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.CV) 2026-06-11

Multimodal Brain Tumour Classification Using Feature Fusion

Clinicians diagnose brain tumors by synthesizing patient symptoms, medical history, and quantitative imaging data from modalities such as MRI and CT scans into a unified clinical judgement. However, most deep learning models rely on MRI/CT images alone, failing to replicate the clinicians multimodal reasoning. We explore a two-branch multimodal network combining raw MRI scans with 91 extracted radiomic features (intensity, texture, shape, and boundary descriptors) to classify brain tumors into glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no-tumor. A pre-trained CNN backbone encodes the image stream, whereas a dedicated MLP encodes the radiomic stream. Both streams are fused via concatenation, gated, or bidirectional cross-modal attention strategies. Across nine experimental runs on a balanced 7,200 image dataset, all multimodal configurations outperform unimodal baselines with gated fusion achieving the best accuracy of 96.13%.

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

ReportQA: QA-Based Radiology Report Evaluation

Radiology report evaluation is essential for advancing automated report generation. Natural language generation metrics have limited clinical relevance. Clinical efficacy (CE) metrics evaluate important medical findings, but focus mainly on presence and cover only a limited set of entities. Due to heavy reliance on manual annotations, it is difficult for CE metrics to extend clinical entities or attributes. In clinical practice, radiology reports serve as a medium for information transfer. Clinicians use them to perform downstream diagnostic tasks without directly inspecting images. Based on this insight, we propose ReportQA, a clinical-related and flexible radiology report evaluation framework, supporting detailed quantitative analysis of radiology report generation systems. We first collect datasets covering multiple imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We then construct knowledge trees of clinical entities and attributes with radiologist guidance, and use large language models (LLMs) to extract structured information from raw reports. Next, we generate QA pairs from predefined templates and apply quality control through self-filtering and report-based filtering. During evaluation, the report is treated as context, and an LLM acts as a judge model to answer the QA pairs. Based on the resulting QA accuracy, we introduce QAScore metric. Compared with existing metrics, QAScore shows better alignment with radiologist judgments. Experiments on multiple state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal that current report-based inference paradigms struggle to learn fine-grained clinical representations and exhibit strong negative prior biases. In contrast, question-driven inference provides a more effective alternative. For reproducibility and extensibility, we release the knowledge trees, structured reports, and QA pairs, along with the pipeline code for QA construction and evaluation.

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

Bridging data-driven priors via the score function for posterior sampling – Comparative review and experimental study

arXiv:2606.14800v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper reviews how a diverse set of popular data-driven priors commonly used in Bayesian inverse problems can be unified through their respective score functions. By framing these priors under this common perspective, we show that they can benefit from their straightfoward and effective integration into a recently proposed sampling algorithm. The applicability of this common framework is illustrated by considering several data-driven priors, namely regularization-by-denoising, normalizing flow-based priors, score-based generative models, and convex-ridge regularizers. For these four particular priors, the performance of the method is evaluated when conducting image inpainting and single image super-resolution. These results, as well as those obtained when restoring real images acquired in a geological context, demonstrate the efficiency of the method. This unified framework proves versatile enough to handle any posterior distribution defined by a broad class of score function-based priors, beyond the specific cases considered in this paper.

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

Unifying Post-hoc Explanations of Knowledge Graph Completions

arXiv:2507.22951v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge Graphs organize information as entity-relation-entity triples, enabling machine learning models to predict plausible missing triples in a task known as Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC). Post-hoc explainability for KGC addresses the problem of identifying which triples most influence the predictions of machine learning models. Currently, the field lacks formalization and consistent evaluations, hindering reproducibility and cross-study comparisons. This paper argues for a unified taxonomy for post-hoc explainability in KGC. First, we propose a characterization of post-hoc explanations via multi-objective optimization that unifies existing post-hoc explainability algorithms in KGC and the explanations they produce, balancing explanation effectiveness and conciseness. Next, we examine improved evaluation protocols based on popular metrics, such as Mean Reciprocal Rank and Hits@k, through illustrative experiments. Finally, we stress the importance of interpretability as the ability of explanations to address queries meaningful to end users. By unifying methods and discussing evaluation standards, this work puts forward a case for more reproducible and impactful research in KGC explainability.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Distributed control circuits across a brain-and-cord connectome

Just as genomes revolutionized molecular genetics, connectomes (maps of neurons and synapses) are transforming neuroscience. To date, the only organisms with complete connectomes are worms1–3, sea squirts4, and comb jellies5 (103–104 synapses). By contrast, the fruit fly is more complex (108 synaptic connections), with a brain that supports learning and spatial memory6,7 and an intricate ventral nerve cord analogous to the vertebrate spinal cord8–12. Here we report the first densely-reconstructed adult fly connectome that unites the brain and ventral nerve cord, and we leverage this resource to investigate principles of neural control. We show that effector neurons (motor neurons, endocrine cells, and efferent neurons targeting the viscera) are primarily influenced by sensory neurons in the same body part, forming local feedback loops. These local loops are linked by long-range circuits involving ascending and descending neurons organized into behavior-centric modules. Single ascending and descending neurons are often positioned to influence the voluntary movements of multiple body parts, together with the endocrine cells or visceral organs that support those movements. Brain regions involved in learning and navigation supervise these circuits. These results reveal an architecture that is distributed, parallelized, and embodied, reminiscent of distributed control architectures in engineered systems13,14.

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

Qwen-RobotManip Technical Report: Alignment Unlocks Scale for Robotic Manipulation Foundation Models

Foundation models in language and multimodality achieve strong generalization by aligning heterogeneous data under a unified formulation and training at scale. In this report, we investigate whether this scaling recipe can be applied to robotic manipulation to achieve genuine generalization. This is challenging because, unlike text, manipulation data is heterogeneous by nature, expensive to collect, and narrow in diversity, making alignment and scale simultaneously difficult. We present Qwen-RobotManip, a generalizable Vision-Language-Action foundation model built on Qwen-VL. Qwen-RobotManip introduces a unified alignment framework across the representation, motion, and behavioral dimensions of manipulation, making large-scale multi-source training coherent rather than conflicting. This alignment capability in turn enables Qwen-RobotManip to absorb manipulation data at a scale that prior training regimes could not sustain. A human-to-robot synthesis pipeline converts egocentric hand demonstrations into robot trajectories across 15 platforms, and a rigorous curation pipeline harmonizes heterogeneous datasets. Using only open-source datasets and human videos without proprietary data collection, Qwen-RobotManip constructs a ~38,100-hour pretraining corpus and exhibits emergent generalization capabilities, including zero-shot instruction following, robustness to perturbations, reactive error recovery, and cross-embodiment transfer. We find that standard benchmarks fail to capture pretraining quality and instead adopt OOD settings including RoboCasa365, LIBERO-Plus, EBench, RoboTwin-Clean2Rand, RoboTwin-IF, and RoboTwin-XE. Qwen-RobotManip substantially outperforms prior state-of-the-art models, including $\pi$0.5, across all OOD settings, ranks 1st in RoboChallenge with a 20% relative improvement, and is validated on real-robot platforms including AgileX ALOHA, Franka, UR, and ARX.

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

Sharp analysis of linear ensemble sampling

arXiv:2602.08026v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We analyse linear ensemble sampling (ES) with standard Gaussian perturbations in stochastic linear bandits. We show that for ensemble size $m=\Theta(d\log n)$, ES attains $\tilde O(d^{3/2}\sqrt n)$ high-probability regret, closing the gap to the Thompson sampling benchmark while keeping computation comparable. The proof brings a new perspective on randomized exploration in linear bandits by reducing the analysis to a time-uniform exceedance problem for $m$ independent Brownian motions. This continuous-time lens appears particularly natural here: it yields an exact representation of the relevant discrete-time processes, and we do not know another route to a sharp ES bound.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Memory-Efficient Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Safety-Critical Control in Adversarial Spacecraft Proximity Operations

arXiv:2606.17414v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous spacecraft rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) require controllers that guarantee safety under thrust constraints while minimizing fuel expenditure. Input-constrained control barrier functions (ICCBFs) provide a control method for nonlinear systems with actuation constraints that construct a forward-invariant safe set. Previous work has shown that learning class-$\mathcal{K}$ functions defining the ICCBF recursion via meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) yields a robust, non-greedy approach to safety-critical control in RPO. This paper extends that framework further by investigating the performance of three recurrent network architectures (Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Selective State Space Model (Mamba)) and two training algorithms (Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor Critic (SAC)) to identify the best setup for tuning ICCBF class-K functions via meta-RL. In addition to cooperative test cases, performance is evaluated in the presence of adversarial behavior where the target spacecraft behaves in a way that worsens the safety of the chaser spacecraft. Results indicate that state space models such as Mamba when used with PPO achieve superior task completion, safety, and fuel-savings compared to other architectures, across all cooperative and uncooperative scenarios tested.

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

RegimeVGGT: Layer-Wise Spatially Preserving Redundancy Removal for Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) recovers dense 3D scene structure from multi-view images in one forward pass, but quadratic cross-frame attention limits its scalability. Existing training-free accelerators reduce computation uniformly along one axis, missing layer heterogeneity. Our spectral, probing, and causal analyses reveal three regimes: shallow layers lack cross-view structure, middle layers drive cross-view alignment, and deep layers are redundant for dense geometry yet their cross-frame attention remains essential for pose. RegimeVGGT applies layer-wise U-shaped compression along two axes: Saliency-Guided Banded Merging protects geometry- and edge-salient tokens, while Selectively Protected K/V Downsampling preserves cross-frame spatial coverage and the pose-critical path through a phase-shifted spatial grid, a reference-frame anchor, and uncompressed camera/register tokens. Training-free, RegimeVGGT achieves a 6.7x speedup over VGGT* at matched reconstruction quality.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Proprioceptive-visual correspondence enables self-other distinction in humanoid robots

arXiv:2606.13222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distinguishing self from others is a prerequisite for social intelligence, yet humanoid robots that increasingly share workspaces with humans still lack this ability. Here we show that a humanoid robot can learn self-other distinction from proprioceptive-visual correspondence, without any identity labels or kinematic models. Once established, this distinction bootstraps a predictive self-model that maps joint configurations to three-dimensional body occupancy, capturing how the robot's body changes with action. In multi-agent scenes involving humans or morphologically identical robots, the system reliably identifies itself, learns a 3D self-model, and supports downstream tasks including target reaching, collision-aware motion planning, and human-to-robot motion retargeting. Together, these results outline a route toward bodily self-representation in robots that act and coordinate alongside others in shared physical environments. Project page: https://euron-zc.github.io/humanoid-self-model/.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

How Inference Compute Shapes Frontier LLM Evaluation

arXiv:2606.17930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI evaluations are shifting toward harder tasks that benefit from longer trajectories involving tool use and iterative problem solving. As a result, performance is increasingly sensitive to the amount and allocation of compute available at test time ("inference compute"). Yet many evaluations still report performance at a single restrictive budget, meaning that low scores may reflect the evaluation setup rather than the model's underlying capability. To test this, we evaluate up to 12 frontier language models on seven challenging benchmarks spanning software engineering, mathematics, medicine, and cybersecurity. We use a controlled setup combining three simple inference-scaling interventions: larger token budgets, context compaction, and repeated submission attempts, guided either by the model itself or by minimal correctness feedback. We find three main results. First, larger token budgets substantially improve performance on benchmarks across multiple domains, including cybersecurity, FrontierMath, Humanity's Last Exam, and TerminalBench. Second, fixed-budget evaluations can increasingly understate frontier capability as models advance. Newer models reach higher performance at large budgets, where they unlock harder tasks and solve them more reliably. Third, benchmarks differ in which inference-scaling methods help most: repeated submission broadly improves performance, but the value of larger token budgets, external feedback, and parallel attempts varies by benchmark. Overall, our results show that benchmark scores are protocol-dependent. We therefore argue that evaluations should report capability as a function of inference-time compute, specify protocol choices explicitly, and compare model generations over a large shared compute range at matched budgets, especially in safety- or policy-relevant settings.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Metastability for the Curie-Weiss-Potts model with unbounded random interactions

arXiv:2505.11260v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We analyse the metastable behaviour of the disordered Curie–Weiss–Potts (DCWP) model subject to a Glauber dynamics. The model is a randomly disordered version of the mean-field $q$-spin Potts model (CWP), where the interaction coefficients between spins are general independent random variables. These random variables are chosen to have fixed mean (for simplicity taken to be $1$) and well defined cumulant generating function, with a fixed distribution not depending on the number of particles. The system evolves as a discrete-time Markov chain with single spin flip Metropolis dynamics at finite inverse temperature $\beta$. We provide a comparison of the metastable behaviour of the CWP and DCWP models, when $N \to \infty$. First, we establish the metastability of the CWP model and, using this result, prove metastability for the DCWP model (with high probability). We then determine the ratio between the metastable transition time for the DCWP model and the corresponding time for the CWP model. Specifically, we derive the asymptotic tail behavior and moments of this ratio. Our proof combines the potential-theoretic approach to metastability with concentration of measure techniques, the latter adapted to our specific context.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

A MULTICENTER SWEDISH HISTOPATHOLOGY IMAGE DATASET OF PEDIATRIC CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM TUMORS

Refined detection methods, more detailed tumor characterization, and adequate distinction between different pediatric tumor subtypes are necessary to improve diagnosis and treatment, enable precision medicine, and advance patient prognosis. However, the application of computational approaches to pediatric brain tumors remains limited, largely due to the lack of accessible datasets. To address part of this gap, we provide whole slide images (WSIs) of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained tissue sections from all pediatric central nervous system (CNS) samples collected in Sweden between 2013 and 2023. These data represent a population-based national cohort encompassing all six pediatric oncology centers in Sweden and are available through the Swedish Childhood Tumor Biobank (BTB). The dataset includes 1,446 WSIs of sufficient image quality with confirmed CNS tumor diagnoses, derived from 537 unique subjects (562 cases). In addition, diagnosticrelevant clinical information is included. Corresponding whole-genome sequencing (WGS), wholetranscriptome sequencing (WTS), and methylation array data are available for most tumor samples through separate resources. This H&E dataset has been specifically curated to support artificial intelligence-based analyses, while also serving broader applications in medical research and education. When combined with matched molecular data, it provides a valuable resource for advancing multimodal and precision diagnostic approaches in the pediatric population. Refined detection methods, more detailed tumor mapping and adequate distinction between different subtypes of pediatric tumors are necessary to improve treatment, enable precision medicine and improve patient prognosis. Application of computational algorithms for pediatric brain tumors is very limited mainly due to the unavailability of pediatric histology brain tumor data sets. To enable the development of AI models comprehensive datasets covering a wide range of pediatric brain tumors are needed.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis using a Multimodal Approach with 3D MRI and PET

arXiv:2606.20037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an irreversible neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of death worldwide. Early diagnosis plays an important part especially at the Mild Cognitive Impairment stage, where timely intervention can help slow its progression before it advances to AD. Neuroimaging data, like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans, can help detect brain changes early by providing structural and functional brain changes related to the disease. Yet, many multimodal models still fuse MRI and PET with static concatenation and apply identical computation to all subjects, which limits robustness to patient/site heterogeneity and can waste computation. To address these limitations, we present the first study of combining 3D convolutional feature extractors with three fusion strategies - concatenation, Gated Multimodal Unit (GMU), and gated self-attention - and a sparsely gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) classifier that performs input-adaptive routing, activating only the most informative experts per case. Finally, we utilize Grad-CAM to visualize disease-related regions, ensuring model interpretability. Experiments are performed across three binary classification tasks (NC vs. MCI, MCI vs. AD, and NC vs. AD). Results show that GMU achieves accuracies of 80.46 % (NC vs. MCI) and 95.47 % (NC vs. AD), while gated self-attention attains 82.08 % on MCI vs. AD. Ablations show that removing the MoE consistently degrades accuracy across all tasks. These findings underscore the value of input-adaptive, multimodal modeling for AD diagnosis by leveraging the complementary nature of MRI and PET.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Sex-specific multimorbidity clusters and all-cause mortality in relatively healthy older adults: findings from the ASPREE cohort

Background: Multimorbidity is common in older adults, but sex differences in chronic condition clustering remain unclear. This study explored multimorbidity clusters and their associations with all-cause mortality among community-dwelling adults aged 70 years and over. Methods: This was a secondary analysis of data from 16,095 Australian ASPREE participants aged at least 70 years without prior dementia or cardiovascular disease. Fifteen baseline chronic conditions were grouped using latent class analysis (LCA). Observed-to-expected (O/E) ratios characterised conditions over-represented within clusters, and Cox proportional hazards models assessed associations with all-cause mortality. Results: Among 16,095 participants (mean age 74 years), 88.3% had multimorbidity at baseline; 4,217 deaths occurred over a median follow-up of 10.85 years. Five clusters were identified overall: hypertension and dyslipidemia (52.1%), gout and metabolic (14.4%), depressive symptoms, osteoporosis and frailty (10.0%), anaemia and kidney disease (10.2%), and hypotension, thyroid disorder and past cancer (13.3%). Sex-stratified analyses revealed three clusters in males and four in females. The frailty, depressive symptoms and osteoporosis cluster was associated with higher mortality in both sexes (aHR 1.56 [95% CI 1.40-1.73] in males; 1.68 [1.49-1.89] in females). Higher mortality was also observed for the metabolic, gout and kidney disease cluster in males (aHR 1.63 [1.47-1.81]) and the gout, anaemia and kidney disease cluster in females (aHR 1.96 [1.74-2.21]). Conclusions: Distinct multimorbidity clusters differed by sex and were associated with increased all-cause mortality. These findings may support risk stratification, targeted screening, and more person-centred management of older adults with multimorbidity.

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

Implicit Reasoning for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge. Yet reliably invoking this knowledge for GR remains poorly understood. A key obstacle is that LLM-based GR typically represents items with Semantic IDs (SIDs), disrupting LLMs' natural-language reasoning interface because these tokens are unseen by the LLM during pretraining. Existing approaches address this with expensive multi-stage pipelines that ground SIDs and elicit explicit rationales, but offer limited insight into when and why each stage is necessary. In this work, we systematically decompose explicit reasoning training pipelines for LLM-based GR, revealing three key limitations: weakened world-knowledge verbalization, misalignment between SID and natural-language token embedding spaces, and sensitivity to rationale quality, all of which hurt explicit reasoning performance. To circumvent these issues, we propose PauseRec, a lightweight implicit reasoning paradigm tailored for GR. PauseRec is exceptionally practical, avoiding costly reasoning trace acquisition and reasoning alignment training, leading to a multitude of benefits: (1) it outperforms standard explicit CoT methods by up to 6.22%, (2) it reduces training cost by up to 65% GPU hours, and (3) it speeds up inference by up to 71.3%. These results position PauseRec as a lightweight alternative to explicit rationale generation, enabling more effective and efficient LLM-based GR.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Online Distributional Prediction via Latent Cluster Geometry Under Drift and Corruption

arXiv:2606.18778v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online learning in non-stationary streams is often formulated as tracking a point estimate, but many applications require predicting the full data-generating distribution. We study online distributional prediction under drift and adversarial corruption. Our approach represents each candidate law through a latent cluster geometry: a variable-size configuration of centers that organizes probability mass and induces a predictive distribution. A Gibbs quasi-posterior over these configurations yields an online predictor by posterior averaging, and the resulting variable-dimensional posterior can be sampled with reversible-jump MCMC. The method therefore avoids specifying a parametric streaming law while retaining a structured latent space for uncertainty, regularization, and comparison. We evaluate performance by cumulative Wasserstein-1 regret against the time-varying true law. The analysis separates two effects: corruption perturbs the loss-based posterior update, whereas drift makes long-horizon posterior memory stale. We address the latter with a restarted variant that temporally localizes the same quasi-Bayesian update. The resulting high-probability bounds decompose into a PAC-Bayesian complexity term, a corruption-sensitive posterior perturbation term, and a dynamic optimal-transport term driven by \(A_T^{\mathrm{OT}}=\sum_{t=2}^T W_2^2(p_{t-1}^*,p_t^*)\). Under bounded support, stable latent geometry, predictive-map regularity, oracle realizability, localized restart windows, sublinear transport action, and sublinear corruption budget, the restarted predictor achieves sublinear cumulative Wasserstein regret. These guarantees require no parametric model for the stream, drift mechanism, or corruption process.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Resource-Efficient Variational Quantum Classifier

arXiv:2511.09204v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the unambiguous quantum classifier based on Hamming distance measurements combined with classical post-processing. The proposed approach improves classification performance through a more effective use of ansatz expressivity, while requiring significantly fewer circuit evaluations. Moreover, the method demonstrates enhanced robustness to noise, which is crucial for near-term quantum devices. We evaluate the proposed method on a breast cancer classification dataset. The unambiguous classifier achieves an average accuracy of 90%, corresponding to an improvement of 6.9 percentage points over the baseline, while requiring eight times fewer circuit executions per prediction. In the presence of noise, the improvement is reduced to approximately 3.1 percentage points, with the same reduction in execution cost. We substantiate our experimental results with theoretical evidence supporting the practical performance of the approach.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Vibrato Expression Control for Singing Voice Conversion with Improving Independent Control

arXiv:2606.17126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Singing style is a crucial aspect of a natural and expressive singing voice. Singers utilize singing styles to convey the feeling or emotion of the songs. Several works have been proposed to control singing style for making the more expressive singing voice. Recently, VibE-SVC successfully controls vibrato by predicting high-frequency F0 contour. In this paper, we introduce a singing voice conversion framework, called VibE-SVC2, to improve singing style conversion performance and controllability. The model offers control over two types of singing styles: a pitch style and a timbre style. For the pitch style, to resolve the pitch-energy entanglement issue that is unresolved in our previous work, we introduce a novel Energy Style Converter to address remaining style information in the energy contour. In addition, we propose a Zero-shot Pitch Style Converter, which mimics the pitch style of reference audio. To expand the controllability of the model, we propose vibrato rate scaling that is an independent control of vibrato extent, which is unavailable in VibE-SVC. For the timbre style, we extend the model to handle a variety of phonation styles. However, addressing specific styles such as vocal fry poses a challenge, as conventional F0 extraction often fails due to their inherent subharmonic characteristics, which degrades the conversion quality. To address this, we propose a novel Subharmonic Correction algorithm to refine the F0 contour for more natural timbre conversion. Through comprehensive objective and subjective evaluations, we demonstrate that VibE-SVC2 provides fine-grained, independent control over two types of singing styles, outperforming existing methods.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

SSNAPS: Audio-Visual Separation of Speech and Background Noise with Diffusion Inverse Sampling

arXiv:2602.01394v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of audio-visual single-microphone speech separation and enhancement in the presence of real-world environmental noise. Our approach is based on generative inverse sampling, where we model clean speech and ambient noise with dedicated diffusion priors and jointly leverage them to recover all underlying sources. To achieve this, reformulate a recent inverse sampler to match our setting. We evaluate on mixtures of 1, 2, and 3 speakers with noise and show that, despite being entirely unsupervised, our method consistently outperforms leading supervised baselines in WER across all conditions. We further extend our framework to handle off-screen speaker separation. Moreover, the high fidelity of the separated noise component makes it suitable for downstream detection of the acoustic scene. Code and pretrained models will become available upon acceptance. Demo page: https://ssnaps2026.github.io/ssnaps2026/

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

Test-Time Training for Robust Text-Guided Open-Vocabulary Object Counting

Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) enables counting arbitrary object categories specified by text prompts, offering substantially greater flexibility than conventional closed-set counting. However, existing TOOC methods are developed and evaluated primarily on ideal images, while real-world scenes often suffer from adverse conditions such as rain, fog, darkness, and sensor noise, which severely degrade visual quality and impair vision-language alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Robust-TOOC, the first benchmark for evaluating TOOC under diverse corruption conditions, which covers six representative degradation types: rain, fog, darkness, Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and mixed corruption. To improve robustness while preserving the original counting architecture, we propose Dual-TTT, a dual-architecture test-time training framework for TOOC. Specifically, during test-time training, Dual-TTT updates only the Text-guided Lightweight Denoising module (TL-Denoiser), while keeping the original counting network frozen. Inspired by diffusion models, the TL-Denoiser is optimized to remove corruption-aware noise from image representations under degraded conditions. Since only the TL-Denoiser is trained at test time, Dual-TTT is annotation-free and can be seamlessly integrated into existing TOOC models without modifying their original architecture. Extensive experiments on multiple recent TOOC baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

22.
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.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

EventDrive: Event Cameras for Vision-Language Driving Intelligence

Event cameras sense the world through asynchronous brightness changes with microsecond latency and high dynamic range, offering motion fidelity far beyond frame-based sensors and capturing temporal structure that conventional exposures often miss. These properties make events a powerful complement to RGB in autonomous driving, especially under blur, glare, and rapid motion, where frame-based perception can become unreliable. However, existing event-aware vision-language models remain limited to generic perception and do not reveal how event sensing contributes to reasoning and decision-making across the full driving loop. We present EventDrive, a large-scale benchmark and model suite that unifies event streams, RGB frames, and language supervision across four core dimensions: Perception, Understanding, Prediction, and Planning, covering captions, structured QA, grounding, motion-state recognition, trajectory forecasting, and planning tasks. Building on this foundation, EventDrive-VLM introduces a multi-horizon event pyramid and a temporal-horizon mixture-of-experts module to adaptively encode and fuse asynchronous and frame-based information for downstream reasoning. Comprehensive evaluation across diverse tasks shows that event streams provide substantial gains in temporal precision, motion awareness, and robustness, bringing event sensing into the center of driving intelligence.

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

It's About Time: Temporal References in Emergent Communication

Emergent communication enables agents to develop bespoke languages that improve communication efficiency. Despite the known importance of temporal structure in natural language, there is no existing evidence of temporal references in emergent communication. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring how agents communicate about temporal relationships. We analyse three potential factors for the emergence of temporal references: environmental, external, and architectural. Our experiments demonstrate that altering the loss function is insufficient for temporal references to emerge; rather, architectural changes are necessary. A minimal change in agent architecture, using a different batching method, allows the emergence of temporal references. This modified design is compared with the standard architecture in a temporal referential games environment, which emphasises temporal relationships. The analysis shows that over 95% of the agents with the modified batching method develop temporal references, without changes to their loss function. We consider temporal referencing necessary for future improvements to the agents' communication efficiency, enabling future agents to use a closer to optimal coding as compared to purely compositional languages. These insights provide the basis for incorporation of temporal references into other emergent communication settings, and investigation of other aspects of language.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Practical Tests and Witnesses of Fermionic non-Gaussianity

arXiv:2605.26218v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fermionic Gaussian states describe free fermions and underlie the mean-field picture of matter, from metals to superconductors; they are also efficiently simulable on classical computers. Departures from Gaussianity – the correlations produced by interactions – are therefore what make a fermionic system hard to simulate classically and useful for quantum computation, analogous to the role of magic in stabilizer-based quantum computation. Yet detecting and quantifying such non-Gaussianity at scale has remained challenging. Here we introduce practical tests and witnesses of fermionic non-Gaussianity built on fermionic antiflatness, a measure derived from the two-point covariance matrix. We estimate it with two protocols – a two-copy Bell measurement and a single-copy scheme using commuting Majorana bilinears – that determine whether a state is Gaussian or far from it at lower measurement cost than existing approaches, using only operations native to fault-tolerant hardware. For mixed states, a purity-corrected witness certifies non-Gaussianity and remains robust under strong noise; running it on the IQM quantum processor, we find that noise can both reduce and enhance non-Gaussianity. Finally, we show that preparing pseudorandom fermionic states requires extensive non-Gaussianity. Together, these tools enable the study and certification of non-Gaussian fermionic resources on present-day quantum devices.