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.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Ten simple rules for turning your qualifying exam into an NIH-style fellowship proposal: A guide for graduate students

by Courtney Peña-Lima, Cameron S. Bader, Brendan K. Ball, Troy C. Dildine, Mekhala V. Dissanayake, Iris van ‘t Erve, Albina Ibrayeva, Amy Nippert, M.K. Quinn, Chelse Spinner, Samuel Thompson, Antonio Tomasso, Crystal M. Botham Qualifying exams, often referred to as “quals” or candidacy exams, are an important milestone in doctoral programs. Although the style of quals varies greatly by program and institution, it is usually a proposal that requires students to develop research ideas as well as their scientific writing skills. Many quals are modeled after funding mechanisms that graduate students can apply to and on a topic that the student will pursue in their dissertation. This paper offers graduate students a step-by-step guide on how to turn their quals into a fellowship-style research proposal, using National Institutes of Health (NIH) mechanisms as a benchmark, as this is the norm within US research institutions. This paper will be most useful for students who have completed or are in the process of completing proposal-based qualifying exams, usually in the second year of a doctoral program.

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

Mitigating Disparate Impact of Differentially Private Learning through Bounded Adaptive Clipping

arXiv:2506.01396v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) has become an essential framework for privacy-preserving machine learning. Existing DP learning methods, however, often have disparate impacts on model predictions, e.g., for minority groups. Gradient clipping, which is often used in DP learning, can suppress larger gradients from challenging samples. We show that this problem is amplified by adaptive clipping, which will often shrink the clipping bound to tiny values to match a well-fitting majority, while significantly reducing the accuracy for others. We propose bounded adaptive clipping, which introduces a tunable lower bound to prevent excessive gradient suppression. Our method improves worst-class accuracy by over 10 percentage points on Skewed and Fashion MNIST compared to unbounded adaptive clipping, 7 points compared to Automatic clipping, and 5 points compared to constant clipping. The code is available at https://github.com/TrustworthyMLHelsinki/adaptive-clipping-fairness.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mitigating Visual Hallucinations in Multimodal Systems through Retrieval-Augmented Reliability-Aware Inference

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in vision-language understanding and natural-language response generation. However, these systems can still produce overconfident predictions and hallucination-like outputs, particularly when the visual evidence is weak, ambiguous, or semantically inconsistent. Most existing approaches focus on improving multimodal representation alignment or retrieval-augmented generation, while providing limited mechanisms to quantify instance-level prediction reliability or identify incorrect visual outputs. This work proposes a retrieval-augmented reliability-aware inference framework for trustworthy multimodal visual understanding. The proposed framework constructs an external visual evidence database using pretrained visual embeddings and nearest-neighbor retrieval over normalized feature representations. Retrieved evidence is used to estimate prediction trustworthiness through multiple reliability indicators, including similarity strength, class-support agreement, evidence margin, entropy-based uncertainty, and an aggregate reliability score. Based on these signals, a decision gate determines whether the system should accept the prediction, answer with caution, or abstain/fallback when evidence is insufficient. A multimodal response-generation layer then produces a final user-facing response conditioned on the reliability decision. Experiments on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that the proposed reliability-aware framework improves accepted prediction accuracy from 85.84\% to 88.88\% at 89.04\% coverage. The hallucination-like accepted wrong-answer rate is reduced from 14.16\% to 11.12\%. These results show that integrating retrieval evidence, reliability estimation, and selective decision gating can improve calibration and reduce overconfident visual errors without retraining large multimodal models.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

E2Vec: Feature Embedding with Temporal Information for Analyzing Student Actions in E-Book Systems

Digital textbook (e-book) systems record student interactions with textbooks as a sequence of events called EventStream data. In the past, researchers extracted meaningful features from EventStream, and utilized them as inputs for downstream tasks such as grade prediction and modeling of student behavior. Previous research evaluated models that mainly used statistical-based features derived from EventStream logs, such as the number of operation types or access frequencies. While these features are useful for providing certain insights, they lack temporal information that captures fine-grained differences in learning behaviors among different students. This study proposes E2Vec, a novel feature representation method based on word embeddings. The proposed method regards operation logs and their time intervals for each student as a string sequence of characters and generates a student vector of learning activity features that incorporates time information. We applied fastText to generate an embedding vector for each of 305 students in a dataset from two years of computer science courses. Then, we investigated the effectiveness of E2Vec in an at-risk detection task, demonstrating potential for generalizability and performance.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Probing Quantum States over Spacetime Through Interferometry

arXiv:2507.19258v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Establishing a notion of the quantum state that applies consistently across space and time could be a crucial step toward formulating a relativistic quantum theory. We give an operational meaning to multipartite quantum states over arbitrary regions in spacetime through a causally agnostic measurement, a measurement scheme that can be consistently implemented independently of the causal relation between the regions. We prove that such measurements can always be implemented with interferometry, also known as the scattering circuit technique, wherein the conventional density operator, the recently developed quantum state over time (QSOT), and the process matrix formalisms smoothly merge. This framework allows for a systematic study of mixed states in the temporal setting, which turn out to be crucial for modeling quantum non-Markovianity. Based on this, we demonstrate that two different ensembles of quantum dynamics can be represented by the same QSOT, indicating that they cannot be distinguished through interferometry. Moreover, our formalism reveals a new type of spatiotemporal correlation between two quantum dynamics that originates from synchronized propagation in time under time-reversal symmetry. We show that quantum systems with such correlation can be utilized as a reference frame to distinguish certain dynamics indistinguishable under time-reversal symmetry.

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

Simple Domain Generalization Methods are Strong Baselines for Open Domain Generalization

In real-world applications, a machine learning model is required to handle an open-set recognition (OSR), where unknown classes appear during the inference, in addition to a domain shift, where the data distribution differs between the training and inference phases. Domain generalization (DG) aims to handle the domain shift situation where the target domain of the inference phase is inaccessible during the model training. Open domain generalization (ODG) considers DG and OSR. Domain-augmented meta-learning (DAML) is a method targeting ODG; however, it has a complicated learning process. By contrast, although various DG methods have been proposed, they have not been evaluated in ODG situations. In this study, we comprehensively evaluate the existing DG methods in ODG and show that the two simple DG methods, CORrelation ALignment (CORAL) and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), are competitive with DAML in several cases. In addition, we propose simple extensions of CORAL and MMD by introducing the techniques used in DAML, such as ensemble learning and Dirichlet mixup data augmentation. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the extended CORAL and MMD can perform comparably to DAML with lower computational costs. This suggests that the simple DG methods and their simple extensions are strong baselines for ODG.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Complex Layout Classification in the Wild: A Low-Resource Approach with Layout-Preserving Augmentations

Many digitized corpora suffer from low resources because annotations may be scarce, page scans are noisy and of poor resolution, or layouts are structurally complex in ways that negatively affect the quality of automatic transcription. Developing robust classification models for low-resource languages is inhibited by the lack of large-scale annotated data and by the frequent semantic complexity of page layouts. To this end, we have curated a complex-layout dataset, manually classified into eight distinct layout types based on their separator regions. To overcome data scarcity, we propose a novel training strategy in the form of a CNN-based classifier that employs strong, domain-aware augmentations to improve generalization. We utilize narrow anisotropic Gaussian masking to suppress incidental textual details while preserving essential separations, compelling the model to learn global geometric arrangements. Additionally, we implement reflection-induced label transformations to enrich the training distribution while maintaining label consistency across asymmetric categories. The results demonstrate that layout-specific augmentations can substantially improve page-level layout classification under severe annotation scarcity.

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

Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems: Mitigating Semantic Drift with the Argent Signaling Protocol

When multi-agent LLM systems produce bad answers, not all failures are equal: some answers are grounded in the right material but incomplete, while others are simply ungrounded and should be stopped. Current retry strategies treat both cases identically (try again and hope for the best), leaving human supervisors unable to tell whether a retry was warranted or whether the system should have halted instead. We introduce the Argent Signaling Protocol (ASP), a compact machine-readable header that accompanies every AI-generated response with structured quality signals: certainty (@C), grounding (@G), stochasticity (@S), and an assumption index that classifies the evidentiary basis of each claim. These signals enable a controller to distinguish repairable failures from containment failures and route each case differently. We evaluate ASP in two modes. In standalone mode, a 27-question document-grounded QA benchmark over the Array BioPharma/Ono license agreement compares baseline prompts against ASP-instrumented controller actions across three local GGUF models. On Qwen~(0.8B), ASP improves pass rate from 11.1% to 33.3% and mean term coverage from 36.7% to 65.4%; on Dobby~(8B), ASP produces 4 fail-to-pass recoveries, raising pass rate from 33.3% to 44.4%; on SmolLM3~(3B), ASP alternates between repair and containment per question. Aggregate improvement is meaningful (12/81 to 21/81 passes). In multi-agent mode, an ASP sidecar sits between a retrieval agent and a downstream decision agent; the sidecar blocks 100% of ungrounded upstream outputs from reaching the downstream agent (24/27 blocked, 0 ungrounded propagations).

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

The N-Body Problem: Parallel Execution from Single-Person Egocentric Video

Humans can intuitively parallelise complex activities, but can a model predict this from observing a single person? Given one egocentric video, we introduce the N-Body Problem: predicting how N individuals, can hypothetically perform the same set of tasks. The goal is to maximise speed-up, but naive assignment of video segments to individuals often violates real-world constraints, leading to physically impossible scenarios like two people using the same object or occupying the same space. To quantify this, we formalise the N-Body Problem and propose a suite of metrics to evaluate both performance (speed-up, task coverage) and feasibility (spatial collisions, object conflicts and causal constraints). As a proof of concept, we introduce a structured prompting strategy that guides a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to reason about the 3D environment, object usage, and temporal dependencies, producing a viable parallel execution. On 100 videos from EPIC-Kitchens and HD-EPIC, for $N = 2$, our structured prompt improves action coverage by 45% over a baseline prompt for Gemini 2.5 Pro, while simultaneously slashing collision rates, object and causal conflicts by 51%, 52% and 55% respectively.

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

Credibility-Weighted Pricing of Autonomous Vehicle Liability Under Operational Design Domain Shift

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated Driving System deployments create a foundational ratemaking challenge: sparse experience, shifting operational design domains, and non-stationary risk across software releases. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian credibility framework pooling across cities, software versions, and territories via a learned ODD-similarity kernel, nesting Buhlmann-Straub as a limiting case. Demonstrated on 648 verified-engaged Waymo crashes across four U.S. metros from the NHTSA Standing General Order database against 116 million matched miles, city-aggregate credibility weights are moderate (0.12-0.46), partial pooling decisively outperforms no pooling, and a power analysis shows the learned kernel's advantage becomes detectable at approximately twelve deployed cities.

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

Co-policy: Responsive Human-Robot Co-Creation for Musical Performances

arXiv:2606.19914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Art has long stood as a pivotal expression of human creativity. Embodied artificial intelligence offers a route for generative models to participate in that creativity through physical action rather than disembodied digital content. In robotic music co-creation, it is challenging to connect semantic musical understanding with real-time and physically executable performance. We present Co-policy, a framework for human-robot musical co-creation that separates semantic intent grounding, constrained musical variation, and visuomotor execution. To ground musical semantics, Co-policy uses pre-inference semantic anchors and a fine-tuned Qwen-vl planner (F-Qwen) to transform speech, live musical seeds, and visual observations into structured co-creation plans. To support low-latency execution, Co-policy introduces a Gaussian-Mixture Visuomotor Policy (GMP), implemented as a conditional mixture-density policy that maps target notes and visual context to multimodal robot actions in a single forward pass. Unlike robotic playback systems that merely reproduce user-specified notes, Co-policy generates complementary musical responses under both musical and physical constraints. Real-robot chime experiments, ablations, and expert evaluation show improved intent alignment, execution accuracy, and response frequency over diffusion-policy and ablated baselines, supporting physically grounded action generation as a key requirement for embodied human-AI co-creation.

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

Stochastic-Dimension Frozen Sampled Neural Network for High-Dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii Equations on Unbounded Domains

arXiv:2604.09361v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper introduces the Stochastic-Dimension Frozen Sampled Neural Network (SD-FSNN), a novel computational framework for solving high-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) on unbounded domain. The proposed method circumvents the curse-of-dimensionality that plagues traditional discretizations and the computational bottlenecks of gradient-based neural network solvers through a synergistic combination of techniques. First, a prescribed Gaussian envelope encodes the far-field decay of the wavefunction, enabling a space-time separation where the spatial approximation is handled by a frozen, single-hidden-layer neural network with data-driven sampled features. This yields a gradient-free formalism where spatial derivatives are analytically precomputed and time-dependence is evolved via reduced ODEs. Second, a stochastic-dimension sampler provides a conditionally unbiased estimate of the spatial operator by evaluating only a small subset of spatial dimensions at each time step, essentially reducing computational and memory costs. Discrete conservation laws are also enforced, ensuring long-term stability. Extensive numerical experiments on GPE in up to 1000 dimensions demonstrate that SD-FSNN achieves significantly higher accuracy and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods, including PINNs, randomized feature methods, and tensor-network approaches. The results confirm that SD-FSNN effectively mitigates the Kolmogorov $n$-width barrier for frozen-basis models on structured solution manifolds.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Layer-Isolated Evaluation: Gating the Deterministic Scaffold of a Production LLM Agent with a No-LLM, Regression-Locked Test Harness

End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where. We present layer-isolated evaluation: a deployed ordering agent is decomposed into a fixed taxonomy of layers (ontology, intent, routing, decomposition, escalation, safety, memory, and cross-cutting envelope/defense), each exercised by its own assertion slice in a deterministic, no-LLM "pure" mode. The pure suite (238 cases across 23 slices; 225 run in 2.39 s, ~10 ms/case) runs in CI on every change against a locked per-slice baseline. We validate by controlled regression injection, degrading one layer at a time across seven non-safety layers. The effect we did not design in is masking: the aggregate pass-rate barely moves (-1.7 to -5.9 pp for six local regressions), while the matching slice craters (-25 to -91 pp). A layer's slice reacting to its own fault is partly by construction; the measured results are (i) the aggregate masking and (ii) that damage stays off the other slices: the injected layer's slice is the single worst-hit in 5 of 7 cases and top-3 in 7 of 7 (mean rank 1.29 of 19). Localization replicates on a second, structurally different tenant (Starbucks SG): all seven matching slices crater, so it is not a single-catalog artifact. We position it as a concrete, deterministic instantiation of the component-level evaluation EDDOps prescribes but leaves unimplemented, with CheckList as ancestor and as the deterministic mirror image of whole-workflow stochastic mutation testing. Our contributions: (a) a fully decomposed, sub-second, no-LLM per-layer harness for a production agent, (b) a coverage-honesty test-adequacy criterion that refuses to score an unexercised layer, and (c) the regression-injection demonstration that per-slice baseline-locked gates localize regressions an aggregate metric masks.

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

Vision Transformers for Face Recognition Need More Registers

Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) for face recognition (FR) have moved beyond the standard CLS-token paradigm. In this paradigm, a special classification token (CLS) is prepended to the patch embeddings and used as a representation of the input for downstream tasks. An alternative approach, Concatenated Patch Embeddings (CPE), instead leverages all patch tokens by concatenating them into a single vector, which is then projected into a compact face representation. CPE has been shown to improve recognition performance in comparison to CLS-based ones, but our qualitative analysis of attention maps showed the presence of artifacts that limit their interpretability. To address this issue, we incorporate register tokens, learnable tokens concatenated to the initial patch embeddings, and processed jointly through the ViT encoder blocks. This mechanism has been shown to produce more structured and interpretable attention maps compared to baseline ViT. We empirically demonstrate that these artifacts consistently appear across various ViT backbones, including small and large models, and that introducing register tokens effectively mitigates them. Adding four or eight registers significantly enhances interpretability, with eight registers providing the highest verification accuracies and smoothest attention structures. Our resulting model, ViT-8R, corresponds to a CPE-based ViT-B architecture augmented with eight register tokens achieves state-of-the-art performance among ViT-based FR models on large-scale IJB-B and IJB-C benchmarks. Also, ViT-8R produces substantially clearer attention maps compared with the baseline model, which offer deeper insight into the model's attention behavior (https://github.com/TaharChettaoui/ViT-FR-Registers)

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Beyond Prediction: Tail-Aware Scheduling for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.18431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM serving exhibits extreme length variability, making size-based scheduling difficult in practice. Recent LLM schedulers approximate SJF/SRPT using predicted decode lengths or ranks and primarily report mean-centric metrics such as TTFT and TBT. We show that these prediction-driven policies can be fragile under distribution shifts, bursty arrivals, and GPU memory pressure, while offering limited control over the tail latency (P90-P99) that dominates user experience, even with perfect decode-length knowledge. We introduce a distribution-aware, prediction-free scheduling framework that replaces explicit length prediction with soft priority boosting driven by lightweight statistical signals. Our design co-optimizes scheduling and cache-aware preemption to account for memory-coupled decode dynamics across workload mixes. Evaluated on production and open-source traces, our method reduces P99 TTLT by up to 35-50% relative to SRPT with perfect length knowledge and reduces TTFT by 34-47% across workloads, including reasoning-heavy and chat-heavy tasks. These results demonstrate a robust alternative for optimizing tail latency in online LLM serving.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

MetaboNet-Bench: A Multi-modal Benchmark for Glucose Forecasting in Type 1 Diabetes

arXiv:2606.18640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Glucose forecasting algorithms are an important aspect of glycemic control management in type 1 diabetes. So far, the research community has developed numerous algorithms and models for forecasting. However, it is well-recognized that the lack of standardized model performance evaluation benchmarks makes fair comparison difficult and hinders further innovation, and thus benchmark standardization is in urgent need. Furthermore, many published glucose forecasting algorithms are limited to CGM data alone, ignoring other multimodal signals such as insulin dosing and carbohydrate intake. Here, we introduce MetaboNet-Bench, a benchmark for multimodal glucose forecasting for patients with type 1 diabetes that provides an extensible open-source evaluation framework for comparison of glucose forecasting algorithms that leverage glucose, insulin, and carbohydrate data. We then demonstrate its utility by benchmarking several recently published glucose forecasting models and a custom multimodal time-series model, representing different model architectures. The results show that the benefit of adding data modalities is conditioned on the complexity of the model and that incorporating more clinical metrics helps identify meaningful gaps to fill for future research.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Harnessing cortical geometry, wiring, and function as inductive biases for recurrent neural networks

arXiv:2606.14975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How the wiring and functional organization of cortex shape recurrent computation remains a central question in both neuroscience and machine learning. Here, we leverage data released through the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program–a functional connectomics resource spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex, in which dense calcium imaging is co-registered with high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction from the same animal–to build biologically grounded recurrent neural networks. Using neuronal spatial coordinates, anatomical connectivity, and function-derived relationships from nearly 12,000 coregistered excitatory neurons, we initialize recurrent weights and impose communication-aware spatial constraints during learning. Across three cognitive decision-making tasks, networks constrained by cortical structure and function consistently outperform baseline and partially constrained models. Functional weight initialization provides the largest gain, while real spatial embedding yields robust additional improvements across conditions. These biologically grounded networks also develop low-entropy, modular, and small-world organization, and retain strong performance even when recurrence is restricted to positive weights. Together, our results show that the machinery of cortex–its geometry, wiring, and functional structure–can be harnessed as a powerful inductive basis for building recurrent networks that learn more effectively while converging toward key organizational principles of biological computation.

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

CoMNeT: A MedNeXt-CorrDiff Framework for Volumetric Brain Tumor Segmentation

Accurate brain tumor segmentation from multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is critical for treatment planning, response assessment, and quantitative neuro-oncology research. However, automated segmentation remains a difficult task in computer vision because of variation in tumor appearance and MRI protocols across patient scans. Moreover, clinically important regions such as enhancing tumor (ET) and tumor core (TC) are often small relative to the full brain volume, furthering increasing the difficulty of achieving high voxel-level precision. In this paper, we show that combining a modern 3D convolutional segmentation model with corrective diffusion-based refinement and ensembling improves volumetric glioma segmentation on the UTSW-Glioma dataset. We propose CoMNeT, a MedNeXt-CorrDiff framework that uses four MRI modalities as input and predicts ET, TC, and whole tumor (WT) regions for automated brain tumor segmentation. MedNeXt is used as the primary segmentation model with Global Response Normalization for feature learning, while CorrDiff is trained as a postprocessing residual refinement method to correct errors in the probability maps before final thresholding. Using five-fold cross-validation, CoMNeT achieved the highest Dice score for most tumor regions, with ET, TC, WT, and average Dice scores of 0.7543 +/- 0.0261, 0.6806 +/- 0.0166, 0.9049 +/- 0.0128, and 0.7798 +/- 0.0184, respectively. CoMNeT outperformed two selected baseline models: SegResNet (0.7555 +/- 0.0190 average Dice) and standalone MedNeXt (0.7697 +/- 0.0154 average Dice). Our findings support the use of corrective diffusion and fold-level probability ensembling as practical additions to existing state-of-the-art 3D convolutional models for automated glioma segmentation.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Time and Killed Resolvents in Reflected Optimal Stopping with a Max Payoff

arXiv:2606.18214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study infinite-horizon optimal stopping for normally reflected two-dimensional diffusions in the positive quadrant with max payoff \(G(x_1,x_2)=x_1\vee\alpha x_2\). The non-smooth payoff produces a singular stopping-gain measure on the kink set \(\Delta=\{x_1=\alpha x_2\}\). We prove $\displaystyle \Gamma^\Delta(dx) = -\frac{n^\top a(x)n}{2\sqrt{1+\alpha^2}}\,\sigma_\Delta(dx)$, with $n=(1,-\alpha)$, so the diagonal component is non-positive and strictly negative under local ellipticity. This implies that every interior kink point lies in the continuation region. We further show that the correct value representation uses the resolvent killed at first entry into the stopping set, $\displaystyle V=G-R_r^{\mathcal C}\Gamma$, and give a closed-form reflected Brownian counter-example showing that the unrestricted reflected resolvent is generally wrong. A reflected Brownian benchmark and numerical experiments illustrate the local-time, resolvent-gap, and diagonal-avoidance mechanisms.

21.
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.

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

MiniFool – Physics-Constraint-Aware Minimizer-Based Adversarial Attacks in Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2511.01352v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we present a new algorithm, MiniFool, that implements physics-inspired adversarial attacks for testing neural network-based classification tasks in particle and astroparticle physics. While we initially developed the algorithm for the search for astrophysical tau neutrinos with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, we apply it to further data from other science domains, thus demonstrating its general applicability. Here, we apply the algorithm to the well-known MNIST data set and furthermore, to Open Data data from the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. The algorithm is based on minimizing a cost function that combines a $\chi^2$ based test-statistic with the deviation from the desired target score. The test statistic quantifies the probability of the perturbations applied to the data based on the experimental uncertainties. For our studied use cases, we find that the likelihood of a flipped classification differs for both the initially correctly and incorrectly classified events. When testing changes of the classifications as a function of an attack parameter that scales the experimental uncertainties, the robustness of the network decision can be quantified. Furthermore, this allows testing the robustness of the classification of unlabeled experimental data.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LEDGER: A Long-Context Benchmark of Corporate Annual Reports for Grounded Financial Retrieval and Extraction

Finance reporting is a natural proving ground for large language models, and the very-long-context capabilities of recent models across all sizes make rigorous evaluation in this domain an increasingly pressing need. Yet most public financial resources reduce the task to plain-text SEC 10-K filings paired with a handful of question-answer items. We release LEDGER (Long-context Evaluation of Documents for Grounded Extraction and Retrieval), a corpus of 4,999 digitized corporate annual reports - full documents with figures, tables, and narrative, not just regulatory filings. Each report is labeled with 31 consolidated financial KPIs to be extracted and linked to the market's reaction at the earnings date. From this data we derive three evaluation benchmarks spanning the difficulty spectrum: a pure page-level KPI retrieval task with TREC-style relevance judgments over 118,048 questions in natural language, a conversational "needle-in-a-haystack" single-value lookup, and a full KPI extraction task, both from long, numerically dense reports. We additionally provide human OCR-quality annotations with inter-annotator agreement and the complete extraction, validation, and scoring toolchain. We further demonstrate the dataset's research utility with a case study linking CEO-letter rhetoric to post-publication market impact.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

From Detection to Recovery: Operational Analysis on LLM Pre-training with 504 GPUs

arXiv:2605.09370v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale AI training is fundamentally a distributed systems problem, where hardware failures are routine operating conditions rather than rare exceptions, yet public operational evidence from production training clusters remains limited. This report presents an empirical analysis of a 63-node NVIDIA B200 production cluster (504 GPUs), using 55 days of Prometheus time-series data and 73 days of operational logs covering 224 multi-node training sessions. The environment is cross-organizational: five parties (SKT, Upstage, Lablup, NVIDIA Korea, VAST Data) share a unified monitoring pipeline. This enabled joint diagnosis of a 60-node-scale storage I/O bottleneck absent in 2-4-node tests, a production-scale phenomenon no single team could isolate alone. We perform three quantitative analyses yielding four findings. First, over 751 Prometheus metrics and 10 XID-identified GPU failures, no single metric is consistently dominant across failure types, motivating multi-signal detection. Second, 523 checkpoint events trace the save/load path from GPU VRAM to the NFS server: restart loading reaches 21.5% of maximum read bandwidth (700 GB/s) and save bursts 16.0% of maximum write bandwidth (250 GB/s), with NFS/RPC queueing and transport-layer backlog rising together. Third, across 224 sessions over 73 days, node exclusions concentrate so the top 3 of 63 nodes account for over 50%. Fourth, auto-retry chain analysis shows a 33.3% success rate over 12 chains (73 attempts), 2.7x the 12.5% manual rate, with a median retry interval of 11 minutes (IQR 10-11). All analyses are grounded in production infrastructure providing session-level workload management, GPU-centric scheduling, and unified observability.