, model selection for semantic caching is a calibration problem, not a ranking one, and measuring it is the first step to closing the gap.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fabricating fiber cavity mirror substrates compatible with high coupling efficiency

Authors:
Michael Caouette-Mansour↗Thomas J. Clark↗Valeria Mosso Tsedilkina↗Jack C. Sankey↗

arXiv:2606.12168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fiber optical cavities offer small mode volumes and correspondingly strong light-matter interactions in an open Fabry-Perot geometry. However, existing fabrication techniques do not reliably produce substrates with surface profiles amenable to high mode matching between the cavity mode and fiber core, thereby limiting the achievable collection efficiency. Here we present a technique to fabricate fiber mirror substrates while using $in situ$ reflectometry to constrain the achievable mode matching prior to coating. By measuring the back-reflection from freshly cleaved fiber tips, we pre-select 138 fibers compatible with 96.5-99.5% mode matching, and after a single CO$_2$ laser ablation pulse, these fibers remained compatible with 95.3-99.2\%. This simple technique provides rapid feedback during each stage of substrate fabrication, greatly enhancing the yield of viable fiber mirror substrates prior to (expensive) coating runs.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CARE: Controlling LLM-Generated Policies through Auditable Review of Evidence in Scientific Experimentation

Authors:
Guanyu Liu↗Weiyi Kong↗Zeyu Wang↗Boer Zhang↗Baiqing Li↗Peiyu Zhang↗Tianyu Shi↗

arXiv:2606.14581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Granting LLMs direct control over costly, irreversible scientific experiments leads to unsafe exploration and unstable performance, but discarding LLM creativity entirely sacrifices significant optimization potential. We introduce CARE (Controlling LLM-Generated Policies through Auditable Review of Evidence in Scientific Experimentation), an auditable controller for high-throughput experimentation (HTE) optimization that keeps a non-LLM incumbent optimizer as the default action path while using LLMs to revise challenger ranking policies. Before each outcome is revealed, a public-evidence intervention gate compares the challenger with the incumbent. It authorizes the challenger's selection only when the evidence available before selection supports the change, with the decision recorded in the audit log. CARE outperforms all other evaluated methods on Minerva/Olympus and ChemLex benchmarks, with final-best improving from 80.0 to 88.5 on Minerva/Olympus and from 83.9 to 92.1 on ChemLex, relative to the public incumbent. Our experiments indicate that LLM self-evolution is more reliable when it expands the proposal space under an auditable controller, rather than directly choosing experiments.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

ASymPO: Asymmetric-Scale Policy Optimization for Asynchronous LLM Post-Training Without Behavior Information

Authors:
Zehua Liu↗Yuxuan Yao↗Xiaojin Fu↗Tao Zhong↗Mingxuan Yuan↗

arXiv:2606.03070v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning can improve language-model post-training throughput by decoupling response generation from policy optimization, but stale responses introduce distribution drift. Standard behavior-corrected methods control this drift with behavior-policy probabilities, importance ratios, or clipping, which requires token-aligned, versioned, and numerically consistent behavior log-probabilities across rollout and learner systems. We ask whether asynchronous group-relative RL can instead be stabilized using only current-policy probabilities. We identify a scale-imbalance failure mode: when stale responses are evaluated under the current policy, positive and negative loss terms can appear at different negative log-probability scales, so zero-sum advantages no longer imply balanced loss contributions. We propose Asymmetric-Scale Policy Optimization (ASymPO), which normalizes each response's token loss by its current average token negative log-probability. ASymPO requires no behavior-policy probabilities, restores response-level zero-sum balance, and preserves a nonzero learning signal. We also introduce Scaled Policy Optimization (SPO), a fixed negative-scaling baseline, and evaluate both current-policy-only objectives in asynchronous mathematical reasoning post-training.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Towards UAV Image Dehazing: A UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model, Benchmark, and Geometry-Aware Deep Unfolding Network

Authors:
Wenxuan Fang↗Jiangwei Weng↗Yu Zheng↗Junkai Fan↗Guangfa Wang↗Xiang Chen↗Jian Yang↗Jun Li↗

In UAV applications, haze significantly obscures distant details and weaken structural information, hindering the recovery of details. Current UAV scenarios still face two key challenges: (i) paired hazy/clean images from the real world are unobtainable, while the classical atmospheric scattering model is inadequate for modeling the spatially non-uniform haze in UAV imagery; (ii) existing dehazing methods struggle to remove the heavy haze accumulated in the upper regions of UAV images. To address these issues, we first propose a UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model (UASM), which explicitly incorporates flight altitude, viewing pitch, and extinction to characterize the non-uniform haze distribution in UAV imaging. Based on UASM, we develop a physics-driven dehazing framework, termed Geometry-aware Proximal Deep Unfolding Network (GP-DUN). Specifically, GP-DUN consists of three key modules: a Latent Geometry Estimator (LGE) that infers transmittance consistent with UAV imaging geometry, a Geometry-aware Gradient Descent Module (GeoGDM) that embeds UASM into the data-fidelity term and performs physics-consistent closed-form updates, and an Pooling-Expert Proximal Mapping Module (PE-PMM) that learns an implicit prior to restore textures and structures beyond the capability of explicit physical modeling. In addition, we further construct UASM-HazeSet, which provides controllable paired synthetic data together with 2,285 real UAV haze images for testing. Extensive experiments show that GP-DUN consistently outperforms existing methods on both UASM-HazeSet and real UAV haze benchmarks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Multi-component Causal Tracing in Large Language Models

Authors:
Zirui Yan↗Dennis Wei↗Dmitriy A. Katz↗Prasanna Sattigeri↗Ali Tajer↗

Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model's (LLM's) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM's behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model's components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZiruiYan/multi-component-causal-tracing.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Assessment of occupational aerosol exposure for laboratory technicians: A quantitative study using {Phi}X174 phage as a substitute virus

Authors:
Liu↗Zhang↗

This study aimed to clarify aerosol exposure risks throughout the workflow of a Biosafety Level 2 (BSL-2) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) laboratory, validate the suitability of the {Phi}X174 bacteriophage as an indicator virus, and provide evidence for biosafety control measures. The {Phi}X174 bacteriophage was used to simulate viral samples, and a concentration-bacteriophage plaque standard curve was constructed (R2=0.998). Five operational steps in a simulated PCR laboratory were quantitatively monitored for aerosol concentration using double-layer agar plates, with blank controls used to eliminate interference. Statistical analysis was employed to identify risk differences. Sample homogenization ((5.67 {+/-} 1.23) x 104 plaque-forming units (PFU)/m3) and nucleic acid extraction ((3.45 {+/-} 0.89) x 104 PFU/m3) were identified as high-/very high-risk steps. The viral load in the samples was strongly positively correlated with the aerosol concentration (r = 0.926, P

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum speedup from nonclassical polarization

Authors:
Tim A{\ss}brock↗Jan Sperling↗Laura Ares↗

arXiv:2603.23124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a framework for identifying nonclassical speedups in systems with polarization, likewise spin degrees of freedom. By confining the dynamics to the manifold of angular momentum coherent states, which act as the classical reference in this case, we compute the speed limit that bounds the rate of change of the state achievable without generating quantum coherence. A comparison with the unrestricted quantum speed limit enables the quantitative identification of speedups arising from polarization nonclassicality. We apply this framework to the cross-Kerr interaction, demonstrating a persistent speedup scaling as $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{N})$ with the photon number $N$ with a parity effect in favour of even photon numbers. The results establish polarization nonclassicality as a genuine dynamical resource, linking quantum coherence to quantum-enhanced evolution speeds in nonlinear photonic systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Agentic Retrieval and Reinforcement Learned Equation Chains: A Controlled Generation Framework for Complex and Novel Physics Word Problems

Authors:
Tirthankar Mittra↗

Generating high-quality Physics Word Problems (PWPs) that are novel, complex, and solvable remains a challenging and underexplored problem in educational content generation. Existing approaches, many adapted from Math Word Problem (MWP) generation, often produce ambiguous, unsolvable, or structurally simple questions with limited linguistic diversity. We introduce ARVRE (Agentic Retrieval Value Reinforced Equation-chain), a two-stage framework for generating diverse and mathematically valid PWPs. In the first stage, a form of offline temporal-difference learning is used to construct valid chains of physics equations, while an agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework dynamically selects topic-specific concepts and vocabulary. This design enables explicit control over problem structure and difficulty. In the second stage, a Large Language Model (LLM) converts the equation chain and retrieved concepts into a natural-language physics question. By grounding generation in valid equation chains, our method preserves mathematical correctness while promoting linguistic diversity and contextual richness. Human and automated evaluations demonstrate that ARVRE generates PWPs that are more complex, novel, and solvable than those produced by existing approaches. These results highlight the potential of combining reinforcement learning, retrieval, and LLMs for reliable generation of educational physics content.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

The Measurement Gap in the Automation of EU Law: Benchmarking Doctrinal Legal Reasoning under the EU AI Act

Authors:
Mich\`ele Finck↗

Large language models now produce legal text of at least median quality, yet no existing benchmark can evaluate whether they perform doctrinal legal reasoning, which forms the interpretive core of legal work, rather than the ancillary, paralegal tasks that most current legal-AI evaluations measure. This measurement gap is not only methodological but legal: the EU AI Act makes "appropriate accuracy" a binding requirement for high-risk AI used in the judicial domain, yet that requirement cannot acquire operational content without the very doctrinal-reasoning benchmark the field lacks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Adaptive Speech-to-Spike Encoding for Spiking Neural Networks

Authors:
Taharim Rahman Anon↗Jakaria Islam Emon↗

arXiv:2606.19039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The mismatch between continuous acoustic signals and discrete event-driven processing remains a fundamental bottleneck for neuromorphic speech processing. Current systems typically rely on fixed spike encoders, forcing downstream Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to compensate for non-adaptive input representations. To address this, we present a learnable residual speech-to-spike encoder jointly trained end-to-end with a Recurrent Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (R-LIF) backbone. We validate this approach on the Google Speech Commands v2 (GSC-v2) benchmark, achieving up to 94.97% accuracy. Notably, the learned encoder remains highly parameter-efficient with a compact 35k-parameter variant that reaches 89.8%, matching or exceeding prior baselines that require an order of magnitude more parameters. Our encoder-focused analysis, including linear probing and gradient-residual inspection, indicates that the encoder does not target faithful signal reconstruction but instead learns task-aligned spike representations that enhance class separability. Finally, we benchmark bio-inspired, hardware-friendly credit assignment by comparing Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA) with surrogate-gradient BPTT under identical architectures and training conditions. We find that DFA reaches 91.5% accuracy, quantifying the performance trade-off of bio-inspired learning rules for modern neuromorphic audio.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

When Multiple Scripts Matter: Evaluating ASR in Clinical Settings

Authors:
Jean Seo↗Minkyu Kim↗Jeonguk Lee↗Jisoo Jung↗Wooseok Han↗Eunho Yang↗

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) in non-English clinical settings is challenged by multiscript variability, where the same term may appear in multiple valid orthographic forms. Conventional string-matching evaluation metrics often underestimate ASR performance by treating orthographic variants as errors. To address this issue, we introduce MultiClin, a clinical ASR benchmark designed to evaluate robustness to multiscript variability. Experiments across diverse ASR models show that multiscript-aware evaluation provides a fairer assessment of recognition quality than conventional single-reference evaluation. We further investigate the impact of script consistency during training and find that inconsistent script mappings increase orthographic uncertainty and hinder model convergence, with a balanced 50% mapping ratio producing the highest entropy. In contrast, script unification consistently yields the best ASR performance. Our dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/aitrics-ronaldo/Interspeech_MultiClin.

Read & Discuss → View Source →