中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

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

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Detecting AI Coding Agents in Open Source: A Validated Multi-Method Census of 180 Million Repositories

Authors:
Arsham Khosravani↗Audris Mockus↗

arXiv:2606.24429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI coding agents are entering the open-source supply chain, yet their diverse and often invisible traces leave their prevalence poorly understood. We introduce a multi-layered detection framework that integrates configuration-file scanning, commit-message analysis, author-identity matching, and bot-signature lookup across World of Code (180M+ Git repositories), classifying agent traces into four behavioral types. No single method captures more than a fraction of activity: multi-method detection identifies 850,157 Claude Code commits in one snapshot, of which bot-account lookup_the signal most adoption studies rely on_recovers only 28,154 (3.3%), a 30x relative-recall gap, so single-signal prevalence estimates are biased low by at least this factor. Every detection pattern is hand-validated (495 labels) with per-cell precision and Wilson confidence intervals. Across snapshots from December 2024 to April 2026, commit-attributed agents generate over 320,000 commits per month; Claude Code leads (886,122 commits across 17,295 projects) and dominates silent, configuration-file-only adoption (21,078 projects). Compared against an independent pull-request census (AIDev), the two channels capture nearly disjoint agent populations_a PR census misses 79% of commit-detected Claude Code adopters and essentially all Codex adopters_and different kinds of work: PR-deployed cloud agents (Codex, Cursor) surface as feature work, while commit-deployed in-editor agents (Claude Code, OpenHands, Aider) surface as maintenance. The observed work profile follows deployment and detection mode rather than the tool itself, so no single channel is representative.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Prague Dependency Treebank – Consolidated 2.0: Enriching a Complex Annotation Scheme

Authors:
Marie Mikulov\'a↗Ji\v{r}\'i M\'irovsk\'y↗Milan Straka↗Pavl\'ina Synkov\'a↗Jan \v{S}t\v{e}p\'anek↗Barbora \v{S}t\v{e}p\'ankov\'a↗Jan Haji\v{c}↗

The Prague Dependency Treebank framework is unique in its attempt to systematically include and link different layers of language, including a meaning representation with several types of inter-sentential phenomena, especially coreference and discourse relations. We present its second consolidated version (PDT-C 2.0), which concludes almost 30-years long project of sustained development of the resource to a uniformly and coherently annotated, genre-diversified, almost 4 million token language resource of Czech language, with accompanying fully compatible lexicons. In addition to continuous linguistic research, the richly linguistically annotated corpus is also widely used in international comparisons of the development of traditional and novel NLP tools as well as in conversions into other formalisms. The corpus and the trained parsers are available under the CC BY-NC-SA licence.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation

Authors:
Jiaqi Zhang↗Ashton Lee↗Anthony Wong↗John Zou↗Sami BuGhanem↗Randall Balestriero↗

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/LEAP

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

Authors:
Stipe Frkovic↗Metod Jazbec↗Dan Zhang↗Christian A. Naesseth↗Ilija Bogunovic↗Eric Nalisnick↗

arXiv:2606.12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes. To address this, a growing body of work has sought to extend masked dLLMs with self-correcting (remasking) capabilities. One appealing subset of these methods does so in a training-free, post-hoc manner based on token confidences, with encouraging early reported results. In this work, we revisit the empirical evaluation of a representative post-hoc remasking method, WINO [Hong et al., 2026], and find that under standard decoding settings (shorter block lengths) it brings little-to-no benefit over confidence-based unmasking alone [Wu et al., 2025]. Extending the evaluation to non-greedy decoding, we find that while confidence-based remasking can mitigate errors introduced by increased stochasticity to some extent, it also exacerbates the diversity collapse previously reported for confidence-based unmasking. Overall, our results show that the benefits of post-hoc confidence-based remasking are highly setting-dependent, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive evaluation framework.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Multi-task Learning is Not Enough: Representational Entanglement in Dual-output Second Language Speech Recognition

Authors:
Seung Hwan Cho↗Young-Min Kim↗

Second-language (L2) speech recognition often requires transcriptions of pronunciations and intended meanings. Multi-task learning (MTL) is a natural approach because it assumes that shared representations benefit both outputs. However, this paper shows that this assumption does not hold across Korean and English. MTL improves meaning but degrades surface transcription, especially in English, where the degradation scales with surface-meaning divergence measured by Levenshtein edit distance. Encoder analysis links these patterns to encoder-level entanglement, with Korean preserving distinct task representations while English produces nearly identical ones. Cross-task decoder analysis shows that the meaning dual-output decoder adapts with a unique representation, while the surface dual-output decoder remains constrained by the encoder. These findings motivate the design of MTL frameworks that mitigate encoder-level entanglement to reduce surface degradation in dual-output L2 automatic speech recognition.

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

Temporal Straightening for Latent Planning

Authors:
Ying Wang↗Oumayma Bounou↗Gaoyue Zhou↗Randall Balestriero↗Tim G. J. Rudner↗Yann LeCun↗Mengye Ren↗

arXiv:2603.12231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning good representations is essential for latent planning with world models. While pretrained visual encoders produce strong semantic visual features, they are not tailored to planning and contain information irrelevant – or even detrimental – to planning. Inspired by the perceptual straightening hypothesis in human visual processing, we introduce temporal straightening to improve representation learning for latent planning. Using a curvature regularizer that encourages locally straightened latent trajectories, we jointly learn an encoder and a predictor of a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world model. We show that reducing curvature this way makes the Euclidean distance in latent space a better proxy for the geodesic distance and improves the conditioning of the planning objective. We demonstrate empirically that temporal straightening makes gradient-based planning more stable and yields significantly higher success rates across a suite of goal-reaching tasks. Our code is available at https://agenticlearning.ai/temporal-straightening.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Silent Failures in Federated Personalization of Foundation Models

Authors:
YongKyung Oh↗Alex Bui↗

arXiv:2606.00947v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly personalized on decentralized private data through federated learning and are now deployed at scale under growing regulatory requirements for post-market monitoring. We argue that this convergence creates a distinct and under-recognized class of trustworthiness failures, which we term "Silent Failures." These include amplified bias, fairness collapse, and alignment erosion that may remain difficult to detect because federated learning's privacy constraints limit visibility into model behavior. A landscape analysis of existing benchmarks reveals a structural divide. Federated benchmarks evaluate system performance but provide limited insight into model behavior, whereas centralized trustworthiness benchmarks assess behavior but require model access incompatible with federated privacy. We introduce a taxonomy of six silent failure modes arising from the interaction of foundation model personalization, dataset shift, and core federated constraints. Our analysis shows that privacy-preserving training alone is insufficient for trustworthy deployment. We conclude with a research agenda for privacy-preserving behavioral evaluation and propose that silent failures become a standard diagnostic category for trustworthy federated artificial intelligence.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Waning protection of long-acting RSV monoclonal antibodies in infants: a Bayesian analysis of clesrovimab and nirsevimab trial data

Authors:
Gong↗Flasche↗Hodgson↗

Clesrovimab and nirsevimab are long-acting monoclonal antibodies used to prevent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) disease in infants, but waning protection in the first year of life is incompletely characterised. We applied a published Bayesian inference framework to clesrovimab and pooled nirsevimab trial data to estimate time-varying efficacy against medically attended RSV lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) and RSV-associated hospitalisation, accounting for differences in placebo-arm event timing between trials. Estimated clesrovimab efficacy declined from 60.7% (95% CrI: 46.3-72.6) shortly after dosing to 38.3% (8.6-52.9) at six months against medically attended RSV LRTI, and from 87.1% (71.2-96.2) to 49.6% (10.4-70.7) against RSV-associated hospitalisation. For nirsevimab, corresponding estimates declined from 86.9% (75.4-95.0) to 53.8% (27.4-69.7) against LRTI, and from 77.5% (52.6-91.8) to 49.7% (15.7-68.3) against hospitalisation. After accounting for differences in RSV exposure timing and LRTI endpoint definitions between trials, we found no evidence of a difference in efficacy or waning between clesrovimab and nirsevimab.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

An expressivity analysis of hierarchical modelling in deep transformers via bounded-depth grammars

Authors:
Vinoth Nandakumar↗Qiang Qu↗Pramod Thebe↗Sakshi Khachariya↗Tongliang Liu↗

Deep neural networks are widely believed to derive their expressive power from their ability to form hierarchical representations, capturing progressively more abstract and compositional features across layers. In language modeling, transformers have emerged as the dominant architecture, with early layers capturing local syntactic patterns and later layers encoding more complex clause-level dependencies. While this intuition has shaped model design, there remains a lack of rigorous theoretical work demonstrating how deep transformers represent such hierarchical structures. In this work, we analyze the expressiveness of deep transformer models through the formal lens of bounded-depth, non-recursive context-free grammars. For this class of grammars, we explicitly construct transformers with positional attention whose depth grows linearly with grammar depth, while the neuron count scales with the number of derivation-tree shapes and quadratically with the number of production rules. Our theoretical results support the linear representation hypothesis by demonstrating that these architectures possess the structural capacity to encode abstract grammatical states into low-dimensional, linearly separable subspaces within the residual stream.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

When Retrieval Metrics Mislead: Measuring Policy Signal in Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agents

Authors:
Tianyu Ding↗Juan Pablo De la Cruz Weinstein↗

Exact-match retrieval recall is often used as a proxy for whether a retriever supplies useful policy context to a downstream decision model. We test this proxy for pre-action policy classification in tau-bench using Qwen2.5-3B/7B classifiers. Under gold-policy conditioning, a compact structured state improves macro-F1 over raw trajectories by 0.13-0.17 after tuning. We then replace the benchmark-designated policy clause with the top-ranked clause retrieved from decision-time context. Although the exact governing clause is retrieved at rank 1 for only 7% of airline states, the primary 3B classifier obtains macro-F1 0.58 with retrieved clauses versus 0.60 with gold clauses (Delta=-0.02, task-cluster 95% CI [-0.23,+0.21]); mismatched-policy and no-policy controls score 0.32 and 0.21. We do not detect a macro-F1 difference between retrieved and gold clauses in this configuration, although the interval remains too wide to establish non-inferiority. The same qualitative pattern appears with a second retriever and at 7B, while varying across fine-tuning configurations. These results indicate that exact-match clause recall can underestimate downstream policy utility in this benchmark setting, motivating evaluation with retrieved policies in the classification loop rather than recall alone.

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

Rethinking Scaffolding in LLM Tutors: The Interactional Mismatch Between Benchmarks and Real-World Deployments

Authors:
Alexandra Neagu↗Jeffrey T. H. Wong↗Marcus Messer↗Rhodri Nelson↗Peter B. Johnson↗

arXiv:2606.15766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central pedagogical value evaluated in AI tutor benchmarks is scaffolding: guiding students through graduated steps toward a solution. Alignment and evaluation methods for embedding scaffolding behaviour into chatbots, however, rest on an implicit assumption: that students will take up the scaffolding and engage in the conversation. To examine whether this assumption holds, we introduce an evaluation pipeline around two metrics - Chatbot Scaffolding and Student Uptake - and apply them across nine datasets of 9,490 chats, spanning AI tutor benchmarks and real-world deployments of educational chatbots. Our analysis reveals that while benchmarks assume a high-scaffolding, high-student-uptake environment, students in real-world settings exhibit lower levels of uptake overall - frequently bypassing the chatbot's pedagogical framing to drive the interaction toward their own learning goals at little interpersonal cost. We argue that bypassing scaffolding is not necessarily detrimental; rather, it frequently highlights a mismatch between a chatbot's pedagogical framing and the student's learning goals. To meaningfully evaluate the effectiveness of a chatbot's assistance, future benchmarks must move beyond the assumption that students will simply take up the scaffolding, and instead evaluate how these chatbots navigate diverse learning contexts and student-driven interaction patterns.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Meta-classification of one-class classification models using ranking correlation and nearest neighbor

Authors:
Toshitaka Hayashi↗Hamido Fujita↗Dalibor Cimr↗Richard Cimler↗Jitka K\"uhnov\'a↗

arXiv:2606.17858v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) techniques have been applied to various problems. However, applying ML to ML models is an unexplored direction. For this purpose, this paper considers a meta-classification of one-class classification (OCC) models, because all ML models could be approximated as OCC models. The proposal represents OCC models as normality rankings and classifies them using nearest-neighbor and ranking-correlation metrics. The experiment classifies OCC models, where classes correspond to training datasets, algorithms, and hyperparameters. The proposal achieves high accuracy when class labels are datasets. Moreover, it can classify algorithms when the training datasets contain the same class. In addition, the discussion highlights that the classification of OCC models is essentially the classification of datasets that treats multiple samples as a single input. The experiment demonstrates the classification of datasets using sleeping records. The proposed method can provide a unified solution for classifying OCC models, datasets, and rankings. Source code is uploaded to the public repository https://github.com/ToshiHayashi/ClassOCC.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

An Approach to Simultaneous Acquisition of Real-Time MRI Video, EEG, and Surface EMG for Articulatory, Brain, and Muscle Activity During Speech Production

Authors:
Jihwan Lee↗Parsa Razmara↗Kevin Huang↗Sean Foley↗Aditya Kommineni↗Haley Hsu↗Woojae Jeong↗Prakash Kumar↗Xuan Shi↗Yoonjeong Lee↗Tiantian Feng↗Takfarinas Medani↗…

Speech production is a complex process spanning neural planning, motor control, muscle activation, and articulatory kinematics. While the acoustic speech signal is the most accessible product of the speech production act, it does not directly reveal its causal neurophysiological substrates. We present the first simultaneous acquisition of real-time (dynamic) MRI, EEG, and surface EMG, capturing several key aspects of the speech production chain: brain signals, muscle activations, and articulatory movements. This multimodal acquisition paradigm presents substantial technical challenges, including MRI-induced electromagnetic interference and myogenic artifacts. To mitigate these, we introduce an artifact suppression pipeline tailored to this tri-modal setting. Once fully developed, this framework is poised to offer an unprecedented window into speech neuroscience and insights leading to brain-computer interface advances. The source code and data are available.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

The Wrong Kind of Right: Quantifying and Localizing Misfired Alignment in LLMs

Authors:
Naihao Deng↗Yiming Feng↗Chimaobi Okite↗Kaijian Zou↗Lu Wang↗Rada Mihalcea↗Yulong Chen↗

Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment. Instead, this paper highlights the need for principled approaches to more advanced alignment. Alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave safely and reliably, including by avoiding unsafe inferences. However, we show that such safety-oriented behaviors can misfire: models may reject warranted conclusions even when they are explicitly supported by context. We call this failure mode misfired alignment, where alignment-induced changes cause LLMs to override explicit evidence. To quantify this phenomenon, specifically on stereotype-related alignment, we introduce VETO, a benchmark consisting of 2,032 BBQ-derived contrastive pairs, and define a new metric, Misfired Alignment Rate (MAR), which measures on a 0 to 100 scale how often a model fails on a stereotype-related question but succeeds on its contrastive counterpart. We benchmark 25 LLMs on VETO, and show that all LLMs, including the most recent ones, exhibit non-trivial (4.7 to 18.9%) MARs while all human participants achieve 0.0% MAR. Controlled priming experiments further show that alignment-induced cues can substantially amplify MAR across LLMs, indicating that these failures are not merely artifacts of individual examples but can be induced by safety-related framing. Mechanistic analyses on open-weight LLMs reveal late-layer suppression of evidence-supported answers, and comparisons between instruct and base LLMs suggest that this suppression emerges after instruction training. These findings show that current alignment methods can overgeneralize surface-level safety cues, to the point of overriding objective evidence, motivating more work on alignment objectives that better preserve contextual grounding.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Layer-Resolved Optimal Transport for Hallucination Detection in NMT and Abstractive Summarization

Authors:
Mariia Onyshchuk↗Maksym-Vasyl Tarnavskyi↗Marta Sumyk↗

Optimal transport (OT) has been shown to detect hallucinations in neural machine translation (NMT) by measuring the geometric distance between cross-attention distributions and a reference distribution, without any supervision. We extend this analysis to all six decoder layers of the Fairseq DE-EN model ($N=3{,}414$), showing that Wass-to-Unif and Wass-to-Data are complementary detectors specialised across hallucination types, that detection is concentrated in layers L1–L4 with L5 anti-predictive for subtler types, and that hallucinated translations lack the exploratory attention phase present in correct translations from the first decoding step. We further evaluate whether the geometric signal transfers to abstractive summarization faithfulness detection: our unsupervised OT detector on AggreFact ($N=1{,}116$) achieves $57.2\%$/$57.6\%$ balanced accuracy on CNN/XSum – above chance but substantially below supervised MiniCheck-Flan-T5-L($69.9\%$/$74.3\%$). This gap is principled: unlike NMT hallucinations, unfaithful summaries can attend correctly to source tokens while misrepresenting their content, a failure mode invisible to concentration-based OT metrics by construction. Structural experiments on T5-base confirm consistent decoder organisation across depth, with Layer~3 showing peak concentration and Layer~12 being most critical for generation quality. Together, the results establish OT on cross-attention as a reliable detector when the failure mode is source disengagement, a principled interpretability tool regardless of task, and fundamentally limited when faithfulness failures occur downstream of attention.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Beyond External Load: Integrative Immune Monitoring Reveals Injury-Predictive Signals in the Athlete's Internal State

Authors:
Heyn↗Perron↗Rodas↗Mendizabal Sasieta↗Grzelak↗Soto↗Capelli↗Martin-Garcia↗Mallol↗Pruna↗Gomez-Chereguini↗

Abstract (already in the PDF; paste if a box is required): Injury risk prediction in elite football relies almost exclusively on external load metrics derived from GPS tracking, overlooking the molecular state of the athlete. We monitored 26 male players from FC Barcelona's first team across the 2025 calendar year, integrating GPS-derived training load with longitudinal blood-based immune monitoring (systemic inflammation and TCR-derived immune age). Immune age acceleration and inflammation were elevated in the 14 days preceding musculoskeletal injuries. A logistic regression model combining external load, inflammation, immune age acceleration, and career injury history reached an overall AUC of 0.678 and a mean per-player AUC of 0.754 (SD 0.146), improving on a GPS-only baseline of 0.541. Applied to 2026 data, the frozen model ranked players who later sustained non-contact musculoskeletal injuries high in the risk distribution. Together, our data suggest multimodal immune monitoring in elite football to reveal the athlete's internal physiological state, which carries injury-relevant information that external load alone does not capture.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Deep learning for interactive and automated inner retinal layer segmentation in OCT images of patients with retinitis pigmentosa using limited training data

Authors:
Laurence↗D. S↗Schilling↗Grimm↗N.-A↗Mace↗Bemme↗Pape↗

Purpose: New therapeutic strategies such as optogenetics have created a need for accurate tracking of inner retina degeneration in Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) patients. We introduce two tailored deep learning models to segment the RNFL (retinal nerve fibre layer), GCIPL (ganglion cell inner plexiform layer), INL (inner nuclear layer), CFT (central foveal thickness) and RPE (retinal pigment epithelium) in RP: The first is based on a Segment Anything Model (SAM), the second on nnU-Net. To our knowledge, SAM has not yet been applied to retinal layers in OCT data. Methods: SD-OCT images of a retrospective cohort of 37 RP patients were included. Data for four training cycles were prepared semi-automatically in MATLAB, then assessed and corrected by three expert graders. 1,700 segmented B-Scans from two open datasets were used for pretraining. For post-processing, semantic retinal boundary detection was developed. The final models, OCT-SAM and nnU-Net, were trained on 228 annotated RP scans. Detected layer thicknesses were validated against manual segmentation at 90 random points in 30 OCT B-Scans. Finally, OCT-SAM was tested on three RP cases with retrospective, longitudinal OCT data. Results: nnU-Net achieved a precision, recall and F-1 score of 0.96 while OCT-SAM performance resulted in slightly lower values of 0.93, 0.8 and 0.85, respectively. OCT-SAM measurements had low bias and good agreement with manual annotations, confirming reliability. Conclusions: OCT-SAM enabled fast data annotation and tool integration, whereas nnU-Net provided the best segmentation performance. OCT-SAM demonstrated longitudinal reproducibility and detected RP-characteristic pathologies and degenerative changes. Future work will extend OCT-SAM to 3D OCT segmentation.

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

Dynamic Black-hole Emission Tomography with Physics-informed Neural Fields

Authors:
Berthy T. Feng↗Andrew A. Chael↗David Bromley↗Aviad Levis↗William T. Freeman↗Katherine L. Bouman↗

With the success of static black-hole imaging, the next frontier is the dynamic and 3D imaging of black holes. Recovering the dynamic 3D gas near a black hole would reveal previously-unseen parts of the universe and inform new physics models. However, only sparse radio measurements from a single viewpoint are possible, making the dynamic 3D reconstruction problem significantly ill-posed. Previously, BH-NeRF addressed the ill-posed problem by assuming Keplerian dynamics of the gas, but this assumption breaks down near the black hole, where the strong gravitational pull of the black hole and increased electromagnetic activity complicate fluid dynamics. To overcome the restrictive assumptions of BH-NeRF, we propose PI-DEF, a physics-informed approach that uses differentiable neural rendering to fit a 4D (time + 3D) emissivity field given EHT measurements. Our approach jointly reconstructs the 3D velocity field with the 4D emissivity field and enforces the velocity as a soft constraint on the dynamics of the emissivity. In experiments on simulated data, we find significantly improved reconstruction accuracy over both BH-NeRF and a physics-agnostic approach. We demonstrate how our method may be used to estimate other physics parameters of the black hole, such as its spin.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II

Authors:
Adrian de Wynter↗

Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain invariant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion on these attributes requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions. This is regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject, or whether the outcome shows existence or non-existence. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

DivRL: Disentangled Self-Similarity Rewards for Diverse Subject-Driven Generation

Authors:
Qian Wang↗Zhenyu Li↗Abdelrahman Eldesokey↗Peter Wonka↗

Subject-driven image generation faces an "Identity-Diversity Paradox", where strong identity preservation often leads to rigid and low-diversity outputs. We propose a post-training framework called DivRL that jointly optimizes identity consistency and structural diversity simultaneously by leveraging disentangled visual features from a robust similarity model. Specifically, we introduce a Negative Self-Similarity Measure (nSSM) to quantify structural diversity, and Visual Semantic Matching (VSM) to evaluate identity consistency. We propose an "Explore-and-Suppress" strategy that treats VSM as a gated constraint: the model freely explores structurally diverse configurations, and only samples that violate the identity threshold are penalized via a quadratic hinge loss. This converts identity preservation from a competing objective into a feasibility constraint, allowing nSSM and VSM to improve jointly. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively pushes the model to generate both consistent and diverse images and improves structural diversity while maintaining comparable identity consistency through a gated optimization formulation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Critical Percolation as a Synthetic Data Model for Interpretability

Authors:
Aryeh Brill↗Tom Ingebretsen Carlson↗

arXiv:2606.20347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural networks learn features that reflect the hierarchical, multi-scale structure of natural data. Synthetic datasets used to evaluate interpretability methods typically lack this structure, limiting their value as realistic toy models. To close this gap, we introduce a family of synthetic datasets consisting of hierarchical functions defined on critical mean-field percolation clusters embedded in a high-dimensional data space. The percolation data consists of sparse, low-dimensional fractal clusters with a power-law size distribution. Latent variables modeling a taxonomic hierarchy generate each data point's target value. The data model is analytically tractable with known critical exponents that fix its properties without requiring hyperparameter tuning. We leverage a mapping between percolation clusters, random trees, and additive coalescence to propose an almost linear-time algorithm to jointly sample a random tree and its hierarchical latent decomposition, enabling data generation at arbitrary scale. Using probing experiments, we find that the model's ground-truth latent variables can be linearly decoded from neural network activations. Together, sparsity, self-similarity, power-law statistics, and analytical tractability make critical percolation a principled testbed for interpretability research.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Limit theorems for random Dirichlet series with summation over primes, with an application to Rademacher random multiplicative functions

Authors:
Congzao Dong↗Alexander Iksanov↗

arXiv:2508.15032v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is shown that two conjectures put forward in the recent article Iksanov and Kostohryz (2025) are true. Namely, we prove a functional central limit theorem (FCLT) and a law of the iterated logarithm (LIL) for a random Dirichlet series $\sum_p \frac{\eta_p}{p^{1/2+s}}$ as $s\to 0+$, where $\eta_1$, $\eta_2,\ldots$ are independent identically distributed random variables with zero mean and finite variance, and $\sum_p$ denotes the summation over the prime numbers. As a consequence, an FCLT and an LIL are obtained for $\log \sum_{n\geq 1} \frac{f(n)}{n^{1/2+s}}$ as $s\to 0+$, where $f$ is a Rademacher random multiplicative function.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

Stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active conformational transition of NLRP3 monomer

Authors:
Jin Peng↗

by Jin Peng, Wenjian Li, Hao Wang, Xiaohui Chen, Manjie Zhang, Bin Sun The NLRP3 inflammasome is a multiprotein complex that primes cytokine production in the innate immune system. The inflammasome activation involves the cage-to-disk transition of NLRP3 oligomers, facilitated by the co-factor NEK7 protein. While NEK7’s role in promoting cage disassembly has been reported, its involvement in the large conformational changes of the NLRP3 monomer during activation remains elusive. Here, by using multi-scale simulations, we uncovered a stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active transition. In the early stage, NEK7 reshapes the dynamics of the highly unstable inactive NLRP3 monomer to resemble active state, priming the conformational transition. In the middle stage, NEK7 impedes progression by populating an intermediate state farther from the active conformation than the NEK7-free counterpart, and structures in this state exhibit reduced allosteric potential toward activation. In the late stage, NEK7 has negligible impact, as the active conformation remains inherently isolated by a high energy barrier regardless of NEK7 presence. This highlights the critical role of oligomeric assembly in enabling monomeric NLRP3 to complete its conformational transition, in agreement with experiment observations. Our work suggests a multilayered activation mechanism where oligomer-level assembly and monomeric conformational changes are coupled, providing new mechanistic insights into this physiologically essential macromolecular process.

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

Technical Report for ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge: Leveraging DINOv3 for Robust Outdoor Scene Understanding in Field Robotics

Authors:
Jaeil Park↗Hyobin Choi↗Sangjin Lee↗Hyungtae Lim↗Sung-Hoon Yoon↗

The GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge at the ICRA 2026 Workshop on Field Robotics evaluates dense semantic segmentation of off-road imagery over a fine-grained taxonomy of 64 classes and 11 evaluated non-void coarse categories. We present the first-place solution to this challenge. Our solution comprises two complementary improvements: (a) a network-level design that combines a self-supervised DINOv3 ViT-L/16 backbone, a ViT-Adapter, and a Mask2Former mask-classification decoder, together with a coarse-category auxiliary loss on the global [CLS] token; and (b) an inference-time aggregation strategy based on multi-scale and horizontal-flip test-time augmentation and an ensemble of the top three checkpoints selected using Codabench scores. Our method achieves an official composite score of 76.57%, consisting of 69.32% fine-class mIoU and 83.81% category-level mIoU, and ranks first on the final phase leaderboard: www.codabench.org/competitions/14257/#/results-tab.

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

Clinically Aware Synthetic Image Generation for Concept Coverage in Chest X-ray Models

Authors:
Amy Rafferty↗Rishi Ramaesh↗Ajitha Rajan↗

Deep learning models for chest X-ray diagnosis are constrained by limited coverage of clinically meaningful concept combinations in publicly available training datasets. While synthetic image generation has been explored to increase data diversity, existing methods rarely enforce clinical or anatomical constraints, limiting utility for improving model reliability. We propose CARPA, a clinically aware and anatomically grounded framework for synthetic chest X-ray generation that applies targeted perturbations to clinical concept vectors while preserving anatomical structure. By producing anatomically faithful synthetic images with controlled concept insertions and deletions, CARPA expands clinically relevant concept coverage. We evaluate CARPA across seven backbone architectures by fine-tuning models on synthetic subsets and testing on a held-out MIMIC-CXR benchmark. Compared to prior concept perturbation approaches, fine-tuning on CARPA-generated images consistently improves precision-recall performance, reduces predictive uncertainty, and improves model calibration. Structural and semantic analyses demonstrate high anatomical fidelity, strong concept alignment, and low semantic uncertainty. Evaluation by two expert radiologists further confirms realism and clinical agreement. Together, these results show that anatomically grounded concept perturbations enable more effective use of synthetic data, improving both performance and reliability of chest X-ray classification models and supporting safer clinical deployment.

Read & Discuss → View Source →