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 (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Sparse Configuration Interaction for the Electronic Schrödinger Equation Revisited: Complete Basis Set Limit Complexity and Quantum-Encoding Impact

Authors:
Michael Griebel↗Jan Hamaekers↗

arXiv:2606.20385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article we revisit regularity results for eigenfunctions in the discrete spectrum of the electronic Schrödinger equation and study their consequences for approximation complexity. In particular, for the convergence to the complete basis set limit, it can be shown that the curse of dimensionality in the leading algebraic exponent can be mitigated. That is, for general sparse grid constructions, the main term of the convergence rate with respect to the number of degrees of freedom is independent of the number of electrons. These insights indicate potential benefits for classical numerical solvers of the electronic Schrödinger equation and also for quantum-computing approaches through new qubit-efficient wavefunction encodings.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Can Factual Opinions Be Edited (Manipulated) in Large Language Models?

Authors:
Yuanpu Cao↗Ziyi Yin↗Fenglong Ma↗Jinghui Chen↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into various domains, making knowledge editing techniques crucial yet potentially hazardous. Current editing methods primarily target atomic facts, overlooking the significant risks associated with manipulating factual opinions, e.g., documented stances of public figures on societal issues. Such manipulation could reshape public images, influence elections, and alter societal views. To systematically assess this threat, we introduce the Factual Opinion Editing with Evidence (FOE) benchmark, which encompasses 261 public figures, 19 issue categories, and 2,178 complete opinion records. Our evaluations demonstrate that current editing techniques struggle significantly with factual opinions, often achieving only superficial changes while failing to preserve consistency between the edited opinion and the supporting evidence generated by the model. To address this limitation, we further propose a simple yet effective Self-Generated Evidence-Aligned method that achieves opinion-evidence alignment without relying on explicit instructions. Together, our benchmark and method provide a foundation for understanding the emerging security implications of factual opinion editing in LLMs.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Beyond Layer Importance in Layer-wise Sparsity: An Inter-Layer Perturbation-Absorption Perspective

Authors:
Tao Jing↗Ningxin Wu↗Chen Kang↗Dong Yu↗Changliang Li↗Pengyuan Liu↗

The considerable layer-wise redundancy in large language models (LLMs) has established non-uniform sparsity allocation across layers as the standard pruning approach for efficient compression. Existing layer-wise allocation methods that estimate allocation strategy from local signals such as activation outliers or weight spectra mainly derive from local layer importance, whereas the final post-pruning performance is also influenced by the network's subsequent compensatory capacity. In this paper, we directly characterize this property through controlled perturbation experiments. We make the following empirical findings. First, layers exhibit highly heterogeneous responses to pruning-scale perturbations. In most cases, early layers amplify perturbations, while middle and late layers actively absorb them, with relative L2 drift decreasing monotonically across depth and direction realigning toward the unperturbed hidden-state trajectory. Second, absorption is a large-perturbation phenomenon. Under small perturbations the network exhibits amplification across all layers, and the transition to absorption occurs smoothly as perturbation magnitude grows to pruning scale. This enriches the linearized accumulation theory underlying related works. Building on these findings, we define an absorption coefficient per layer and propose absorption-aware correction, an orthogonal augmentation that improves OWL and AlphaPruning by reducing perplexity by 7.13% and boosting zero-shot accuracy by 1.02% across multiple model families at 70% sparsity.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RefGC-SR$^2$: Reference-guided Generated Content Super-Resolution and Refinement

Authors:
Jeahun Sung↗Dahyeon Kye↗Soo Ye Kim↗Jihyong Oh↗

Reference-guided generation (e.g., object compositing, customization) has progressed rapidly, yet current pipelines share a fundamental limitation: the object-centric high-resolution reference image (HRRI) provided by users is downsampled to a fixed low-resolution (LR) before being fed into the model, so the fine-grained details are discarded before the output is even produced. In addition, the generation step then introduces its own artifacts (e.g., identity distortion) on top of this loss. Existing reference-guided generated content refinement (RefGCR) methods can correct some of these artifacts but still operate in the LR domain; reference-guided super-resolution (RefSR) methods recover resolution but assume natural-image degradations and ignore the artifact distribution of generative pipelines. To address both gaps in a single formulation, we introduce a new task: reference-guided generated content super-resolution-refinement (RefGC-SR$^2$), where the original HRRI is reused at the post-processing stage to recover lost details, refine generative artifacts, and upscale the output simultaneously. We construct the first real-world triplet data generation pipeline for this RefGC-SR$^2$ task, training a diptych-conditioned generator to synthesize paired low-quality anchors that public pretrained models cannot provide. We further present a frequency-aware diffusion transformer model for RefGC-SR$^2$ that selectively injects fine details from the HRRI while removing generative artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RefGC-SR$^2$ model successfully (i) refines the object identity faithfully with respect to the reference, and (ii) recovers high-resolution details, so that the final result is significantly higher quality and practically more usable compared to existing RefGCR and RefSR baselines.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Leveraging Audio-LLMs to Filter Speech-to-Speech Training Data

Authors:
Qixu Chen↗Satoshi Nakamura↗

Large-scale mined corpora provide abundant training data for end-to-end speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) but may contain noise, misalignment, and semantic errors. Filtering noisy data is crucial to maintain robust speech translation performance. We study how to train an audio-language model to make keep/drop decisions on paired speech directly from audio. To obtain reliable supervision without manual labels, we adopt a scalable two-stage Rank-to-Distill strategy. A lightweight ranker generates keep/drop pseudo-labels from noisy speech pairs, then trains an audio large language model to predict keep/drop directly from raw paired speech. The resulting model jointly captures acoustic fidelity and cross-lingual semantic consistency for the selection of speech-conditioned data. Experiments on CVSS-C and SpeechMatrix show consistent improvements over unfiltered training, yielding up to +1.4 ASR-BLEU for end-to-end S2ST.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Promera: a unified model for biomolecular structure prediction, filtering, and design

Authors:
Jing↗Bafna↗Diaz↗D. J↗Klivans↗A. R↗Berger↗

Generative models have become staple tools for modeling and designing biomolecular structures. However, although these tools have improved in structural prediction accuracy, their ability to filter designed binders—an essential use case—remains insufficient; whereas design methods have focused more on unconstrained binder generation rather than capabilities enabled by controllable design. We introduce Promera, a unified generative model that combines all-atom structure prediction with improved filtering and controllable design. We find that Promera's confidence metrics are more accurate for filtering binders from non-binders for both miniproteins and nanobodies, while its co-folding performance surpasses popular open-source models (OpenFold3-p2, Boltz-2) on therapeutically relevant categories. As a design model, Promera generates binders by predicting masked protein sequences with optional epitope, paratope, and template constraints. Remarkably, our nanobody designs match the in silico success rates from backprop-based techniques (mBER) when evaluated under co-folding confidence filters. We further provide two in silico demonstrations of the the versatile capabilities of our design method: epitope targeting of the Andes hantavirus glycoprotein with VHHs and active state stabilization of the beta-2 andrenergic GPCR. We conclude by proposing a scaling law for co-folding models, suggesting a path for further performance improvement.

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

Are LLMs Bad at Moral Reasoning?

Authors:
Menghang Zhu↗Seth Lazar↗

arXiv:2606.11635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For highly capable AI systems to operate safely in dynamic, open-ended environments, they must be able to identify, understand, and respond to moral reasons for action, and constrain their behaviour accordingly. A growing body of research aims to evaluate this capacity – moral competence – in today's most capable AI systems, recently reaching broadly pessimistic conclusions. One of the most ambitious such papers collects gold-standard human-authored rubrics for evaluating moral reasoning in 1,000 cases, and benchmarks frontier AI models against those rubrics, with underwhelming results. In this paper, we argue that the MoReBench dataset can be redeployed to give a much more optimistic picture of LLMs' moral reasoning (an essential part of moral competence). We show that if, instead of scoring LLMs' responses to these cases against these rubrics, we instead give the LLMs the same task given to humans – to generate scoring rubrics for the moral analysis of particular cases – the rubrics they generate are both better calibrated to the human rubrics than their open-ended responses, and, where they differ, plausibly reflect nothing more than the vast dimensionality of most moral problems, as well as highlighting some human departures from the "rubric for creating rubrics". Taking these points into consideration, the MoReBench dataset suggests that LLMs are significantly more capable at moral reasoning than was previously believed.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Adaptive Speech-to-Spike Encoding for Spiking Neural Networks

Authors:
Taharim Rahman Anon↗Jakaria Islam Emon↗

arXiv:2606.19039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The mismatch between continuous acoustic signals and discrete event-driven processing remains a fundamental bottleneck for neuromorphic speech processing. Current systems typically rely on fixed spike encoders, forcing downstream Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to compensate for non-adaptive input representations. To address this, we present a learnable residual speech-to-spike encoder jointly trained end-to-end with a Recurrent Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (R-LIF) backbone. We validate this approach on the Google Speech Commands v2 (GSC-v2) benchmark, achieving up to 94.97% accuracy. Notably, the learned encoder remains highly parameter-efficient with a compact 35k-parameter variant that reaches 89.8%, matching or exceeding prior baselines that require an order of magnitude more parameters. Our encoder-focused analysis, including linear probing and gradient-residual inspection, indicates that the encoder does not target faithful signal reconstruction but instead learns task-aligned spike representations that enhance class separability. Finally, we benchmark bio-inspired, hardware-friendly credit assignment by comparing Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA) with surrogate-gradient BPTT under identical architectures and training conditions. We find that DFA reaches 91.5% accuracy, quantifying the performance trade-off of bio-inspired learning rules for modern neuromorphic audio.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
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 →
10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FactoryLLM: A Safe and Open-Source AI Playground for Evaluating LLMs in Smart Factories

Authors:
Yash Pulse↗Yong-Bin Kang↗Abhik Banerjee↗Abdur Forkan↗Prem Prakash Jayaraman↗

arXiv:2606.14119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault diagnostics and recovery in smart factories is challenging because critical information is dispersed across manuals of multiple machines which are interconnected through the manufacturing process. Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide a promising approach. In this paper, we propose FactoryLLM, a safe and open-source AI playground designed for evaluating different LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models by analysing documents from multiple machines across the manufacturing process. FactoryLLM enables the user to configure the LLM, and assess performance when reasoning over multiple documents, through a dual evaluation setup using both RAGAS and NVIDIA's LLM-as-a-Judge metrics. FactoryLLM is safe because it allows users to run local or open-source LLMs without sharing sensitive industrial data, providing a controlled environment for experimentation. We demonstrate the efficacy of FactoryLLM through a case study which involves an Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle and its Mobile Planner software, evaluating three LLMs across 30 maintenance queries derived from approximately 600 pages of cross-machine documentation. The results suggest that FactoryLLM is effective in cross-machine document reasoning: every model achieved a groundedness score above 0.88. The full code and documentation for community to test FactoryLLM with their manufacturing specific scenarios are publicly available.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Neither Parallel Nor Sequential: How DiffusionGemma Actually Commits Tokens

Authors:
Ali Asaria↗Tony Salomone↗Deep Gandhi↗

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

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Adherence to Red Reflex and Vision Screening Recommendations: A Deep Dive into Primary Care Implementation Gaps

Authors:
Asare↗A. O↗Robles↗Hartmann↗E. E↗Stipelman↗Calder↗Omotowa↗Montgomery↗Baugh↗B. T↗Stagg↗…

Introduction: Early childhood vision screening is critical for detecting amblyopia and other vision-threatening conditions. Despite screening recommendations during well-child visits, rates remain low. Red reflex assessment is recommended to identify serious ocular pathology, yet its use in primary care is not well described. We examined rates and drivers of vision screening in pediatric primary care. Methods: We conducted a retrospective review of electronic health records for children 3 to 5 years attending well-child visits in 2022 in one of three representative primary care clinics within a university health system. Outcomes were documented red reflex and functional vision tests. We evaluated associations with patient demographics and clinic site using multivariable logistic regression Results: Among 1,003 visits, 21.1% (n=212) had a documented red reflex assessment, and 60.8% (n=610) a functional vision test. Younger children (ages 3 and 4 vs. 5 years) had higher odds of red reflex assessment [adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 9.00 and 8.64], and lower odds of a functional vision (aOR 0.47 and 0.59) test. Females had higher odds of red reflex assessment (aOR 1.53). Other/Multiracial children had lower odds of red reflex assessment than Non-Hispanic White children (aOR 0.48). Screening rates varied significantly by clinic site Conclusions: Visual function and red reflex assessment are inconsistently performed in pediatric primary care, with particularly low rates of red reflex documentation. Screening rates varied between clinics and were affected by age. These findings highlight missed opportunities for early detection of vision-threatening conditions and identify targets for improving adherence to pediatric vision screening recommendations

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Efficient Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridge for CT Field of View Extension

Authors:
Zhenhao Li↗Song Ni↗Long Yang↗Xiaojie Yin↗Haijun Yu↗Jiazhou Wang↗Hongbin Han↗Weigang Hu↗Yixing Huang↗

Computed tomography (CT) is a cornerstone imaging modality for non-invasive, high-resolution visualization of internal anatomical structures. However, when the scanned object exceeds the scanner's field of view (FOV), projection data are truncated, resulting in incomplete reconstructions and pronounced artifacts near FOV boundaries. Conventional reconstruction algorithms struggle to recover accurate anatomy from such data, limiting clinical reliability. Deep learning approaches have been explored for FOV extension, with diffusion generative models representing the latest advances in image synthesis. Yet, conventional diffusion models are computationally demanding and slow at inference due to their iterative sampling process. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient CT FOV extension framework based on the image-to-image Schrödinger Bridge (I$^2$SB) diffusion model. Unlike traditional diffusion models that synthesize images from pure Gaussian noise, I$^2$SB learns a direct stochastic mapping between paired limited-FOV and extended-FOV images. This direct correspondence yields a more interpretable and traceable generative process, enhancing anatomical consistency and structural fidelity in reconstructions. I$^2$SB achieves superior quantitative performance, with root-mean-square error (RMSE) values of 49.8 HU on simulated noisy data and 152.0 HU on real data, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion models such as conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic models (cDDPM) and patch-based diffusion methods. Moreover, its one-step inference enables reconstruction in just 0.19 s per 2D slice, representing over a 700-fold speedup compared to cDDPM (135 s) and surpassing DiffusionGAN (0.58 s), the second fastest. This combination of accuracy and efficiency indicates that I$^2$SB has potential for real-time or clinical deployment.

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

A Technical Taxonomy of LLM Agent Communication Protocols

Authors:
Linus Sander↗Habtom Kahsay Gidey↗Alexander Lenz↗Alois Knoll↗

arXiv:2606.19135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) advance and multi-agent systems aim to overcome the limits of standalone agents, robust communication protocols are becoming essential infrastructure for distributed agent networks. Nonetheless, the fragmented protocol landscape presents a significant interoperability challenge. This study develops a technical taxonomy to classify and analyze LLM agent communication protocols. Following an established iterative method, we defined the taxonomy's purpose, meta-characteristic, and ending conditions, then performed five iterations, three empirical-to-conceptual and two conceptual-to-empirical, on nine actively maintained open-source protocols with demonstrable adoption. The taxonomy comprises five dimensions: counterparty, payload, interaction state, discovery mechanism, and schema flexibility. Classification reveals recurring architectural patterns: all sampled agent-to-agent protocols combine hybrid payloads with session-state persistence; most protocols support multiple predefined schemas, and two negotiate schemas at runtime, indicating a trend toward schema flexibility; decentralized discovery remains rare. Analysis suggests short-term convergence pressure toward protocols unifying agent-to-agent and agent-to-context (tool and data) communication. Long-term, however, no single protocol is likely to maximize versatility, efficiency, and portability simultaneously. The field will more likely evolve toward a federated, layered protocol stack. The framework guides protocol selection and highlights open research gaps such as privacy and policy enforcement.}

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hybrid Transformer-Mamba for Weakly Supervised Volumetric Medical Segmentation

Authors:
Yiheng Lyu↗Lian Xu↗Coen Arrow↗Mohammed Bennamoun↗Farid Boussaid↗Girish Dwivedi↗

Weakly supervised segmentation enables model training from plane-level labels. Existing methods often rely on 2D encoders, neglecting the volumetric nature of medical data. We propose TranSamba, a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture designed to capture 3D context via cross-plane modeling. TranSamba augments a Vision Transformer backbone with Cross-Plane Mamba blocks, leveraging linear-time modeling for efficient information exchange across neighboring planes. This exchange improves in-plane self-attention and subsequent attention maps for object localization. TranSamba maintains linear time complexity and constant space complexity with respect to the input volume depth. Extensive experiments on three datasets covering diverse modalities and pathologies show that TranSamba achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the generalizable efficacy of cross-plane modeling. Code is available at: https://github.com/YihengLyu/TranSamba.

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

Optimizing Health Coverage in Ethiopia: A Learning-augmented Approach and Persistent Proportionality Under an Online Budget

Authors:
Davin Choo↗Yohai Trabelsi↗Fentabil Getnet↗Samson Warkaye Lamma↗Wondesen Nigatu↗Kasahun Sime↗Lisa Matay↗Milind Tambe↗St\'ephane Verguet↗

arXiv:2509.00135v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As part of nationwide efforts aligned with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 3 on Universal Health Coverage, Ethiopia's Ministry of Health is strengthening health posts to expand access to essential healthcare services. However, only a fraction of this health system strengthening effort can be implemented each year due to limited budgets and other competing priorities, thus the need for an optimization framework to guide prioritization across the regions of Ethiopia. In this paper, we develop a tool, Health Access Resource Planner (HARP), based on a principled decision-support optimization framework for sequential facility planning that aims to maximize population coverage under budget uncertainty while satisfying region-specific proportionality targets at every time step. We then propose two algorithms: (i) a learning-augmented approach that improves upon expert recommendations at any single-step; and (ii) a greedy algorithm for multi-step planning, both with strong worst-case approximation estimation. In collaboration with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute and Ministry of Health, we demonstrated the empirical efficacy of our method on three regions across various planning scenarios.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Unleashing Emergent Fermions with Rydberg Atom Simulators

Authors:
Hanteng Wang↗Xingyu Li↗Shang Liu↗Yingfei Gu↗Chengshu Li↗

arXiv:2606.19444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rydberg atom simulators, in both analog and digital modes, have attracted significant recent interest due to their versatile geometric reconfigurability. In this work, leveraging this feature, we propose two complementary approaches, one for each mode, to characterize emergent fermions in critical quantum many-body systems. In the analog mode, we assemble the Rydberg atoms in a "developable" (namely, preserving local couplings) Möbius band geometry to realize antiperiodic boundary conditions, where fermionic states reside. Spectroscopic measurement in this sector then reveals universal energy ratios of the bosonic and fermionic states. In the digital mode, we carry out a fermionic version of Kibble-Zurek ramping with a quantum circuit, directly addressing the fermionic scaling form. Reconfigurability allows an exponential speed-up of this task, with an $O(\log L\log\log L)$ circuit-depth overhead. Our work establishes the Rydberg atom simulator as a uniquely powerful platform to attack the notoriously difficult issue of experimentally probing emergent fermions that are nonlocally defined in a bosonic system.

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

Towards Fully Automated Exam Grading: Fairness-Aware Recognition of Handwritten Answers with Foundation Models

Authors:
Hartwig Grabowski↗

Correcting handwritten exams by hand is time-consuming and error-prone, particularly for large cohorts, while fully digital exams tend to force a didactic narrowing towards closed question formats. A practical middle ground keeps paper-based, problem-oriented tasks but records the assessment-relevant answers as single capital letters in a table that a machine can read. The open question is whether this reading can be made accurate and, above all, fair enough for unsupervised grading. Earlier automated approaches reached only about 88%–91% recognition – too low – and failed on the cases that matter most: answers placed outside the cell, crossed out, or written in cursive. We show that general-purpose vision-language foundation models (VLMs), which interpret the page rather than match pixel templates, close this gap. On a benchmark of 61 anonymised exams (3141 answer positions) the best model reaches 98.4% accuracy, well above the previous baseline. Crucially, we centre the evaluation on fairness: we distinguish false negatives (a correct answer marked wrong, which disadvantages the student) from false positives, and a lightweight prompt that supplies the reference solution as context lowers the false-negative rate to 0.58%. Under an exemplary grading scheme only three of the 61 exams would be graded worse, all caught by a student self-review step. Fully automated, fairness-aware exam grading at scale is therefore defensible; we release the anonymised benchmark to support reproducibility.

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

Beyond the Linear Separability Ceiling: Aligning Representations in VLMs

Authors:
Enrico Vompa↗Tanel Tammet↗Mohit Vaishnav↗

A challenge in advancing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) is determining whether their failures on abstract reasoning tasks, such as Bongard problems, stem from flawed perception or faulty top-down reasoning. To disentangle these factors, we introduce a diagnostic framework centered on the Linear Separability Ceiling (LSC), the performance achievable by a linear classifier on a VLM's raw visual embeddings. Applying this framework to state-of-the-art VLMs, we uncover a pervasive ''alignment gap'', where most models fail to generatively outperform the linear separability of their representations. We find that the few models surpassing this ceiling do so via two mechanisms: by further refining visual representations into a more linearly separable format or by executing non-linear decision logic. We demonstrate that this bottleneck is not a fundamental limitation but a solvable visual alignment issue. Our method augments standard next-token prediction with a contrastive objective to restructure the visual manifold into a more one-dimensionally linear geometry, improving image-to-image comparison and enabling models to significantly surpass the LSC on abstract compositional reasoning tasks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Arrival times of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate

Authors:
Pascal Naidon↗Lucas Happ↗Denis Boiron↗

arXiv:2606.20281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The times of flight of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate are theoretically investigated in the experimentally unexplored regime corresponding to detection close to the trap of the condensate. In this regime, there is no consensus on how to calculate the distribution of times of arrival onto the detector. For non-interacting particles, distinct theoretical predictions have been made in the past. This work analyses how these predictions are modified for an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate. For this purpose, a time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation is solved analytically and numerically.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Compressed Qubit Noise Spectroscopy: Piecewise-Linear Modeling and Rademacher Measurements

Authors:
Kaixin Huang↗Demitry Farfurnik↗Dror Baron↗Yi-Kai Liu↗

arXiv:2601.02516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Random pulse sequences are a powerful method for qubit noise spectroscopy, enabling efficient reconstruction of sparse noise spectra. Here, we advance this method in two complementary directions. First, we extend the method using a regularizer based on the total generalized variation (TGV) norm, in order to reconstruct a larger class of noise spectra, namely piecewise-linear noise spectra, which more realistically model many physical systems. We show through numerical simulations that the new method resolves finer spectral features, while maintaining an order-of-magnitude speedup over conventional approaches to noise spectroscopy. Second, we simplify the experimental implementation of the method, by introducing Rademacher measurements for reconstructing sparse noise spectra. These measurements use pseudorandom pulse sequences that can be generated in real time from a short random seed, reducing experimental complexity without compromising reconstruction accuracy. Together, these developments broaden the reach of random pulse sequences for accurate and efficient noise characterization in realistic quantum systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

EventDrive: Event Cameras for Vision-Language Driving Intelligence

Authors:
Dongyue Lu↗Rong Li↗Ao Liang↗Lingdong Kong↗Wei Yin↗Lai Xing Ng↗Benoit R. Cottereau↗Camille Simon Chane↗Wei Tsang Ooi↗

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.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

REDACT: A Systematically Controlled Multilingual Benchmark for Personal Information Detection

Authors:
Guneesh Vats↗Anubha Agrawal↗Shikha Singhal↗Ajita Dash↗Praison Selvaraj↗Vidhan Jhawar↗Ranga Prasad Chenna↗Bharadwaj Y M G↗

Benchmark infrastructure for personally identifiable information (PII) detection remains limited: existing corpora cover few entity types, use ad hoc generation conditions, and do not show which surface conditions cause detector failures. We present REDACT, a systematically controlled multilingual PII benchmark with 13,427 records, 324,078 entity annotations, 51 entity types, 4,127 surface-form patterns, and 25 languages across 9 scripts. A strength-2 covering-array sampler controls nine generation axes: domain, format, difficulty, length, density, code-switching, language, adjacency, and co-occurrence. Three entity-level metadata fields (disclosure status, disclosure form, and a GDPR-aligned sensitivity tier) enable stratified evaluation beyond aggregate or per-type F1. From the full benchmark, we evaluate five detectors (Presidio, GLiNER, the OpenAI Privacy Filter, GPT-4.1, and Claude Sonnet 4.6) on a locked, language-stratified sample of 1,000 records. Aggregate F1 masks an architecture-dependent failure structure: the rule-based detector performs poorly on the highest-stakes data, including HIGH-sensitivity categories (recall 0.07) and non-verbatim disclosure forms, while the LLM detectors remain more robust, with the HIGH tier as their strongest sensitivity slice. A three-model reference-free LLM-as-judge assessment corroborates that sensitivity-tier assignment is the task's hardest axis. We release the benchmark, schema, prompts, and stratified evaluation harness.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Shrinking Lifespan of LLMs in Science

Authors:
Ana Tri\v{s}ovi\'c↗

arXiv:2604.07530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling laws describe how language model capabilities grow with compute and data, but say nothing about how long a model matters once released. We introduce time-to-peak and lifespan as measures of model obsolescence and use them to characterize the scientific adoption trajectories of 62 LLMs across more than 108k citing papers (2019-2025), separating active adoption from background citation to recover per-model trajectories that citation counts cannot resolve. We find that a model's longevity is shaped more by when it was released than by its characteristics: release year predicts time-to-peak and lifespan more strongly than architecture, openness, or scale. LLM adoption follows an inverted-U curve (rising after release, peaking, and then declining), but this pattern is rapidly compressing. Each successive release year is associated with a 27% shorter time-to-peak and a 23% shorter lifespan ($p < 0.001$), robust to minimum-age thresholds and controls for model size. These adoption-side dynamics are invisible to scaling laws and suggest that specialization on any single model may be a depreciating investment, with costs falling on reproducibility and migration.

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

On the Benefits of Weight Normalization for Overparameterized Matrix Sensing

Authors:
Yudong Wei↗Liang Zhang↗Bingcong Li↗Niao He↗

arXiv:2510.01175v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While normalization techniques are widely used in deep learning, their theoretical understanding remains relatively limited. In this work, we establish the benefits of (generalized) weight normalization (WN) applied to the overparameterized matrix sensing problem. We prove that WN with Riemannian optimization achieves linear convergence, yielding an exponential speedup over standard methods that do not use WN. Our analysis further demonstrates that both iteration and sample complexity improve polynomially as the level of overparameterization increases. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first characterization of how WN leverages overparameterization for faster convergence in matrix sensing.

Read & Discuss → View Source →