Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

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

01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CoVEBench: Can Video Editing Models Handle Complex Instructions?

While recent text-guided video editing models excel at elementary tasks (e.g., style transfer, object insertion), real-world user requests are highly compositional. A single prompt often demands multiple coupled edits, such as modifying subjects, actions, and camera views, while strictly preserving unrelated spatiotemporal content. Existing benchmarks, heavily constrained by isolated edits and coarse global metrics, fail to diagnose how models handle such complex workflows. To address this gap, we introduce CoVEBench, a compositional video editing benchmark comprising 416 curated source videos, 626 multi-point editing instructions, and 9,990 fine-grained checklist items. Covering diverse editing dimensions, CoVEBench evaluates models via MLLM-judged instruction compliance and video fidelity, alongside automated metrics for video quality. Extensive experiments reveal that compositional editing remains a profound challenge: current models frequently omit edits, violate preservation constraints, or introduce artifacts when handling multiple operations simultaneously. CoVEBench provides a challenging, diagnostic testbed to advance video editing toward realistic user workflows.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Singular Vector Finite Element Basis Functions for Tetrahedra in Complex Electromagnetic Geometries

arXiv:2606.18140v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electromagnetic finite element method (FEM) implementations using traditional basis functions struggle to accurately represent field behavior near singular features such as conducting wedges. To combat this, specialized singular basis functions have been introduced to directly model the singular fields in these regions, leading to substantially improved performance. While these efforts have been pursued extensively in 2D, few functions have been developed for 3D elements. In this work, we develop basis functions for this in tetrahedra. Unlike prior functions, these basis functions are additive, meaning they are included alongside the standard vector basis functions to achieve more robust performance. Further, these functions are designed to be adaptable to tetrahedra touching several unique singular features by using combinations of basis functions singular with respect to each node and edge in the element, making them applicable to highly complex geometries. Higher-order interpolatory versions of the basis functions for modeling singular behavior with greater accuracy are also provided. These basis functions lead to substantial improvements in accuracy relative to the standard basis functions, and allow otherwise expensive simulations to be performed at far lower costs. As an application example, we perform simulations to extract critical quantities for designing superconducting qubits that significantly depend on the behavior of singular fields. In Ansys HFSS, this took 21.27 hours and a peak memory usage of 6.23 TB with 800 processors available, while using our singular basis functions achieved comparable results in 196 seconds while using 27.24 GB of memory and only 16 processors. Due to these benefits, our singular basis functions could be applied to enable design optimization of electromagnetic geometries with dominantly singular behavior, such as superconducting qubits.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Structure preserving properties of higher order moment closures for TASEP

arXiv:2604.15925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) is a stochastic model for the unidirectional flow of interacting particles on a 1D-lattice that is much used in systems biology and statistical physics. Its master equation describes the evolution of the probability distribution on the configuration space. The size of the master equation grows exponentially with the length of the lattice. It is known that the complexity of the system may be reduced using mean-field approximations. We provide a rigorous definition of a family of such models using moments of any order and an extension to the pair approximation for obtaining closures for the system. The dimension of these models grows linearly with the lattice size and exponentially in the order of the approximation. Moreover, we show that the states of these models still have a probabilistic interpretation and that basic structural properties of the master equation are preserved. This extends known results on the Ribosome Flow Model which can be viewed as the first order approximation for TASEP.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Variational Quantum Eigensolver-Based Quantum Bootstrap Embedding for Molecules

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17095v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulating strongly correlated molecular systems on near-term quantum hardware remains challenging due to modern hardware's limited quantum volume and moderate-fidelity qubits. One potential way to circumvent this challenge is through bootstrap embedding (BE). Bootstrap embedding breaks molecules into smaller fragments that are then embedded into the "bath" of other fragments in an iterative way. Bootstrap embedding is appealing for quantum simulation because fragmenting the system reduces the qubit requirements for any given fragment. In this work, we develop a quantum bootstrap embedding (QBE) workflow that uses variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) fragment solvers and study the algorithmic choices that determine the overall VQE-QBE algorithm's success. To improve efficiency, we introduce FastAdaptVQE, a sparse matrix-accelerated form of the adaptive variational quantum eigensolver (ADAPT-VQE) that replaces symbolic commutator evaluation with direct statevector linear algebra, and MatrixFreeAdaptVQE, a matrix-free extension that removes the sparse-matrix memory bottleneck that appears when treating larger fragments. We also modify the ADAPT-VQE operator selection step by replacing the purely greedy choice with a look-ahead strategy. Benchmarks on $H_4$ and $F_2$ reach chemical accuracy, within 1 kcal/mol of bootstrap embedding results using a full configuration interaction (FCI) solver. These results show that combining QBE with VQE can accurately calculate energies of molecular systems. This research lays the foundation for extending energy calculations to larger molecular systems and quantum materials on near-term quantum hardware.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

RedactionBench

Large Language Models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains that require redaction of personally identifiable information (PII). While redacting PII is a data cleaning prerequisite, existing benchmarks conflate extraction mechanics with privacy semantics. A public phone number is not equivalent to a phone number in a medical record. Whether information constitutes a violation depends heavily on who holds it, why, and in what context, fundamentally differentiating redaction from simple entity recognition. Grounded in contextual integrity, we introduce RedactionBench, a manually annotated benchmark comprising 200 diverse documents across 11 domains, mostly seeded from real-world sources. We also introduce R-Score, a novel character-level metric that treats semantically similar redactions equally and nullifies shallow formatting choices, such as varying masking styles for phone numbers. Evaluations across Named Entity Recognition models, entity extraction Small Language Models, and frontier models equipped with agentic tools demonstrate that contextual redaction remains an unsolved problem. A human evaluation with over 80 users on RedactionBench reveals a stark dichotomy in privacy perceptions. Annotators show consensus with target labels for mandatory redactions (89.4 percent) and safe text preservations (94.1 percent), but fail to agree on contextual redactions (47.7 percent). This variance demonstrates the subjective nature of contextual privacy and motivates R-Score, which decouples contextual ambiguity from strict precision. We compare 35 models across families and report their performance in redacting PII. Finally, we release RedactionBench to establish a baseline for future privacy-preserving systems, hoping to inspire efficient model design and standardized evaluations.

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

A Comprehensive Survey of Knowledge-Based Vision Question Answering Systems: The Lifecycle of Knowledge in Visual Reasoning Task

Knowledge-based Vision Question Answering (KB-VQA) extends general Vision Question Answering (VQA) by not only requiring the understanding of visual and textual inputs but also extensive range of knowledge, enabling significant advancements across various real-world applications. KB-VQA introduces unique challenges, including the alignment of heterogeneous information from diverse modalities and sources, the retrieval of relevant knowledge from noisy or large-scale repositories, and the execution of complex reasoning to infer answers from the combined context. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), KB-VQA systems have also undergone a notable transformation, where LLMs serve as powerful knowledge repositories, retrieval-augmented generators and strong reasoners. Despite substantial progress, no comprehensive survey currently exists that systematically organizes and reviews the existing KB-VQA methods. This survey aims to fill this gap by establishing a structured taxonomy of KB-VQA approaches, and categorizing the systems into main stages: knowledge representation, knowledge retrieval, and knowledge reasoning. By exploring various knowledge integration techniques and identifying persistent challenges, this work also outlines promising future research directions, providing a foundation for advancing KB-VQA models and their applications.

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

Fair Cognitive Impairment Detection Through Unlearning

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a medical condition characterized by a noticeable decline in memory, language, or thinking abilities. MCI detection from spontaneous speech is promising for scalable screening. However, learned models often exploit demographic cues correlated with labels, resulting in a large performance gap across subgroups. We present a multimodal framework that combines (i) cross-model fusion between modalities (speech, text, and image), and (ii) unlearning using gradient reversal that discourages the shared embedding from encoding task-irrelevant demographic attributes. Evaluated on the multilingual benchmarks TAUKADIAL and PREPARE, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art multilingual and multimodal baseline in MCI classification while substantially reducing the performance gap across patient subgroups (sex and language). We further analyze transfer across datasets, showing that demographic unlearning helps learn more robust representations for MCI detection.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Photon anti-bunching in high harmonic generation

arXiv:2606.17620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photon anti-bunching is the direct evidence for the existence of photons without having a classical counterpart. Unlike bunching of photons, which can have a semi-classical description, the effect of photon anti-bunching can only be understood with quantized electromagnetic fields. However, for the process of high harmonic generation (HHG), where many photons of the driving field are upconverted to a single photon of higher energy, there is yet no clear evidence for the presence of individual photon emission. The key result of this work is the prediction of photon anti-bunching in the process of HHG, marking it the first theoretical discovery of non-classicality in the temporal correlations of HHG photons. While other non-classical signatures in HHG, such as sub-Poissonian statistics or squeezing, have been discussed for an ensemble of photons, the anti-bunching signature reported here is a signature of a single photon. This is achieved by using the recently developed Heisenberg picture approach for quantum optical HHG, revealing clear anti-bunching signatures in the intensity correlation function across the entire harmonic spectrum.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

DataMagic: Transforming Tabular Data into Data Insight Video

arXiv:2606.20388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data videos integrate dynamic charts, voice narration, and synchronized animations to communicate data insights as temporal narratives, making them an effective medium for improving data consumption efficiency in the data management lifecycle. However, producing high-quality data videos requires expertise spanning data analysis, narrative design, and video production. Existing approaches fall short: static visualization tools (e.g., BI dashboards) lack narrative logic and animation; authoring tools require users to pre-prepare visualizations rather than working from raw data; pixel-level video generation models cannot guarantee data fidelity or provenance. We demonstrate DataMagic, an end-to-end interactive system that transforms raw tabular data and natural language queries into narrative data-insight videos. To ensure data fidelity, DataMagic introduces the declarative specification DVSpec, which binds visual and animation elements to underlying data fields through data-driven semantic references. To address the combinatorial explosion of the design space, DataMagic adopts a Generate-then-Orchestrate multi-agent architecture that generates candidate scenes in parallel and then optimizes narrative coherence through global orchestration. Leveraging DVSpec's decoupling of logic and rendering, the system further supports three interaction modes and structured provenance-based data Q&A, transforming one-way videos into explorable interactive data interfaces. Evaluation on 109 real-world samples validates the effectiveness of the DataMagic. Homepage: https://datamagic-home.github.io/

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLM Consumer Behavior Theory: Foundations of a Novel Research Field

arXiv:2606.18005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that make consumption decisions on behalf of users. This shift raises fundamental questions for consumer theory, which has traditionally modeled humans as the primary decision-makers. In this paper, we introduce LLM Consumer Behavior Theory, a new field of study concerned with analyzing consumer behavior in agentic markets. Drawing on classical and behavioral economics alongside recent advances in Natural Language Processing, we formalize how human preferences are reflected and acted upon by LLM-based agents, and how agent-level decisions aggregate into market demand. We unify previously fragmented literature on LLM decision-making, human behavior simulation, and preference elicitation under a common economic lens, highlighting where assumptions, such as rationality and heterogeneity, may fail in agentic markets. Rather than providing empirical validation, this paper outlines the scope of LLM consumer behavior and identifies open research questions related to alignment, preference representation, and market dynamics.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Predicting Cognitive Load from Speech and Interaction Dynamics in Dyadic Conversations

arXiv:2606.12971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating cognitive load from speech has largely been studied in controlled laboratory settings, with limited understanding of its reliability in natural collaborative conversations. We investigate whether speech and interaction dynamics predict perceived cognitive load during dyadic conversations. We analyze audio from 53 dyads performing nine collaborative tasks and extract static acoustic, dynamic, and interaction features to train a two-head Gated Recurrent Unit encoder to predict cognitive load scores. Results show conversational interaction provides useful signals for predicting cognitive load related to time pressure, mental work, effort, and task performance. Temporal demand is associated with turn-taking dynamics such as overlap and speaker switch, while mental demand is linked to imbalanced participation between speakers. These findings highlight the importance of task structure and conversational interaction for modeling cognitive load in natural collaborative settings.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

CaVe-VLM-CoT: An Interpretable Vision-Language Model Framework

arXiv:2606.18385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain prone to hallucinations, producing fluent but visually unfaithful outputs. Existing chain-of-thought and retrieval-augmented methods only partially address this, as they neither enforce step-level citation grounding nor route verification failures back to retrieval for correction. We present CaVe-VLM-CoT, a modular reflection-based agentic-RAG framework that enforces evidence-grounded reasoning through a five-stage closed-loop pipeline: Extractor, Retriever, Solver, Citation Injector, and Verifier, in which detected ungrounded claims trigger structured feedback to the Extractor for targeted re-retrieval. Since no existing framework jointly measures retrieval quality, step-wise citation faithfulness, and cross-modal grounding, we propose a suite of 23 component-wise metrics across all stages, anchored by CaVeScore, a composite metric weighting accuracy, citation precision and recall, attribution, and evidence grounding. Without any architectural or prompt modifications, CaVe-VLM-CoT achieves 87.1\% accuracy and 56.6\% CaVeScore on ScienceQA , and 55.2\% accuracy and 35.7\% CaVeScore on MMMU (30 subjects).

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Overcoming Rank Collapse in Feedback Alignment

arXiv:2606.11123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Backpropagation (BP) is widely viewed as biologically implausible, in part because it requires feedback weights to be the transpose of forward weights for error propagation. Interestingly, when training a network with fixed random feedback weights to circumvent this issue, learning aligns the forward weights with the feedback weights, leading the backpropagated error signal to become an approximation of the standard gradient used by BP. This process, called Feedback Alignment (FA), occurs in MLPs and very shallow CNNs but does not scale well to deeper architectures. In this work, we first investigated differences between BP and FA models, trained on CIFAR10, specifically focusing on the effective rank of the signal. We found that the FA error has a considerably lower rank and hence is constrained to a lower-dimensional subspace compared to BP, limiting exploration of the parameter space. Motivated by this observation, we evaluated two mechanisms for increasing the effective dimensionality of FA: Muon, an optimiser that orthogonalises weight updates; and hidden activity normalisation, which promotes activation orthogonality. Across larger architectures and benchmarks, we find that these methods consistently improve over FA baselines, for example, on CIFAR100 with a Resnet-18, accuracy increases by 9 percentage points. Our results identify low-dimensional gradient dynamics as a key obstacle to scaling FA and suggest that inducing higher-dimensional update geometry is a promising route toward scaling alternatives to backpropagation.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

ContinuumCellAgent: A Framework-Guided Agent for Long-Horizon Scientific Research

AI-scientist systems are beginning to automate parts of scientific research. We present ContinuumCellAgent, an autonomous agent that executes literature review, hypothesis formation, computational experimentation, manuscript drafting, and adversarial peer review as a single unattended run. Existing AI scientist systems remain difficult to diagnose because they lack modularity, systematic prompt grounding, and observability into long-running behavior. ContinuumCellAgent addresses these gaps with a modular supernode architecture for stage-wise backend swapping, protocols grounded in curated research-method checklists that also define reviewer rubrics, and a diagnostics layer that records file-based artifacts, message traces, and state transitions. We evaluate the system on open-domain QA benchmarks and biomedical/longevity case studies, showing that it can produce checkable research artifacts while exposing pipeline dynamics for rigorous AI co-scientist research.

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

MADAR: An Address-Free Processor

arXiv:2606.15535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In a modern processor, computing is the cheap part. Most of its area and energy go to addressing – moving operands to and from a register file and cache, and running the tags, ports, miss queues, and bypass networks that find a value where it was left. MADAR deletes that machinery by abolishing the address. All state circulates in rings of slots that advance one position per clock; instructions and data ride in the same slots; a value is named by its place in an orbit – a \rp{} coordinate – not by an address; a fixed station computes when a circulating instruction sweeps past its operands, on a schedule set at compile time; and a hierarchy of rings of increasing period replaces the cache hierarchy, movement between them scheduled rather than triggered by a miss. No prior circulating-store, dataflow, or statically scheduled machine combines all four of these. We define the execution model, validate it in a cycle-accurate register-transfer-level implementation, show it compilable – a constructive scheduler emits programs cross-checked against the implementation – and price it with a first-order energy model. The payoff is clearest for AI acceleration: the multiply-accumulate at the heart of every matmul and convolution compiles to a streaming form whose energy per operation stays flat as the reduction grows, and the operand reuse that makes matrix multiplication efficient is carried by the ring-period hierarchy – the memory hierarchy doing by rotation what a cache does by tags. MADAR is a new design point for any computation whose data movement is known before the program runs.

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

Observable Patterns Are Not Explanations: A Causal-Geometric Analysis of Latent Reasoning Models

Latent reasoning models (LRMs) replace explicit chain-of-thought with continuous thoughts. Recent work treats observable latent-state patterns, such as BFS-like frontiers and decodable arithmetic computation, as evidence for internal reasoning mechanisms. Evaluating two LRMs (Coconut and CODI) against controls lacking the proposed recurrence or curriculum, we find these patterns also appear in the controls and do not always causally affect behavior. Causal interventions reveal that latent-thought utilization is not binary but graded, scaling with a thought's causal effect on model behavior. Geometric analyses reveal this effect concentrates in low-rank directions whose step-to-step geometry grows more structured as their behavioral influence increases. Latent thoughts should therefore be treated as hidden computation, not hidden explanation: decodability, attention, or static structure alone cannot establish mechanism. LRM interpretability thus requires matched controls and causal tests.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scalar-Stepsize Nonuniform Monte Carlo Optimistic Policy Iteration: A Certified Counterexample

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tsitsiklis proved convergence of Monte Carlo optimistic policy iteration under a uniform update structure and identified nonuniform update frequencies as a delicate obstruction. We give a certified negative answer for the natural scalar-stepsize, unnormalized asynchronous state-value recursion with fixed nonuniform state-selection probabilities. In a three-state, two-action discounted MDP, the nonuniform update frequencies induce a diagonally scaled greedy-policy mean field with a certified nonconstant attracting hybrid periodic orbit. With a bounded unbiased geometric-horizon estimator and Robbins–Monro stepsizes, the original stochastic recursion remains trapped near the cycle with positive probability and therefore fails to converge. The example pinpoints a geometric obstruction: uniform sampling gives radial residual contraction, whereas scalar nonuniform sampling anisotropically distorts the residual dynamics and can generate switched attracting cycles.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generation

Recent image generators have demonstrated impressive photorealism and instruction-following capabilities in single-image generation and editing. However, constrained by their architectures, they cannot achieve interleaved generation (text-image sequence), which has crucial applications in visual narratives, guidance, and embodied manipulation. Even the latest open-source Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) exhibit limited performance in this regard. In this paper, we introduce InterleaveThinker, the first multi-agent pipeline designed to endow any existing image generator with interleaved generation capabilities. Specifically, we employ a planner agent to organize the image-text input sequence, instructing the image generator on the required execution at each step. Subsequently, we introduce a critic agent to evaluate the generator's outputs, identify samples that deviate from the planned instructions, and refine the instructions for regeneration. To implement this pipeline, we construct the Interleave-Planner-SFT-80k and Interleave-Critic-SFT-112k to perform a format cold-start. Then we develop Interleave-Critic-RL-13k to reinforce the step-wise instruction correction capability within a generation trajectory using GRPO. Since a single interleaved generation trajectory may involve over 25 generator calls, optimizing the entire trajectory is computationally impractical. Therefore, we propose accuracy reward and step-wise reward, allowing single-step RL to effectively guide the entire generation trajectory. The results show that InterleaveThinker improves performance across various image generators. On interleaved generation benchmarks, it achieves performance comparable to Nano Banana and GPT-5. Surprisingly, it also significantly enhances the base model on reasoning-based benchmarks; for example, on 4-step FLUX.2-klein, we observe substantial gains on WISE and RISE.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

One Token to Fool LLM-as-a-Judge

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trusted as automated judges, assisting evaluation and providing reward signals for training other models, particularly in reference-based settings like Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, we uncover a critical vulnerability even in this reference-based paradigm: generative reward models are systematically susceptible to reward hacking. We find that superficial inputs, which we term ''master keys'' such as non-word symbols (e.g., '':'' or ''.'') or generic reasoning openers (e.g., ''Thought process:'' or ''Let's solve this problem step by step.''), can consistently elicit false positive rewards without any substantive reasoning. Our systematic evaluation demonstrates this is a widespread failure affecting a diverse range of models, including leading proprietary systems such as GPT-o1 and Claude-4. These results challenge the assumed robustness of LLM judges and pose a significant threat to their reliability. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective data augmentation strategy using truncated model outputs as adversarial negative examples. The resulting Master Reward Models (Master-RMs) demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness against these ''master key'' attacks while maintaining high performance in standard evaluation settings. We supplement these findings with a comprehensive analysis of the vulnerability across model scales, prompt variations, and common inference-time strategies, offering insights to guide future research on robust LLM evaluation. We release our robust, general-domain reward models and the synthetic training data at https://huggingface.co/sarosavo/Master-RM and https://huggingface.co/datasets/sarosavo/Master-RM.

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

Blind Dexterous Grasping via Real2Sim2Real Tactile Policy Learning

arXiv:2606.11767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Blind grasping with a dexterous hand is a crucial manipulation capability. Nevertheless, learning such tactile-only policies for real robots remains challenging due to the tactile sim-to-real gap and the limited expressiveness of sparse tactile signals. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework for tactile-only blind grasping that is deployable on a physical multi-fingered robotic hand. Our approach combines three key components. First, we introduce a Real2Sim tactile calibration pipeline that constructs a contact-calibrated digital-twin simulator capable of reproducing real tactile signals. Second, we improve the expressiveness of sparse tactile observations using a layout-aware tactile encoder, which incorporates sensor-geometry priors through self-supervised pretraining. Third, to improve generalization to unseen objects, we train object-specific reinforcement-learning experts in the calibrated simulator and aggregate their successful grasp trajectories into a tactile-conditioned Diffusion Policy. We evaluate our method on a physical LEAP Hand equipped with distributed tactile sensing across 10 seen and 10 unseen objects. The deployed policy achieves a 27\% real-world grasp success rate across all 20 objects, without real-world grasping demonstrations or visual input. Simulation ablations show that layout-aware tactile pretraining improves grasping performance, while sensing-level evaluations confirm that Real2Sim calibration increases the consistency of tactile contact events between simulation and hardware. Together, these results suggest that contact-event calibration, geometry-aware tactile representation learning, and diffusion-based policy aggregation provide an effective path toward tactile-only blind grasping on real dexterous robotic hands. Project page:Dex-Blind-Grasp.github.io.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Taming Curvature: Architecture Warm-Up for Stable Transformer Training

arXiv:2606.16768v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training billion-parameter Transformers is often brittle, with transient loss spikes and divergence that waste compute. Even though the recently developed Edge of Stability (EoS) theory provides a powerful tool to understand and control the stability of optimization methods via the (preconditioned) curvature, these curvature-controlling methods are not popular in large-scale Transformer training due to the complexity of curvature estimation. To this end, we first introduce a fast online estimator of the largest (preconditioned) Hessian eigenvalue (i.e., curvature) based on a warm-started variant for power iteration with Hessian-vector products. We show theoretically, and verify empirically, that the proposed method makes per-iteration curvature tracking feasible at billion parameter scale while being more accurate. Using this tool, we find that training instabilities coincide with surges in preconditioned curvature and that curvature grows with depth. Motivated by these observations, we propose architecture warm-up: progressively growing network depth to carefully control the preconditioned Hessian and stabilize training. Experiments on large Transformers validate that our approach enables efficient curvature tracking and reduces instabilities compared to existing state-of-the-art stabilization techniques without slowing down convergence.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

County Year Informatics Model for Annual and Cumulative Unique Lung Cancer Screening Eligibility in Maryland, 2026 to 2045

Purpose: Population-level lung cancer screening programs require denominators that reflect age, smoking history, geography, and changing eligibility over time. We estimated annual prevalent and 20-year cumulative unique low-dose computed tomography screening eligibility for Maryland residents under alternative screening criteria. Methods: We built a deterministic cohort-cell stock-flow simulation using Maryland county-equivalent jurisdiction projections by age, sex, and race/ethnicity, with ACS socioeconomic/nativity covariates and smoking-history priors for ever-smoked status, pack-years, and quit-years. Scenarios included USPSTF 2013 legacy, USPSTF 2021, ACS 2023/2024, a risk-model-expanded sensitivity, and ever-smoked-only capacity stress tests. Cumulative unique eligibility counted people once at first eligibility rather than summing annual prevalent person-years. Results: Under USPSTF 2021, an estimated 238,346 Maryland residents were eligible in 2026 and 245,326 in 2045. The 20-year cumulative unique denominator was 768,668, whereas naively summing annual prevalent counts produced 4,850,735 person-years, a 6.31-fold overcount. ACS 2023/2024 expanded annual eligibility to 314,616 in 2026 and cumulative unique eligibility to 902,796 by adding remote former smokers. Ever-smoked-only adult eligibility was 1,957,699 in 2026 and 3,383,683 cumulative unique over 20 years. Conclusion: A Maryland statewide screening initiative should plan from cumulative unique eligibility and county-equivalent jurisdiction-specific burden rather than annual prevalence alone. Explicit pack-year and quit-year modeling materially changes statewide and county allocation compared with current-smoking proxy models.

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

Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games

arXiv:2606.17657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People make decisions differently in strategic interactions. Some update beliefs like a Bayesian; others exhibit biases like motivated reasoning. Although creators of large language models use simulated humans for safety evaluations and training, they often fail to cover this breadth of human behavior. We argue that cognitive science and economics provide a convenient tool for doing so, making use of mathematical models of human decision-making. We propose an approach that we call Equation-to-Behavior Prompting for guiding large language models to match cognitive models, and evaluate this approach on persuasion games based on legal decision-making. We find that large models can approximate equation-based specifications – Bayesian updating, affine distortion, motivated updating, and Grether's $\alpha$-$\beta$ model – using prompting, but small models fail to do so. However, training small models with reinforcement learning to adhere to mathematical rules, Equation-to-Behavior RL, reduces belief error by 26.5% in out-of-distribution parameterizations. We show that these simulations can help create diverse training environments; training small models to consider different kinds of decision-makers improves average belief change by 2.5%–12% over Bayesian-only training, even when persuading GPT-5-mini. Our work could improve human simulations for training and evaluation in increasingly realistic settings, and could also enable novel research into more complicated mathematical models of human decision-making.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tunneling Dynamics and Time Delay in Electron Transport through Time-Dependent Barriers with Finite-Bandwidth Reservoirs

arXiv:2507.20649v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a model system consisting of a tunneling barrier driven by an external harmonic field and coupled to two leads with finite bandwidth. Avoiding Floquet expansions, we derive simple expressions for the time-dependent tunneling current in the adiabatic regime. Our approach relates the barrier modulation to a measurable time delay in the steady-state periodic current. It provides a physically consistent definition of the tunneling time inside the barrier by subtracting the time delay associated with the leads from the total time delay. We find that the tunneling time always vanishes for wide/high barriers. Remarkably, the time delay persists even when the barrier becomes static, i.e., in the limit where the modulation frequency vanishes. This indicates that the time delay obtained through the introduction of an external periodic perturbation actually reflects an intrinsic property of the tunneling dynamics, rather than an effect of the external drive or of a particular system. We apply our results to the analysis of tunneling times in optical experiments and find good agreement with the experimental data.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Aligning Quantum Operators with Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.13811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) understand and reason about quantum operators? Despite their remarkable capabilities in mathematics and symbolic reasoning, LLMs remain inherently blind to quantum representations such as unitary matrices. In this work, we take a step toward bridging this gap by introducing an approach that maps unitary operators into the latent space of an LLM, enabling unified modeling over quantum and linguistic inputs. We instantiate this idea on Clifford+T circuit synthesis over a Pauli rotation gate set, where our model achieves results competitive with state-of-the-art methods and scales consistently with training data, with no signs of saturation. Our approach further enables language-conditioned synthesis, allowing gate constraints unseen during training to be specified directly in natural language. This work suggests a path toward quantum–aware foundation models that can natively interpret and reason about quantum operations, which could have broader implications reaching across quantum compilation and algorithm discovery.