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.AI) 2026-06-16

Green AI Carbon Optimizer: Carbon-Efficient Training Location Recommendation and Global AI Energy Demand Forecasting

arXiv:2606.14707v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI training and deployment consume substantial electricity, but carbon outcomes remain weakly integrated into routine model development decisions. This paper presents Green AI Carbon Optimizer with two primary contributions: (i) a carbon aware cloud region recommendation method for training workloads, and (ii) a power law forecasting pipeline for global AI energy demand. For location recommendation, we combine regional grid carbon intensity, renewable share, and data center Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) into a unified scoring model across 100+ regions from major cloud providers. For a reference workload (8*A100, 100h), estimated emissions in our sampled regions range from 7.74kg to 272.00kg CO2. Selecting the best region instead of the worst corresponds to a 97.2% reduction relative to the worst case. Ablation shows that ranking by renewable share alone can select regions with higher CO2 emissions than rankings that include grid carbon intensity. For forecasting, we fit a power law relation between parameter count and training energy using 26 anchor models. We combine this fit with scenario assumptions on model growth, hardware efficiency, and training frequency, and evaluate sensitivity to inference ratio and ecosystem scaling. Across scenarios, projected 2030 demand ranges from 7TWh to 1,436TWh under the stated assumptions, highlighting the importance of deployment choices, model scaling discipline, and transparent energy reporting.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Multi-Agent Reasoning with Adaptive Worker Allocation for Stance Detection

Stance detection requires identifying an author's position toward a target, often from short-form texts where stance is implicit, indirect, or rhetorically framed. Although large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on this task, single-pass prompting can be brittle when multiple interpretations are plausible. Existing aggregation strategies, such as majority voting or self-consistency, improve robustness by combining labels, but they discard the intermediate reasoning needed to resolve conflicting interpretations. We introduce a multi-agent reasoning framework with adaptive worker allocation for stance detection that shifts aggregation from label-level voting to reasoning-level synthesis. The framework employs a Manager-Worker architecture in which a Manager adaptively allocates a variable number of Worker agents based on input complexity. Each Worker analyzes the input from a distinct perspective and produces a reasoning-only explanation without emitting a stance label; the Manager then synthesizes these explanations to produce the final prediction. We evaluate the proposed framework on SemEval-2016, P-Stance, and COVID-19 Stance using Llama, Mistral, and Gemini. Results show that the framework yields the largest gains on implicit and context-dependent stance cases, achieving 86.07 Macro-F1 on COVID-19 and 82.90 on SemEval-2016, while remaining competitive on more explicit stance datasets such as P-Stance. These findings suggest that adaptive reasoning-level aggregation is most beneficial when stance cannot be reliably inferred from surface cues alone.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Asymptotically Optimal Circuit Depth for Diagonal Unitary Synthesis and Compilation on Two-Dimensional Grids

arXiv:2606.17589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diagonal unitaries are a fundamental but resource-intensive class of quantum operations, arising as the phase separators of QAOA and the time-evolution blocks of Hamiltonian simulation. Under all-to-all connectivity their optimal depth is established, but on nearest-neighbor hardware general-purpose compilers fall back on heuristic search, which yields no analyzable cost bound and becomes intractable at the very sizes where depth is the bottleneck. We address synthesis and compilation jointly. On the synthesis side, we develop a Gray-Path Framework (GPF) that realizes any $n$-qubit diagonal unitary in asymptotically optimal $R_z$ and CNOT depth $O(2^n/n)$ without ancillas. Our main result is that compiling GPF onto a two-dimensional nearest-neighbor grid preserves this optimality: routing adds depth $\Theta(2^n/n)$ and gate count $\Theta(2^n)$. Because GPF fixes its entire interaction structure in advance, routing reduces to scheduling a known sequence, with no heuristic search. We give the construction both with and without ancillas: the ancilla-free, cost-optimized layout is a two-row grid, and a $2k$-row layout introduces a space–time tradeoff that cuts depth by $1/k$ while remaining asymptotically optimal for the enlarged register; both are deterministic and analyzed in closed form. The same complexity is also attained on a linear nearest-neighbor chain, so the preservation is topology-independent, holding on any architecture that contains such a chain. All routing bounds are closed-form, giving the concrete resource estimates that heuristic compilers cannot provide at scale.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Integrative Transfer Network: Deep Transfer Learning Across Populations and Prediction Targets

Authors:

Large-scale clinical and biomedical datasets increasingly contain both diverse subgroup attributes (e.g., demographic or clinical subgroups) and multiple prediction targets. Although various machine learning approaches can address subgroup differences or multi-target prediction, they often consider these aspects independently rather than jointly. To more effectively capture the shared and subgroup-specific information in such complex datasets, we propose the Integrative Transfer Network (ITN), a deep neural network designed to leverage data across subgroups and multiple related outcomes simultaneously. In extensive experiments, including time-to-event and classification tasks where demographic subgroups and multiple disease endpoints are prevalent, ITN demonstrates consistent improvements in subgroup-specific prediction by borrowing strength from other subgroups and outcomes. We envision ITN as a unified framework for learning from heterogeneous datasets where subgroup-specific insights are critical.

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

Attribution-Guided and Coverage-Maximized Pruning for Structural MoE Compression

arXiv:2606.18304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale compute efficiently, yet remain expensive to deploy due to their substantial memory footprint and inference overhead. Prior compression methods mainly operate at the expert level, either removing entire experts or ranking experts by coarse-grained importance scores. However, such expert-wise decisions are often too coarse to capture fine-grained redundancy, leading to misallocated pruning budgets and limited compression. To address this problem, we observe that information within MoE experts is highly concentrated in a small subset of channels, leaving substantial redundancy even in experts deemed important. Based on this observation, we propose a structural pruning framework tailored for MoE models. Our method reformulates prune-ratio allocation as a channel-score coverage maximization problem and solves it efficiently using an attribution-based approximation. Experiments on DeepSeek and Qwen MoE models show that our method preserves model accuracy under 50% or 25% structured pruning when combined with 4-bit quantization. On Qwen3-30B-A3B, our approach reduces memory footprint by 5.27$\times$ and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse benchmarks.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

The Amazon can be saved — with concerted action inside and outside Brazil

Authors: Unknown Author

As deforestation in the Amazon falls, fresh evidence shows that the rainforest can withstand global warming, but only if there is a worldwide effort to stop cutting it down. As deforestation in the Amazon falls, fresh evidence shows that the rainforest can withstand global warming, but only if there is a worldwide effort to stop cutting it down.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CottonLeafVision: An Explainable and Robust Deep Learning Framework for Cotton Leaf Disease Classification

Globally, cotton is a highly economically beneficial crop, as the textile industry heavily depends on it. So, the precise identification and detection of cotton leaf disease is crucial for economic stability. The development goal of "CottonLeafVision" is to accurately classify and detect cotton leaf disease. With this goal, we have evaluated multiple pretrained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, including DenseNet201, InceptionV3, and VGG19 on a publicly available cotton leaf disease image dataset. This image dataset includes seven classes, six disease classes, and one healthy class, collected under various field conditions reflecting real-world challenges. Among these pretrained models, with DenseNet201, we have achieved the highest classification accuracy of 98%. To enhance the model reliability and interpretability, we have implemented different techniques and methods such as Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), occlusion sensitivity analysis and adversarial training to increase the noise resistance of the model. Finally, we have developed a prototype in order to utilize the model's capabilities on real life agriculture. This paper shows the deep learning model's capabilities to classify the disease in real-life cotton disease management situations.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

ILV: Iterative Latent Volumes for Fast and Accurate Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

A long-term goal in CT imaging is to achieve fast and accurate 3D reconstruction from sparse-view projections, thereby reducing radiation exposure, lowering system cost, and enabling timely imaging in clinical workflows. Recent feed-forward approaches have shown strong potential toward this overarching goal, yet their results still suffer from artifacts and loss of fine details. In this work, we introduce Iterative Latent Volumes (ILV), a feed-forward framework that integrates data-driven priors with classical iterative reconstruction principles to overcome key limitations of prior feed-forward models in sparse-view CBCT reconstruction. At its core, ILV constructs an explicit 3D latent volume that is repeatedly updated by conditioning on multi-view X-ray features and the learned anatomical prior, enabling the recovery of fine structural details beyond the reach of prior feed-forward models. In addition, we develop and incorporate several key architectural components, including an X-ray feature volume, group cross-attention, efficient self-attention, and view-wise feature aggregation, that efficiently realize its core latent volume refinement concept. Extensive experiments on a large-scale dataset of approximately 14,000 CT volumes demonstrate that ILV significantly outperforms existing feed-forward and optimization-based methods in both reconstruction quality and speed. These results show that ILV enables fast and accurate sparse-view CBCT reconstruction suitable for clinical use. The project page is available at: https://sngryonglee.github.io/ILV/.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Holographic Memory for Zero-Shot Compositional Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs: A Mechanistic Study of Where and Why It Fails

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24948v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models predict single-hop links well but have no mechanism for zero-shot compositional queries: multi-hop questions whose relation chains never appeared during training. Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR), which bind and unbind symbols via circular convolution, are a theoretically attractive candidate, since binding is approximately invertible and associative. We test whether this promise holds. We study two holographic memory variants, real-valued HRR and phase-only Fourier HRR (FHRR), each with a modern Hopfield cleanup, on FB15k-237 over five seeds. Four findings follow. First, both are competitive single-hop retrievers (filtered MRR 0.358 +/- 0.002 for HRR, 0.350 +/- 0.021 for FHRR). Second, neither composes zero-shot: accuracy stays at chance across all cleanup temperatures. Third, the main contribution, we localise the failure mechanistically. A hop-1 probe shows the memory recovers the correct intermediate entity with high fidelity (MRR 0.896 +/- 0.002 for HRR), yet composition still fails even with a verified-correct intermediate. A second probe shows why: posing the ground-truth second-hop fact as a standalone atomic query, bypassing composition entirely, already recovers it at only 0.26 to 0.48x average atomic accuracy, uniformly across relation fan-out. The bottleneck is not the bind-unbind algebra or the cleanup; it is that facts compositional chains pass through are intrinsically harder for the superposed memory to retrieve, a capacity and interference effect present already at a single hop. Fourth, we prove (Lemma 4.1) that FHRR's softmax cleanup is not phase-equivariant, compounding the primary failure on the minority of chains where hop-1 itself errs. Fixing zero-shot composition requires improving retrieval capacity under superposition, not just redesigning the cleanup.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A prototype differential atom interferometer for fundamental physics

Gravitational waves and ultralight dark matter are among the most compelling frontiers in fundamental physics, motivating proposals for very-long-baseline atom interferometerssuch as AION1, MAGIS2, AICE3 and AEDGE4 that aim to detect at frequencies at which ground-based5 and space-borne6 laser interferometers lose sensitivity. Very-long-baseline atom interferometers look for signals by comparing the quantum phase evolution of widely separated atomic ensembles interrogated by a common laser. However, their performance depends critically on suppressing noise sources, particularly laser phase noise. The experimental validation of such noise rejection remains an important challenge. Here we demonstrate a prototype differential atom interferometer based on the single-photon clock transition of fermionic 87Sr. Thus, we obtain a gradiometer configuration with a species intrinsically suited to kilometre-scale and space-baseline operation. The instrument operates at the standard quantum limit7 with no excess noise beyond atom shot noise. The differential configuration maintains quantum-limited sensitivity in the presence of several radians of artificially injected laser phase noise per shot, which emulates the conditions expected in a very-long-baseline atom interferometer. We also demonstrate the recovery of coherent oscillatory signals across a broad frequency range under fully phase-randomized conditions, a capability that is inaccessible to a single interferometer operating in the same regime. These results provide an experimental validation of the noise-immune measurement principle underlying very-long-baseline atom interferometers and mark an important step towards next-generation quantum sensors for gravitational-wave detection and searches for ultralight dark matter8,9. A prototype differential atom interferometer operates at the standard quantum limit with no excess noise beyond atom shot noise, achieving performance in line with the specifications for future long-baseline atom interferometers.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Interpretable Alzheimer's Diagnosis via Multimodal Fusion of Regional Brain Experts

Accurate and early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is critical for effective intervention and requires integrating complementary information from multimodal neuroimaging data. However, conventional fusion approaches often rely on simple concatenation of features, which cannot adaptively balance the contributions of biomarkers such as amyloid PET and MRI across brain regions. In this work, we propose MREF-AD, a Multimodal Regional Expert Fusion model for AD diagnosis. It is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that models mesoscopic brain regions within each modality as independent experts and employs a gating network to learn subject-specific fusion weights. Utilizing tabular neuroimaging and demographic information from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), MREF-AD achieves competitive performance over strong classic and deep baselines while providing interpretable, modality- and region-level insight into how structural and molecular imaging jointly contribute to AD diagnosis. The source code is available at https://github.com/PennShenLab/mref-ad.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NRITYAM: Language Models Meet Art and Heritage of Dance

Language models have become essential tools in shaping modern workflows. However, their global effectiveness hinges on a nuanced understanding of local socio-cultural contexts. To address this gap, we present NRITYAM, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the cultural comprehension capabilities of language models in the context of global dance traditions. NRITYAM comprises 9,260 carefully curated question-answer pairs spanning 12 languages, making it the largest dataset dedicated to evaluating cultural knowledge in dance. The dataset has been developed from the ground up through close collaboration with native dance artists and native speakers of the languages, who authored and validated culturally relevant questions specific to their regions. We evaluate a broad set of models, including large language models, small language models, multimodal large language models, and small multimodal language models. As a multilingual and multicultural benchmark, NRITYAM sets a new standard for evaluating the ability of AI systems to understand and reason about traditional performing arts. Detailed dataset samples are available at~\url{https://github.com/niladrighosh03/NRITYAM}.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

FactCheck: Feasibility-aware Long-term Action Anticipation with Multi-agent Collaboration

Long-term action anticipation (LTA) aims to predict an ordered sequence of future verb-noun actions from a partially observed video. While this task serves as the foundation for embodied intelligence, anticipating physically feasible long-term actions remains a critical challenge. Existing methods, which operate in an open-loop manner, often hallucinate non-existent objects, violate object affordances, or disregard object states, as they lack explicit mechanisms to verify action feasibility against the physical environment. To address this, we propose FactCheck, a novel multi-agent collaboration framework that improves feasibility through a closed-loop "Observe-Plan-Verify" mechanism. FactCheck decomposes the complex LTA task into specialized roles: an Observer that recognizes historical actions from video observations and constructs a dual-form structured memory, comprising a History Action Abstract that captures high-level human intentions and environmental status, and a History Action Graph that encodes object states and temporal dependencies; a Planner that generates draft future actions conditioned on both low-level historical actions and high-level History Action Abstract; and a Verifier that rigorously validates the draft against the History Action Graph and refines infeasible actions. Extensive experiments on the EPIC-Kitchens-55 and EGTEA Gaze+ benchmarks demonstrate that FactCheck consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our work establishes a new paradigm for feasibility-aware long-term action anticipation, effectively closing the loop of action recognition, action prediction and action verification.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Learning-Augmented Approximation for Unrelated-Machines Makespan Scheduling

arXiv:2606.13133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recently, Antoniadis et al. (ICLR 2025) proposed a framework for incorporating predictions to approximate NP-hard selection problems. Despite its simplicity, this approach tightly matches theoretical lower bounds, making its generalization highly compelling. We address an open question raised in the work of Antoniadis et al., concerning the extension of this approach to other important problems outside the class of selection problems, such as scheduling. We develop a learning-augmented algorithm for the makespan minimization problem on unrelated machines, denoted by $R\|C_{\max}$. By using predictions of heavy job assignments, we achieve a polynomial-time $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation for accurate predictions that smoothly degrades to a worst-case 2-approximation as the error increases. We conclude our work with an empirical analysis of our method.

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

PVminerLLM2: Improving Structured Extraction of Patient Voice via Preference Optimization

Motivation: Patient-generated text contains critical information on patients' lived experiences, social context, and care engagement, but remains largely unstructured, limiting its use in patient-centered outcomes research. Prior work introduced the PV-Miner benchmark and PVMinerLLM models for structured extraction. However, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone struggles with rare, fine-grained, and unevenly distributed errors, particularly in token-critical structured outputs. Results: We present PVminerLLM2, an improved set of LLMs for structured patient voice extraction that applies preference optimization to address token-critical errors beyond the reach of supervised fine-tuning. Our method introduces (i) a preference objective with token-level gated stabilization term that prevents degradation of absolute token likelihood under preference optimization, and (ii) confusion-aware preference pair construction to better capture low-separation distinctions. We further incorporate token-importance weighting and inverse-frequency reweighing to address token imbalance and class skew. Across multiple model sizes, PVMinerLLM2 consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving gains of up to 4.43% (Code), 3.50% (Sub-code), and 1.55% (Span), and outperforms baseline LLM trained with existing preference optimization methods. Availability and Implementation: The supplementary material, code, evaluation scripts, and trained models for PVminerLLM2 are publicly available at: https://github.com/Data-Mining-Lab-Yale/PVminerLLM2

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

Natural-Language Temporal Grounding in Hour-Long Videos is a Search Problem: A Benchmark and Empirical Decomposition

Temporal grounding–returning the interval $[t_s, t_e]$ for a natural-language query over a video–is the language interface to long-form video, yet has been studied on short videos; the dynamics of hour-scale natural-language grounding remain underexplored. We take the position that at hour-scale, the binding constraint is search, not recognition: Video-LLMs are bottlenecked not by localizing a nearby event, but–given a natural-language query–by searching for the relevant region of a long video. To test this, we release ExtremeWhenBench, the first open hour-scale grounding benchmark (2,273 queries over 194 videos, mean 75.7 min, max 9 hr) with an open-form query distribution. Every open Video-LLM collapses while a frame-level retrieval baseline outperforms them; a failure taxonomy attributes 85% of failures to search; and a retrieve-then-ground hybrid recovers 6.7x over the monolithic Video-LLM–mirroring retrieve-then-read in open-domain QA.

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

TWLA: Achieving Ternary Weights and Low-Bit Activations for LLMs via Post-Training Quantization

arXiv:2606.13054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment. Ternarization has emerged as a promising compression technique, offering significant reductions in model size and inference complexity. However, existing methods struggle with heavy-tailed activation distributions and therefore keep activations in high precision, fundamentally limiting end-to-end inference acceleration. To overcome this limitation, we propose TWLA, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that achieves 1.58-bit weight compression and 4-bit activation quantization while maintaining high accuracy. TWLA comprises three components: (1) Euclidean-to-Manifold Asymmetric Ternary Quantizer (E2M-ATQ) minimizes layer-output error under weight ternarization via a two-stage optimization from Euclidean initialization to manifold relocation; (2) Kronecker Orthogonal Tri-Modal Shaping (KOTMS) applies a Kronecker-structured orthogonal rotation to reshape weights into ternary-friendly tri-modal distributions, while the shared rotation statistically suppresses activation outliers; and (3) Inter-Layer Aware Activation Mixed Precision (ILA-AMP) explicitly introduces adjacent-layer second-order interaction costs in bit allocation and jointly optimizes for the layer-wise disparity of activation quantization gains induced by the shared orthogonal transform, preventing cascades triggered by a few weak layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TWLA maintains high accuracy under W1.58A4, while delivering significant inference acceleration. The code is available at .

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

libhmm: A Modern C++20 Library for Hidden Markov Models with Correct MLE Emission M-Steps

Authors:

arXiv:2605.29208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We describe libhmm, a C++20 library for Hidden Markov Model parameter estimation, sequence decoding, and model selection. libhmm addresses two gaps in existing software: the absence of a well-maintained, zero-dependency C++ HMM library suitable for embedding in production systems, and the widespread use of method-of-moments (MOM) approximations in the emission distribution M-step of the Baum-Welch algorithm. The library implements correct maximum likelihood estimators for sixteen scalar emission distributions, including an ECME algorithm for the location-scale Student-t distribution, Newton-Raphson maximization for Gamma, Beta, Weibull, and Negative Binomial distributions, and the von Mises distribution for circular data. All forward-backward and Viterbi calculations operate in full log-space. SIMD acceleration is provided for AVX-512, AVX2, SSE2, and ARM NEON via compile-time dispatch with scalar fallback. Version 4 adds multivariate observation support via the BasicHmm template, with three multivariate emission families (diagonal Gaussian, full-covariance Gaussian, and independent components) each with correct weighted MLE M-steps. Python bindings are available via the companion package pylibhmm. We compare libhmm against established C and C++ HMM libraries and against published R reference packages on seven real-data benchmarks, and discuss the architectural tradeoffs made in the design.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Patients With Personality: Realistic Patient Simulation through Controlled Diversity and Selective Disclosure

arXiv:2606.17441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulating realistic patient interactions is a key requirement to testing clinical applications of LLMs at scale without time-consuming and expensive user studies. However, existing approaches often lack realism and controllability, often oversharing information unprompted, and failing to capture the wide variability of patient behavior. Here, we introduce PatientsWithPersonality (PWP), a patient simulation framework that generates realistic yet diverse virtual patient responses through explicit personality parametrization over a latent patient state. Grounded in HEXACO, a six-dimensional personality space used to quantify and parameterize human behavioral traits, our approach enables fine-grained control over conversational style, cooperativeness, and information disclosure within a unified framework. In a clinician evaluation, PWP is judged nearly as realistic as recorded human actors and clearly ahead of prior simulators, while being flagged as "too informative" far less often. Conditioning on HEXACO axes yields personas whose configured traits are recoverable by both clinicians and an autorater, span a substantially wider behavioral footprint than the closest baseline, and prevent oversharing. Altogether, our framework paves the way for more accurate and informative LLM benchmarking through our realistic and steerable patient simulator.

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

The Stanford EDGAR Filings Dataset: Reconstructing U.S. Corporate and Financial Disclosures into Layout-Faithful and Token-Efficient Pretraining Data

arXiv:2606.18192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As high-quality public web corpora become increasingly exhausted, clean long-context documents have become a scarce and expensive source of training data for large language models (LLMs). Existing long-context corpora are often proprietary and costly to acquire, synthetically generated, or concentrated in narrow domains such as programming. We introduce the Stanford EDGAR Filings Dataset (SEFD), an open reconstruction of SEC filings into layout-faithful MultiMarkdown for financial language modeling and evaluation. SEFD makes audited financial statements, risk disclosures, ownership reports, accounting notes, and market-moving event filings usable as long-context pretraining data and as a basis for financial reasoning, forecasting, compliance, and document understanding. The resulting corpus is token-efficient, model-ready, and has less than 0.1% overlap with Common Crawl-derived corpora. We release SEFD-v1, a 152B-token initial public snapshot, and provide corpus-level analyses of a larger 18.5M-filing archive estimated at 550B tokens. We further introduce two SEFD-derived benchmarks: EDGAR-Forecast, which evaluates filing-grounded numerical forecasting after model knowledge cutoffs, and EDGAR-OCR, which evaluates transcription of complex financial tables.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Information Is Not Physical: Possibility Spaces, Erasure, and the Structure of Unrealized Alternatives

arXiv:2606.15120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The slogan ``information is physical,'' introduced by Rolf Landauer and developed through quantum information theory and black-hole thermodynamics, has achieved near-axiomatic status in modern physics. Yet the ontological status of information remains surprisingly underexamined: most discussions either reduce information to a form of energy or treat it as a purely mathematical object. This paper proposes a third position. I argue that information is neither a physical substance nor a free-floating abstraction, but rather the structure of physically realizable alternatives – a counterfactual structure that a physical system instantiates in virtue of the possibility space available to it. Building on Shannon's combinatorial definition, the Landauer principle, the no-cloning theorem, and the black-hole information paradox, I show that the informational content of any physical event is constituted by the set of outcomes that could have occurred but did not. This counterfactual reading dissolves several persistent confusions: it explains why erasing information dissipates heat without making information ``material,'' why quantum superposition is informationally richer than any classical mixture, and why information loss in black holes is physically significant beyond mere bookkeeping. The proposal sits within a structural-realist framework but departs from standard structural realism by locating the relevant structure in modal, not merely actual, relations. I conclude by sketching implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, and scientific ontology more broadly.

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

Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Silhouette-Guided Animal Art

Generative AI has advanced the ability to render photorealistic or artistic images, yet it remains limited in a key aspect of human creativity: interpreting ambiguous shapes. This phenomenon, rooted in pareidolia, allows humans to perceive meaningful forms in random patterns such as clouds, stones, or leaves. To computationally replicate this imaginative process, we introduce Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Visual-RAG), a framework that generates animal art directly from natural silhouettes. Our method retrieves structurally similar animal shapes from a curated corpus of 28,586 high-quality silhouettes and uses them as reference exemplars to guide diffusion-based generation with ControlNet and IP-Adapter. Ablation studies confirm that shape Context with RANSAC provides the most accurate alignment, while removing shape standardization reduces the inlier ratio to just 13.4\%, underscoring the importance of structural fidelity in Visual-RAG. A user study with 12 participants evaluated the outputs in terms of aesthetics, silhouette fidelity, and overall impression. Results reveal that while Visual-RAG provides plausible interpretations, challenges remain in achieving high perceptual impact. This work lays the foundation for computational pareidolia, showing how machines can contribute to the early stages of imaginative discovery.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CrossFlow: One-Step Generation Across Latent and Pixel Spaces

Most diffusion and flow-matching generators define the prior, probability path, and prediction target in the same representation space. Latent diffusion improves efficiency by moving this path into an autoencoder latent space, but the final sample is still produced by a separately trained decoder. This separation creates a mismatch: the generator is optimized for latent-space prediction, while final quality depends on how the decoder handles generated latents that may differ from clean encoder outputs. We introduce CrossFlow, a cross-space flow formulation that maps noisy latent inputs directly to pixel-space images. The key technical step is a velocity-free one-step objective: the latent trajectory defines the training path, but the supervised prediction is an image rather than a latent displacement. This lets one model act both as a one-step latent-to-pixel generator and as a decoder replacement for latent diffusion pipelines. On class-conditional ImageNet-1k at $256\times256$, CrossFlow-XL achieves 1.62 FID with one function evaluation. Ablations show that the latent encoder and pixel-space perceptual and adversarial losses are important for fidelity. These results indicate that cross-space flow objectives can combine the efficiency of latent representations with direct pixel-space supervision, without requiring a separate decoder at inference.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Program Evaluation with Remotely Sensed Outcomes

arXiv:2411.10959v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study causal inference in experiments and quasi-experiments, where the economic outcome is imperfectly measured by a remotely sensed variable. The remotely sensed variable is low-cost, scalable, and predictive of the economic outcome in observational data; examples include satellite imagery and mobile phone activity. We model the remotely sensed variable as post-outcome: variation in the economic outcome causes variation in the remotely sensed variable. For example, changes in environmental quality cause changes in satellite imagery, not vice versa. Under this assumption, we propose a formula to nonparametrically identify the causal parameter by combining experimental and observational data. We develop a method for n^{-1/2} inference that is robust to misspecification and that does not restrict the algorithms used to process remotely sensed variables.