Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

NeuroSymbolic AI for Legal AI-TRISM: Trustworthy, Reliable, Interpretable, Safe Models

arXiv:2606.15646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, but their lack of interpretable reasoning and tendency to hallucinate pose significant challenges for legal applications. While LLMs show promise for legal text analysis and generation, they struggle with accurate citation attribution and precedent verification. For example, in legal contexts, a single incorrect precedent can jeopardize a case. Current approaches to improve LLM reliability in legal domains suffer from two key limitations: inadequate integration of structured legal knowledge during training or fine-tuning, and insufficient verification mechanisms for generated legal content. To address these challenges, we propose the TRISM (Trustworthy, Reliable, Interpretable, Safe Models) framework, which integrates NeuroSymbolic AI principles with LLMs to leverage both neural learning capabilities and symbolic reasoning over structured legal knowledge. The TRISM approach addresses the above limitations while maintaining interpretable decision pathways. Our framework formalizes the extraction of symbolic knowledge from legal textual documents and incorporates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) as a core component for grounding LLM outputs in verified legal sources. In this position paper, we make the following contributions: (1) An analysis of the limitations of AI in law; (2) Introduce RASOR RAG which creates foundations for neurosymbolic RAG by generating explicit interpretable rationales that could be formalized into symbolic representations; (3) A formalized methodology for creating symbolic legal knowledge bases that support both interpretable reasoning and output verification in LLMs; and (4) The TRISM framework for integrating symbolic legal knowledge with LLMs.

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

DoubtProbe: Black-Box Jailbreak Defense via Structural Verification and Semantic Auditing

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing systems, black-box jailbreak defense has become an important practical problem. Existing defenses often rely on known-attack coverage, prompt-level semantic judgment, or local runtime control, yet these paths can become unstable under evolving prompt packaging, expression rewriting, and structure manipulation. We observe that many black-box jailbreaks do not remove the harmful goal, but reorganize the information needed to express and execute it, thereby evading safety alignment while remaining recoverable during generation. Motivated by this observation, we propose DoubtProbe, a dual-branch inference-time defense framework that combines structural verification with semantic auditing and formulates black-box jailbreak defense as consistency checking under controlled transformation. The structural branch extracts a structured representation from the original request, reconstructs the request under representation constraints, and detects information-preservation failures between the original and reconstructed requests; the semantic branch audits the original prompt directly. We evaluate DoubtProbe against representative black-box defenses on jailbreak and benign-request benchmarks, and further test backbone transfer from Qwen2.5-72B to Llama-3.1-70B. Results show that DoubtProbe achieves a stronger and more stable defense-utility trade-off: on Qwen2.5-72B, it reduces the JBB attack success rate from 0.293 to 0.100 and the CodeAttack attack success rate from 0.152 to 0.001, while maintaining false positive rates of 0.022 and 0.016 on AlpacaEval and OR-Bench; the same pattern remains stable on Llama-3.1-70B. These findings show that structural inconsistency signals provide a practical and generalizable basis for black-box jailbreak defense, especially when combined with semantic auditing.

03.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

PepAnno: A structure-aware deep learning framework for bioactive peptide prediction, structural visualization, and physicochemical profiling

Authors:

by Enyan Liu, Yueming Hu, Liya Liu, Yifan Chen, Shilong Zhang, Sida Li, Haoyu Chao, Luyao Xie, Yi Shen, Liangwei Wu, Julio Raúl Fernández Massó, Ming Chen Peptides are gaining prominence as therapeutic candidates due to their diverse physiological functions and structural simplicity. Although multiple computational tools exist for bioactive peptide prediction, many suffer from limitations such as non-intuitive interfaces, sequence-only representations, insufficient structural awareness, restricted interpretability, or fragmented analysis workflows, leading to reduced research efficiency and higher costs. To address these challenges, we present PepAnno (https://bis.zju.edu.cn/pepanno/), a comprehensive and user-friendly web server for multi-functional peptide annotation. PepAnno is powered by a novel structure-aware, multi-view geometric deep learning framework that integrates pre-trained sequence embeddings with predicted 3D structural graphs through a dual-stream architecture combining a Transformer and a GATv2 network. A cross-modal attention mechanism is employed to effectively fuse semantic and geometric representations, enabling accurate multi-task prediction across 7 key bioactivities, including antimicrobial and anticancer properties. Comprehensive evaluation on seven curated bioactivity datasets demonstrates that PepAnno achieves robust and competitive predictive performance across tasks, consistently outperforming or matching existing methods in terms of discrimination and stability. Beyond functional prediction, PepAnno provides automated calculation of physicochemical properties, structure visualization, and access to an integrated repository of peptide-related databases and tools. By enabling one-click peptide annotation, PepAnno offers an efficient and interpretable solution for large-scale peptide analysis and facilitates downstream experimental design and peptide-based drug discovery.

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

P3B3: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Measuring European and Brazilian Portuguese Variety Bias in LLMs

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become embedded in everyday communication, capturing regional linguistic variation is essential for reliable and equitable language use. In Portuguese, European (pt-PT) and Brazilian (pt-BR) varieties remain unevenly represented, with pt-BR dominating in data quantity, while LLM preference for Portuguese variants remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce P3B3, an expert-curated language variety agnostic benchmark of conversational prompts, along with an evaluation framework for measuring variety bias and controllability. Experiments on several models show that most LLMs exhibit a strong bias toward pt-BR, with variation in controllability across models. These results highlight the need for more balanced multilingual representation across language varieties.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Validating an Early Pregnancy HbA1c as the Screening Test for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: Findings from PRISMA Pakistan Cohort

Background: Early identification of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is critical to improving maternal and neonatal outcomes, particularly in resource-constrained settings where universal oral glucose tolerance testing (OGTT) is burdensome. We assessed whether early-pregnancy HbA1c alone or combined with common risk factors can predict GDM and reduce the burden of OGTT requirements in a peri-urban cohort in Karachi, Pakistan. Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of the Pregnancy Risk Infant Surveillance and Measurement Alliance (PRISMA) Pakistan cohort. Women enrolled before 20 weeks' gestation with available early-pregnancy HbA1c and a 2-hour 75g OGTT at 24 to 28 weeks were included. We externally validated GDM prediction models originally developed in the STRiDE-India cohort. Model performance was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and area under the curve (AUC). We assessed four models: HbA1c alone (Model 1a); age, BMI, and family history of diabetes mellitus (FH DM) (Model 1b); HbA1c combined with age, BMI, and FH DM (Model 2); and an extended model, i.e., Model 2 combined with socioeconomic status, gestational age, parity, systolic and diastolic blood pressure (Model 3). A dual-threshold approach was applied to assess rule-in and rule-out performance. Results: Among 2,489 women, GDM incidence was 7.5% (n=186). Models with a broader set of predictors demonstrated higher AUC values, with Model 2 achieving an AUC of 0.61 (95% CI: 0.57, 0.66). Including additional factors (Model 3) did not further improve predictive ability (AUC: 0.62; 95% CI: 0.58, 0.66). In addition, at predefined thresholds, Model 2 achieved sensitivity of 73.7% (rule-out) and specificity of 83.5% (rule-in), with the potential to reduce OGTT requirements (58.5%). Conclusions: Early-pregnancy risk stratification using HbA1c combined with simple clinical predictors offers a pragmatic approach to streamline GDM screening among high-risk pregnant women. A dual-threshold strategy using Model 2 could reduce reliance on universal OGTT while prioritizing high-risk women for confirmatory testing.

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

Train, Retrieve, or Both? A Four-Arm Head-to-Head for Correct Statutory Citation on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act

arXiv:2606.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-represented tenants, landlords, and help-desk staff need to be pointed at the provision of law that actually governs a question, with a correct statutory citation. We study this task on the Ontario Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 (RTA) and its core regulation, asking the operator's question empirically: is fine-tuning enough, or is hybrid retrieval needed? We run a four-arm head-to-head on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (base zero-shot, LoRA SFT-only, RAG-only, and an SFT+RAG hybrid), scored on citation exact-match (section+subsection) over a small, human-verification-pending real eval set. The base model cannot cite the RTA and SFT-only mis-recalls sections; retrieval is essential and drives hallucination to zero by construction; and the SFT+RAG hybrid scores highest at 0.481 exact-match with zero hallucinated citations. Its edge comes from SFT making provision selection more robust to the higher-recall candidate sets that hurt zero-shot RAG. Notably, this cheap bge-small hybrid matches or beats a pipeline built on bigger, specialized retrieval models (a larger embedder and a cross-encoder reranker), and a larger/improved training set does not help either: strong statutory-citation performance here does not require specialized retrieval models or more data. The artifact zeroes hallucination and clears the lift-over-base bar but does not reach the aspirational 0.70 exact-match target. All results are on a small, human-verification-pending real eval set and are reported as preliminary.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Analyzing Visual Aircraft Representations with Sparse Autoencoders

Vision models can achieve strong performance on classification tasks, but the internal representations supporting their predictions are often difficult to interpret. This work investigates whether sparse autoencoders can decompose intermediate representations of a vision model into interpretable features. We train a ConvNeXt classifier on the FGVC-Aircraft dataset, extract spatial activations from its final feature stage, and train a sparse autoencoder on these activations. The learned sparse features are analyzed using top-activating image patches, activation strength, and class selectivity. Qualitative visual inspection reveals that several features correspond to recognizable aircraft structures and visual patterns. We evaluate a subset of selected features using input-space and feature-space ablations, measuring how blurring image patches and suppressing sparse features affect class logits, classification margins, and prediction confidence. The results suggest that sparse autoencoders can reveal partially interpretable, class-relevant visual features associated with aircraft recognition, while also exposing limitations such as polysemanticity and coarse spatial localization.

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

Quality Adaptive Angular Margin Learning for Respiratory Sound Classification

arXiv:2606.11915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a quality-adaptive angular-margin learning framework that improves feature generalization by enforcing intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Our framework, titled QLung, introduces a no-reference audio quality margin derived from spectral entropy and root-mean-square energy, which adaptively scales angular margins based on recording quality. To this end, we propose a log-scaled angular margin that stabilizes training under severe class imbalance. We also use an angular classifier that normalizes features and class weights, ensuring margin penalties are applied consistently on the unit hypersphere. Our approach improves in-distribution performance on the ICBHI dataset by 2.46\% over the cross-entropy baseline, and most significantly, achieves the strongest out-of-distribution performance on the SPRSound dataset compared to prior state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/RSC-Toolkit/QLung.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SciRisk-Bench: A Risk-Dimension-Aware Benchmark for AI4Science Safety

arXiv:2606.18936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in AI for Science (AI4Science) workflows, from scientific question answering and literature analysis to laboratory planning and autonomous discovery. This progress creates an urgent need for safety benchmarks that evaluate not only scientific competence, but also whether models recognize and avoid risks in high-stakes scientific contexts. Existing AI4Science safety datasets cover several disciplines and task formats, leaving the underlying risk dimensions underspecified. We introduce SciRisk-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI4Science safety from two complementary perspectives: explicit risk dimensions and scientific disciplines. SciRisk-Bench covers 7 disciplines, 31 subdisciplines and 10 risk dimensions. In the experimental section, we evaluate both mainstream LLMs and science-oriented LLMs across risk dimensions, disciplines, and sub-disciplines, enabling fine-grained diagnosis of where scientific models remain unsafe.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

VarEx: A Large Language Model Pipeline for Automated Extraction of Exposures, Outcomes, and Covariates from Epidemiologic Studies

Objective: Observational studies are essential for investigating risk factors for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), but inconsistent reporting and selection of covariates can contribute to residual confounding, omitted-variable bias, and reduced reproducibility. We developed and evaluated VAREX (Variable Extraction), a large language model (LLM)-based information extraction framework designed to automatically identify exposures, outcomes, and covariates from epidemiologic studies and populate structured evidence repositories. Materials and Methods: VAREX combines retrieval-augmented generation, biomedical language-model embeddings, semantic chunking, cross-encoder reranking, and prompt-engineered LLM workflows to extract epidemiologic variables from full-text biomedical articles. The framework was evaluated using a reference-standard corpus of observational studies examining blood pressure variability (BPV) and Alzheimer's disease-related dementias (ADRD), together with external validation datasets involving other exposure-outcome relationships. Extracted variables were compared with independently curated human reference standards using semantic matching and one-to-one assignment procedures. Covariates were additionally classified into ten epidemiologically relevant semantic categories. Results: In the primary BPV[->]ADRD corpus (10 studies), VAREX achieved a precision of 0.91, recall of 0.84, and F1-score of 0.87 for variable extraction. Covariate classification accuracy was 0.90, yielding a strict extraction-and-classification F1-score of 0.78. External validation datasets demonstrated comparable performance across diverse epidemiologic domains, with extraction F1-scores ranging from 0.73 to 0.85. Category-level performance was strongest for health behaviors (F1=0.96), sociodemographic variables (F1=0.90), and medication exposures (F1=0.89). Compared with published estimates of manual systematic-review effort, VAREX reduced processing time from approximately 61 minutes to 9 minutes per article, representing an 85.7% reduction in review time. Discussion: These findings demonstrate that LLM-based information extraction can accurately identify and classify epidemiologic variables across heterogeneous observational-study designs. Automated extraction enables scalable construction of structured repositories of exposures, outcomes, and covariates while substantially reducing the labor required for evidence synthesis and systematic reviews. Conclusion: VAREX provides an effective framework for automated extraction and classification of epidemiologic variables from the biomedical literature. By supporting large-scale evidence synthesis and structured knowledge resource development, VAREX may facilitate more rigorous observational research, improved confounder identification, and enhanced reproducibility in epidemiology.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Substantia Nigra and Subthalamic Nucleus Deep Brain Stimulation Exert Opposing Effects on Novelty Recognition in Parkinson's Disease

Episodic memory plays a critical role in supporting adaptive behavior; however, whether it can be causally regulated in humans via deep subcortical stimulation remains unclear. In the present study, we investigated the differential effects of substantia nigra (SN) and subthalamic nucleus (STN) stimulation on episodic memory, as well as the underlying mechanisms of its associated brain networks, using a recognition memory task combined with concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging in patients with Parkinson's disease. SN-DBS increased recognition sensitivity and reduced false alarms at both frequencies, whereas 10 Hz STN-DBS reduced sensitivity and increased false alarms. Functional connectivity analyses in the absence of DBS stimulation identified a false recognition-related network linking nigral, pallidal, subthalamic, medial temporal, frontal, and occipital regions. SN-DBS-related false alarm reduction tracked modulation of this circuit and was marked by its baseline vulnerability state. These behavioral effects mapped onto target-dependent parieto-occipital and SN-visual retrieval pathways, supporting a model in which DBS bidirectionally regulates recognition memory through target- and frequency-dependent subcortical-cortical circuits.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Excursion Fluctuations and Spectral Universality in Gaussian Fields

arXiv:2606.15630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the large-scale spatial fluctuations of excursion volumes for a class of smooth stationary Gaussian fields. In the case of Berry's random wave model in dimension $d \geq 2$, we show that the spatial fluctuations for fixed $u>0$ converge to the fractional Gaussian field $(-\Delta)^{-1/4}W$ in the space of tempered distributions $\mathcal S'(\mathbb{R}^d)$, where $W$ is the $d$-dimensional Gaussian white noise. This explains the long-range correlations in the apparent filament structure of the Random Plane Wave model. For a class of smooth planar Gaussian fields whose spectral density has a power-law singularity at the origin, we prove convergence to fractional Gaussian fields with an index determined by the singularity exponent. More generally, the results illustrate that, for stationary random measures, large-scale spatial fluctuations are determined by the behaviour of the spectral measure density exponent near zero.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DiFlow-TTS: Compact and Low-Latency Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Discrete Flow Matching

Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) has made significant progress in replicating unseen voices, yet balancing generation quality and inference efficiency remains challenging. Autoregressive models suffer from high latency, while diffusion-based approaches are constrained by training-time configurations. Moreover, most flow-based methods operate in continuous space, which introduces optimization challenges because continuous token spaces are inherently more complex than discrete ones. To address these limitations, we propose DiFlow-TTS, a novel zero-shot TTS framework based on discrete flow matching. The model consists of a deterministic Phoneme-Content Mapper for linguistic modeling and a Factorized Discrete Flow Denoiser that simultaneously generates prosody and acoustic token streams. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple evaluation metrics.

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

Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling

Reliable watermarking of panoramic imagery is fundamentally challenged by arbitrary 3D rotations. As panoramas are defined on the sphere, they naturally transform under the action of $SO(3)$, rendering conventional planar representations and augmentation-based robustness strategies inadequate and devoid of theoretical guarantees. To address this, we formulate panoramas as spherical signals and leverage $SO(3)$ representation theory to derive provably rotation-invariant descriptors. While spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations, the natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics which eliminate directional information and severely constrain embedding capacity. In this work, we introduce a principled third-order invariant construction by coupling higher-order $SO(3)$ irreducible representations via tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation. This yields a spherical invariant bispectrum that preserves phase information while remaining strictly rotation-invariant. Leveraging this property, we embed watermarks into higher-order spherical harmonic coefficients and recover them from invariant bispectral scalars, enabling reliable extraction under arbitrary 3D rotations. We provide a theoretical proof of $SO(3)$ invariance for it and demonstrate experimentally its near-perfect robustness to continuous rotations while maintaining high visual fidelity.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Variational Polaron Theory for Ground States of Strongly Coupled Light-Matter and Electron-Phonon Systems

arXiv:2606.19748v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Strong light-matter and electron-phonon coupling generate ground states dressed by virtual bosonic excitations, making bare-state truncations and perturbative treatments unreliable in the ultrastrong-coupling regime. We introduce a nonperturbative variational ground-state framework based on a state-dependent polaron transformation, combined with a product-state ansatz and a second-order perturbative correction for residual matter-boson entanglement. We show that the optimized transformed frame becomes asymptotically decoupled at infinite coupling, because the leading linear coupling is canceled while off-diagonal matter transitions are suppressed by displaced-oscillator overlaps. The approach is asymptotically correct in both weak- and strong-coupling limits and remains accurate in the intermediate regime, where fixed polaron transformations are least reliable. Dicke-model benchmarks reproduce ground-state energies, fidelities, and the superradiant transition, with second-order energy errors below 0.2%. Holstein-model benchmarks yield errors below 0.5% and clarify how translational symmetry affects wave-function quality. This dressed-basis framework enables nonperturbative modeling of strongly coupled light-matter and electron-phonon systems.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Augmenting Game AI with Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Immersion in video games depends not only on graphics, audio, and game mechanics, but also on the quality of in-game characters. Producing believable characters, or game AI, remains a significant challenge as behavioral complexity is hard to capture with hand-coded systems. Game AI is a source of immersion and engagement; however, the limitations stemming from the challenges of creating game AI often lead to frustration and the breaking of the illusion of realism within the game. The introduction of machine learning models opens the door to creating more believable, authentic, and relatable characters in games. The promise is that they either learn from interacting with the game, or from player data, to develop true human-like behavior. In this paper, we envision more applications of reinforcement learning for game AI in the future. For this to materialize, current research limitations are prohibitive to broad deployment across game genres. Therefore, we propose a framework for training reinforcement learning models with a set of requirements in mind that are suited towards game AI and game development. We present examples of games with reinforcement learning-augmented game AI and describe the practicalities of deploying player-facing machine learning agents in modern games. Furthermore, we identify bottlenecks and hard problems in these areas, which we believe offer promising research directions to accelerate the adoption of machine learning in game AI for the video game industry.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Do Large Language Models Have Emotions?

arXiv:2606.14742v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Do LLMs have emotions? A recent paper from Anthropic reports finding internal representations of emotion concepts in Claude Sonnet 4.5, concluding that the LLM has 'functional emotions.' We evaluate this claim against what is known about how emotions actually function in biological systems. We argue that emotions serve two core functions: the context-sensitive interpretation of situations, and the reorganization of processing across multiple systems in response to those interpretations. The Anthropic findings offer partial support for the first function, though the consistent, discrete emotional representations identified in Claude sit uneasily with affective neuroscience findings that human emotion is characterized by variable rather than uniform neural signatures. On the second function, the evidence is mixed: Claude's representations modulate output without producing the dynamic reorganization of attention, decision speed, and motivational state that defines emotion in biological systems. We close by proposing what it would take for an LLM to have emotions.

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

When Sample Selection Bias Precipitates Model Collapse

arXiv:2606.13732v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The proliferation of recursive training on synthetic data can alleviate data scarcity but risks model collapse, where repeated training erodes distributional tails and homogenizes outputs. Data selection is widely viewed as a remedy, yet its reliability depends critically on the reference distribution used by the verifier. We show that in low-resource verification regimes, where each verifier observes only a small, fragmented, and biased slice of the target manifold, selection itself becomes biased. This situation naturally arises in low-resource data silos such as healthcare consortia or proprietary financial institutions, where raw data cannot be pooled and local references are inherently incomplete. As a result, selection preferentially retains samples aligned with the local manifold while pruning globally relevant tail modes, turning from a safeguard against collapse into a mechanism that precipitates it. We theoretically prove that such siloed selection accelerates collapse and induces power-law diversity decay. As an initial mitigation, we construct Wasserstein proxy references from multiple silos without sharing raw data. Empirical results confirm that local-reference selection fails on skewed distributions, whereas collaborative proxy references mitigate diversity degradation, suggesting that recursive synthetic-data pipelines require particular caution when real-data coverage is fragmented or scarce.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Neither Parallel Nor Sequential: How DiffusionGemma Actually Commits Tokens

arXiv:2606.14620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open diffusion language models are marketed as parallel, non-autoregressive decoders, yet the order in which a shipped checkpoint actually commits its tokens is almost never measured. We instrument DiffusionGemma 26B, a masked discrete-diffusion mixture-of-experts model built on Gemma 4, hooking its sampler's accept step to record which canvas positions commit, when, and at what confidence. Across a 686-prompt, six-regime probe suite we find that its decoding is neither parallel nor block-autoregressive: it follows a partial left-to-right commit bias whose apparent strength depends almost entirely on the granularity at which you look. Order is weak token by token and strengthens smoothly as the analysis is coarsened, so the model's "block size" turns out to be an artifact of the measuring ruler rather than the architecture. The model commits in large simultaneous batches, leaving much of the within-batch order genuinely undefined rather than merely unobserved. The behaviour is regime-dependent: structured JSON is committed in essentially arbitrary order, and a position's commit confidence tracks correctness on mathematical reasoning but carries no signal on factual recall. Commitment is aggressive, finishing in a short late burst well inside the step budget, while task accuracy matches the model's autoregressive Gemma-4 sibling. Beyond these findings, our central contribution is methodological: measuring decoding order honestly demands handling trailing-EOS padding, within-regime confounding, commit non-monotonicity, block-size sensitivity, and large commit-batch ties, each of which can otherwise manufacture a decoding-order result that is not really there.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contactless Respiratory Monitoring on Heterogeneous Mobile Robots: A Multimodal Edge-Computing Framework

Respiratory-rate (RR) monitoring is a critical component of remote triage and victim assessment in emergency response, disaster recovery, and infectious-disease scenarios, where minimizing physical contact can reduce responder risk and improve operational safety. However, field deployment of contactless RR monitoring remains challenging due to variable illumination, posture changes, platform heterogeneity, and the impracticality of wearable sensors in hazardous environments. In this paper, we present a modality-adaptive contactless RR monitoring framework for heterogeneous mobile robots with onboard edge computing. The proposed system combines brightness-adaptive sensor selection across RGB, thermal, near-infrared (NIR), and low-light cameras, keypoint-guided chest ROI extraction for posture-robust monitoring, and a signal-quality-index (SQI)-based filtering mechanism for reliable respiratory estimation. We implement and evaluate the framework on three robotic platforms spanning quadruped and wheeled locomotion and multiple edge-computing architectures. Experiments conducted across diverse lighting conditions, subject poses, and robot-to-subject distances demonstrate that the framework generalizes across platforms without per-platform algorithmic retuning, while revealing modality-specific operational boundaries. RGB provides the broadest coverage up to 8m, NIR remains effective up to 6m, thermal is reliable only at short range, and low-light sensing supports monitoring in complete darkness up to 8m. Overall, the results demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal contactless RR monitoring on mobile robots and support its use as a foundation for autonomous triage and victim assessment in hazardous search-and-rescue settings.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PrefSQA: Pairwise Preference Prediction for Speech Quality Assessment and the Critical Role of High Quality Datasets

arXiv:2606.19597v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mean opinion scores (MOS) are widely used for speech quality assessment, yet scalar labels are sensitive to rater variability and listening test differences. This introduces labeling noise, which limits the reliability of MOS prediction. Preference prediction reduces this variability as listeners compare signals directly, producing cleaner labels. We study MOS-free preference prediction and propose PrefSQA, which incorporates uncertainty-aware logits, an impairment attention head, and a module based on non-matching-reference comparisons. We use and refine five datasets, including MOS-derived and low-noise simulated sets with matching and non-matching content, experiment with human preference sets, and test on unseen data. Experiments show small improvements on MOS-derived data, while other sets reveal clear improvement over the baselines, highlighting the value of high-quality preference data and demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

An integrated interpretable control effectiveness learning and nonlinear control allocation methodology for overactuated aircrafts

arXiv:2606.13794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nonlinear dynamics and the strong couplings that arise between multiple effectors undermine the assumptions behind conventional, linear control allocation techniques. When flight enters regimes where nonlinear effects dominate, linear allocators exhibit reduced accuracy due to increased model mismatch, which subsequently degrades performance and robustness of the flight control system. High fidelity onboard models and black box data driven approaches can recover accuracy across the flight envelope, but respectively impose computational burdens prohibitive for real time allocation and sacrifice the interpretability required for verification and fault diagnosis. This paper addresses these limitations by learning an explicit, physics constrained analytical model of the control effectiveness mapping from representative flight data using Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics. The resulting mapping is compact, interpretable, and admits analytical derivatives, enabling efficient computation within nonlinear solvers that additionally incorporate actuator dynamics, without requiring an onboard model. An online adaptation mechanism monitors prediction residuals and refreshes the model when significant plant changes are detected, providing graceful reconfiguration under actuator failures and varying operating conditions. The methodology is evaluated on a high fidelity nonlinear benchmark aircraft across a range of aggressive maneuvers, achieving accuracy comparable to a full nonlinear onboard model while substantially reducing computational cost relative to established baselines.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models

Processing video in vision-language models is expensive: each frame occupies hundreds of tokens, and inference cost scales with every frame and every repeated query. We introduce Frames2LoRA, a method for parametric video internalization. A perceiver hypernetwork reads the intermediate representations produced layer-by-layer as a frozen VLM encodes a video, and generates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter in a single forward pass. Unlike standard LoRA fine-tuning, which requires iterative gradient updates, Frames2LoRA predicts these weights directly from the video. Trained for SmolVLM2 500M and 2.2B on video summarization and captioning, Frames2LoRA enables the same frozen VLM to answer queries from the adapter alone, with zero visual tokens in its context at query time. Frames2LoRA is statistically non-inferior and equivalent to direct video-in-context inference across all five captioning benchmarks at both model scales, and across seven of eight video question answering benchmark-scale pairings. Although trained only on 12 frames at 384px, it remains stable up to 1,024 frames and 1024px, where direct video-in-context inference often degenerates. Across this sweep, it reduces answer-time visual-token load by up to 1,500x and query TTFT by 6-80x, while preserving video-faithful outputs. We also find that independently generated adapters for non-overlapping video segments can compose in rank space, suggesting a path toward chunked long-video internalization.

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

MOLAR: Learning Multimodal Molecular Representations from Noisy Labels

arXiv:2606.18390v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivation: Noisy labels are a common challenge in molecular property prediction because molecular annotations are often obtained from assays, curated databases, or weak annotation pipelines rather than directly observed clean biological states. Treating recorded labels as reliable supervision can cause models to memorize corrupted observations and learn misleading molecular evidence. In multimodal molecular representation learning, this issue can be amplified by graph-text fusion or alignment, which may propagate label-induced errors across modalities. Results: We propose MOLAR, a noise-aware framework for learning multimodal molecular representations from noisy labels. MOLAR separates latent clean-property inference from recorded-label observation: graph and text views contribute residual evidence to a clean-property distribution, and a categorical label-observation channel maps this distribution to recorded labels for training. This formulation derives posterior label reliability and modality-specific molecular evidence from the model. Experiments on naturally noisy molecular benchmarks and controlled label-flipping benchmarks show that MOLAR consistently outperforms representative baselines. Visualization analyses further show that MOLAR provides interpretable reliability and modality-evidence diagnostics.