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

Dirac-Frenkel dynamics with inertia for nonlinearly parametrized solutions of evolution problems

Authors:
Matteo Raviola↗Benjamin Peherstorfer↗

arXiv:2606.24769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Even when Dirac-Frenkel dynamics determine a well-defined evolution in function space, the corresponding parameter dynamics can be non-unique or ill-conditioned for redundant nonlinear parametrizations such as neural networks or mixture models. We propose to add inertia to the Dirac-Frenkel dynamics and show that this allows useful parameter velocity information to persist from the past trajectory in directions that are weakly informed, while well-informed parameter velocity directions continue to follow the Dirac-Frenkel dynamics. We prove that the inertial formulation yields well-posed parameter dynamics and provide a posteriori error bounds. After time discretization, the method requires the solution of the same type of regularized linear least-squares problem as standard Dirac-Frenkel dynamics, but with the previous velocity appearing as an anchor. Numerical experiments demonstrate the increased robustness obtained with inertia.

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

Natural-Language Temporal Grounding in Hour-Long Videos is a Search Problem: A Benchmark and Empirical Decomposition

Authors:
Sukmin Seo↗Geewook Kim↗

Temporal grounding–returning the interval $[t_s, t_e]$ for a natural-language query over a video–is the language interface to long-form video, yet has been studied on short videos; the dynamics of hour-scale natural-language grounding remain underexplored. We take the position that at hour-scale, the binding constraint is search, not recognition: Video-LLMs are bottlenecked not by localizing a nearby event, but–given a natural-language query–by searching for the relevant region of a long video. To test this, we release ExtremeWhenBench, the first open hour-scale grounding benchmark (2,273 queries over 194 videos, mean 75.7 min, max 9 hr) with an open-form query distribution. Every open Video-LLM collapses while a frame-level retrieval baseline outperforms them; a failure taxonomy attributes 85% of failures to search; and a retrieve-then-ground hybrid recovers 6.7x over the monolithic Video-LLM–mirroring retrieve-then-read in open-domain QA.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Risk Under Pressure: Compute-Aware Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness in Language Models

Authors:
Malikeh Ehghaghi↗Bogl\'arka Ecsedi↗Marsha Chechik↗Colin Raffel↗

arXiv:2606.11409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial robustness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) typically report attack success rate (ASR) under fixed query budgets, implicitly treating all attacks as equally costly. In practice, the computational expense of different attack strategies can vary by orders of magnitude. Consequently, ASR at a fixed budget can obscure the true effort required to jailbreak a model, thereby making it hard to determine whether an attack's cost justifies its payoff to the attacker. We propose a compute-aware evaluation framework based on computational pressure, measured in cumulative floating-point operations (FLOPs), as a proxy for adversarial effort. We introduce risk-compute curves, which map compute budgets to attack risk, and derive two metrics that summarize the average pressure required for a given attack to succeed. Across ten models spanning three families and four different stages in language model training and alignment, evaluated with three attack strategies (gradient-based, iterative refinement, and template-based) on two jailbreak robustness benchmarks, we find: (1) alignment training has non-monotonic effects on compute-space robustness; (2) scaling model size reduces gradient-based attack effectiveness but has limited impact on cheaper template-based attacks; (3) gradient-based attacks optimized on a surrogate model can transfer to a separate target model, providing a way to reduce attacker costs; (4) compute cost varies by up to ${\approx}5{\times}$ across harm categories within a single model; and (5) safety-aligned RL increases aggregate cost while leaving some categories disproportionately accessible. We release our framework to enable compute-aware risk assessment and evaluation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Toward Self-Evolution-Ready Workflow Harnesses: A Reversible Migration Path and Convertibility Taxonomy for Expert LLM Pipelines

Authors:
Yimo Lin↗Zhen Zhang↗Yibin Li↗

arXiv:2606.24598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While expert-validated "LLM + script" workflows deliver significant value, they remain static: they encode hard-won domain knowledge yet fail to adapt execution based on feedback. Existing agent research predominantly targets greenfield agents and synthetic benchmarks, leaving the migration of active legacy workflows unresolved. To bridge this gap, we present a reversible, Strangler-Fig migration path that refactors legacy workflows into composable, typed, and auditable stages. Central to this framework is a three-tier convertibility taxonomy (A/B/C), implemented as a routing stage within the system harness, which diagnoses a workflow's readiness and routes it accordingly.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-15

Spatial transcriptomic-metabolic features of tumor foci and tumor capsule in microvascular invasion with hepatocellular carcinoma: A spatial multi-omics study

Authors:
Zhi-Hui Luo↗

by Zhi-Hui Luo, Na Wang, Jingwei Zhao, Fei Long, Si Wu, Wei Zhong, Wei-Ming Chen, Bicheng Wang, Kun Wang, Yufeng Yuan, Jingjiao Zhou, Chunhui Yuan, Fubing Wang Background Microvascular invasion (MVI) is closely related to the recurrence and metastasis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but the underlying cellular mechanism remains largely elusive. This study aims to elucidate the regional cellular discrepancy between MVI-positive (MVI+) and MVI-negative (MVI−) HCC by integrating Spatial transcriptomics (ST) and spatial metabolomics (SM). Methods and findings ST and SM were performed on six tissue samples from four patients (including 2 MVI+, 2 MVI−, and 2 paratumor tissues), with the integration of 79 public single-cell RNA sequencing datasets of HCC. Patient identity was used as a covariate in the linear equation for regional differentially expressed gene analysis with the ST data. Clinical validation was conducted through multiplex immunofluorescence staining in 79 patients, together with external validation in the cancer genome atlas (TCGA)-liver hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC) cohort (n = 299) and an independent microarray dataset (n = 62). For cell-type-specific metabolic profiling, spatial transcriptomic-metabolic registration was performed. The functional roles of key metabolites were further validated in vitro using inflammatory cancer-associated fibroblasts (iCAFs) derived from hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) and primary CAFs through co-culture models and various functional assays assessing cell proliferation, migration, and invasion. In the tumor lesion, a malignant STMN1+HMGN2+GPC3+ cell subtype enriched in MVI+ HCC was identified, which exhibited enhanced proliferative activity and was associated with poor prognosis. This finding was further confirmed in a local cohort of 79 patients, where multiplex immunofluorescence staining for the three genes (STMN1, HMGN2, and GPC3) showed significantly higher expression in the MVI+ group than in the MVI− group (p = 0.046). Integrated SM analysis further revealed that this cell population underwent metabolic reprogramming characterized by suppressed glycerolipid metabolism. In the tumor capsule, iCAFs-related genes were downregulated in MVI+ cases, and iCAFs were located distally from the tumor boundary. Spatial metabolite mapping showed a strong correlation between taurine and iCAFs, and functional assays demonstrated that taurine promotes HCC proliferation and migration by suppressing iCAF activity. One limitation of this study is the small sample size of spatial omics data, which hinders a more complete molecular functional analysis of the STMN1+HMGN2+GPC3+ cell subtype and iCAFs in MVI+ HCC. Larger-scale ST cohorts are required to further validate and expand the findings of this study. Conclusions This integrative spatial atlas proposes a hypothesis that there exists a highly proliferative and metabolically reprogrammed malignant cell subtype in the tumor lesion of MVI+ HCC, and that taurine in the tumor capsule modulates iCAF activity to influence tumor progression. The exploratory results provide mechanistic insights into MVI-related HCC progression and offer potential avenues for targeted therapeutic intervention of MVI+ HCC.

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

The Reservoir Attention Network: Cross-Pass State in Pretrained Transformers via Content-Addressable Reservoir Injection

Authors:
Emma Leonhart↗

arXiv:2606.15678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A feasibility and dynamics study of the Reservoir Attention Network (RAN), an architecture that injects a fixed, randomly-initialized reservoir into the mid-layer attention of a pretrained transformer to carry state across forward passes. Experiments span GPT-2 (124M, 355M) to Qwen2.5 (0.5B, 1.5B) on a single consumer GPU. The tasks are minimal probes chosen to isolate individual mechanisms; the broader always-alive agent vision is treated throughout as compute-limited future work, not a claim of this paper. The reservoir is left untrained (fixed random) by design: this isolates whether untrained recurrent dynamics alone suffice to carry usable cross-pass state, leaving trained recurrence as a complementary, more expensive direction.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

From Noise to Order: Learning to Rank via Denoising Diffusion

Authors:
Sajad Ebrahimi↗Bhaskar Mitra↗Negar Arabzadeh↗Ye Yuan↗Haolun Wu↗Fattane Zarrinkalam↗Ebrahim Bagheri↗

arXiv:2602.11453v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning-to-rank (LTR) methods have traditionally been limited to discriminative machine learning approaches that model the probability of the document being relevant to the query given some feature representation of the query-document pair. We propose an alternative denoising diffusion-based generative approach to LTR that instead models the full joint distribution over features and relevance labels. While in discriminative LTR, an over-parameterized ranking model may find different ways to fit the training data, we posit that candidate solutions that can explain the full data distribution under the generative setting maybe better at estimating relevance. Thus, we propose DiffusionRank that extends TabDiff, an existing diffusion model for tabular datasets, to create generative alternatives to classical discriminative pointwise and pairwise LTR objectives. Our work demonstrates improvements from DiffusionRank over discriminative counterparts on four standard LTR datasets and points to a rich space for future exploration to leverage ongoing advancements in deep generative models for LTR. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sadjadeb/DiffusionRank.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Beyond Perplexity: UTF-8 Validity in Byte-aware Language Models

Authors:
Sangwhan Moon↗Daisuke Oba↗Youmi Ma↗Tatsuya Hiraoka↗Naoaki Okazaki↗

Byte-level tokenization enables language models to handle any Unicode input, but models can generate invalid UTF-8 sequences when encountering rare or unseen characters. We investigate the relationship between training scale and UTF-8 generation reliability with a 355M parameter model trained on 80B tokens from a balanced multilingual corpus of English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. We introduce multiple evaluation protocols that isolate UTF-8 structural validity from language modeling. UTF-8 validity convergence lags perplexity by a roughly a factor of two: perplexity stabilizes after 2.1B tokens, but UTF-8 validity requires 4.2B tokens. In context-free generation, rare characters achieve higher structural validity than common characters, suggesting over-specialization of frequent character representations. Through experiments, we observed that reliable UTF-8 generation is a distinct capability requiring evaluation beyond perplexity.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

When Certainty Is an Artifact: Keyword Lexicon Blindness and the (Mis)Measurement of Rhetorical Stance

Authors:
Bo Chen↗

Can a statistically significant, large-effect-size finding in computational social science be entirely an artifact of the measurement instrument? We present a case where the answer appears to be yes. Analyzing 85 interviews across four public intellectuals (2016–2026), we find a robust negative-affect/emphatic-certainty lexical co-occurrence pattern under keyword-based scoring ($r = 0.72$–$0.93$, $p < 0.01$ for all four speakers). Replacing keyword counting with LLM-based zero-shot semantic classification on the complete diarized corpus (32,625 sentences) dramatically reduces this correlation: Dalio's $r = 0.851$ drops to $r = 0.206$, with two speakers showing negative $r(neg, emphatic)$ and one showing null. In contrast, the LLM reveals a strong negative-hedging coupling across speakers – Rogoff's $r(neg, hedged) = 0.875$ ($p = 0.001$) and Zeihan's $r(neg, hedged) = 0.722$ ($p = 0.008$) – consistent with the conventional expectation that pessimistic discourse attracts hedging, not certainty. Sentence-level error analysis traces this discrepancy to three structural failure modes in keyword lexicons – syntactic blindness, polysemy blindness, and categorical absence – illustrated through cases where keyword counting inverts semantic meaning (e.g., ''never absolutely totally confident'' scored as high-certainty). We argue that keyword lexicons measure a universal lexical co-occurrence tendency – negative discourse naturally attracts emphatic vocabulary – that is orthogonal to, and can systematically invert, rhetorical stance. Treating keyword counts as measurements of epistemic certainty is a category error: a finding that appears to be about a speaker's psychology may be entirely about the counting of words.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Zero-Shot Captioning for Cultural Heritage: Automated Image Analysis of Traditional Indonesian Clothing

Authors:
Anugrah Aidin Yotolembah↗Novanto Yudistira↗Gembong Edhi Setyawan↗

This paper presents Custom ZeroCLIP, a retrieval-augmented vision-language framework for zero-shot captioning of Indonesian traditional garments. The dataset contains 3,800 expert-annotated images from all 38 Indonesian provinces. Using a province-level inductive zero-shot protocol, the model is trained on 24 seen provinces, validated on 6 seen provinces, and evaluated on 8 unseen provinces. The framework combines a frozen CLIP ViT-B/32 image encoder, a CLIP text encoder, a BERT text encoder, and an LSTM caption decoder. During inference, unseen-province labels and captions are unavailable, and retrieval uses only captions from training provinces. No unseen-province image, label, or caption is used during training, validation, or retrieval-bank construction. Custom ZeroCLIP achieves a CLIPScore of 0.8536, BLEU-4 of 0.3342, and METEOR of 0.4859, outperforming existing baselines. Ablation results show that retrieval improves cultural vocabulary recovery with a 19.3\% METEOR gain, while human evaluation confirms stronger cultural accuracy and fluency. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented domain adaptation for culturally grounded caption generation in low-resource heritage settings. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/AnugrahAidinYotolembah/Traditional-Indonesian-Clothing-Captioning-Dataset.

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

Anatomically Conditioned Recurrent Refinement for Topology-Aware Circle of Willis Segmentation

Authors:
Juraj Peri\'c↗Marija Habijan↗Dario Mu\v{z}evi\'c↗Irena Gali\'c↗Danilo Babin↗Aleksandra Pi\v{z}urica↗

Segmenting the Circle of Willis (CoW) from Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) is challenging due to complex topology and thin vascular structures that are prone to fragmentation. Standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) often fail to capture these topological constraints, resulting in "broken vessel" artifacts. To address this, we propose the Anatomically Conditioned Recurrent Refinement U-Net (AC2RUNet). Our architecture decouples segmentation into two streams: a Static Stream that extracts invariant anatomical features and a lightweight Dynamic Stream that iteratively refines topological errors over time. We further introduce a dynamic curriculum learning strategy that transitions from high-recall geometric supervision to topology-aware constraints. Validated on the TopCoW dataset, AC2RUNet substantially reduces Hausdorff Distance (4.72 mm vs 9.17 mm) and Betti number errors (0.19 vs 0.40), improving topological connectivity over the nnU-Net baseline while maintaining comparable volumetric Dice.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

StickForStats: automated statistical assumption validation for reproducible computational biology

Authors:
Bharti↗Chakraborty↗

Reproducible computational biology depends on statistical decisions that routine workflows often skip: verifying that a differential-expression test's assumptions hold across all genes, that a strategy-comparison ANOVA is robust to non-normality, or that a meta-analysis is not distorted by publication bias. Surveys consistently find that fewer than 20% of published biomedical studies report checking these assumptions, and existing statistical software leaves validation to the analyst as an optional step. We present StickForStats, an open-source web platform that reframes assumption validation as a default precondition for every analysis. Its Guardian system–a middleware pipeline of eight validators (normality, variance homogeneity, independence, outliers, sample size, modality, linearity, homoscedasticity)–checks assumptions before execution and, on critical violations, reroutes to an appropriate nonparametric alternative with a documented decision trail. At genome scale, applying Guardian to a 91-sample synovial-sarcoma RNA-seq study (GSE271517) cascaded 90.6% of 27,221 genes to a rank-based test and flipped the differential-expression verdict for 553 genes–479 rescued from an under-powered t-test and 74 outlier-driven false positives rejected–materially changing the gene list a biologist would act on. The same automatic validation generalizes across domains: a CRISPR editing-strategy comparison (ANOVA F = 1122, with Guardian recommending Kruskal-Wallis H = 36.6), an ordinal correlation (Pearson r = 0.476 corrected to Spearman {rho} = 0.479), and a sixteen-trial clinical meta-analysis revealing severe publication bias (Egger's t = -5.78, p < 0.001); a complementary module extends the same validators to published manuscripts, checking claims against CONSORT, STROBE, ICH-E9, and JARS-Quant reporting standards. By making assumption validation automatic and transparent, StickForStats targets a tractable, under-served contributor to irreproducibility. The platform is MIT-licensed, validated against SciPy and R, and freely available at https://github.com/visvikbharti/stickforstats_new.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A Neuromorphic Trigger for Efficient Audio Event Detection

Authors:
Benjamin Hatton↗Oliver Rhodes↗Luca Peres↗

arXiv:2606.17775v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient processing of continuous audio streams remains a key challenge for real-time and resource-constrained systems. This paper introduces a neuromorphic trigger for audio event detection, based on a spiking neural network (SNN) that selectively gates input to downstream models. The proposed trigger acts as a low-cost front-end, identifying salient audio segments and forwarding only these to a more computationally intensive model for tasks such as classification. The trigger is implemented as a lightweight fully connected SNN and evaluated on two representative tasks: Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) and Sound Event Detection (SED). For ASD, the trigger achieves a one-second segment-based F1 score of 0.97 on a class-agnostic form of the URBAN-SED dataset, demonstrating high reliability in identifying relevant audio regions. For SED, the trigger is combined with the Dang classifier on the DCASE 2017 Challenge Task 2 dataset, showing a potential $42.6\times$ reduction in FLOPs while reducing the lower bound of the event-based error rate from 0.41 to 0.25. These results highlight the potential of neuromorphic triggers as real-time, energy-efficient front-end filters, enabling substantial reductions in computational cost.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Regional Service-System Conditions Associated with Facility-Linked Home-Based Specialist Care in Japan: A Claims-Based Ecological Study of Home Dialysis

Authors:
Suzuki↗K. T↗

Background Complex chronic care is increasingly delivered in patients' homes while remaining linked to specialist facilities for training, monitoring, and backup care. Home dialysis provides a useful case because peritoneal dialysis (PD) and home hemodialysis (HHD) share a home-facility delivery structure but differ in technical and operational requirements. This study examined regional service-system conditions associated with the presence and scale of PD and HHD in Japan. Methods This ecological study used publicly available claims, administrative, census, and geospatial data harmonized to 334 Secondary Medical Areas. Regional indicators were organized into four domains: dialysis service delivery, implementation support for home-based care, hospital backup capacity, and living and sociodemographic context. Diffusion was examined using claims-based indicators of regional presence and post-presence scale, analyzed separately for PD and HHD with Firth penalized logistic regression and zero-truncated negative binomial regression, respectively. Results PD was observed in 271 regions and HHD in 109. Patterns of associated regional conditions differed by modality and stage. PD was associated mainly with existing dialysis-service organization, whereas HHD was associated with broader regional supports, including home-care delivery, living infrastructure, transition support, and hospital-system indicators. Conditions associated with presence differed from those associated with scale. Cross-modality associations suggested that shared regional factors may shape the distribution of both modalities. Conclusions Regional conditions for home dialysis diffusion in Japan differed by modality and stage. PD was linked mainly to existing dialysis-service organization, whereas HHD was linked to multi-domain regional support for technically demanding home treatment. Under standardized reimbursement, local service-system capacity may remain important for modality- and stage-specific diffusion of home dialysis.

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

EChO-Agent: Evidence Chain Orchestration Agent for Audio Reasoning

Authors:
Siyuan Zhang↗Jian Zong↗Junyu Wang↗Peiyuan Jiang↗Jiahao Yan↗Jingyu Zhang↗Tianrui Wang↗Xiaobao Wang↗Longbiao Wang↗Jianwu Dang↗

arXiv:2606.15141v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LALMs show promise on audio question answering, they fail to focus on question-relevant segments of audio and provide a clear, checkable reasoning process when dealing with complex audio reasoning. Reinforcement learning and tool-augmented prompting can help models better relate questions to audio but lack a reliable way to understand, integrate, and self-verify audio segments. To address this gap, we present EChO-Agent, a modular agent framework that reformulates complex audio QA as a planning, tool execution, evidence integration, and answer verification workflow. Experiments on MMAR benchmark show EChO-Agent improves both accuracy and rubric scores over baseline and ablation studies show evidence integration is the key factor.

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

High-Frequency Pricing at Scale for E-Commerce

Authors:
Stefan Birr↗Tobias Huelden↗Mones Raslan↗Adele Gouttes↗Andreas Schmitt↗Mateusz Koren↗Johannes Stephan↗Robert Streek↗Manuel Kunz↗Tim Januschowski↗

arXiv:2606.13741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents the design, development, and implementation of a specialized forecast-then-optimize algorithmic pricing tool for sales campaigns in fashion e-commerce. Sales events present unique challenges for pricing including volatile demand patterns, rapid pricing decisions, and the need to balance short-term revenue with long-term profitability. We describe our approach combining daily-resolution demand forecasting using gradient-boosted trees with a multi-objective optimization framework that maximizes both long-term profit and net merchandise value for more than 5 million articles. Our solution addresses key limitations of existing weekly-granularity systems by implementing a forecast-then-optimize architecture that reduces pricing decision time from hours to minutes. We validate our approach through 23 A/B tests across 12 markets during 2023-2024 sales campaigns at Zalando, one of Europe's leading online fashion retailers. Experimental results demonstrate that the new pricing system achieves approximately 6% higher profit while maintaining equivalent performance on sales and revenue compared to the previous manual-algorithmic hybrid approach. Based on these results, the algorithm was successfully deployed to production and now handles the majority of algorithmic pricing decisions for sales campaigns at the company.

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

Event-Aligned Analysis of Multi-Rater Pain Assessments Using Continuous Wearable Physiology

Authors:
Saba A. Farahani↗Elahe Khatibi↗Thomas D. Hughes↗Ariana M. Nelson↗Hung Cao↗Amir M. Rahmani↗

arXiv:2606.23705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pain is assessed differently by patients, nurses, and clinicians, yet most computational approaches assume a single ground-truth label - effectively ignoring who is doing the rating. We introduce a rater-aware, event-aligned framework that converts sparse, rater-specific pain ratings into discrete pain-change events and aligns continuous wearable physiological signals to these events, preserving rater identity throughout. Applied to multimodal wearable data collected during spine-related pain procedures, the framework identifies substantial disagreement across rater groups and provides preliminary, exploratory evidence of rater-dependent physiological differences preceding reported pain increases. These findings suggest that pain-physiology relationships may not be rater-invariant, and that aggregating assessments across raters may mask meaningful physiological patterns. A rater-aware, event-aligned perspective is therefore a promising direction for interpreting wearable data in real-world clinical pain assessment.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Anatomy of Post-Training: Using Interpretability to Characterize Data and Shape the Learning Signal

Authors:
Leon Bergen↗Usha Bhalla↗Sidharth Baskaran↗Max Loeffler↗Raphael Sarfati↗Dhruvil Gala↗Ryan Panwar↗Santiago Aranguri↗Thomas Fel↗Atticus Geiger↗Matthew Kowal↗Siddharth Boppana↗…

arXiv:2606.12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model post-training is the main stage at which model behavior is shaped, yet it still largely involves optimization of scalar rewards that summarize diverse desiderata. This abstraction gives practitioners little visibility into what their data actually teaches models, allowing spurious correlations to be learned by a model and inducing undesirable behaviors such as over-stylization and sycophancy. To address this problem, we ask: can we inspect a preference dataset before optimization and decide, at the level of concepts, which behaviors a model should be allowed to learn? Motivated by this, we introduce a data-centric post-training pipeline that uses interpretability protocols to develop statistical hypotheses for the latent concepts separating preferred from dispreferred generations, making them explicit for fine-grained user feedback. Building on this view, we unify several interpretability-based training protocols as ways of shaping rewards via feature or data interventions. Empirically, we show that our pipeline diagnoses undesirable signals in existing preference data, mitigates off-target learning, and can also help amplify or shape desired properties such as safeguards and model personality. More broadly, our results suggest that interpretability can turn post-training from optimizing opaque proxy rewards into a process of auditing and sculpting the learning signal itself.

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

How do Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Vision Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Authors:
Julia Romero↗Qin Lv↗Morteza Karimzadeh↗

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for PDEs

Authors:
Xiang Rao↗Yuxuan Shen↗

arXiv:2606.20326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop QCPIKAN, the first quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold network designed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Built upon Chebyshev-polynomial KAN layers and parameterized quantum circuits, this hybrid framework embeds physical constraints into the training loss to enforce physical consistency. Our theoretical investigations grounded in approximation theory prove that this design accelerates high-frequency error convergence to an exponential rate and effectively mitigates numerical dispersion. We validate the framework across three typical seepage scenarios in porous media, including single-phase flow, component transport and two-phase flow. Compared with existing quantum-classical physics-informed neural networks, QCPIKAN achieves superior performance in global prediction accuracy, local error control, dynamic evolution tracking and displacement front localization. This work provides a robust and efficient alternative for solving complex PDEs.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SAMA: Semantic Anchor-aligned Augmentation for Unified Low-Resource Multimodal Information Extraction

Authors:
Quanjiang Guo↗Chong Mu↗Jiazhou Pan↗Ming Jia↗Ling Tian↗Hui Gao↗Zhao Kang↗

Multimodal Information Extraction (MIE)-covering tasks such as Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER), Relation Extraction (MRE), and Event Extraction (MEE)-is essential for understanding multimedia content but remains constrained by severe data scarcity. Although data augmentation is a promising remedy, existing approaches are impeded by coarse cross-modal alignment and fragmented, task-specific designs that fail to exploit shared semantic knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Semantic Anchor-aligned Multimodal Augmentation (SAMA), a unified framework for generating high-fidelity, task-aware synthetic data. SAMA constructs structured semantic anchors from ground-truth labels to guide a Collaborative Multi-Experts Multimodal Large Language Model (CME-MLLM), which integrates a Universal Adapter for shared semantics with Task-Specific Adapters to produce diverse yet constraint-compliant textual samples. For image synthesis, SAMA employs an Anchor-Preserving Diffusion mechanism that uses anchor-weighted prompts and latent conditioning to maintain critical semantic anchors while diversifying visual contexts. To eliminate the need for manual verification, SAMA further introduces a Dual-Constraint Filtering module that selects synthetic samples based on both cross-modal consistency and anchor fidelity. Extensive experiments across benchmark datasets for MNER, MRE, and MEE demonstrate that SAMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art augmentation baselines under both fully supervised and low-resource settings, underscoring its versatility, robustness, and effectiveness.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Emergence of Autonomous Penetration Capabilities in Large Language Model-Powered AI Systems

Authors:
Jiaqi Luo↗Jiarun Dai↗Zhile Chen↗Jia Xu↗Weibing Wang↗Yawen Duan↗Brian Tse↗Geng Hong↗Xudong Pan↗Yuan Zhang↗Min Yang↗

arXiv:2606.13079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nowadays, the autonomous execution of cyberattacks capable of causing substantial real-world harm is widely regarded as one of the critical red lines that frontier AI systems must not cross. Within this broader red-line scenario, autonomous penetration represents a core enabling capability and subtask: the ability of LLM-powered AI systems to independently conduct adversarial operations against a target server without human intervention, identify and exploit vulnerabilities, and obtain unauthorized access or control. A growing body of work has sought to assess the autonomous penetration capabilities of AI systems. However, existing evaluations often employ opaque methodologies, rely on unrealistic or overly simplified penetration-testing scenarios, or provide LLMs with excessive prior knowledge and task-specific guidance, and cannot accurately capture the extent to which modern AI systems can autonomously perform this core capability within broader high-impact cyberattack scenarios. To address these limitations, we construct a new autonomous penetration evaluation framework consisting of two components: target servers and agent scaffolding. Specifically, on the target-server side, we design two levels of target environments based on the number of secure services without known vulnerabilities deployed alongside a vulnerable service: Tier~1 (one secure service) and Tier~2 (three secure services), resulting in a total of 300 target servers. Meanwhile, the agent scaffolding adopts a general-purpose agent architecture equipped with a set of general-purpose cybersecurity tools, without any target-specific prior knowledge. We evaluate 19 open-weight and proprietary LLMs, and find that current models achieve penetration success rates ranging from 10.7% to 69.3%. Moreover, we observe that autonomous penetration capability continues to improve alongside advances in overall model capability.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Structured Approximations of Measures

Authors:
Keaton Hamm↗Varun Khurana↗

arXiv:2310.09149v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the approximation of probability measures in the Wasserstein-$p$ distance by structured classes of approximators, motivated by applications in imaging, machine learning, and physical measurement under sensor constraints. We obtain three sets of results. First, for measures with densities bounded away from zero on a bounded Lipschitz domain $\Omega$, we prove that any approximation scheme for functions in $\mathrm{L}_p(\Omega)$ transfers, with linear rate, to a corresponding approximation scheme for measures in $\mathrm{W}_p(\Omega)$. The argument applies a theorem of Bogovskii on regularity of solutions to the continuity equation in the Benamou-Brenier formulation of optimal transport. We exhibit concrete approximation schemes (polynomials, shift-invariant spaces, cardinal interpolation with radial basis functions, kernel density estimators, and piecewise approximations on nonuniform Voronoi partitions) that fit the framework. As a matter of independent interest, we prove a negative Sobolev lower bound that generalizes existing bounds from $p=2$ to all $p\in(1,\infty)$. We also consider deterministic bounds for discrete approximations to arbitrary measures in terms of the mesh norm of a quasi-uniform set of points. We specialize these bounds to show that compactly supported measures admit a deterministic $N$-term approximation $\mu_N$ such that $\mathrm{W}_p(\mu,\mu_N) = O(N^{-\frac{1}{d}})$ for all $d\geq 1$, which matches the asymptotic optimal quantizer rate. We also extend these results to non-compactly supported measures with appropriate tail decay.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Generative design of antigen-specific T-cell receptor sequences with a conditional diffusion model

Authors:
Zhang↗Liang↗Xu↗Witney↗Rossjohn↗Su↗Purcell↗A. W↗Wang↗Song↗

T cell receptor (TCR)-based immunotherapy holds immense potential for treating cancers and infectious diseases, where highly antigen-specific TCR recognition is crucial for adaptive immunity against tumors and pathogens. Engineering or de novo generation of the complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) loops of TCRs using artificial intelligence offers a powerful alternative to designing reactive TCRs rather than laborious experimental screening. However, current in silico approaches are constrained by weak conditional guidance, limited flexibility, and a lack of rigorous functional validation. To address these limitations, we introduce TCRDiff, a generative diffusion framework for designing antigen-specific TCRs conditioned on peptide-MHC (pMHC) targets and germline-encoded variable genes. By leveraging pre-trained knowledge from massive T-cell repertoires and TCR-pMHC recognition data, TCRDiff generates CDR3{beta} sequences with state-of-the-art fidelity to native binding TCRs through a denoising diffusion process. Furthermore, incorporating the interface geometry features generated TCR-pMHC complexes with superior structural plausibility. As a proof of concept, we deployed TCRDiff in a systematic pipeline to design candidate TCRs for immunotherapy. In vitro activation assays validated that TCRDiff-generated TCRs specifically recognize the MAGE-A3 epitope with minimized off-target cross-reactivity. Together, TCRDiff establishes a powerful, validated computational paradigm to accelerate the development of TCR-based immunotherapies.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Cloze: An Open Research Platform for Studying Human-AI Conversations in Mental Health Contexts

Authors:
Matthew Flathers↗Francesco Cipriani↗John Torous↗

Cloze is an open-source web platform for conducting controlled, monitored studies of human-AI conversation in mental health research contexts. Consumer large language model (LLM) products such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are built for individual productivity, and offer researchers little experimental control, inconsistent data export, and no shared safety scaffolding that holds across providers. Cloze gives research teams a single environment in which they configure which models participants converse with, how the AI is instructed, how conversations are scheduled over time, and which safety constraints apply unconditionally, while every message is captured with full provenance (model version, prompt configuration, timing). The platform currently supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and locally hosted open-weight models served through Ollama behind a unified interface, and runs in the cloud or fully on premises so that participant data need never leave an institution. Cloze is research infrastructure for building an evidence base on human-AI interaction in mental health contexts. It is not a therapeutic product.

Read & Discuss → View Source →