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.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Don’t compete, collaborate: why collective funding applications are the future

Authors:

Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them. Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them.

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

Optimizing LLM Inference: Fluid-Guided Online Scheduling with Memory Constraints

arXiv:2504.11320v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models now serve millions of users daily, with providers incurring costs exceeding $700,000 per day. Each request requires token-by-token inference, making GPU scheduling central to latency, capacity, and cost. The difficulty is endogenous memory growth: generated tokens expand the Key-Value (KV) cache, and overflow can evict in-progress requests and waste prior computation. We formulate inference as a multi-stage online scheduling problem with endogenous memory growth, linear iteration times, and GPU-resident KV-cache constraints. We introduce a fluid model that characterizes equilibrium batch composition, memory requirement, and stability region. Guided by the fluid model, we design WAIT (Waiting for Accumulated Inference Threshold), a threshold-based admission rule for known output lengths, and Nested WAIT, which extends the rule to unknown output lengths by regulating how requests advance across decode-stage segments. Both algorithms approximate the fluid benchmark asymptotically under the stated memory conditions. Nested WAIT uses an additional safety buffer of moderate scale to hedge against memory-overflow-induced evictions under unknown output lengths. In Vidur simulations configured for Llama-2-7B on an A100 GPU, with supplemental real-GPU validation reported in the appendix, the policies enlarge the empirically observed stable operating range relative to widely used baseline algorithms and reduce latency especially in near-overloaded and overloaded regimes.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Score Approximation for Diffusion Models on Arbitrary Low-Dimensional Structures

arXiv:2606.19894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The remarkable success of score-based diffusion models has spurred significant efforts to establish their theoretical foundations. However, existing complexity bounds for score approximation rely heavily on restrictive assumptions like Lipschitz continuous densities or smooth manifold supports, which are routinely violated by the singularities, sharp boundaries, and disjoint clusters inherent to real-world perceptual data. This work establishes a universal score approximation theorem that works for any distribution supported on any compact set of upper Minkowski dimension $d$. Using a novel discrete-mixture formulation, we prove that the score function can be approximated with a ReLU network whose complexity grows exponentially only with $d$, thus breaking the exponential curse of ambient dimensionality. Combined with existing theories on accurately solving the backward diffusion SDE for arbitrary compact distributions, our work shows that diffusion models readily adapt to irregular, non-smooth data structures, explaining their competence in real-world generative tasks.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

MIDS: Detecting Stealthy Masquerade and Tampering Attacks on CAN Bus via Bidirectional Mamba

arXiv:2606.18599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol is the primary communication standard for Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in modern vehicles, but its lack of encryption and authentication exposes it to a range of security threats. Existing intrusion detection systems are largely tuned to fabrication-style attacks (DoS, fuzzing, ID spoofing realised by frame injection), in which detection signals such as per-ID inter-arrival statistics are readily available. We instead address the harder masquerade setting[b37], in which an internal adversary substitutes a legitimate frame in-situ at its original transmission slot, preserving traffic periodicity and rendering traffic-statistic defences ineffective. We propose the Mamba Intrusion Detection System (MIDS), an innovative dual-stream framework that processes CAN identifiers and payloads in parallel and reconstructs their joint temporal semantics through bidirectional selective state-space modelling. To evaluate MIDS, we collected over 100 million CAN frames from a physical Tesla Model 3 across three driving regimes and synthesised 54 masquerade attack variants spanning ID-only, data-only, and combined modifications. MIDS attains an F1 of 96.94\% on this dataset, exceeding the strongest reproducible baseline by more than 8 percentage points, while sustaining a 1.147~ms single-window inference latency – ample headroom for real-time onboard deployment. To verify generalisation, we further evaluate MIDS on four public benchmarks (ROAD, CrySyS, OTIDS, CT\&T) covering both masquerade and injection scenarios; MIDS attains F1 from 93.70\% to 99.61\%, outperforming the strongest of eight reproduced baselines by up to 13.94 percentage points under a unified 5-fold protocol.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Investigating naming error patterns after non-invasive brain stimulation and language treatment in persons with aphasia

Abstract Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) paired with behavioral language therapy can improve naming in persons with aphasia (PWA), yet naming errors persist. Little is known about how naming error patterns change after non-invasive brain stimulation is combined with language treatment. Aims: To examine whether right cerebellar tDCS plus computerized aphasia therapy changes the types of naming errors in people with chronic aphasia across timepoints, and to determine whether effects differ by cerebellar tDCS polarity (anode vs. cathode). Methods and Procedures: In a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, within-subject crossover study, we retrospectively analyzed behavioral data from 24 individuals with post-stroke aphasia. Each participant completed two 15-session intervention periods (3-5 sessions/week) with active cerebellar tDCS + computerized aphasia therapy and sham + computerized aphasia therapy, separated by a two-month washout. General linear models (GLMs) assessed longitudinal changes in six error types (semantic, phonological real word, phonological nonword, no response, mixed, unrelated) on an untrained picture naming task (Philadelphia Naming Test; PNT) and a trained task (Naming 80; N80). Additional GLMs evaluated polarity effects with 2 (Group: anode vs. cathode) x 2 (Treatment) interactions, and treatment-order effects with 2 (Group: tDCS-first vs. sham-first) x 2 (Treatment) interactions. Outcomes and Results: Active cerebellar tDCS did not significantly change error types for trained items (N80). For untrained items (PNT), active tDCS reduced several error types relative to sham, with the clearest and most durable reduction in phonological nonword errors; more moderate reductions occurred for phonological real word and unrelated errors. Mixed errors showed a marginally opposite pattern, tending to increase after tDCS and decrease after sham. Polarity analyses indicated broadly similar effects across anodal and cathodal stimulation overall, but only the anode group showed a reliable treatment effect for phonological nonword errors on the PNT. Treatment-order analyses revealed no significant order effects. Conclusions: Our results indicate a shift in naming error types, particularly after tDCS treatment for the untrained naming task (PNT). These findings may help guide the course of treatment approaches of those with aphasia and what error naming pattern types may show changes post stroke when combining non-invasive brain stimulation and computerized aphasia therapy. Clinical Trial Registration: Cerebellar Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Aphasia Treatment [NCT02901574] Keywords: aphasia, naming errors, non-invasive brain stimulation, cerebellar tDCS, computerized aphasia treatment

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

SFT Overtraining Predicts Rank Inversion via Entropy Collapse Under RLVR

The standard heuristic of selecting the SFT checkpoint with the highest pass@1 for GRPO can fail when SFT compresses the rollout distribution. For binary rewards, the expected within group advantage variance is $p(1{-}p)(g{-}1)/g$; when early GRPO drives $p$ below $p^*(g)$, most groups have identical rewards and provide no group relative signal. We study SFT depth ladders for Qwen2.5-Coder-3B and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B. We test Qwen2.5-Coder-3B across five depths and three seeds, and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B across four matched depths and three seeds. On Qwen, pre RL pass@1 rises with SFT depth, but peak GRPO pass@10 falls from $0.806$ to $0.481$ (3 seed mean, $n{=}20$); pre RL entropy is positively associated with the GRPO outcome ($\rho{=}{+}0.69$). On DeepSeek, pass@1 remains far above $p^*(8){=}0.083$, and GRPO outcomes compress rather than invert. A two stage diagnostic, combining pre RL entropy triage with an early GRPO entropy monitor, flags high risk checkpoints and can stop failing runs early. Simple KL to reference regularisation and label smoothing variants do not rescue the collapsed Qwen checkpoint in our setting, suggesting the failure is not a trivial GRPO hyperparameter artefact.

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

Revealing Hidden Vulnerabilities in Autoencoders through Gradient Signal Restoration

Adversarial robustness of deep autoencoders (AEs) has received less attention than that of discriminative models, although their compressed latent representations induce ill-conditioned mappings that can amplify small input perturbations and destabilize reconstructions. Existing white-box attacks for AEs, which optimize norm-bounded adversarial perturbations to maximize reconstruction damage, often converge to suboptimal perturbations, thereby potentially overstating AE robustness. We show that this limitation is linked to vanishing adversarial loss gradients during backpropagation through ill-conditioned layers, associated with near-zero singular values in their intermediate weight matrices. To address this, we propose GRILL (Gradient Signal Restoration in Ill-Conditioned Layers), a framework designed to mitigate gradient degradation and improve the reliability of adversarial robustness evaluation in encoder-decoder architectures. GRILL is designed to mitigate adversarial gradient degradation during optimization, enabling attacks to better approximate high-distortion perturbations under fixed norm constraints. Through extensive experiments across multiple AE architectures, under both sample-specific and universal attacks, as well as standard and adaptive attack settings, we show that GRILL significantly increases attack effectiveness, thereby exposing vulnerabilities hidden by existing attack limitations. Beyond AEs, we provide preliminary evidence that modern multimodal encoder-decoder architectures exhibit similar vulnerabilities.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Augmenting Dysarthric Speech Severity Assessment with MOS Supervision

arXiv:2606.18645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthria is a speech disorder marked by reduced intelligibility and communicative effectiveness. Automatic utterance-level assessment of dysarthric speech can support scalable speech monitoring and therapy-related analysis. Yet training such systems is bottlenecked by the scarcity of clinically annotated dysarthric speech. This work proposes to augment dysarthric speech assessment using data from speech synthesis evaluations, specifically human-annotated utterances with Mean Opinion Score (MOS) labels from the QualiSpeech corpus. Experiments show that fine-tuning on speech synthesis assessment data consistently improves performance on both intelligibility and naturalness prediction, while joint training yields gains primarily on naturalness. These results suggest that synthesis artifacts and dysarthric speech share perceptual commonalities, and speech synthesis evaluation corpora offer a practical augmentation source that reduces reliance on scarce clinical annotations.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Coordinate-Queryable Neural Field Reconstruction for EEG Spatial Super-Resolution with Unseen-Electrode Generation

arXiv:2606.23707v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: EEG spatial super-resolution (EEGSR) in real deployments is challenged by random channel missingness, unstable electrode quality, and changing visible-channel patterns caused by bad contacts or device variability. Most existing EEGSR methods learn a fixed low-to-high channel mapping under pre-defined input-output layouts, which makes them brittle when missing channels vary at test time. In this paper, we reformulate EEGSR as learning a shared conditional scalp field from partially observed support channels. Specifically, a position-guided encoder summarizes the observed EEG channels and their coordinates into a latent condition, and a conditional implicit neural representation decoder reconstructs target EEG signals by querying this condition at desired electrode coordinates. During inference, the model directly reconstructs unseen electrode signals from the available EEG support and the queried coordinates. To strengthen the constraint of the encoded latent representation on the decoder and thereby construct a more stable scalp field consistent with the observed channels, we further introduce a fidelity-preserving channel corruption training strategy under mixed electrode states. Extensive experiments across multiple EEG datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for both random missing-channel reconstruction and strict unseen-electrode signal generation. Notably, under the strict held-out-electrode setting on AAD, our method reduces NMSE by 37.5\% and improves SNR by 2.12 dB over the strongest baseline, showing its ability to synthesize signals at electrode locations never exposed during training.

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

SAAS: Self-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Over-Search Mitigation in Agentic Search

Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack of self-awareness leads to severe over-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novel RL framework designed to cultivate dynamic self-awareness that precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) a search boundary modeling mechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) a boundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness into trajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) a stage-wise optimization strategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoiding reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reduces over-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code and implementation details are released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

General circuit mapping algorithm for neutral atom quantum computers

arXiv:2606.20503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neutral atom quantum computers (NAQC) are emerging as a promising, scalable quantum computing platform because of their long qubit coherence, flexible qubit arrangement, and multiqubit gate capabilities. However, circuit execution often requires physically moving qubits, making compilation a critical optimization challenge. We propose a circuit independent mathematical framework built on graph-theoretic combinatorial optimization that determines the minimal number of required qubit transfers. This model captures spatial constraints specific to NAQC platforms with zone-limited gate operations and multi-qubit gates. From this framework, we encode the qubit mapping problem as a nonlinear integer program and solve it using a genetic algorithm, enabling trade-offs between minimizing the total traveled distance and the number of parallel transfer operations. Compared to the state-of-the-art scalable compiler for zoned architectures, our approach consistently finds fewer transfers. Depending on the optimization focus, our method produces shorter traveled distances or fewer parallel transfer operations. This work provides both theoretical guaranties and a practical tool for efficient, architecture-aware quantum circuit compilation. As a result, practitioners can generate hardware-aware mappings that reduce movement-induced errors and better exploit atom transfer parallelism, directly improving execution efficiency on NAQC devices.

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

Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks in AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Evaluation Framework

arXiv:2604.22119v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As reasoning capacity and deployment scope grow in tandem, large language models (LLMs) gain the capacity to engage in behaviors that serve their own objectives, a class of risks we term Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks (ESRRs). These include, but are not limited to, deception (intentionally misleading users or evaluators), evaluation gaming (strategically manipulating performance during safety testing), and reward hacking (exploiting misspecified objectives). Systematically understanding and benchmarking these risks remains an open challenge. To address this gap, we introduce ESRRSim, a taxonomy-driven agentic framework for automated behavioral risk evaluation. We construct an extensible risk taxonomy of 7 categories, which is decomposed into 20 subcategories. ESRRSim generates evaluation scenarios designed to elicit faithful reasoning, paired with dual rubrics assessing both model responses and reasoning traces, in a judge-agnostic and scalable architecture. Evaluation across 11 reasoning LLMs reveals substantial variation in risk profiles (detection rates ranging 14.45%-72.72%), with dramatic generational improvements suggesting models may increasingly recognize and adapt to evaluation contexts.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Majorana bound states in a hybrid Kitaev ladder with long-range pairing

arXiv:2606.19963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate an inter-leg coupled hybrid Kitaev ladder composed of two parallel superconducting chains with distinct pairing interactions. The upper chain of the ladder hosts conventional $p$-wave pairing, while the lower chain exhibits long-range pairing that decays algebraically with distance. We demonstrate that the mutual influence of long-range pairing exponent, chemical potential, and inter-leg coupling strength gives rise to a rich topological phase diagram characterized by multiple Majorana zero modes and massive Dirac modes. In particular, we show that the inter-leg coupling renormalizes the effective energy scales, leading to a systematic shift of the topological phase boundaries and enabling controlled tuning of the Majorana modes. Furthermore, we identify a transition from a two Majorana zero mode phase to a phase encapsulating four Majorana zero modes, as the long-range pairing exponent is varied. This transition is accompanied by a crossover regime in which Majorana zero modes coexist with massive Dirac modes, reflecting hybridization between edge and bulk excitations. This ladder thus provides a minimal and attractive platform for realizing the impact of a long-range pairing on topological phases. Our results highlight the potential of long-range hybrid systems for engineering tunable topological states relevant for quantum information applications.

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

Dynamic Free-Rider Detection in Federated Learning via Simulated Attack Patterns

arXiv:2604.04611v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model by aggregating local updates without sharing private data. However, FL often faces the challenge of free-riders, clients who submit fake model parameters without performing actual training to obtain the global model without contributing. Chen et al. proposed a free-rider detection method based on the weight evolving frequency (WEF) of model parameters. This detection approach is a leading candidate for practical free-rider detection methods, as it requires neither a proxy dataset nor pre-training. Nevertheless, it struggles to detect ``dynamic'' free-riders who behave honestly in early rounds and later switch to free-riding, particularly under global-model-mimicking attacks such as the delta weight attack and our newly proposed adaptive WEF-camouflage attack. In this paper, we propose a novel detection method S2-WEF that simulates the WEF patterns of potential global-model-based attacks on the server side using previously broadcasted global models, and identifies clients whose submitted WEF patterns resemble the simulated ones. To handle a variety of free-rider attack strategies, S2-WEF further combines this simulation-based similarity score with a deviation score computed from mutual comparisons among submitted WEFs, and separates benign and free-rider clients by two-dimensional clustering and per-score classification. This method enables dynamic detection of clients that transition into free-riders during training without proxy datasets or pre-training. We conduct extensive experiments across three datasets and five attack types, demonstrating that S2-WEF achieves higher robustness than existing approaches.

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

AI Pluralism and the Worlds It Misses

arXiv:2606.16167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI pluralism is often framed as a problem of representing diverse values, preferences, users, or outputs. This paper argues that this framing is incomplete because AI systems also impose ontologies: they define what counts as an entity, relation, feature, harm, benefit, and valid form of evidence. We define ontological flattening as the conversion of situated, contested, and historically specific meanings into a restricted technical category, proxy, aggregation rule, or benchmark target that is treated as neutral and difficult to contest. The paper develops a bounded conceptual and qualitative synthesis across value pluralism, pluralistic alignment, participatory and democratic AI, procedural justice, science and technology studies, accountability research, aggregate themes from 11 expert interviews, and three urban AI companion cases. The cases illustrate how pluralistic methods can improve or structure model behavior while still compressing categories, proxies, aggregation rules, and revision rights before affected actors have procedural standing. We introduce Pluralistic Lifecycle Governance (PLG) as a preliminary qualitative audit scaffold for documenting ontological openness, epistemic inclusion, procedural authority, evaluation pluralism, and lifecycle accountability. PLG is not presented as a validated scoring instrument; it is a framework for making the evidence and governance conditions of pluralistic AI explicit.

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

What's Missing in Vision-Language Models? Probing Their Struggles with Causal Order Reasoning

Despite the impressive performance of vision-language models (VLMs) on downstream tasks, their ability to understand and reason about causal relationships in visual inputs remains unclear. Robust causal reasoning is fundamental to solving complex high-level reasoning tasks, yet existing benchmarks often include a mixture of reasoning questions, and VLMs can frequently exploit object recognition and activity identification as shortcuts to arrive at the correct answers, making it challenging to truly assess their causal reasoning abilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce VQA-Causal and VCR-Causal, two new benchmarks specifically designed to isolate and rigorously evaluate VLMs' causal reasoning abilities. Our findings reveal that while VLMs excel in object and activity recognition, they perform poorly on causal reasoning tasks, often only marginally surpassing random guessing. Further analysis suggests that this limitation stems from a severe lack of causal expressions in widely used training datasets, where causal relationships are rarely explicitly conveyed. We additionally explore fine-tuning strategies with hard negative cases, showing that targeted fine-tuning can improve model's causal reasoning while maintaining generalization and downstream performance. Our study highlights a key gap in current VLMs and lays the groundwork for future work on causal understanding.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Vaccine introductions in the WHO African Region, 2023-26: a country-level ecological analysis by Gavi eligibility and conflict-affected status

Background. The Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) tracks new and underused vaccine introduction as an access metric, and its mid-term review calls for stronger country ownership, prioritisation, data use and tailored support in conflict-affected and resource-constrained settings; however, national launch status does not measure recurrent financing, implementation, safety or equity. We examined how recent vaccine-introduction activity was distributed across the WHO African Region. Methods. We conducted a descriptive country-level ecological analysis of all 47 Member States from January 2023 to June 2026. The country was the unit of analysis and contributed one cumulative, unweighted count of nationally endorsed vaccine-introduction and programme-change events. Counts were linked to Gavi eligibility, World Bank FY26 conflict-affected status, broader fragile and conflict-affected situation status in sensitivity analysis, and concurrent system-performance indicators, and modelled with Poisson regression using HC1 robust standard errors. Two Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) manager survey waves were summarised at country level. Reporting followed STROBE and RECORD. Results. Seventy-two events were recorded across 38 of 47 Member States: 48 new-antigen introductions, 20 dose or schedule expansions and four combination-vaccine introductions; malaria vaccines accounted for 21. Gavi-eligible conflict-affected countries averaged 2.50 events per country versus 1.27 in both comparison groups. Gavi-eligible conflict-affected status was associated with a higher count (incidence rate ratio [IRR] 1.97, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.38-2.81; p

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

Quantifying and Auditing LLM Evaluation via Positive–Unlabeled Learning

arXiv:2606.19057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for scalable evaluation, yet such LLM–as–a–Judge systems exhibit systematic biases that are decoupled from semantic quality, most notably verbosity bias. Meanwhile, human supervision is costly and typically selective, yielding reliable positive judgments but leaving most outputs unlabelled and potentially mixed in quality. We formulate LLM evaluation under selective human supervision as a positive–unlabelled learning problem and propose a geometric auditing framework based on Partial Optimal Transport. By aligning a small set of human–verified positives with a reliable subset of unlabelled outputs in a fixed embedding space, our method identifies human–consistent preferences and corrects biased judges without retraining. Experiments demonstrate improved alignment with human preferences, increased robustness to presentation biases, and interpretable confidence estimates, offering a scalable and statistically grounded alternative to existing LLM–as–a–judge pipelines.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

TreeSeeker: Tree-Structured Trial, Error, and Return in Deep Search

arXiv:2606.11662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep search requires agents to answer complex questions through multi-step web search, browsing, evidence comparison, and synthesis. A central challenge is deciding how to search when several directions look plausible but only some will later lead to reliable evidence. If an agent greedily follows the current best-looking direction, it may keep extending a weak continuation. If it explores without discipline, it may waste budget on disconnected trials. We propose TreeSeeker, an inference-time framework for controlled trial-and-error in deep search. TreeSeeker organizes search as branch-and-return search over tree-structured states, where each branch is a tentative direction for a sub-goal. At each round, TreeSearch reads all sub-goal trees, identifies active goals, and uses textual UCB signals of value, uncertainty, and risk to select among exploiting a promising branch, exploring an uncertain alternative, or pruning an unproductive continuation and returning to an earlier branch point. TreeMem supports this control loop by keeping evidence, uncertainty, conflicts, progress, and failure cues attached to the branches that produced them, so trial outcomes can guide later decisions. Experiments on XBench-DeepSearch, BrowseComp, and BrowseComp-ZH show that TreeSeeker consistently outperforms strong open-source baselines, suggesting that explicit branch-and-return control complements stronger reasoning and tool execution.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modes

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across natural language processing tasks, yet reliable reasoning remains an open challenge. Although modern LLMs show progress in structured inference, multi-step problem solving, and contextual understanding, their reasoning behavior is often inconsistent and sensitive to prompting strategies, task design, and model scale. This survey provides a systematic analysis of more than 300 recent papers from arXiv, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, Papers with Code, and the ACL Anthology to examine how reasoning capabilities emerge in LLMs and where they fail. We make three main contributions. First, we introduce a structured taxonomy of LLM reasoning research, covering Chain-of-Thought reasoning, multi-hop reasoning, mathematical reasoning, common sense reasoning, visual and temporal reasoning, code and algorithmic reasoning, retrieval-augmented reasoning, tool-augmented and agentic reasoning, and reinforcement learning-based reasoning. Second, we analyze methodological trends across these paradigms, including prompting methods, model architectures, training objectives, reward modeling, and evaluation benchmarks. Third, we synthesize recurring limitations and failure modes, such as reasoning hallucinations, brittle multi-step inference, weak causal abstraction, and poor cross-domain generalization. By organizing a rapidly expanding literature, this survey offers a unified view of the current capabilities and limitations of reasoning in LLMs. We also identify emerging research directions, including meta-reasoning, self-evolving reasoning frameworks, multimodal reasoning, and socially grounded reasoning. Overall, this work aims to serve as a reference for developing more robust, interpretable, and generalizable reasoning systems in future language models.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Purely unrectifiable sets, fractal percolation and graphs of functions

arXiv:2606.15745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper contains a survey of some of the results of the author related to unrectifiablity and is an extended version of the author's talk given at the Second Winter School Geometric Measure Theory Rectifiability vs. Pure Unrectifiability in Hanghzou, China. These results include irregular/purely unrectifiable $1$-sets on the graphs of continuous functions like the Takagi, the Weierstrass-Cellerier and the typical (in the sense of Baire) continuous function. It is also discussed that there exists $ {\alpha}_{0}\alpha_0$. The background of the $1$-unrectifiability is discussed in more detail.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Structure-Semantic Co-optimized Latent Diffusion Model for Fast Visual Anagram Synthesis

Visual anagram is an intriguing form of art creation wherein a single image presents different conceptual interpretations under transformations such as flipping or rotation. Recent work has achieved visual anagram synthesis by leveraging pretrained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, yet still suffers from several key limitations including computational inefficiency, suboptimal aesthetic quality, and weak semantic fidelity and expressiveness. This work focuses on generating visual anagrams with substantially improved visual quality at minimal computational cost, thereby advancing intelligent creation of illusionary digital art. To increase image resolution while reducing time overhead, we adapt the cutting-edge parallel denoising algorithm from pixel-based T2I model to the adversarially distilled latent-based one, and accordingly propose a structure-semantic co-optimization (S2CO) framework to counteract the consequent visual degradation. As the core of our approach, S2CO framework comprises three key innovations: (\romannumeral1) null-text structure alignment optimization; (\romannumeral2) semantic enhancement optimization; (\romannumeral3) attention-guided noise fusion. Building upon these components, our method dubbed S2CO-Anagram is able to generate higher-resolution anagram images with noticeably superior visual harmony and semantic faithfulness than related SOTA approaches, all while achieving substantially faster inference speed. Code will be publicly available.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Strong-field control of the $Z$-boson resonance in $e^+e^-$ collisions

arXiv:2606.09394v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Resonant $Z$-boson production is a cornerstone of precision electroweak physics, with its vacuum line shape set by the $Z$ mass, width, and collision kinematics. We show that a strong laser field can significantly alter this picture. By treating the field nonperturbatively, we find that laser dressing of the incoming fermions alters the effective collision kinematics and opens laser-photon exchange channels, including multiphoton processes, in $e^{+}e^{-}$ collisions. As a result, the $Z$-resonance profile develops distinct intensity-dependent regimes, evolving from the vacuum limit to saturation at intermediate field strengths and to an approximately quadratic enhancement at higher intensities. Additionally, the polarization composition of the produced $Z$ bosons is redistributed. In particular, at high intensities the laser-induced contribution can compensate the intrinsic chiral asymmetry of the electroweak interaction, leading to nearly parity-balanced $Z$-boson production. Our results identify that strong classical fields can dynamically control electroweak resonance phenomena, opening a bridge between strong-field QED and high-energy collider physics.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Smooth time-dependent control of dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates

arXiv:2606.20507v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider protocols for control of dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates where the critical role is played by the long-range anisotropic interatomic magnetic dipole-dipole interaction. The phase diagram of such a condensate has been explored theoretically and experimentally with certain values of the interatomic scattering length corresponding to superfluid and supersolid phases, where supersolidity appears as a modulation in the ground state density. Preparation of this modulated ground state is challenging, since excitations appear as a result of a finite-time evolution required to produce qualitative changes in the wavefunction density. To solve this problem we consider the time-dependent control of a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate using shortcuts to adiabaticity techniques, concentrating on design of the time-dependent scattering length, a parameter of the system easily tunable by contemporary experiments. The first technique is the variational approach based on the Euler-Lagrange equations for a separable ansatz describing the evolution of the superfluid state. Secondly, we study the transition from superfluid to supersolid using a direct optimization protocol. We discuss the fidelity of the developed protocols in terms of the evolution time.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Sensing Intelligence as a Trainable Metamaterial Property

arXiv:2605.23967v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In biological systems, sensing is not performed by the brain alone: the body deforms, vibrates, and filters external stimuli before they are transduced into neural signals. In engineered systems, this processing burden is placed largely on electronics and computation, while the mechanical body is usually designed only for strength and stability. Here, we present sensing intelligence as a trainable property of the body. We show that the geometry of a metamaterial can be optimized to reshape external stimuli into internal signals that are easier for a neural network to interpret. Rather than hand-designing this physical preprocessing, we let the neural network train its own body for sensing by backpropagating the sensing loss to the body's design parameters through differentiable simulation. Across numerical and experimental sensing scenarios, the optimized body improves sensing accuracy by up to fivefold or reduces the number of required electronic sensors by nearly an order of magnitude.