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

ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Modeling Narrative Structures via Pseudonymization and Multi-View Sentence Alignment

Authors:
Tai Tran Tan↗An Dinh Thien↗

We present our approach to SemEval 2026 Task 4: Narrative Story Similarity and Narrative Representation Learning. Our solution uses contrastive learning with fine-tuned sentence transformers to capture narrative similarity across abstract themes, course of action, and outcomes. We develop two pipelines: (Track A) a single-view method that encodes full narratives with smart layer freezing to reduce overfitting, and (Track B) a multi-view method that models theme, plot, and outcome with view-specific projection heads and self-supervised alignment. Both pipelines build on sentence-transformers models and are trained with contrastive loss on synthetic data. The code is available at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/dinhthienan33/SemEval2026-Task4-ttda704.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Universal Image Restoration via Internalized Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Authors:
Yu Guo↗Zhengru Fang↗Shengfeng He↗Senkang Hu↗Yihang Tao↗Phone Lin↗Yuguang Fang↗

Image restoration seeks to recover high-quality images from degraded inputs but becomes highly ill-posed under complex, mixed degradations. While unified all-in-one models are common, their performance declines as degradation complexity increases. Recent works adopt Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for multi-round restoration using specialized modules. However, this approach faces two key limitations: (i) increased computational cost due to multi-step processing, and (ii) weak modeling of interactions between degradations during stepwise inference. We introduce CoTIR, a universal image restoration framework that internalizes CoT reasoning within a single model. Concretely, we view image restoration as a specialized subtask of image editing, which implies that a large-scale pre-trained editing model provides a more favorable optimization starting point. Building on this, we fine-tune the model for restoration and further encode structured CoT-style reasoning into the learning objective via a differentiable formulation inspired by Lagrangian optimization, enabling holistic restoration without chaining specialized restorers. To facilitate training and evaluation, we further present CoTIR-Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 5.2 million samples with CoT-style reasoning traces. Extensive experiments on CoTIR-Bench and broad real composite degradation scenes show that CoTIR achieves stronger perceptual quality and more competitive fidelity than both all-in-one models and multi-round restoration methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/gy65896/CoTIR.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Enhancing Decision-Making with Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Fictitious Play

Authors:
Leyang Shen↗Yang Zhang↗Xiaoyan Zhao↗Chun Kai Ling↗Tat-Seng Chua↗

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated great potential in solving tasks with execution complexity, by distributing subtasks across cooperative agents. However, this divide-and-conquer paradigm falls short on decision-making tasks that are also prevalent in the real world. These tasks require simultaneous reasoning from the stances of all involved stakeholders whose decisions are mutually dependent and thus cannot be solved in isolation. We characterize this challenge as stance entanglement, a form of decision complexity distinct from execution complexity. To address it, we propose Multi-Agent Fictitious Play (MAFP), a novel MAS paradigm that represents stakeholder stances as agents and formulates decision-making as an equilibrium-seeking process. Built on the game-theoretic principle of fictitious play, MAFP iteratively updates each agent's decision by best responding to the empirical mixture of other agents' past decisions. This enables agents to expose and address one another's weaknesses, progressively improving decision quality and robustness. We evaluate MAFP on challenging decision-making tasks that test the capability of deciding strategies for competitive scenarios prior to acting. MAFP outperforms both single-round and multi-round baselines on two complementary metrics, tournament strength and robustness, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing stance entanglement.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Learning to Distort: Weakly-Supervised Image Quality Transfer for Prostate DWI Correction

Authors:
YuCheng Tang↗Wen Yan↗Alexander Ng↗Natasha Thorley↗Pawel Rajwa↗Yipei Wang↗Aqua Asif↗Clare Allen↗Louise Dickinson↗Francesco Giganti↗David Atkinson↗Shonit Punwani↗…

Single-shot echo-planar prostate diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is frequently complicated by geometric distortions, which impact the ability to derive reliable diagnoses from such images. Developing automated correction methods is challenged by the absence of paired distorted and undistorted clinical scans. In this paper, we first propose a novel weakly-supervised image quality transfer (IQT) framework from undistorted to distorted images that utilizes image quality assessment (IQA) signals to supervise the transfer process. Unlike traditional methods that require expensive, voxel-wise paired data or resort to developing unpaired algorithms, our approach utilizes image-level quality labels (here, distorted vs. undistorted) to establish latent quality prototypes within a pre-trained feature space. Recognizing that simulating realistic distortions is more reliable than direct unpaired correction, we describe a weakly-supervised prototype flow matching algorithm to explicitly regularize generative trajectories towards distorted prototypes, producing realistic susceptibility artifacts that mimic clinical degradations. By synthesizing these realistic pairs, we enable a second IQT model to be trained in the forward direction for distortion correction. Experimental results demonstrate that our generated images successfully mimic the diagnostic interference of real-world artifacts, which leads to more capable distortion correction IQT models. In addition to qualitative comparisons, we also conduct exhaustive quantitative evaluations that compare our approach with existing unpaired approaches (e.g., CycleGAN, UNIT-DDPM, and OT-FM) - as either forward or reverse alternatives - by assessing clinical downstream task performance in PI-RADS and Gleason score classification, using both in-distribution and external data sets.

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

Velocity Prediction in Automatic Guitar Transcription

Authors:
Jackson Loth↗Xavier Riley↗Simon Dixon↗Emmanouil Benetos↗

arXiv:2606.24912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) models have achieved a high level of success in polyphonic transcription of various instruments. Velocity, typically a measure of note intensity, is less commonly predicted in these models due to the absence of velocity labels in available datasets and lack of a proper definition for instruments other than piano. We present a methodology and model for velocity prediction in Automatic Guitar Transcription (AGT) which uses virtual instruments to generate synthetic training data with velocity labels. We first pretrain a model on this synthetic data. These weights are then transferred to a different model and trained on real guitar audio, allowing the model to retain the working velocity prediction while also achieving high performance and generalisability from the real training data. The velocity prediction is shown to outperform a baseline model which does not use the pretrained velocity weights, when evaluated on synthetic data. In addition, using the pretrained velocity weights offers a small improvement in note transcription, though the magnitude of this improvement is limited and not always significant depending on the testing data. Overall the model achieves results comparable to the state of the art in guitar transcription, while also successfully predicting velocity.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

LatticeBridge: Rare-Event Sequential Inference for Faithful Structured Sequence Synthesis

Authors:
Faruk Alpay↗Bugra Kilictas↗

Structured sequence generation often requires a model to satisfy several input-derived constraints in a single output. Standard decoding methods may assign high probability to fluent continuations while placing low mass on continuations that realize all required anchors jointly. We study this regime as a rare-event sequential inference problem. LatticeBridge combines a compact prefix language model, instance-compiled surface automata, and a twisted sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) decoder with resampling, multilevel splitting, and a source-support proposal term derived from instance-provided phrases. The constraint representation is compiled from each input instance and does not rely on manually curated lexical classes. On 2,610 attainable validation tasks spanning CommonGen, E2E NLG, and WikiBio, the particle decoder improves exact anchor satisfaction and mean anchor coverage over greedy, beam-filtered, and best-of-k ancestral baselines under a shared proposal model. Since exact anchor satisfaction alone does not rule out unsupported attribute substitutions, the evaluation reports required-anchor coverage, source coverage, source-intrusion diagnostics, overlap, runtime, and particle statistics jointly. The benchmark characterizes the faithfulness-overlap-latency frontier under a fixed proposal model.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

AI tool spots antibiotics that fight drug-resistant gonorrhoea

Authors: Unknown Author

The bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae has evolved resistance to most antibiotics used to treat it, but a machine-learning screen reveals potential therapies. The bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae has evolved resistance to most antibiotics used to treat it, but a machine-learning screen reveals potential therapies.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Wasserstein Equilibrium Decoding for Reliable Medical Visual Question Answering

Authors:
Luca Hagen↗Johanna P. M\"uller↗Weitong Zhang↗Mengyun Qiao↗Bernhard Kainz↗

Small vision-language models (2-8B) are well-suited for clinical deployment due to privacy constraints, limited connectivity, and low-latency requirements favouring on-device or on-premise inference. However, their limited capacity exacerbates the generation of plausible but incorrect outputs. We extend game-theoretic decoding, previously restricted to text-only, closed-ended NLP tasks, to vision-language models for open-ended Medical VQA. We introduce a semantically aware Wasserstein stopping criterion that replaces lexical order matching, enabling convergence based on semantic consensus among near-synonymous candidate answers and avoiding unnecessary iterations caused by clinically equivalent ranking swaps. On VQA-RAD and PathVQA, we obtain consistent, statistically significant improvements over greedy and discriminative baselines. On VQA-RAD, we improve Qwen3-VL-2B by +3.5 percentage points (p < 0.01), surpassing the greedy 4B model, with similar trends at larger scales. On PathVQA, Gemma-3-4B with BDG matches MedGemma-4B under greedy decoding despite no domain-specific fine-tuning. At accuracy parity with classic BDG, the Wasserstein criterion reduces average convergence iterations by approximately 20%, improving inference efficiency while preserving the game-theoretic equilibrium behaviour. Code is available at https://github.com/luca-hagen/ Wasserstein-BDG-medical-VQA.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Hierarchical symmetry selects log-Poisson cascades: classification, uniqueness, and stability

Authors:
E. M. Freeburg↗

arXiv:2604.01632v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Within i.i.d. multiplicative cascades, a single axiom – the hierarchical symmetry, a linear contraction on incremental scaling exponents – is shown to be necessary and sufficient for the cascade multiplier to be log-Poisson. We prove: (1) a characterization theorem determining the log-Poisson law with explicit parameters, within the class of all multipliers with finite lattice moments; (2) a classification theorem locating the log-Poisson class inside the log-infinitely-divisible family and identifying the mechanism by which every rival sub-family fails the symmetry; (3) a stability theorem with sharp constants – $(1+\beta)^{1/2}$ when the limiting increment is known, $\sqrt{2}$ when it is fitted – and (4) an unconditional propagation theorem transferring the bound to the multiplier distribution at the sharp rate $\Theta(\sqrt{\varepsilon})$, with a matching lower bound. Beyond independence, the classification extends exactly at the level of asymptotic statistics (limiting cumulant generating function, large deviations, multifractal spectrum) and provably not at the level of laws: an explicit stationary ergodic Markov multiplier satisfies the symmetry exactly with a non-log-Poisson marginal, while exchangeable multipliers collapse to the i.i.d. log-Poisson cascade and finite-state Markov multipliers cannot satisfy the symmetry at all. In the continuous category of exactly scale-invariant log-infinitely-divisible multifractal random measures, no finite moment window of structure-function exponents identifies the cascade class, whereas at the level of the scale-invariance generator the symmetry selects exactly the Barral-Mandelbrot compound Poisson cascade, with scale-ratio-free stability constants. The proofs reduce to second-moment identities on [0,1] via the change of variables $u = e^{kx}$, boundedness of the multiplier, and multiplicative couplings.

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

Ultrafast On-chip Online Learning via Spline Locality in Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Authors:
Duc Hoang↗Aarush Gupta↗Philip Harris↗

arXiv:2602.02056v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ultrafast online learning is essential for high-frequency systems, such as controls for quantum computing and nuclear fusion, where adaptation must occur on sub-microsecond timescales. Meeting these requirements demands low-latency, fixed-precision computation under strict memory constraints, a regime in which conventional Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are both inefficient and numerically unstable. We identify key properties of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) that align with these constraints. Specifically, we show that: (i) KAN updates exploiting B-spline locality are sparse, enabling superior on-chip resource scaling, and (ii) KANs are inherently robust to fixed-point quantization. By implementing fixed-point online training on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), a representative platform for on-chip computation, we demonstrate that KAN-based online learners are significantly more efficient and expressive than MLPs across a range of low-latency and resource-constrained tasks. To our knowledge, this work is the first to demonstrate model-free online learning at sub-microsecond latencies.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Hilbert space embeddings of independence tests and interaction measures of several variables

Authors:
Jean Carlo Guella↗

arXiv:2411.08653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a unified theoretical framework for kernel-based measures of dependence on product spaces. Building on the ideas underlying distance covariance, distance multivariance, and the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), we define a new family of kernels on an $n$-fold Cartesian product, termed positive definite independent of order $k$ (PDI$_{k}$ kernels). These kernels extend the concepts of positive definite and conditionally negative definite kernels to higher orders and provide the foundation for generalized independence and interaction tests, such as the generalized Lancaster interaction of order $k$ ($\Lambda_{k}^{n}$), and the Streitberg interaction ($\Sigma$). Our analysis focuses on the continuous setting, where we prove a Kernel Mean Embedding Theorem for PDI$_{k}$ kernels and establish the corresponding integrability restrictions. Based on these results, we characterize how the Kronecker products of PDI kernels behave.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

VFUSE: Virulent Feature Understanding with Sparse autoEncoders

Authors:
Olson↗M. L↗Yu↗

Generative models have shown remarkable progress in a variety of domains such as protein design, but such power enables the opaque generation of hazardous proteins. In this work, we introduce VFUSE (Virulent Feature Understanding with Sparse autoEncoders), a mechanistic interpretability approach that trains SAEs on diffusion-transformer activations to audit protein models for hazard-aware features. We apply VFUSE to RoseTTAFold3 and RFDiffusion3, popular open-weight models for protein folding and synthesis. We find that for certain blocks, linear probes detect hazardous designs significantly better when fit in the SAE latent space over the original model's representations: improving interpretability without sacrificing model performance. Furthermore, we identify monosemantic features from the SAE that fire only on hazardous designs at up to AUROC 0.84 (q < 10-13).

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Adaptive deep brain stimulation for dynamic gait control in Parkinson’s disease: a randomized feasibility trial

Authors:
Kenneth H. Louie↗

A randomized crossover study of five patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) demonstrates that gait-synchronized adaptive deep brain stimulation is feasible and safe, and reduces falls compared with continuous stimulation. Gait dysfunction in PD is a major source of disability and is often insufficiently treated by continuous deep brain stimulation (cDBS). Although adaptive DBS (aDBS) has shown efficacy for other motor symptoms using β-based, state-driven neural signals, gait is a dynamic, cyclical behavior that may require temporally precise modulation. Here we evaluated a behavior-contingent aDBS approach that synchronizes stimulation to gait phase. We reported a single-center, blinded, randomized, crossover study evaluating the feasibility of identifying patient-specific biomarkers to drive aDBS. The primary outcome was feasibility of successful identification of gait-phase biomarkers to implement aDBS. Five participants with PD undergoing pallidal DBS and subdural electrode paddle implantation were enrolled. We successfully identified personalized gait-phase biomarkers from cortical or pallidal field potentials in all five patients and embedded them into a bidirectional neurostimulator. During acute in-clinic testing, aDBS improved step variability and step symmetry versus cDBS. Three participants subsequently completed a double-blinded, multi-day crossover phase. In this setting, aDBS maintained general motor symptom control, reduced falls and yielded patient-specific gait improvements. No adverse events occurred and aDBS was well tolerated. These findings establish the feasibility of biomarker-driven, movement-synchronized neuromodulation and support the development of a larger randomized trial to determine clinical efficacy. ClinicalTrial.gov registration: NCT04675398 . A randomized crossover study shows that gait-phase-synchronized adaptive deep brain stimulation is feasible and safe, and reduces falls compared to continuous stimulation in Parkinson’s disease.

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

Beyond Rubrics: Exploration-Guided Evaluation Skills for Reward Modeling

Authors:
Xing Yue↗Linjuan Wu↗Daoxin Zhang↗Yongliang Shen↗Weiming Lu↗

Open-ended reward modeling requires judges that can follow subtle, domain-specific preferences when verifiable answers are unavailable. Existing rubric-based methods often address this by generating criteria online for each query, but the extra generation step can add inference overhead and produce rigid or misaligned guidance. We introduce Eval-Skill, an exploration-guided method that synthesizes reusable evaluation skills for reward modeling and reframes reward guidance as context evolution rather than parameter training or per-query rubric generation. Using only 100 cases per domain for skill evolution, Eval-Skill synthesizes reusable domain-level evaluation skills through two progressive stages, workflow generation followed by principle generation, with exploration and selection interleaved across both stages. Once generated, a skill is directly injected into the judge context. Across multiple RM benchmarks, Eval-Skill consistently improves diverse judge backbones; on RewardBench 2, it yields significant gains over vanilla judging for each main backbone (+13.44% for Qwen3-8B, and 18.51% for DeepSeek-V4-Flash). Further analyses of evolution-time scaling, generalizability, and transferability show that compact evaluation skills offer an efficient new paradigm for LLM-based evaluation. Code is available at https://github.com/xing-stellus-yue/Eval-Skill.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

The Unreliable Judges: Assessing Reproducibility and Self-Preference Bias of LLMs as Free-Text Evaluators

Authors:
Alvarez-Arenas↗J. I↗mananes↗jimenez-carretero↗Sanchez-Cabo↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming clinical practice and research, but their adoption requires rigorous evaluation. While human assessment is ideal, its cost has driven the widespread use of LLMs as evaluators. We introduce an open-source reciprocal framework comparing 71 human experts against six LLMs. AI evaluators show a strong self-preference bias, yet neither group reliably identified whether a response was human- or AI-generated. AI scores correlated with surface features such as length and lexical diversity, whereas human scores did not. By probing the evaluator's hidden states and applying targeted steering, we show that verbosity is a major causal driver of the bias. Moreover, shuffling question-response pairings shows that long responses keep high scores even when they no longer answer the question, whereas short ones do not, demonstrating that AI judges reward verbosity largely independently of content alignment. Finally, API-based and batch inference inflate stochasticity, underscoring the need for controlled deployment.

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

FeedEval: Pedagogically Aligned Evaluation of LLM-Generated Essay Feedback

Authors:
Seongyeub Chu↗Jongwoo Kim↗Munyong Yi↗

Going beyond the prediction of numerical scores, recent research in automated essay scoring has increasingly emphasized the generation of high-quality feedback that provides justification and actionable guidance. To mitigate the high cost of expert annotation, prior work has commonly relied on LLM-generated feedback to train essay assessment models. However, such feedback is often incorporated without explicit quality validation, resulting in the propagation of noise in downstream applications. To address this limitation, we propose FeedEval, an LLM-based framework for evaluating LLM-generated essay feedback along three pedagogically grounded dimensions: specificity, helpfulness, and validity. FeedEval employs dimension-specialized LLM evaluators trained on datasets curated in this study to assess multiple feedback candidates and select high-quality feedback for downstream use. Experiments on the ASAP++ benchmark show that FeedEval closely aligns with human expert judgments and that essay scoring models trained with FeedEval-filtered high-quality feedback achieve superior scoring performance. Furthermore, revision experiments using small LLMs show that the high-quality feedback identified by FeedEval leads to more effective essay revisions. We release our code and curated datasets at: https://github.com/BBeeChu/FeedEval.git.

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

LiFT: Local Search via Linear Programming for Overfitting-Controlled Transformers

Authors:
Abhishek Shukla↗Anikeit Khanna↗Ankur Sinha↗Faiz Hamid↗

This paper proposes a Linear Programming (LP)-based local search framework for fine-tuning pretrained transformer models with explicit control against overfitting. The approach formulates transformer fine-tuning as a bilevel optimization-based regularization problem, in which model parameters and regularization hyperparameters are jointly updated. Information collected during initial warm-up iterations, including validation gradients and training Hessian information, is used to construct a local descent direction by solving an LP that minimizes a scaled directional derivative while preserving training optimality. This validation-aware descent direction enables focused local updates of both parameters and regularization hyperparameters, reducing overfitting without requiring repeated full retraining cycles. The resulting method, termed Linear Programming-based Fine-Tuning (LiFT) for transformers, differs from conventional fine-tuning by systematically identifying task-specific updates rather than relying on heuristic or grid-based hyperparameter selection. Experiments on GPT-2 Small fine-tuned on WikiText-2 demonstrate that LiFT enables effective adaptation through selective tuning of transformer blocks and regularization parameters, yielding consistent improvements in test perplexity across multiple layer configurations and regularization settings, with particularly pronounced gains in overfitting-prone scenarios. Beyond empirical performance, LiFT establishes a principled connection between transformer fine-tuning, bilevel optimization, local search, and regularization theory.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

ThousandWorlds: A benchmark for climate emulation of potentially habitable exoplanets

Authors:
Edward T. Stevenson↗Mei Ting Mak↗Eric Wolf↗Denis E. Sergeev↗Tobi Hammond↗N. J. Mayne↗Miles Cranmer↗

arXiv:2606.18338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The search for life beyond Earth will depend on detecting faint signatures in the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets. Interpreting those signatures requires understanding the host planet's climate: the same molecule may signal life on one planet and abiotic chemistry on another. Global climate models (GCMs) provide this understanding, but individual runs can require up to millions of core-hours and substantial domain expert time. Machine-learning emulators could remove this bottleneck, but progress has been limited by the absence of a curated, multi-model exoclimate dataset. We introduce ThousandWorlds, an ML-ready benchmark for exoclimate emulation and for the broader regime of low-data, multi-simulator, parameter-to-field regression. The dataset contains approximately 1800 simulations from five GCMs, mapping eight planet parameters to 3D atmospheric fields including temperature, humidity, winds, clouds, and radiation. Three nested subsets define progressively harder challenges: single-simulator regression, multi-simulator regression with complete observations, and multi-simulator regression with structured missingness. We propose two evaluation protocols: one for ranking methods, and one that measures performance relative to the disagreement between GCMs themselves. We evaluate seven baselines spanning simple methods, deep learning, and Gaussian processes. GP-based methods perform best, suggesting that ThousandWorlds exposes a regime where off-the-shelf deep learning does not yet succeed. Data: https://doi.org/10.57967/hf/8695. Code: https://github.com/edstevenson/ThousandWorlds.

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

RIFT-Bench: Dynamic Red-teaming For Agentic AI Systems

Authors:
Yarin Yerushalmi Levi↗Roy Betser↗Amit Giloni↗Lidor Erez↗Itay Gershon↗Oren Rachmil↗Sindhu Padakandla↗Roman Vainshtein↗

arXiv:2606.23927v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving into autonomous decision-making systems, exposing attack vectors beyond those of traditional LLM vulnerabilities. Existing security evaluations are often tied to specific implementations or domains, limiting unified comparison across heterogeneous systems. To address this gap, we introduce RIFT-Bench, a graph representation-driven methodology for dynamic red-teaming that enables unified evaluations across diverse agentic architectures. Building on a novel hierarchical representation, RIFT-Bench operates in two automated phases: Discovery, which extracts system structure, and Scanning, which deploys adaptive adversarial attacks and produces a comprehensive evaluation report. It evaluates the examined system itself, leveraging a broad set of dynamically adaptable adversarial probes across diverse attack vectors and objectives. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed evaluation pipeline across 45 agentic systems spanning a diverse range of implementations, showing that the approach generalizes effectively to heterogeneous agentic architectures. Beyond systems and attacks, RIFT-Bench also supports direct evaluation of mitigation strategies. These key capabilities make RIFT-Bench a scalable foundation for security evaluation of agentic AI systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Shapley-Inspired Feature Weighting in $k$-means with No Additional Hyperparameters

Authors:
Richard J. Fawley↗Renato Cordeiro de Amorim↗

arXiv:2508.07952v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Clustering algorithms often assume all features contribute equally to the data structure, an assumption that usually fails in high-dimensional or noisy settings. Feature weighting methods can address this, but most require additional parameter tuning. We propose SHARK (Shapley Reweighted $k$-means), a feature-weighted clustering algorithm motivated by the use of Shapley values from cooperative game theory to quantify feature relevance, which requires no additional parameters beyond those in $k$-means. We prove that the $k$-means objective can be decomposed into a sum of per-feature Shapley values, providing an axiomatic foundation for unsupervised feature relevance and reducing Shapley computation from exponential to polynomial time. SHARK iteratively re-weights features by the inverse of their Shapley contribution, emphasising informative dimensions and down-weighting irrelevant ones, and is equivalent to replacing the arithmetic mean of feature dispersions with their harmonic mean. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets show that SHARK consistently matches or outperforms existing methods, achieving superior robustness and accuracy, particularly in scenarios where noise may be present. Software: https://github.com/rickfawley/SHARK.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DAM-VLA: Decoupled Asynchronous Multimodal Vision Language Action model

Authors:
Pankhuri Vanjani↗Zhuoyue Li↗Jakub Suliga↗Moritz Reuss↗Gianluca Geraci↗Xinkai Jiang↗Rudolf Lioutikov↗

Vision-language-action (VLA) models inherit a shared synchronous clock from vision-language pretraining, processing every input at one rate. This is misaligned with physical interaction, where a high-frequency modality changes at hundreds of hertz, vision evolves more slowly, and language stays constant across an episode. A synchronous VLA oversamples slow modalities, undersamples fast ones, and caps action generation at the lowest effective frequency. We hypothesize that decoupling temporal processing per modality, letting each update and retain information at its own sensor rate, yields stronger representations and more robust control. We present DAM-VLA, which maintains per-modality latent buffers refreshed at sensor rates and read continuously by the action head, integrating new high-frequency modalities through gated cross-attention that leaves the pretrained backbone intact. Across seven contact-rich real-world manipulation tasks, DAM-VLA more than doubles the average success rate of the strongest synchronous baseline (95.2\% vs.\ 40.95\%) while sustaining smooth, reactive 100\,Hz control. Project website: \href{https://intuitive-robots.github.io/DAM-VLA/}{intuitive-robots.github.io/DAM-VLA/}

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

Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data

Authors:
Ilia Kulikov↗Chenxi Whitehouse↗Tianhao Wu↗Yixin Nie↗Swarnadeep Saha↗Eryk Helenowski↗Weizhe Yuan↗Olga Golovneva↗Jack Lanchantin↗Yoram Bachrach↗Jakob Foerster↗Xian Li↗…

We introduce Autodata, a general method that enables AI agents to act as data scientists who build high quality training and evaluation data. We show how to train (meta-optimize) such a data scientist agent, so that it learns to create even stronger data. We describe the overall formulation, and a specific practical implementation, Agentic Self-Instruct. We conduct experiments on computer science research tasks, legal reasoning tasks and reasoning with mathematical objects, where we obtain improved results compared to classical synthetic dataset creation methods. Further, meta-optimizing the data scientist agent itself delivers an even larger performance uplift. Agentic data creation provides a way to convert increased inference compute into higher quality model training. Overall, we believe this direction has the potential to change the way we build AI data.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Instrument for Measuring Regional Human Mobility: The Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE)

Authors:
Amil Khanzada↗Takuji Takemoto↗

arXiv:2603.21639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurately estimating human mobility in peripheral regional economies presents a fundamental measurement challenge: physical ground-truth sensors are sparse, behavioral intent signals are heterogeneous, and environmental friction introduces systematic bias into demand inference. We introduce the Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE), a multi-modal sensor fusion architecture that addresses this challenge by integrating physical instrumentation (Edge-AI cameras), digital intent signals (route search impression metrics), behavioral records (90,350 spending records, 97,719 standardized survey responses), and meteorological data across four geographically distributed nodes in Fukui, Japan. The primary measurement-science contribution is the design, deployment, and cross-node validation of the DHDE as a sparse-sensor compensation instrument: a heterogeneous sensor fusion architecture that anchors non-stationary digital intent signals to concurrent physical ground-truth counts, correcting for systematic bias introduced by meteorological planning friction. The instrument is implemented as an ensemble inference pipeline (Random Forest and Ordinary Least Squares with Newey-West robust inference), calibrated across 397 daily observations and validated by chronological holdout replication across four geographically distinct node types. The primary OLS specification achieved an in-sample explanatory power of R2 = 0.810 and a chronological out-of-sample predictive performance of R2 = 0.683. Results identify an Under-Vibrancy Paradox where macro-regional visitor satisfaction correlates positively with crowd density (Spearman rank correlation rs = +0.150, p = 0.002). We estimate an annual proxy gap of 865,917 intent-implied visits, corresponding to JPY 11.96 billion (USD 72.6 million) in foregone revenue.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Optimal Order of Multi-Agent and General Many-Body Systems

Authors:
Jake J. Xia↗

arXiv:2606.20485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a general framework for analyzing multi-agent systems with feedback loops between agents actions and collective observations. The framework is built on two fundamental agent-level variables: power, which measures agent influence on collective outcomes, and response functions, which determine how agents react to observations. We derive how macroscopic properties, including total power, useful power, entropy, order, fragility, and mobility, emerge from these two variables of heterogeneous agents. To study the trade off between growth and resilience, we introduce a system-level utility function parameterized by a risk-appetite coefficient and derive an optimal degree of order that balances productivity, stability, and adaptability. The analysis suggests that stronger synchronization can increase collective output but may also increase systemic fragility and reduce mobility. We further argue that order, entropy, information, and useful energy are task-dependent and system-relative concepts whose meanings depend on the objectives of the system. By measuring and designing agent power distributions and response functions, it may be possible to better understand, predict, and optimize collective behavior and identify the conditions under which collective intelligence and optimal order emerge.

Read & Discuss → View Source →